As much as I lean to hate this despite it not even affecting me as a Linux user…

I’m going to structure this as a Q&A with myself now, based on comments online

What is that? “I’m going to pretend to ask questions that I’ll then answer myself the way I think it’ll outrage that most people do I’ll get a lot of clicks on this shitty article”? What crappy excuse for content creation is this? I hate it.

It surely is going to help “marketing” with “numbers”.

Good. I hate bags that keep that precious garbage juice to themselves.

If the alternative is Windows which is increasingly filled with ads or Linux which shifts the burden of computer administration to a user who might not have a clue about what they’re supposed to do if their WiFi doesn’t “just work”, paying for a managed walled garden that doesn’t try to install candy crush without you asking for it isn’t such a bad option.

Oh we have a dedicated Linux service contract with a dedicated Linux support company that has technicians just to deal with Linux issues and provide the Linux setup. We’ve had time to adapt. I guess some bloke still decided that there just had to be a malware scanner and now we all have to eat shit. This is much less a lesson for it departments and much more a lesson that the people who manage stuff just have other goals than the people working with the tools that are managed, so you end up with somebody who wants to cover their ass in case something goes wrong in the future and makes it a terrible experience for everybody in the process but can sell it as a necessity to the people below and as action to the people above.

Same. The Linux setup there is a fucking mess though… AD authentication freezes login for a minute or so if you switch networks at the wrong moment, puppet keeps messing with the system and recently they installed clamav as a live malware scanner on all machines, making them eat batteries for breakfast and slowing down even menial tasks. If you have admin rights, they refuse to add your user to sudoers but instead create a new admin user (another indicator that they’re just really coming from windows) which everybody just uses to add their original user to sudoers, which was a nice workaround but which they now noticed and want to prohibit via puppet or user rights or something. It’s just such a mess. I mean, still leagues ahead of using windows, but a corporate environment really is a machine that transforms time and money into a terrible experience for everybody.

Maybe just go fuck yourself? Those people died trying to make this world a little bit more humane. What have you done with your life so far?

You think Germans know how to joke?

The channel in my example only needs to be opened with one month’s pay, not 6 years worth. The same initial balance goes repeatedly goes back and forth across the channel as it is paid and spent.

You’re assuming that all funds are spent every month. Like, January 31st the balance is 0. That won’t work. I guess you’ll just have to discuss with your employer how much you want to save vs how much you want to spend, just so they can fill the channel properly. Exactly what my employer’s business is. You know what’s great, too, about having a shared escrow with my employer that they put my money in? They know how much I spend. Not what people like. Easy to avoid though: just use a third arbitrator that manages the channel for that scenario. And bam, we’re back with banks and PayPal. Lol, it’s such a dumb system…

Ah, lightning… The dumbest idea ever to happen to bitcoin.

Those channels need to be filled with btc before they work. Who can do that? I certainly can’t do that for 6 years in advance. I’m certain my employer can’t do that for all his employees. You know what players can create large lightning channels? Banks! Why on earth would anyone who likes the idea of btc, with its promise of “your keys, your coins” suddenly go back to a banking system where an arbitrary third party service can just lock your funds because they dislike what you spend your money for? Lightning has been 10 years in the making but the idea hasn’t been picked up and I’m certain it never will. Because not only does the current implementation and user experience suck hard but because it literally copies the banking system that btc came to fight, giving users an experience that has literally no advantage at all compared to PayPal or visa. 10 years and even you are still all “would” and “could” in how you describe it.

If your argument why pow crypto isn’t energy hungry is that you don’t even have to use pow crypto but can just rely on an entirely different tech tacked to it in order to reduce usage of the core tech, fine. I guess it still proves my point. Besides the issue that nobody uses that broken piece of crap, the issue of course remains that there’s still no indication that it’s less energy hungry per transaction than any banking system. Banks are good at one thing, which is managing money. If you think that they’re intentionally wasting terawatthours of energy because of laziness or incompetence you’re mistaken. Distributing it to the users won’t cost less energy and I have no idea where that notion comes from.

Their math is nonsense because that document compares total energy consumption instead of consumption per transaction. That’s like saying Lamborghinis are the most efficient cars on the road because their summed up fuel consumption is lower than that of all VWs or all Toyotas (or probably even all bicycles).

There.

/edit I just needed to come back to this comment because that document really makes me irrationally angry. It’s not just that it doesn’t compare energy consumption per transaction, it’s also that especially btc is pretty much the worst offender when it comes to energy per transaction. It’s not just that it consumes more energy if more transactions are scheduled… Once the blocks are full, the users spend horrendous fees to get their transactions through in time, meaning that suddenly it becomes economically viable to spend a lot more on mining to be the one to find the next block with all those precious transaction fees. Btc’s energy footprint literally explodes once the blocks are at capacity - and at that point btc is still orders of magnitude away from visa or banks and their transaction volume. That problem is so bad that other cryptos have written their protocols to automatically increase block size once the volume increases or simply forked away from btc to allow bigger blocks (which was necessary because the miners have absolutely no incentive to increase the block size as it’s obviously in their best interest to earn money with transaction fees). Proof of work crypto is literally the worst offender when it comes to energy efficiency, with high performance computing centres spending incomprehensible amounts of energy to solve the mathematical equivalent of Sudokus, just to be eligible to retrieve the next prize as the first solver of that puzzle with no gain for humanity from all that spent energy whatsoever. It’s as if banks insisted on all transfers being brought to the next bank using a pick up truck that is only allowed to drive in first gear and at max rpm, just because.

And for what? Power to the people? Instead of a handful of banks, the important cryptos are now in the hands of a handful of miners, but without the consumer protection laws that banks have to follow. Great job.

A crypto mining company is your source for claims that crypto mining companies operate ethically?

a whole lot more

You have a source on that? Proof of work is notoriously energy hungry… That’s the “work” part.

Duh.

Dude, they butchered and kidnapped the attendees of a music festival. That’s not righteous resistance. Are you insane?

Soldiers reported they had heard cries of “help” and “hostages” in Hebrew, but that they assumed it was an attempt by Hamas to lure them into a trap.

They also reportedly found signs left by the hostages to get the military’s attention but dismissed these as part of the supposed ploy.

Everybody’s Hamas. If they’re not, they’re Hamas in disguise.

Are you really arguing that Hamas are the good guys because of their lower “civilian casualty rate”? Like, “yeah, they killed a lot of civilians, but the others killed more, so they’re the good guys, touché”? Are you insane?

Well… I guess those Israelis that were butchered at that concert don’t count, then?

Hamas is a terrorist organisation that has killed and kidnapped civilians. Israel killing more civilians doesn’t make Hamas any less of a despicable bunch of fucks.

You bet they could place shortcut icons to websites on a grid of icons? Pretty bold statement there.

FYI: the German Wikipedia page suggests that he might have had klismaphilia. The English version, despite being much more detailed and extensive, doesn’t, for some odd reason.