The problem is that you just swap one problem - different time zones for another one - not knowing the hours of operation of the place you're calling.
For example, if you ring someone in a different time-zone now, you can just ask what time it is there, e.g. it's 9am there but 10am where you are, and you immediately know they're 1 hour behind you and that office hours there are still "9 to 5".
However the "no time zones but everyone works different hours based on the sun" system would in fact be more confusing than having time zones. Then, if you ring someone they can't just say "it's 3am here" and you know you've rung at the wrong time. "3am" could be the middle of the afternoon there, or it could be the middle of the night, you have no way of working that out without additional information that the call hasn't provided. Instead of knowing the time offset of each place, you'd have to have a chart for every city for what is considered "work hours" there.
Some towns would be 9am-5pm. Some towns would work 9pm-5am. Some would work from 6pm-3am. Yeah, great, so we got rid of "timezones" so now it's the "same time" everywhere, except we've lost all additional layers of context for what a time of "5pm" actually means, which means we have to convey additional information on calls, not less.
You know, it's actually far more likely that this would have arisen if you'd restricted people from searching for pictures of females *who were not their friends* but didn't make the same restriction for males.
This could in fact be a feature intended to prevent harassment / stalking of women who haven't accepted you as a friend.
... is a chicken and egg question. Are mature games more likely to reduce your moral common sense, or are those lacking moral common sense more likely to be drawn to smutty games?
1) you need income support for the poor, or things go to bad to "Calcutta bad"
2) it costs a lot to make people jump through useless hoops - often double to triple the actual amount of money that's being given to them
If you cut (1) then you end up using PRISON to house a lot of the dirt poor people who suddenly have no money for food or rent. And putting one person in prison cost about 10 times as much as UBI would.
You can cut (2) (bullshit compliance bureaucracy) because those are policies that only make politicians look good, actually cost far more to administer than they payments alone, and they're proven time and time again to have virtually zero effect on unemployment rates. Axe the failed programs, and what you're left with is basically UBI.
For a good reason that if you let people starve there will be more crime. It makes business sense to make sure everyone has a basic standard.
Also, from the viewpoint of other workers, if there are more desperate people out there, that will drive your wage-value down. Spending some of your tax dollars to ensure that there is a basic safety net ends up increasing your own bargaining power.
There is a different way to look at this data. It's not a coherent argument to just say that UBI recipients didn't get jobs, when those recipients are drawn from a pool of people already receiving long-term unemployment benefits. First, those people aren't really a representative cross-section of society, since in a nation with full emploment,only a couple of % of all people are going to be on long-term unemployment benefits (aged or single-parent pensions, and the like, are different).
So, since these are long-term unemployed, it only makes sense to compare how they fared vs other long-term unemployed that you didn't include in the trial (a control group).
Here's the thing: making job seekers jump through hoops requires a large and complex bureaucracy just for that. And the Finland data shows that people who go through that are no more likely to get off long-term unemployment benefits than the UBI recipients are. This proves the current programs are a costly waste of time. Additionally, lower stress almost certainly means lower future health costs, and these save money for the taxpayer too.
UBI isn't going to make long-term unemployed magically get jobs, but it is a hell of a lot cheaper just to give out a payment and leave people alone than the current overly bureaucratic and expensive methods, which plainly don't work.
> But, what do you do with the significant number of people that, rather than spend their UBI on food, shelter and other necessities of life....they BLOW it on drugs or other bad choices?
But... that's their problem, not yours. It's not the job of other citizens to morally police how other people spend their money.
Another way to look at this is that people have *finite income*. If they get "free shit", then they're going to spend the rest of their money on other products. Spending a ton of money (taxpayer and corporate) on IP policing is just a drain on the economy, and less actual products get sold. Policing piracy doesn't mean people have more money to spend, since if they do buy your movie instead of streaming it for free, then now they have to not buy something else.
Therefore, the taxpayer should have *no part* in paying for copyright protection. It's robbing peter to pay paul, since any revenue gain for one company is revenue another company cannot earn. If a company's stuff is easily stolen, that's their problem, not the community / taxpayer's job to subsidize.
Note: "Sesame Credit" is the source of many of the details on these "social credit" stories.
The thing is, a "Sesame Credit" score on their platform is in no respect more "Orwellian" than whatever secret tracking Facebook, Google and Twitter and all other social media regularly do. which is actually better?
1) To be *explicitly* track and rated, in a system with clearly-defined rules.
2) To be *secretly* tracked and rated, but we pretend it's not happening and won't tell you the rules
"Chinese gamers face direct ‘social penalties’, such as lack of access to Visa schemes and dating sites... Buying games could potentially lower your ‘social credit’ in China by 2020 if a new government scheme gains traction. The Black Mirror style trial scheme discourages certain types of behaviour and can even penalise people for buying video games."
As much as I don't like the phrase, this text is absolutely "fake news" since there is no such plan for the Feds in China to monitor video game playing, or block people from dating sites:
https://www.bbc.com/news/world... "Someone who plays video games for 10 hours a day, for example, would be considered an idle person, and someone who frequently buys diapers would be considered as probably a parent, who on balance is more likely to have a sense of responsibility," Li Yingyun, Sesame's technology director told Caixin, a Chinese magazine, in February."
Note, these are ideas completely concocted by a private company Sesame, owned by Ali Baba fo their social-network score "Sesame Credit". If you score higher on Sesame Credit, then the company wants to do things like place you higher in search results on their platform-owned dating app. And you can score poorly for e.g. playing games ON the Sesame platform for 10 hours a day.
Note: this is completely different to the first article's claims that (1) buying games will (2) get you banned from dating apps due to (3) the Chinese government's social credit system. It's actually, if you (1) game too many hours per day on particular online platform you could be (2) down-rated on THEIR dating app due to (3) a scoring system unique to that company. It's nothing to do with the government, the social-credit system and doesn't in fact mention "banning" anyone from anything.
this is why the articles are junk, it takes very little research to prove them wrong. There are almost no sources you can trust to get the basic facts right here, no matter who you agree with.
Note: I missed mentioning this part because of an edit: but the original 2014 white paper in China about creating the system noted 4 categories of entities it would apply to. (1) government agencies / local governments (2) private corporations (3) courts and judicial and (4) individuals. All of these types of entities are supposed to be rated by those who interact with them. This is important context that you ideally should have if you want to make your own mind up about what the intent here is all about.
"Deadbeat debtors in North China's Hebei province will find it more difficult to abscond as the Higher People's Court of Hebei on Monday introduced a mini-program on WeChat targeting them. Called "a map of deadbeat debtors", the program allows users to find out whether there are any debtors within 500 meters."
First, this is a initiative by a local province, not "China". Second, it involves those who have defaulted on actual physical loans, and is completely unrelated to the "social credit" concept that the Chinese government is talking about. Additionally, many other things that are supposedly part of the social credit system, and reported as such in the West are actually privately designed and run things on Chinese social media sites run by Ali Baba and the like, and not actually ideas related to the social credit concept. (example: the thing where if you play a lot of MMOs you get rated lower on the dating apps: none of that has any connection to the Chinese government. The social media that collects the data and the dating app are both privately designed and run systems. It's like blaming the Feds for Facebook algorithms). Basically, 99% of the things that get reported as being part of the social credit concept aren't in fact part of anything run by the federal government in China. This is just a very poor l
While there are definitely questions to be answered, nobody is being well-informed about the issues if we keep getting bombarded with completely unconnected things and being told that they are "THE social credit system". The actual system proposal, from what I've read is was better translated as a "social trust system" in China since fraud is rampant and trust in local/federal government officials and private companies is rock bottom. The biggest penalties such as being blocked from luxury hotels and first-class flight were in fact proposed for company executives of companies that have breached the social credit system. The real story here, lost in the BS, is that China desperately wants to create a "trust culture" where people have faith in not only each other but government and companies. that basic trust is highly lacking, and that's really what this is all about. Doing business in China is much harder that it needs to be, because rampant fraud has led to a lack of trust. The *actual* social credit program seems more about creating a core of "trusted" entities, both public and private institutions.
Maybe the social credit ideas are completely misguided and the actual system will end up being abused and failing completely, but it really serves no purpose to get fed blatantly false headlines conflating unrelated things with the actual Chinese federal government's plans.
One important missing part of the story is how does the decision-making of algorithms fare against decision-making of humans?
Just like self-driving cars, the important thing for law enforcement AI isn't the absolute rate of errors in judgement, it's the relative rate of errors compared to humans making those decisions. Human decision making is far from perfect, so we shouldn't throw out algorithmic tools completely because they don't end up magically being correct 100% of the time. They just have to be at least 1% more consistent than we are to be of overall benefit. Remember, the goal here is to *reduce* the prison population through the use of AI. Less people will end up in prison due to the algorithms than would otherwise be there. Sure, it will make some mistakes, but overall, less people will be in prison compared to the human-judgement based system, because that is the metric the AIs are being trained to improve. If the prison population drops by 30% due to AI optimization, then that means a LOT less black people in prison, so even if the percentage error rate was a bit higher, less black people would be negatively impacted.
Because the algorithm finds correlates to explain the data, and it always takes the "path of least resistance".
For example, say that women weren't hired as often because women tend to lack the necessary job experience more often than men. Then, the algorithm is looking for the *simplest possible* variable that correlates with that decision, so it notices otherwise irrelevant terms like "women's" or that successful candidates are more likely to use "masculine words". Those female candidates weren't rejected *because* of those word-selections, but because they tended to have less experience, but the algorithm isn't smart enough to understand that, so it glomps on b.s. word choices as a deciding factor.
For example, say that more successful candidates were more likely to wear good shoe brands, so your algorithm decides that choice of shoes should be a factor in hiring, because it's just that much easier for the algorithm to pick that signal out of the noise of the data you've fed into it. The original hirers didn't actually give a toss what shoes you wore, it's just that more successful people could afford better shoes to start with, but the algorithm hones in on "only hire nice-shoe-people" as if it's important. This is one of the problems with machine learning. It learns the "what" and not the "why" behind data correlations.
Well, no, it's a perfectly sensible thing to worry about. For example in Communist China, Mao encouraged everyone to wipe out sparrows because sparrows are a filthy nuisance and they eat crop seeds. So they did that, a government-driven program to eliminate sparrows. Yay, no more sparrows mucking the place up. Except, it turned out that sparrow ate a lot more insects than they did seeds, and after that China started to be beset with locust plagues which actually did wreck agriculture and millions starved to death. They then had to go over to Russia and buy sparrows to breed up and release in China to replace them.
No that's silly. The amount of energy used to mine bitcoins won't exceed the market value of the coins, otherwise people will be going broke by mining it, thus forcing themselves out of the mining market. Do you really think the value of the coins mined account for 0.5% of world GDP?
Sure, but the server time has intinsic value, so the value of Ethereum won't drop below the market-value of the server time it's equivalent to. If it does, then anyone needing the server time benefits from buying Ethereum. So there's a natural pricing floor for Ethereum in a way that Bitcoin doesn't offer.
In fact, if a story omits all mention of race, almost all the time you can conclude the criminal was white, otherwise race would have been mentioned. Attempts at uniform reporting isn't the bias here, it's that race is only mentioned at all when the person isn't white.
It's also counter to common sense. if a white person does something, their race is rarely mentioned at all. "Florida Man" is the meme, not "Florida White Man". If a story doesn't mention race, and you find out the person is black, that's not "Media Code Words" it's just having fair standards for reporting, but people get upset because they've become *used* to race being mentioned in, and only in, stories where the person isn't white.
Not to knock western journalism, but articles in the foreign press are saying Maduro was saying that the Petro will be used as an internal token of accounting within the state oil company. So, plenty of articles if you look it up state it wasn't *intended* to be traded to the public. The new Bolivar is pegged against the petro. It's still a clusterfuck, but the level of fact checking on Venezuela stuff is actually really poor.
> If the price of a cryptocurrency goes up, more energy will be used in mining it; if it goes down, less energy will be used
Block difficulty is already used to self-regulate the timing of blocks. Difficulty correlates with energy use, and it's a proxy for the market value of the coins themselves. So if the effective difficulty is double, that means the value of the block reward in $USD is roughly double, tracking the energy needed.
This suggests an interesting secondary regulation level - the block reward could be inversely proportional to the difficulty. What this would mean is that if the energy needs double then the coins per block halves, so the total $USD value of each block is always about the same.
The layers of regulation therefore would then work like this: as the coin value increased, mining becomes more profitable, and more people mine. This then causes blocks to be generated too fast. So, the block difficulty is raised. However, the new part here is that the block reward also drops now, so that profitability drops as well. That means miners reduce their amount of mining (or inefficient miners are pushed out of the market). This then slows block production, so the difficulty is lowered again, erasing the energy-sucking effect of the coin price spike. With the right parameters, such a system would head towards equilibrium with a fairly predictable amount of power usage no matter what price the coins hit.
Slashdot Mirror
The problem is that you just swap one problem - different time zones for another one - not knowing the hours of operation of the place you're calling.
For example, if you ring someone in a different time-zone now, you can just ask what time it is there, e.g. it's 9am there but 10am where you are, and you immediately know they're 1 hour behind you and that office hours there are still "9 to 5".
However the "no time zones but everyone works different hours based on the sun" system would in fact be more confusing than having time zones. Then, if you ring someone they can't just say "it's 3am here" and you know you've rung at the wrong time. "3am" could be the middle of the afternoon there, or it could be the middle of the night, you have no way of working that out without additional information that the call hasn't provided. Instead of knowing the time offset of each place, you'd have to have a chart for every city for what is considered "work hours" there.
Some towns would be 9am-5pm. Some towns would work 9pm-5am. Some would work from 6pm-3am. Yeah, great, so we got rid of "timezones" so now it's the "same time" everywhere, except we've lost all additional layers of context for what a time of "5pm" actually means, which means we have to convey additional information on calls, not less.
You know, it's actually far more likely that this would have arisen if you'd restricted people from searching for pictures of females *who were not their friends* but didn't make the same restriction for males.
This could in fact be a feature intended to prevent harassment / stalking of women who haven't accepted you as a friend.
... is a chicken and egg question. Are mature games more likely to reduce your moral common sense, or are those lacking moral common sense more likely to be drawn to smutty games?
Main points:
1) you need income support for the poor, or things go to bad to "Calcutta bad"
2) it costs a lot to make people jump through useless hoops - often double to triple the actual amount of money that's being given to them
If you cut (1) then you end up using PRISON to house a lot of the dirt poor people who suddenly have no money for food or rent. And putting one person in prison cost about 10 times as much as UBI would.
You can cut (2) (bullshit compliance bureaucracy) because those are policies that only make politicians look good, actually cost far more to administer than they payments alone, and they're proven time and time again to have virtually zero effect on unemployment rates. Axe the failed programs, and what you're left with is basically UBI.
For a good reason that if you let people starve there will be more crime. It makes business sense to make sure everyone has a basic standard.
Also, from the viewpoint of other workers, if there are more desperate people out there, that will drive your wage-value down. Spending some of your tax dollars to ensure that there is a basic safety net ends up increasing your own bargaining power.
There is a different way to look at this data. It's not a coherent argument to just say that UBI recipients didn't get jobs, when those recipients are drawn from a pool of people already receiving long-term unemployment benefits. First, those people aren't really a representative cross-section of society, since in a nation with full emploment ,only a couple of % of all people are going to be on long-term unemployment benefits (aged or single-parent pensions, and the like, are different).
So, since these are long-term unemployed, it only makes sense to compare how they fared vs other long-term unemployed that you didn't include in the trial (a control group).
Here's the thing: making job seekers jump through hoops requires a large and complex bureaucracy just for that. And the Finland data shows that people who go through that are no more likely to get off long-term unemployment benefits than the UBI recipients are. This proves the current programs are a costly waste of time. Additionally, lower stress almost certainly means lower future health costs, and these save money for the taxpayer too.
UBI isn't going to make long-term unemployed magically get jobs, but it is a hell of a lot cheaper just to give out a payment and leave people alone than the current overly bureaucratic and expensive methods, which plainly don't work.
> But, what do you do with the significant number of people that, rather than spend their UBI on food, shelter and other necessities of life....they BLOW it on drugs or other bad choices?
But ... that's their problem, not yours. It's not the job of other citizens to morally police how other people spend their money.
You obviously skipped the classes on being a decent human being however.
Another way to look at this is that people have *finite income*. If they get "free shit", then they're going to spend the rest of their money on other products. Spending a ton of money (taxpayer and corporate) on IP policing is just a drain on the economy, and less actual products get sold. Policing piracy doesn't mean people have more money to spend, since if they do buy your movie instead of streaming it for free, then now they have to not buy something else.
Therefore, the taxpayer should have *no part* in paying for copyright protection. It's robbing peter to pay paul, since any revenue gain for one company is revenue another company cannot earn. If a company's stuff is easily stolen, that's their problem, not the community / taxpayer's job to subsidize.
Note: "Sesame Credit" is the source of many of the details on these "social credit" stories.
The thing is, a "Sesame Credit" score on their platform is in no respect more "Orwellian" than whatever secret tracking Facebook, Google and Twitter and all other social media regularly do. which is actually better?
1) To be *explicitly* track and rated, in a system with clearly-defined rules.
2) To be *secretly* tracked and rated, but we pretend it's not happening and won't tell you the rules
Here's the source on that. Here's the "scare version" in the Western media:
https://www.gamesradar.com/min...
"Chinese gamers face direct ‘social penalties’, such as lack of access to Visa schemes and dating sites ... Buying games could potentially lower your ‘social credit’ in China by 2020 if a new government scheme gains traction. The Black Mirror style trial scheme discourages certain types of behaviour and can even penalise people for buying video games."
As much as I don't like the phrase, this text is absolutely "fake news" since there is no such plan for the Feds in China to monitor video game playing, or block people from dating sites:
https://www.bbc.com/news/world...
"Someone who plays video games for 10 hours a day, for example, would be considered an idle person, and someone who frequently buys diapers would be considered as probably a parent, who on balance is more likely to have a sense of responsibility," Li Yingyun, Sesame's technology director told Caixin, a Chinese magazine, in February."
Note, these are ideas completely concocted by a private company Sesame, owned by Ali Baba fo their social-network score "Sesame Credit". If you score higher on Sesame Credit, then the company wants to do things like place you higher in search results on their platform-owned dating app. And you can score poorly for e.g. playing games ON the Sesame platform for 10 hours a day.
Note: this is completely different to the first article's claims that (1) buying games will (2) get you banned from dating apps due to (3) the Chinese government's social credit system. It's actually, if you (1) game too many hours per day on particular online platform you could be (2) down-rated on THEIR dating app due to (3) a scoring system unique to that company. It's nothing to do with the government, the social-credit system and doesn't in fact mention "banning" anyone from anything.
this is why the articles are junk, it takes very little research to prove them wrong. There are almost no sources you can trust to get the basic facts right here, no matter who you agree with.
Note: I missed mentioning this part because of an edit: but the original 2014 white paper in China about creating the system noted 4 categories of entities it would apply to. (1) government agencies / local governments (2) private corporations (3) courts and judicial and (4) individuals. All of these types of entities are supposed to be rated by those who interact with them. This is important context that you ideally should have if you want to make your own mind up about what the intent here is all about.
There are a number of articles pointing out that the coverage of this stuff is full of holes. Here's the actual article:
http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/a...
"Deadbeat debtors in North China's Hebei province will find it more difficult to abscond as the Higher People's Court of Hebei on Monday introduced a mini-program on WeChat targeting them. Called "a map of deadbeat debtors", the program allows users to find out whether there are any debtors within 500 meters."
First, this is a initiative by a local province, not "China". Second, it involves those who have defaulted on actual physical loans, and is completely unrelated to the "social credit" concept that the Chinese government is talking about. Additionally, many other things that are supposedly part of the social credit system, and reported as such in the West are actually privately designed and run things on Chinese social media sites run by Ali Baba and the like, and not actually ideas related to the social credit concept. (example: the thing where if you play a lot of MMOs you get rated lower on the dating apps: none of that has any connection to the Chinese government. The social media that collects the data and the dating app are both privately designed and run systems. It's like blaming the Feds for Facebook algorithms). Basically, 99% of the things that get reported as being part of the social credit concept aren't in fact part of anything run by the federal government in China. This is just a very poor l
While there are definitely questions to be answered, nobody is being well-informed about the issues if we keep getting bombarded with completely unconnected things and being told that they are "THE social credit system". The actual system proposal, from what I've read is was better translated as a "social trust system" in China since fraud is rampant and trust in local/federal government officials and private companies is rock bottom. The biggest penalties such as being blocked from luxury hotels and first-class flight were in fact proposed for company executives of companies that have breached the social credit system. The real story here, lost in the BS, is that China desperately wants to create a "trust culture" where people have faith in not only each other but government and companies. that basic trust is highly lacking, and that's really what this is all about. Doing business in China is much harder that it needs to be, because rampant fraud has led to a lack of trust. The *actual* social credit program seems more about creating a core of "trusted" entities, both public and private institutions.
Maybe the social credit ideas are completely misguided and the actual system will end up being abused and failing completely, but it really serves no purpose to get fed blatantly false headlines conflating unrelated things with the actual Chinese federal government's plans.
One important missing part of the story is how does the decision-making of algorithms fare against decision-making of humans?
Just like self-driving cars, the important thing for law enforcement AI isn't the absolute rate of errors in judgement, it's the relative rate of errors compared to humans making those decisions. Human decision making is far from perfect, so we shouldn't throw out algorithmic tools completely because they don't end up magically being correct 100% of the time. They just have to be at least 1% more consistent than we are to be of overall benefit. Remember, the goal here is to *reduce* the prison population through the use of AI. Less people will end up in prison due to the algorithms than would otherwise be there. Sure, it will make some mistakes, but overall, less people will be in prison compared to the human-judgement based system, because that is the metric the AIs are being trained to improve. If the prison population drops by 30% due to AI optimization, then that means a LOT less black people in prison, so even if the percentage error rate was a bit higher, less black people would be negatively impacted.
Because the algorithm finds correlates to explain the data, and it always takes the "path of least resistance".
For example, say that women weren't hired as often because women tend to lack the necessary job experience more often than men. Then, the algorithm is looking for the *simplest possible* variable that correlates with that decision, so it notices otherwise irrelevant terms like "women's" or that successful candidates are more likely to use "masculine words". Those female candidates weren't rejected *because* of those word-selections, but because they tended to have less experience, but the algorithm isn't smart enough to understand that, so it glomps on b.s. word choices as a deciding factor.
For example, say that more successful candidates were more likely to wear good shoe brands, so your algorithm decides that choice of shoes should be a factor in hiring, because it's just that much easier for the algorithm to pick that signal out of the noise of the data you've fed into it. The original hirers didn't actually give a toss what shoes you wore, it's just that more successful people could afford better shoes to start with, but the algorithm hones in on "only hire nice-shoe-people" as if it's important. This is one of the problems with machine learning. It learns the "what" and not the "why" behind data correlations.
Well then we need randomized fonts that select one of a range of letter styles for each word.
The internet doesn't want to hear this stuff, Nintendo, when you haven't even commented yet on the great job we did with Bowsette.
Well, no, it's a perfectly sensible thing to worry about. For example in Communist China, Mao encouraged everyone to wipe out sparrows because sparrows are a filthy nuisance and they eat crop seeds. So they did that, a government-driven program to eliminate sparrows. Yay, no more sparrows mucking the place up. Except, it turned out that sparrow ate a lot more insects than they did seeds, and after that China started to be beset with locust plagues which actually did wreck agriculture and millions starved to death. They then had to go over to Russia and buy sparrows to breed up and release in China to replace them.
Food chains are in fact pretty delicate things.
No that's silly. The amount of energy used to mine bitcoins won't exceed the market value of the coins, otherwise people will be going broke by mining it, thus forcing themselves out of the mining market. Do you really think the value of the coins mined account for 0.5% of world GDP?
They only get to decide between permanent summer or winter time, they don't get to keep the daylight savings system.
Sure, but the server time has intinsic value, so the value of Ethereum won't drop below the market-value of the server time it's equivalent to. If it does, then anyone needing the server time benefits from buying Ethereum. So there's a natural pricing floor for Ethereum in a way that Bitcoin doesn't offer.
In fact, if a story omits all mention of race, almost all the time you can conclude the criminal was white, otherwise race would have been mentioned. Attempts at uniform reporting isn't the bias here, it's that race is only mentioned at all when the person isn't white.
Yes to this.
It's also counter to common sense. if a white person does something, their race is rarely mentioned at all. "Florida Man" is the meme, not "Florida White Man". If a story doesn't mention race, and you find out the person is black, that's not "Media Code Words" it's just having fair standards for reporting, but people get upset because they've become *used* to race being mentioned in, and only in, stories where the person isn't white.
Not to knock western journalism, but articles in the foreign press are saying Maduro was saying that the Petro will be used as an internal token of accounting within the state oil company. So, plenty of articles if you look it up state it wasn't *intended* to be traded to the public. The new Bolivar is pegged against the petro. It's still a clusterfuck, but the level of fact checking on Venezuela stuff is actually really poor.
> If the price of a cryptocurrency goes up, more energy will be used in mining it; if it goes down, less energy will be used
Block difficulty is already used to self-regulate the timing of blocks. Difficulty correlates with energy use, and it's a proxy for the market value of the coins themselves. So if the effective difficulty is double, that means the value of the block reward in $USD is roughly double, tracking the energy needed.
This suggests an interesting secondary regulation level - the block reward could be inversely proportional to the difficulty. What this would mean is that if the energy needs double then the coins per block halves, so the total $USD value of each block is always about the same.
The layers of regulation therefore would then work like this: as the coin value increased, mining becomes more profitable, and more people mine. This then causes blocks to be generated too fast. So, the block difficulty is raised. However, the new part here is that the block reward also drops now, so that profitability drops as well. That means miners reduce their amount of mining (or inefficient miners are pushed out of the market). This then slows block production, so the difficulty is lowered again, erasing the energy-sucking effect of the coin price spike. With the right parameters, such a system would head towards equilibrium with a fairly predictable amount of power usage no matter what price the coins hit.