Let's Be Less Critical

Kingdom living, as opposed to reaching salvation and stopping our Christian growth, has been a theme I've been hearing lately. Our leaders are teaching this approach but the ball must be picked up by the mature Christians to be more successful in sharing His light with love and good works. If not, how can we shine it in baby Christians' face with the complaint that we wish they'd stop squinting their eyes, slapping out at us or turning their backs completely. Salt, forced fed rather than sprinkled, is embittering; and light, glared rather than glowed, is only more blinding. We, more mature brothers/sisters, need to be more patient with His sheep. The world is looking at how we treat each other to determine whether they want what we profess to have.
Let's Be Less Critical

I liked this article by Ray Hollenbach, It’s Time to Stop Using John 3:16 for Outreach

I recently reflected on the below article by  Ray Hollenbach, a Chicagoan, writes about faith and culture and think its good. You can check out his work at studentsofjesus.com
I hate bumper stickers, even when I agree with them. How can anything important be reduced to so few words? Our media soaked, marketing driven age has generated a sound-bite generation. We have been trained to reduce life and death thoughts into catch phrases and slogans. It’s even true in the church, where for the last 60 years the most popular verse in the Bible has been John 3:16, “For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life.”

Researchers find that one person likely drove Bitcoin from $150 to $1,000

I've been leery about cryptocurrency investing for a longtime. In an article posted by John Biggs, found on the website techcrunch.com,  researchers have written a eyeopening paper on Bitcoin price manipulation. Entitled “Price Manipulation in the Bitcoin Ecosystem” and appearing in the recent issue of the Journal of Monetary Economics the paper describes to what degree the Bitcoin ecosystem is controlled by bad actors.

To me, since I've experienced thin market trading in currency futures trading 10 years ago,  it’s been obvious that the Bitcoin markets are, at the very least, being manipulated by a few big players. “This paper identifies and analyzes the impact of suspicious trading activity on the Mt. Gox Bitcoin currency exchange, in which approximately 600,000 bitcoins (BTC) valued at $188 million were fraudulently acquired,” the researchers wrote. “During both periods, the USD-BTC exchange rate rose by an average of four percent on days when suspicious trades took place, compared to a slight decline on days without suspicious activity. Based on rigorous analysis with extensive robustness checks, the paper demonstrates that the suspicious trading activity likely caused the unprecedented spike in the USD-BTC exchange rate in late 2013, when the rate jumped from around $150 to more than $1,000 in two months.”
The team found that many instances of price manipulation happened simply because the market was very thin for various cryptocurrencies including early Bitcoin. A theory, initially espoused in a Reddit post shortly after Mt. Gox’s collapse (Anonymous, 2014b), is that hackers stole a huge number (approximately 650,000) of bitcoins from Mt. Gox in June 2011 and that the exchange owner Mark Karpales took extraordinary steps to cover up the loss for several years.
The bottom line is simple: if Bitcoin wants to be taken seriously it probably shouldn’t be this easy or legal to manipulate the markets. While decentralization is supposed to replace regulation it’s clear that there is still a way to go before it can be truly taken seriously. “As mainstream finance invests in cryptocurrency assets and as countries take steps toward legalizing bitcoin as a payment system (as Japan did in April 2017), it is important to understand how susceptible cryptocurrency markets are to manipulation. Our study provides a first examination,” write the researchers.

Tips of Living Debt Free

Tips of Living Debt Free

Here are some tips for handling credit card debt in pursuit of living debt free.

1. Get rid of gold and platinum cards, which usually have annual fees which are high
2. Payoff high interest rate cards first, you'll have more money left to pay other debts and more money in your pockets.
3. You don't need a lot of cards maybe a Visa or Mastercard and or American Express. Get rid of department store cards and gas company cards.
4. Pay a little extra each month, over and above the minimun payment. Start with $10 per month, the sooner you payoff this debt, you'll save a lot of interest.
5. Don't miss any payments, the credit card company will raise your interest rate. When it hits your credit report, your other card companies may increase their's too.
6. Ask for no annual fee or lower interest rate, they may do so just to keep your business.

I hope these tips are helpful and they give you the confidence to continue working on ways for proper.

Cash 4 Books

Now that its spring time, you may want to sell some of your old books. I did some spring cleaning and mailed a group of books to Cash 4 Books. It was very simple to do and I got cash shortly thereafter.

Use the link to the right and you can do the same.

Happy New Year to all.  I'm retired now and look forward to spending my days in a more relaxing way.  Hasn't 2017 been an interesting year with the new president, North Korea, Bitcoin and the stock market continuing to rise?  I will try to share more insight into these and many other topics in 2018.  I was just looking at the fact that I started this blog in 2009 when my son was 14 now he is 21 years old, my does time fly.  Also, I have added Amazon links here where you can enter the Amazon site to buy items and I've been selling books online on Amazon online under the name Salespro. 
Here is my link

Is your local government constricting your property rights?  Read this article I found today.  Florida’s Third District Court of Appeal dealt a major blow to property rights when it upheld the Village of Miami Shores’ ban on front-yard vegetable gardens. This means homeowners Hermine Ricketts and Tom Carroll—and others like them—are still banned from growing a front yard garden to provide food for themselves. Hermine and Tom are represented by the Institute for Justice (IJ), which first challenged the ban in November 2013.