If I was a foreign nation, I’d look at America and point out that the penny is one of the most outdated ideas in modern history. It’s useless, more costly to make than its worth, a time waster, a mess, and an example of a society that is not progressive.

The Penny

I would never call you a bozo for buying BitCoin because the concept is intriguing. Unfortunately it’s backed by nothing. When currency is backed by nothing, volatility and uncertainty occur. What I don’t quite understand about Bitcoin is that it’s still measured in dollars. Your Bitcoin has no value. It’s converted into a US dollar. So the idea is that you have a digital currency, tied to the US dollar, that your trusting random exchanges with your money. Think about that. You give $1,000 of your hard earned dollars to an exchange. Some clown on their computer mines your transaction for a transaction fee that they earn. Let’s remember that there are hundreds of thousands of transactions currently happening and the ones that pay the highest transaction fees are being mined first. So if you aren’t paying much for the transaction fee, there is quite the possibility that you can’t sell when you want to. Beside that, you now have a wallet with bitcoin in it. You can’t go to the coffee shop and spend it unless they accept it which i’d guess 9 out of 10 don’t. So what can you do with it? You can gamble it on Bovada. You can hold onto it and hope the value goes up so that you can sell and get…US dollars. The idea behind Bitcoin was that there were no fees associated with using it but that’s all changed now that the concept is wide spread. Bitcoin has a place. Where that is, I don’t know. I do know that at $10,000 a BitCoin, and if I owned a BitCoin, I wouldn’t be surprised to see it go to $5,000 real fast once people start understanding that big money can leave at any time and kill the valuation. At that point, you don’t want to be left holding the bag. That’s why I see all these people predicting BitCoin can hit $100,000, how much BitCoin do you think they own? Feel free to correct my assessment in the comments. This was the most interesting comment I read about it, “in fact, one could argue that bitcoin’s rising valuation is just a bet that its most dubious uses—say, avoiding taxes or laundering money—will keep rising.”

Surveys show that the vast majority of bitcoin owners are buying and holding bitcoin to exchange them for dollars. Let’s be clear: If the predominant use case for any asset is to buy it, wait for it to appreciate, and then to exchange it for dollars, it is a terrible currency. That is how people treat baseball cards or stamps, not money. For most of its owners, bitcoin is not a currency. It is a collectible—a digital baseball card, without the faces or stats.

I wrote this intro about BitCoin because it brings me to the penny – the most useless piece of zinc on the planet. It costs 1.7 cents to produce a penny. Pro advocates, like the zinc manufacturers, argue that they keep pricing low because without the penny, rounding would occur. The penny also pays tribute to Honest Abe. Finally, they raise millions of dollars of charity with their penny drives. Start shaking your head now.

Here is a picture of how many pennies I have. #humblebrag

I’d guess there are about 500 of them. That’s 5 dollars worth of pennies that I’ve accumulated in 6 months. I haven’t used a penny since I was 10 when I was buying dum dum’s from Maple Glen Pharmacy. I can’t think of one time I would ever use a penny. All they are good for is getting stuck in my jeans and falling out of my pockets. There is no logical reason to keep them. It actually makes me irate when I see them lying around because the time it takes me to pick it up is actually negative EV. Time to bar the penny.

I’m going to give some thoughts that have evolved throughout my business career.

Day 1 – What’s an order?

Day 100 – How much money are we making on this order?

Day 250 – I see how we are making money, how can we make more money?

Day 1,500 – This advertising is working, how do we keep spending prudently?

Day 3,000 – We are getting a good amount of customers, but we have to stop wasting time on the wrong customers.

Day 4,500 – Fuck you wrong customer, we aren’t selling you.

I’m sure there can be about a thousand more revelations I could describe throughout my career, but this is where I am currently. I have been working the same job for coming up on 13 years and I don’t think this is too far off when you start learning what is important.

You can’t be successful selling a ketchup Popsicle to a woman in white gloves. Ketchup Popsicle? Narrowing down what industry you can be successful in, what products you can sell into that industry, and then who to sell to is the only way to see growth.

This is a scary time we are living in. Take all the shootings on the reg, Hollywood inappropriateness that keeps exposing itself, and overall madness that occurs on a regular basis. I’m not sure if this has been happening for the last century, and we all didn’t have cameras to record it, or if it’s the way the way society has evolved. This observation truly makes me scratch my head.

I have a 4 minute commute. It’s short, sweet, and simple. What could possibly happen in 4 minutes? I haven’t noticed this in past years, but I swear to god, people are trying to get hit by my car. They cross streets without looking both ways. Head down on their phone and crossing streets aimlessly. People expect you to see them and throw no caution to the wind. Nate Berger in college used to have the saying “don’t break stride”. I thought it was the epitome of stupidity. These people must know Nate.

Pedestrian’s are bad but biker’s are worse. They will ride 5 mph in the MIDDLE OF THE ROAD. I understand bikers who are trucking it, moving near the speed limit for a short period of time. These bikers I see nowadays are asking to get hit so they can sue. They WANT to get hit. There are only 2 things I can think of:
1) Life is so miserable they want to get hit so they can end up in the hospital, get taken care of and waste tax payer dollars, collect disability, and sue.
2) They have small brains.

Have I hit a person yet? I have not but it gets closer every day. The phone makes it bad. The lack of caring, or dirty intentions, makes it worse.