no lie, the second half of this post really helped me put a different perspective on my life and greatly the decreased the anxiety i have about my life to come
ra ra rasputin is objectively the funniest song ever written it’s like “rasputin was an advisor to the romanovs and honestly he was a bit of a power-hungry conman (oof)… but you’re not here for a history lesson! you want to know how much he fucked, don’t you? well i’ll tell you: he fucked. he fucked often and severely.”
I know that people are starting to calm down with the whole situation surrounding John Mulaney, which is good, but I just wanted to get this off my chest.
The way that people reacted to the news about John Mulaney going to rehab, getting divorced from his wife, and dating someone new really speaks volumes to the taboo that surrounds recovering addicts and the unhealthy way we view celebrities.
John Mulaney has been pretty open about the fact that he is a recovering addict. He has joked about it plenty of times in the past, and nobody seemed to find anything wrong with that. But after he relapsed, I’ve heard tons of people saying things like “I can never look at John Mulaney the same again!” or “How can someone who seems so smart and funny actually be so fucked up??” and many other things in that vein, and it’s just really upsetting. Addiction is a disease, its not something that can be easily overcome. Relapsing doesn’t mean the person is weak or no longer deserves respect.
The fact that people have reacted so negatively to the news that John is going through a divorce and that he has started to date someone new really shows why parasocial relationships are bad for everyone. There is nothing wrong with divorce, and there is nothing wrong with seeing new people, but so many fans are acting like John has done something horrible, when in reality all he did was make a decision that his fans didn’t want him to make. We need to remember that no matter how big of a fan you are of someone, you still don’t know them personally, and they are going to do things that you personally don’t want, understand, or agree with, and you just need to accept that.
Overall, I just wish people would understand two things about this situation:
Addicts are human beings, they deserve respect, and there is nothing about being an addict that makes them any lesser then others.
Celebrities are normal people just like the rest of us, their personal lives are really none of our business, and you can be a fan of someone without feeling like you are entitled to knowing everything about them.
Anonymous asked: why do you despise privilege politics? i been feeling a similar way but i can't express why? and every time i've tried people talk over me so
the way privilege is talked about at least in the united states is often divorced from historical power structures. it has also been corroded by neoliberalism. this is why mtv can make ironic commercials about white priv for some coin and be praised for some reason, as if the social reality of white supremacy from which white priv stems doesn’t kill people daily, and if all we do is merely “check” it, that means racism is over. what we know as privilege are societal results of power, thus white supremacy –> white privilege and so on. people are taught about privilege without being taught about supremacy/power and without learning the historical reasons and timeline behind why realities like white supremacy have been produced. you’ll see people compartmentalize privilege politics, treating them like checklists, which is how we get the erroneous idea of black men and white women being “equal.” even on tumblr you’ll see people say “white privilege is why white people aren’t brutalized by police in the capacity that black people are” when that’s a case of white supremacist capitalism at play, not privilege. there’s a reason why people are more comfortable with privilege politics rather than analyzing how we interact with and utilize power. talking about how white people’s identities have been made possible through white supremacy is a lot less fun to talk about than having workshops dedicated to whites checking their privilege and whatnot.
Ok so can someone explain to me how cryptocurrency pollutes? Like what crazy calculations are they running that they need enough brainpower to significantly effect things? Like I’m assuming what’s causing the pollution is increased electricity consumption but… how does sending lil pretend money tokens back and forth or whatever cause so much pollution?
Also, what the fuck is “mining”? How d'you mine… like bitcoin is not a naturally occurring resource, and I assume that you can’t just make it, cause that would make it instantly worthless… help?
So you get “coins” as a reward for performing the cryptographic calculations necessary to update the public ledger which is the blockchain. This is, by design, an increasingly complex and resource intensive process to slow down the collection of (intentionally finite) coins.
So every transaction with bitcoins requires the ledger to be updated with the current ownership of every already existing bitcoin, which also requires encrypting and decrypting a bunch of information and sharing it across the public ledger. So every transaction made with bitcoins increases the energy requirements of updating the ledger making it harder and harder to complete the latest version and get the coin which is a reward for doing that work.
There’s a lot I don’t fully understand myself but the long and short of it is that the actual value of any crypto currency is pretty much just what people agree on, except instead of a fiat currency where a government says it’s worth something and a mint that makes physical currency, there’s a bunch of nerds who agree that solving certain math problems is worth rewarding.
Feeling like adding on for a bit of context, I know it’s kind of hard to understand how mining for really any kind of crypto is hard to imagine, but seeing what a bitcoin mining facility looks like for the first time really helped me realize just how energy intensive it is.
See all these warehouses? They’re quite literally filled to the brim with specialized computers that do nothing but mine, each one filled with thousands of these computers, just row after row of this:
So all the power consumption winds up adding up like crazy.
Yep, that’s why cryptocurrency and NFTs are considered major contributors to pollution – because the energy needs of all those computers doing the calculation are equivalent to a medium sized country. Currently, crypto consumes more energy than Argentina.
Guess what’s inside a lot of mining rigs? Gowan, guess.
Graphics cards!
Lots and lots of these puppies side by side, spinning their little fans as fast as they can go because as it turns out: GPUs are perfect for doing the calculations required for mining cryptocurrency.
Which means amateur miners buy a lot of these things.
So many, in fact, that there is now (May 2021) a world-wide shortage of NVIDIA and AMD graphics cards and building a new gaming rig is damn near impossible because of the shortage.
OR you can pay a ridiculously inflated price by GPU scalpers on eBay.
Seriously. Places that sell GPUs impose quantity limits because if they don’t… some crypto asshole will buy out their entire stock in one go.
But the “good” news is that the professional miners (like the Bitmain site up there, in the photos) use dedicated ASIC mining rigs which don’t use consumer GPUs. But (bad news) they DO use the same sort of chips that NVIDIA & AMD rely on to make their products, which just starves the supply pipeline at a different point.
Bottom line: not only does cryptocurrency mining consume terawatts of electricity, it also consumes megatons of computer hardware. Which is expensive to produce (in resource terms, like rare metals, petroleum, water, electricity, paper) and will, someday, require even MORE resources to recycle. Or else it ends up in a landfill.
Note that current dedicated mining rigs are so highly specialized they are useless for anything other than mining. They cannot be easily repurposed to (say) sequence DNA or fold proteins for miracle cures.
What a waste.
was anyone gonna tell me that some nerds peepee poopoo “currency” is the reason why graphics cards are sold out everywhere or was i supposed to find that out from comments under a screenshot from twitter user whoreganic cop puncher explaining how bitcoin is just an artificially complicated math problem
Also I’ve read be very wary about buying used graphic cards cause there’s a chance it’s one that’s mostly heavily used from one of these bastards. These thing are very heavily used so a used one sold by one of these guys would be on its last leg of life from being on 24/7
Make sure there’s a return policy just be very careful if you’re buying used.
To be more fair than Crypto miners deserve, they’re only one of the factors driving the current chip shortage.
The other issues are both related to the pandemic. The first one is that manufacturing of a many things, especially cars, slowed down quite a bit until recently when the factories reopened. But so many reopened at the same time and went full blast that the demand far outstripped the supply, a supply already reduced by the shutdown of those factories.
The other bottleneck is literal mining. Computer chips rely on silicon and various metals, especially gold and copper to conduct electricity to do their work. In normal times this means that crypto’s environmental impact is even higher than just the energy requirements. But in the meantime the mines and refineries that provide the raw materials were also shut down in many cases due to the pandemic, squeezing the supply further.
Mining shutdowns have also caused a huge shortage of ammunition in the US (brass bullet casings need copper). Which means for anybody wanting to buy consumer electronics of a reasonable complexity you’re competing against both ends of the libertarian spectrum, the crypto techies and the gun nuts.
Really glad someone brought this home to actual mining, and I want to show you what the mines look like:
These are silica mines, necessary for making ALL things requiring silicon, among other things.
These are rare-earth mineral mines.
Both are required for the manufacture of computer technologies. Both requre excavating huge amounts of earth, decimating all life in that area and more often than not, ruining land that is supposed to be stewarded by indigenous people.
They’re very, very bad for the environment.
This is where the ‘online’ world comes from. It’s not another place. Every transaction, every pixel comes from the ground.
So yeah, crypto mining is definitely deceptive. That ‘value’ isn’t coming from nowhere. It’s ripped from the earth.
So Iain up Earth’s rarest reasorces to make nerd horoscopes, got it.
i recommend learning other alphabets if for no other reason than it’s very fun to see people replace latin alphabet letters with complete nonsense for Aesthetic
as julius caesar famously said: “vspph vphdph vphcph”
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