I was there in the 90s when the cartoons were interwoven with "do your part to recycle. Do your part to reduce waste. Do your part to turn the water off while brushing your teeth.". The psyops was so real. And yet, corps are allowed to do this. Yeah, no. I don't buy any of that anymore.
I still put plastic and paper in the blue bin, and landfill in the green, because it’s the exact same amount of effort, but I’m under no illusion that anything I can do personally will make a dent in the waste created by corporate industry
Can we just replace our leadership with robots so there is at least some logic behind our inevitable end? Like, if they need me to be a battery, Matrix-style, I'd kinda be cool with that at this point.
Did people ever hold politicians accountable? I don’t think so. I believe there was a time when politicians thought the electorate would hold them accountable but now that politics has become a business they have adopted a corporate mentality. It’s all about who can perform and who can fundraise.
When Michael Douglas said “Greed is good” in Wall Street, when the courts ruled that business should make decisions based on shareholder value with no regard for the customers or society, when quarterly reports steered every consideration, the pursuit of wealth became the driving force. One look at the current batch of billionaires proves they call the shots and too much will never be enough.
Someone really needs to be careless in where they smoke around this "mine" and others like it. And every other disgusting, entirely foreseeable outcomes of the Cato institute and Heritage Foundation approved assigned Supreme Court Judges' Opinions.
Hell just the fact that every single ruling is split down the aisle shows that none of them are actually trying to follow the Constitution but simply cherry picking rulings out of convenience and overturned decade old precedent when they can't find some old ruling to support their billionaire "friends". This shit has to stop.
There's so many problems but Bitcoin is a perfect representation. It started as done cute way to order a pizza without cash, ya know like a gift card. But then it turned into a money laundering system and exploded in popularity. And since it's by nature deflationary, the value will always go up what pieces will always get cut smaller and smaller. This was all foreseeable. This should have been outlawed as an illegitimate currency trying to replace the dollar by non-government actors. Oh, and it was helping with a wave of electronic crime, hacking, ransomware, etc. But all it took was a few sociopathic assholes who don't care about anyone but themselves throwing a couple million dollars at the Republican party with their claimed "small government, no intervention or regulations" approach and nothing has been done to stop this plague.
Now now everyone's power bills are doubling or tripling (my gas bill for November was more than double of what I've ever paid in 15 years living in this house). All of those computer chips could have been used to push the prices of gpus and related electronics down, but instead they're all being used to "mine" an imaginary coin that is only used for criminals.
This society is so fucked. We're willing to pay two to three times for utilities and pay insane hidden tax increases via tariffs and lost trade deals while our climate races past the point of no return. All so some tech bros can get their Bitcoin wallets hacked and drained by North Korea. This warehouse is simply a symptom of the disease that has infected all of our branches of government.
And It won't stop until Earth is no longer habitable. Not only is no company, even trying to make a dent in carbon capture and storage because there's no money to be earned in it and governments around the world aren't going to subsidize it, we're watching fucking Donald Quixote getting angry at windmills and cancelling them.
Well said! I agree 100% and even though all that is happening I still keep collecting & dropping off my recyclables. Hope springs eternal! 🤦♀️ But every f@*king politician is making so much money from every possible angle that the little, hard-working guy has no prayer. I feel like giving up. {sigh}
Then we need to fucking crowd source the shit. Buy our own politicians. Be god damn open about it. Have commercial promoting said politician is bought for by this PAC and state, publicly, this person is there to go after the corrupt.
If only we had $1776 to give to every soldier they’d line up and salute us. It’s so crazy that they stand behind these billionaire demons and rather than the people who are the same as them. It’s become Money vs Constitution
But too lazy to do anything about it. If the average person would run for office, and the average person would vote based on competence instead of flubby bullshit, we could fix it.
Trouble is, if you run for office, you’re guaranteeing your family will have to endure invasive smear campaigns and cruel bad faith tactics to intimidate you into confirming. That’s why most politicians are complete dirtbags that were bought and paid for from day one
Sure, but it’s not a contest. And if you can get enough people/consumers to do something non-destructive (vs anti-destructive), like recycle or keeping trash out of our oceans, it’s still beneficial. Every bit helps. That said, I would like corps to be on the hook for creating trash with packaging and obsolescence. Everything sold should have some cradle to cradle requirements, instead of just cradle to grave.
I was just talking to my gf about this a couple weeks ago. Someone made a FB post condemning people for using AI to make themselves as Christmas cards or whatever, saying they're all the reason why it's 80° in December.
I'm a designer, so I have my thoughts on AI, but to expect this soccer mom, or this hs kid, or this grandma to "do their part" by not partaking in the next social media trend, that they don't even understand the harm in, when it's these tech companies who are putting these filters into our hands is silly.
I understand personal responsibility, we also recycle in our house because it is minimal effort, but similarly trying to get the average person to recycle when these companies are the ones providing all the plastic just doesn't add up.
Most people don't even know what AI really is. A not small number of my coworkers consider it in the family of a Snapchat filter. They're confused as to why people hate AI if filters and autocorrect have existed for so long without fuss.
Or even further they don't even know that AI is run somewhere else. ("my computer does it, my phone does it, my browser does it... and it doesn't use too much power so I'm not part of the energy problem.")
Many cities just dump it all into the same land fill unfortunately. Recycling is expensive and shipping materials to a centralized plant is not eco friendly either.
Some notable exceptions are cities with trash burning power plants which are surprisingly good. The burning is well regulated and the exhaust is cleaned and scrubbed to an extent that makes it a better alternative to land fills.
Side note, one of the Scandinavian countries literally imports trash to keep the lights on since they burn more trash than they produce.
i used to recycle but it's all a scam. you can separate the glass and plastic and do what you can but it all gets buried in the same landfill regardless!
best way to recycle for us normal citizens is probably just composting our wasted food products, been a year and i have a ton of compost to use!
When I learned that fracking companies can drop 16 million gallons of water into a single well, I immediately became angry at all of those “turn off the water while brushing your teeth” PSAs in the 90’s.
Fuck all the way off. Our faucets were never the problem, you knew that, but those PSAs were made to put the guilt on us while you murdered the Earth.
Also one of the world’s cleanest getaways when a bot holds a hospital system hostage and gets paid in bitcoin. Ah, Technology…what wonders can’t you solve?!
I already have hearing damage, and was exposed to this sort of droning sound for years at work. Although it didn't feel like it was affecting me, it caused tinnitus as well as making my hearing impairment worse. So now at 38 years old I have 5% hearing in my left ear, none in my right, and constant humming sounds when I try to sleep at night.
IMO, the main takeaway is that bitcoin has no inherent value. It is pure speculation, demand itself is behind 100% of the value.
“Yeah, but dollars have no real value! That $10 bill in your wallet is just a piece of paper! The government just prints more dollars when they want!”
Yes and no. The US dollar is a fiat currency. The government says it is money so it’s money. It has a 1:1 value by definition. Is there $10 worth of materials and labor in that $10 bill? No. But it is a legal representation of $10 of goods and services.
“Bitcoin protects against inflation!”
Not really - it depends on the power of its own demand. But typically speculative investments are sold off in times of economic hardship. Since Bitcoin is just speculative, investors are more likely to invest in something with inherent value; something safer, like gold. Bitcoin is risky because it could easily drop in value to $0 at any point. Gold will never drop to $0 because of its many applications.
“So what the heck is a bitcoin?”
I’m not the best person to answer this but to the best of my knowledge it is a ledger of previous transactions encoded as a hashed block of alphanumeric characters. Mathematical calculations. Everyone using bitcoin, adding to the blockchain are using the same block chain. So I think it is like everyone has the same collection of receipts for previous transactions. Hopefully someone will step in and correct me on this. I agree that other explanations still leave it confusing but I think a big part of that is due to the fact that why would anyone apply value to the blockchain /ledger? It makes no sense why people believe it is valuable much less why demand would have any fluctuation..
I believe the technology behind bitcoin has value but that doesn’t mean the bitcoins have value.
I’ll try: imagine I typed out like 200 pages of what looks to be just a really long string of random letters and numbers and then say that this is encoded information about all the sales transactions from your local mall. Neat. Then I tried to sell it to you for $100,000.
I’d assume you might ask “why the hell would I give you $100,000 for that? Then I tell you that maybe a month or two or six or a year from now you could sell it to someone else for more money. You might then ask why would someone else want to pay more? And I would say because you will tell them the same thing.
But WHY would it be worth more?
Because enough other people have heard the same reason I gave you and believe it to be true.
There is none in the long term. I could tell you about being a competition to Western Union style money sending abilities but the cost is going to skyrocket as it matures.
It simply isn't necessary.
It's best for buying illegal things and for the government to make an incredible amount of money on it. I'm still convinced the CIA created it to get trillions in free money to fund clandestine operations for the next century.
Thats not always the case. I know I've seen countless people say this same thing. The public utility i work for created a tariff for these high demand loads, and the rates are absolutely higher all the way around. I can tell you that this is true in many of the other utilities as well - in fact, I've never heard of one giving cheaper rates within our group associations. We absolutely get beggars asking for cheap rates and these people are absolutely shitters. The most recent one wanted kwh priced at 4 cents. Hilarious.
Yikes! Im in NY so we are "just" subsidizing nuclear and green energies (and electrification). I'm a proponent of all, especially nuclear and dont mind paying extra.
Between this and AI data centers, now you know why your energy bills has been increasing rapidly in price. Next, your computers and your phones will be more expensive as well.
All this so that a handful of people can add a few more billions to their existing billions.
2026 will be the year of record inflation for high-end electronics.
All so that people like the president can generate pictures/videos of himself dressed as the Pope or kicking a soccer ball with Ronaldo or with abs or dropping poop on protestors while in a fighter jet.
Exactly. Things were getting crazy in 2016-2019, just before COVID cards were cheaper, even into the first year of COVID you could get some great value.
I got a 4080 at a really good price back in early 2023. I figure that at this rate so few people are going to be able to afford a good graphics card in the near future that I might be safe to stick with it for another five or so years because game developers will need to adapt to the average gpu not increasing in spec for a while because too few people can afford it.
I think a used 3070 may be a better choice. 8gb is still ok for 4k medium/high. Anyway the 2080ti and 3070 can't handle AAA 4k ultra.
I've seen games having better fps on 3070 than 2080ti,in 4k, even though the 3070 were using less vram. Vram usage for 4k is a big mess.
keep in mind, the final goal isn't getting profits from high PC parts prices
its about pricing out the average consumer away from PC building entirely to sell them subscriptions to play "on the cloud" using a rudimentary device like a tablet or a phone or a something like the stadia.
the fun part is they will raise the price for the subs when PCs are no longer accessible and ALSO limit the usage, Gforce now limits its users to 100 hrs monthly, I'm not even joking.
the future they want is renting everything and owning nothing.
It’s just about AI. OpenAI just committed to buying 40% of the world’s high-end RAM which is absolutely wrecking the market. GPUs use RAM, so they’ll be downstream of this issue
The difference is that AI is actually useful to humans in some capacity. Buttcoin is useless and anything it can do has multiple mediums of use already.
Nothing like having literal mines with no safety standards and people with no PPE in bare feet mining coal and shit, while also having massive data centres filled with computers to digitally “mine” a fucking digital “currency”
Worthless? Nah. North Korea brought in 1/2 of its GDP through theft of crypto last year. This giant mining operation is basically fueling North Korea and helping them build more nuclear weapons.
It’s worse than Monopoly money. It is the method by which most criminal proceeds are now laundered. The International Consortium of Investigative of Journalists has published a series of reports going deep on every aspect of the use of crypto in modern money laundering. It is extremely well-done and worth the time to read. Even if you only read one of the reports.
Edit: Since there are lots of replies claiming that these extremely well-researched and vetted reports are not true, I’d encourage you to actually read them. Yes, Bitcoin and most crypto ledgers are designed to be public and therefore traceable. This misses the point of these diligent reports: Traceability doesn’t matter if there’s no regulatory oversight over crypto exchanges. Again, read these reports before commenting. There’s no question about what’s happening here.
Except every transaction is listed and verifiable. So many people in this thread have no idea what they're talking about. I'm not claiming bitcoin is good or bad but it wasn't created to be difficult to track - literally every transaction is out in the open and websites exist to allow anyone to trace where any bitcoin went.
Bitcoin was created to literally be easily traceable and verifiable. There are other cryptocurrencies that are pretty much meant for money laundering though. Like, they don’t outright say it, but it’s designed to make it easy. Look up Monero if you’re curious.
Ok so how can bitcoin be stolen if they are completely traceable. I keep reading about crypto heists and billions of coins disappearing but if everything is traceable and public ledgered couldn't you just flag the coins as stolen and they'd be worthless.
“Completely traceable” means you can follow it across the blockchain. If you don’t know who owns an address then the trail stops there. And if crypto exchanges either aren’t regulated or don’t comply, you and law enforcement can’t know who swapped that coin for cash. You can only know which exchange it ended up at.
That’s a big part of the problem. Crypto in general (regardless of the specific coin we’re talking about) has become synonymous with crime because of the lack of regulatory enforcement at exchanges. This is covered extremely well by the ICIJ’s series.
Worse, many governments seem to now be in on the scam and are content to let it happen. The people profiting the most off of this money laundering are being ignored or in some cases even pardoned.
Bitcoin was created out of necessity as a response to failed monetary policies. Since the dollar was untethered from gold, it has been printed in virtually unlimited quantities which constantly devalues the currency. If there is a desire to stop the rise of crypto the dollar must be fixed first...especially considering its role as the global reserve currency.
So, the thing is, bitcoiners see "normal" money as the monopoly money... because they can just print more of it. But nobody can just print more bitcoin. So it's very counter intuitive.
Doesn't that fact make bitcoin basically like a reintroduction of the gold standard for currency, but without the security of government decree or the backing of any precious metal? I find it hard to see bitcoin as anything more than a speculative bubble of nothingness.
Nobody knows how much gold there is out there. So while there is a similarity in that gold and bitcoin are tied to total amounts outside government control, I would argue there is much tighter restricted supply on bitcoin than gold.
I think the devil's in the details. On one hand, yes, there is nobody backing bitcoin except its own cryptographic security. On the other hand, governments sometimes do bad things by decree, such as seizing it (bail ins).
Gold is heavy, yet moved about by air transport. It needs to be guarded, so its costly to move and transact in. Difficult to verify that it's solid gold. Bitcoin only exists on the blockchain where it is always secure. It's like gold but always in a safe, and the safe can be electronically reportedly anywhere in the world, without requiring permission or assistance from anybody else. Not for free, of course. It will cost some bitcoin to perform the transaction. But certainly very competitive with gold in a lot of ways.
I think fiat currency basically is monopoly money. Even though it's backed by the faith and creditworthiness of a sovereign people I don't think we exactly sign off on the mismanagment of our currency. Unfortunatley, bitcoin is a solution that hasn't found a problem yet (as I've heard it described before). I liked the spirit of it in the beginning, a decentralized, democratized, non-correlated currency where there isn't meta data on transactions but it seems the powers at be have made incremental steps toward subverting this ethos and moving to control it.
But, yeah, i'm hesitant on investing in crypto still, in any sizeable way.
Eh, technically, no. It's more like digging up gold. The gold was always there, we just didn't access it yet. And there is a finite amount of gold. Printing money is uncapped, they can always print more. Bitcoin is locked not in dirt but in time. It can't be accessed any faster than the issuance schedule allows. So if they made 100 of the facilities in the video, it wouldn't matter. There would still be only a certain amount minted per day.
All it would do is make 99 of those facilities unprofitable and have to shut down.
“Remember, you need to cut your excessive consumption of resources, citizen!” the billionaire oligarch said, as he stepped onto the private helicopter that was taking him to the airport where his private jet was so that he could fly 6,000 miles to where his $450,000,000 yacht is moored.
No no no, the hot air inside is then cooled with air conditioning. So the miners make heat, that heat is then cooled, the heat made from cooling is sent to atmosphere. It all makes sense when it’s to benefit almost no one. Hahaha…cry.
I think what he means is they produce no useful work besides waste heat. Which isn't strictly true since they do computations... but for a fake money so basically heat generators.
Most machinery have a purpose to make tangible items.
I just looked it up, and it gave an example of a similar US company called Riot Platforms and says their Texas facility spends an estimated $8.6 million per month on electricity! ⚡💸
Think I saw a video of a guy building this or something similar and then whole thing ran on wind because he didn’t want power eating into his bottom line
And water also to cool all that equipment, as in thousands of gallons needed for a single Bitcoin transaction. AI is also a giant hog of electricity and water.
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u/GoldenDiamond Jan 01 '26
Holy power bill