Dr Laura James's writings

(part 2 of this ) On to crypto in various forms. Highlights mine. permalink #60 of 340: Brian Slesinsky (bslesins) Thu 6 Jan 22 10:04     Beyond the environment costs, though, I wonder about the cultural     costs of the rise of gambling 2.0, investment edition. It turns out     that not only any cryptocurrency but any small stock can be     converted into a fun gambling game with a bit of promotion on social     media. The new online casino is anywhere you can attract enough     players to have some fun. permalink #74 of 340: Vinay Gupta (hexayurt) Thu 6 Jan 22 15:06     Stephen Diehl:.. A world class cryptographer ... If he applied that critical eye to, say, US indebtedness both     personal and Federal, I have no doubt he would have very serious     arguments against that entire system. Same for VISA, SWIFT, and the     rest of the ...

The thing about the Well's state of the world review in January each year is there's often a lot of good bits, and so sorting out a modest number of key things I want to remember is tricky. At the time I didn't finish writing up my thoughts on the 2021 Well State of the World so here's some of the posts that still seem interesting after a year... Bruce Sterling: But what's significant for MMXXI is that Jack Ma, who is head of Alibaba and therefore Jeff's Chinese twin, got abducted and vanished by the Chinese secret police.  Jack Ma is the first Big Tech mogul, the first grandee from "Google Apple Facebook Amazon Microsoft Baidu Alibaba Tencent," to be directly repressed by state-sponsored trenchcoats and guns.   ... Also, if the surveillance is so intense, fearsome and all-encompassing now, then why is public life so obviously loose, corrupt and poorly organized?  Shouldn't grifters be immediately outed for all their dirty money, because of som...

The highway in BC which was comprehensively destroyed in the dreadful floods in mid November actually re-opened in December, thanks to astonishing engineering work.  Meanwhile, Colorado's latest fires suggest the return of the urban firestorm - a very different proposition to the rural fires which are more familiar. (HT Nathan Schneider for the link) Why do education secretaries hate online learning, asks Martin Weller : On the one hand, all Governments like to berate education for not fully preparing students for the modern workplace . They unveil plans about how they will be a modern, 21st century, digital economy. And yet, successive education secretaries have berated online learning, which one would think was an essential component in realising both of the previous aims. And not just offer up some valid criticisms around issues of retention or engagement, say, but they use terminology that portrays online learning as, at best, a lazy, cheap option and at worst, some f...

DW has a great article about the sustainability of wind power - covering all the aspects from recycling turbines, to bird fatalities, to mitigations such as "a ring of tiny air bubbles used during construction activities that dampens noise by around 90%". Thanks to Joanna Bryson. Laurie Macfarlane writes about land . Highlights mine. Although there is much hype around the promise of impressive Negative Emissions' Technologies (NETs), such as carbon capture and storage, to date the only proven NET is the restoration of forests, peatlands and other natural carbon sinks. ... In the case of carbon emissions, the approach enables those who invest in projects that will sequester carbon from the atmosphere to claim carbon credits (or carbon ‘offsets’), which can either be ‘netted off’ against the owner’s emissions, or sold on to other emitters via emissions-trading schemes. ... over the past decade, a number of large-scale emissions-trading schemes have been establi...