The Blaisdell Blog

  Trump has made millions in the crypto market while the fools that invested in it have lost billions.   Trump’s own crypto coin was shilled for an IPO of $74/per.   It is now selling for around $3.   If you bought it you fell for the pitch and lost everything, including your pride.   You have been had, but even now you do not know how bad.   Why?   Because Trump and his family made themselves the brokers for this coin, which means that not only did they get rich from the initial bloated (pick me, pick me) price, they also get a cut of every consequent purchase or sale.   You bought when it was high? They got a cut.   You sold when it was dropping?   They got a cut.   You decided to cut your loses?   They got a cut. If you are one of the crypto-crazies and among the ever-hopeful, but intellectually challenged devotees, thereof.    Here are some things that you need to know. Crypto is nothing more than the 21st C...

Belgium is one of the smallest and most densely populated nations in Europe.   It is snugged between France, the Netherlands and Germany with the North Sea forming its northern border. Belgium’s population is educated, intelligent, refined and ostensibly neutral. But, in 1914 its children were starving to death.   During World War I Belgium fell to Germany, which refused to feed Belgian’s civilians.   You don’t have to carry a gun to die in war, and children are the easiest and most quickly dismissed victims of all.   In London an American businessman had already launched and administered a successful effort to bring relief to Americans trapped in England at the beginning of the war.   He was respected and liked, though his social skills were sometimes thin or absent entirely (when he grew weary of the chatter at a dinner party he would simply find a quiet room, pick up a book and start reading).   He was well known as a good judge of character, a creativ...

  Both of my children were involved in sports, starting in kindergarten.   I never missed a game.   By the time both girls had graduated from high school I felt like I had to call the athletic director and ask him where I was supposed to be on Tuesday.             I was particularly fond of basketball.   When you watch a high school basketball game you are going to see every player leave their heart on the court.   And it is free.   That is why I was aghast to hear that the NBA finals were going for $7000 per seat!               While I am a free-market economist I know a problem when I see it.               Capitalism has a fatal flaw, and that flaw can be illustrated in what has come to be called the K-shaped economy.   Most economic models show themselves as waves, undula...

A friend recently sent a message from Hot Springs, Arkansas and I immediately found myself thinking of the time Tom and I spent several days in this happy town.   To visit Hot Springs is to travel back to 1912.   To get a picture of life in 1912 think of the movie Titanic .   It was in April of that year that the doomed ship sailed and the movie offers a good look at the lives, dress and manners of both the well-heeled in a pre-income tax world and the working class who put together enough money for the voyage if not the luxury.   These were the days leading up to the Roaring Twenties when disposable income was available, people were optimistic and the banks had not yet failed.   The suffragette movement was in full gear, though women did not get the right to vote until 1920.             This was also the time before antibiotics when warm, natural springs were considered curative.    The hot sp...

  Ebola, Mutation and a Lack of Preparation Under a microscope an Ebola virus reminds me of a sailor’s double half hitch.   It is a virus of African origin, a hemorrhagic fever, meaning it causes intense bleeding, frequently from every orifice of the body, in the later stages of the disease.   Ebola virus disease (EVD) typically emerges periodically in small villages of Central and West Africa, near tropical rainforests.    Ebola’s natural host is probably the fruit bats of the tropics.   When the disease moves to larger animals, principally primates (humans are primates) it becomes fatal.   When the people of these remote villages find the ill or dead primates and use them for food, Ebola enters the human population where is kills and spreads—always through contact with infected bodily fluids.   The disease first appeared in 1976 simultaneously in two countries, the Sudan and the Democratic Republic of the Congo.   At that time, it had a...