[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.*
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.*
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.*
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.
… 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.*
Tonight, Barbados becomes a republic. Like Ireland. Unlike Canada, Australia and New Zealand. https://t.co/L7FDITYBgb
— Alan Sharp (@chggenerations) November 29, 2021
