The riots last summer didn't involve insurrectionists violently invading the seat of power of the legislative branch with live ammunition intent on disrupting the peaceful transfer of power in a democratic republic.
You’re right, rioters in DC this summer only tried to storm the White House [0].
72 people were arrested in DC on weapons charges during the summer riots [1]. Protestors erected a guillotine in front of Jeff Bezos’s house [2]. Rioters threw bricks through apartment windows and accosted random people on the street [3] in scenes reminiscent of the Cultural Revolution.
Let’s not use the violent insurrection at the Capitol to downplay other violent episodes.
I think a useful yardstick is how many people died. IIRC a sum of around 25 deaths was attributed to all of the "BLM protests" last year, and I don't recall any police deaths that weren't eventually attributed to right-wing folks.
The events of this Wednesday, a single (what I would call) medium-sized protest, got 5 people killed including one policeman, right? So just in terms of the ratio of deaths to participator-days, I think this Wednesday's event probably has last year's protests beaten by at least two orders of magnitude in the loss of life department. Even if you take away the two people who didn't die from the use of a weapon or a savage beating, I think they still got the high score by far.
To be sure, mob violence should be condemned wherever it appears. But in judging movements like these, I think it's important to keep in mind a sense of proportionality, among other things.
Earlier I saw a report that one of the others died because he shocked himself with a Taser while trying to pull a piece of artwork off a wall. Is that not true? Otherwise I’m not sure how this is relevant to my comment, since I explicitly called out that two of the deaths were “natural causes”.
I’d say that poor woman died precisely because she was brainwashed by an amorphous, cult-like movement—the very same movement behind the entire event, more or less—to think that leading an armed mob to where the members of our government’s legislative branch were taking shelter wouldn’t result in the use of force against her. So maybe the rioters didn’t kill her on an individual level, but the riot certainly did—and that’s relevant in the quantitative comparison I made in my previous comment.
Leading many to thing -correctly- that the rioters killed five people.
The actions of a group designed to deliberately create panic and terror caused the heart attack in the assaulted. Without the rioters this people would be alive today, therefore is obvious that they killed also those people.
The whataboutism is out of control in this discussion. Its like people forget these same elements showed up to lockdown protests armed and wearing protective vests and, most important of all, attempted to kidnap the Governor of Michigan. So yeah, its a different thing altogether when these elements show up and invade the Capitol building
Whataboutism is so easy to spot yet people step right into the trap all the time. But once you can spot it, it just takes a quick remark to shut it right down. ie. either don't respond at all or kindly ask the whatabouter to stick to the topic at hand.
When I was applying to Coinbase, the interviews were heavily biased against people using low level data structures to write efficient code.
On my first interview I used C++, and it was very hard to pass their expectiations (the interviewer didn't know C++, so he couldn't appreciate the effort of me using a low level language).
I switched to Ruby for the next rounds, and got through easily.
Then I went to their beautiful office, I loved the people and the culture there, but didn't code fast enough to join the startup (which I'm happy about...startup mindset is not for me).
I think it's all about whether you belong to a company or not. As I wrote, it's great that I wasn't accepted to Coinbase, as I wasn't a good fit (even though I was and still is a huge Bitcoin fan).
In another interview at a quant hedge fund I had a lot of fun talking to the interviewers (even the CEO) about low level data structures, and I got some tricky questions about the CPU that I really liked.
This sounds like a good thing for Coinbase IMO. An instinct to reach for low-level data structures and static typing to solve ambiguous or fast-changing business problems is usually a red flag for premature abstraction and sometimes also correlates with attitudes of superiority or looking down on other possible technology choices.
I don’t know if they treated you fairly or not, but the policy at least of appraising an instinctual reach for low level C++ as a negative sounds correct to me and should be a much more widely used heuristic in software hiring.
I was specificially asking to work on the exchange trading backend, as that's what I was interested in. It was at a time when Coinbase was using javascript for the trading engine if I recall correctly (I think they moved to C++ since then, but not sure).
When I applied to a quantitative hedge fund, I was being asked questions about synchronizing data structures between threads without using mutexes (again not something you often do in a high level language). I was accepted there, although I couldn't go to work there because of health reasons.
At the end I went back to Google where I had to launch a new machine learning model without introducing even 0.1ms latency in the ads backend. Good luck doing that in a high level language.
I was up with you in the first 1.5 sentences. Genuinely, I expected the comment to be about the need for very strict security in a financial codebase, and C++ is a known tool, that enables shooting yourself in a foot.
But then you started talking about static typing as negative, and suggesting to move fast and break things for a company, that probably hadles trillions in assets.
I opposed static typing because I favor safety, not oppose it. Type system designs prevent solving those problems.
Most of my career has been focused on helping large companies use Python to achieve as-fast-as-C performance with extremely little code and extremely safety-focused non-OOP software architectures, including in high frequency trading (where I built a company’s entire core trading platform in Cython).
The idea that static typing leads to safety is false. Static typing adds more code, more code is more liability. The cost of that liability is not recouped with any offsetting benefits.
Yeah, I was complaining about outages for high volume way back in June 2017. (Unfortunately, the links are relative and no longer point to the specific June events.) It's when I started trading, and why I never finished setting up the account, preferring Gemini.
Edit: lol what a day to say that! For the first time I’m seeing unplanned outages on Gemini.
Much less? Bitcoin currently powers almost none of the world’s transactions, yet consumes all that energy.
The entire us consumes 75 twh in a year, the same as bitcoin’s global energy use.
Of that, the entire commercial sector is about 12 twh. That’s not just banks. That’s every company. Banks alone are surely far less. Maybe 2-3 twh? And the us is 15% of global gdp. So, global finance might consume about 14-32 twh.
Again, that is while doing all of global finance. Bitcoin powers a rounding error of transactions yet consumes 75 twh.
There’s just no comparison energy wise. My math could be off by several orders of magnitude and bitcoin would still consume more if it were actually powering the world’s transactions.
The US consumes about 4 PWh/year, so bitcoin isn't comparable with the nation as a whole. However, that is more power consumption than many individual states, so your overall point remains completely valid.
Your units are funny. Using W-hr (energy) and then making it a rate by making it per year which gets you back to power. You could have just said, “the US consumes energy at a rate of 450 GW”.
There’s no need to introduce hrs and years to the mix. Watts describe precisely what you’re attempting to quantify.
Whoops yeah that should have been 9.4 quadrillion BTU. The online calculator I used for TWH conversion was very wrong. Looks like the correct value is about 2,000 twh for the us commercial sector?
If we assume banks are 10% of that, then it’s 200 twh. 3x bitcoin. But also, handling literally all finance and banking in the US. Vs essentially nothing for bitcoin, compared to the scale of the us economy.
It'd be really nice if I could find a study on this, but just because bitcoin doesn't power the majority of the transactions doesn't mean it couldn't do so without the energy needs scaling linearly with transactions. If anything I'd imagine it could become more efficient as more transactions were taking place. I see people argue this a lot and I think it's too narrow of a view on the situation.
Of course it'd be much better for us to adopt a crypto currency that uses a different algorithm that has even less energy usage. Even without that though I think it could prove to be more efficient than existing financial systems.
Your numbers are totally wrong. The fact your own link suggests that bitcoin uses as much electrical energy as Chile should tell you it's not close to the USA. Recheck?
People actually buy stuff on paypal. They processed 2.5 billion transactions in 2020. Bitcoin processed about 250 million transactions.
The total amount of reported money transacted might be higher for bitcoin but that doesn’t come from contact with the real economy. So that depends on the valuation of bitcoin rather than economic impact.
When confronted with relatively concrete studies on Bitcoin's wasteful energy use, are you going to point to the fact that physical money printer energy use has not been studied to muddy the waters? The reason it hasn't been studied is that it doesn't use a huge amount of electricity.
Anyway, as another way of answering your question, physical money printing and transfers require no electricity at all, predating the invention of electric power by thousands of years.
Zero bitcoiners going "BUT WHAT ABOUT CONVENTIONAL MONEY HUH" provide numbers.
Since you're too lazy to, I will:
* Bitcoin: 0.1% of all electricity in the world, 7tps.
* THE ENTIRE REST OF HUMAN CIVILISATION, EVERYONE IN IT AND EVERYTHING THEY DO: 99.9% of electricity, a hell of a lot more than 6,993tps.
Bitcoin is the most inefficient payment system in history.
Bitcoiners' usual objection at this point is to claim that transactions per second is a bad measure, for some reason - though if you're comparing how much each system achieves for the resources it uses, it's precisely the obvious and correct measure.
But if tps doesn't matter, then the entire bitcoin ecosystem should be replaced with a small rock. A whole country's less electricity use, and only 7tps less! Also, it'd be hard currency.
> Bitcoiners' usual objection at this point is to claim that transactions per second is a bad measure, for some reason
You've probably been told before but I'll tell you the why again. Bitcoin's energy consumption is not proportional to the number of transactions it's processing.
The energy used is proportional to the block reward, the reward that miners get from mining a new block roughly every 10 minutes. They won't spend more money on energy than they get from mining, or they would go out of business. That mining reward goes up with price, (because it's paid out as a fixed amount of BTC) and goes down with each halving event (every ~4 years the block reward is cut in half in BTC terms).
The network can be doing 7tps or 7 million tps, doesn’t really matter for energy use, although higher usage can have indirect effects on price or other things.
The vast majority of dollars in circulation exist only in accounting records and do not exist as actual physical tokens. Printed money uses no energy because we do not print money anymore, we write it in a SQL database (or, god forbid, an Excel spreadsheet).
> They saw no evidence of a crime and had no authority to enter his home or fenced property
They did their due diligence and couldn’t do anything more. Are we supposed to live in such a police state where a single warning would be enough to ruin your life?
I think the implication is that the ‘bad guys’ maybe shouldn’t actually be the ‘bad guys’. Our nation spends an obscene amount of money on the war on drugs. I’m not advocating for mass legalization of everything imaginable but maybe we should lay off a little bit? I mean do we need fully armored militias chasing down pot dealers? It seems like resources are tied up in drugs and stuff like this maybe doesn’t get as much attention because of that.
I think part of fixing the problem of no-shows would be to not let members see who/how many people have said that they're going. If 25 people say they're going to show up, then it's not a big deal if I don't, right? Until half the people have the same idea. There will be more perceived social pressure to keep that commitment if people don't think they're just going to get lost in a crowd.
Oh jeez my worst nightmare might just be going to a Meetup without knowing how many people I should expect and ending up being the only one who showed up. If Meetup didn’t tell me how many people RSVP’d I’d never go to any of them.
