Its not just the coal generator accidents but the weirdly long underground fires that rarely get a mention.
Here's one article I found of a fire underneath some suburban houses: https://www.abc.net.au/news/2019-07-26/underground-fire-in-c...
It casually mentions a decades-long struggle a primary school has had with an underground fire. Obviously not a very big deal for some folks.
That is not so unusual for underground coal fires. They can be all but impossible to put out. It has been a phenomenon basically forever [0]. I assume a lot of the modern ones are linked to mining activity, but they do turn up naturally from time to time.
I would advise people not to build on top of a known coal seam fire.
Not sure about the others, but basically these are the people with whom a composer registers their work.
These organisations work together by forwarding royalties collected within each territory to their rightful owners.
I am a member of APRA and very much doubt that someone got away with registering a Beethoven work as their own.
Very curious indeed. I have no explanation.
[Edit]
You are only meant to register your work in one territory, so it is odd that this 'work' would be registered in four of them.
> I am a member of APRA and very much doubt that someone got away with registering a Beethoven work as their own.
I've yet to hear of one of these nationwide registries vetting any of the work that gets submitted to them for novelty or whatever. That would be too much like doing due diligence.
Take a pinch of half truth (this is about protecting journalists), mix with a dusting of nationalism (FB are intimidating Australia) and viola - a news monopoly gets a legislated free ride.
Lets all fight amongst ourselves about government versus FB while the real winners remain invisible.
Using Smalltalk (particularly Pharo) has been an eye-opening experience for me.
Its interesting to see that Amber has a Boolean class which I suppose corresponds to the JS boolean primitive.
In other Smalltalks, I've seen a wonderful design where True and False are subclasses of Boolean. This way, there are no conditionals in the implementation of ifTrue: and ifFalse:
YouTube has probably wasted more human energy and potential than any other platform. I mean, don't get me wrong, I could crush a video of a monkey riding on a Segway right now. But it's an endless stream of videos algorithmically presented to be maximally addictive. Fun times, and the people on here are probably the ones that can most resist the siren lure of a beautiful teenager pouting at the camera or someone opening a box of consumer electronics. But, first do no harm.
The electricity angle on BTC is, let's admit it, pretty dumb. If people were worried about CO2, like, for reals, we would be talking about concrete, and trying to find something less CO2y for our roads. People want to talk about culture, and approve or disapprove of what they like or dislike. So yeah, if you don't like Bitcoin and want to sniff at it, go ahead and stuff a plastic straw in its nose and call it a seaturtle. You can tweet about it on a platform that uses a comparable amount of electricity, and cause a few servers to get spun up to get your trending hashtag to the concerned masses.
If you actually givea crap about CO2 (unlikely, but possible), become a materials scientist, or advocate for the funding thereof, or fight for more nuclear powerplants. Stop making your ethical decisions based on aesthetics.
Bitcoin holders don’t want Bitcoin to be useful for spending or transacting, or even selling. Previous attempts to increase the block size, a trivial modification, have failed to gain traction.
They only want Bitcoin useful for two things: Buying and holding. These actions drive the price up. As long as no one is using or selling Bitcoin, the price stays high.
Between the high transaction fees ($8 right now), the deflationary nature, and the “HODL” narrative, everything about Bitcoin was designed to disincentivize actually using it. It’s designed for hoarding and speculating.
Most people don't use Bitcoin, and most who use it (from what I see), just want to sell it at a higher price than they bought it. Only a minority of Bitcoin users use it for anything practical like payments.
The same could be argued for a Ponzi scheme: it is useful for the people at the top that have taken money from others, and not so useful for the people that have lost money by buying in later on.
The more interesting question is what value Bitcoin has created for society besides acting as a speculative good.
They never claimed Bitcoin had “absolutely no use at all”
The point is that Bitcoin is designed to be inherently power-inefficient. Proof of work systems rely on the work being both difficult to calculate and useless.
Even if Bitcoin transactions went to 0 tomorrow, the system would still consume more energy than Argentina just to keep everyone’s balance.
Worse yet, it the power consumption goes up every year because the system incentivized it.
> Even if Bitcoin transactions went to 0 tomorrow, the system would still consume more energy than Argentina just to keep everyone’s balance.
Do you have to do proof of work when there are no transactions?
My understanding was that the PoW was done to place transactions on the block chain. If nothing has changed, nothing has to be done. The entire system can be offline and archived if we have 0 transactions.
Sure, provided everyone agrees there have been no transactions and what the end result was. The PoW is necessary to ensure this consensus, but it would indeed become obsolete if people found a different way to form a consensus of the final state (ending bitcoin).
I assumed by him saying youtube was 'useful' by serving content and saying bitcoins merely exist, he was implying bitcoins do no useful work at all - simply not true.
The parent claims Bitcoin is not using the power for useful work. Which is entirely true. The vast vast vast majority of electricity for Bitcoin goes to hashing random numbers where the output has no value.
Your first link seems to imply that bandwidth use is the same as data center use. YouTube and other streaming platforms are generally served from edge locations and use last mile bandwidth and do not constitute large CPU costs when compared to bandwidth.
This comparison is almost certainly off by orders of magnitude.
One could also argue that the power used by the vehicles themselves contributes to increased emissions.
I think the only way forward here is to generate electricity as cleanly as possible. That way we won't get bogged down in arguments about amazon's terawatt-hours being more worthwhile than those of facebook or bitcoin.
That's exactly why people advocate for carbon taxes. Instead of guilt tripping people you just add a financial tradeoff for pollution. Businesses don't understand morals but they do understand money and once you give them a profit motive they are willing to eat their polluting competitors for lunch.
