You might have noticed I am rather obsessed at the moment about the lovely dry weather we are having on the Isle of Man. It has been really cold with top temperatures reach between 4 and 7C during the day. Today started off lovely and dry, a few moments ago we had a winter hail shower which only lasted a few minutes. Now let me explain about this hail, it’s nothing like we used to get in South Africa. It is tiny, no bigger than the size of a pea. Sunset tonight is at 16h01, we are getting close to the peak of the short days, and then we start gaining more light after the 21st of December.
HOW PLASTIC IS CONSUMING OUR LIVES
Lots of debate around at the moment regarding plastic bags which have been banned recently in the UK and it’s now filtering through to the Isle of Man. Sky News recently ran a campaign about the big topic of plastic is our oceans. How as humans can we do this? We have absolutely no regard for our environment and it’s just getting worse. In the UK, thirteen of the big retailers has signed up to cut the packaging of food, but this just isn’t enough or soon enough. As touted a plastic tax is being considered, but this would mainly affect the consumer and not the manufacturer, so what happens then? People stop buying the goods in plastic and then profits go down for the retailers, perhaps when it starts affecting their profits they will be motivated to make these changes quicker. We have made an effort to collect our plastic bottles and drop them off at our recycling centre every weekend.
IS THE BITCOIN BUBBLE ABOUT TO BURST?
I have been very tempted to invest more into Bitcoin, but I have decided to wait for a really big correction. The growth for 2017 has been over 1000% which is insane. I would rather err on the side of caution. It is so volatile, after reaching a high of $11,000 it slumped nearly 20%. The energy drain is rather intense; a recent estimate by tech news site Motherboard put the energy cost of a single Bitcoin transaction at 215 kilowatt-hours, assuming that there are around 300,000 Bitcoin transactions per day. That’s almost enough energy as the average American household consumes in a whole week. Did you know that Bitcoin’s smallest unit is a Satoshi, named after the elusive creator, Satoshi Nakamoto. One Satoshi is one hundred-millionth of a Bitcoin, making it worth around $0.0001 at current exchange rates. I don’t doubt the cryptocurrency but I think the growth may be inflated and it’s going to drop. Hey, I could be so wrong on this as it could keep growing in value and then it costs even more to buy. Something is telling me to hold for the moment and I think I will.
Thanks for reading!