Here in the UK, we have Lord Alan Sugar.

Alan is our "guy on The Apprentice". He made his money selling consumer electronics (Amstrad), but what most people don't know is that most of his income now is from his office property empire.

Somewhat predictably, he seems to appear in the papers decrying the awfulness of remote working every other week or so.

You're right, it's not really a conspiracy - it doesn't even need one. Just a bunch of self-interested assholes all acting in their own interest and trying to convert their clout into pressure to return to the office.

It's funny how selfishly maximising your own utility is the foundation of capitalism until it means less work being done for the Man.

A single bitcoin transaction consumes enough electricity to power the average UK household for 2-3 months, and generates about half a smartphone of e-waste.

And you can't ignore mining costs, because the network depends on the participation of miners as well as full nodes, which aren't cheap to run either - verifying every block is not a zero cost operation.

That's 5 orders of magnitude more than a VISA transaction.

Wait, so it's only a waste when the government does it?

Guess you'd better get off the internet (aka DARPAnet, project of the Defence Advanced Research Projects Agency). Developing it was a waste.

Also any local WiFi LANs, since they were invented by the Australian government research agency, CSIRO. What a waste.

Etc. Etc. Etc. Etc.

Don't forget non corporate COBOL users.

e.g. The UK Department for Work and Pensions.

- Pays out £70,000 of transactions per SECOND
- Despite frenetic activity on their new systems and having an in-house staff of over 700 developers, the "over 50% COBOL" statistic still stands

Also, a GPG web of trust for peer review. Reviewers can get their public key signed by other experts to build up their reputation as an expert on X. Then they sign their reviews of papers, and you can verify whether they are an expert in the field they are reviewing.

... with nuclear waste.

Since the spate of nuclear tests in the 60s, carbon-14 levels still haven't dropped to baseline.

There's also a market in pre-nuclear age steel for use in applications where sensitive equipment would be affected by the cobalt-60 that contaminates our entire steel industry because it uses the air that we soiled with nuclear explosions.

However, we've not all mutated into comic-book superheroes or Cronenberg monsters.

Stuff gets contaminated with stuff. It's generally only a problem for biological lifeforms when natural processes concentrate that stuff and it's toxic to them.

GPS can't send shit. It's a receiver only, it picks up signals from satellites in frigging space. If your phone could send signals to space it would cost, and weigh, a fuckload more.

There's no remote tracking without a cellular modem or other transmitter to send the coordinates resolved by the GPS receiver across a terrestrial network.

I came here to say just this, but if Backblaze really will give you unlimited backup AND there's a duplicity backend for it, if you're backing up more than 1TB or so then Backblaze will be cheaper than even S3 Glacier.

Backblaze are probably making out like gangbusters even if they're re-selling S3 capacity though, most people's backups will only be a small fraction of that.

People game standardized tests. Graphics cards, benchmarks, cars, students, teachers, if you have a standardized test, people will put in the effort to game the numbers.

Maybe they should do what they do for TV : recruit a random sample of people, stick an energy monitor on their appliances, and see what happens.

The government in the UK has promised to help their motivation and spirit by putting a lien on their parents house to pay for any social care they require. Go UK!

nvidia just released a single-card GPU geared specifically to deep learning computing loads with 21 billion transistors in it.

The first computer I used made do with about 6,500 but still fit in a case the size of a hardback book. And that wasn't even one of the earliest ones.

George Hotz - one guy working along - hacked together a passable self-driving car with less powerful hardware. Logically speaking, the computing hardware in the Google self-drivers must.. fit in a car.

They've already trialled automated truck platoons - multiple trucks in a virtual train, slipstreaming to save fuel - on the M6 motorway in the UK.

Even if the trucks can only cope on freeways / motorways with their simplicity... that eliminates the vast majority of hours required to get cargo from A to B. There are already firms starting up "last mile" drone-truck remote-piloting services, where the truck driver sits on his ass in a gaming rig and drives the truck from a staging depot just off the freeway to it's destination.

Even if they can't get the tech for THAT right - they'll just have drivers sat at the depot, maybe with a folding moped in a bag. Drive the truck to it's drop off, then to any local pickup, back to the depot where the robot takes over.

Turns trucker into a gig economy job instead of a steady middle class occupation.

I'd agree but the keyboard layout is *terrible* for a programmer. All the important keys are in the wrong place.

I'd rather have Linux on quality PC hardware - like a Lenovo T460s - than a Mac any day. The mistake people make with PCs is buying bargain basement quality hardware because you can - they should be looking for Maclike quality - and they'll probably end up spending less.