Bitcoin

A former co-worker decided to flex and sneer about his investing in BitCoin (in a comment on a post about some financial issues I'm dealing with -- totally classy), along with a preemptive "but it's not bad for the environment" whine that of course he couldn't substantiate with any real sources.

Anyway, wrote this on FB, but might as well put it somewhere where things don't get algorithmically buried:

A few follow-ups to the Bitcoin discussion from the other day:

1. Bitcoin is environmentally ruinous. Full-stop. If you're involved with it, you're doing damage. To be clear, lots of things we're involved with hurt the environment, so how involved you are is a factor (though if you mine bitcoin, you're at ground zero).

2. If you bought Bitcoin in 2013 (or 2010, or 2018) and became rich from it, it's not because you were smart. It's because you did something really stupid with your money and got lucky. The only way buying Bitcoin in 2013 could be "smart" would be if you're a time traveller, and given point 1 above, that would make you scum.

2.5 Yes, BitCoin is a pyramid scheme.

3. Ethereum is also ruinous (and yes, has been planning a change to a less awful system for so long, it might as well be called Duke Nukem Forever). As are almost all the chains where NFTs exist (with the exception, best I can tell, of Wax and a handful of others).

4. As the crypto bros like to sneer, I "did my own research." When the bros sneer that, they don't actually mean it -- they actually just want you to shut up and listen to them and not do any research.

5. There are plenty of cryptocurrencies that are low-energy and, if not environmentally friendly, generally on the same level as other things like email, texting, etc. But as long as all the bros are behind the big ones, that almost doesn't matter.

Life updates

1. I finally, three years after taking an incredibly underpaying job at a Local College (that everyone wrongly assumes is named after a Transcendentalist) with some toxic co-workers (including the first actual workplace anti-Semitism I had to deal with), found a job that both pays well (at least by academic IT standards) and doesn't treat me like shit. My happiness at work went up a lot last August.

2. Our landlords decided to sell our house, and after initially promising us a one-year lease extension, reneged because their realtor said that would make it harder to sell. Thanks to the financial issues caused by three years in the underpaying job above, we're not in a great position to buy a house yet, but also kind of have to, since the rental market here (especially given our needs vis-a-vis medical care, public transit, and our dog) is damned near a worse option. Needless to say, I have a LOT of thoughts on the state of housing. And this is pretty much the thing occupying all my waking non-work hours these days.

3. Oh, we have a new dog (as of over a year ago). We got Starla about a year after losing Nicky, and to say she bonded with us in a heartbeat would be an understatement. She's also a chihuahua, and an utter sweetheart (except when any other dog has the nerve to walk on the same street as her).