Move aside, Technoking: All hail the Sweat Master and his many inspirational job titles You know my name. Look on my works and despair. "Does he get paid for that?" Yup, I can hear you despairing right now. My name is not enough. What I need now is a stupidity-engorged job title. Oh yes, the fashion is back for overegged descriptions of what you want other people to think you do for a living. Thought you'd seen …
... but do you have any actual figures for environmental damage?
I will put only one here: Rocket CO2 emissions are 0.0000059% of global emissions. At first sight Musk flavoured rockets look quite bad because of their high market share and extra fuel for recovery. If you add in the CO2 emissions for refining and bending metal then divide by the number of flights per rocket then SpaceX look really good compare to other rockets.
The everyday astronaut covered this topic in great detail in a long article and a matching video.
(Love the rockets but even a judge agrees Elon needs adult supervision before being allowed near twitter.)
Gonna have to step in mmkay. The problem isnt the amount of energy used by Bitcoin, it's how that energy is produced. Energy is not hard to come by, it's just difficult to harness.
You see we folks on earth have become used to the idea that energy is a rare and precious thing because we've been burning fossils for so long, rare and precious things. In fact energy is present everywhere all the time we simply haven't figured out how to use it yet and the competition (burning things like primitives) is cheaper / easier.
>Nope, just compost them. Which precludes the use of quicklime, and carpets only if those are fully biodegradable.
For long term carbon capture don't you want them not to biodegrade?
I bury all my victims in disused salt caverns (hypothetically of course)
I love how you use the term "them" when you clearly mean "us" or maybe just "me".
(Joke alert, because, well, we are talking about ending peoples life here, and, this being the Internet, I think it is wise to have a disclaimer that says that I don't want to end peoples life.)
Ways of getting very wealthy, in descending order of success rate:-
1. Arrange to have very wealthy parents.
2. Arrange to have wealthy parents, a little luck and sociopathic tendencies.
3. Start with very little, have a large amount of luck and be a highly talented functional psychopath.
4. Win a mega-lottery.
#4 should be "Win a mega-lottery and keep the money", which seems to be beyond the capability of most winners. (I'd say that lottery players self-select for poor financial choices, but in moderation I suppose it's an entertainment expense. Not one I'm interested in paying, but then I don't spend a lot of money on opera tickets either, so who am I to judge?)
According to this
https://digiconomist.net/bitcoin-energy-consumption/
Bitcoin has the same carbon footprint as Switzerland
and the same electricity consumption as Finland.
So basically Bitcoin is consuming as much resources as a Medium sized western country and will only get worse as the current Tulip buying frenzy goes on.
Yes, yes but Bitcoin is worth almost as much as Switzerland and how much energy has Switzerland consumed to get where it is over the centuries?
If Bitcoin was a national currency, it'd have the 14th biggest market cap on Earth, one place behind Switzerland. Given that nations have huge amounts of industry behind them in order for them to have currency in circulation...
https://fiatmarketcap.com/
TIL James Randi has stopped making "good use of oxygen"! So many dead in 2020.
Sadly, also Chris Cornell has been gone a while.
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Sometimes History looks like a big wheel,making circles. In the 60s, people seem eager to believe a lot of BS, Mao was a wonderful guy, loving flowers in the mud was the top of life, and so on... After that, the next generation realized how vain and stupid was all this, helped by decade-long crises. And now we are back to the same stage again, with new hippie-like beliefs propagating like a forest fire, just waiting to be trashed as the utter nonsense they are in 10 years. Never trust a hippie, so sad there's no lesson from History.
> In the 60s, people seem eager to believe a lot of BS
In the 70s, people seemed eager to believe a lot of BS. In the 80s, people seemed eager to believe a lot of BS. In the 90s, people seemed eager to believe a lot of BS. In the 00s, people seemed eager to believe a lot of BS. In the 10s, people seemed eager to believe a lot of BS. And in the 20s, people still seem eager to believe a lot of BS.
I trust you see a pattern.
It's just that it's more reassuring to consider your parents (or yourself a long time ago) were utterly misguided, rather than accepting that people in general are always following varying fads, and mostly incapable of any (terribly misnamed) "common" sense.
bin man --> Sanitation Engineer
sales droid --> Executive Sales Associate/Director/Manager
marketing --> Customer Engagement Director
help desk --> Customer Success Executive
dogsbody/gopher --> Personal Assistant
boss' significant other --> Corporate Evangelist
big cheese --> Chief Executive Officer
bean counter --> Chief Financial Officer
alpha nerd --> Chief Technical Officer
"Hod-carrier's Tea-masher's mate" when I wor a lad
I just got new business cards listing me as a "Principal Research Engineer" immediately followed by a memo that I can't use them externally because i'm not officially an Engineer in this state.
Since I mostly behind a screen "Searching Stackoverflow" as a profession I don't see why I need business cards, especially since this is the C21 and people have email. So logically ones that I have to keep secret are no less useful.
There's a gullible idiot born every minute! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uVvcD4Czx4Y
I was working in a hospital in Wimbledon once, and when I'd finished went to the car park and saw a van parked next to me with the words "Communicable Disease Eradication Team". Feeling a bit non-plussed and this being about the time when Ebola was in the headlines, I asked what disease they were there to eradicate.
"Oh, it just means we're the cleaners" came the reply
Every month or some some gullible journo at the BBC (and sadly at New Scientist who I'd hope might know better) reports on another revolutionary way of extracting energy from footfalls, arm waving, gastric juices, farting or whatever - usually with some meaningless statement such as "the system was able to produce more than three volts of power".
I don't understand how the 'bio-tech researchers' (Head of Biokinetic Energy Engagement, anyone?) get funding given the basic thermodynamic impossibility of getting worthwhile amounts of power from a person's unrestricted day to day activities.
My favourite, which keeps coming back, is powering the street lights from the pavement. I have an image of pedestrians bumping into each other negotiating a surface with the consistency of a meter's depth of foam rubber with a few flickering overhead LEDs.
Still waiting for someone to troll them with the revolutionary Potato Power* (requires copper and zinc electrodes). While we as functioning bio-power devices produce 100 watts of heat doing nothing, and can generate up to 250 watts of actual power continuously**, turning all that bio-power into electricity doesn't usually produce anything much beyond a few tens of watts, if that. All you have to do is remember that science museum exhibit where you labour mightily to get a bulb to glow. On the other hand a gaggle of random walkers can set a footbridge to swaying dramatically, so maybe you can get a little out of that.
* What's a Potato Clock? Well, you set your alarm and get a potato clock.
** If a trained athlete in peak condition
Hopefully next month (no contract yet) I will start work as a Technical Services Officer TSO. This is what used to be and should still be called a School Science Technician. Nobody knows what a TSO is. What jobsworth decided that needed updating to something which bears little relation to the job? Probably some overpaid consultant determined to give 'value for money'.
I've actually done part of the job before, back in the mists of time. For the first 3 years of secondary school I was the Chemistry Monitor (paid). My form teacher taught Chemistry you see. This got me out of the winter rain with a kettle and an aged flip side toaster (I replaced the element on it). I set up for labs and cleaned up afterwards. Kept the chemicals organised properly, that sort of thing.
I neglected to mention that at interview but got the job anyway on the strength of being an actual scientist (former). A job where my PhD wasn't a hindrance, finally.
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