Honestly, i’m glad whatever nut did this chose such an ineffective method as trying to burn down an office door in front of a fire sprinkler given they could have just gone to a sporting goods store, got an AR15, and actually killed a lot of good people.
Then why in the world would he not just say so and just drive or walk to the train between DC and New York? He’s a government official, but not really one notable enough to need a security escort to go to the grocery store.
Yes, the market decides how useful it is, and given many online platforms that once accepted crypto payments have quietly dropped such features do to a lack of actual demand, and physical retailers, transit agencies, etc haven’t seen enogh customer demand to accept such payments when the vast majority of an already small number of transactions is between speculators rather than consumers buying real world objects.
Bitcoin and Bitcoin Lightning are centralized systems, in that they are a single central way of doing things that is dictated by the majority of the people processing the transactions. These rules have changed and updated over the years, and a 2024 mining node would not be compatible with 2012 one for instance owing to the migration from BerkeleyDB to LevelDB.
Similarly, while we’re not taking about Etherium, it is a very similar in concept and up until recently consensus mechanism, and was forked to reverse a series of whale transactions back in 2016. Ya sure, Etherium classic maintained the transactions, but its also a tiny fraction of the size and relivence of the one that bowed to whale and miner pressure.
Back in BTC land, as of 2023 Antpool and Foundery together own 53.4 percent of the gobal bitcoin hashrate, which pretty directly translates to mining power. You say that if a mining pool acts unethically it will be abandoned in short order, but historical precedent seems to suggest the opposite. If a majority of miners decide on an alternate transaction history, historical precedent is that they win. This is hard to do by outright threat, but historically easy to accomplish by greed.
Yes, if you are scamming people on Facebook marketplace, elemanating all after the fact consumer protections is great. If you are honest, then it is not an typical problem because consumers are limited in how they can use chargebacks, and small claims court can deal with such matters, where as proving jurisdiction can be vary hard in crypto transactions.
The vast, vast majority of people, especially common people, are consumers, and consumers should always be inherently protected over businesses.
You should not have to pay a premium for fundemntal transaction security measures like disputability, reversibility, and hold times. An attacker which gains acess to my account should also not be able to bypass such measures, seeing as that is both the most likely and most damaging form of attack.
You suggest that no one is selling high value goods overseas in fear of fraudulent chargebacks, but actual market behavior doesn’t seem to be effected by this, likely because most international transactions use backed in fraud and holding checks instead of credit cards.
Bank transfers also have a several day going period during which they can be reversed, large transactions often have to be approved in person, and even smaller yet major ones by phone. Someone hacks into my computer and gains access to my wallet it’s empty while I have no recourse, if they do the exact same thing to my back account it’s an triviality to get it reversed if it’s even possible at all. That is why it is unheard of for anyone to be extorted, hacked, or otherwise loose acess to their bank account directly, yet people loose access to their crypt wallets every single day.
Neglecting the absurdly of claiming inflation is theft, you realize that the actual total supply of currency is completely decoupled from inflation and deflation outside of hyperinflationary and hyperdeflationary death spirals, right? One would think that this would be pretty obvious to someone with a knowledge of BTC, as what was enough coin to buy me a pizza in 2010 is now enough to buy a mansion worth nearly half a billion dollars in 2024, and yet as you say the total supply of currency has remained largely the same between thouse two dates. That is an absurdly volatile shift value on par with a small nation in complete economic collapse, not something which is posturing itself as a serious gobal one world currency.
I don’t know about what holidays there are in your part of the world when you can’t use cash, checks, debit, or credit cards, but they don’t seem to exist here in North Amarica. Massive bank transfers sure, but thouse take days anyway to ensure that all or most of my money can not be stolen, being unable to loose that much instantly is a key security feature, not a bug, and one should never be in the position where one needs to loose that much money in a day.
Cash still works when i’m offline, as do checks, debit, and some credit cards. They can all be used when both parties are offline, no internet involved. I don’t give a shit what the monitary system backend is doing during a gobal apocalypse when the gobal internet splits in half, I care about being able to by food after a hurricane or when the store’s internet is down, and my card or cash can do that while BTC by its very nature can’t be used without acces to the internet.
Yes, but reduceing demand spent on frivolous projects also cuts down on waste immediately, instead of the decades it take to physically make things.
Electrical waste is the fundamental value that underpins the entrity of Bitcoins exsistance. Bitcoin has a per transaction energy cost of 767kwh per transaction. That is enough to physically drive an electric suv like the Ionic 5 from Seattle WA, to Jacksonville FL, for every single transaction. Visa can handle nearly a million transactions for the same energy cost, and is part of a global banking system that handles the needs of billions of people, not a hobby project for a few tens of thousand of speculators.
While chasing very cheap energy is critically important to miners given the vast amount of energy consumed, most poor countries would like to phase out more expensive sources of energy like coal and gas in favor of cheaper solar already, but cannot do so because they need to supply the demand of miners who generally need to be operating for as much of the day as possible to make the cost of the back. If these electrical grids really were to that point, then they would be consistently running with or at least hitting zero fossil input, something which is incredibly rare even in developed nations withs decades of building out renewables.
While transactions are secure in a technical sense, as far as any user is concerned they are vastly less secure than traditional transactions because they inherently cannot be reversed or disputed in any way, unless your a whale and can convince everyone to fork the entire monetary system of course. Anyone who gains access to an account can take all its contents and you have zero recourse, not to mention that disputing transactions is the primary security against fraud and deception, and hence why a system that eliminates all aspects of it has been overrun with fraud and deception.
Bitcoin is a massively centralized system. Not only because it is a single central system, but over fifty percent of that system is controlled by just five groups, who by definition have complete control over that system and are accountable to exactly no one.
Market cap is irrelevant, just the current price people are willing to pay times the total amount of bitcoin to ever exist. It has nowhere near that liquidity, and no fundamental value to hold beyond its speculative nature.
No bank is going to have a money holding money for someone, the problem is that the someone doesn’t have money or any need to spend it beyond a five minutes walk around thier village. You would know this if you actually researched the reason poor people in remote and developing areas might be unbanked instead of just using it as a talking point to liquidity into a speculative asset.
Moreover, most major cell providers in poor nations also already allow customers to store and transfer funds directly from their account to others. Other nations like India have things like their Universal Payment Interface, which allows any two business, customers, or people to make instant free transactions.
It is also inherently only as reliable as ones internet connection, and in many developing nations that is no where near 100% uptime. If the power or internet go out, all acess to your money does aswell, as you can’t make changes to an allways online database without acess to the internet.
Yep, expansion of coal is a failure on all levels all right.
More expensive than even natural gas, let alone solar, is only financially viable with government handouts, dumps more carbon into the air than any other mainstream type of energy, renewable or not, creates vast open ponds of radioactive fly ash, and since all mining has moved to new open pit low sulfur coal in the eighties it doesn’t even employ more than a handful of people.
I mean, their reserves have been holding steady for the last two winters, and the US has already picked up so much slack that it’s now the worlds largest exporter of natural gas. Even more export capacity on top of current capacity, to be completed years from now, isn’t that bad for Europe, especially when their demand is expected to drop from now on as the rate at which they adopt renewables continues to increase.
The extra capacity is primarily aimed at lowering the export prices in industrializing nations in Africa and South America so natural gas can get back to some semblance of cost parity with currently cheaper and more reliable solar. Bad for US gas companies yes, Europe, probably not.
Worth noting that with the current US electrical grid an EV produces about half to too thirds of the pollution per mile, and is expected to be down to one third by the time a new electric vehicle bought today reaches the end of its life. Given that cars represent a significant portion of the transportation sectors carbon emissions, which in turn represent theory percent of the US entire emissions, I wouldn’t call halving that inside ten years insignificant, especially as there is no practical alternative that could be implemented on a similar time scale that would be prevented by said EV adoption.
It’s also practically possible to decarbonise electricity, indeed renewables are now cheaper than fossil for new electrical generation even accounting for their intermittence, while it’s not really feasible to do so with oil. While carbon capture is a thing, it hasn’t been able to scale well dispite having been thrown money at for nearly fifty years now and there industries like aviation that can pay a lot more to get first dibs on said fuel.
Lithium is hardly particularly damaging to the environment to mine when compared to most other mining operations, like in the case of the worlds largest lithium producer’s(Australia) the coal mines next door. Cobalt actually isn’t that relevant in mass adoption scenarios as it’s cost means it tends to be completely absent in most adorable mass market EVs which currently tend to use LFP as compared to lithium ion or nickel cadmium.
As for recycling batteries, you just toss them in a industrial scale dielectric bath crusher and treat the output as absurdly high grade lithium-cobalt ore. The reason it has been slow to scale is not technical difficulty but rather a lack of demand, as even the first model S(one of the first properly mass produced EVs) will still have over two hundred of its two hundred and sixty mile range today. Given that one can cross the entire US with only a hundred mile range, there is still a lot more demand for reusing such cars then you get from the batteries scrap value even before considering the demand for cheap large scale batteries for things where that loss of power density doesn’t matter.
After the used and crashed market reaches maturity and we go from being able to just reuse them, recycling will actually become a significant strength of EVs, as a majority of the emissions are in battery mining, and thusly only happen once. We have a 97% capture rate on lead acid car batteries today, and thouse are only worth dozens of dollars in material, not thousands, so I hardly expect any to make their way into landfills in sufficient quantities to compete with the byproducts of even just refining oil on water and soil conditions.
That’s good news, it’s also possible last I heard that it is upside down solar panels are facing east instead of the intended west, which would mean that it might come back up once the sun has moved across the sky in a week or so.
I feel like the primary problem here is just that detecting pedestrians and figuring out how they are going to is actually one of thouse problems that is just very hard for computers. Obviously it’s not impossible to do at all, but it is difficult to do reliably, especially once one considers the risks of false positives as well as negatives.
It is definitely concerning though that these systems are being pushed and marketed beyond their actual capabilities though. Some proper truth in advertising law might actually help here, and of course in an ideal world this would be an open source project with all the major automakers and academics contributing.
Ya, in all seriousness, it is amazing to me how hard some people are pushing the idea that the US helping stop an far right dictator at the head of an imperial empire from annexing it’s neighbor and systematically destroying its culture is just like the US helping support a far right almost dictator amex its neighbor and systematically destroy its culture.
I get why it happens and why milk toast neoliberals want to equate Israel’s occupation of Gaza with Ukraine’s defense of its own long established borders, but as far as I can tell the ones pushing the idea that both interventions are bad tend to be either isolationists how forgot how that ended last time, or are just starting from everything the US does it bad and working backwards from there.
From my, admittedly limited, understanding of Epstein’s operations and why it’s been so hard to actually nail anyone who recived his ‘services’, while he definitely prostituted minors he did not only prostitute minors, and the full list of which was which died with him. Most of his ‘clients’ got young but legal, but younger could be acquired if desired. It helped insulate him because when people in thouse circles talked about it they could be assured that the ‘escorts’ were fully legal and anyone making a fuss was just exaggerating their age to get attention.
I think the root of the problem is that, from Hollywood actors and Celebrity appearances to Fluxbait here on Lemmy, people are constantly shown and told that young is beautiful and desireable when it comes to women, and the younger the more beautiful and desirable. We know that what styles and appearances are considered attractive varies by culture, and our culture is based around young and smooth when it comes to women.
Interestingly, it doesn’t seem to apply to men as much. What are pitched as hottest men in film and magazines are often twenty to thirty something’s with a decent amount of muscle, but when it comes to women it’s thin, snooth, and just turned 18.
This very much isn’t a justification, but I think it is a reason.
Yes, the water is not particularly radioactive. It does however contain the spent fuel rods at the bottom that are.
This Nitter thread sums it up nicely i think. Shamelessly stolen from Five@slrpnk.net.
The Lancet report puts about 42.8 percent of the recoded killed being nineteen or under. Assuming that raitio has remained consistent, and using the twenty one thousand, five hundred and seven deaths recorded as of Dec 29th, that puts the number of dead kids at nine thousand two hundred and five.
While it is more difficult to actually figure out how many Hamas Israel have actually gotten, given that a lot of the Israeli fire has been launched at buildings where Hamas broke in, lobed a RPG from a shoulder fired launcher, then drove off within a minute, or have been against refugee camps and other purely civilian targets, it’s unlikely that many actual terrorists more important than the now easily recureted cannon fodder have been successfully killed. Especially given that many of the ones involved in the all or nothing attack on Oct 7 never actually made it back to Gaza.
Moreover, given that Israel has been more than happy to share names when it actually has them, and generally there haven’t been that many, putting a vague estimate at about a hundred or so isn’t that unreasonable.
Even the best case Israeli numbers put it at less than one terrorist per kid, given their reluctance to back any of that up the amount of evidence they have since walked back, and how terrorist groups are organized in the first place, it is very unreasonable to use said estimate.
Hey look, they do have ways to target Hamas without leveling a civilan skyscraper using artillery. While there were a few civilian casualties in this instance, I have been repeatedly assured that you have to use dumb bombs that go “off target” to land on a ambulance or crowded parking lot, and that killing eighty kids per actual Hamas was the best poor Israel could do.
So what your saying is that the title is technically correct, becuse the water spilled was containing nuclear materials, but written in such a way that anyone reading it would come to the wrong conclusion that radioactive material contained in the water left the plant.
Weird how that happens when you constantly invest in scaling up a sector.
Thankfully most signs are that the PLA is targeting having a force capable of credible cross strait operations in 2027, so we still have at least three years. Taiwan, Japan, South Korea, and the US all know this and have been spending the last two plus years reshaping thier militaries to be capable of directly opposing such an act, and in doing so it is become pretty clear that any cross strait action is only going to end in a lot of CCP ships on the bottom and a good fiscal year for Lockheed Martin.
In doing so it makes it vanishingly unlikely that it will actually move beyond posturing in the first place. Unlike in Ukraine where the West has committed to supporting and resupplying the victim, many of the Asia Pacific Nations are committed to providing active military operations in defense of Taiwan.
That being said there is still to my knowledge no Asia Pacific equivalent to NATO Article 5 unfortunately, which may result in dangerous doubt in terms of credible deterrence, especially if the CCP believes it has friends that will quietly bow to it in Tokyo and Washington in 2027. For all of Trump’s shouting, most of his actual actions involvedo withdrawing the US from everything he could that China didn’t like.
While still unlikely, credible deterrence still requires the Chinese Intelligence both believe and be good enough at handling bad news to accurately report that up the chain of command, and as the FSB demonstrated in Ukraine that’s not necessarily a given. If there are enough yes men, then things could get very bad indeed.
Removed by mod
Labor continues to try and find ways to throw what must be one of the easiest elections in the world. Like seriously, why is Labor so desperate to adopt Tory practices, positions, and controversies when the biggest advantage they have right now in the mind of the average British voter is that they arn’t the Tories?