miscellany

image from Twitter thread below

space formerly occupied by an ICE “can be filled with ice and drinks”*

video from NDR – Norddeutscher Rundfunk – with a 2-minute introduction in German

The sketch is almost completely unknown in England. It was first broadcast on German TV in 1963 and has been a New Year’s Eve fixture since 1972.

image of Grenfell Tower fire copied from 2017 post*



George Monbiot:

[Johnson’s Brexit freedoms bill] is the point of Brexit. The multimillionaires who funded the campaign to leave the European Union sought freedom from the decencies they owe to other people, freedom from the restraint that defines civic life. Our country has been torn apart in the civil war within capitalism: between the businesses seeking stability and predictability, and the asset-strippers and oligarchs who want to rip everything down and then sift the rubble for gold.*

image on Twitter*

“Can we continue to trust our intelligence to get us out of any impending ecological disasters?”

Well, one of the most famous solutions to the big question – “Why haven't we discovered any aliens? If there are alien civilizations in the universe, why haven’t they contacted us?" – one of the most famous solutions to that paradox is that it’s quite likely that civilization, once it reaches a certain technological advancement, simply destroys itself.

And from our experience, that would seem to be a very reasonable hypothesis. I mean, we are not doing a good job. Prospects for the human race do not look good. Whether we will still be here in a thousand years is a question that we don’t know the answer to. So it could just be that once you reach a certain level of technological mastery over your environment, but haven’t reached a level of sophistication and wisdom to be able to protect your environment, then you’re essentially doomed to extinction.*

Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, prepares to testify before a U.S. congressional committee in Washington, D.C., last week. Fauci’s prognosis that coronavirus is likely to be with us indefinitely isn’t meant to scare us, but prepare us. Photo by Shawn Thew/POOL /via REUTERS

Fauci’s ideal universal vaccine … would provide lifelong immunity against all coronaviruses, preferably in one dose. Development of such a vaccine will require greater knowledge of the human immune system and its response to coronaviruses. And that, as Fauci acknowledges, will likely require the use of (ethically controversial) “human challenge” trials.*

2022-01-20T22:02−08* / January 20, 2022

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*a link or not; see a note on notes and links and a disclaimer; see also the about post and the archive of miscellany or notrehta posts

from Google's cache* – as it was at 2022-01-19T14:14:04Z – and shown below

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a YouTube post from July 20, 2020*

from a comment on the video by the speaker, Ron Ballard:

Bitcoin was the reason that blockchain was invented, and Bitcoin remains the biggest blockchain, with the largest market capitalisation. Bitcoin has 62% of the market and the remaining 38% is divided between the other 2,600 or so blockchain-based currencies. Then, allegedly, there are also non-currency applications of blockchain.

So that is why I focused on Bitcoin. Being the biggest, Bitcoin also is the most harmful to the environment, and that is my main gripe against it. I'm retired now and hopefully the climate crisis will not damage the world too spectacularly in my lifetime. But I have a child and five grandchildren and many young friends and relatives who will suffer under the climate disaster that Bitcoin is hastening. And I do spare a thought for the billions of young people I do not know.

In my talk I looked at all the claims of the advantages of blockchain and I was unable to be convinced by any of them. Gary Nuttall[*] says that the “real advantages of Bitcoin [are] censorship resistant and peer-to-peer transactions.” This puzzles me. What does "censorship" mean in terms of financial transactions? The only thing I can think is that it is the prevention of transactions that are fraudulent or illegal in some other way. If that's it then "censorship" sounds like a good thing to me – I want illegal transactions to be prevented. And peer-to-peer transactions seem to me to be non-existent with Bitcoin. Every transaction goes through a miner. The miners can decide which transaction is processed and which is not. If my bank refused my transaction I could challenge it; if a miner refused my transaction I would not be able to find someone to hassle.

The conventional financial organisations are far from perfect. They do billions of successful transactions and when they fail they can cause a lot of grief. I would like them to be more strongly regulated and for any perpetrators of financial crime to be punished much more harshly than they have been so far. Blockchain was supposed to make such financial crimes impossible, but instead it facilitates speculation and massive actual crime. It is not worth making each transaction cost 600,000 times as much, just to get another flawed system.

As for non-mining currencies, that takes away my biggest complaint, but what is the point of them? For currency and non-currency applications, I have not seen one that could not be implemented in other technologies with the same or more functionality and massively less cost.

2022-01-18T20:47−08* / January 18, 2022

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*a link; see a note on notes and links and a disclaimer; see also the about post and the archive of miscellany or notrehta posts

for a PDF of slides for this presentation and much else of interest, see The Data Studio*

the savage state >> the arcadian or pastoral state >> the consummation of empire >> destruction >> desolation

from Letter from the Collapse, a post by Ed Simon:

… the truth can be bluntly stated as follows: our current problems aren’t like the fall of Rome because they’re far, far worse. Would it only be that we faced the collapse of the U.S. government, or authoritarianism, or even civil war, because the rising average temperature per year, the pH of the oceans, and the biodome’s decreasing diversity are things unheard of on the Earth since the Permian-Triassic extinction of more than 250 million years ago, when 70 percent of life on land perished and almost 95 percent in the seas did.*