Would you be able to execute this person yourself?
Yes.
Why? Because I'm old enough to understand that some people just need to be put down. We put down rabid dogs, frankly there are humans who are no better.
Do I think that should be done often? No, but there are times and cases when the criminal clearly understands that he/she was committing crimes and hurting people, that he/she was abusing the system for personal gain and didn't care who they hurt.
Such people tend to be sociopaths, they don't care about others, they don't care who they hurt, so long as they can do whatever they want.
My moral views do not prevent me from shooting such a person in the head, frankly we're doing them a favor and doing society a favor.
I know that isn't a widely popular view, many people these days believe that all humans are special and deserve to be bent over backwards for... but I disagree. Some people are winners, some people are losers, and some people are sociopaths who need to be shot in the head.
But don't think that I believe in harsh law and order enforcement, I think the war on drugs is stupid. Most people in jail for using drugs should be let out tomorrow, most drugs should be, at least, decriminalized. 30 year prison sentences are stupid, it costs us all a ton of money, just to warehouse a human, which is more evil than shooting them would be.
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BTW, do I think I'm wise enough to know all the right answers for this? No, I do not. Do I think I should have the final say? No, I do not. But you asked if I could execute such a person. The answer is yes, I have no moral issues with it, and it would save us all a ton of money by not warehousing him for 18 years, then letting him out with a record that will make honest employment almost impossible and with no useful skills anyway.
You can't fine the man enough money, he can't pay it. Even if you took all his current money and gave it to his victims, it would be pennies on the dollar.
What then, a slap on the wrist? Heck, if I could figure out how to steal $10 million dollars in a non-violent way and you'd only want to send me to jail for 6 months, sign me up.
Which of course is exactly why we don't do that, people would take that risk in huge numbers.
I don't suggest locking him up forever, I suggest executing him. He has caused more harm to society than he can ever repay, he clearly is beyond redemption, he knew what he was doing and didn't care.
Frankly, considering the economic damage he did, the thousands (if not millions) of people he screwed over and caused pain and suffering to, the time wasted to clean up his mess...
18 years is quite small, I'd have no problem with executing him. If people who commit crimes behind computer keyboards were actually punished more often, we might have less of it. As it is, the fraud and abuse online are really more like the wild west than the 21st century.
The link between CO2 and global warming is even better documented.
Actually, I completely and totally disagree with you here, the link is fragile at best. It will be awhile before any link is remotely documented well enough to pass the court of law test.
That being said, the risks of burning all that CO2 and finding out that it is bad is high, so I'm willing to be a bit preemptive and cut it back, even without a real link between the two.
After all, by the time we have real evidence, it may well be too late to do anything about it. Better not chance destroying our only place to live.
But frankly, just taxing people is not the solution.
While the harm that is inflicted specifically on me from one particular car is too small to count in a court of law, nothing stops me from using democracy to handle the compensation in aggregate.
That is true, and nothing stops me from doing the same to stop you.
It does not matter where the money goes. It is a separate problem.
Except... if you don't use all the "new money" to fix the problem, then what is the point in doing it?
That was my point about the money grab comment, if you don't actually want to fix the dent, then it comes across as money envy... and you'll find you get a lot less support for that...
Perhaps, but first we have to figure out what the damage it, how much it should cost, and where should the money go.
Otherwise it just becomes a money grab and the cause is damaged because of it.
I'm actually on-board with the whole idea of cutting fossil fuel consumption, the question is, how do we go about it?
Personally? I think building a hundred new nuclear reactors is a really good start, but a lot of people disagree with that. Mostly people who think with emotions rather than with the facts.
However, if we burned all of those fossil fuels over 1000 years it would not be as bad as if we do it over 100 years.
This is the part I disagree with. Frankly, I think it makes zero difference to humanity if we do it in 100 years or 1,000 years, the result will be just as horrible and life changing to everyone here.
Will life go on? Yes
Will Earth itself care? No
Will human beings care? Yes
The problem is that humans tend to think and make decisions in human timescales, without taking into account that Earth does not work in human timescales, both in terms of harm and healing. We may already be past the point of no return and not even know it, because we think 50 years is a lot time (it isn't, from Earth's point of view).
A change of 3 degrees over 1000 years is not nearly as catastrophic as a change over 50 years.
True, but a change of 30 degrees over either time period would be a disaster. If we burn all the fossil fuels in the ground, all the coal, oil, and natural gas, do you think the change will be limited to 3 degrees?
If so, heck, burn it all, go for it... we can all just move 200 miles north (and inland). It is the 30 degree change that has me worried... that we would be unlikely to survive.
Every bit we do to reduce it, does help.
This is technically true, an extra 200 gallons of fuel will take a 747 crossing the ocean just a bit further, but if it doesn't get you to land, does it matter?
If we cut our CO2 emissions by 5%, does it help? Sure... does it change the outcome within a reasonable period of time? No, it really doesn't.
But that works both ways. If we cut 99% of our CO2 emissions, does that change the outcome? Yes, it does. If we cut 94% of our CO2 emissions, does it change the outcome? Yes, it does.
We don't have to cut to zero, we simply have to cut to a sustainable number. But that number is much closer to 0 than what we're doing now, we probably do need to cut our CO2 emissions by 90%, and that is going to be very hard indeed. A "little bit" makes everyone feel good, but doesn't tackle the problem.
Think of it like the federal budget for the US. 4 things make up most of it... Social Security, Medicare, Defense, Welfare.
If you don't tackle those 4 big items, nothing you do to everything else matters. No amount of cuts to NASA or the CDC is going to change the outcome if you won't touch the big 4.
Likewise, if we don't address the big sources of pollution, no amount of small changes will help.
Coal fired power plants, gas powered cars, natural gas power... Deal with those 3 and you have a shot, but you have to make huge cuts, not baby steps, or you will be outpaced by the growth in power demand.
Someone posted the other day that 17 new solar panels are installed every day in the US. Great, but solar power is 0.17% of our total power produced. We continue to build new coal power plants. Until you actually stop building new ones, you're just pissing in the wind.
While I completely agree with you in principle, in practice it isn't so clear cut.
The average person doesn't understand most things, and tends to vote with their heart and wallet first, both are really poor ways to do it.
The flip side is you end up with a dictatorship where someone else "decides for you", which isn't actually bad when they actually care about you, but REALLY sucks when they don't.
There have been kings (and queens) throughout history who actually did care about their people. And there have been just as many who were horrible beyond belief.
I have no easy answers... but what I will say is that the "will of the people" can easily be "two wolves and a sheep voting on dinner".
This is no joke. While working at a DOE energy lab, one of my coworkers was riding his motorcycle and put into a vegetative state when a teenage girl was texting and plowed into his motorcycle at speed with her SUV.
Not trying to be cruel, but frankly the SUV did its job, and it simply proves the point as to why I'll never ride a motorcycle.
I have 3 kids, when they reach driving age, they'll be in trucks, regardless of their cost. No amount of carbon taxes will change that. Hopefully they'll be electric trucks with power produced from non-carbon fuel sources.
For what it's worth, my standard on what sized vehicle is in any way justified is the amount of stuff it carries on a regular basis
On that basis of justification, almost nothing in our world is "justified". We don't need any TVs, any computers, or any airplanes. We could revert back to a 19th century style of farm life and be just fine.
Once you move beyond just living to be alive and spending all your time and energy looking for food, then it ALL becomes "want".
I totally believe that CO2 emissions matter, there is no future in the burning of dead dinos. If you have read my other posts on the subject, I'm totally on board with electric cars, clearly it is the future. GM doesn't make an all electric Suburban, or even a "Volt technology" type Suburban. If they did, for a reasonable price, I'd be all over it.
Carbon taxes don't help, because they don't actually cause people who can afford $60K trucks to change their behavior (I can afford gas prices doubling), but what they do is crush the poor who can't afford double gas prices for even small cars.
The problem with that idea is that it implies that any actions that I take will change anything about the course of human events.
I could drive my big truck, or not, won't change anything. If you want to change things, then you have to change the rules of society.
It is worth keeping in mind that if we put carbon taxes into place and double the price of fuel, it won't change what I drive, for two reasons. First, I can afford that, second, I actually use the space and abilities of my truck, so a smaller car won't work for me. What you WILL do is hurt the poor, who have no extra money to pay double the fuel prices, even for their small cars.
You can drive anything you want, as long as you compensate society for the harm it causes.
The trick, of course, is to figure out what that "harm" is, and what the "compensation should be.
Giving you money because I pollute doesn't remove the pollution. If it did, I'd perhaps not mind so much.
If our government was actually dependable in keeping pots of money separate, and could create a carbon reducing pot of money that ONLY reduced carbon and didn't mix with general funds, then I'd be more supportive of such a program.
I'm in Texas, they say "The Texas Lotto supports Texas Education".
Well, it does, all the funds from the Lotto do go to generation education, but the funds that the state tax revenue that used to go there were diverted somewhere else, so no net change to education.
I disagree. I don't think it's all or nothing. If it were, you would be implying we would have to eliminate all forest fires too as it's essentially the same thing as burning fossil fuels.
No, you're thinking of it wrong... current forests and current fires are just recycling.
Burning dead dinos (and dead forests) are 1,000 generations of CO2 storage that was created over a very long period of time.
Releasing all the CO2 trapped by forests over a few years would be bad, but not the end of the world. Releasing all the CO2 trapped by 1,000 Earth's in a few years? Massively destructive.
100 million years of trapped CO2 is being released in just a few hundred years. We can't grow enough trees to counter that.
Sometimes it does, and sometimes it makes no difference whatsoever...
There are things in life that are all or nothing, this is one of them. Either we stop burning coal, oil, and gas, or we don't. Burn them in 20 years, 50 years, or 200 years, if we keep burning them, we'll burn them all.
It is like flying across the ocean in a plane, saying that a little bit of extra fuel helps only if it gets you to the land on the other side. If you run out of fuel 50 miles from shore, is that any better than running out 200 miles from shore?
You either do it right or you don't take off. Same thing here with burning stuff, either we stop, or we don't, there is no halfway.
When we don't want to burn fossil fuel, and turn to Nuke, we end up having radioactive waste that can last very very long time.
Yes, but that can be reprocessed and reduced down to almost nothing, and what is left can be placed in double sealed barrels, stored on 6 foot thick concrete platforms raised 20 feet in the air, monitored by video cameras 24/7 posted online so everyone in the world can see they aren't leaking (and scream very loudly if they are).
Stick the barrels out in the middle of the West Texas desert and no one will bother them for 10,000 years.
You can't do that with CO2 and other crap released from burning dead dinos.
Even if a nickle costs 6 cents to make, it gets used over and over again without incurring any further costs. There is a cost in compute power every time a bitcoin changes hands. Pollution created by mining gold doesn't have to be repeated over and over either, and there are practical useful applications for gold, between jewelry and electronic manufacturing.
Bitcoin has no actual practical utility. It is just an expensive, polluting way to come up with another pattern of 1s and 0s. The whole thing is, frankly, stupid. The idea of another currency is not, but the idea that the currency depends on massive amounts of compute power is stupid.
Besides, most money doesn't move via a physical nickle, it moves in 1s and 0s in computers. The cost to do that is almost zero in terms of power (and far less than to move bitcoin around).
Let me try another approach. If you use power to produce bitcoin, then you're adding to the CO2 in the atmosphere, all to create fancy 1s and 0s. Even if your power comes from wind or hydro, that power could have instead been used to offset coal, so ultimately since we have a fixed amount of clean power, you're polluting by mining bitcoin.
Bitcoin, the ultimate dirty, unclean, polluting, currency...
The fact electricity costs real money is one of the economic underpinnings of the currency.
It is irony that you use the term "real money" when talking about paying for electricity to create bitcoins.
What happens when the power company will accept payment in bitcoin? It becomes a circle jerk, you use the power from the electric company to produce more bitcoins than it costs.
Except, that is like saying you have to only pay $500 to buy a tree that grows $1,000. If everyone can do it, then money becomes worthless.
If everyone can't do it, then you have a lot of trees being grown just to produce money.
Oh, people/have/ talked about that since day one, and this objection has been pretty thoroughly debunked...
Eh? How so? None of the examples you provided have debunked it...
If Bitcoin were to take over for the US dollar, all your examples would become true about it.
The only difference? A huge amount of power would be consumed to verify bitcoin transfers and the chain would become very long indeed.
There is nothing special about 1s and 0s in a computer, Bitcoin's entire design is about how we can consume as many resources as possible to create them, when in truth they could be created out of thin air. (just like US Dollars are)
Slashdot Mirror
Would you be able to execute this person yourself?
Yes.
Why? Because I'm old enough to understand that some people just need to be put down. We put down rabid dogs, frankly there are humans who are no better.
Do I think that should be done often? No, but there are times and cases when the criminal clearly understands that he/she was committing crimes and hurting people, that he/she was abusing the system for personal gain and didn't care who they hurt.
Such people tend to be sociopaths, they don't care about others, they don't care who they hurt, so long as they can do whatever they want.
My moral views do not prevent me from shooting such a person in the head, frankly we're doing them a favor and doing society a favor.
I know that isn't a widely popular view, many people these days believe that all humans are special and deserve to be bent over backwards for... but I disagree. Some people are winners, some people are losers, and some people are sociopaths who need to be shot in the head.
But don't think that I believe in harsh law and order enforcement, I think the war on drugs is stupid. Most people in jail for using drugs should be let out tomorrow, most drugs should be, at least, decriminalized. 30 year prison sentences are stupid, it costs us all a ton of money, just to warehouse a human, which is more evil than shooting them would be.
------
BTW, do I think I'm wise enough to know all the right answers for this? No, I do not. Do I think I should have the final say? No, I do not. But you asked if I could execute such a person. The answer is yes, I have no moral issues with it, and it would save us all a ton of money by not warehousing him for 18 years, then letting him out with a record that will make honest employment almost impossible and with no useful skills anyway.
You can't fine the man enough money, he can't pay it. Even if you took all his current money and gave it to his victims, it would be pennies on the dollar.
What then, a slap on the wrist? Heck, if I could figure out how to steal $10 million dollars in a non-violent way and you'd only want to send me to jail for 6 months, sign me up.
Which of course is exactly why we don't do that, people would take that risk in huge numbers.
I don't suggest locking him up forever, I suggest executing him. He has caused more harm to society than he can ever repay, he clearly is beyond redemption, he knew what he was doing and didn't care.
So shoot him in the head and move on with life.
18 years is quite small, I'd have no problem with executing him. If people who commit crimes behind computer keyboards were actually punished more often, we might have less of it. As it is, the fraud and abuse online are really more like the wild west than the 21st century.
The link between CO2 and global warming is even better documented.
Actually, I completely and totally disagree with you here, the link is fragile at best. It will be awhile before any link is remotely documented well enough to pass the court of law test.
That being said, the risks of burning all that CO2 and finding out that it is bad is high, so I'm willing to be a bit preemptive and cut it back, even without a real link between the two.
After all, by the time we have real evidence, it may well be too late to do anything about it. Better not chance destroying our only place to live.
But frankly, just taxing people is not the solution.
While the harm that is inflicted specifically on me from one particular car is too small to count in a court of law, nothing stops me from using democracy to handle the compensation in aggregate.
That is true, and nothing stops me from doing the same to stop you.
I am demanding rightful restitution for harm done.
To do that in a court of law, you generally have to be able to show damages.
In this case, the whole thing is still up for debate, so I don't believe you can actually prove damages, at least not to the extent required by law.
I hope I can get support for fair compensation of victims.
Except in this case, we're all victims... Paying you makes no sense when I breath the same air...
Even worse, you'd harm the economy without actually fixing anything...
If that money was exclusively used to install new solar power, I'd at least feel better about it, but from what you're saying, you just want cash.
I think you're polluting just as much if not more by supporting the banking infrastructure.
But that is the point you're missing... the banking infrastructure won't go away, even if bitcoin completely replaces the USD.
This is not some fantasy world where bitcoin is going to replace the banks and wall street. It is just another tool, not a new system.
So bitcoin will just add to the existing system, not replace it.
It does not matter where the money goes. It is a separate problem.
Except... if you don't use all the "new money" to fix the problem, then what is the point in doing it?
That was my point about the money grab comment, if you don't actually want to fix the dent, then it comes across as money envy... and you'll find you get a lot less support for that...
A business has to be profitable to be sustainable and to serve large number of customers.
In general, you're correct... what happens when machines make everything? Who will the customers be?
Ever watch The Jetsons? George Jetson went to work every day to Spaceley Sprockets. His job? To press the big red start button for the robots.
That's it.
That day isn't here, it won't show up in 5 years. It may well show up in 50 years. Then what?
We need a new economic model to take into account what happens when obtaining employment for everyone is no longer the goal (or even possible)
Otherwise it just becomes a money grab and the cause is damaged because of it.
I'm actually on-board with the whole idea of cutting fossil fuel consumption, the question is, how do we go about it?
Personally? I think building a hundred new nuclear reactors is a really good start, but a lot of people disagree with that. Mostly people who think with emotions rather than with the facts.
However, if we burned all of those fossil fuels over 1000 years it would not be as bad as if we do it over 100 years.
This is the part I disagree with. Frankly, I think it makes zero difference to humanity if we do it in 100 years or 1,000 years, the result will be just as horrible and life changing to everyone here.
Will life go on? Yes
Will Earth itself care? No
Will human beings care? Yes
The problem is that humans tend to think and make decisions in human timescales, without taking into account that Earth does not work in human timescales, both in terms of harm and healing. We may already be past the point of no return and not even know it, because we think 50 years is a lot time (it isn't, from Earth's point of view).
A change of 3 degrees over 1000 years is not nearly as catastrophic as a change over 50 years.
True, but a change of 30 degrees over either time period would be a disaster. If we burn all the fossil fuels in the ground, all the coal, oil, and natural gas, do you think the change will be limited to 3 degrees?
If so, heck, burn it all, go for it... we can all just move 200 miles north (and inland). It is the 30 degree change that has me worried... that we would be unlikely to survive.
Every bit we do to reduce it, does help.
This is technically true, an extra 200 gallons of fuel will take a 747 crossing the ocean just a bit further, but if it doesn't get you to land, does it matter?
If we cut our CO2 emissions by 5%, does it help? Sure... does it change the outcome within a reasonable period of time? No, it really doesn't.
But that works both ways. If we cut 99% of our CO2 emissions, does that change the outcome? Yes, it does. If we cut 94% of our CO2 emissions, does it change the outcome? Yes, it does.
We don't have to cut to zero, we simply have to cut to a sustainable number. But that number is much closer to 0 than what we're doing now, we probably do need to cut our CO2 emissions by 90%, and that is going to be very hard indeed. A "little bit" makes everyone feel good, but doesn't tackle the problem.
Think of it like the federal budget for the US. 4 things make up most of it... Social Security, Medicare, Defense, Welfare.
If you don't tackle those 4 big items, nothing you do to everything else matters. No amount of cuts to NASA or the CDC is going to change the outcome if you won't touch the big 4.
Likewise, if we don't address the big sources of pollution, no amount of small changes will help.
Coal fired power plants, gas powered cars, natural gas power... Deal with those 3 and you have a shot, but you have to make huge cuts, not baby steps, or you will be outpaced by the growth in power demand.
Someone posted the other day that 17 new solar panels are installed every day in the US. Great, but solar power is 0.17% of our total power produced. We continue to build new coal power plants. Until you actually stop building new ones, you're just pissing in the wind.
The will of the people and all that.
While I completely agree with you in principle, in practice it isn't so clear cut.
The average person doesn't understand most things, and tends to vote with their heart and wallet first, both are really poor ways to do it.
The flip side is you end up with a dictatorship where someone else "decides for you", which isn't actually bad when they actually care about you, but REALLY sucks when they don't.
There have been kings (and queens) throughout history who actually did care about their people. And there have been just as many who were horrible beyond belief.
I have no easy answers... but what I will say is that the "will of the people" can easily be "two wolves and a sheep voting on dinner".
This is no joke. While working at a DOE energy lab, one of my coworkers was riding his motorcycle and put into a vegetative state when a teenage girl was texting and plowed into his motorcycle at speed with her SUV.
Not trying to be cruel, but frankly the SUV did its job, and it simply proves the point as to why I'll never ride a motorcycle.
I have 3 kids, when they reach driving age, they'll be in trucks, regardless of their cost. No amount of carbon taxes will change that. Hopefully they'll be electric trucks with power produced from non-carbon fuel sources.
For what it's worth, my standard on what sized vehicle is in any way justified is the amount of stuff it carries on a regular basis
On that basis of justification, almost nothing in our world is "justified". We don't need any TVs, any computers, or any airplanes. We could revert back to a 19th century style of farm life and be just fine.
Once you move beyond just living to be alive and spending all your time and energy looking for food, then it ALL becomes "want".
I totally believe that CO2 emissions matter, there is no future in the burning of dead dinos. If you have read my other posts on the subject, I'm totally on board with electric cars, clearly it is the future. GM doesn't make an all electric Suburban, or even a "Volt technology" type Suburban. If they did, for a reasonable price, I'd be all over it.
Carbon taxes don't help, because they don't actually cause people who can afford $60K trucks to change their behavior (I can afford gas prices doubling), but what they do is crush the poor who can't afford double gas prices for even small cars.
I could drive my big truck, or not, won't change anything. If you want to change things, then you have to change the rules of society.
It is worth keeping in mind that if we put carbon taxes into place and double the price of fuel, it won't change what I drive, for two reasons. First, I can afford that, second, I actually use the space and abilities of my truck, so a smaller car won't work for me. What you WILL do is hurt the poor, who have no extra money to pay double the fuel prices, even for their small cars.
You can drive anything you want, as long as you compensate society for the harm it causes.
The trick, of course, is to figure out what that "harm" is, and what the "compensation should be.
Giving you money because I pollute doesn't remove the pollution. If it did, I'd perhaps not mind so much.
If our government was actually dependable in keeping pots of money separate, and could create a carbon reducing pot of money that ONLY reduced carbon and didn't mix with general funds, then I'd be more supportive of such a program.
I'm in Texas, they say "The Texas Lotto supports Texas Education".
Well, it does, all the funds from the Lotto do go to generation education, but the funds that the state tax revenue that used to go there were diverted somewhere else, so no net change to education.
That's the problem...
I disagree. I don't think it's all or nothing. If it were, you would be implying we would have to eliminate all forest fires too as it's essentially the same thing as burning fossil fuels.
No, you're thinking of it wrong... current forests and current fires are just recycling.
Burning dead dinos (and dead forests) are 1,000 generations of CO2 storage that was created over a very long period of time.
Releasing all the CO2 trapped by forests over a few years would be bad, but not the end of the world. Releasing all the CO2 trapped by 1,000 Earth's in a few years? Massively destructive.
100 million years of trapped CO2 is being released in just a few hundred years. We can't grow enough trees to counter that.
We can discuss how quickly this needs to happen, but we need to agree that neither "tomorrow" nor "1,000 years from now" are acceptable answers.
I'm happy to agree that the above statement is correct.
We can't stop tomorrow, but we can't wait 1,000 years either.
All true, but you can't plant enough trees to absorb all the CO2 being released from 100 million years of dead dinos (and dead plants).
Every little bit helps though.
Sometimes it does, and sometimes it makes no difference whatsoever...
There are things in life that are all or nothing, this is one of them. Either we stop burning coal, oil, and gas, or we don't. Burn them in 20 years, 50 years, or 200 years, if we keep burning them, we'll burn them all.
It is like flying across the ocean in a plane, saying that a little bit of extra fuel helps only if it gets you to the land on the other side. If you run out of fuel 50 miles from shore, is that any better than running out 200 miles from shore?
You either do it right or you don't take off. Same thing here with burning stuff, either we stop, or we don't, there is no halfway.
I mean, do we need a VERY HEAVY VEHICLE, even if they are electrically driven, to get us from point A to point B ?
No, we don't "need" it, but frankly, we don't "need" almost anything in our modern world.
So we have to get past the "need" aspect and move on to "want".
My truck weighs 5,700lbs, or about 3 tons. You probably think that is insane. Maybe it is... but it is my right to own it because I like it...
When we don't want to burn fossil fuel, and turn to Nuke, we end up having radioactive waste that can last very very long time.
Yes, but that can be reprocessed and reduced down to almost nothing, and what is left can be placed in double sealed barrels, stored on 6 foot thick concrete platforms raised 20 feet in the air, monitored by video cameras 24/7 posted online so everyone in the world can see they aren't leaking (and scream very loudly if they are).
Stick the barrels out in the middle of the West Texas desert and no one will bother them for 10,000 years.
You can't do that with CO2 and other crap released from burning dead dinos.
Even if a nickle costs 6 cents to make, it gets used over and over again without incurring any further costs. There is a cost in compute power every time a bitcoin changes hands. Pollution created by mining gold doesn't have to be repeated over and over either, and there are practical useful applications for gold, between jewelry and electronic manufacturing.
Bitcoin has no actual practical utility. It is just an expensive, polluting way to come up with another pattern of 1s and 0s. The whole thing is, frankly, stupid. The idea of another currency is not, but the idea that the currency depends on massive amounts of compute power is stupid.
Besides, most money doesn't move via a physical nickle, it moves in 1s and 0s in computers. The cost to do that is almost zero in terms of power (and far less than to move bitcoin around).
Let me try another approach. If you use power to produce bitcoin, then you're adding to the CO2 in the atmosphere, all to create fancy 1s and 0s. Even if your power comes from wind or hydro, that power could have instead been used to offset coal, so ultimately since we have a fixed amount of clean power, you're polluting by mining bitcoin.
Bitcoin, the ultimate dirty, unclean, polluting, currency...
The fact electricity costs real money is one of the economic underpinnings of the currency.
It is irony that you use the term "real money" when talking about paying for electricity to create bitcoins.
What happens when the power company will accept payment in bitcoin? It becomes a circle jerk, you use the power from the electric company to produce more bitcoins than it costs.
Except, that is like saying you have to only pay $500 to buy a tree that grows $1,000. If everyone can do it, then money becomes worthless.
If everyone can't do it, then you have a lot of trees being grown just to produce money.
Oh, people /have/ talked about that since day one, and this objection has been pretty thoroughly debunked...
Eh? How so? None of the examples you provided have debunked it...
If Bitcoin were to take over for the US dollar, all your examples would become true about it.
The only difference? A huge amount of power would be consumed to verify bitcoin transfers and the chain would become very long indeed.
There is nothing special about 1s and 0s in a computer, Bitcoin's entire design is about how we can consume as many resources as possible to create them, when in truth they could be created out of thin air. (just like US Dollars are)