Journal – Mind Cages and Coin Dumping

It is such a struggle sometimes to be ruled by the things that you don’t like. It can limit you to the point where you are afraid to even go to the store unless you really have too. It can keep you doing things that you tolerate and prevent your growth, just because there are things that you hate that you are trying to avoid.

My son really doesn’t like the bus. I guess there are many things about it that prevent it from being a fun experience. He seems to feel a certain level of pride in being able to get “car pickup” every day much to my annoyance. I’ve always felt a level of pride in being able to use the bus but admittedly have not for several years in part because I work at home.

When I was younger using the bus was my ticket to getting to many different places that I would not have been able to do on my own. Rides were not available for me then and even my dad choose to take the bus back and forth to work. At that time the bus was much better than trying to commute by car because it would go through the express lane and get there faster.

My dad really liked the bus and felt that public transport was very important to help save resources and clean up the environment – this has become my feeling too although I like to commute by bike if I can. I did a thirty four mile ride three days a week even in the winter for my longest record. Many times I would beat the traffic home when doing a rush hour commute on the shorter rides.

I think my son and I have kind of felt some friction over this. To me it is not that far a walk when I compare it to what I had done every day as a child and I did not have an option to take a bus. But I had a locker that I could keep most of my books in and he has to carry all his stuff back and forth. The weather here is much warmer than the conditions I was exposed to as a child but in some ways people don’t seem to know how to deal with the short cold snaps we do get. The jackets are not as warm as what I had as a child and people don’t wear hats and gloves.

If my son doesn’t walk home he tends to not do much exercise. I guess he must get enough walking around the school because he always seems a bit tired. I hope this is not the case because he stays up too late and does not eat a good diet. I guess I use a bit of mental energy being concerned for his welfare and not really knowing what the best course of action should be to encourage him to make healthy choices.

So I’m sticking myself in a mind cage trying to conserve resources for the benefit of all humanity and encourage exercise for the long happy life that it provides. My son seems to just plain despise the bus at this point, I hope he is not staying at school extra long just so he can avoid riding it home. Maybe I had something to do with how he views things. I have to admit, I can be a hard person to get along with by some accounts with a bit of an eccentric over analytical “I’ll do what I want” type attitude. Maybe that rubbed off a bit on him.

There are so many other ways I do this to myself and build mind cages. Society even does this too - they are all built from our aversions and desires. Our desires can build even bigger cages and keep us shackled to the things we hate in endless cycles of addiction. Really huge mind cages cause many people to charge into machine gun fire. Sometimes they are built with things that are not true or partially misleading – look up the Gulf of Tonkin incident if your interested.

I’m feels like I’m starting to break free from some of these things. You can really only build a cage strong enough to hold yourself and you hold the key to getting out of it in spite of what the other people around you do, think and say. (This is particularly true I believe, if you have some notion of your eternal nature) Ultimately you have the choice to listen to your thoughts or not.

If peoples actions or words really bother you or get you mad it is probably just them rattling the bars of the mind cage trying to break it up a bit. It is usually better not to get too worked up about it unless of course your life is in danger and you need the adrenaline to get you out of a sticky situation. Still though it is tough to really know sometimes how to act authentically.

Coin Dumping

I got to play dumpy, dumpy, on the exchanges yesterday and took a bit of profit from some coins I’ve been staking. Those who dump the quickest, dump the mostest right? Lol. Well, luckily there has to be a seller for every buyer and I tried my best not to totally destroy any of the markets out there – I don’t really have enough value to make that much of difference anyway so no worries. Besides the value of a any coin has to come from its utility and trading around is what we can do to build some kind of price right now.

I guess I’m feeling a bit guilty about it so if anyone asks it “wasn’t me” that did it. I know at least one other person was helping because when I hesitated a bit and left some higher priced buy orders available they quickly filled dropping the price even more.

So after I got my little stash of BTC I looked for a way to get it off the exchange but on some of the smaller exchanges this can be a bit of problem if your trying to avoid moving BTC. From my experience with Crypsy I try as best I can not to leave much value on any exchange.

Luckily for me the BTC moved pretty quickly and easily and the 0.00020000 BTC fee was not too bad considering the amount moved. Still though, I would have liked to be able to just purchase Steem or other alt coins and perhaps make a profit in the transfer or to simply store them in my wallet, but it is hard to do that now.

So I did my job to keep the exchange honest anyway. If you leave too much up there they start to turn into a bank and think they only need to keep a small amount in ‘reserve’ because nobody will want all the Bitcoin to withdraw at once. I think this could be a bigger problem with the bigger exchanges.

I hope we have all the problems like Crypsy and Mt. Gox, behind us yet because of the nature of things the fundamental issue is still there. When we start doing more direct exchange of coins this problem should finally go away along with some other issues but for now the exchanges are very convenient and provide a good service.

With all these cryptocoins out there it is pretty complex ecosystem, if you can call it that. There is plenty of ways to move and transact value besides Bitcoin and I think this is a good thing. If everything starts moving more towards block chains for holding value we are going to need a bunch of ways to do it. There is simply not enough capacity built into Bitcoin and beside it uses much more energy than some of the more recent coins that are capable of doing the same thing.

If you can do the same result using much less energy and resources I think eventually the market will move that direction unless there are other conditions stopping it.

Duck Update

Today the ducks were down to seven gals and two guys. How’s that for family values? Lol. I think the others had given up on begging and went off to the ocean areas or other places with better food. I’ve seen them diving for food around here so I know there are still some natural food sources around for them. The water is very cold in the ocean - I certainly would not want to get in it, but then again, I’m not a duck.

None of them were too vocal today and they kept a respectable distance from me but were still friendly enough to come on over and pose for the camera.
Processing added by Google Photos

There was a really cool color of light coming off a big piece of ice that looked like a diamond.
There is a bit of abstract work from GIMP on this image

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Thanks for reading! As always I greatly appreciate your support. The photos and other graphic work are done by me from pictures taken on my Galaxy S7.