That's insufferable, I love it.

The way that people reacted to the news about John Mulaney going to rehab, getting divorced from his wife, and dating someone new really speaks volumes to the taboo that surrounds recovering addicts and the unhealthy way we view celebrities. 

John Mulaney has been pretty open about the fact that he is a recovering addict. He has joked about it plenty of times in the past, and nobody seemed to find anything wrong with that. But after he relapsed, I’ve heard tons of people saying things like “I can never look at John Mulaney the same again!” or “How can someone who seems so smart and funny actually be so fucked up??” and many other things in that vein, and it’s just really upsetting. Addiction is a disease, its not something that can be easily overcome. Relapsing doesn’t mean the person is weak or no longer deserves respect.

The fact that people have reacted so negatively to the news that John is going through a divorce and that he has started to date someone new really shows why parasocial relationships are bad for everyone. There is nothing wrong with divorce, and there is nothing wrong with seeing new people, but so many fans are acting like John has done something horrible, when in reality all he did was make a decision that his fans didn’t want him to make. We need to remember that no matter how big of a fan you are of someone, you still don’t know them personally, and they are going to do things that you personally don’t want, understand, or agree with, and you just need to accept that. 

Overall, I just wish people would understand two things about this situation: 

Addicts are human beings, they deserve respect, and there is nothing about being an addict that makes them any lesser then others.

So every transaction with bitcoins requires the ledger to be updated with the current ownership of every already existing bitcoin, which also requires encrypting and decrypting a bunch of information and sharing it across the public ledger. So every transaction made with bitcoins increases the energy requirements of updating the ledger making it harder and harder to complete the latest version and get the coin which is a reward for doing that work.

See all these warehouses? They’re quite literally filled to the brim with specialized computers that do nothing but mine, each one filled with thousands of these computers, just row after row of this:

Graphics cards! 

Lots and lots of these puppies side by side, spinning their little fans as fast as they can go because as it turns out: GPUs are perfect for doing the calculations required for mining cryptocurrency.

Which means amateur miners buy a lot of these things.

So many, in fact, that there is now (May 2021) a world-wide shortage of NVIDIA and AMD graphics cards and building a new gaming rig is damn near impossible because of the shortage. 

OR you can pay a ridiculously inflated price by GPU scalpers on eBay.

Seriously. Places that sell GPUs impose quantity limits because if they don’t… some crypto asshole will buy out their entire stock in one go.

But the “good” news is that the professional miners (like the Bitmain site up there, in the photos) use dedicated ASIC mining rigs which don’t use consumer GPUs. But (bad news) they DO use the same sort of chips that NVIDIA & AMD rely on to make their products, which just starves the supply pipeline at a different point.

Bottom line: not only does cryptocurrency mining consume terawatts of electricity, it also consumes megatons of computer hardware. Which is expensive to produce (in resource terms, like rare metals, petroleum, water, electricity, paper) and will, someday, require even MORE resources to recycle. Or else it ends up in a landfill.

Note that current dedicated mining rigs are so highly specialized they are useless for anything other than mining. They cannot be easily repurposed to  (say) sequence DNA or fold proteins for miracle cures.

The other issues are both related to the pandemic. The first one is that manufacturing of a many things, especially cars, slowed down quite a bit until recently when the factories reopened. But so many reopened at the same time and went full blast that the demand far outstripped the supply, a supply already reduced by the shutdown of those factories.

The other bottleneck is literal mining. Computer chips rely on silicon and various metals, especially gold and copper to conduct electricity to do their work. In normal times this means that crypto’s environmental impact is even higher than just the energy requirements. But in the meantime the mines and refineries that provide the raw materials were also shut down in many cases due to the pandemic, squeezing the supply further.

These are silica mines, necessary for making ALL things requiring silicon, among other things.

These are rare-earth mineral mines.

Both are required for the manufacture of computer technologies. Both requre excavating huge amounts of earth, decimating all life in that area and more often than not, ruining land that is supposed to be stewarded by indigenous people.

They’re very, very bad for the environment.

This is where the ‘online’ world comes from. It’s not another place. Every transaction, every pixel comes from the ground.

Yes.

Did I giggle every time?