George Soros: The Man Behind the Curtain? A Former Mobster's Take

In 2021, on this blog I shared a video from the edu-tuber Mr. Beat. He breaks down historic figures in a straightforward way, and one of them was billionaire George Soros. Here's what I wrote back then:

As of late you hear a lot about how Soros uses his fortune to fund politicians favorable to his political ideology. He's also been accused of funding soft on crime prosecutors here in this nation from Los Angeles to San Francisco to Philadelphia. Even right here in Cook County/Chicago with our current State's Attorney.

That post stuck with the basics—his funding of progressive causes and DAs. It didn't dig into the "why" or the full picture of what Soros represents.

Recently, I came across a video from Michael Franzese, a former mobster who's shared a lot of raw stories about living that Mafia life. He often steps back to look at bigger issues in the world today. This time, he takes a hard look at Soros.

D.O.G.E. might cut the penny

From CBS News:

In Tuesday X post, Musk's DOGE wrote that the U.S. spends about 3 cents to mint each penny, which, of course, is only valued at 1 cent.

"The penny costs over 3 cents to make and cost U.S. taxpayers over $179 million in FY2023," DOGE wrote. "The Mint produced over 4.5 billion pennies in FY2023, around 40% of the 11.4 billion coins for circulation produced."

In pointing out the penny's costliness, DOGE is taking aim at an issue that has sparked debate for years, although the price of manufacturing the cent has only grown over the past several years. In 2016, for instance, the U.S. was spending about 1.5 cents to mint each penny, or less than half of its current manufacturing cost.

Still, the cent's $179 million in costs represents mere metaphorical pennies when it comes to DOGE's mandate to cut federal spending. President Donald Trump has said DOGE will provide recommendations to "slash excess regulations, cut wasteful expenditures and restructure federal agencies." Musk has said the group will aim to trim $500 billion in annual federal spending.

Probably time to cash in the pennies I have around the house. Convert it into some real cash.

Federal officials have proposed suspending the penny in prior years, with former Treasury Secretary Jacob Lew pushing the idea in 2015. Some economists have also advocated for dropping the penny from circulation, but there could be a costly downside to ditching the cent, as transactions would be rounded to 5-cent intervals, the Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond said in a 2020 blog post.

"For a single item or small-value purchase, rounding up or down could represent a significant price change," the post noted.

Other nations have ditched their equivalent of the penny, including Canada, which stopped minting its one-cent coin in 2012. One 2018 economic analysis found that Canadian consumers paid about $3.27 million in additional Canadian dollars at grocery stores each year due to prices being rounded higher after the change.

"On the other hand, there may be additional, hard-to-quantify costs to using pennies that would argue in favor of elimination. Counting pennies to make change takes time, and as the old business adage goes, time is money," the Richmond Fed noted.

I don't know. I often don't use change when I spend cash. It has become more convenient for me to use a debit card for every day purchases. Although most of the time I do prefer cash.

I suppose since there are more options than cash when you have to spend at the store (any store - especially supermarkets) is it possible that change will have to be rounded up to a nickel?

Time will tell.

h/t Newsalert 

#Bitcoin

[VIDEO] I've been keenly interesting in learning more about bitcoin. Bitcoin is a crytpocurrency created in 2009 by "Satoshi Nakamoto" - the name is placed in quotes because the world doesn't know the identity of this person or persons. All we know is that there was a paper in their name, a computer program for bitcoins, and several forum posts and then a few years after developing botcoin this alias vanished. That's the story you see above from CNBC.

Back in 2009 I was on the verge of graduating from Morehouse College. Upon achieving my degree it was time to look for job which would happen by that fall. It was also safe to say, my finances were in the red with not a lot of income back then and student loans. Perhaps I was a long way from being able to take advantages of bitcoin with the low prices back in the early part of this decade. A small investment back then would provide nothing but significant returns now. You can check current bitcoin prices here.

While it seems one could make money from bitcoin, I have been advised that it's still considered make believe money. Since it mainly exists in cyberspace it's not real thus it's better to invest in something that exists in the real world such as a precious metal. And also the possibility that if something goes wrong with hardware or software the crytocurrenty can go up in smoke.

On the other hand, one good use for bitcoin I have seen is that if you need to sent money somewhere for example sending money to relatives in an unfriendly nation. No need for banks or a Western Union to be the middle man. Use the peer-to-peer network to send the bitcoins to where they need to go and those on the receiving end will get their cold hard cash from the crytocurrency.

You can read more about advantages & disadvantages here. Meanwhile through a variety of sources online and offline my goal is to continue gaining more knowledge of this.

Classical Values: Big government war on big bills?

Hmmm, I do some cashiering and am often annoyed by those who pay with big bills. Of course these days that means $50 and $100 bills. I can't imagine it was worse before they pulled bills larger than that out of circulation.

I must say the argument made over at Classical Values makes sense. Why were bills larger than $100 taken out of circulation. Was it because of the drug war or was it because government didn't want their citizen to have a stash of cash in case of some unforsee disaster.

Either way I wish I could get at some of those rare large bills because I expect a nice pay day in today's dollars when I'm ready to sell it!

Via Instapundit!