Tag Archives: Mining

Is it reality?

That is the question I am faced with as I saw the article at CBC which I cannot continue as CBC screwed up its site giving us advertisements every inch of the article, as such Brodie Fenlon clean up your freaking site, and fire the idiot responsible for this. Yet the BBC came to the rescue and gives us (at https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cx2v37z333lo) ‘Trump deep sea mining order violates law, China says’ in earnest, that article is three days old and I preferred the CBC article as it shows a little more clearly how desperate America has become for funds. I reckon that the interest on 36 trillion of debt is gnawing on the bones of America, more prevalent that gnawing has gone beyond the bones as it is starting on the bowels of America. The BBC article gives us “Donald Trump has signed a controversial executive order aimed at stepping up deep-sea mining within US and in international waters. The move to allow exploration outside its national waters has been met by condemnation from China which said it “violates” international law.” I tend to agree with China, but merely as it allows a setting where the desperate poor countries who cannot counter America and these nations are left with baubles. A setting they learned from the slave traders around 1768. You have to hand it to trump. He is giving the old scriptures a chance to prove themselves. The issue I partially have a problem with is “The administration estimates that deep-sea mining could boost the country’s GDP by $300bn (£225bn) over 10 years and create 100,000 jobs”, in the first there is no clear setting for the $300,000,000,000 revenue. If they ‘mine’ in a few wrong sports, the price if mining and the revenue of staff will cost them an easy $50,000,000,000 which implies a lost revenue base of 16%, the second part is that these jobs are mostly given to people they just evicted. Only the higher levels will get a nice dime, the rest will be done by Americans who didn’t want the job anyway and that breeds errors and often mistakes. A non-committed employee screws up the daily routine a lot more than you are happy with and that will be dozens of people. The part that I never gave the right attention is seen in ““The harm caused by deep-sea mining isn’t restricted to the ocean floor: it will impact the entire water column, top to bottom, and everyone and everything relying on it,” he added in a statement released on Friday.” The he in that quote is Jeff Watters of Ocean Conservancy, a US-based environmental group. The fact that Jeff merely got one quote implies that he has a whole lot more to say and I wonder if we will ever see that part of the equation. The larger setting is that America is now ready to start bullying its way through international waters. So what will they call those who want to intervene on their waters (or too close to it), will they suddenly be branded pirates? A larger setting that America has lost the plot and I warned for this a decade ago. Deal with your debt unless it deals with you and that seemingly seems to be happening now. It also opens a new setting. These little nations will now be ready to side with China, which is another headache for America. And that setting will give China (as a protector or these nations) an options to scuttle these miners. So $300 billion largely lost and American lives lost (at present no one cares about those). Now we get the added cost of these mining platforms and as such America gets into deeper waters. 

So the end of the BBC article gives us “A recent paper published by the Natural History Museum and the National Oceanography Centre looked at the long term impacts of deep sea mining from a test carried out in the 1970s. It concluded that some sediment-dwelling creatures were able to recolonise the site and recover from the test, but larger animals appeared not to have returned.

The scientists concluded this could have been because there were no more nodules for them to live on. The polymetallic nodules where the minerals are found take millions of years to form and therefore cannot easily be replaced.” As such we have a (non proven) stage for the desperation of Americans. This was shown half a century ago. And the fact that America is willing to ignore “larger animals appeared not to have returned” as well as “polymetallic nodules where the minerals are found take millions of years to form and therefore cannot easily be replaced”. As I personally see it, to ignore these two facts implies that America doesn’t care (or cares less) about marine life and that it will act like a carrion eater in regards to the ocean floor and take now what needs millions of years to form whispers (to me) that America is decently beyond broke and it falls to President Trump to default the larger part of 36 trillion of debt. I’m pretty sure that I made mention of that chance in the past and as I am likely proven right yet again, the question becomes why didn’t economics signal clear levels of dangers? The news now, as the Times writer (and American economist) Irwin Stelzer gives us that the economy of America is in rather good shape. So is it really? Please give us the goods on how America is doing well? It might be that the America Economy is seemingly hanging tough, but they lost billions of revenue all over the field from retail to defense contracts. They might be in denial, bit as I see it only two years ago we would never have seen ‘Italian defence and aerospace giant Leonardo has signed a new Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) with the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia’ a mere three months old. So how much did America lose here? I cannot set the valuer of that contract, but the quote “multiple areas of collaboration to include space industry, airframe MRO (Maintenance, Repair and Overhaul), localisation of electronic warfare systems and radars and assembly of helicopters, a focus on Combat Air and Cross-Domain Integration fields, industrialisation processes and human capital development, national supply chain in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia and the country’s role for Leonardo in the region as well as the global value chain.” (Source: www.leonardo.com) leaves me to believe that it is a serious amount of money, now add the new European slices and with the tariffs the loss of America is now on a threshold to fuel a larger recession than ever speculated on before, the larger players (read: Bloomberg) set this chance at the moment at 40%, as America scuttled their own retail houses (like Walmart) of cheaper goods, they need to continue without the goods, you might think it is nothing, yet 1% of the American population works there, now take out the thousands of shoppers (read: immigrants) and that 2025 revenue of US$680.99 billion will topple by at least 10%, 30% if they are not careful and what remains of that Net revenue of US$19.436 billion? You see, they either fire a whole lot of them or lose close to 40% of their business. These are personally considered numbers, so I might be wrong here to the amount of loss, but not the intention of loss and this is merely Walmart. There are several other chains facing this setting. So how good is that shape of the economy? 

I wrote a few years ago that we need to see where all these bonds are, no serious journalist ever looked into that matter it was the time around the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank in 2023. I wondered how the could have happened and it was a much bigger thing. The acquisition of Credit Suisse by UBS gave me pause to ponder, I figured that several banks had over swallowed on bonds which left them not dissolvent, but left their funds largely frozen as such I speculated that Credit Suisse and SVB had too many bonds and at that time the loss of value of these bonds were crippling them. At present no one really looked at this, even to debunk my train of thought and now we also see some are selling their debt of the US. The BBC touched on that on April 10th (at https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c5yrr0e7499o), so feel free to think I am crazy (always a decent stance to have) but there is ruffling in the economic oceans and the stage that the economic times are decently horrendous is not a bad thing. 

I just thought of something, did America rename the Gulf of Mexico for mining purposes? Now a bad stance, if it not for the tiny fact that the Bermuda Triangle is there too, as such how many mining platforms will operate in that region and what remains a few weeks later is anyones guess. Just me having fun with the situation. 😛

Have a great day and feel free to enjoy a coffee, it leaves you with a warmer feeling than a US bond at present will. 

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Mercy on stupid people?

In this age when we have 8,000,000,000 people walking around, should we show mercy on stupid people? I am not talking about people with some mental disorder, I am not talking about people with a speech impediment or people with a physical disorder. No, I am talking about people with a  greed disorder, a mental stage of everything is for free. Should we allow them to be alive? It is a serious question. You see, the BBC gives us ‘How hackers are using gamers to become crypto-rich’ (at https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-57601631) and the BBC adds to the stupidity to put a picture of a nice girl there, although these transgressions are most likely done by well over 90% males. The list “Versions of Grand Theft Auto V, NBA 2K19, and Pro Evolution Soccer 2018 are being given away free in forums” implies that. You see NOTHING is for free, and nowadays, the sun might be (for now) the only thing that comes for free, but air is close to no longer free. In the last decades we wasted air quality to such a degree that more and more need oxygen and that stuff is not free and not cheap. So when I see “hidden inside the code of these games is a piece of crypto-mining malware called Crackonosh, which secretly generates digital money once the game has been downloaded. Criminals have made more than $2m (£1.4m) with the scam, researchers say.” I reckon that this goes far beyond the UK borders and as such the revenue will be a lot higher, in addition, the stupid person thinking that they are getting a free game are using electricity like there is no tomorrow. So any gamer having anything from a 750W Corsair to a 1200W Asus Thor will be donating $0.50 – $0.75 a day per PC to that criminal group. And that is the best news theory, if they leave the computer on and unattended the price could go up by 200%-400% a day, which means that this free game is costing you a lot more, optionally buying that game in the story will cost you $48 at Amazon, implying that you will pay for the game more than once after 15 days, if you are lucky after 20 days. So how free was that game? You might not pay for the electricity yourself but it will reflect in the bill and mom and dad will hold your PC up for ransom if you do not pay the electricity bill. 

So far two places out of a lot more gives us: 

United States: 11,856 victims
United Kingdom: 8,946 victims

As such the $2m is delusionally optimistic, the damage is more than likely a lot higher, especially when we see 

When Crackonosh is installed, it takes actions to protect itself including:

disabling Windows Updates
uninstalling all security software

And that was merely the better news, when you consider elements like

computer slowing down
wearing out components through overuse

You end up with the short end of the stick, and you better believe that it is a lot shorter than you hope it is. So should I feel mercy when a stupid act degrades a persons PC, sets the cost of living a lot higher per week, but that does not matter, does it? You got a free game out of it!

There is one side that bothers me, it is the quote “Tracking the hackers’ digital wallets has revealed the scam has yielded over $2m in the cryptocurrency Monero, Avast says”, it is the part ‘hackers’ digital wallets’, wallets is plural, as such there is every chance not everything has been found and there is even a much larger chance that they will find one group and have several groups walk away, because they were never spotted, and they were optionally a little more clever than the other players. The damage I a lot worse, yet when it comes to stupid people, I do not mind, more game time, more original game time for me. And this is merely the first setting, you see, I took notice because it flushes the one element out into the open. I touched on this with “I believe that it is a first step in the overly effective phishing attacks we face, Facebook might not be part to that, but I reckon the phishing industry got access to data that is not normally collected and I personally believe that Facebook is part of that problem, I also believe that this will turn from bad to worse with all the ‘via browser gaming apps’ we are currently being offered. I believe that these dedicated non console gaming ‘solutions’ will make things worse, it might be about money for players like Epic (Fortnite), but the data collected in this will cater to a much larger and optionally fairly darker player in this, I just haven’t found any direct evidence proving this, in my defence, I had no way of seeing the weakness that SolarWinds introduced. It does not surprise me, because there is always someone smarter and any firm that has a revenue and a cost issue will find a cheaper way, opening the door for all the nefarious characters surfing the life of IoT, there was never any doubt in this.” I wrote it in ‘Not for minors’ in December 2020 (at https://lawlordtobe.com/2020/12/18/not-for-minors/) and anyone (read: Epic) with claims that they will stop this, would be lying to you. Criminals are massively intelligent and their opponents (police and FBI) are not equipped to deal with this, that is beside the manpower shortage they would face. So when you get to slide between stupid kids and greed driven short sighted IT solutions, the people are about to lose a bundle, for the tech criminals it will be Christmas for them 340 days a year (with 25 very well paid holidays).

And that was just the beginning, how long until these easy virtue characters offer games with even more powerful ways to mine? A version of some merge 3 game but now utilising 95% of your processor 100% of the time? It will not interfere with receiving calls, it will not interfere with laptop, tablet and other device, but you become the pawn in a need to mine and it will cost you a lot more than you think. How long until someone combines screensavers and locked screens with the old SETI program and let devices mine the truckloads out of massive data files and we all contribute for every downtime minute every day? That was the danger that greed driven Epic contributed to (as I personally see it), that is the danger that we all face, and it gets worse. You see Yahoo told us ‘Epic is deliberately keeping ‘Fortnite’ off Microsoft’s Xbox Cloud Game service’, isn’t that interesting? The cloud is their competitor, so they want to open up all the markets for THEM, but they are not that eager to hand their game to a streamer where they cannot collect as much. As I personally see it, it is about their margins, it always was and as such I personally consider their case to be a bogus one, but they opened a door, a door criminals will be eager to use, so how long until they offer Fortnite cheats, Fortnite chests with weekly prices, hardware and skins? It will be the gateway to more systems and the law is not ready and the makers of games will find out too late that the floodgates had been opened. That is how these events usually go, but in the end it will not cost them anything, because they will cover all third party solutions and it will be up to the gamer (and their parents) to pay that price. 

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