Hm, if we divide $2.4 T by $121,000 we arrive at ~ BTC 19.8 M --> so I guess they used the total number of mined BTC, _including_ those millions of coins that are hopefully never going to be moved again.

Oh well, Satoshi's coins are currently worth ~ 1,100,000 x $121,000 = $0.13 T ..

So excluding these coins would still land BTC at $2.27 T market cap .. not that big of a difference.

Which number of BTC is used here?

Total mined till today? Or total mined till today _minus_ all the BTC that were premined by Satoshi and never moved?

Well, you should combine "A, democratic nation that isn't warmongering" with "B, democratic nation that has the military strength to be likely to come out of war XY as (superficial) winner".

Skipping B makes the "statistic" almost meaningless.

I forgot to mention .. Gossip - and all other applications - would also run smoother if I just replaced the 5400 rpm HDD with an SSD.

But something makes me stubbornly cling to my HDDs. 🤷

Microplastics seems to me like one of the toughest problems of our time.

Why?

Because even if we mostly stopped using plastics right now, which is laughably unrealistic, we would probably still be exposed to it for years or even decades.

Millions of tons of plastic particles at nano scale are floating on the oceans right now.

And inevitably, a bit of it will end up and is already ending up in people's bodies.

And just because they to a degree behave chemically inert, doesn't mean they do no harm, for example to our brains.

Now for many of the monomers/polymers, (first the fughi for the polymers, and then) the extremely high numbers of bacteria in the biosphere will find a way to metabolise them.

But my rudimentary knowledge of chemistry makes me think that there are probably some poly/monomers that just cannot be broken down by enzymes/biology, at least not at any relevant rate compared to the rate humanity emits them into the biosphere.

Maybe those monomers with fluoride? Not sure.

Now while bacteria will probably quickly, or have already, evolve to metabolise some of the plastics and thus use it instead of being hindered by it, humans and other animals will take ages for this.

It's one of the most profoundly careless and shortsighted things humanity is doing .. allowing the emission of molecules into the world that nature has no mechanism to process. Just because plastics is convenient.

Mirror life will also be a very tricky thing, but at least that is still at least a decade in the future.

But what do I even care ^^ .. maybe not until the majority of people on earth have Alzheimer's .. we may all live to nice old age .. what does anything at all matter if we can't make any sense of it or even just recognise our friends & family?

On Linux, having the directory with the database in a ram disk (tmpfs) makes Gossip run almost perfectly smooth for me .. on my ancient (> 15 years) laptop .. which it ran very laggy on before. (Writing this from a different key/client)

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> ..Then they get in to their new Tesla and drive home to the Ukraine over the weekend to chill with the family.

What kind of wild made-up nonsense is that?

Buying a Tesla from benefits? Laughably unrealistic.

How did you come up with such an outrageous claim? Got any "source"?

Unless over time some majority of regular people ends up saving at least some amount of money in Bitcoin, there's no one who'd stop politicians from raising the unrealised capital gains tax for Bitcoin to a value that makes it unattractive.

As much as groups provide comfort and identity and meaning and community .. things most people value greatly, I've grown more more wary/sceptical of groups over the years.

In-group/out-group dynamics which are deeply rooted in the human being (oxytocin) are just soooo destructive.

How does reality/society produce such absurd outcomes?

Power. (+ obfuscation through complexity/opacity)

Not being honest? :D

Don't get what you're talking about.

Never mind, I was trying to come up with an explanation for why things are happening .. I'm not arguing for/against some position here.

We're probably just talking/writing past each other.

Same goes the other way round.

I had no intention to justify. Just trying to reason.

Imbalances between jurisdictions will always exist, creating problems like this one.

Politics is hard.

In order to have systems slowly adapting and gently drifting into new dynamic equilibria, instead of swinging into place with lots of friction and losses after shocks .. politicians would have to put political decisions into place gradually.

But what they often do is impose step functions on the world.

Operating physical/mechanical systems should teach anyone that it has profound benefits to do gradual small changes, see how the system reacts and then adjust.

In law, regulation by step function can easily be done. No physics or inertia to immediately and inevitably punish the person in control, as would be the case when trying to halt your bike instantly.

What? You kidding?

That would make - at least on the surface - make everything RFK has done in the last few months void.

Could the strategy just be the following?

They're trying to skim the top x percentile off the tech workforce?

With a population of > 1 bln India/China will have a lot more highly gifted and educated people than US will ever be able to birth/teach. Just about population size.

US can hardly triple the number of people so it's easier to get talent from abroad.

Question 2:

Is it possible to shift the onset of the effects of fasting - basically fast forward - by beginning the fasting with a medium to heavy sports unit?

Let's say you do a 10k run or some good workout .. shouldn't everything shift to a few hours earlier?

Because you're basically directly in a calorie deficit after the workout.

Question 1:

Is the autophagy and other cleanup mechanisms not rather linked causally to protein consumption (or rather lack thereof)?

I'd speculate that just withholding protein alone - without any calorie restrictions - should already force our body to do significant shifts in its metabolism.

Because it basically _must_ cleanup some lying around protein in order to synthesise any urgently needed new ones.

So I'm wondering if one could maybe achieve some of the benefits of fasting without actually having to stop eating.

Great read, lots of well put findings.

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Thought/thesis/idea: the sinister core strategy behind it all is:

Taking away the ability to save from lower/middle class people, drastically reduces their power on the labour market.

Thus it effectively forces lower/middle class to offer their time/labour at low cost, basically providing for the disproportionately large consumption of the upper class for relatively cheap and continued.

It keeps people from building wealth from no wealth.

Before Bitcoin, there was practically no way for lower class people to actually save.

Buy USD 200/month worth of real estate? Possible, but the fees take most of the gains.

Same with stocks.

Gold? Who can buy small amounts monthly and keep them safe without the fees eating up the gains?

So the different scales of magnification are genuine but they were assembled into one video?

The way in which more detailed structures almost suddenly appear out of uniform grey instead of becoming visible gradually makes it look staged to me.

"Gewaltenteilung", haben sie gesagt.

Jaja, alles sauber, gibt nichts zu sehen hier.

Aber naja, schon daran wie sehr bei Parteien der reine Selbstzweck der Machtfestigung und Ausweitung im Vordergrund steht, offenbart ja wie sehr das politische System im Gesamten einen performativen Charakter hat.

Not paving over vegetation but instead using mostly dead land is a positive IMO.

Assuming there were in fact intentionality behind this .. what would be the sought purpose of lowering the birth rate?

I don't think the Greens per se *want* manufacturing to leave .. but they'd accept it as an assumed necessary evil.

They seem to not be aware of how important the exports are as the basis for prosperity and ability to import stuff. And it will be hard for Germany to build up a replacement for the manufactured goods they exported by trying to export services instead. What services would they export?

Apart from that, there could be tourism bringing in money .. but who would want to rely on tourism?