That's because most blockchain activity is wash trades, so everything else is small in comparison. Here's something to get you started:

https://www.moneylaundering.co...

Reminder to all readers: Monero and zcash exist, off-chain transactions (including cash-for-wallet deals) exist.

The difference is that Visa transactions are overwhelmingly for non-criminal purposes, while cryptocurrency transaction are (excluding wash trades) overwhelmingly for criminal purposes.

I'll just leave these here:

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/1...

https://www.rand.org/pubs/comm...

https://www.dw.com/en/north-ko...

https://www.queensu.ca/iigr/re...

https://www.moneylaundering.co...

There are two cryptocurrencies that functionally specialize in helping criminals launder money and evade sanctions, Monero and zcash. They are inherently untraceable and can work as a one-stop money laundromat once you can get currency in and out of them, and the subset of cryptobros who are trying to take cryptocurrency mainstream don't want you to know this. A little money laundering flaring up with some random stablecoin is background noise in the criminal finance world of cryptocurrency.

Catch up to the Chinese on battery tech? They don't have any special battery tech. There's nothing special about Chinese EVs components, they're basically the same stuff everyone else is making their EVs out of.

Biofuels aren't worse than fossil fuels but they surprisingly aren't much better. You can make renewable e-fuels with just renewable power and recaptured CO2, but they take an obscene amount of energy and then the ICE turns most of what all that energy produced into waste heat.

Hydrogen is a fossil fuel industry distraction, it offers the best selection of the worst downsides: An expensive and currently mostly fossil-sourced fuel you need to get at a station like gas/diesel, relatively long refuel times and short range in a vehicle with a higher up-front cost and weight like an EV, and a fuel that is only available at a small handful of stations, needs to be stored at immense pressures, escapes through solids and embrittles steel on the way out, and burns with an invisible flame like only hydrogen can offer.

We won't be able to get rid of liquid hydrocarbon fuels completely any time soon but we can make their uses a small enough fraction of what they are today that they're no longer a major source of fossil CO2 emissions and these oddball "fucking around in the margins" solutions can fulfill a decent fraction of the demand.

My last three landscape sliders were the Nokia N900, Motorola Droid 4 and F(x)tec Pro1, so they survived longer than that, and all three were in the size range of normal phones.

It's best to assume that banking apps won't work with anything but a non-rooted commercial Android install with its full suite of Google trash. Either that, or the most meticulously rooted systems that can fool all forms of root checking. Banks only want their apps running on walled-garden systems.

The solution for me has been to use banking websites rather than banking apps. This also eliminates the potential issues of banking apps having access to more than what can be seen through the browser, and it will hopefully show the bank that there is still demand for web access.

This. It seems that the US has forgotten the '80s automotive malaise era. Trump has tried to start a fresh one before and it looks like this time he's succeeding.

Don't worry, we're all Homo Economicus by default. Perfectly informed, perfectly rational, perfectly selfish. Otherwise the whole system would be a broken farce! So each buyer will independently source their own perfect climate risk data, obviously.

Interesting that the "EMI hardening" is a software/firmware error correction feature and not a physical shielding around the hardware like on military planes.

A slop-designed rocket engine might explode violently enough to give another big piece of metal a shot at becoming the fastest human-made object.

Rose: "The sun is too hot, now I shall die"

Cladosporium sphaerospermum: "Fuck yeah, strong ionizing radiation!"

I'm really hoping it pops before the Pitt Race track gets bulldozed.

Story for those not in the know, what's heavily rumored and circumstantially almost certain to be an AI datacenter operation is in the process of buying out Pitt Race at the height of its success from the already generationally wealthy family that owns it for what's rumored to be a 9-digit sum. The race track happens to be next to some major electrical infrastructure. Equipment from the track has already been auctioned off.

I was also kind of hoping the nuclear reactors might get started before it pops but that might be wanting to have the cake and eat it too...

I'm thinking sometime between right now and late 2026. It may be starting to pop already.

The guts of the data centers will mostly head for the landfill (or may get a short stint as cryptocurrency mining or HPC operations at most), they may get repurposed as conventional data centers or possibly warehouses or factories.