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Cake day: June 15th, 2023

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  • I would much rather pay for a missile that Ukraine fires against a Russian tank in Ukraine, than pay for a missile I have to fire against the Russian tank myself after it rolled through Ukraine and to my doorstep.

    I would also much rather pay to educate the world (using Russia as an example) that the international community isn’t putting up with wars of aggression and won’t let you get away with them, than have the world thrown into disarray when the next country decides to disrupt global supply chains with their war of aggression.

    Supporting Ukraine is a smart thing regardless of what you think of Ukraine. It’s also the morally right thing, but if you don’t care about that, egoism should drive you to the same decision.











  • Bullshit article/study:

    These numbers are estimates based on the assumption that the Bitcoin mines run on water-dependent cooling systems typical in large data centers.

    So they took the typical datacenter water consumption per MW, applied that to some estimate of Bitcoin power consumption (wouldn’t be surprised if they did the usual “use current output rates and multiply with power-per-output numbers of long obsolete hardware”, often seen in “studies” “showing” how tech X is horrible for the environment), and assumed that would be it.

    All pictures of Bitcoin mines I’ve seen used (direct) free cooling which doesn’t use water. That has changed now, but simply assuming it’s the same as for normal data centers is an obviously questionable assumption.

    Fun experiment: look up the CO2 intensity of electricity, look up prices for industrial electricity, look up claims of “CO2 emission per Netflix movie streamed”, then compare with the cost of your Netflix subscription and wonder whether Netflix would really be profitable if streaming was that power hungry.

    (Also, the author misunderstood how this system works: “However, some data centers and crypto mines use a different system that keeps computers cool and cuts down water consumption by immersing them in a non-conductive liquid.” Now that DC has a hot liquid, which they could cool in a number of different ways, some using water some not. Which system they use to get the heat from the chip to the cooling system doesn’t matter if they aren’t freecooling)


  • I think there is a huge psychological difference between “spending on public good” and “here is some money”, and especially where the latter happens, it should be very clear that the money is coming from the state/nation, not the individual leading it.

    That may be obvious to you, so the message doesn’t look like a problem, but I bet at least 1% of Americans think Trump personally gave them some of his personal cash out of generosity, effectively turning it into a bribe with public money. Which is exactly why Trump insisted that his name would be placed on the check. (The letter that came with it was surprisingly reasonable and clear, which is why I estimated 1% and not 5%).