Also infrastructure dollars spent on data centers are not spent on more useful projects.

It doesn't have to be a zero-sum game but it is. It is extremely hard to get the billionaires to allow us to spend any money on infrastructure. They do it begrudgingly and in exchange for huge amounts of free money. The last major push for infrastructure in America was in the mid 1980s when the Democrat party compromised with Ronald Reagan giving Reagan all the military spending he wanted in exchange for 1 trillion dollars worth of infrastructure spending to build out much needed cities. If you're over 50 that's why and how you are able to afford to buy a house.

I think one of the things that confuses economists is that the economy shouldn't be a zero-sum game and you're taught that it's not but in practice because of the bizarre political realities it is.

If they wanted to really define new categories and make waves again they would bring back Scott Forstall and someone as good as Johnny Ive and let them clash. Those arguments made Apple their first trillion. Tim Cook was a peace maker. Steve Jobs was THE referee. The competition between those two are why we have an iPhone like we do today.

I just really wish that the world could just pick one distro and go with it.

I get that techies like the ability to pick their favorite distro and I get that Ubuntu is gotten close to being the default but in practice it's not.

There really needs to be a consistent way to install and deploy software and a consistent set of tools and libraries for accessing things like audio and video and for programming things like basic UI components.

If Linux could just settle on one distro and maybe two or three desktops (a light one, the heavy one for mainline desktops and maybe one for mobile and tablet) I think it could capture a lot more market share. Sort of like how stuff like ruby on rails and a lot of frameworks get popular because while they might not do things the best they just pick a way to do something and go with it.

Choice paralysis combined with diluting the developer pool creates all sorts of problems at this junction.

And I really really want a good competitor for Windows. Because holy crap Windows 11 is terrible. It is the most user hostile software I have ever seen in my life.

That's too many numbers, some of them gotta be made up

So your point is that a dump does in fact exist for solar panels and solar panels can be damaged by hurricanes. I honestly don't think you live in the same state as me.

There's an interesting chart here showing the relationship between the market value and the mining hashrate. Less people mining does cause the difficulty to drop, but realistically we're talking small fluctuations - not anything that would suddenly make this gimmick of a heater profitable.

The idea being that a $70 1,500w heater isn't any better than a $20 1,500w heater, at least as far as producing heat goes. The more expensive ones might have a more accurate thermostat or produce less noise, but none of the typical resistance heaters sold at big box retailers give you any extra heat for your buck (damn those pesky laws of physics).

It depends entirely on if you consider the $900 for the Bitcoin heater a sunk cost, and also the fact that you're only actually getting 400w of heat from the Bitcoin miner - the remainder of the heat output is produced by a standard resistance heat strip. Meaning you'd have to actually buy four of those Bitcoin heaters in order to get 1,600w of heat, spending a total of $3,600.

There actually are portable heat pumps on Amazon for under $500. While they won't mine any Bitcoin, heat pumps will produce way more heat per kWh and that's ultimately all that matters when you're comparing it against a mining rig being operated at a loss. They also double as air conditioners during the warmer parts of the year, while the Bitcoin heater sits around collecting dust.

If you pay normal US utility rates for electricity, you presently can't mine Bitcoin profitably. You're just effectively buying coinage through your power bill, on top of whatever you paid for the mining hardware. As per the article, this just results in slightly discounted heat, and there are better ways of achieving that end.

As to where new Bitcoin comes from, the amount of Bitcoin mined always stays the same regardless of the number of miners participating. The concept of having lots of people all attempting to be lucky enough to find the next block is only what secures the blockchain, with the mining difficulty automatically adjusting itself in response to changes in total network hashrate. Generally, there's also a bit of a human aspect involved as people won't mine when it's not profitable to do so, with the network hashrate dropping in response to declines in Bitcoin's trading value, and miners coming online as the value rises.

The short of it is, the network already is made up of miners willing to eek by at the tiniest sliver of profit imaginable. If you join in, you're fighting for your own slice of a pie that has already been divided down to atoms. Good luck.

Heat pump > natural gas > Bitcoin miner > space heater.

Bitcoin relies entirely on SHA256 ASIC's for hashing and they typically need replacing every year or two because more efficient models come out making the old ones unprofitable, especially at halvings. Due to the RoI and first-mover advantage the profitable ones are very expensive.

If you want to heat your home with proof-of-work, use a coin that uses RandomX or some other deliberately ASIC-resistant algorithm (usually CPU mining).

You can pool mine on an old CPU and still get a few pennies for your efforts, though if you want to invest in an EPYC and have other uses for it (maybe you have work jobs to run during the day and want more heat on cold nights) it could actually be profitable.

Resistive electric heating is still a very expensive way to heat, though some people don't have better options. There's a development near where I am that was built shortly after Nixon announced Project Independence and every house (cold climate) has wall-to-wall electric baseboard heating.

The problem is that the mining hardware costs more than the amount it of Bitcoin it will ever generate in a reasonable amount of years, even if you're getting your electricity for free.

Realistically, this is one of those rare occasions where the first post nailed it - if you need heat, it's hard to beat the bang for your buck from a heat pump. Except maybe with one of those cheap Chinese diesel heaters, if somehow you have access to free fuel like this guy.

According to the article:

So, you've got 400 watts of Bitcoin-generating heat, and the remainder of the heat is provided by a standard resistive heating element if you actually want the amount of BTUs that you'd typically get from a standard 1,500w portable space heater.

Oh boy. So, let's ask our favorite LLM how long that'd take to pay for itself with the "savings" from mining Bitcoin. It estimated 54 years, running the heater for 8 hours every day in the winter. The good news is you'd have your 50-year-mortgage paid off by then, at least.

To be fair, the article does recommend just buying a standard portable electric space heater if that's what you really need. Although, its $70 recommendation is silly in its own right, as all portable electric space heaters generally put out the same 1,500w - so you might as well just grab the cheapest one at Walmart and call it a day.

The target price Musk brought up several times was $25k, and adjusted for 15 years of inflation, that's roughly what the Model 3 Standard now sells for. Don't get me wrong, I'm the last person who'd jump to Musk's defense. I'm not a fan of the man or his politics, but technically it's true that if you could afford a $25k car 15 years ago, that's the same buying power it takes to buy a Model 3 Standard today.

The Cybertruck is more of a Veblen good, so the usual economics of making it cheaper in order to make up for the lost profit in volume, might not apply.

Based on past experiences I've had owning ICE Hyundai cars, I'd personally never trust them with an EV. The most recent Hyundai I owned, an Elantra, had problems with the electronic power steering and the tranny. My mother had a 2014 Accent that was recalled due to an issue where it could leak brake fluid inside the ABS module and catch fire. Their fix under the recall? They install a lower rated fuse on that specific circuit, so if it shorts out you just end up with a busted ABS module rather than a fire.

Reliability aside, another "gotcha" of the Ioniq 5 EV is that the 800v battery architecture (on 2025 and newer model years) maxes out at a charge rate of 135kW on 400v DC fast charges (which the majority of Tesla Superchargers still are 400v). The older model years were even slower, at 99kW. For comparison, Tesla's current gen vehicles can charge at up to 250kW. It's true that as charging networks are upgraded, this will eventually be less of an issue, but it's still worth pointing out.

Personally, if I was looking for a new vehicle in the current post-tax-rebate market, I'd give serious consideration to Toyota's hybrid and PHEV offerings.

With the way lobbying works you just can't do that. Especially with the droughts driving up the cost of beef through the roof.

One thing you could do is single-payer healthcare especially in america. Back when I used to work really shitty call center jobs I need people that would take their antibiotics until they felt better and stop because they were saving them for the next time. That was because they couldn't afford to see a doctor.

There's an old saying, it's cheaper to be a good person.