You will have to get used to what happens when electricity is not available. You have no idea what hard times look like. My wife and children are experiencing that in Zambia, with a power drought and an erratic internet. Near-instantaneous is a fragile luxury and will be the first thing to go. So, your options are an empty set.

As it is, Western Union wire transfers are near-instantaneous over long distances, in cash, so that is an option that millions of people are using all the time. You don't have much vision with which to see.

It is easy to transmit nothing...and that is what cryptocurrency is.

If someone shot from the front, the exit wounds would be in the back of the head. The smallness of the throat wound might have been discordant.

It will be a short future. The analyses I've seen peg their doom as being only a few years away at the present growth in electric power requirements to sustain the blockchain mining. Why don't you sit down and get your head around this problem, instead of jumping on your charger and prophesying victory?

Stock shares are close to that.

I don't have any trust in the current financial system. Where did you get that absurd idea? Criticizing a "currency" that is entirely fictitious is not demonstrating any faith in the fiat currency (I even described crypto as fiat currency for the modern types).

If Crypto is the future, prepare for it to be blown away. You won't have anything, then. Even shares of stock would be more valuable, and that is one thing you are forgetting. If currency has no commodity value...it ultimately has no value.

I am hoping that Trump will re-establish our currency as a gold-backed one. (And maybe also silver, but I am not clear on the whole controversy over bimetallism.) It would be straightforward to make the conversion voluntarily.

Crypto is a bright idea that is more flashy than bright. There are those who are invested in it and talk it up, like a Ponzi scheme. It all looks fabulous if you don't examine the background economics of "mining" and the immense power growth required to keep the scheme bankrolled.

And SHTF includes complete power outage? And erratic telephone lines? You seem to have a very elegant conception of SHTF.

Not a bad analogy, except that you can't convert data back into energy. Bitcoin might be the scent of elephant shit...a hint of something being there that really isn't.

Here's an interesting analogy. Suppose someone made a currency from ice medallions on which beautiful miniature paintings have been made on them from water-soluble ink, each one unique. You trade them by moving them quickly from one refrigerated wallet to another. There must be continuous refrigeration power to keep them intact and valuable. And then the power system blows out and there is no power. All your currency melts away, worthless. (People sometimes make the utterly ignorant statement that "information cannot be destroyed." Burn a book in front of them sometimes and see if they think it has not been destroyed.)

I think the way that worked was that elephant dung could be burned for a fire.

Here is something to think about. There is the problem of differentiating between leaders and followers. As a matter of natural distribution, leaders are about 5% of a general population. (Empirical experiment: In the Korean War, North Korea segregated its prisoner population into those likely to lead and those likely to follow. They put the "leaders" under heavy guard. The "followers" did not need such heavy guard. The proportion was 1 in 20.)

Now, you consider the idea of "span of control." How many people can a leader lead without fumbling or missing something. In large corporate environments it is something close to 10, after which you need subordinate management. You can then construct a pyramid of a large organization as successive tiers of managers until you reach the top...and then add up what you have. I did this once for the Boeing company where I was working, and arrived at a fraction of the workforce in management that was much higher than 5%. I think it was about 15%. 2 out of 3 managers were in place not because they were good at leading, but because they were a penny in the fusebox. Just there to complete the chain of command.

I drew some conclusions from this. Management is not always going to entail leadership (which is why most managers are poor leaders). There aren't enough leaders at large. Why do people become managers? Not because they can lead---but because they are willing to put up with the bullshit. What is the largest organization we have? The Army and Navy, where "leaders" who are only managers spell death for those they lead.

I'm sure that any military or ex-military anons can pick up the thread of this thought.

"Mining" for digital currency requires computation. Computation requires continuous electric power. In order to mine new "coins" the computation becomes more complex and time-consuming...and power consuming. Others have done this analysis. The requirements are growing exponentially due to the nature of the mathematics and there will come a time when we simply do not have enough electric power to keep the blockchain calculations going and it all comes to a stop. An EMP only hastens the end. A bitcoin is not worth the paper it is not printed on. Market volatility is very high, because there is no commodity value. I can't even use a bitcoin as a coffee coaster. A cowrie shell has more commodity value than a bitcoin. A bitcoin is fiat currency for the paperless society.

It seems that Biden is sliding into deeper decrepitude, with his naps bordering on coma. He may be well beyond the criteria for the 25th Amendment, which means he is being used as a Wooden Indian (in the closet), something like Brezhnev became. This is bad enough, because he may be cognitively and physically incapable of manipulating the nuclear arming codes should the necessity arise. If anyone else is privy to those codes and directions, that would be an overthrow of government.

What could be worse is if he simply dies in place. Then what would they do with him? By the Constitution, Harris would become president. The military would have to be aware of this. If there is any irregularity in her assuming office, they would be aware of that also. Given her not-too-bright, impulsive, and panicky nature, would she rip loose from her puppet strings to do what seems best for HER? Would she appoint Walz as replacement VP and submit him for confirmation? And what if he is not confirmed? Open game? If he is confirmed, would that give them the confidence needed to suspend elections in the event of a "national emergency"?

Right now, we have a sitting president that is only a Sitting President, with moderately steady seas. The future of Ukraine is steadily going south, however, along with everything the Deep State has been trying to protect, preserve, and conceal. War between Iran and Israel may break out, which could go nuclear (I'm not so concerned about Iran's arsenal, but Israel has had undeclared nuclear weapons for years and had developed a fully operational intermediate-range ballistic missile, Jericho III.) Biden's somnolence would not be tenable if the world went "hot".

I'm not arguing for any conclusion to draw, except possibly that things are festering which would make the Deep State vulnerable, highly reactive, and unpredictable. The failure of the sales campaign for Harris might be another aggravating element. Time is running out, along with their list of backup plans.

This makes sense when you consider that the Space Force pertains not only to space operations, but also to the message traffic facilitated by space assets. They are the go-to force for issues of cybersecurity and cyberwarfare. A national guard for Space Force would be reserve forces.

And you exemplify the complacency. "There's nothing we can do, so we should do nothing." A perfect excuse for standing by while the train crashes and then whine about the wreckage.

It is not a question of what anyone thinks we can do---it is a question of doing what we think needs to be done. Sometimes we fail, but we do not allow a dooming premise to permit failure.

And whatever happened to the "no dooming" injunction on this board? If you want an excuse to sit on your ass and do nothing, I guess dooming is the perfect way to go. Don't bother to be involved in public life (Ewww...it's icky) or public discussion. Don't run for the smallest office. Don't get involved with your local school board. Just do what all whiner conservatives do: nothing. And blame it on the Zeitgeist.

It turns out that the true south pole is surprisingly close to the continental shore. You would have to traverse a large ice shelf, maybe feasible with an icebreaker.

Evidence that can be trusted. You should know by now that anti-Semitic and genocidal barbarians like Hamas and Ukraine are proven liars from start to finish. And when the U.S. goes along with their lies, it is complicit. You believe the casualty figures from either of them? Sorry, you are the one who needs to wind his alarm clock. You, on the other hand, are seemingly willing to believe any lie that feeds your hatred of Jews.

Yep. I had to change my handle because I lost my password.

This is complete paranoid fantasy.

What you are seeing is the natural crossing of flight paths. There is a lot of aerial traffic, and we seldom hear the sound. I live next to an international air terminal and they are common. Zero humidity on the ground does not translate to zero humidity at high altitude. And what is really crucial is the relative humidity, not the absolute humidity. If the vapor pressure of water vapor is higher than the vapor pressure from frozen ice crystals, the crystals will not sublimate into vapor. This is a very low vapor pressure.

I've observed persistent contrails in a clear sky when I was a toddler sitting in my back yard. The only aircraft that could do that were B-52s on test flights from the Boeing factory in Seattle where they were constructed. 50,000 feet altitude. So it is simply untrue that contrails always dissipate in 2 or 3 minutes. They are clouds and they will persist as long as a cloud can persist, quite some while. Your 2-3 minute persistence requirement is sheer myth.

A persistent contrail will unwrap and spread, becoming more diaphanous. I've seen that recently. That's a pretty stupid concept of spreading anything, that it would stay in place at high altitude for hours and not descend.

As for what a whistleblower might say, we have no substantiation of his claims. I reserve the right to be doubtful because I have already seen hoax material coming out of the "chemtrail" camp. There is a strong element of ignorance and deceit in this camp.

And contrails are not produced by heated air. They are produced by water vapor in the jet exhaust that is frozen solid upon exposure to ambient atmospheric conditions. In other words, it is a cloud just like the other clouds at that altitude. The clouds persist. No reason for a contrail not to persist if the relative humidity is 100%.

Yes, because they announce the presence of increased atmospheric humidity. They are not the cause. They are the effect. Where I live, we get hashtags all the time...and rain all the time. No big deal. A nearly 70-year history of persistent contrails at high altitude.

Ever heard that a "mackerel sky" would portend a change in weather? They are high-altitude clouds. A contrail is a high-altitude cloud. It's appearance can portend a change in weather.

Rain weather systems occur in humid air. As they move into an area, the humidity in the upper atmosphere will increase. This promotes the development of contrails. So, in the natural order of things, contrails are caused by the approach of a rain system, and the rain system will arrive in due course. Once all the humidity is flushed out of the air, the air is less humid, and contrails will be less frequent.

You are confusing cause and effect without understanding the actual causes and effects. And your lament over clouds is laughable. I live where the normal color of sky is "cloud." We get our sunshine. We live. We thrive. And these paltry clouds we call contrails do not interrupt the solar radiation to a significant extent. They are, after all, brighter than the sky you see them against---so how could they be reducing the sunlight?

Dream on. That's not going to happen unless you ground all commercial air transport. Those are contrails and the laws of physics and chemistry trump any dreams of being King Canute and lashing at the tide.

I will bet they are doing nothing to capture the lithium oxide and other unhealthy combustion products being given off.

It used to be we could buy "pre-owned" cars. Now we can buy "pre-burned" cars?

No shame whatsoever. He has reclaimed the Republican Party from its elitist corruption and returned it to its popular and anti-slavery origins. The Democrat Party has always been the party of slavery. This is the epochal fight to the end, and it really needs to be understood in this light.