I revised the essay, my priors were off. Added Good Samaritan data (zero successful CPR lawsuits in 30 years), duty-to-rescue statutes across Europe, and a new section on self-defense showing the trap cuts across Common Law/Civil Law (UK restrictive, Germany/Poland permissive).
Power consumption is one side of the coin. The net utility is another:
- With sufficient demand-scaling, Bitcoin incentivizes more power generation capacity since it's the buyer of first resort, establishing some floor on electricity price. This makes additional investment into renewables etc. more sustainable. E.g. where I live, there are days of slightly negative prices, and those clearly are not sustainable, so Bitcoin is the perfect way to ensure we get plentiful cheap energy with continuing investments.
- There's a case to be made that there are more and longer wars under fiat currencies since money-printing is a hidden tax that no one votes for, making it possible to fight in wars that exhaust all state resources, whereas under a Bitcoin standard the wars would be few and limited in scope.
Additionally, US Space Force's Jason Lowery argues that Bitcoin is a weapons technology in cyberspace, and the global Bitcoin mining competition is a form of "soft war", and further argues that a constant "soft war" is more efficient way to defend property rights.
The latter two points are not yet all that salient but imo that is the world we're heading towards inevitably. Bitcoin eventually outcompetes other forms of money as a layered technology and leads to this "hyperbitcoinized" world where they hold true.
This one is not about chirality. Instead, they re-engineer DNA to be made from entirely different bases, thereby obtaining immunity from all extant viruses.
Yes! Agreed, but this is definitely the one, because I'm a huge Gred Egan nerd. I just misremembered. (So not big enough a nerd to actually remember correctly)
When I was living in Edinburgh, I encountered the corner case of the upper levels of an apartment building having a different postcode from the lower levels.
Everything online used the same address database so I wondered why I could never find my address under my (presumed) postcode.
When I worked at Scottish Gas, dealing with tenement flats in Edinburgh was always a nightmare because TGB (the old billing system) used the old 1F/2F/3F system but the electricity system used the numbered system - so customers would get mail for both but it would be mixed up all the time.
If you have to deal with a pre-pay meter going in, or just a change in meter they usually screwed up the MPR number with the address and end up replacing the wrong one.
And I lived in Edinburgh for 13 years, mostly in tenement flats - so it was always a hassle.
Edinburgh is awesome, in particular, for the way that flats can be numbered within buildings.
I used to live in flat on the top floor which received mail as either "TFL" (for top-floor, flat on the left", or "Flat 6". Different companies used different formats for the address.
I'd lived in GFL "ground-floor, flat left" and "GFR" for "Ground-floor, flat-right" as well. But never in a middle floor. I assume they would be MFL and MFR respectively. But who knows?
Flats on floors in between usually have the floor number as the first part: "3FL" for third floor on the left or "2F3" for second floor, third flat. Or at least that's how it was when I lived in Edinburgh in the 90s.
Here's a recent reddit thread on the problems of post and delivery services, and the address format for tenements. It discusses 'royal mail' vs 'council format' and the PAF
when i lived in edinburgh in the 70s, we would just stick a card on the flat door with the surnames of the inhabitants on it - the flats themselves did not have numbers.
Norwegian apartments are all identified by a single letter and four numbers. For example, H0203 means 2nd floor, 3rd apartment from the left as seen when ascending the stairs. The H means "main floors" (as opposed to the loft or cellar). Very useful when visiting other apartments.
I've seen this done (in England) for blocks of flats where each floor has it's own postcode that matches the floor, eg ZZ1 Z1A through to ZZ1 Z1G (A-G for floor 1 to 7).
Wearing those disposable masks causes a lot of this. I'm apparently allergic to polyester so I notice this from sofas and uncovered mattresses and various other materials that (to me) surprisignly, emit a lot of plastic.
Last time I looked into OCR stuff I came to a similar conclusion (though I didn't implement anything back thne). It would be really nice to have "open source" models that had similar performance, without having to deal with the iphone cluster hackery.
Inflation is likely to remain high for a while, and perhaps for good so the value of your USD will go down.
Rents and stuff rose 20% or so in the US which ought to be indicative of the real rate of inflation.
Euro seems to fare better so far but the ECB printed even more euros than the US printed dollars so I'm minimizing my own euro exposure.
Virtually 100% of my assets are USD denominated anyway, I keep very little savings, everything that I don't spend goes straightly to the stock portfolio.
So inflation and FX isn't really a concern for me, it's just a fact of life.
If you're keeping a decent investment portfolio in Europe, it's almost certainly mostly in USD.
I tried this path, but I find myself disillusioned. So far I don't have a cause I could spend all of my time advancing.
I don't have the burning motivation to do everything to found a thriving startup doing some random thing. It is really hard.
Maybe I could eventually find one but the odds don't seem great. Ideally I might work for something like Neuralink but I don't think I can get there. The chasm to making that a reality seems too deep. Though this may be a self-fulfilling prophecy in a way.
As for other startups, I don't think e.g. any of the local ones pay well and, like many would say, I value equity options at zero until they're liquid.
I just feel like I've been burned too many times to grasp for more lottery tickets.
I revised the essay, my priors were off. Added Good Samaritan data (zero successful CPR lawsuits in 30 years), duty-to-rescue statutes across Europe, and a new section on self-defense showing the trap cuts across Common Law/Civil Law (UK restrictive, Germany/Poland permissive).