Farmer Diaries

Over the past few weeks, I've begun to be bombarded with deals that refer to the next big thing:  Edge computing.  The concept is simple, lots of data is produced by all our devices from your smartphone to your car to your smart meter on your house.  All these things produce data, and the internet is a big pipe, but it's not that big. The Verge had an interesting article about Edge Computing and one of the things they mentioned is the security camera conundrum; let's assume that you install a camera in your house, and stream that data to the cloud (eg the web -- so you can see that camera feed on your iPhone).  All is good, but let's assume that you decide that one camera is good, but 12 is a lot better.  The problem is obvious you have data clog in your system.  You either purchase much more bandwidth or your system doesn't work.  But in reality 99.999% if what on security camera is a lot of nothing.  Assume that your home server reco...

So it feels like -60 in Chicago (doesn't matter celsius or Fahrenheit-- its bloody cold).  But in Montreal its only -11c or 12F.  So what gives.  Polar Vortex has not made it to Quebec...and it will not.  So while the US is freezing (as is part of Western Canada) Quebec and Ontario escaped the whole thing...   

This comment should be treated with a large grain of salt! The reason you should care, but not too much about this "proof" of the slow down is that its circumstantial with a sample of TWO.  That's just not enough to get people excited.  Moreover, one of the two "example" was recently acquired -- which means that the pre-purchase performance was over-inflated and that reality is catching up. The examples are as follows: (1) A Fintech (2) A law firm The first (the subject of a recent acquisition -- all participants were private companies...), has seen, since the end of Q4/2018 a slow down in billing; both in terms of acquiring new clients but also getting new business from existing clients.  I should point out that this fintech is very exposed to the retail sector (via its clients).  they have seen, on average, a 25% reduction in billing from existing clients!  Heads rolled last week! The second is a law firm, that is seeing a massive increase in...

In September 2018, BKXCM (02450 SHE) annual financial statements showed that the company's cash and non-cash short term holdings exceeded Y15 billion, that was sufficient to cover 15x its interest and principal due on January 14, 2019.  The company declined to pay interest on its bonds a few days ago, because of cash flow issues.  It makes you wonder if 90 days ago there really was ever Yuan 15 billion in cash and near cash assets on the balance sheet of KXCM. The problem is as follows:  There is no concept of audited financial statements in China, the numbers are all essentially "Management's Accounts", which has limited value.  China is not the only place in the world were this occurs (E.G. Turkey) but it's somewhat unusual for a country like China not to have the concept of third-party accounting. The reason the Y15 billion was never really there is that it's more than likely that the company over-inflated the value of its profits and the difference had...

A fascinating article out of University of Chicago Business school on the limits of blockchain -- especially when regarding cryptocurrency security.  I have to be honest that some of the proof was "well above me" but the fundamental issue is true; cryptos are created with Math, and there's, at the very least, then this massive power could also be used to corrupt the system. The article is here , and should make for interesting reading especially for those who are still good at math! The concept is that of a double spending attack, the attacker sells say bitcoin for dollars. The bitcoin transfer is registered on the blockchain and then, perhaps after some escrow period, the dollars are received by the attacker. As soon as the bitcoin transfer is registered in a block–call this block 1–the attacker starts to mine his own blocks which do not include the bitcoin transfer. Suppose there is no escrow period then the best case for the attacker is that they mine two blocks 1′...