We do know how to lure you into these threads
@Vastness
I could feel it coming, but it really does strike me how you of all people could not be annoyed. Don't overthink the 'of all people' of course
Hah, OK I'm lured. And no worries, I'll take the "of all people" as a compliment.
But this reveling in some sort of amazing genius persona is just extremely annoying, and I am opposed to the worshiping of just about any living human. Much of what he does is in my opinion PR stunts to raise money, shift public perception and get ludicrous tax cuts here and there.
You dislike his public persona. To me this is superficial. Consider also - Tesla has 0 marketing budget - so PR stunts in this case as effectively an extremely cost effective form of marketing, although to be honest I'm finding it hard to think of what "PR stunts" he's actually done, unless you just mean Twitter. A lot of people point to the Falcon Heavy launch as a PR stunt - it was not, at least not primarily, it was a test launch of a cutting edge heavy lift rocket.
Personally I'm convinced that anyone who can easily dismiss SpaceX and Tesla as "not that impressive" or useful or whatever just hasn't really looked into them enough. The amount of engineering leaps and technological innovation that has happened in such a short time is staggering. SpaceX is frankly in a different league to any other space company and has no serious competitors right now. Additionally, it's not a requirement that you buy into the value of travelling to Mars, or indeed, electric or self driving cars (although the latter is a lot harder for me to understand) for the technologies that these efforts will develop to have immense value in other fields (for example - Tesla battery and proprietary regenerative braking tech).
By many accounts Musk is difficult to work with and his huge ego is real, fine, if anyone here had actually worked with him and was saying they just don't like the dude, fine. I just roll my eyes at people ranting about and abstractly hating public figures they've never met, especially when the specifics of these complaints seem to be pretty vague. A far more interesting discussion obviously (IMO) would be the value of certain technological developments to the human race, but this is just short-circuited by Musk this, Musk that, whatever, oh he said something annoying on Twitter again,
I'm fuming!
An example I like to use to illustrate this is Donald Trump. Arguably, his own financial manipulations to set up his doomed casinos in Atlantic City and New York real estate empire were far more shady and morally dubious than anything Musk has done, and hurt a lot more people on the way up. Before they went bankrupt though, they probably employed a lot of people, brought other businesses to the region, whatever, but primarily, who here can say that if they could see a route to having what is essentially a part time job for millions of dollars a year, they wouldn't do it? Maybe some of us here (hopefully) would do things slightly differently, settle with less, cause less collateral damage, whatever, all well and good. I'm getting a bit sidetracked here but the point I'm trying to get to is that even though I personally think a lot of what Trump did back then (let's just forget about his political life entirely for purposes of this discussion) was probably immoral - I don't dislike
him, I don't know him. I dislike some things he's done, for sure, but I admit I find myself just dissociating a little from any conversation where people seem to be really angry at him personally, he's so stupid, he this, he that. It just doesn't make sense to me, and interferes with any effort to reach a common understanding for why people do certain things, and how we can stop people from doing things that are detrimental to humanity as a whole - or how we can promote traits which are beneficial to humanity as a whole.
I feel like I'm risking diluting my point by bringing up Trump here but it's hard for me to see that Musk has done that much explicitly harmful to anyone... residents of Boca Chica who didn't want to move, yeah maybe, people who got burned by stock movements caused by Tweets, yeah, maybe, but cheap spaceflight and huge advances in electric cars and autonomous driving, seem like good things to me.
I'm not advocating hero worship obviously, just remaining objective about people we've never met. We always find it easiest to see in others the faults we most fear in ourselves - and I would say that applies to some peoples' fixation on Musk's ego, or sweeping statements about his or anyone else's intentions or inner world that don't seem to be directly based on anything he's actually said.
It just occurred to me I should probably add because it's easily pointed out that I almost certainly wouldn't bother wading into a discussion about Trump in the same way - because I don't think that Trump's actions have value in the same way, so just lazily disliking him as a person has less consequence and is arguably even beneficial in some ways. On the other hand, I do think that the science and engineering advances that have occurred in companies under Musk's leadership have
a lot of value, and there's a danger of this value being dismissed as "fanboyism", whereas in most cases, I think (although I could be wrong) what some would label fanboyism is actually just enthusiasm for the works of a group of pioneering technology companies that happen to fall under the leadership of a certain polarising individual.
No it is an intrinsic problem with POW currencies, at least with most of the schemes that use POW. It works like a lottery, and the vast amount of the work burned by miners is discarded to heat providing absolutely nothing of value. It's like a lottery where all the money gets burned, and the winner gets a very fancy pokemon card that they can optionally sell on ebay. No matter if the energy comes from coal, the sun, or a fusion reactor, it's still a massive waste of energy that could have been used for something that adds value.
It's not strange to focus on BTC's energy consumption, what is strange is that hardly anyone is. So many people who are ostensibly concerned with climate change either completely don't want to take a look at it, or pull mental gymnastics to justify this colossal energy pig.
Not to mention the e-waste...
But... Bitcoin does have value. Yes, it has value because people believe it has value but ever since fiat currencies have been uncoupled from precious metals the same is true of fiat. If we could somehow get to a place where we didn't need capital for society to function, we would immediately eliminate a huge amount of arguably wasteful overhead in how human society functions, but given the fact that we seem to live in a capitalist world and there do not seem to be any easy routes to changing that, tokens of capital be they physical and issued by governments or virtual and issued by an algorithm serve a certain purpose, and cryptocurrencies exist because they have properties that fiat currencies do not, and are therefore
valuable in different ways.
I wonder if there is a level of power consumption that would be acceptable to you? If the power consumption of Bitcoin-mining was closer to that of digital movement or tracking of fiat currencies, or perhaps other digital industries, would that make a difference?
Consider this also - Bitcoin (according to a quick google) consumes ~121.36 terawatt-hours (TWh) a year.
Youtube uses ~243.6 TWh a year, and if you check out that link you'll see an even more specific breakdown of exactly how much energy people are wasting by indulging arguably fairly useless interests.
Video media has a place for sure, there are things that can be communicated effectively by video that cannot be communicated by text. But, not nearly as much as the insane volume of (again, arguably) fairly vapid, repetitive content that exists on YouTube, influencer vlogs, lazy "top ten" compilations, endlessly regurgitated snippets and recuts, of equally vapid content... Should we start trying to curb "useless" video media on the internet because of the environmental impact, replacing redundant videos with text, just flat out deleting huge swaths of some of the aforementioned categories with intrinsic value that is fairly unclear? Perhaps, but if it's strange that hardly anyone is focusing on Bitcoin's energy consumption, it's surely even stranger that hardly anyone is focusing on the energy-waste and consequent environmental impact of video media, which is twice that of Bitcoin on YouTube alone.
If we keep digging we can surely find more arguably wasteful uses of energy facilitated by the internet and digitization. Digital music and/or audio recordings? Not really essential to life, let's scrap it. For that matter, high speed internet is itself a bit of an energy drain, maybe we should all go back to dialup.