Comments

Episode-1975- Listener Feedback for 4-3-17 — 27 Comments

  1. Question for Jack.

    What are your, feelings on lever action pistol cal guns mostly 357 as i don’t reload. I’m considering a ranch hand or 92 both rossi for the lower cost and i consider guns tools not art. Anyway, being from the midwest we always use larger cal rifles 308, 270, and 06, I’ve never considered deer hunting with pistol, but now that i live in NM I’ve started toying with the ideal. It is legal in NM to use any center fire rifle or pistol cal, but from forums it seems pretty split with guys 100% yes or 100% no. I do know that 357 has distance and power limitations, but can you give some insite as you have lived in and I’m assuming hunted the south central high planes area. Also 92 for ammo capacity or ranch hand for size? Thoughts.

    • .357 out of a carbine is a good hunting option. I know you don’t reload but it is STUPID easy with a straight walled catridge like the .357 and opens up a lot of options. Lee Classic Loaders are just so simple. The options are what shut down the nay-sayers. 125gn-180gn weight bullets leave you with a bunch of ways to hunt big and little game (big meaning whitedeer and hogs). If you buy factory, soft nose jacketed or hollow points for everything but hogs. Hogs are too tough for hollow points in my opinion. I just pissed on off. Firearm should hold 10-12 rds total. All my opinion but my ancestors hunted everything with a .32-20 so a .357mag would have seemed CRAZY to them. And then there is that bow and arrow thing. Yup, .357mag in a rifle is great.

  2. Off topic, but could anyone please remind the name of the “rule” or “law” that states that as organizations grow, they become more about perpetuating their own existence rather than the goals they originated from? Jack has mentioned it several times but I can’t seem to find it.

  3. Never seen The Princess Bride? As @ child of the eighties? That is totally, completely, and in all other ways INCONCEIVABLE!

    • The title alone makes it sound horrible, a chick flick. I guess it isn’t but that is all I ever figured it was, come one THE PRINCESS BRIDE?

      You put bride and princess in a movie title and I am not exactly excited about it, makes me think about things like Sweet November, Hope Floats and some stupid Mail Box at a beach house.

      You know like this https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UJUC2VgN2So

      • This actually reminds me of the opening scene of the movie.
        grandson: is this a kissing book is it?
        grandfather: wait, Just wait
        grandson: well when does it get good?
        grandfather: keep your shirt on.

        I watched this all the time as a kid….along with monty python. 🙂

      • You have to see it, Jack, if for no other reason than to be able to imagine facing your worst foe and telling them you are dueling..To The Pain!

      • You gotta see the Princess Bride Jack, it’s in no way shape or form a chick flick, it’s so good

        • @Justin Stern um, “A fairy tale adventure about a beautiful young woman and her one true love. He must find her after a long separation and save her. ”

          Yea right up my alley. LOL

      • > A fairy tale adventure about a beautiful young woman and her one true love. He must find her after a long separation and save her.

        Eh, a very superficial description. As @Loren mentioned, the grandfather in the film gives a better one: “Are you kidding? Fencing, fighting, torture, revenge, giants, monsters, chases, escapes, True Love, miracles….”

        suffice to say, a very excellent and *manly* movie, title/description notwithstanding, lol

        • I particularly like the “revenge” part. I may have issues.

          Show of hands, who says we screen The Princess Bride at the fall workshop?

  4. Jack,
    Do you have a recommendation to people (me), on where to get the most “plain talk” information on blockchain everything.
    All I know is that bitcoin is on a blockchain; that’s it. I don’t even know what questions to ask.

    Thank’s for prodding me in this direction. You’ve mentioned “Bitcoin and Blockchain” so many times that I finally have to, at least, understand what it is, how I can use it, or if I should use it.

    Thank’s you are a blessing to us all.

    • I really don’t I do have a guest booked that I feel will be more helpful than past ones on the subject.

      • Thank you for replying, I’ve been working on taxes and old taxes so sorry for not responding sooner.

        Again, thank you so much for your time and effort to keep us in the loop about the things we should be paying attention to.

    • There’s a lot of confusing info out there.

      A Block Chain is a distributed 3rd party verification system. That’s it. It could be verifying financial transactions, as with BitCoin (functioning like a bank to verify funds), Contracts as it does with Etherium and others (functioning like a notary public), it could be used for secure logins… Anytime you need a 3rd party to validate something, that’s what a blockchain is for.

      It does this by keeping a public ledger, then rewarding people validating queries against that ledger. Because so many people are validating trillions of queries a second, and there is so much redundancy, it becomes virtually impossible to “cheat” and falsely verify something.

      Let’s use BitCoin as an example. Keep in mind, Bitcoin is more than a blockchain, it’s merely built ON a blockchain.

      Lets say you wanted to transfer $10 to me. You would send it to my address (which looks like this: 3CG3P5YrVFJBi4mgreyu1fuZMwcLg31zYJ).

      Before funds can transfer, we need to verify you actually have the funds, just like a bank does. So that payment record is sent out to hundreds of thousands of people to verify and is encrypted. Everyone’s funds (by account #, not name) are visible to everyone else. There is a small transaction fee (about 30¢ per $1,000) which is split among all the people who validate those funds in the public ledger to confirm the transaction. That functions as the incentive for people to process transactions. The people/machines who process the transactions are called “Miners”.

      So a few dozen miners check the ledger and determine you do have the funds. Once that confirmation is there (and verified by multiple parties), they write a new line in the ledger, deducting the funds from your account, and adding them to the recipient. Because the request was encrypted, it takes multiple people, all working on parts of it to decrypt the request. So an individual miner doesn’t have the ability access all parts of the request and decrypt it fully, so they can’t validate anything alone. That keeps them from making false records to steal or create new money. It’s actually much more secure than traditional banking.

      But bitcoin is a currency, so beyond the blockchain functions, there are secondary actions, like the creation of new bitcoin. Right now, there is a lottery of sorts between all miners. Every 10 minutes, 12.5 new bitcoins are created and given to the person who completed the last part of the “block” (transaction request). There are trillions upon trillions of parts being processed every second, so the odds of an individual miner getting these bitcoins are pretty low (getting struck by lightning while winning the national lottery low), billions to one against. So people break off into “pools”, and collectively work to mine these blocks and share the proceeds when they find one. This function is part of BitCoin, but not the Block Chain itself. It’s a superficial addition which runs on the blockchain.

      So to clarify, The Blockchain is just a system of authentication, BitCoin is a currency transacted on that authentication system. When people talk about mining, exchange rates, pools, etc, those are properties of the currency, in how it operates on the blockchain, but a blockchain could exist without any of that. Most of what you’ll read about actually relates to Currency, and not to the blockchain itself.

      • Just a follow-up: I know some people have been thinking about mining BitCoin. As a miner myself, I can assure you, there is no money to be made in it.

        If you mine on a computer using a CPU, and it’s a FAST computer, you can get about 50kH (kilo-Hashes). That will make you about 1,000 Satoshis per day. A Satoshi is a one hundred millionth of a bitcoin. If we normalize the exchange rate to 1BTC = 1,000 USD (it’s a bit higher at the moment), one Satoshi is 0.001¢.

        GPU Mining (using a computer graphics card, assuming top opf the line hardware) makes about 4¢ per day.

        FPGA (Field-Programmable Gate Arrays), the hardware that allows Google to process millions of searches per second can reach Giga-Hashes, and maybe make you 10¢ a day.

        An ASIC (Application Specific Integrated Circuit) can hit Tera Hashes. 1 TH = ~53¢ a day.

        Mind you, you have to pay for electricity to run these machines, and the machines cost money.

        On one of my old miners, I get 1.122TH/s (an “AntMiner S5”)
        That’s running 550 Watts @ 5¢/kWh.
        I make from that about $1.25 a month or $15 a year.
        The hardware costs about $100.

        Keep in mind, the difficulty of mining increases frequently, so my rates lower over time. Right now, unless a lot of miners go out of business, this machine will never pay for itself.

        So why do it? As a hobby, to stay aware of the BitCoin market, and because it’s a way to contribute to the BitCoin economy, as each miner makes it more secure.

        If you wanted to mine for profit, look at Hosting Services. Genisis-Mining comes to mind (not a recommendation, they’re just the most popular). For $1,950, you get a 2 year mining contract on their hardware, at 15TH/s, which includes power costs. You could double your money if the price holds where it is, but there’s a risk. If more miners join, and the difficulty increases, everyone makes less. If the BitCoin price drops, you make less. They are hedging their bets on their own mining operation by selling contract shares for actual money. If the BitCoin value decreases, they still get paid. So it’s a financial risk pool.

        People who make money off of BitCoin do so as day-traders. Buy low, sell high. But since it takes 10+ minutes for a transaction to hit the blockchain, that too is a risk, and a lot of work for little gain unless you have a lot of BitCoin to play with.

        If you’re holding BitCoin, treat it as a long-term investment and just sit on it. That’s the only method that makes sense, and even then, it’s a risk. In 2013, Bitcoin was $140 a coin. After the Silk-Road takedown, it dropped to $110. It’s ten times that now, but that was a substantial loss for many. It was the crypto-currency equivalent of the great depression, all because of one site coming down.

        What’s propping up BitCoin now is Ransomware. People hijack computers and ransom them back for a few hundred dollars in BitCoin. Some people estimate that accounts for 10-30% of the bitcoin economy. If Microsoft comes up with an effective patch, even temporarily in the short-term to reduce the infection rate, it could drop the value substantially. If another big infection like CryptoLocker spreads over the internet, it could drive up BitCoin values. The long term trend is up, but there’s a lot of volatility in the short term.

        Your best option for BitCoin investment is to buy $20 worth every week or so, and just sit on for a few years, pay attention to the markets, but don’t get jumpy, and don’t risk any money you’ll miss if things go badly. A lot of people dumped their coin after the silk road was shut down. They’re kicking themselves now.

      • I must need more basic info. You started right off the bat “over my head” I am sensing I need to understand basic investment and economics beyond loans and taxes.

  5. The free RV space for helping feed livestock….
    We have taken Jacks advice and added the ues of our bathroom and laundry room as well as including the ues of one of our gas powered back up generator and solar panels. I want anyone considering this to know we are for real, this isn’t something we are just kicking around its been a long term plan of ours for a long time now. We’re serious and ready to start now.
    Also we understand like jack said on air RVERS like to be mobile and we’re open to any idea that will keep someone here on the days were gone. A single season or seasonal deal would be fine.
    It’s also worth mentioning that if a long term deal can be made we have even found away to work a small income into the deal once we start harvesting if the person is willing to man a farmers market stand.
    Thanks again to the entire tsp community, and here’s that link to the ad again…

    http://spokane.craigslist.org/prk/6073417294.html