Apparently the crypto folks are really mad at me. Overnight I received 9,546 pieces of spam email, asking me to sign up for newsletters, buy shoes, end world hunger, or a variety of other things that require my username and password. Although they come in many languages, by a remarkable coincidence a large proportion of them are in Russian. Here’s one:

According to Google Translate, here’s what it says:

Hello pomqwrth1979!

Thank you for registering with LLC NEO. Your account has been created and must be activated. You can activate your account by clicking on the activation link, or by copying the link to your browser: http://ctoneon.ru/index.php?option=com_user&task=activate&activation=…

After activating your account, you will be able to login to http://ctoneon.ru/ using the specified username and password:

Username – pomqwrth1979
Password – 5c0e76.

So charming. On the bright side, the email account they’re attacking has been so larded up with spam for so long that I hardly use it anymore. However, since this is obviously bot-driven, I suppose I ought to deactivate it for a while so their spam gets bounced.

These crypto folks are pretty easily offended, aren’t they? Maybe I should start using blockchain technology to operate my blog just to assuage them.

This is John McAfee, by far the biggest draw of the cruise. If you don't know who he is, just Google him. Do you expect me to do *all* your work for you?CoinsBank

It used to be libertarians. I’d mention something unflattering about Ron Paul and the result would be hundreds of angry, illiterate insults from true believers who were convinced that Ron Paul was just short of the second coming of Christ.

Now it’s crypto crackpots—unsurprisingly, I guess, since there’s a huge overlap in the crypto fan base and the Ron Paul fan base. After writing a couple of posts about Bitcoin over the weekend, my Twitter feed is bursting with—you guessed it: angry, illiterate insults from true believers who are convinced that Bitcoin is the only thing standing between us and monetary Armageddon. It would be amusing if it weren’t for the fact that so many of these people are obviously not well off themselves and are being taken for a ride by con men who care only about their bank accounts—and by that, I mean their real bank accounts, not their crypto wallets.

There’s not much I can do about that. As Jesus didn’t say, the con artists you will always have with you. But in the meantime I can recommend “Four Days Trapped at Sea With Crypto’s Nouveau Riche,” by Laurie Penny. It’s all about her invitation to spend time on a Mediterranean cruise dedicated to wining and dining crypto enthusiasts. The passenger list is about two-thirds crypto nerds and one-third “hostesses” from Ukraine, Russia, and Belarus:

On this half-empty passenger ship with its swirling ’80s carpets right out of The Shining, there is very little sober talk of blockchain’s obstacles or limitations. Nobody mentions how wildly ecologically unsound the whole project is—some estimates have bitcoin burning as much energy as the entire nation of Ireland for a relatively small pool of users. Instead, the core and only existential question is which of the various coins and ICOs (initial coin offerings) will make you the richest the fastest before dawn.

Freedom here means freedom of money, and only freedom of money—and what freedom of money means is the freedom to amass great stocks of it without being taxed or traced. Occasionally, people even talk about this on panels, though nobody is really here for the conference part of the conference.

….On most ideological bandwagons, there is usually a distinction between grifters and true believers. The grifters are in it for the fame and the money and will say any old bollocks to get either. The true believers accept the money and fame as an inevitable proof of their genius. And then there is a rare subset of incredibly dangerous sociopaths soaked in Dark Enlightenment nightmare libertarianism for whom grifting is true belief. For many of them, including not a few on this boat, screwing over other people for your own gain is not just a side effect of economic philosophy, or proof of concept. It is a sacred calling. To them, the presence of thieves and Ponzi scheme dealers means the new free market is thriving.

Roger Ver is a true believer. “My ideal future,” he tells me, about 10 seconds after I turn on the recorder, “is that each individual has 100 percent complete control over their own money and they don’t have to get permission from any politician or banker or anybody at all to send or receive that money with whoever they want anywhere in the world. I’m trying to build the tools to enable that for everybody all over the planet.”

The crypto fad will eventually burn itself out as the marks lose their money and the grifter run out of new chumps to play. It feels to me like that day is near, but as Keynes didn’t say, “Con artists can keep the con going longer than you’d think.” Still, the Ron Paul bubble eventually burst, didn’t it? This one is bound to as well.

In November, the citizens of Wisconsin had the gall to elect a pair of Democrats to the offices of governor and attorney general. The Republican legislature, by remarkable coincidence, quickly decided that December was the perfect time to strip the governor and attorney general of many of their powers. This needed to be done quickly so the legislation could be signed by the lame duck Republican governor before he steps down in January.

So what does the incoming Democratic governor plan to do about this?

Wisconsin Gov.-elect Tony Evers (D) said Sunday that he may take legal action to block Republicans’ lame-duck measures to limit his authority upon taking office, calling their effort “a mistake.”

“I’m not making any promises one way or the other, but we’re looking at all issues, all options on the table,” Evers said in an interview on NBC News’s “Meet the Press.”

Have you ever seen the difference between Democrats and Republicans demonstrated so starkly? If the roles were reversed, Republicans would have long since declared war. They’d have a huge team of lawyers with lawsuits ready to file the moment the legislation was signed into law. Fox News would be screaming 24/7. The incoming governor would go on TV to loudly declare that he was going to ignore the law and continue exercising his traditional powers—and the incoming attorney general would back him up completely.

But Tony Evers, a Democrat? He “may” take legal action but he’s not promising anything.

Fucking hell.

Just in case you’re curious, here is the growth of household income over the past 40 years:

Please note a few things:

• I have used the PCE inflation index in order to keep all the PCE folks happy.
• The income data comes from the Census Bureau. It is market income. It does not include food stamps or Section 8 vouchers or other social welfare payments.
• The growth rate since 2000 has been 0.44 percent per year. This is not “stagnant.” However, it is “sluggish.”
• Thanks to high growth since 2013 (about 4.2 percent per year) households have finally recovered the income they lost in the Great Recession. However, that is flattening out and will most likely return to the ~0.5 percent growth rate of the post-2000 era.

Anyone who wants to call income growth of 0.44 percent anything better than sluggish is welcome to do so. But if you do, your understanding of the English language is different than mine.

Here’s a fairly typical email I got in response to my post last night about Bitcoin:

You write reckless articles without dd , s recent international survey shows bitcoin mining is 60% mined with renewables on top of that your foolish article is reckless because as price dropped it also reduced the difficulty by 24% in the last week , the lightning network has grown by 16000% in 2 months .

Please let me know what info you would like to know about crypto since you are clueless .

Thank you
Finance Director
John P….

This is one of the reasons I continue to say that Bitcoin is a con. This email is obviously illiterate nonsense, but it’s a typical defense of Bitcoin and it’s the kind of thing that keeps innumerate chumps pumping money into the crypto market.

As near as I can tell, the Bitcoin market is split between cutthroat Chinese miners running huge racks of servers, and hopeful but clueless marks who would be better off putting their money into lottery tickets. So this is the test: Are you a cutthroat Chinese miner running huge racks of servers? No? Then you’re one of the clueless marks. Sorry.

Bitcoin continues to plummet in value:

Putting aside the fact that the Bitcoin crash is teaching idiots a lesson, there really is a reason you should care about this. John Quiggin explains:

The good news is that a lower Bitcoin price makes the energy-wasting process of Bitcoin mining unprofitable for many, so lots of miners are turning off their servers. Most estimates of the marginal cost of mining are around $4500 per coin, but the market price has just fallen to $3500.

….The rapidity with which Bitcoin prices are falling give some hope that the entire disastrous episode will soon be over. If the current rate of decline (50 per cent per month) is maintained, Bitcoins will be worth less than dollar coins in a year’s time, and their impact on electricity demand will be negligible. That’s equivalent to taking a small country like New Zealand off-grid.

Cryptocurrencies are inherently a dumb idea. But aside from being a con, they also waste enormous amounts of energy in service of a pointless goal. The sooner Bitcoin crashes the better off the entire world will be.

Rich Lowry, the editor of National Review, has a story today:

Yes, Voter Fraud Is Real

Maybe ballot security isn’t such a bad thing after all. Democrats, who the day before yesterday were insisting that voter fraud didn’t exist, now believe that it was used to steal a North Carolina congressional seat from them — and they may well be right.

[etc.]

The North Carolina race demonstrates how even relatively small-scale cheating — no one will ever mistake McCrae Dowless for a major player — can undermine faith in our system. And how, if anyone doubted it, voter fraud is real.

This really pisses me off. Lowry knows perfectly well that he’s telling a lie. No Democrat has ever said that voter fraud doesn’t exist. This is not some kind of geeky pedantic point. Democrats just haven’t said this. Ever. Period.

What Democrats have said, over and over and over, is that in-person voter fraud doesn’t exist.¹ ²

This is not a casual “oops” kind of thing. Everyone who writes about election fraud knows the difference. It’s roughly like an auto mechanic knowing the difference between wheels and tires. Of course he knows.

But Lowry went ahead and wrote this anyway. He knows it’s dishonest, and he knows that, in fact, Democrats have been warning about absentee ballot fraud for years. But on the right, I guess we’re all Fox News now.

¹There are probably a few cases here and there, but they number in the dozens over the course of decades. If Lowry had said “in-person voter fraud,” I wouldn’t argue with shorthanding the Dem side of things as “it doesn’t exist.”

²Just to refresh your memory, in-person voter fraud is when someone comes to a polling station, pretends to be someone else, and fills in a ballot. This is the kind of voter fraud that could potentially be stopped by requiring photo ID, but there’s not much point since it never happens. Other kinds of election fraud include registration fraud, where you get people to fill out registration forms with bogus names, and absentee ballot fraud, where you somehow get access to absentee ballots and change the vote before the ballot is mailed in. These kinds of fraud happen periodically, but voter ID laws do nothing to stop them.

Pictures like this always crack me up. Hopper looks like she’s some kind of feline mafia capo, walking purposefully along the fence to make me an offer I can’t refuse. I want that food bowl filled on time today, capiche? Once she gets to me, of course, all she does is look wistfully into my eyes and demand that I scratch her head. And I do.

Bill Clark/Congressional Quarterly/Newscom via ZUMA

Tim Scott, the only African-American Republican member of the Senate, took to the pages of the Wall Street Journal today to defend his decision to oppose the nomination of Judge Thomas Farr to a federal district court:

The solution isn’t simply to decry “racial attacks.” Instead, we should stop bringing candidates with questionable track records on race before the full Senate for a vote.

That’s simple enough. But he’s the only Republican senator who feels that way. Just like Condi Rice and Colin Powell were the only members of George Bush’s administration to oppose his view on affirmative action. And just like Susan Collins, Kay Bailey Hutchison, Lisa Murkowski, and Olympia Snowe were the only Republican senators to vote for the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act.

It’s remarkable, isn’t it? Republican women know how to do the right thing for women. Republican blacks know how to do the right thing for blacks. The rest of the party knows too. They just ignore all the women and blacks even in the Republican Party itself.

I wonder what all the white men in the Senate Republican conference think of this. Do they not even realize it’s happening? Do they think women and blacks—even if they’re good conservatives otherwise—suddenly go nuts over identity politics when it affects them? Do they chalk it up to a mere political desire to keep their black/female base happy? Do they know perfectly well what the right thing is, and simply choose to ignore it because their own base of old white men won’t stand for it?

I suppose we all know the answer.

Over at New York, Eric Levitz headlines a recent post this way:

Millennials Aren’t Post-Consumerist, They’re Just Poor, Fed Finds

Unfortunately, I clicked on the link to see if this is truly what the Fed believes. If you’re not in the mood to read an entire blog post, let alone a Fed working paper, the nickel summary is: No, I don’t think this is what the Fed said at all. But there are certainly nuances here. So let’s spend some time comparing Millennials to Gen X. The full Fed report is here, and this is what it found. Note that all of these things compare Millennials and Gen X at points in time where they were similar ages (roughly around 1995 for Gen X and 2015 for Millennials).

• Millennials don’t hate cars. In fact, they buy them at exactly the same rate as Gen X. In both generations, about 82 percent own cars and the average value of their cars is $17,000.

• Millennials are slightly better educated than Gen X.
• They get married at lower rates than Gen X.
• Millennials have slightly higher incomes than Gen X.

• They spend money at about the same rate as Gen X.

• And their spending habits are fairly similar, with a few interesting deviations.

• Millennials have slightly less total debt than Gen X: $19,600 vs. $23,100.
• Their homeownership rate is far lower than Gen X: 34 percent vs. 50 percent.
• However, among those who own homes, Millennials own more expensive homes: $165,000 vs. $135,000.
• Those homes also come with higher mortgages: $105,000 for Millennials vs. $94,000 for Gen X.
• Net worth is about the same between generations: $48,000 for Gen X vs. $42,000 for Millennials.

By far the biggest difference between Millennials and Gen X is in homeownership: 34 percent vs. 50 percent. This also affects the nature of their debt: among those who do own homes, Millennials have bigger mortgages: $105,000 vs. $94,000. Millennials, on average, also have higher education debt: $18,000 vs. $13,000.

On all other measures—income, spending, debt, net worth—Millennials at age 30 are pretty similar to Gen X at age 30. They aren’t post-consumerist, they don’t hate cars, and they aren’t especially poor. Compared to Gen X they spend a little more on food and a little less on entertainment and clothes. They spend more on housing, but less on transportation.

And that’s about it. Almost literally, the only big difference is in homeownership, and even there it’s hard to know how much of this is because of changing tastes and how much is because housing costs have gone up. I suppose that would require another study.

POSTSCRIPT: Some of you may be surprised by the housing numbers. Isn’t a $105,000 mortgage awfully low?

No. It’s not. This is something I gripe about periodically, but when you say Millennial everyone immediately thinks of a bright, young college-educated person who lives in New York City and voted for Bernie Sanders. But that’s only a fraction of the Millennial population. Most of them don’t have college degrees and live in ordinary cities or rural areas where houses don’t cost a million dollars. If you live in Toledo, you can buy an ordinary 2-bedroom house for $150,000 or less. Ditto for Des Moines, Abilene, and Scranton. I suspect that a lot of people really need to readjust their mental picture of what an average Millennial is like.