I don’t like it

It’s anti-tech propaganda. The same is happening with crypto. Certain groups don’t like it, so they try to convince the public that it is bad for the environment so it will be banned

This isn’t a good situation, but I also don’t like the idea that people should be banned from using energy how they want to. One could also make the case that video games or vibrators are not “valuable” uses of energy, but if the user paid for it, they should be allowed to use it.

Instead of moralizing we should enact a tax on carbon (like we have in Canada) equal to the amount of money it would take to remove that carbon. AI and crypto (& xboxes, vibrators, etc) would still exist, but only at levels where they are profitable in this environment.

Humanity:

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

I’m not a big fan of karma either, I definitely don’t want to see it baked into the core protocol. However with this implementation, it doesn’t seem to harmful as most users won’t have it.

I would also love to see some experimentation with different methods of assigning karma on the fediverse. The Community Notes algorithm from twitter is very interesting as it boosts answers that have support across many groups of users. It’s an attempt to encourage answers that reach across divides, instead of ones that foster echo chambers.

Let a million experimental flowers bloom!

This hasn’t been my experience

I wasn’t aware of the tipping controversy. That’s not a good look, but I don’t use their crypto features (apart from IPFS every once in a while).

No tech company is squeaky clean in 2024, and Brave’s baggage seems better than Chrome’s.

I use Brave an don’t understand the hate it gets. Seems like a good alternative to Chrome if you don’t like ads. Can someone fill me in on where the hate comes from?

Edit: The people downvoting this comment instead of having a discussion are really winning me over to their side /s

Awesome ideas!

Yup! EVs and renewables are broadly good things. Just wanted to give some added perspective :)

Just wanted to add some perspective. There’s a narrative lately that China is a champion of the green movement, which is absurd

I joined lemmy back in June but slowly returned to reddit. Now I’m back on lemmy because I’ve noticed the huge surge in political rage baiting (likely by bad actors) on reddit. Lemmy is just nicer!

It’s worth noting that this is not being done for environmental reasons (more half of all coal pollution comes from China), but for strategic reasons as China has limited access to oil near it’s borders.

This is less about malicious people and more about tragedy of the commons. Most people don’t want to see the environment destroyed, but are acting under their own incentives. If I cut down a tree it seems to makes a negligible different to the forest and my family gets to be warm that night. But if a million of us do it the forest is gone.

Multiply that by several generations and increasing power due to technology and we’re here now, still under the same incentives

This is the opinion of most macro economists today, but it’s not universally accepted. Macro-economics is not nearly as scientific as micro-economics, and some people will say that its models are just about who can tell the most convincing story (or the story that’s the most convenient for those in power)

There are some people who point out that things like electronics have been undergoing rapid deflation for decades and this has not caused people to stop purchasing them. The economy is a chaotic system and anyone who claims to be able to predict it’s outcomes is selling something

It’s strange to me that for a lot of people pro-natalism equals pro-capitalism. These are not opposites, in fact hyper-capitalism is likely a contributing factor to declining birth rates

It is possible to hold a left wing position and be concerned about the affects of declining population on our political stability