sugardaddy

New York (CNN Business)The decade is almost over — and one incredibly volatile investment stood out from all the rest as the best of the 2010s. Want to guess what it was? Bitcoin.According to a recent report by Bank of America Securities, if you invested $1 in bitcoin at the start of the decade, it would now be worth more than $90,000.A bitcoin (XBT) is currently valued at about $7,000. While that's still significantly below its peak price of just under $20,000 two years ago, it's substantially higher than the fractions of a penny that one bitcoin cost at the beginning of the Twenty-Teens.Bitcoin remains a highly speculative investment, but it has soared during the past decade as it emerged as the most-popular and widely accepted cryptocurrency.More retailers are accepting bitcoin as a form of payment, and several investment firms and exchanges have launched futures trading for bitcoin, a move that helped legitimize it.And Facebook's (FB) planned launch of the Libra digital currency initiative has also further validated bitcoin and other crytpocurrencies in the minds of many investors.The BofA report lists several other fun facts about what's been a wild decade for the markets — one that has seen stocks recover from the depths of the Great Recession and hit new highs despite a trade war between the United States and China, attacks on the Federal Reserve by President Trump, Brexit concerns and a slowdown in Europe as well as continued malaise in Japan.https://edition.cnn.com/2019/12/17/investing/best-worst-investments-decade-bitcoin/index.html

Pobrecito ese Kinger

THE TERROR QUEUE These moderators help keep Google and YouTube free of violent extremism — and now some of them have PTSD GoogleGoogle and YouTube approach content moderation the same way all of the other tech giants do: paying a handful of other companies to do most of the work. One of those companies, Accenture, operates Google’s largest content moderation site in the United States: an office in Austin, Texas, where content moderators work around the clock cleaning up YouTube. Peter is one of hundreds of moderators at the Austin site. YouTube sorts the work for him and his colleagues into various queues, which the company says allows moderators to build expertise around its policies. There’s a copyright queue, a hate and harassment queue, and an “adult” queue for porn. Peter works what is known internally as the “VE queue,” which stands for violent extremism. It is some of the grimmest work to be done at Alphabet. And like all content moderation jobs that involve daily exposure to violence and abuse, it has had serious and long-lasting consequences for the people doing the work. In the past year, Peter has seen one of his co-workers collapse at work in distress, so burdened by the videos he had seen that he took two months of unpaid leave from work. Another co-worker, wracked with anxiety and depression caused by the job, neglected his diet so badly that he had to be hospitalized for an acute vitamin deficiency. Peter, who has done this job for nearly two years, worries about the toll that the job is taking on his mental health. His family has repeatedly urged him to quit. But he worries that he will not be able to find another job that pays as well as this one does: $18.50 an hour, or about $37,000 a year. Since he began working in the violent extremism queue, Peter noted, he has lost hair and gained weight. His temper is shorter. When he drives by the building where he works, even on his off days, a vein begins to throb in his chest. “Every day you watch someone beheading someone, or someone shooting his girlfriend,” Peter tells me. “After that, you feel like wow, this world is really crazy. This makes you feel ill. You’re feeling there is nothing worth living for. Why are we doing this to each other?” Like many of his co-workers working in the VE queue in Austin, Peter is an immigrant. Accenture recruited dozens of Arabic speakers like him, many of whom grew up in the Middle East. The company depends on his language skills — he speaks seven — to accurately identify hate speech and terrorist propaganda and remove it from YouTube. Several workers I spoke with are hoping to become citizens, a feat that has only grown more difficult under the Trump administration. They worry about speaking out — to a manager, to a journalist — for fear it will complicate their immigration efforts. (For this reason, I agreed to use pseudonyms for most of the workers in this story.) More than that, though, Peter and other moderators in Austin told me they wanted to live like the full-time Google employees who sometimes visit his office. A higher wage, better health benefits, and more caring managers would alleviate the burdens of the job, they told me. “We see the people coming from there, how they are, how they are acting more free,” Peter tells me. For most of this year, I thought the same thing Peter did. Bring the moderators in house, pay them as you would pay a police officer or firefighter, and perhaps you could reduce the mental health toll of constant exposure to graphic violence. Then I met a woman who had worked as a content moderator for Google itself. She earned a good salary, nearing the six-figure mark. There were excellent health benefits and other perks. But none of these privileges would ultimately prevent the disturbing content she saw each day from harming her. https://www.theverge.com/2019/12/16/21021005/google-youtube-moderators-ptsd-accenture-violent-disturbing-content-interviews-video

Impressive Reverend... you have shaved YEARS away thanks for your bad ass diet. Congrats hermano, and keep it going

Saw this elsewhere... copying over to hopefully help some avoid grief dealing with DSI.... "They seem to have snuck in some new rules recently. Primarily: Updated* November 7th 2019. Any new member who registered from August 1st 2019 to current date will have a maximum bonus cash out $10,000. Any member registered before this time frame will have a max bonus cash out of $25,000. And, perhaps the worst rule in offshore bonus history: For any new member who has registered from the date of August 1st 2019, allocated bonuses greater than $999 will have a maximum of $100 applied to rollover on any wager placed towards meeting rollover requirement regardless of the wagered amount. This means if you sign up today, and take them up on their BTC150 offer by sending $1500 and receiving a $2250 bonus your rollover will equal $93,750. But with only $100 maximum being credited towards your rollover that means you will need to make 937 bets at $100 apiece. This would take the average bettor close to a decade to complete. To add insult to injury, you can only cash out a maximum of $10,000 from this $2250 bonus. And, don't forget, there is a good chance they reduce your limits to $50 during the rollover. Your friend, BAUS"

Very nicely written. Merry Christmas 'ole timer.

Let's rate how well each of TGF's valuable mods has performed this year, and what gifts everyone is getting for each of them. King The Rev Yanks BBB SharpSquare (honorable mention)

Watch out cheaters... Fitbit doesn't fool around: How the fitness tracker helped this woman catch her boyfriend cheatingJessica GuynnUSA TODAY If you are going to cheat, don't forget to slip off your Fitbit along with your drawers. NFL Network correspondent Jane Slater says she caught a former boyfriend cheating after spotting a suspiciously rapid increase in his heart rate and physical activity at 4 a.m. on their shared Fitbit app. The ex had given her the Fitbit as a Christmas gift so they could track each other's activity levels and motivate each other to exercise more. Slater says she didn't hate it until "he was unaccounted for at 4 am and his physical activity levels were spiking on the app." "Wish the story wasn’t real,” Slater wrote in a post which has been retweeted more than 46,000 times and has more than 470,000 likes. She added: "Spoiler alert: he was not enrolled in an OrangeTheory class at 4am." Making the experience even more painful, Slater, at the time, was preparing to celebrate his birthday. "I was at his home w balloons ahead of the birthday I planned the next day." She was so concerned about where he was, she even contemplated calling the police. "My girlfriend once said 'one day we will laugh about this' as I sobbed uncontrollably in the car," she tweeted. "I have now many times bahahahah." Slater's followers chimed in with their own tales of infidelity outed by fitness trackers. "My ex-husband got caught in an affair because he was wearing the training watch and heartbeat monitor my mom bought him for Christmas — while ‘running,’” @carey_gibbons wrote. “It was the under-one-minute heart rate spike that confirmed things for me! #prematuresayswhat.” Sexual activity does register on fitness trackers, Alex Koch, professor of exercise science at Lenoir-Rhyne University in North Carolina, told Business Insider. Fitbits and other devices have accurate heart rate monitors that detect spikes including those brought on by intimate moments. Fitbits also have an accelerometer, which detects vibrations from movement. "There's definitely going to be a substantial rise in heart rate from resting, depending on how energetic you are," he said. But don't just assume your partner's having an affair. Fitness trackers can't distinguish between sexual activity and other forms of cardio, Koch said.

I'm with ya Wade... know exactly how you feel. We need a rubberband play...

After a powerful storm washed away their cover, thousands of unsightly — and phallic-looking — worms were left bare on a California beach. Fat innkeeper worms — colloquially known as "penis fish" — washed up on Drakes Beach in Point Reyes, Calif., around fifty miles northwest of San Francisco, last Friday. First reported by nature publication Bay Nature, the "penis fish" that washed ashore is the Urechis caupo, a type of spoonworm that primarily lives on the Pacific coast from southern Oregon to Baja California, according to naturalist Ivan Parr. At around 10 inches, its peculiar shape is perfect for coastal life, allowing it to dig a U-shaped burrow for itself and for other sea creatures, like crabs and fish, in sand or mudflat, he said. (Sandbox ready)

Sexual harassment like that will land that fella in deep doo-doo

Amazing place Slim.... extremely impressive.... but those $200+ dinners per person... yikes! Enjoy your travels, and thanks for sharing those incredible pictures.

Insiders tell me YES

A U.S. man has pleaded guilty to having embezzled millions from his former employer and splashing the funds on personal expenses and crypto-funded poker. Dennis Blieden committed the crimes while an executive at StyleHaul Inc. – a firm that provided marketing services for social media “influencers.” According to a U.S. Department of Justice news release, Blieden faces a statutory maximum sentence of 22 years in federal prison after admitting wire fraud and aggravated identity theft. From October 2015 to March 2019, Blieden was controller and vice president of accounting and finance for StyleHaul, where he “abused” his control of company bank accounts to send money to his personal bank account, a plea agreement says. He used the stolen money to pay for personal expenses and his professional poker life, which he funded with cryptocurrency bought with the firm’s money. Said to have taken part in, and won, poker tournaments, Blieden apparently used company money to buy in to two competitions with $52,000 and $103,000, respectively. $1,204,000 was also paid in personal checks to other poker players. He also gambled online, transferring $8,473,734 of StyleHaul cash to his crypto accounts to fund that habit. In order to cover up the thefts, Blieden created fake entries in StyleHaul’s books disguising wire transfers to his account as legitimate payments to clients, or as equity payments owed to him by the firm, court documents indicate. He also faked letters supposedly from Western Union suggesting he’d made wire transfers to a client who was owed money. The former exec further brought the charge of aggravated identity theft upon himself by faking that his employer kept a beach-side condo in Mexico for use by clients and staff, which involved him forging the signature of another exec at StyleHaul. He admitted stealing $230,000 through the fake perk, says the DoJ. Blieden will face a sentencing hearing on March 20. https://finance.yahoo.com/news/exec-embezzles-22m-influencer-marketing-134500349.html

Individuals who earn less than $30,000 per year are more likely to spend money on vices such as alcohol, tobacco, lottery tickets and other forms of gambling, according to personal finance resource Bankrate. The U.S. adults who admitted to feeding into these vices also paid a disproportionate amount of their annual income when compared to adults who earned more. Excluding the respondents who said they don’t spend money on vices at all, the study found that the lowest earners are expending more than any other income bracket -- with 11 percent of annual income going to alcohol, 13 percent going to tobacco or e-cigarette products, 13 percent going to lottery tickets and 4 percent going to gambling. “It’s important for all adults, not just lower earners, to take stock of their spending habits and make sure that their priorities are in the right place,” said Amanda Dixon, a Bankrate analyst. Bankrate also found that age and gender were two “strong indicators” that informed the study. When it comes down to which generation is most susceptible to each vice, Millennials between the ages of 23 and 38 were the highest spenders with $1,741 going to alcohol, $2,498 going to tobacco and $976 going to lottery tickets annually. Conversely, Baby Boomers between the ages of 55 and 73 were most susceptible to gambling out of all the generations. According to the study, Baby Boomers gamble $2,913 per year. Averaging out the results of the study across generations, Bankrate found that Millennials spent over $1,000 more than Gen X and Baby Boomers when the four vice categories were combined. Across gender lines, men spend twice the amount women do for both lottery tickets and gambling. Men also spend more on alcohol, but the difference is not as drastic. Surprisingly, women who smoke tobacco or vape e-cigarettes beat out men by a slight margin. However, men spend more than double on average than women on these four financial vices. When combined, Bankrate found that men spent $3,205 annually versus women who spent $1,670. Bankrate commissioned YouGov Plc to conduct the consumer survey, which used a total sample size of 2,377 adults who went on the record to share their household income.

That's a lot of cold and snow there. Where abouts is this?

Egg-zactly --BBB

There is something very special about the simple life friend. Sincere admiration.

What's still on your bucket list before this year 2019 kicks the bucket? What's on your bucket list for the upcoming year?

After reading Sir Brock's pick, I went the opposite way, just to be consistent. GL to all.

Good one hahaha As far as original question here... geez.. tough question.

Yes, totally... very nice looking living area. Congrats, and many blessings this Christmas season for you and the housepicks family.

One of my all time favorite scenes

Extra points if that's a real tree.

Awesome stuff DS, and congrats to the wife for the special effort.