I am not convinced that this is all a bad thing. It is premised on the possibly false capitalist assumption that the motivation for scientific research is driven by money. It also assumes that instiutions like universities are the only place that such research could actually be conducted. I posit that this is not true.

Look at the number of scientific minds emerging from the Enlightenment forming the basis of scientific thought. All of them performed research and contributed to science out of passion and all before the advent of the University system. There was an accepted belief that if you practiced or performed some thing, then you were in fact that thing. The idea that an instiution must "certify" or label you to use that title professionally or as an amateur was not established, yet we still had minds like Gallileo, Newton, Maxwell, Einstein, etc... that all formed the basis of the very science we understand today.

Perhaps the University system is an obsolete product of the dysfunctional capitalist society.

Designing a building is predicated on well solved problems in the domain of structural engineering. These are codified into various building codes that inform the design. All of this implies that engineering discipline is at the core and definition of all the work that is being done by the carpenters, masons, and plasterers.

Architecture and software design are both functions of a software engineering discipline. This should be undeniable by anybody with any experience in either of these things. Agile then, in any form, is not compatible with an engineering approach. The ethics of an engineering discipline (not to be confused with a framework of morals) drive the best practices of that engineering discipline. The only ethical practice of a scrum team is to deliver stories. They are not compatible.

Agile makes more sense from the peespective of building something that is already well understood and engineered. The folks coding are more analagous to carpenters working on a schedule.

Goodness here is another rsilvergun comment about cryptocurrency that compels me to respond again.

Normally I hate using "whataboutism"s to respond to an argument, but with logical fallacies and blind spots in your argument I felt it only proper to point out the irony in several of your points where you are comparing crypto to the superiority of fiat currency while neglecting to acknowledge how fiat actually solves these problems.

• 51% Attacks! - This is a theoretical problem that hasn't been proven to be possible in major adopted cryptocurrencies yet first of all. Secondly, how terrifying that a centralized entity could exert influence and override a currency, even to the point where it could benefit cronies financially. Thankfully no such entity exists that could do such a thing for the US dollar *cough* bank bailouts *cough*.
• Money laundering - The fact that this governmental abuse of using theft and state violence to use a currency as a weapon against unwanted economic activity is normalized in the capitalist psyche is unfortunate. We are programmed from a young age to just accept that money laundering is inherently evil when in fact it is a consequence of government control and interference. Money laundering would mostly go away if they stopped this foolishness of making consumption and production of recreational drugs illegal.
• Market Consolidation - You imply that without heavy regulation that market consolidation is inevitable. I actually agree with this. I also believe however that this also tends to exist in the presence of heavy market regulation. In fact, it might even be argued that heavy market regulation encourages market consolidation to only a few big players as the regulations become so onerous as to stifle and remove startup competition and make it too expensive for smaller players to engage in a market. This is evidenced by the top 5 US banks having over 90% of all market share At best I would say then that market consolidation in no way is a consequence of regulation. One might argue it is an inevitable conclusion of late stage capitalism, but that is a topic for another argument.

• I would say that all of your criticisms of cryptocurrencies are either evidenced in the only other choice we have of fiat currencies, or simply are not problems at all (money laundering). This leads me to the inevitable conclusion that you simply just have a deep love for centralized government authority and control in all things and that this means you can actually be considered part of the illness in our society that needs to be cleansed.

Daily Mail... https://www.dailymail.co.uk/ne...

This is a great idea, but even better for energy usage, look up the Proof-Of-Space protocol implemented in Chia. It allows for miners to operate on no more energy usage than it takes to run a disk array.

Well if you were a Russian national on the sidelines of this fiasco and you wanted the agency to transfer money without random political squabbles getting in the way of your legitimate and legal livlihood, I would say with certainty that crypto outside of the centralized government backed banking cartel would be looking rather useful to you right now.

And before you say, "Gee golly, my first world government would never sanction me!" I would suggest you to lookup how Australia is freezing bank accounts of its own citizens as we speak, simply for voicing pro-Russian opinions on social media platforms. We are frogs being boiled in a pot slowly, and you wont realize it until its too late. In 5 years this will be normalized in the Land of the Free, mark my words.

I can't necessarily address the other problems you stated but in terms of energy consumption, there are some exciting new algos that have been proven out to address this. Chia for instance, is an example of a cryptocurrency validated on Proof-Of-Space, which is basically an algorithm that rewards miners based on the number of plot files they have on disk. Creating the plot files takes some energy however the energy usage after plots are created is equal to the average power consumption of a spinning disk drive (Approx. 5W).

Its exciting because it offers a green alternative to Proof-Of-Work without the centralized control issues introduced by Proof-Of-Stake. A mining setup is basically the initial investment in your disk arrays and could be made to be carbon neutral through a typical residential grade solar panel system.

As someone with permanent burn scars from an accident while changing out fryer grease when I was a kid, I can tell you that unless the robot can replace the fryer grease as well then accidents will continue to happen.

As an early adopter of cryptocurrencies, I have done extremely well on it, however even to this day I dont look at it as an investment per se. To me it is and always has been a democratized form of money. It is also a moral decision on my part as I feel centralized banking and fiat currency is repugnant. I have a modest portion of my net worth in crypto as well as many other assets and securities of varying liquidity, mostly as a hedge against the rapidly falling dollar.

With that being said these short term trading crypto bros or fools putting their life savings into it are gambling addicts and need help. If you dont understand it, believe in it, and dont see crypto as the modern revolution in currency and accounting, then you might be investing for the wrong reasons.

There are a 1,000 choices for child friendly coding (Eg. Scratch), but the huge missed opportunity is to teach kids the fundamentals of computing systems with Redstone in Minecraft.

For the uninitiated, redstone in Minecraft allows you to transmit or generate redstone power across and into blocks, allowing for in game automation systems like auto-farming, item sorting and dispensing systems, and many other uses. The neat thing is that when you create a redstone torch, it is either ON or OFF depending on if it is attached to a powered block or not. This allows for the combination of torches and blocks to form all of the required Logic Gates that form the bedrock of a computing system.

While building a Turing Complete computer might be difficult for a child, it presents a real opportunity to teach kids about logic gates, discrete math, latches, flip-flops, adders, and muxers and demuxers, all to solve real automation problems that players will find in the game.

So to summarize your argument here, because such a 500+ year plan does not exist that it shouldn't? I dont agree that this is a "couldn't" problem. A friend of mine works for the charity wealth trust setup by the estate of the late steel magnate Andrew Carnegie. For over 100 years since his death, investment managers have been protecting and growing this wealth not for profit, with all excess profits after operating costs going to charitable causes. Adjusting for inflation it has grown considerably and provided billions towards charity at the same time.

Even if you consider that maintaining the facility and providing security would not be managed by the military, this is something that can absolutely be set up via free market solutions with an initial seed investment that actually grows with the economy and provides the service for hundreds of years to come. This is all moot anyway because much of the waste can be refined into weapons grade nuclear material so it has intrinsic military value. The military would absolutely have a vested interest in securing such a facility, which lets be honest, the cost to maintan per year would be less than a single war plane.

Oh ffs, you are such an oil industry shill. How many hundreds of billions of subsidies have the oil industry enjoyed? How many trillions of tax payer funded dollars paid for unused tanks sitting in warehouses and billion dollar war planes that are barely functional? Biggest theft of tax payer money, what a load of crock.

I agree with your opinions on nuclear power, however your interpretation of the US Federal mandate for governance is about 150+ years out of date. The US Civil War settled that one. The Federal government no longer exists at the pleasure of the States, the States exist at the pleasure of the Federal government. State marijuana programs are Federally illegal on paper. They only are allowed to exist because the Federal govt has no immediate desire to prosecute individuals or sue State governments. They even stated that if it looks like medical and legalization programs are causing marijuana to cross borders into other states where it is illegal then they will modt certainly step in and put a stop to it.

Sigh. Modern thorium reactors dont melt down. Seismically active areas like Japan should not build these antiquated reactors anymore. Further, oil is not a great example to hold up either. Remeber what happened to the gulf of mexico?

This is all oil disinformation.

1) If you take all the nuclear waste that has been produced since the dawn of nuclear energy, it would fit in an area smaller than a football field with 50 more years to spare, safely encased in lead and concrete.

2) Currently in the US we keep all of the waste in a seismically non eventful area, buried under a mountain. There is this misconception about nuclear waste that it will accumulate beyond our ability to safely deal with. Spent fuel rods are actually quite small. Even if they weren't, there are a number of nuclear reactors that can actually recycle spent fuel rods

3) Modern thorium reactor designs can actually be shut down with no risk of meltdown. The Fukishima disaster would not have happened if they were using thorium reactors. A counter attack to this argument is the environmental disaster that a major oil spill can and has caused. Look at what happened to the Gulf of Mexico. Lets also not forget fracking leaks and poisoning of water tables. Oil and natural gas dont exactly hsve a great track record either.

4) Cost is brought up as a common argument against nuclear power. Fair enough, but if you remove the subsidies that oil and natural gas receive as well then that alternative becomes a lot more expensive as well. My final thought on this is about cost externalities. When the affordable cost of fossil fuels is brought up, this argument only holds true when burners of these fuels are not held liable for cleaning up the environmental damage and pollution that these cause. For the lead and carbon in the atmosphere that must be cleaned up, the health issues caused by those subject to this pollution, the oil spills to be cleaned up. The poisoned water supplys from fracking activities, these are all hidden costs that oil, natural gas and coal have put on society at large to deal with. The damage has been estimated to be in the trillions and the future generations are picking up the tab. Cost average this to the price per MCF of natural gas or a barrell of oil and the true cost of fossil fuels will likely make it extremely unattractive compared to not just nuclear, but most other types of renewable power generation.