This is a bit of a fallacy. In a normal market, the rent for a home is less than the costs of home ownership (mortgage + maintenance + taxes) and that saved money can be used to purchase other assets.

Until the real estate mania of the last few years, if you followed this strategy, you would not be any worse off than the person who bought their home.

I personally would much rather have equity in more fungible assets than a home. Owning a home ties you to a specific location, and can’t easily be sold in an emergency. Plus it’s not a very diverse portfolio if most of you wealth is in a single property

Humanity:

It would be very stupid to set up a system where you have to give the porn site your ID. Better to just have an attestation that this user is over 18 years old.

There even ways to do this without the government knowing which site you visited with zero knowledge cryptography. But that would probably require everyone to get a Yubi key or equivalent, which might be hard to swallow

Governments already have systems to handle citizen IDs. They’re not perfect, and fake ones do get created, but they’re good enough. All that is needed is to connect that system to a UBI key or other device. Then websites could use cryptographic tools (signatures, ZK-SNARKS, etc) to verify that someone is over 18 without revealing their identity

I fear internet ID is coming whether we like it or not. AI powered bots will pass all captchas and be indistinguishable from humans. The open, pseudonymous internet cannot survive under those conditions. You could spend all day without seeing a comment by a real human.

I suspect some of the negativity comes from porn users who are in denial

It seems to me much more likely that the porn industry is financing studies that say there is nothing wrong with porn use. The means and motive make a lot more sense going in that direction, as they don’t want to be seen as the new cigarettes

I agree some are problematic. The first one is based on brain scans, which is hard to refute. And there are many more like it

The porn industry has a vested interest in suppressing this, and billions of dollars to spend muddying the waters.

There are many studies that indicate porn use can negatively affect your brain, sexual performance, and pro-social behaviour.

Porn linked to decreased grey matter

Porn addiction linked to lower executive functioning

Porn linked to negative social behaviour

Meta analysis on research into adolescents porn use discusses a range of negative outcomes such as anxiety, suicidal ideation, social isolation, and academic disengagement

I’m not really sure this law will “solve” the problem, or if it’s a good solution to the problem. But there are real, negative outcomes of internet porn

The only developed country that doesn’t seem to have a housing crisis right now is Japan. After their real estate market collapsed in the 90s, they instituted a number of reforms to make housing less attractive as an investment vehicle. Now housing there tends to depreciate over time, not appreciate. Consequently, it’s viewed not as an investment but as a consumer product, much like buying a car, and there is competition that brings costs down.

I think this is the sensible approach we need to follow in the rest of the developed world, but I don’t think it’s not going to be politically feasible until a lot of homeowners feel a lot of pain and give up on the idea of housing as an investment

It seems to be a lightweight alternative to Mastodon that is easier for individuals to run on a private server

Yes, of all the problems in the healthcare system, the problem of letting AI help patients diagnose their own problems is definitely top of the list /s

brew create --cask molson

That would be great! And I’m sure there are people doing it. And if 2.3% of the US Power grid were dedicated to that I’m sure some people would be upset about it too

My basic point is I don’t think there is anything morally wrong with Bitcoin miners using energy, even though this is a narrative that is very popular now. There are plenty of other valid criticisms of Bitcoin, but I don’t think this one stands up to scrutiny.

I would love if this were an option, but it’s not. The current battery technologies don’t have the scale for grid level storage capacity. The only grid scale storage solution that is really being done is to build very expensive infrastructure that moves water between two dams of different heights, and building more of those doesn’t seem politically likely at the moment

The reality is that there is much a whole bunch of excess energy supply that is produced because power plants can’t cycle up and down with demand. So they have to keep producing at peak demand 24/7 (there is some nuances based on the type of power plant, NatGas is faster to turn on/off, but this is broadly true)

I have my qualms with Bitcoin. As a currency it has significant transaction speed problems, and potential security ones after a couple more halvenings. But I don’t see a problem if Bitcoin miners want to pay energy producers to use energy that would be produced anyway and earn the producers nothing.

I agree with everything you’ve said

Pretty much the only things Bitcoin has on Ethereum today is a better brand and Lindy effect

Oh yeah there are many criticisms of Bitcoin one can make, I just don’t think the energy one is very convincing if you think about it a bit

It does NOT fucking matter if it’s “”“”““waste””“”“” energy

Sounds like you don’t actually care about the energy use, you just hate this for moral reasons. Using excess energy has zero externalities

I’ve always found this argument against crypto to be a bad one. The headline will say something like “Crypto mining uses XYZ total energy” and we’re supposed to infer that this means crypto is polluting a lot. But it doesn’t say how much pollution there actually was. For economic reasons, these miners often use cheap excess energy that would have been produced anyway or green tech. Not all of it obviously, but that level of nuance is missing.

Also, we don’t make the same moral arguments against other energy uses. Air conditioners use more energy than Bitcoin mining does, but we don’t go around saying the government should ban people from using AC.

There are legitimate problems with crypto, but this one never convinced me

Tbf, most money nowadays doesn’t physically exist nowadays. Only a tiny fraction of the “money” that is out there has a physical instantiation. Most of it is just numbers in bank servers