Nope - in free societies you should be able to refuse service on any grounds, including those things. Otherwise you're permitting the government to forcibly compel you to allocate your time and resources to ends they define.
In free societies, governments should only be able to forcibly compel people not to do things (murder, threaten, steal, etc.) - see the concept of "negative rights."
In societies that have full respect for private property, I should be able to refuse to do business with you for any reason, including the color of your shoes, the kind of music you listen to, or your marital preferences. Whether it is wise or rationally self-interested to do so is a different question.
> But to expect that a _federal agency_ will be denied service from a private entity, especially for essentially political reasons, is lunacy.
Um, think you've got this backwards. Private entities shouldn't have to take on anyone they don't want as customers (for whatever reason - do you have to justify who you do or don't want in your livingroom?), but publicly-funded institutions shouldn't be able to deny service on political grounds.
I recently wrote this (https://github.com/jamesob/clii) because I can't stand click and got sick of having to check the argparse docs every time I wanted to write a CLI. I guarantee you'll spend a tenth of the time trying to figure out how to use this thing, it has no dependencies, and is implemented in a single vendor-friendly file.
You obviously didn't read the whole article because he explicitly covers refinancing during favorable rate changes - he has a whole section on 30yrs basically being implicit long vol trades on rates.
Chaincode Labs will be subsidizing flights to and lodging in NYC, so this is a great opportunity to get some experience building on top of Bitcoin using the Lightning Network.
Something from a few months back that's a bit closer to Bitcoin's actual implementation but at a similar level of readability: https://github.com/jamesob/tinychain
A block's timestamp is frozen in its hash, which is validated by any node receiving a block (whether during initial block download or otherwise). Bitcoin and tinychain don't accept blocks with a timestamp in the future beyond some threshold (in both cases 2 hours).