>I would cooperate with law enforcement if they're investigating serious (violent) crime.

The choice to cooperate or not should be yours, not the camera vendor's.

Everyone starving equally might be worse.

Things like firewood banks rely on donated goods and donated labor. They are less likely to need a GoFundMe fundraiser.

... that has chat features.

because I'm old and not cool. All the cool kids are using VisiCalc.

My most charitable guess is that they had the foresight to see this market segment as valuable and have been developing a service like this in-house, but something went wrong and they realized their in-house service couldn't be made competitive in an acceptable time-frame without spending more than $11B. It wouldn't be the first time that IBM tried to create something in-house and wisely decided to cut bait (there is wisdom - and profit - in knowing when to cut bait).

My less charitable guess is that they did not see this market segment as being worth investing in until recently, and realized that their only hope was to buy an existing company.

... Kafka-esque?

... this demand is politically stupid.

Read the letter.

It should be obvious from the last few election cycles that America is nowhere close to accepting such a demand. Making it will just inflame those on the right and make you look stupid or overly-demanding to those in the middle. This hurts your credibility and makes it that much harder when you need to ask the government for something else in the future.

A better/more-politically-savvy approach would be to issue a softer, open-to-negotiation request/suggestion/demand that new large-scale electricity-consuming sites only be approved if they provide for the production and delivery of electricity without causing significant additional harm to the environment. This approach might ultimately fail to get what you are asking, but at least it wouldn't come across as a whiney demand from someone who thinks they are entitled to getting their way.

For what its worth, this weaker, more reasonable demand would still shut down some planned projects and anger some investors, but it would allow it if the planned project could either

* Build an on-site environmentally-sustainable power plant,
* Buy electricity from an existing source, but only if it wouldn't strain the grid's production or delivery capacity (this option is likely the most feasible as long as the project is powered down during peak hours)
* Buy electricity from an existing source and pay to have additional transmission lines run so it doesn't hurt the existing transmission network,
* Pay to build a new environmentally-sustainable power plant, but only if the transmission grid can handle the load,
* Or some combination of the above.

As for water consumption, it's reasonable to ask that new facilities use either air cooling or closed-loop cooling, so there is no wasted water.

> one of the core principles of Western Civilization â" the right of free speech.
Another principle: The right of a sovereign nation to control what goes on in its own borders.

When speech crosses borders, preserving both completely may not be possible.

The biggest draw I can see for me to use any cryptocurrency is to be used as a short-term method of exchange where fiat currency is not practical or too expensive. For example, if I want to send a $1000 graduation gift to my nephew who lives overseas, it's unsafe to send him a stack of $100 bills by mail, international money orders are no longer sold by the US Post Office, and bank-based and Venmo-like services charge tens of dollars on that amount, which is a fee I would like to avoid. So I'll buy him $100 of crypto if I can get it a lot cheaper than the Venmo-like-services charge. He can cash it out at the local crypto ATM.

>Now he wants government owned businesses on government land competing with private companies...
This is nothing new. Granted, it's closer to lowercase-c-communism than it is to old-school-pre-Trump GOP lower-case-c-conservatism, but it's not new.

The US government and government-owned enterprises have been in direct competition with private enterprises for a long time. One obvious example is the Post Office's package-delivery business which competes with FedEx, UPS, and others.

Ditto government land being in direct competition with private landowners. The government has leased ranch land for a very long time, so do nearby private landowners.

There are likely many more examples.

>I am shocked I tell you!
he says as someone hands him the address of a bitcoin wallet, saying "your payment, sir."

As GameboyRMH pointed out in his reply above this one, cash-for-wallet deals exist.

Granted, cash-for-wallet depends on trusting the person you are buying the wallet from. This greatly limits the practical use. But it is doable if you have some way of enforcing payment if the wallet turns out to be bad or if a previous owner kept a copy then spends it before you do. Those methods could range from the above-board like keeping escrow accounts until the wallet was emptied to the clearly-illegal mob tactics ("if the wallet doesn't spend, your family will need to buy a casket.")

As for monero and zcash, time will tell if their claimed anonymity features survive future technological breakthroughs.

>2. Laundering money through a crypto ATM may be feasible for the corner drug dealer's few hundred dollars. But, you'll have a much harder time doing it with tens of thousands or millions of dollars.

If you are running a multi-million-dollar criminal enterprise, you may be able to skip the dollars entirely. Just deliver the goods and demand payment in a relatively untraceable cryptocurrency. From what I read in mainstream media, that's how the enterprises that sell ransomware-as-a-service tools operate.

When it's time to cash out, use your crypto to buy things that can be relatively easily converted into dollars, or pay off your minions with a hard-to-trace crypto and let them visit their neighborhood crypto-ATM-machine to cash out.

If you are sitting on tens of thousands of dollars of ill-gotten cash, you can probably buy a few hundred dollars of crypto a week at each of the many crypto-ATM-machines within a few hours' drive of you until you've spent your cash.