Odds and Ends — 22 March 2023
Cryptocurrency, Investing, Money, Economy, Business, and Debt:
Just what the world needs, extra FUD: President’s Economic Report Blasts Crypto for ‘Ignorance of Basic Economic Principles’
Innovation in digital assets is "mostly about creating artificial scarcity," the White House says. "Many of them have no fundamental value."
Coinbase Argues an Arbitration Case in U.S. Supreme Court as Crypto Makes Its Debut
The first cryptocurrency matter to come up at the high court isn’t directly about digital assets but is a dispute over how courts should handle scuffles over arbitration.
Coronavirus News, Analysis, and Opinion:
If you had Covid before you were vaccinated, you might have less immunity than you think, study says
FDA May Authorize Additional Covid-19 Booster Shots
Florida Man:
Florida Governor Ron DeSantis Introduces State Legislation Banning CBDCs
Because of the Interstate Commerce Clause, this probably wouldn’t survive a legal challenge. But let’s say @taskmaster4450 is mistaken and CBDC is introduced in the United States. During some financial crisis? Hypothetically to distribute $1,000 a month in UBI to every adult? Any politician who stood between Joe Sixpack and “free money” would be strung up from the nearest lamppost.
DeSantis’s pivotal service at Guantánamo during a violent year
Politics:
Special Counsel Says Trump Misled His Attorneys
Prosecutors in the special counsel’s office have presented compelling preliminary evidence that former President Donald Trump knowingly and deliberately misled his own attorneys about his retention of classified materials after leaving office, a former top federal judge wrote Friday in a sealed filing…
Stop Overthinking It: An Indictment Would Be Bad For Trump
It is precisely the sort of thing one would expect from a delusional bedlamite who invented an imaginary friend to lie to the New York Post about his sex life and then named his youngest son after said imaginary friend. A federal prison is not the only kind of facility one can imagine Donald Trump locked up in.
I don’t know whether he is mentally ill in a medical sense any more than I know whether Joe Biden is cognitively impaired in a medical sense, but I do know that, in the colloquial sense of the word crazy, he is as crazy as a sack of ferrets.
It’s pretty weird that we use interest rate hikes to reduce aggregate demand
…there is something deeply perverse about raising interest rates to slow the economy only to flip around and do bailouts to prevent interest rates from slowing the economy too much.
Manhattan DA Responds To House GOP Letter: ‘We Will Not Be Intimidated’
’Don’t Say Gay’ lawmaker pleads guilty to COVID relief fraud
SHOWN: Noah prepares for MAGA tears. pic.twitter.com/rD5I7zUARy
— Middle Age Riot (@middleageriot) March 21, 2023
“You Know What? I’m Not Doing This Anymore.”
There’s a quiet new crisis brewing in Texas following the abortion ban. It could get much worse.
Serendipity:
The One Cause of Poverty That’s Never Considered
…poverty is a social reality that Americans create and sustain—and from which many of the nonpoor benefit materially in more direct ways than they care to acknowledge.
How a New York gang truce spawned an Olympic sport
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