Archive for the ‘Politics’ Category

Peak Oil and Global Warming

Sunday, January 9th, 2022

I Just had a interestingly cynical thought about why we might not hear more about peak oil in the USA.

One of the most destructive Big Industries is Big Politics. I’ve talked about how the USA carefully keeps people divided on hot button topics while making very little progress on them so it can continue to donation farm the suckers. (Lately this has been combined with the right out and out selling total falsehoods to their constituents, who are apparently not bright enough to figure out they’re being lied to or even remember that the past has changed over and over and over so that whatever’s Pravda now can be Pravda. )

Anyway, one of the things I’ve been deeply puzzled by is why people don’t talk about peak oil more, because while we might be arguing over the science of global warming it’s just about impossible to argue about the fact that Earth’s oil wells are going dry at a prodigious rate and that subject matter experts estimate 35 years of economically recoverable oil remain.

I think the reason global warming is pushed is because Peak Oil is something that there’d be bipartisan agreement about. Like infrastructure renewal, we carefully have to keep peak oil off the table to discuss because we’d all agree something needs done – and even worse, the things that we’d all agree need done are for the most part the same thing those global warming nuts want anyway! It’d be a very bad day for Big Politics.

(One consistent distraction from all this is the bullshit hydrogen economy. A few reminders, just to get them out of the way

1) There are very few metals that can catalyze hydrogen and oxygen to make electricity i.e. make a fuel cell for hydrocarbons. They’re all *very* rare and very expensive. There’s no way we have enough of them to put a FCV vehicle in every driveway in america
2) Hydrogen has a much lower energy density than any other hydrocarbon. This is a problem for several reasons. The first is that if we wanted to burn it in a conventional engine that engine would need enormous displacement per horsepower output. This makes using conventional engines to use hydrogen impractical
3) ALso because of the lower energy density, combined with the fact that it is a cryogenic gas (cannot be liquefied at room temperature, requires significant refrigeration to maintain in a liquid state), hydrogen is very difficult to store. Absent some sort of catalytic storage system (and it is possible such a thing could be found, ammonia seems tempting) storing hydrogen requires storing it at hundreds of atmospheres in order to get usable energy densities. Such a container is fantastically dangerous if it is ruptured because everyone near it will freeze to death – and that’s before we talk about fires etc.
4) Because hydrogen has to be compressed to hundreds of atmospheres, there’s some significant challenges in making it energy efficient because of the Boyle’s Law impact of compressing a gas to hundreds of atmospheres. Various challenges ensue to try to recapture all the waste heat of the multistage compressors required.
5) Hydrogen is very slippery. IT’s a tiny molecule that likes to leak – in fact many of the Los Angeles based hydrogen fueling stations have burned to the ground because of such leaks. It’s not the easiest material to work with.
6) It is not practical to have a fuel cell battery big enough to provide for the peak power (100kW) required during acceleration of a modern car. Therefore a FCV by definition is also a BEV, with all the complications that implies plus the complications of moving energy between the fuel cell and the battery pack. Even if it were possible to make fuel cells big enough, fuel cells must go offline from time to time to purge the water they are generating from their membranes.
7) Oh, yes, as well as being stupidly expensive (and if you thought having your catalytic converter stolen was bad, wait till you get your fuel cell stolen) fuel cells also *wear out* much faster than batteries do. Expect to change your fuel cell every 100k miles, as opposed to 200k for battery packs. (oh, yes, and expect to change your battery pack too, see above about how a FCV is a BEV)

Fuel cell vehicles may well be the answer for very large things, like trains, boats, and possibly tractor-trailers. But they are not a good candidate for everyday drivers and therefore using “let’s wait for the hydrogen economy” as a excuse for not settling the issues surrounding peak oil now is bullshit. Naturally the republicans love it.)

Anyway, all that said, Global warming *will be inconvenient*. It’ll cause crop failures, bad weather, heatstroke, etc. Peak Oil *will kill us*. Our entire food network runs on oil. It takes us more than a calorie of petrochemicals to *make* a calorie of food (counting fertilizers) and that’s before we even start to talk about moving it around. And it will kill us *soon*. If you are my age and have children, *they will starve to death* unless we change our ways.

What are the solutions? Well, for crops, Monsanto could stop being assholes and start working on crops that need less fertilizer and do less damage to the soil. For cars, battery electric vehicles – there’s plenty of lithium in seawater and for many of us nickel metal hydride would be adequate to our needs. For trains, overhead or rail fed power – although that’s less of a desperate need because trains are very efficient. For airplanes, BEVs for small ones and biofuels for big ones. Many different solutions exist – but we should begin transition *now*. We don’t want to wait until we have 5 years of oil left – among other things, humans are such idiots that we will spend the last of the oil fighting wars over the last of the oil. Also, almost all of this stuff is going to have bugs. None of it is going to work right immediately. We need to kaizen the designs (iteratively and slowly improve them)

For energy – the obvious big winners here are wind, solar, and nuclear. Not just because they’re carbon neutral, but because they’re the cheapest per kwh options in terms of deaths per kwh. Nuclear probably will also become the cheapest in terms of dollars per kwh as we design better plants. We’re already well on our way to replacing our peaker plants with wind and solar. Now we just need to slay the baseline load dragon – and if you all *really* hate nuclear even after you understand it, I guess we can talk about pumped storage, mechanical storage, and battery storage. We will come up with something.. if we try.

One thing we do need to figure out what to do about is republicans out-and-out lying about technologies to try and block them. I’m sure you’ve all heard the *absurd* claim that a wind plant or a solar array takes more power to make than it generates. We really do, as a side note, need to figure out how we can possibly survive as a country *at all* with one side willing to *lie repeatedly* about *everything* in order to try and make a few billionaires richer.

Capitalism and unconscious bias

Sunday, October 31st, 2021

So, I inadvertently got into a discussion about piracy and intellectual property in a place where a number of content creators hang out, and the results drew my attention to something that I’ve thought about before, and want to speak on some.

Said content creators were insisting that piracy hurt their bottom line. One spoke about how a new book she had writen “made only $20”. Now, I’m very clear on piracy had nothing to do with this – the problems those creators are up against is that we have many, many, many more good content creators than we did – the internet has made every person with a video camera, tape recorder, or keyboard a potential filmmaker, musician, or author, and the net result is that it’s very, very difficult to stand out of the crowd and get noticed. I spent ten hours on my last song and it has, thus far, 41 downloads – I consider myself very lucky when content I am working on breaks 100 downloads, and I will be astonished if my upcoming album makes more than 100 sales.

However, that’s not what I wanted to talk about. What I wanted to talk about is how capitalism affects unconscious bias in ways that hurt us all. This is most dramatic to me in the case of the preacher who cannot fathom in any way that the religion they are spreading might be wrong or damaging (because if that was the case they’d have to find a new job) but I think also the content creators blaming piracy – and more to the point, *caring* about what people who can’t possibly buy their content do – also illustrates the same sort of problem. The grocer who makes sure to destroy potential food before throwing it away so homeless folks don’t eat it. I could go on for a while, but the point I want to make is that we are not always aware of the neural structures that are being built inside our minds but it is a *really* safe bet that those structures are going to tend to be pro-survival since that’s why evolution has seen fit to gift us with these big brains anyway. Now, capitalism often makes decisions which hurt all of us pro-survival for individual members of the species. I think a lot of people have implicit biases towards acts that one might call evil, or at least incredibly selfish, but are not aware of those biases because they’re wired into their neural net on a subconscious level, or at least in a way their neocortex can not enumerate and/or see.

Nowhere is this more frightening than in for-profit medicine. I’ve noticed that when it comes to things that will kill you otherwise (i.e. heart attacks) the US healhcare system is moderately competent if overpriced. But when it comes to things that won’t, they’re really, really bad. I think part of why this is is that evey doctor in the system is going to have uunconscious bias towards doing things which don’t solve the problem so you’ll keep coming back because every time you come back they make more money. Basically it’s just like the thing with SSDI and the printer cables all over again.

And this isn’t something we’re looking for or measuring, partially because one of the unconscious biases we end up with is that capitalism is good and helping us – if we have a lot of money. And of course because of some of the decisions we have made lately if we have a lot of money we also have a lot of power so we are the one who’s decisions and thoughts are leading to the end result. It’s amazing how pervasive these unconscious biases can be – I gesture you to the cash for kids scandal – these judges really thought, at least claimed to have thought, that they were still behaving reasonably.

Anti-piracy measures hurt us, piracy helps us

Thursday, October 28th, 2021

So, I wanted to write yet another essay on my opinions about intellectual property. They have become more clearly defined in my mind over time. Now, keep in mind, these opinions are based on a holistic view – if one were looking at the human race from the outside.

My first observation is that anti-piracy measures have cost us all millions of man-hours. the FBI warnings that can’t be skipped, all the thousands of hours developers have wasted on anti-piracy measures despite the fact that ultimately any media (music / movie / what have you) cannot be made pirate-proof because there is no closing the analog hole. Anti-piracy hurts the human race and the only reason it exists is there are some morons who can’t do the math and can only feel tall if they know someone else is short.

It also hurts us in other ways. To the extent that law enforcement and the CRJ wastes time on these frivolous claims by multimillion-or-billion-dollar-entities about people with almost no money, it’s wasting the time of those systems, and to the extent that they actually choose to punish piracy, it’s hurting people who have committed no real crime. It’s a sign of how deeply fucked up our world is that we would put someone in jail for stealing something that A: they couldn’t pay for and that B: that isn’t *gone* once it’s stolen. It shows that we let exactly the wrong people drive the bus.

My second observation is that piracy *helps us*. Now, I’m not speaking here of piracy done by people who could afford the content. They’re being asshats, screw them. Them as have the resources should pay for content – as I do, now that I do – so that content creators will have the resources to continue creating content.

I’m talking about the 12 year olds copying music, the people who barely manage to pay their bills pirating movies, things like that. In the first place, I made a argument a very long time ago that their piracy is just a form of de-facto librarying – humanity has certainly purchased enough licenses of this content that isn’t in use at any given point that you can think of what they’re doing as just using library copies in a more efficient way. but beyond that, they also help us all in several other ways.

First of all, exposure to ideas in movies, music, books, etc, makes people’s neural networks grow. Our brains physically change state when exposed to new input. So these people are helping themselves grow and become more intelligent and capable – or more SOMETHING anyway – which thusly is helping humanity as a whole have more people who are bigger and more complex. And, let’s face it, it’s not like these people were going to pay anyway. They don’t have the money. No one is losing any money, some people are just too awful to share.

Second of all, having a number of people who are familiar with the same books and movies and music gives us cultural references than enable us to communicate more clearly. So these people are aiding humanity as a whole’s ability to communicate.

Third of all, to the extent that these people enjoy their pirated content, they are adding to the net happiness of humanity as a whole.

I want to mention a few more things about intellectual property while I’m at it. First of all, you have to remember that intellectual property *existed before we found it* in potentia. As I’ve talked about before, any digital content is already sitting on the number line, existing in a abstract sense, before we do the work to concretely bring it into this world. Not only that, you can make infinite copies of any digital asset without reducing in any way the value or quality of the original. (In fact, as I discussed above, the original *gains* value when it becomes a cultural rosetta stone)

It’s also true that one number might well mean two different things depending on what codec you run it through. So you may find yourself (in a really odd world) in the bizarre position of, for example, having a digital image that’s identical to a MIDI file that contains a hook that already exists. As soon as you start thinking about the absurdity of, for example, someone claiming they own the number ‘2’, you start to comprehend the insanity of our system that allows someone to camp on any idea – when the same idea might have occured to many, many people. It’s a safe bet that across the universe musicians on millions of planets have landed on the same chord progressions as sounding good – once you start looking at infinity and eternity it becomes clear that we’re never the first to play these notes or think these things.

Intellectual property is a band-aid to try and make our already broken resource allocation system work for content creators. Personally I think – as I’ve discussed many other places – that it’s time to invent a new resource allocation system because ours is deeply flawed in ways that are reducing the net happiness of most of the users – and I do think it’s important to think of the needs of *all* the users in the system, not just the most mercenary.

Wednesday, September 29th, 2021

I do sometimes feel like I was born in the wrong place or time, but I have to admit there are many worse places I could have landed in. My pro-collectivism attitude would have ensured I was unemployed and homeless in the 50s thanks to McCarthy. My anti-Christian attitudes would have gotten me *hung* in the middle ages, and my mental illness would have gotten me shot by the cops by now if I were black. All of this does underline the fact that we have more freedom than we ever have, but that we also have a long way to go.

Why to play fair in war, especially cold wars

Tuesday, September 28th, 2021

So, recently on facebook on the Heinlein discussion group I had discussed the fundamental hypocrisy of the USA threatening the USSR over the missiles they placed in cuba when we had missiles placed in europe equally close to the USSR and ready to threaten their homes.

Someone in the group had said essentially that one should not try to play fair in war, that you should do whatever you can do to win.

Now, shortly after this I decided to take a facebreak, so I never posted my rebuttal there. However, I”m going to post it here, because I think it’s a important idea to think about.

No, you should not take unfair advantage, *especially* in a cold war. Even Heinlein recognized this – in The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress he did not have the colonists drop their kinetic energy weapons on every city in the world even though they clearly could have wiped out 90% of humanity with the first drop. Prof’s reason was sanity itself “Whenever possible, always leave room for your enemy to become your friend.”. The same sanity appears in Crimson Tide “The enemy is war itself”.

This is *especially* important in the nuclear age, but it was important even before then. A endless serious of escalations will eventually leave everybody blind and will lead to a never-ending war. The USA unfortunately has a thuggish attitude when it comes to the rest of the world and has no problem with using force when it’s not appropriate. For this, we leave our children with a unpayable debt- eventually our country will be forced to default or disband, or we will need to change the way we think about money. For this, we have the ability to wipe all humanity off earth just by launching a third of the fusion weapons we have mounted on ICBMs. (One might say one proof there is a God is that WWIII hasn’t happened – although this may just prove that quantum immortality is a fact)

You cannot do whatever it takes to win. Sometimes you have to accept that losing now is better than losing later in a much larger way. The Geneva Conventions, which the USA has violated over and over, recognize this fact, as well as the fact that civilians should not be forced to suffer because of the awfulness of leaders. Unfortunately because we have the biggest gun, our government can not be put in the slammer, but that is undoubtedly where it belongs for repeated crimes against humanity.

I will also mention that in a cold war, it’s *especially* important to play fair. The best outcome of a cold war is massive technological innovation and no actual hostilities. The USA and the USSR didn’t manage this – we had a series of proxy wars that killed millions and did untold damage to ecosystems. Hopefully a future performance test between collectivism and individualism will be less damaging to the world and the people in it.

..

Tuesday, September 28th, 2021

So, while watching You Don’t Know Jack, I pondered about how the religious are almost always on the wrong side of every issue. Over time, the people figure this out, but they always slow down the growth of humanity.

Naturally the religious are on the wrong side of assisted suicide – abortion – gay marriage – whether the earth orbits the sun or vice versa, even.

My natural tendency is to blame religion but I’m starting to contemplate whether I’m looking at this backwards. Perhaps religion is not the cause but rather the symptom, and the cause is a neural network that resonates with wrong ideas. (in some cases just wrong in that they’re inherently internally inconsistent, wrong in some cases in that they discard empathy and throw fellow humans under the bus, and wrong in some cases in that they are demonstrably factually incorrect)

This clearly is conservativism – how many times have they tried the Laffer curve in the hopes that maybe this time Lucy won’t pull away the football? How many times do they insist the problem is the immigrants when in fact the immigrants add enormous value to the society and have a much lower rate of crime than native citizens?

One question is whether that structure is something that can change. I tend to think it’s probably not.. it’s probably compiled in via neural structures on a level below that which most people can access. Conservatives can’t see that they’re wrong, any more than religious can see the inherent contradictions in their religion. I’m sure I have similar blindness lurking somewhere, but of course I can’t know where it is either.

And another..

Tuesday, September 28th, 2021

One thing that is dramatic and scary is how quickly Americans are willing to watch their government throw away the bill of rights. (Except, of course, the second :)) I’m watching a history of the communist party in America and it’s incredible to what extent the government tried to outlaw a *idea*, and punished people for having that idea. It’s also similarly impressive how quickly half of Americans embraced facism when Trump showed up – and still can’t acknowledge to this day – even after a armed insurrection to overthrow the result of a free and fair election – that that’s what they embraced.

The bill of rights represents a set of ideals that we should try to live up to. It is true that from time to time we will slip – and from time to time safety may require placing some limits (i.e. not equipping citizens with nuclear bombs, no matter what the second amendment says) – but we should all act, by removing leaders who are encouraging overthrowing the ideas mentioned in the bill of rights. (This should be done by channels built within the system when possible, but at some point force may be necessary because of a willingness to cheat by both of the current sides). We have already lost the freedom to assemble – police regularly gas, mace, and beat up demonstrators who are peacefully assembling to petition the government for redress of grievances. And apparently in the 50s, we as a people allowed our leaders to go considerably further, and to outlaw ideas and to punish free speech and forbid association.

The truth is, if marxist or stalinist communism was superior, it should have been permitted to win. But it clearly wasn’t – events at the chernobyl power station demonstrate that stalinist communism had fatal flaws and would ultimately be relegated to the dustbin of history. (Any command and control axis that allows what is politically popular to override what is true in a nuclear power station without a containment system deserves to die a very quick death. Clearly the people in a control room “representing the interests of the party” should not have had any power at all – and yet they were able to bully board operators into doing suicidally stupid things. Of course, in America we’d probably see the same stupidity, but for money. Fortunately other forces – the fear of being sued into oblivion if you irradiate a few million civilians – mean we build nuclear power stations with containment systems so when they fail few radioactives get to escape)

However, we the people should be permitted to decide on our means of government – part of why I am so upset about Trump et al is not because Trump was a fascist, but because he did not have a majority and he still behaved as if he had a clear mandate. And, to underline the fact, he would never claim that he had won the popular vote in the second election, but he was willing to use violence to prevent the transfer of power.

So what gives? When is it appropriate to use violence, given that humans are wrong so often? It would have clearly been appropriate to use violence to *prevent* Trump from becoming a dictator, for example. And yet, one can look at cautionary tales like the USSR and the Nazis and McCarthyism and see that sometimes what is approved of by the majority is clearly wrong.

Hopefully it’s not a question I’ll have to come up with a firm answer to in the near future.

Side note

Tuesday, September 28th, 2021

One side note to the previous post – one major problem I see in general is that people tend to identify a political and resource allocation system, declare it perfect, and then fight for it. In the case of the USA we’re willing to commit mass murder to stop other countries from practicing collectivism, for example.

What we don’t do, and we *really should*, is figure out ways to testbed different systems and compare them with each other – and I don’t think that the ideal country is the one that can build the best weapons systems, but in general the current situation of the world has a number of people trying to optimize for this.

People have religious level attachment to systems of government – no one believes in testing, or in test-release cycles for things like laws. If we wrote code for applications the way we wrote laws, you wouldn’t even be able to get a working word processor written. In general one big problem is people believing they are right – and continuing to believe it even when proof they are wrong is shown to them.

This of course is part of the inherent limitations I talked about with NNNs, in the previous article. But we should build systems of government with the intention that we will check on the basic structure and tune it from time to time. It is not enough to vote in and out people to hold representative positions in a system that is itself failing to meet the needs of the users.

The implications of the limits of neural networks on political systems

Tuesday, September 28th, 2021

One of the things I’ve been thinking about a bit is the limitations of neural-network based life (i.e. us) and how they affect the political systems we form and our quest for something approximating a utopia.

Here are some of the more obvious limitations of NNNs:

1) “Unlearning” is difficult in general
2) Certain subjects (politics and religion) tend to end up compiled as hard structures and therefore be difficult to unlearn
3) The part of us that actually makes decisions and the part of us that explain the decisions we make are not that tightly coupled. Due to this, we will often explain our decisions in ways that are not correct even though we are not consciously lying.
4) Skills we don’t use tend to atrophy as the network repeatedly rebalances to reinforce and improve skills we do use. This in particular is a problem when we exercise too much power as we tend to lose our ability to empathize with people we have power over. Literally, authority causes brain damage – this is dramatically demonstrated time and time again throughout our society but we have made no real move to indoctrinate people into understanding that it is true or to change the structure of our society to be less hierarchical.. one study here.
5) While we as collective individuals are very good at identifying the source of information (internal vs external) – or at least think we are – individual subnets have a very difficult time doing so. Therefore people asserting authority can order us to do things that are wrong and we are very likely to do them anyway – see the Milgram effect.

I was pondering why I think that our best and most ideal political systems are not really implementable in the real world. I’ve talked about wanting a direct democracy where people only vote on the topics that interest them, and their vote is weighted based on demonstrated knowledge on the topic in question. There’s no way that the powers that be would ever willingly let go of their power, partially because they are brain damaged and do not realize they are – see #4.

People also are carefully in this country brainwashed to fear collectivism, mostly with appeals to emotion and faulty statements. In the real world resource allocation involves flows of resources, not flows of money, but we’re assured that any time someone gets a free meal it costs dollars out of our pockets.

I do think the most ideal resource allocation system would have a greater aspect of collectivism than the world we currently live in. I also do think that a direct democracy mixed with a meritocracy would result in the best possible governance. The advantages of using a more collectivist resource allocation system is that we could pursue mass automation without anyone starving or not being able to live indoors, and the advantage of a direct democracy which is also a meritocracy are legion and probably could be the subject of a entire series of articles. We’d have to start out by talking about the basic problems with representitive democracy, especially when limited to a two party system.

Anyway, it should be pretty clear why a direct democracy is preferable over a representative democracy considering #4. When speaking of collectivism, though, I think it is important to draw a distinction between communism and socialism.

I wish that I could believe otherwise, but I have to say that until and unless we can build a command and control system that isn’t subject to corruption, communism is a bad idea. The reason is that in a communist system, the resources belong to the state. We have yet to figure out how to build a trustworthy state – ideally I wouldn’t even allow the states of the world to own weapons of mass destruction.

Socialism is definitely a better idea (the resources belong to the workers) but one unfortunate tendency is that unethical individuals will claim to be leading a socialist revolution until they get into control and then it turns out their socialist revolution is actually a attempt to build a dictatorship or oligarchy.

Anyway, I think no matter what you do, you have to remember that it’s a bad idea to leave people in power for too long. We have seen in the united states a government that has run away into repeated acts of pure evil – starting wars over false pretenses and for profit, drone strikes that kill 10x the number of innocents that they kill targets – and we can go back further in time and see the government repeatedly destroy people’s lives for daring to promote collectivism, and willing to use a machine gun on workers who are striking for better conditions. We can see the government repeatedly break it’s word with the native americans. We can, over and over, see the government being horrible. And yet, there is no real attempt to fix it. At this point I think a lot of people recognize there is a problem, although one very big issue is that we do have two different utopias – at least!

Anyway, I hope that at some point we will run into a generation which will think about, as they are designing resource allocation systems and command and control systems – and please remember those are TWO DIFFERENT THINGS – communism, socialism, and capitalism are NOT political systems nor systems of command and control – dictatorship, monarchy, oligarchy, representative democracy, direct democracy are NOT resource allocation systems – and consider the limitations of humans as they design our path forward.

I also do think there is a large role for programmable computers in a future world. Just in representative democracy they can be used to draw the lines of districts but they can also help us run a direct democracy with discussion groups for individual topics, weighting and votes on individual topics, etc. I know that a number of people are concerned that such a system would disenfranchise the homeless and poor, but I think we could easily arrange to have computers in libraries to give people the access they need – and I also know that we could arrange for computers in prisons and that there are a lot of reasons to think that that would be a good idea.

My response to Robert Reich’s comment on cryptocurrency

Thursday, May 20th, 2021

1) I think it’s a good thing to take money – the power to mint it and control it – out of the hands of government. Crypto also offers the possibility of evolving money in two important directions – #1: we can start tracking metadata for each transaction including real world resources and man-hours – ETH already has the vehicle for this, although it would take getting everyone to understand why it was a good idea to get it implemented #2: We can start using separate types of money for renewable and nonrenewable resources. Cryptocurrency helps open people’s eyes to the idea of ‘multiple types of money’ and could also be a vehicle to help facilitate this. Squishing all types of value into one type of money is resulting in us repeatedly doing stupid things.
2) The large use of energy is something that could easily be rectified. If instead of having all participants constantly hashing and scaling the difficulty needed by the total hashrate, we required participants to *occasionally* hash to prove they *could have* (replace the proof of work with a proof of capability of work) and to hash on demand (allowing the network both to get the hashes it needs to make the blockchain go and also allowing the network to challenge suspected cheaters to prove they really can turn over them hashes) we could reduce power exponentially. The huge power usage is because no matter how many participate, the payout per block is the same – and stupid numbers of people have started participating. We can design the network to still do what it does while using a lot less power than it does.
3) Blockchain technology offers us a lot of awesome possibilities, including the possibility of checking vote aggregation ourselves. So far it’s the wild west on the idea of using it for money/value, but the idea is a good one – governments would likely be much better behaved if we took the power of the purse away from them. This is not saying I don’t believe in funding government operations – but right now, my government is murdering massive numbers of people using my tax dollars, and I feel represented by basically Bernie, AOC, and no one else. Cryptocurrencies offer us the possibility of taking some power away from governments and I think that is a good thing
4) Some cryptocurrencies also use very little power while empowering a new way of building a communications network – I gesture you to Helium.
5) All that said – the future of cryptocurrencies as a vehicle for value is extremely unclear. No one should invest any money in them they can not afford to lose. It is also not at all clear what future cryptocurrencies based on a proof of work that uses hashing have post the advent of large quantum computers.
6) Most of the time I agree with you, but on this one I think you’re probably under informed and acting as a shill for people in power that are frightened – though whether that’s because they *don’t* understand blockchain or whether it’s because they do, I don’t know.