smute:

ralfmaximus:

white-throated-packrat:

brokenmachine3553:

commiemartyrshighschool:

annoyingalchemist:

guerrillatech:

Ok so can someone explain to me how cryptocurrency pollutes? Like what crazy calculations are they running that they need enough brainpower to significantly effect things? Like I’m assuming what’s causing the pollution is increased electricity consumption but… how does sending lil pretend money tokens back and forth or whatever cause so much pollution?

Also, what the fuck is “mining”? How d'you mine… like bitcoin is not a naturally occurring resource, and I assume that you can’t just make it, cause that would make it instantly worthless… help?

So you get “coins” as a reward for performing the cryptographic calculations necessary to update the public ledger which is the blockchain. This is, by design, an increasingly complex and resource intensive process to slow down the collection of (intentionally finite) coins.

So every transaction with bitcoins requires the ledger to be updated with the current ownership of every already existing bitcoin, which also requires encrypting and decrypting a bunch of information and sharing it across the public ledger. So every transaction made with bitcoins increases the energy requirements of updating the ledger making it harder and harder to complete the latest version and get the coin which is a reward for doing that work.

There’s a lot I don’t fully understand myself but the long and short of it is that the actual value of any crypto currency is pretty much just what people agree on, except instead of a fiat currency where a government says it’s worth something and a mint that makes physical currency, there’s a bunch of nerds who agree that solving certain math problems is worth rewarding.

Feeling like adding on for a bit of context, I know it’s kind of hard to understand how mining for really any kind of crypto is hard to imagine, but seeing what a bitcoin mining facility looks like for the first time really helped me realize just how energy intensive it is.

See all these warehouses? They’re quite literally filled to the brim with specialized computers that do nothing but mine, each one filled with thousands of these computers, just row after row of this:

So all the power consumption winds up adding up like crazy.

Yep, that’s why cryptocurrency and NFTs are considered major contributors to pollution – because the energy needs of all those computers doing the calculation are equivalent to a medium sized country. Currently, crypto consumes more energy than Argentina.

Guess what’s inside a lot of mining rigs? Gowan, guess.

Graphics cards! 

Lots and lots of these puppies side by side, spinning their little fans as fast as they can go because as it turns out: GPUs are perfect for doing the calculations required for mining cryptocurrency.

Which means amateur miners buy a lot of these things.

So many, in fact, that there is now (May 2021) a world-wide shortage of NVIDIA and AMD graphics cards and building a new gaming rig is damn near impossible because of the shortage. 

OR you can pay a ridiculously inflated price by GPU scalpers on eBay.

Seriously. Places that sell GPUs impose quantity limits because if they don’t… some crypto asshole will buy out their entire stock in one go.

But the “good” news is that the professional miners (like the Bitmain site up there, in the photos) use dedicated ASIC mining rigs which don’t use consumer GPUs. But (bad news) they DO use the same sort of chips that NVIDIA & AMD rely on to make their products, which just starves the supply pipeline at a different point.

Bottom line: not only does cryptocurrency mining consume terawatts of electricity, it also consumes megatons of computer hardware. Which is expensive to produce (in resource terms, like rare metals, petroleum, water, electricity, paper) and will, someday, require even MORE resources to recycle. Or else it ends up in a landfill.

Note that current dedicated mining rigs are so highly specialized they are useless for anything other than mining. They cannot be easily repurposed to  (say) sequence DNA or fold proteins for miracle cures.

What a waste.

was anyone gonna tell me that some nerds peepee poopoo “currency” is the reason why graphics cards are sold out everywhere or was i supposed to find that out from comments under a screenshot from twitter user whoreganic cop puncher explaining how bitcoin is just an artificially complicated math problem

stitch-n-time:

iris-collects:

1oldbear:

daughterofaphrodite828:

nothinglu:

Ohhh

Incredible 😍😍😍

Eat your heart out, Bilbo

It’s not every day that you get to see a Wizard at work…

I have a great and burning desire

ephemeral-dreamer:

jenniferrpovey:

sketiana:

burn-brighter-than-fire:

It depends on where you get hit

Cheek: a round dull pain that clocks your entire head in a different direction. It’s painful and throbs but the main effect of a punch to the cheek is how jarring it is. You feel it in your mouth, your teeth. And no matter how you position that punch the knuckles will always hit the jaw and cheek bones adding a frame of sharp pain in which the redness will be painted.

Temple: getting hit on the temple pushes your head to the side rather than turning it. It’s disorienting because it leaves you very off balance. It essentially feels like a bad pressure headache, like when you have a sinus infection on a plane, but in one spot and on the outside. It’s sharp in the middle and radiates outward and even after the initial impact it pulses like an earthquake epicenter. It easily causes long lasting headaches and is the most likely of these examples to cause a concussion.

Eye: this is a weird one. The fist doesn’t fit within the eye socket so either the knuckles on the brow and cheeks bones protect the actual eye or they don’t. The former option gives a full spreading pain below the eye which results in the classic black eye look and a sharp pain on your brow similar to hitting your shin on the couch. The latter option, well bad things can happen when a hard fast object makes direct contact with your eye but for the sake of this it feels like a vacuum bc the concave shape is being covered and pressurized. The eye feels pushed back and pulled forward all at once. It doesn’t necessarily hurt that bad for that long unless the punch was meant to do damage. I’m fortunate to say I don’t know what it would feel like then.

Nose: remember that prank kids used to pull where they’d line up their hands with their nose, push them in one direction and crack a knuckle at the same time to pretend to break their nose? Yeah that’s what it looks like when someone punches you from the side in the nose, except it’s someone else’s hand and your nose makes the sound instead of their knuckle. It’s just like breaking any bone where you hear it and feel the action if it being done but that moment of shock blankets you for a split second until all the pain comes rushing back. It’s sharp and needlelike and can give you black eyes just to add insult to injury. If you get hit in the nose from the front it’s like the uncomfortableness of when you have to sneeze but can’t. Except that feeling took all the steroids and is now using your face as a punching bag to express its roid rage. It crackles outward like static electricity under your skin, your eyesight gets fuzzy and you can’t tell if it’s because you’re tearing up, it’s hard to open your eyes, or you’re momentarily stunned and blinded. Just know it’s all three. I find that this one knocks the wind out of you the most. Gotta remind yourself to breathe just don’t try to do it through your nose.

If you really want to know what this feels like I’d suggest joining a mixed martial arts because they’ll teach you correct form and power distribution and you can spar with pads and actually hit each other.

sketiana:

sketiana:

how does being punched in the face feel like

literally i just wanna know

I’d also recommend learning what it feels like to punch someone in the face. It’s much more fun and pretty damn cathartic when they deserve it.

i was just being stupid but these descriptions are actually so well written i could feel them lmao bless

Well, thanks for “being stupid,” because this is a great ref for writers.

Thanks for writing all of this

lynati:

lew-basnight:

quoms:

xenosagaepisodeone:

in retrospect, video rental stores *would* probably still exist today in some capacity had it not been for blockbuster. the nostalgia for the blockbuster browsing experience undermines the reality of how aggressively the chain snuffed out smaller video rental stores and would eventually become notorious for its abusive late fee collection policy once there were no significant competitors standing. the rise of streaming is often attributed to blockbusters demise, but what’s not often recognized is how netflix’ earliest (and most successful) marketing tactics were in fact advertising the absence of the aforementioned terrible late fees as opposed to the convenience of not having to go to the store. I was actually surprised to find out how much of blockbuster’s demise can be attributed to spiraling out of control as it attempted to manage viacom’s ever increasing debts than to the fact that people just naturally gravitated towards streaming (which is not to say that it wouldn’t have happened eventually, but).

see also: borders / barnes & noble with bookstores. amazon’s original pitch was probably more “look how convenient!” than it was “look, you can avoid the awful sterility of the inside of a barnes & noble!” but it’s interesting that with its aggressive tracking and tailoring of recommendations amazon is having machines do (in an impersonal and invasive way) what the staff at a local, non-chain bookstore would do, which is match their selection to your preferences

Barnes & nobles and Borders raced against each other, across the country, to oversaturate the bookstore market. This isn’t paranoia or conspiracy — it’s the same fucking model Starbucks used. Oh, your community supports three bookstores? We’re going to open five, until the little indies go under. Then we’ll close four of our own (sorry not sorry staff, enjoy competing with each other for a handful of positions!) and now you have no other choice. Movie rental chains did the same thing.

And then all these huge chain retailers have the fucking gall to weep and whine as amazon proceeds to wipe them out, and now I live in a small city where you just… can’t get stuff. If you don’t want to use amazon, if you don’t have a car to drive out to the big box on the highway, you literally can’t buy a pair of socks or an ice pack. No more pharmacies, no more bookstores, no more video or music stores… if this was plants and not retailers you’d call it monoculture, and you’d raise an alarm about how prone to catastrophic collapse monocultures are.

Ohhh that last line.

breelandwalker:

thisnewdevilry:

skylightsofmylife:

… huh.

EXACTLY.

worldheritagepostorginization:

charlesoberonn:

basic-banshee:

cooliopumpkin:

basic-banshee:

basic-banshee:

justluckyiguess:

basic-banshee:

basic-banshee:

basic-banshee:

bazfloralsuit:

basic-banshee:

sweet-chesus:

basic-banshee:

basic-banshee:

I keep using my girlfriend with unusual work hours to get out of coworker interactions and happy hours and hanging out.

But now the company holiday party is upon us.

And I’ve been lying about the girlfriend.

I suddenly really empathise with the characters in Hallmark Christmas movies.

I like that people have two reactions to this post.

Reasonable: “just say she couldn’t make it!”

Chaotic: FAKE DATING AU

Well, which one is it going to be?

And so it begins

having the DMV area Craigslist bookmarked has never come in handy before but now

Update, Craigslist has flagged my post as inappropriate.

Apparently you can’t solicit a date as a “gig”

I now see my mistake

Update: a date has been acquired. This is true lesbian solidarity in action.

My wife has now read this and wonders how baby gays are even meeting and mating

Can confirm I am meeting and mating just fine 😂

By the way I’m in a relationship with this woman now

This is the feedback I’ve been looking for

World Heritage Post

bettsplendens:

lonelyassassin96:

wickedwonderlandd:

herbalist-witch:

thickness-protection-program:

ferrousferrule:

tami-taylors-hair:

hottiewitabloggie:

riseofthedruids:

ssundiall:

diet-soap:

ssundiall:

hey remember how awhile back i mentioned that tiktok has a whole trend where people mix cleaning supplies well i redownloaded tiktok so im finally able to show you what i mean

I put my bare hands in this sink and get a chemical burn so bad it oozes and bubbles nonstop for days

i have GREAT news for you

potion of cough up blood

people are so fucking stupid oh my god

Cleaning TikTok: We’ve mixed the perfect cleaning solution! 

Everyone Else: You’ve created mustard gas is what you’ve done. Your lungs look like you’ve just returned from the Western Front. 

Jesus fucking christ. One time I accidentally mixed an ammonia scrub and a bleach spray and gave myself a migraine in 15 minutes how the fuck are they even still standing.

Time for a health and safety lesson.

See below for a chart on what household cleaners to NEVER EVER MIX EVER OR YOU CAN (AND WILL PROBABLY) DIE OR OTHERWISE BECOME EXTREMELY FUCKED UP AND NOT IN A FUN WAY BUT IN THE HOSPITAL AND/OR GRAVEYARD WAY:

The above is not a complete list, but these are extremely common in most households and therefore are the most likely chemical fuck-ups to occur. 

DO NOT MIX HOUSEHOLD CHEMICALS. 

DO NOT MIX CLEANING AGENTS.

DO NOT MIX CERTAIN ASTRINGENTS. (HYDROGEN PEROXIDE IS OFTEN IN FIRST AID KITS OR WOUND SPRAYS AND CAN CAUSE A REACTION IN SMALL AMOUNTS IF MIXED WITH THINGS IT SHOULD NOT BE MIXED WITH EVEN ACCIDENTALLY ON A SURFACE ETC.) 

DO NOT MIX ANY CHEMICALS THAT YOU ARE NOT 100% SURE ARE SAFE TO MIX. (SPOILER: MOST THINGS ARE NOT REALLY SAFE TO MIX AND SOMETIMES COMBINING SAFE ONES ACTUALLY MAKES THEM LESS EFFECTIVE ANYWAY, SO JUST DON’T COMBINE THIS KIND OF SHIT!) 

YOU ARE PROBABLY NOT A CHEMIST. PLEASE DO NOT TURN YOUR KITCHEN/BATHROOM/HOME INTO A LAB ACCIDENT. 

IF YOU ARE A CHEMIST, YOU SHOULD STILL NOT FUCK AROUND. MANY OF YOU DO NOT RELIABLY USE YOUR SAFETY GOGGLES OR THE CORRECT TYPE OF SAFETY GOGGLES. (IF YOU’RE THE TYPE OF CHEMIST WHO DOESN’T ENSURE ADEQUATE VENTILATION IN YOUR WORK AREA, I WILL NOT TRUST YOU WITH BLEACH. COMPLACENCY KILLS.) 

CONCLUSION: STOP MIXING CHEMICALS! 

YOU ARE NOT PROFESSOR X, AND YOU WILL NOT END UP CREATING THE POWERPUFF GIRLS. 

YOU WILL ONLY CREATE A NEW INVOICE FOR YOUR LOCAL FUNERAL HOME. 

I AM YELLING AT YOU BECAUSE I LOVE YOU AND WANT YOU TO BE SAFE.

TO ANY DUMBASS TEENAGERS OUT THERE, I WANT YOU TO SURVIVE LONG ENOUGH TO BECOME DUMBASS ADULTS. 

PLEASE DO NOT DIE.

The fumes from this vid burned all the hair off my body,melted my skin, and then killed me t.f

Hey, this actually very useful information to have if you are a kid or otherwise don’t know.

I feel like the “may cause death” part on that chart needs to be majorly bigger. The descriptions of the first two sound like they’d be unpleasant, but “unpleasant” doesn’t cut it. Needs to have a way bigger “THIS IS HOW THEY KILLED PEOPLE IN WARS BEFORE IT WAS OUTLAWED” warning. 

pisshandkerchief-deactivated202:

froody:

froody:

I think if Sherlock Holmes didn’t live with a doctor he would have died absurdly young

Watson: You are pale and sallow. Your fingers are always cold. I know what you are.

Holmes: say it

Watson: severely anemic, please take these

why would you hide this in the notes my dude

pisshandkerchief-deactivated202:

froody:

froody:

I think if Sherlock Holmes didn’t live with a doctor he would have died absurdly young

Watson: You are pale and sallow. Your fingers are always cold. I know what you are.

Holmes: say it

Watson: severely anemic, please take these

why would you hide this in the notes my dude

macaronkitty:

macaronkitty:

This came in our Bark Box???? Full Metal Alchemist “Hypnotist” pocket watch? Has absolutely no branding for FMA, its just there. Super ripped off- so hilarious 🤣