Have lived away from Iowa the last 15 years. Have moved back and attending first basketball game in 15 years this Friday vs UNI. Any advice on parking? Thanks.

To me, these 2 make the most sense for Iowa. 1(ish) years that aren't 5+++ stars but very talented i.e., versatile run/pass. Would be pricey, but not Miller Moss type money. Both upgrades to B. Sullivan.

Adam Lashinsky is a former executive editor at Fortune magazine and the author of “Inside Apple: How America’s Most Admired — and Secretive — Company Really Works.”
The bursting of the cryptocurrency bubble will end the way other speculative crazes have concluded: in a trail of wreckage across companies, continents — and unlucky investors. Crypto has had a horrible year. We saw the terra “stablecoin” wipeout in May, the unraveling of the FTX trading exchange this week and the shriveling of trading in non-fungible tokens all year long.


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Small-time investors already have fled, their grubstakes or life savings decimated. Well-heeled venture capitalists, badly burned by each successive bust-up, will wash their hands and move on to the next shiny object. The side-hustling crypto-ambassadors (insert any big name from professional sports here, please) will slip back backstage. And regulators, as is their wont, will finally issue their overdue rules, long after the damage is done.



There’s a critical difference with crypto, though, compared with past bubbles: It had virtually no intrinsic merit.
Before and after their bubble burst in the mid-1600s, tulips were still pretty flowers. American railroads begot massive (and positive) change well before the Panic of 1873 and are still vital almost 150 years later. The promise of email in the 1990s — and its dot-com derivatives — was real and epochal. Even badly abused subprime mortgages were a lamentable innovation on hard-to-get loans for home purchasers — a market that survived the financial crisis of 2008.
“Crypto,” a still poorly understood catchall phrase for digital currencies and other securities not controlled by a government, won’t be able to make the same claim. Crypto was supposed to be a haven in inflationary times, the way hard-metal commodities such as gold often are. Yet confections like bitcoin and ethereum have plummeted as inflation has skyrocketed. They promised a way to store value. Clearly, they do not.



More egregiously, crypto was supposed to have all sorts of other uses, from easy cross-border remittance to pegging a value for newly created forms of digital art. None of this has come true at any scale worth bragging about.
In our system, entrepreneurs, and the investors who back them, provide a valuable service by taking risks on unproven ideas. Without them, we wouldn’t have Apple or Google — or Post-it notes. But we now know the crop of swaggering financiers who dreamed up the new category of investments casually known as web3 have been kidding themselves.
A common justification for these investments has been that they captured the fascination of software coders and entrepreneurs, leading to the dreamy conclusion that a real market for digital assets of all kinds was emerging.

What emerged instead is another example of one of the worst ills that afflicts Sand Hill Road, the heart of Silicon Valley’s venture-capital industry: confirmation bias. The enthusiasm the VCs mistook for an investment thesis was often just the result of too much cash chasing too few truly good ideas.






Nerds aren’t stupid: If someone offers them oodles of money to chase a fad, they’ll start coding. Hence, crypto.
The past 15 years or so of venture-capital investing can be in many ways explained by the low-interest-rate environment in which it exploded. With endowments and pension funds (and many an ordinary multimillionaire) unable to earn safe returns in bonds for more than a decade, their money managers opted instead to place riskier bets.

Consider the Ontario Teachers’ Pension Plan, Canada’s third-largest. Three years ago, it set up a special fund to make venture-capital-stage investments. It invested $95 million in FTX, a leading crypto trading platform. On Thursday, it noted that “not all of the investments in this early-stage asset class perform to expectations.” It added that its FTX investment — presumably none of which it will ever see again — represents a tiny percentage of overall investments.


For years now, the folly of such investment strategies translated, essentially, into free money for entrepreneurs. It didn’t take a genius to spin up a company when the cost of capital was next to zero.
Now, that era is over. Higher interest rates will allow pension funds such as the one in Ontario to seek safer investments. As a result, the flow of funds to VCs and start-ups will slow. Only the best companies and VCs will emerge on the other side.

hell yeah
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…attending a purity ball and discussing it in this unearthed German doc on the American “purity” movement? Dude is straight up creepy. Poor kids…

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1pm BTN
Iowa -31.5
O/U 163.5

New Orleans (2-6, 0-1 Southland) comes to carver fresh off a tough 73-70 loss at Nicholls.

Time for the hawks to 7-3, 1-1) to take their frustrations out on the Privateers.

I’m thinking 94-68 hawks

I know the Swarm is planning an event on the day of the game. What time will doors open for that?


Is there a Hawkeye Huddle planned the night prior?

Any information is appreciated!

Hank Brown is a Hawkeye.

STORY:

The ‘Deathonomics’ Powering Russia’s War Machine​

Payments for soldiers killed on the front lines are transforming local economies in some of Russia’s poorest regions​

By Georgi Kantchev

Going to war is now a rational economic choice in Russia’s impoverished hinterlands.

Facing heavy losses in Ukraine, Russia is offering high salaries and bonuses to entice new recruits. In some of the country’s poorest regions, a military wage is as much as five times the average. The families of those who die on the front lines receive large compensation payments from the government.

These are life-changing sums for those left behind. Russian economist Vladislav Inozemtsev calculates that the family of a 35-year-old man who fights for a year and is then killed on the battlefield would receive around 14.5 million rubles, equivalent to $150,000, from his soldier’s salary and death compensation. That is more than he would have earned cumulatively working as a civilian until the age of 60 in some regions. Families are eligible for other bonuses and insurance payouts, too.

“Going to the front and being killed a year later is economically more profitable than a man’s further life,” Inozemtsev said, a phenomenon he calls “deathonomics.”

Photo: ukrainian armed forces/Reuters

So many soldiers have now been killed that the payments—totaling as much as $30 billion in the past year as of June—are a telling symptom of how the war is transforming Russian society and the economy at large. Since the start of the invasion, the Kremlin has boosted military spending to post-Soviet highs, offsetting some of the impact of Western sanctions. Weapons factories work around the clock, providing employment and high wages.

Now the mounting death payments are providing an injection of wealth into some of Russia’s poorest areas in return for a steady stream of soldiers for the war effort. Poverty levels are now at their lowest since data collection began in 1995, according to official statistics. Perceptions of what it means to join the military have been transformed.
Army service after the Soviet collapse was viewed for years by many Russians as a career for talentless men unable to fill skilled positions. With no major wars to fight during much of that period, most sat at military bases filing paperwork or doing menial jobs.

But the war in Ukraine has transformed the fortunes of those willing to fight, boosting not just their income but their social status, too. The government has launched a new program, called “Time of Heroes,” aimed at training up service members for government positions.

Schools across Russia host lectures by soldiers fresh from the front lines. Desks are kept empty to honor a local “hero” who never returned from the front, with biographical details inscribed onto it and even objects from the life of the fallen soldier.

President Vladimir Putin, meanwhile, has touted a “new elite” of service members who enjoy myriad perks and a fast track into politics. The incentives have helped tame social tensions fueled by income inequality, in a way that presidential decrees and income-redistribution plans couldn’t. Surveys by the independent Levada Center show a marked increase since the prewar period in the percentage of Russians who think the country is heading in the right direction.

For the Kremlin, generous payments help avoid a general mobilization of fighting-age men after a previous round in 2022 rattled the country and led many young men to flee.

“This is money that most people in these backward areas have never seen in their lifetime, so it’s little wonder that many of them accept,” said Vasily Astrov, economist at the Vienna Institute for International Economic Studies. “And for the Kremlin, offering good pay for soldiers is the only way to maintain their war effort with high levels of domestic support.”

There is little effort to conceal the grim calculus at work.

Putin has publicly promoted the notion that dying on the front is more worthwhile than living a dire existence in Russia’s hardscrabble towns.

“Losing a loved one is a great tragedy, an unfillable void,” Putin said in a November 2022 meeting with Russian women who had lost sons in the war.

“But some people barely live, and when they die, from vodka or something else, it’s unclear how,” he said to one of the mothers. “Your son lived, you understand? He accomplished his goal.”

And some Russian officials actively promote the idea of economic gain from death in war.

“A child should understand: Yes, your father carried out a heroic act, and died, but thanks to his heroic act I have an apartment,” the governor of a region in Russia’s Far East said at a meeting to promote support for children affected by the war. “That makes children more patriotic.”

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Since the start of the war, Russia has suffered over 600,000 casualties, including killed and wounded, according to Western estimates. To offset these losses and incentivize recruitment, the government pays soldiers fighting in Ukraine a minimum monthly salary of 210,000 rubles, equivalent to $2,140, substantially higher than the national average of 75,000 rubles.

Further bonuses are awarded for taking part in offensive military operations and for battlefield feats. Regional governments also give additional payouts. The families of soldiers killed in action can receive over $150,000 in federal, regional and insurance compensation.

He’s already on the Trump Train and Truth Social! Matter of time! Dark days for the left indeed……

@Derekd3408 's thread on the wedding food trucks got me thinking: What's a reasonable amount to spend on a wedding? I'm talking venue, catering, entertainment, dress, everything.

Our daughter (no pics) is in her 20s and will likely get married in the next 5-10 years. I have budgeted $50K (but will tell my wife and daughter the budget is $40K).

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DAVENPORT, Iowa (KWQC) - A Davenport business owner is facing charges after police say he possessed child pornography.

54-year-old Paul Fuller, who owns Kona-Ice Davenport, is charged with five counts of felony purchase/possession of a minor in a sex act.

According to an arrest affidavit, Davenport police received a tip from the National Center of Missing and Exploited Children for an IP address that was traced back to Kona-Ice located in the 7200 block of Northwest Boulevard.

Police said Fuller admitted that he is the owner of multiple social media accounts and the IP address identified from the tip.

Police said they found multiple videos of children involved in sexual acts when searching the accounts.

Emily Joyce Hinojosa, 38, was sentenced to five years of felony probation. She was also ordered to pay the money back to the people who contributed to her fundraiser.

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And it wasn't even close.

Just good player rotation from JJ and realizing she could wear Crooks down with a faster paced game.

Fennelly has no offensive strategy other than feeding the post. He has a 5th year senior at PG who is a turnover machine.
Hope he has a lifetime contract.

Anyone else think it’s time to return to a natural grass field inside Kinnick Stadium?

Keep the same paint schemes just with grass.

Congrats @icwesthawk on taking the title this year🥇

Congrats to @herk u2 and @Herkster5 for last week high score (8)

I'm just happy I finished strong and made the top 10

See ya'll next fall !!!

Honda Motor and Nissan Motor, Japan’s second- and third-largest automakers, are discussing ways to deepen their ties, including the possibility of a merger that could fundamentally restructure Japan’s car industry.
The merger talks between the two storied Japanese giants highlight the intense upheaval within the world’s auto industry, as carmakers grapple with expensive technological shifts, political instability and the rise of fast-growing Chinese rivals.
Though discussions are still at an early stage, the thinking at Nissan and Honda is that combining forces could provide the companies with the resources and scale necessary to navigate those immense pressures.
Last year, Honda sold 3.98 million vehicles and Nissan 3.37 million. Their combination could make them the world’s third-largest automaker group, behind their Japanese rival Toyota Group, which sold 11.23 million vehicles last year, and Volkswagen Group of Germany, which sold 9.23 million.
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Honda and Nissan began collaborating this year on the development of electric vehicles. Over several months, their discussions have expanded to include the potential creation of a new company under which both automakers would operate, according to two people familiar with the matter who were not authorized to speak publicly.
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Nissan and Honda are expected to sign a memorandum of understanding within the next week to formally begin discussions of partnership-broadening steps, including the details of a potential merger, the people familiar with the matter said. No final decisions have been made, they said.
The companies said in statements that they were in talks. “As announced in March of this year, Honda and Nissan are exploring various possibilities for future collaboration, leveraging each other’s strengths,” they said. “We will inform our stakeholders of any updates at an appropriate time.”
The possibility of merging forces would have been largely unthinkable for two Japanese titans of auto making just a decade ago. The talks underscore the level of churn in the industry as manufacturers move away from the internal combustion engine, which has powered the vehicles they have produced for most of the past century.

Big Head Todd his doing a 40th anniversary tour

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It is great to be an Iowa Wrestling fan.

Go Hawks!

good news for the DE position.
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Jordan Dwyer… looks good to me but his level of competition is suspect but that doesn’t always translate to not being good enough by any means

It took me awhile to process this and post it to HBOT, but last Tuesday I was driving on the highway and a freaking Tesla blew by me on the right side like I was standing still (I was doing 70 mph), hit a retaining wall, and bounced back into the traffic lanes hitting the car in front of me. Both vehicles started spinning and by the grace of God I threaded the needle and wasn't involved in the accident.
This isn't the first time a highway crash happened right in front of my eyes and I avoided becoming part of the crash. At least two other times in the past five years.

Am I lucky or unlucky? Should I stop driving before my luck runs out?

Help me process this HBOT. TIA.

Joe Biden on Wednesday delivered remarks at the White House Conference on Women’s Health Research.

Biden told the attendees that doctors opened up the top of his head twice and couldn’t find a brain.

Joe Biden had multiple brain surgeries in the 1980s after suffering two brain aneurysms.

^^^^^ And the Democrats on this board still claim he has always been a man with an impressive mind.

Penix time!