I get a bit into bitcoin today to reflect how volatile it can be. Yesterday,  President Donald Trump threatened new 100% tariffs on China. The  U.S. stock market tumbled , with the Dow Jones Industrial dropping 879 points, or 1.9%.  The broader S&P dropped 2.71%, and the tech-heavy Nasdaq Composite slid 3.56%. Gold rose 1.5%.   Read my posting of yesterday on how just this commodity could trigger a collapse of the USA and World . In particular,  cryptocurrencies Bitcoin ( almost a 10% decline ), Ether ( 14.2% ) and Solana ( 20% ) led the sinking , bringing total liquidations to $14.28 billion, the largest in crypto history.  One of Trump's executive order to allow digital assets to be included in 401(k) plans led to  Bitcoin  soaring to a record high of $124,000 last week.   When to capitalize (b)itcoin?  When referring to the protocol, technology or network.  But lowercase bitcoin is used as a unit of currency....

My blog yesterday ended with some beautiful photos, indicating that these were sent to me by, for me, a relatively new informant, Gan Jing World.  Before I go into this mysterious organization, though, first, a question.  Do you want to be a billionaire? Turns out that the jackpot for the Powerball drawing tonight at 10:59 PM EDT is up to $1.8 billion. This is the second-highest grand prize in history, to the $2.04 billion jackpot won in November 2022. By the way, there is also Mega Millions, which had a $1.602 jackpot in August 2023.  Costs $5/ticket. But back to Powerball, say you match all five numbers.  Are you then a billionaire? Nope.  You have two options. Take a one-time cash payment, and while that is $1.8 billion, for the moment you are a billionaire.  However, the way this works, you only get $826.4 billion. Or, take 29 annual payments to get the full $1.8 billion.  But you still need to pay taxes and wait for 29 years to get it all. Either ...

Time  magazine this morning had this article:   What are the Five Strongest Earthquakes Ever Recorded? #6 was, of course, that massive Russian Kamchatka earthquake of 8.8 magnitude just experienced at 8:25AM local time on July 30.  Amazingly enough, there was only one death, but this was a woman in Japan while evacuating.  So there was none caused by the earthquake itself.   There was another 8.8 earthquake,  Chile in 2010 , which killed around 600, including 25 still missing.  So there is a tie for #6.  I happened to be in Amsterdam, Netherlands that day, but still wrote an article for the Huffington Post entitled  Hawaii Tsunami?   You can click on that link to read the whole article, but I will provide a beginning here: I'm on an around the world odyssey, which you can follow through my   HuffPost postings . Well, my most exciting day is happening right in front of me watching the 8.8 Chile earthquake cataclysm on ...