Five in a Row

About Five in a Row

Cleopatra’s Barge opened in September 1970 in what is now the Nobu Hotel tower, replacing the earlier Nero’s Nook lounge. The 180-seat lounge featured as its centerpiece a “floating” stage designed as a replica of the vessel aboard which the Egyptian queen is said to have bewitched Mark Antony.

The pleasure craft, installed in a shallow lagoon, featured a gold-painted, topless figurehead that extended far into the public walkway. Guests quickly turned rubbing the statue’s golden breasts for luck into a classic Vegas tradition; staff regularly repainted the most-touched areas.

Vital Vegas ranked the display No. 4 on his 2014 list of “10 Things You Can Rub for Good Luck in Las Vegas Without Getting Arrested,” a list that featured three other Caesars Palace entries: the hand of the Caesars statue (No. 1); Joe Louis’s boxing gloves (No. 8); and the toe of Michelangelo’s David replica (No. 9).

The barge itself never actually floated, by the way. That was just a myth. It sat on a fixed platform that created a mild rocking motion. That piece of Vegas engineering, like the statue’s original perch, is now history.

About Five in a Row

During the second half of 2026, prediction markets have endured the wrath of a plethora of state governors, most notably Kathy Hochul of New York.

As the NFL season begins, a state in close proximity to the New England Patriots became the latest to attempt to curb the influence of the trading platforms. On 10 September, one day after the Pats’ season-opening loss to the Seattle Seahawks, Connecticut Governor Ned Lamont addressed the growth of the markets during a speech in downtown Hartford. On the same day, the Connecticut Department of Consumer Protection issued cease-and-desist orders to nine unregulated operators, including Polymarket, Robinhood and Underdog Predict.

“Prediction markets have branded themselves as legal and safe, but the reality is they are not adhering to Connecticut’s consumer protection standards,” Lamont wrote in a statement.

About Five in a Row

Just the rumors of this had spurred BTC past $58,000 a token, but then whoops, it crashed again by about $10,000 in a matter of minutes. This is what corporate America wants to put on its balance sheets? A pseudo-asset that they won’t even know the value of any given minute? Speedballing by comparison seems quite the mild, conservative habit to engage in. But the BTC crowd certainly has one thing absolutely right. Having extra fiat money on your balance sheet, especially U.S. dollars, at this point in monetary history, is extremely dangerous, even suicidal. Corporations are going to have to get rid of them real soon, because the U.S. dollar is about to completely implode. And with the U.S. dollar, will go every single other fiat currency in the world in real purchasing power terms.

Once it becomes obvious, it will be too late to do anything about it. It doesn’t matter how great a company you have. If you are interested in preserving your company, there is only one thing you can do. Replace any extra fiat currency stuck on your balance sheet with real money, with gold, now, or you will sink together with all the inflated paper nothing units on your balance sheets.

I concede, CEOs know much more about business than I do. That’s why they are business leaders and I am not, nor will I ever be. So who the hell am I then? I will say confidently, I absolutely know my place in this world. It is as clear to me as the sun. I may not understand much about doing business, but I know what money is, and I know what money is not. I know what happens to unbacked paper currency when governments shut down the world and blast currency from monetary firehoses all over the world until we are all drowning in it. It dies.