I understand your knee jerk intuition about crypto currency. But very earnestly I suggest learning a bit about monetary policy. It's indispensable. And after that you may want to read about bretton woods and how banks in different countries actually can trade money to each other. The US treasury and its impact on monetary policy enables this. It's not just a methodology in the sense that bitcoin is a method for moving money. Monetary policy is how countries can perform the miracle of Keynesian economics to regenerate Growth in a downturn. That cannot ever be done ever without fiat currency and a central bank. Period. This was. Why for example Germany plunged in to pre-hitler ruin after world war 1. There was no way to climb out of turned down economy when you had no gold reserves (France took them). Germany only managed to recover when they pegged their mark to a kilo of wheat-- not a long term solution but a desperate move that mostly worked. But the economic malaise didn't end till Hitler started spending money into the economy. That was made possible by moving off the gold standard prior to Hitler.

Without monetary policy you are left with the austerity of Austrian economics which pretty much inverts the rational of monetary policy and loses all it's advantages.

If crypto ever rises to rival the dollar you can kiss the USA goodbye because it will mean the end of monetary policy and central banking. If you say good riddance, I think you may not understand how the world works

Concerning portability I wonder why solar panels aren't installed on flatbed trailers and parked in vacant land & parking lots. There are a LOT of vacant parking lots that could serve as temporary solar farm sites.

I think most farms would have ample space to install solar & wind pretty much anywhere on their land, or even on the rooftops of barns and such like. Certainly more than ample to power the household and also to provide heat and light for livestock, & operate at least some machinery.

He has a masters in electrical engineering, albeit one he abandoned for a career in comedy. But he should know better. I think his passion for combustion engines has developed into a hatred for electric motors.

I bet these "partners" are the ones most aggressively interested in squeezing cash out of captive customers. Maybe it's time to review where VMWare is used in the organization and what viable alternatives exist for where it is used. I bet a lot of VMWare instances are costly overkill for the purposes they're being used for.

Hydrogen combustion has to be one of the most comically bad ideas to come out of the automotive industry in recent years. Rowan Atkinson (who is a petrol head and has many terrible takes on electric vehicles) was raving about driving such a car even though its range was in the double digits. But I'm sure it makes throaty broom broom sounds and as a millionaire it doesn't matter to him if it would costs 20x to fuel as a normal petrol engine, or requires extensive engine rebuilds. Still a terrible idea.

The concept has never been promising. Hydrogen is expensive, mostly made from fossil fuels, and it's hard to store / transport. And even if it was made from renewables it takes 3-4x the energy to produce & run a car than just charging a battery. The only reason certain automakers like Toyota have been pushing it is to act as a spoiler for battery powered EVs. Toyota has also been continuously lying about solid state batteries being just around the corner for at least 15 years now - not because they were but to spoil interest in current battery tech. Automakers have mostly pivoted to "synthetic" fuels as their next spoiler for BEVs which solves some of the issues with hydrogen but still sucks. If they had put as much effort into investing in EV manufacturing as they did in spreading FUD, they might not be in this predicament in the first place.

Maybe some big artists should decamp from Spotify and form their own platform. Or at least withdraw their services from any platform that undermines artistry by platforming a) AI generated music, b) sound-a-likes, c) in-house covers / generic muzak.

I think the more modern the US city, the more effort they made to try it. Spain has some grid systems and there are certainly efforts elsewhere so it's not like they don't exist in Europe or around the world. But usually the efforts are dwarfed by more organic city growth. In either case it's still more sensible than a straight line.

Blocks / grids might be common in the US but they aren't super common in Europe, Middle East or Asia. A new city might have a central core (e.g. a palace, or central forum which was designed) designed on a grid. Or maybe a Roman settlement grows from a military encampment. But that structure is soon subsumed as the city grows & absorbs nearby encampments & villages. Then it becomes a hodge podge of streets and alleys. Thereafter there will be periodic efforts to knock parts to widen roads or remodel slums etc. but it's quite organic. Circular designs were common in Mesopotamia and even Baghdad was modeled on a circle but it doesn't last.

But if a new city was to be build then either a grid or a series of circles joined by radiating roads clustered around a purposeful center would make a lot more sense than a line. Neom reminds me of those dumb mega projects architects sometimes throw sketches of out to tabloids to gain free publicity than something anyone was taking seriously.

It was always a stupid idea in just about every way possible, from construction, to operation, to lies about being "green", to its reliance on non-existent future tech, to the assumption anyone wants to live in a police state within a police state. Oh and lots and lots of dead workers. But it's very hard to say no to somebody who has people chopped up into bits for criticizing him.

Same goes for some of Saudi Arabia's other mega projects - ski slopes, mega resorts, giant cube buildings ffs. While not as outrageously stupid as the Line, they'll still cost billions and likely fail in their ambitions. Imagine if the kingdom used the money for the betterment of its people instead of wasting it on boondoggles - solar farms, desalination plants, land reclamation, housing, health, roads / mass transit, liberalisation, democracy / rights etc. If the idea is to prepare for a post-oil world then all those things would pay off far better than pouring blood and money into the sand.

Not buying Nintendo products and having to suffer problems that they themselves created.

... if I use some shitty tech to bootstrap better tech then is that somehow bad? I realise there is more to this than that, but it seems like a terrible argument to complain coal power is being used to manufacture solar power.

... here is a whacky idea - AI slop is uploaded because there is an economic incentive to do it. Remove the incentive and it won't happen. Start by letting people report it, or saying why they're "not interested" in a channel. It shouldn't take much to identify this trash and demonetize it or send it straight to the bottom.