Gun Companies Crushed By Trump

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If you ever wondered what the primary motivator is for Americans buying guns - you now have some good data: the stock prices of publicly traded gun manufacturers.

What you see here is the result of an October and November run-up because it looked like Hillary Clinton would win the election. The second that Trump was elected, their shares got crushed, and they've been hammered hard ever since then.

So what drives sales? Fear. Fear that those Democrats are going to take away all of the guns.

It will be interesting to see if this trend continues deep into a Trump presidency.

Why We Need Healthcare Reform

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Bloomberg Report: The U.S. Lags in Life Expectancy Gains

In the past 40 years, America has dropped from above average to below average life expectancy among developed countries, despite the fact that we spend significantly more per capita on healthcare. 

 Life expectancy at birth, 1970 and 2011

“Life expectancy [in the U.S.] is now more than a year below the OECD average of 80.1,” the OECD said in a press statement, “compared to one year above the average in 1970.”

- Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development report

Every single country doing better than us has some form of socialized healthcare. Purely privatized healthcare for the vast majority of Americans is not fine. The Affordable Care Act may have some serious issues in both implementation and, you know, affordability, but the system is a step in the right direction. It needs to be fixed, not scrapped.

Unless, of course, someone got serious about an actual single-payer system.

Bitcoin Miners: Unboxing and Explanation

If you haven't heard about Bitcoin, I completely understand. If you have, and you don't get the appeal, I completely understand. My interest is in the economics behind the system, and maybe a little bit of interest in what the potential is overall. Regardless, this is kind of how the process has gone for me.

Way back in April, I ordered a couple of the new ASIC (application specific integrated circuit) Bitcoin mining machines from Butterfly Labs. These were really intended to be more educational than investment, so I'm not really going to go into the relative value of the investment more than to say that if I'd simply bought Bitcoin with the money I paid for the machines, I'd be far more wealthy now than with a pair of miners. The quick napkin math would have put me at a rough 450% profit had I simply purchased the coins when I purchased the machines. No matter what your own personal opinion is of Bitcoin, there are people out there who value it, and there are businesses that accept it as payment. That makes it a currency. Its scarcity drives its value. Imagine if pogs were easily traded over the internet, had a limited number printed, and couldn't be counterfeit. That, in a nutshell, is Bitcoin.

At any rate, the two miners I ordered came in over the last month, and it's been kind of excited to see them hashing away.

Currently my machines hash at a combined 42-47.5 GH/s, which would be considered underperforming. The culprit is the Single, which has been plodding away at 35-40 GH/s instead of its intended 50. I have an RMA in to Butterfly Labs for it, but I'm not holding my breath. So what do these things do?

Mining machines spend their days rapidly hashing away, building the Blockchain (the transaction log that makes Bitcoin extremely problematic to counterfeit) and validating network transactions. Once every 10 minutes, 25 Bitcoins are awarded to a miner on the network, rewarding people for their efforts. Because this is the only way Bitcoins can enter the system, and the awarding of Bitcoin for mining shuts off in 2040, there will be a maximum of 21,000,000 Bitcoin. Ever. Once 21 million Bitcoins have been distributed, mining machines earn a portion of all Bitcoin transactions, elegantly building incentive for miners to continue validating network transactions, even after the last Bitcoin has been allocated.

Bitcoin, and almost everything associated with it is like the wild west. There's a lot of theft. There's not much regulation. People love being "free" to use it as they wish, but hate that there's not much recourse if they have their coin stolen. The people making the most money aren't the ones mining, they're the ones selling the miners the equipment. New technology is rapidly outpacing the old, in an arms race of epic proportions.

But it's really interesting, and it's crazy to have watched something take off so much over the last couple of years. There's no shaking the simple fact that if you'd invested 11 dollars to buy a bitcoin a year ago, that same bitcoin would be worth $450 as of this article's creation, which is a gain of roughly 40x.