It is true that the climate is used frequently as a convenient weapon against things people don't like politically, but this is a real issue.
I'm a huge proponent of crypto currencies. I rail against the abuses from central banks like the Fed, and the evils of using a currency to engineer control over free people. I point this out so you know I think crypto currencies like Bitcoin are super important.
But if we destroy our climate/environment, crypto currencies aren't going to feel like a big deal. We have to care about it.
There are alternative models. One of the reasons I got into Eth was the work on proof-of-stake over proof-of-work they were undertaking.
As proponents of bitcoin I think we do ourselves (and bitcoin) a disservice by dismissing climate-based criticisms. Sure the messenger may not be sincere and with the best of intentions, but lets take the argument seriously regardless. If there are problems with the argument, let's address those rather than question the credibility of the messenger.
Aluminum production and datacenter operations also use a shocking amount of energy. Apparently Argentina uses a lot of electricity. People complain about bitcoin specifically because they don't recognize any value and they're frustrated that other people disagree. If they were genuinely worried about environmental impact, they'd look at the externalities of electricity production & distribution in a more general way (cap & trade? carbon tax?) rather than arguing that one particularly visible use of electricity is immoral.
Alcoa owns 24-26% of a very large hydroelectric dam in Wenatchee Washington. It’s more profitable to sell their power shares then to run their plant, so the largest(also one of the best paying) employer in town shuttered their plant to sell power instead.
There are also economic impacts not just ecological.
First it gets removed from Google and Apple stores.
Then it gets deplatformed from Amazon.
Now a hack that was in the making for a while due to political motivations.
LIVE: Georgia House of Representatives Hearing on Election Irregularities 12/10/20
There is an ongoing lawsuit of the State of Texas against the swing-states where massive fraud occurred. Almost 20 states have joined the lawsuit initiated by Texas.
This is being censored by Google, Twitter and the usual Global Reset pawns.
It is safe to assume the FBI helped turn a blind eye or actually helped this human trafficking and sexual slavery operation. All to enable an elaborate blackmail operation for high-profile decision makers.
The FBI must be prosecuted.
They send 15 officers to a Nascar driver's place because he decided to make a publicity stunt and say that a regular garage door noose was a hanging rope placed to scare him because of his skin color.
Enough is enough.
This could be my or anyone else's children.
Disband the FBI.
Prosecute them.
Treason.
You aren’t as well informed as you think. Bubba Wallace didn’t notify the authorities of the noose, his crew members did. Also it wasn’t his place, it was in the garage at the track. He wasn’t aware of the situation until after his team/nascar notified him of what was going on. He wasn’t the one who contacted the FBI, nascar did. Get your facts right. Also what is a regular garage noose?
No, there does not need to be more censorship.
You should realize by now the Russian boogeyman narrative has no power anymore.
Not everything that favors Trump is a Russian initiative. Far from it.
He published a video (still on YouTube) with a unifying message after the death of George Floyd. Jack Dorsey on Twitter deleted it on the basis of copyright claims. If copyright had been truly infringed, it would have been taken down from YouTube.
Twitter is just an extreme example of a social media platform acting like a publisher and applying blatant censorship.
COVID-19 total “deaths” in the U.S. are at 168,864.
So 6% is only 10,131 deaths from COVID-19 with no other underlying causes.
The New York Times put out an extensive article on polymerase chain reaction (PCR) tests and how they determine who has COVID-19 or not. The PCR tests are widely used to search for small segments of genetic material that look like COVID-19. If it finds it, the test is positive.
The sensitivity levels of the PCR tests have been set too high. The New York Times reports that up to 90% of people testing “positive” carried barely any virus.
People may have had COVID-19 a while ago but certainly didn’t have it now. Or the test may have detected some naturally occurring genetic segments that looked like COVID-19 but weren’t.
Context: if the medical community set appropriate sensitivity levels resulting in “real” positives for COVID-19, the COVID-19-related genetic material in a patient’s sample would have to be anywhere between 100-fold to 1,000-fold the levels that are being used today.
The states and the hospital systems use the PCR data when claiming a COVID-19-related death. If the PCR data comes back and says “positive,” then COVID-19 is claimed as a comorbidity. And we now know that up to 90% of those “positive” tests may in fact be “negative.”
The charts used so widely in by the media to scare us with the spikes in new COVID-19 cases… mean nothing at all.
More than half and up to 90% of those “new cases” are nothing at all.
The economic lockdowns were for nothing.
The two-week self-quarantines were for no reason at all.
Someone or some group within the CDC intentionally gave guidance for the PCR sensitivity settings knowing that this would result in an incredible spike in new cases… and economic destruction, fear, panic, and chaos.
charlesism, you are blatantly promoting an agenda of censorship.
One should not behave well due to the threat of punishment but by virtue of virtue.
You appear to stand against everything of value in the West.
There are corporations and special interest groups trying to influence the narrative in reddit and even here in order to further reduce online freedoms and to establish the official list of forbidden thoughts.
Furthermore, The Atlantic has a long number of articles promoting globalism and the destruction of nation-states.
A true free market of ideas requires anonymity.
Who is going to help you when rampant corruption emerges in organizations such as the United Nations (a known harbor for individuals involved in child traffic scandals)?
Remember the gamergate fiasco?
People all over the world are angry, and it is not their fault entirely - overpopulation and resource depletion need to be dealt with.
But why doesn't anyone seem care about raising the bar on education, not just in terms of skill sets but also morality and long-term thinking?
Each state of the USA is large enough to be its own country. It doesn't work equally well for all states, but there is a high degree of freedom of movement, and free trade between states. If every state were indeed its own country, it seems unlikely there would only have been one war between them since 1861.
I’m curious: how do you reconcile your support of nation states on one hand and a “free market of ideas” on the other? Nation states are built on a foundation of one idea — ethnicity derived from geography, language and racial perceptions — towering over all other ideas as an unquestionable absolute that affords sovereignty to those deemed worthy of membership.
The greatest feature of the United States of America is that it was never a nation state.
We are in a nihilist low right now. I don't except that the United States will have any answers. This is because it is an 18th century experiment in governance. People are realizing that the experiment has run its course. I believe we will see a resurgence of 'guilds' for a lack of a better word (except in the United States that is stuck in an outdated experiment). Being a doctor or an engineer is almost an international designation now, their papers are accepted in many countries. International bodies of doctors and engineers will start to gain more power. Perhaps licensed bodies will demand a seat in parliament. For example all the doctors get to vote for a representative in parliament, amongst the reps whose seats are geographically based, engineers as well get one seat. This won't happen in the United States, but maybe one of the former eastern European Countries. The United States has shown that treating someone without education the same as someone with an education doesn't work.
The United States has shown that treating someone without education the same as someone with an education doesn't work.
Our problems aren't created by uneducated people, they're created by educated people who are taking advantage of uneducated people. Removing that step from the equation makes their job easier, not harder.
The question is who should be the ruling class
Not the rich because they already have power.
Not the uneducated because that won't turn out well.
There are two groups;
1)The students that got a C in a technical course
2)Middle class people with more knowledge in culture than money
One problem wit the United States is that the technical professions have let themselves be so marginalized. The Deep Water Horizon disaster would not have happened if the engineers had as much power as the managers.
This is my point, the technical class in the United States doesn't realize it should have more political power. Scientists get kicked around too much.
Any new country should see what happened in the United States and give more power to its technical class. This would be more of a meritocracy.
> ethnicity derived from geography, language and racial perceptions
This cuts both ways. See what happens in states where the border does not respect these local realities, for example where you have sunni led by shia or the other way around. Or look at Africa where Western powers drew lines on maps without respecting ethnicity.
Nation state is one form of decentralization, letting people govern themselves how they want.
Though experiment: imagine that there was a single global state, with one set of laws and institutions. How do you think that would work out?
And furthermore, how do we collectively decide which laws and institutions are codified and which ones are not? How do we ensure that the life and dignity of a rural fisherman is supported to the same degree as an ivy-league educated programmer?
It is entirely possible.
Consider how the United States have some of the best free speech laws in the world, and how that is now threatened with the control of the Internet being handed to the United Nations under Obama.
An overreaching organization without a face for accountability is prone to disaster, as recent decades have shown.
As a curiosity, the United Nations have had a former Nazi at its head. This situation was only rectified thanks to the United States.
Nothing whatsoever to do with censorship. He's suggesting moderation. There is a very significant difference.
The internet and Usenet did OK without moderation until Eternal September and the invention of SPAM, when internet culture started to die. RIP. Before that a new arrival was expected to figure out netiquette, and everyone else would behave accordingly.
Ever since then there has been an fairly steady slide. The arrival of astroturfing corporate and special interest groups, trolls, and platforms that assist the amplification of effect by actively seeking to avoid any moderation has just intensified things. Those places without moderation deviate to lowest common denominator with astounding speed. We've seen it time and time again, and as a result many sites have closed down their discussion areas entirely. See reddit subs with and without active heavy moderation. Moderating does not rule out anonymity, nor should it.
Without moderation commercial interests, political groups and trolls will ultimately ruin all locations that attempt to allow reasonable discussion as it is not in those group's interests to see a virtue in being virtuous.
The few places left where you can have reasonable discussions, including on controversial topics, are those that moderate hard. They don't censor.
It seems you are using "moderate" as a euphemism for "censor". The definitions are extremely similar. What do you see as being the key distinction between the two?
Moderation is keeping people on topic of the forum, killing spam, trolls and sockpuppets, removing abuse and so forth, and trying to keep things on the rails and civil. Including banning trouble makers. Rather like dang does around here. That's not censorship, it's attempting to avoid anarchy. Neither is limiting the range of topics the forum or platform wants. Standards and extent will vary depending on the aims of the site.
Censorship is suppressing a view, even if it follows the standards and allowed topics of the forum. Legal censorship is a little more complex as standards vary between countries.
Having a post removed because it's spam, abusive or is off-topic is not censorship, which was the point the GP was erroneously trying to make.
Creating an artificial system such as the ones which are today mainstream can have undesirable side-effects.
What stops a group of indivudals (or bots for that matter) from injecting rule-breaking content into an otherwise-acceptable thread?
Soft-censorship and derailing is done on purpose to censor certain topics which go against the establishment status quo.
Reddit is fertile with such examples.
If someone is making a comment which does not bode well to those in power, it is common for the thread to be sunken with low-class behavior and baits in order to shut down valid discussion by forcing an emergence of rule-breaking content.
I'm okay calling it either "moderation" or "private censorship." I prefer a world where businesses are explicit about who they are. "Welcome to Acme. If you support poisoning animals, this is the wrong place for you. Go to poisoninganimals.com where you're welcome, instead." I can tell you, if I ran a website and someone plastered a bunch of comments promoting pedophilia, I wouldn't want to be associated with that. Maybe it results in fewer sign-ups, but just hosting content like that is making a statement. Users pick up on it, and you wind up, not being a democratic website for everybody, but being a website slanted towards creeps.
