Terra In The Skies

So To Speak

As longer-term readers will recall, BOOJUM! and Conrad, and indeed the rest of the editorial staff, all view cryptocurrency as the new word we invented for it: a 'scamble', in that it frequently manifests being an utter con and is also more akin to walking into a casino to play poker blindfold than an investment.  One of the most spectacular falls from grace was FTX, which went from being a market leader to a pariah run by indicted criminals.  Art!

SBF

     That's Sam Bankman-Fried, a name of infinite irony if ever there were one.  His future is definitely fried, as he'll spend the next 25 years of it in prison.  Was it worth 3 years of living like a king off other people's money?  Sam's tactical mistake was in pleading not guilty and facing off for a trial, because by that time all his compatriots in crime had done deals with the Feds to get shorter sentences.  Fealty among fraudsters, hmmmm?

     It's not the only recent disaster with crypto-currency, because this market is driven by two essential factors: greed and an expectation of getting something for nothing.  'Investors', for which read 'gullible rampantly-acquisitive sheep' see dollar signs in large amounts, at which point rationality and logic behave like a Ruffian general and leap out of the window.  Art!

     As long as this mindset prevails, and there is insufficient legislation to manage the cowboys, companies like 'Terra' are going to come a cropper.

     Don't worry, I shall avoid going into the technical details of Terra and it's sister company 'luna', because they are deeply boring.  Terra's big con - sorry, 'idea'- was that their cryptocurrency, UST*, would be pegged in value to the US Dollar, one of the world's biggest trading currencies and a bastion of stability.

     What did Terra have stashed in their bank vaults to underwrite their UST cryptocurrency?

     This:

     No, that's not a typo.  They had nothing in cash or collateral or securities.  What they thought would do instead was a mess of algorithms and statistics that would maintain the UST/$ peg, by arcane mathematics akin to black magic.  Art!

     The idea was that investors would buy up UST and then deposit them in a facility called 'Anchor', where they could earn a 20% return on the investment, and swap investments between Terra, luna and Anchor.

     This too closely resembled a Ponzi scheme for the smarter market players, that is, a pyramid con scheme where older investors are paid from the investment from newer investors, not from profits.

     The even smarter market analysts looked at Terra with concern, nothing that it could only sustain itself with an ever-present stream of investors.  If this ever dried up then Terra was in immense trouble, because it had nothing but software in the bank.  Art!

     After a honeymoon period of six months, guess what?  The investors stopped arriving in numbers, probably to another scamble that promised 30% returns.  UST went from what Terra laughably called a 'stablecoin' to what Conrad points at, laughs and calls a 'disastercoin'.  The UFT lost 90% of it's value in a week, knocking $45 billion off Terra's value, as people scrambled to sell what were becoming worthless cryptocoins - luna ended up trading at $0.02 or one-fiftieth of what it was supposed to.  That loss wasn't gradual or incremental, either; it took place within a week.  Not sure how long a period that is in lunar terms; guessing around 7.36 days?

     Terra bit the bullet in January this year and filed for bankruptcy.  What you might call terra infirma.

     

What In The Name Of All That's Holy Is THIS!

Conrad was perusing the front cover of the M.E.N. prior to opening it and tackling the Codeword and Crossword (Cryptic of course; only ever cryptic), and came across an eye-stoppingly hideous photo on the cover that led me to enquire within.  Art!

     Look at it's hideous blank eyes and girning expression, that satanic gaping maw and realise that this is going to haunt your nightmares for months to come.

     Apparently it was to do with the ballfoot game, which is another reason not to love it.

"The War Illustrated Edition 192 October 1944"
We have gradually increased the information present in these item titles, so you can go look them up if the urge so takes you.  First you will need to spend about £100 on the 10 volumes plus post and packing, and second you'd need to diligently pore over 600 pages per volume.  Or - you can leave it to Conrad.  Art!

     "A.V.R.E." stands for "Armoured Vehicle Royal Engineers" and was a Churchill chassis adapted for use by the sappers, who often needed an armoured vehicle to protect their soft squishy skins with.  The Churchill made an excellent base for all kinds of modifications.  At top port you can see one carrying an immense bundle of branches, known as a 'fascine', which will be used to bridge anti-tank ditches, small streams, broken bridges and the like.  To starboard is an AVRE mounting a Petard mortar, firing a whacking big HE round used to engage bunkers and strongpoints, in order to split them open or demolish them.

     Below that you can see a couple of sappers handling one of the Petard bombs, and to starboard an AVRE retrieving a fascine for further use.

     The AVRE was emphatically not intended to take on other tanks or armoured vehicles, but Conrad can't help wondering what would happen to a Teuton tank hit with that Petard round?  Nothing good.

A Mysterious Disappearance

Conrad was watching "The History Guy"'s vlog about the disappearance of Ambrose Bierce, which is quite enough for a whole blog of itself, and he (THG) mentioned one of Bierce's short stories, "Charles Ashmore's Trail".  Art!

Note sinister footsteps

     It's a very short story: Charles Ashmore goes out one evening to collect water from the nearby spring, and is never seen again.  His footsteps are tracked in recently-fallen snow and come to an abrupt end.  That's it.  His kinfolk claim to have heard his voice coming faintly from nowhere specific for a few weeks afterwards, and after that - silence.

     Conrad is certain he read a somewhat enhanced version of this story in an anthology of supposed real-life events, and it probably has an alternative existence as a True Story that people lie about on teh Interwebz.

An Ongoing Process

Here's another from that list of locomotive manufacturers that I dredged up from the internet.  I think.  I wrote their names down, just not where the list came from.  Art!

     This is a 'Process Locomotives' Yard Switcher.  Process mention 'small businesses' in their very small internet advertising presence, so Conrad assumes they're even smaller than Brookville EC.

     Their 'schtick', if you want to call it that, is rebuilding switching locomotives from the wheels up, using re-conditioned frames, trucks and motors.  This enables them to provide kit like the above for far less than a new switcher, with plenty of work left in them.  Art!

     This is a PL Series 15BL Road Switcher.  Conrad believes these are the locomotives that manoeuvre rolling stock around marshalling yards, variously pushing and pulling to assemble or deconstruct freight trains.

     I am going to add in a bit of their spec description, just to boost the word count a tad.

 Features include patented high-adhesion traction control, EPA emission-certified engines, radio remote control, remote maintenance monitoring, video and data event recorders, etc.

     "Radio remote control" sounds rather suspicious to me.  I mean, what could possibly go wrong?  Art!

Flee!  Save yourselves!

Finally -

Time to go scare up a pot of tea.

*  Unbelievably Stupid Toxic?