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Alabama candidate wins by 72 votes after sorority offers voters free drinks

“An candidate for the Tuscaloosa City School Board in Alabama has appeared to defeat his opponent by just 72 votes after a sorority got behind him by offering free drinks and limo rides to the polls to encourage people to vote. In all, more than 60 percent of the people who signed up to vote during the final week were college-aged women. In an email obtained by Al.com, University of Alabama sorority members were promised ‘incentives’ to vote for Cason Kirby and Lee Garrison. On Tuesday, stretch SUV limousines, vans and a passenger bus were seen taking students from Sorority Row to the polling place.” Continue reading →

Do bitcoins belong in your retirement portfolio?

“For years, investment firms and professionals have advocated the need to include a small percentage of high risk and potentially high reward assets into your retirement portfolio. The thinking is that including a small percentage of your overall asset allocation (from 5% – 10%) into these assets can provide high potential returns with only a small impact on your portfolio if the risk becomes too great. Robert Powell wrote on this site recently of how defined benefit plan managers often go beyond stocks and bonds to achieve high returns by pursuing more ‘nontraditional strategies’.” Continue reading →

Bill Bonner: Can paper money survive a full credit cycle?

“A super bank run by super economists? How long would it take for them to blow up the whole world’s financial system? But don’t worry about it. The system will blow up anyway. No paper money system has ever survived a full credit cycle. That – and not a lack of international monetary reform – is why there are so many bubbles now. When interest rates are falling – often pushed to artificially low levels…and held there for an extremely long time – credit expands and the burden of debt. That has been happening for the last 3 decades. And now, the whole economy depends on something that can’t possibly continue. Debt can’t grow forever.” Continue reading →

Anarchy: The Basis for a Civilized Society

“Sartwell says even if anarchism were not practical, it doesn’t follow that it has no value. This is not to put aside the question of practical application. He pointed to the works of anthropologists James Scott and David Graeber, whose work independently has shown how anarchism has worked in a variety of settings. Bowling leagues, to use an example from Sartwell’s book, are anarchist organizations. They are completely voluntary. No one is forced to join. So when you think about it, our lives are full of anarchist organizations built on voluntary foundations. Suddenly, anarchism doesn’t seem like such a radical idea. You come to appreciate that the basis of civilized society is anarchic to its core.” Continue reading →

Freedom and Servitude: Could You Have Answered This Question?

“For this man, following rules that others set made sense – it’s a safe position. But once there, he’ll never really grow again, and he will be cut off from a lifetime of discovery and satisfaction. What’s bad about servitude is that it prevents us from living. To one extent or another, we’ve all let our love of life dim and have taken ‘safe’ positions. We live in a tough world after all. The good news, however, is that we can regain what we’ve lost merely by changing our minds. To repair ourselves requires that we think about these things – to notice when we begin playing a role, to act on curiosity when we feel it, to stop defending our previous choices, to expect surprises and opportunities.” Continue reading →

Researcher: Facebook spammers make $200 million just posting links

“Spammers posting links on Facebook fan pages to send people to third-party scam sites are earning $200m every year, according to calculations by a team of Italian security researchers who have investigated hundreds of thousands of posts on the social network. Trying to catch and get rid of the spammers is a growing problem for Facebook. The revenue that the spammers do not form part of Facebook’s revenue, but instead piggyback on the success of the social network, which now has more than a billion users worldwide. In April, the Italian team uncovered the multimillion-pound business of selling fake Twitter followers, estimating then that as many as 20m were created by spammers.” Continue reading →

Skype confirms it is developing 3D video calls

“Skype has confirmed it is developing 3D video calls – but said it could be many years before we can use the technology. The Microsoft-owned internet telephony firm revealed it is experimenting with 3D video calls on its 10th anniversary. In an interview with the BBC, Mircrosoft’s corporate vice-president for Skype, Mark Gillett, said: ‘We’ve done work in the labs looking at the capability of 3D-screens and 3D-capture. We’ve seen a lot of progress in screens and a lot of people now buy TVs and computer monitors that are capable of delivering a 3D image. But the capture devices are not yet there.'” Continue reading →

Energy harvester that creates power from ambient vibrations comes to market

“MicroGen’s energy harvester, dubbed Bolt, provides power like a battery — but uses a very different means to get there. Housing a piezoelectric microelectromechanical system (MEMS) inside the casing pictured above, the unit creates energy from vibrations in the surrounding environment. Ambient vibrations cause a flap on the device (pictured below) to move back and forth, which in turn creates a current that dumps energy in to either a capacitor or a thin rechargeable battery next to the flap. The Bolt requires a source vibrating at around 120Hz in order to charge, and an LED on the outer casing will blink to let you know it’s full.” Continue reading →