Slope of Hope Blog Posts

Slope initially began as a blog, so this is where most of the website’s content resides. Here we have tens of thousands of posts dating back over a decade. These are listed in reverse chronological order. Click on any category icon below to see posts tagged with that particular subject, or click on a word in the category cloud on the right side of the screen for more specific choices.

Being Clever with Labels

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One of my favorite features in SlopeCharts is the labeling feature, and I had a challenge yesterday that I quickly solved and wanted to share with you.

The challenge was this: I wanted to buy some alt-coins at the Kraken exchange, but I knew Kraken had added some new coins since the last time I checked, and I wanted to make sure I had a complete, up-to-date label reference in SlopeCharts to identify which coins were available. Now, the monkey-brain was to do this would be to go through all my crypto charts, one by one, and label those that were on the Kraken list, but I’d rather work smart than work hard, so here’s what I did.

Step 1: Get the Raw List

I just googled the term “Kraken coin list” and got to the page where it showed the up-to-date listing of coins covered.

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Hosed

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Imagine the following scene.

You are walking on a street, toward the crest of a hill. You can hear the crackling of flames, and you can see the orange glow in the sky as cinders spiral slowly down from above you. Upon reaching the crest, you can see an entire neighborhood engulfed in a conflagration.

And there I am with a hose, pointed right at the center of the flames.

You assume, incorrectly, that I am dousing the flames with a powerful stream of water. You soon discover that the liquid shooting out of my hose is, in fact, gasoline, and I am doing my best to point the hose where I think the gas will be most effective.

“What the hell are you doing?”

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The Last Bus

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Now that I’m back from my travels, I wanted to share an anecdote which I think bears a message about the future.

As almost all of you know, when you fly out of an airport, you’ve got at least a couple of parking options for your car: you can pay a high price for short-term parking, which is close and convenient, or pay a cheaper price for long-term parking, which involves some travel, since it’s well away from the airport. The prices for parking, and the distance of the long-term lot, depend on how big the airport is.

At the San Francisco airport, a day in the long-term parking lot costs $24, while the short-term lot is twice that much. So if you leave for 10 days, you probably don’t want to spend $480 to park your car, so off to the long-term lot you go.

For decades, the way to get back and forth between the long-term lot and the terminal was via a bunch of blue buses like the one pictured below. There were a whole series of these things, each driven by a bus driver, and I always felt pretty sorry for that. After all, driving the same one mile route hour after hour, day after day, week after week, and month after month isn’t exactly nourishing for the soul. But they did it, and that was their livelihood.

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They Rang the Bell Loudly

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There’s nothing easier than hindsight. Yet hindsight – – even that which gazes upon only a few weeks past – – can be instructive. Let us examine the wipeout which has taken place in the entire crypto space over the past month by simply examining some of the breathless coverage that was going on near the top.

We need not look far. Examine this headline from no less a source than NASDAQ, which proclaims, on the heels of Bitcoin’s ascendency to $64,000, that the top may be “nowhere near”. It will come as absolutely no surprise to you that this was published roughly to the millisecond that the top itself was hammered out.

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