Posts by grandours

Re: Not very "Trusted" I guess

Foolish people (and even some not so foolish) have always been and will always be susceptible to scams. If crypto didn't exist, they would just use one of many other methods.

Re: So in conclusion

Solar is intermittent, but energy demand is constant. Therefore wind and solar both require other sources of energy such as coal or natural gas peaker plants, so construction of those also needs to be accounted for when figuring out the total environmental footprint. What we really need is massive investment in nuclear power, as well as geothermal in areas where sufficiently hot rock is close enough to the Earth's surface. Those will both provide the necessary constant baseload power.

Re: And another one bites the dust . . .

"Funny, when Lehman Brothers bit the bullet I don't remember hearing about how Goldman Sachs suddenly froze customer access to their bank accounts."

The reason you don't remember hearing about it is because they don't publicize it. In fact, this kind of thing happens all the time in traditional finance. Ask Marc Cohodes, who was successfully shorting when Goldman froze his account during the 2008-9 financial crisis. In fact this happens all the time. If the wrong people start losing money, trades are frozen/reversed, and the traders who were on the correct side get screwed. This happened this past March on the London Metal Exchange halted nickel trading and reversed trades to protect moneyed interests. Of course that's different from FTX, which was just a giant Ponzi scheme, much like the one operated by Bernie Madoff (which did not involve crypto but did involve customers losing all their money).

Re: "Fun & pro, that's our motto!"

"The corporate idea of "fun" is usually a million miles from a rational human being's idea of fun."

Same thing with the corporate idea of "wellness" - enforced with mandatory wellness modules.

Re: *Sigh*

"I am sure there are many site-specific customizations to make one install more or less usable."

I'm sure you are right. Unfortunately, I expect that we won't see the benefits of most of the possible customizations/optimizations here.

Epic has just been deployed at a friend's hospital, where he works as an emergency department physician. He says his efficiency has decreased by around 30-50% since it was rolled out. That has a direct impact on patients, as people have to wait longer to be seen, and fewer people can be seen. It's no wonder we're in the middle of a health care crisis here in Canada (though this is just one of the many reasons for the crisis).

I understand the point about the difficulties teaching medical doctors about new tech, but some systems are just shite, even in the hands of the most tech-savvy. One can moan about doctors if one wishes, but they are who will be using the software, so the software had better be designed to be easy to use for physicians. Apple gets it. Makers of most professional medical software do not. I'm looking at you G.E.!

Maybe...

The bitcoin enthusiasts would reply that the energy use is not wasted as it serves a useful function: to secure the network. They would further argue that this is at least as legitimate as many uses of energy that we accept but could considered to be a waste. The entire advertising industry, most travel, most television shows, etc. could easily be considered to be a frivolous waste of Earth's resources. Many would say the same of the entire military-industrial complex. I don't know if bitcoin will ever become a globally useful asset that justifies the required energy consumption, but if one is prepared to shut down bitcoin on this basis, then one must also be prepared to shut down many industries that we currently take for granted.

Bitcoin advocates would further argue that it actually creates an incentive for development of clean, cheap energy generation, and for using generated energy that would otherwise be unused, and therefore definitely wasted. I haven't explored these topics in depth, but there's at least prima facie evidence that there's some merit to these arguments (see for example: https://assets.ctfassets.net/2d5q1td6cyxq/5mRjc9X5LTXFFihIlTt7QK/e7bcba47217b60423a01a357e036105e/BCEI_White_Paper.pdf).

That said, the crypto industry broadly speaking is unquestionably rife with fraudsters and phony get-rich quick schemes.

Re: But does it actually save time?

Hah, that's hilarious! It never entered my mind that someone would take it this way. I purposely used a woman in the example to avoid the impression of police profiling, not to imply female drivers are any worse than men. As far as I'm aware, there's no significant difference in male vs female driver quality as measured by accident rates per mile driven.

Amazing how people automatically assume they know what other people are thinking, even when they have no clue.

Re: The perfect Password

From a pedantic point of view you are correct, but you are using the term "guess" in the sense of a random selection. I am using the term to denote using some knowledge about a person to make an educated guess about what a password might be. A very simple example might be someone using their child's birthday as a password. My password-manager generated passwords have no bearing to me, anyone related to me, or anything I might dream up using my imagination. Yes, one could still "guess" one of those passwords, but the odds of doing so would be far worse than winning the powerbowl jackpot. From a practical point of view, they are impossible to guess.

Incidentally, another benefit of using a password manager is when dealing with those annoying but mandatory "security questions", which do nothing but weaken security. For those, I use more password-manager generated passwords. That way, I don't have to worry about people who might know my mother's maiden name, etc., getting access to my accounts.

Re: Second Deadbolt on the Front Door

Well, it helps for those with easily solvable security questions, and for those with passwords such as "Pa55word".