Nov 7, 2025
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Hackers extorted millions from Colonial Pipeline, and now they’ve struck the meatpacking giant JBS. There’s one clear way to prevent future attacks.
If state-sanctioned hackers can’t collect ransom, there’s bound to be a reduction in ransomware attacks.
It would help if America’s major industries weren’t ruled by monopolies; the more concentrated the industry, the more damage can be done by hacking its leading firms. But there’s only one clear way to stop these increasingly destructive ransomware attacks: ban cryptocurrencies.
Ransomware has passed from a minor inconvenience to a widespread threat against major infrastructure, both in the U.S. and around the world. Last year, 2,500 cases of ransomware were reported to the FBI, with $350 million in cryptocurrencies paid out as ransoms.
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Here’s how these attacks work. A hacker penetrates a company’s systems—an often easy task, given many firms’ shoddy cybersecurity practices. The hacker uses ransomware to encrypt the company’s data, making it inaccessible to anyone who doesn’t have the requisite password, and then demands payment in Bitcoin or another digital currency. The victim can open an account on a cryptocurrency exchange, buy Bitcoin, send it to the hacker’s wallet address, and the hacker will then decrypt the victim’s data. Life can then go back to normal, save the embarrassment and damages suffered by the victim’s business—and anyone who depended on it. As for the hacker, they can launder their proceeds by using various exchanges and payment processors that shuffle the cryptocurrency around before issuing the same amount of currency in a new wallet, without a payment trail.
Of course the criminals could return to the old school way of doing things and demand large bags of cash as ransom. But that greatly increases the possibility that they’ll get caught.
The energy footprint of Bitcoin is HŪGE. It should be banned as a menace to climate stability – ransomware attacks aside.
Bitcoin isn’t getting greener: four environmental myths about cryptocurrency debunked
To be honest, crypto seems sketchy; it’s almost like a cult. More people will lose money on it than get rich from it. By the time most people hear about get-rich-quick schemes, the ability to make money from them is already stale.
Financial bubbles have been around for a long time but people don’t study enough history to learn from them.
Celebrities and social media influencers touting crypto and SPACs are not automatic ‘likes’
Crypto is bad for ransomware attacks, bad for the environment, and ultimately bad for naïve investors.
Why do people keep floating the idea of AI bailouts?
Are we being primed to accept the taxpayers funding yet more billionaires? They don't want to pay taxes, but they seem to love taking our taxes.
My letter to reps:
No Bailouts to tech tycoons and the tech industry. If they're so smart, and we're constantly told how smart they are, they should pull themselves up and out of trouble, and prove they can manage their businesses without government handouts. They should be aggressively taxed to make sure they measure up.
Please feel free to copy or repurpose for your own letters to reps.
Is that a popping noise I hear:
AI data centers and the real economy.
What the Economy Really Looks Like When you factor in all the data points, we have an anxious workforce, a business sector seeking opportunity in inflation, and an avalanche of bad policy bearing down on everyone. by David Dayen August 19, 2025 An economy based on individual whim is not one where businesses can plan for the future; indeed, 37,000 manufacturing jobs have been lost since the “Liberation Day” tariff announcement in April, and the subsequent flurry of trade adjustments. I think you can see the consequences of uncertainty come forward in the explosion in corporate stock buybacks; that’s a sign of retrenchment, where money that could be deployed or invested is instead pushed out to shareholders. No wonder markets are near all-time highs while ordinary workers feel miserable. The only area where this investment retrenchment and uncertainty is not in evidence comes from the insane capital expenditures for AI computing power, which is propping up the economy almost by itself. That’s why municipal pushback to data centers will be one of the more fascinating developments of the next few years. And it’s why we should pay a lot of attention to whether AI is a viable business, whether its gains are accelerating or stagnating, and whether too much of this capacity deployment is on spec and fated to cause a crash. (...) The Big Tech obsession, fueled by the Trump administration, to frantically build data centers (and keep the stock market high) is leading to soaring electricity prices, which Trump’s policy to kill any renewable source of energy will only worsen.
My letter to reps:
This big tech AI data center boondoggle push is leading to soaring electricity prices. Nobody wants that. What are you doing to stop this AI bubble and these data center plans built on kooky pie in the sky sci-fi nightmares of people with more money than sense? This doesn't seem like conservative fiscal policy at all for example. And an economy based on a few tech tycoons who seem delusional doesn't really make for a "free market" does it.
Please feel free to copy or repurpose for your own letters to reps.
The Ongoing Stock Market Bubble
The Ongoing Stock Market Bubble
By German Gorraiz Lopez© The Radical Outlook “The day will come when the market will go down like it will never stop” (John Kenneth Galbraith) The current stock market bubble would be the result of the euphoria on Wall Street and by extrapolation from the rest of the world’s stock markets as a result of the monetary policies of the world’s main central banks that have flooded the markets with…
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50 Things That Made the Modern Economy: Tulips https://t.co/zuYCdCnPBi pic.twitter.com/PoS3k82pm4
— Tim Harford (@TimHarford) January 27, 2020
Greater Fool Theory
https://www.investopedia.com/terms/g/greaterfooltheory.asp
WHO'S TO BLAME?
Emerging in 1970, Fama’s concept of Efficient Market Hypothesis (EMH) rests on the assumptions that market changes reflect all information and economic man always acts rationally. Thus, in financial markets, stocks will always be traded at their fair value.
However, as market grows, EMH is constantly challenged. Opponent of EMH like Bernstein (2007) argued that if prices fully reflect all available information, the range of stock market prices changes would not differ too far from its fundamental value (Wójcik, et al.,2013). In addition, the behavioural theorists pointed out that EMH theory blindly assumed that market participants behave rationally. At the stock markets, mistakes will be made by the collective judgement of market participants, and some participants are less likely to be rational (called by “noise traders”). The EMH ignores the systemic risk of noise traders, where it can lead to a large divergence between market prices and fundamental values. (De Long, et al., 1990).
source: http://www.trulyrichclubreview.com/
In the midst of this dispute, the financial bubbles serve as a great deal, lead to the bigger question about the validity of EMH. Market strategists tend to hold EMH responsibles for the bubble occurrences. Grantham (2009) and Fox (2009) stated that EMH reduces the awareness of investors and regulators regarding the dangers of asset bubbles, since they are preached by the notion that market prices reflect all available information (Ball, 2009). Moreover, the market participants’ overconfidence-believing that stock prices will consistently rise-appear to be the fundamental factor which started the bubble to inflate. The disaster occurs when this biased decision followed by a large group of people irrationally, make the market prices reach its maximum value, then burst. On the bursting period, the assets value rapidly reversed and people are rushing to liquidate their investment. This behaviour phenomenon is somehow hard to be explained by EMH.
Conversely, responding to the critics, the proponents of EMH defend that EMH is not accountable for the bubble existence, as the changes in prices is a function of the flow information to the marketplace and it moves in a random walk model (Fama, 1970), hence the future prices are unpredictable (Ball, 2009 & Cochrane, 2011). The volatilities of prices are closely related to the economic value changes of the assets at the time. Furthermore, refuting the behavioural theorists’ opinion, Ball (2009) implies that although behavioural theory can explain how the market behaves in bubble period, it cannot be tested and somehow the ideas are only rationalisations of the anomalies of EMH.
In conclusion, anomalies in market appear to contest economic and financial theories, including EMH. Yet, a further study to measure the correlation between the behavioural theory and EMH anomalies is needed to unfold such phenomena.
References:
Ball, R. (2009). The Global Financial Crisis and the Efficient Market Hypothesis: What Have We Learned? Journal of Applied Corporate Finance, 21(4), 8-16.
Cochrane, John H. (2011). How Did Paul Krugman Get It So Wrong? (Report). Economic Affairs, 31(2), 36-40.
Delong, J. B., Shleifer, A., Summers, L. H., Waldmann, R. J. (1990) Noise trader risk in financial markets. Journal of Political Economy, 98: 703–738.
“‘Efficient markets hypothesis’ inefficient”. Available at https://www.ft.com/content/cb7e1b6e-46bc-11e1-bc5f-00144feabdc0 Accessed 5 November 2018.
Fama, E. (1970). Efficient Capital Markets: A Review Of Theory And Empirical Work*. Journal of Finance, 25(2), 383-417.
“Is efficient-market theory becoming more efficient?”. Available at https://www.economist.com/finance-and-economics/2017/05/27/is-efficient-market-theory-becoming-more-efficient Accessed 5 November 2018.
Krugman, P. (2009). How Did Economists Get It So Wrong?. New York Times (1923-Current File), p. SM36.
Wójcik, D., Kreston, N., & McGill, S. (2013). Freshwater, saltwater and deepwater: Efficient market hypothesis versus behavioural finance. Journal of Economic Geography, 13(2), 257-277.