jkepler

Connect the public water utility to a bitcoin mining operation, with contractual rights to dial down/turn off the bitcoin mining and use that electricity as backup should the water treatment plant's other source of electricity fails. When they don't need the backup power it provides security to the bitcoin network, and when they do need it, its there.

You're correct that the Cedi has lost value compared with the US dollar while existing in a world where USD is one side if nearly every international business transaction.

However, look at the US dollar over longer durations against wheat [1], copper [2], gold[3], or Bitcoin [4]: the dollar buys significantly less than 10, 15, 40, or 100 years ago.

While the Cedi may be much weaker against the dollar, the dollar is loosing against real commodities/assets that can't simply be created by banker's fiat.

So, the dollar's the cleanest dirty shirt in the room. And Ghana just announced that they'd rather trade oil for a clean shirt (gold) rather than taking a dirty one.

[1] https://www.macrotrends.net/2534/wheat-prices-historical-cha...

[2] https://www.macrotrends.net/1476/copper-prices-historical-ch...

[3] https://goldprice.org/gold-price-charts/15-year-gold-price-h... / For 100 year chart, https://www.macrotrends.net/1333/historical-gold-prices-100-...

[4] https://www.xe.com/currencycharts/?from=USD&to=BTC&view=10Y

> China? They do too much contract manufacturing for America, and no one wants yen or a currency from a dictatorship.

Yen is Japanese currency; yuan is China's money.

Doesn't help that the US seems set on destroying the world's confidence in the US dollar: first the 2008 financial crises and monetary creation (I.e. devaluation) in response; then much more recently they hammered nails in the coffin of Breton Woods 2 (I.e. the post-1971 monetary status quo of floating fiat currencies) by confiscating the Afghan Central Bank's reserves (which included private individuals' deposits, and they gave the money to families of September 11th victims) and by freezing the assets of the Russian Central Bank. inter-Central Bank settlements were supposed to be apolitical. All that in the context of multiple hot wars (Iran in 2003 and then Libya, perhaps?) and military actions that appear to be in defense of US dollar dominance: https://bitcoinmagazine.com/culture/the-hidden-costs-of-the-....

Add to this that the US Federal government has conducted numerous hot wars to protect USD dominance. Remember when Saddam Hussain and then Kadafi in Libya each started selling dollars for euros? War. https://bitcoinmagazine.com/markets/petrodollar-deep-dive-wi...

But now the US is even destroying confidence in the dollar, through its confiscation of the Afgan central bank reserves (which included private citizens' deposit accounts) and distributing the money to families of Sept 11th victims; or freezing the Russian central bank reserves, even though the international settlement system was meant to be apolitical.

I had a basic Withings, not the Steel, and there was a lot I liked about it, particularly getting many months out of each battery, and the step counter being a dial from 0 to 50 to 100% of whatever target number of steps one set in the companion app.

But, for me, the lack of a second hand and backlighting or glow-in-the-dark hands & numbers, combined with the strong potential that my health data was being snooped on, convinced me to return to a traditional analog face wristwatch.

But I may look into the OP's original Casio - a sturdy watch with a barometer and compass built in, that would be handy.

Rather than reducing birth rates (which would mean less creative problem-solvers to care for the climate and the broader natural world and human cultures), in the long term we ought to increase energy production. Abundant affordable energy, produced sustainably, will help everyone, especially the poor.

To even pose the question of animal suffering is unique to humans. After all, it's only humans who create humane societies to advocate for animal welfare.

Why?

I don't know how others belief systems would explain that, but from a Christian perspective, humans aren't exactly the same as animals. We're like animals in that humans and animals are all creatures, and yet distinctly non-animal in that we're the only creatures made in the image of God, and given rule over all creature to promote the flourishing of life---human, animal, and plant---for God's glory. And the biblical story is that humans went so far off-course in rebellion against their Creator God that the Son of God had to become human, die, and rise again to restore our ability to care rightly for creation.

Thus, concerns to minimize animal suffering are uniquely human concerns because we /aren't/ animals, but human; and the concern itself is proof we're different from other animals.

2nd paragraph of the article states, "Employment insecurity and the rising cost of living are also taking a toll and expanding the profile of those at risk of homelessness. "

Yet, UBI would drive prices up more, as its simple monetary creation. Rising costs are part of the problem, let's not use UBI to make them rise faster.

(Unless of course one were to simultaneously destroy the same amount if money as the UBI from someone else's savings. But that amounts to theft---unmasking the real morality of UBI. And I've never heard UBI proponents argue that we should steal from the rich to fund it.)

Does anyone have a non-paywalled link to the journal article, rather than just a news story about it?

For nearly 10 years I used a compact netbook with an Intel Atom Z530 1.6 GHz and 1G RAM, a Nokia Booklet 3G. I swapped the HDD for an SDD, and given its fanless unibody aluminum design and its 10.1in 1280x720 screen, it was silent and useable for basic office computing and 720p video, with a full-sized HDMI out. Even with Debian I used to get 6 to 7 hours of battery life. I used it extensively for note taking, dabbling in Python, and writing. It was slow, but more reliable and less buggy than running Debian on my older MacBook Pro (which had hardly any battery life left). I used the Nokia Booklet until its motherboard died in 2018, and I still miss that little machine's compact simplicity and utility.

Lineage OS can often do WiFi only on old Androids.

But unless I'm mistaken, if a device only has 3G, and you want to travel with it away from WiFi, you can't even get 3G data on the device, as they shut off the 3G networks in the USA. Best you're gonna find in some rural areas may be 2G or 2.5G.

This, exactly. I have two ancient Nokia N900s that came out in 2009, runs a Debian variant natively and there's the Maemo Leste project that brings mainline Linux to the device (amazing!). However, is already useless as a phone in the USA. I also hear rumors European carriers will shutter their 3G networks soon; which is a shame. The hardware, while old and slow due to memory constraints, still works. I guess I should relegate it to being a small multimedia server in my apartment.

The planned obsolescence of today's mobile phones makes me sad.

Or its in reality TV.

You buy a digital claim to own a non-scarce jpeg, that anyone can copy, but only you can "own". Problem is, to enforce your ownership rights you are relying on the security of whatever the underlying block chain is.

And, we know that Ethereum has changed history in the past (DAO failure in 2016), and they can do it again anytime a majority of the stakeholders think it ought to be done.

I think rule-of-law property rights are more robust, or simply owning bitcoin, as its just a protocol without a group of people in change.

> ... when there isn’t place in the real world even for the largest one?

Uh, go visit El Salvador. Every MacDonalds, every Starbucks, and tons of local businesses accept "the largest one." That's because bitcoin stands apart, in terms of its real decentralization, and therefore its independence and utility. Give it time, and it will become far more useful than it already is. The dollar may eventually refer not to a specific weight of gold (that's what the term 'dollar' originally meant), but to a specific number of satoshis.

What about Windows 10 Enterprise LTSC ? I recently installed it in a Qubes to be able to run some specific database software until I can export the data to an open, libre database. My understanding was that LTSC didn't require an account or even an activation code, but I've been able to run a trial iso I downloaded directly from Microsoft.

And probably if one can still program lisp, one could write an escape vehicle for an alternate universe...

I was at a conference and 5 minutes into the plenary speaker's keynote address, his Windows 10 laptop that he was running his presentation slides from started an obligatory none-cancelable system upgrade. I don't think Microsoft scored any PR points there.

I've worked for a non-profit that is officially Microsoft Office based, and our policy manual say all field staff (who provide their own laptops/computer hardware) need to be able to interact with MS Office file formats. I and an number of colleagues I know have used LibreOffice for years without ever having incompatibility issues with MS Office; for me its been at least 10 years since I've had MS Office on any of my machines... I run Debian or an old ThinkPad, and Mac OS X with MacPorts.

If a project is actually decentralized, you can't simply fork the code to fork the community. In truly decentralized systems, the consensus rules define whether one is into the system or not.

The big problem here is that most of the systems in crypto are really startups run by a small group of founders. Very few of these projects are really decentralized.

> If bittorent was invented today you'd have to buy into some pyramid scheme to use it.

Bitcoin was effectively invented 'today', yet you don't have to buy into a pyramid scheme to use it.[1] For example, you could simply use it for cross-border remittance to avoid paying Western Union's high fees, without ever holding bitcoin, by using an app like Strike to send dollars from the US to El Salvador (using bitcoin's instantaneous lightning network as the payment rails behind the scenes)[2]. Or you could prove the existence of a digital document at a certain time by using Peter Todd's Open Timestamps[3], which simply puts a hash or your file into an Op Return on bitcoin's blockchain. Or, you could work on developing software or providing support or writing tutorials for the bisq protocol, get paid for your work with their bisq token (which is simply colored bitcoin), and cash out to have you national currency dumped in your bank account using the bisq software which has been developed and supported by a decentralized community with its governance built directly on bitcoin.[4]

If you really still think bitcoin is a pyramid scheme, there's plenty or ways one could benefit from it without having to "buy in" or hold it. But if you put in the time and learn, you'll discover bitcoin is innovative technology, distinctly separate from the crypto space awash with scams and rug-pulls, like the fiat world already is.

[1] https://www.lynalden.com/bitcoin-ponzi-scheme/

[2] https://strike.me/

[3] https://opentimestamps.org/

[4] https://bisq.network/

Don't attribute to malice what could simply be ignorance. Right now, people need to pit in some serious time (upwards of 100 hours minimum) learning about true decentralized open technologies like bitcoin, so I think uninformed ignorance is far more likely than malice in almost all cases... unless the uninformed person stands to profit from his or her ignorance.

I'm not sure Ethereum is anywhere near as decentralized and bitcoin, because the Ethereum foundation and the large stakeholders (now that they have the miners the boot) appear to wield a huge amount of power.

Pay a bit more annually to a reputable DNS company. For example, I initially whet with GoDaddy, until about ten years ago when I read that they were shutting down people's domains simply upon a "we're investigating thisbperson, kill their domain" letter from the US Marshals (a Federal police force). Around the same time I heard about easyDNS in Canada, and discovered that they will only ever seize one of their customer's domains if they receive proper papers from a court---i.e. a search warrant. I like that they're committed to rule of law rather than politically motivated deplatforming.

Thanks.

What are you referring to? Are Debian's default installations going to include the non-free repositories, which aren't officially part of Debian?

How does NixOS compare to running Debian Stable? I've never had problems with upgrades breaking things on Debian stable.

> It's fundamentally a problem of trust.

Absolutely. That's where bitcoin could help a new platform, as a decentralized trust protocol. The bisq.network protocol requires people to put up significant bonds to perform roles that are trusted, and then if they fail to perform well, they can loose some or all of their bond. The bisq token holders (bisq tokens are simply colored satoshis, i.e. they've built functional governance directly on bitcoin) vote monthly on various governance proposals, and can thus hold people doing bonded roles accountable.

The tough question is whether such a system could make to individual apartment rentals in the real world. Its an oracle question: how to you establish the truth of competing claimed about the state if an apartment? Not an easy problem to solve, but if its solveable it could provide an amazing new marketplace.

Does OpenBSD have any kind of cryptographically measured boot like Heads (which I believe can only boot to GNU/Linux)?