The Devil's Conjecture

The Devil's Conjecture:

Either humanity has a limit to its cognitive capacity, a limit that our global society is pressed tightly against, OR

 we're  doing a really really crummy job of sentient beings.

'Limits to Thoughts' or 'merely crappy'?
 On nearly every metric*, we suck.
Antibiotic resistance, environmental pollution, resource wastage, overpopulation, (non)educational systems, politics that haven't evolved since Cato...oh, and lets not forget about asbestos, vaccinations, nuclear waste, nuclear weapons, germ weapons, biome destruction, heavy metals, bureaucracy...**


It may be that our stupidity is the only thing that saves us: we're children playing with matches in a fireworks factory, but luckily, we cannot manage the skill necessary to successfully strike a single match.

So is this just a corollary of Sturgeons Law: e.g. '90% of everything is crap'?
Including, of course, 90% of this post.


* Apparently excluding Moore's Law.
**Took 30 seconds to generate this list, and ipso facto I must be missing a lot of really really obvious topics.

the Electropalypse

At some point, the electrical cost of mining a bitcoin will be equal to the transaction value of the bitcoin, rendering to too expensive to accept the bitcoin in a transaction.
This is ignoring network costs as being part of the invisible glue that hold the Internet together.
 
 So when is this date?
 I can find a few computations on mining costs on line, but they are mostly concerned with amortization of equipment costs.


I do get the creepy feeling that the big money is actually in selling mining rigs.

 The world economy is probably around 70 trillion dollers/year. Smallest possible transaction is (nominally) 1 cent, with 7000 tC (did I just coin teraCent?) in motion per year. Considering the amount of times a dollar can change hands in a day, transaction values are probably a order of a magnitude higher. there must be at least 5 Trillion transactions/year.
Each transaction requires how many cycles of computer time, and ergo, how many watt-hours?
Well, a 70 trillion dollar pool of transactions would pay for a lot of hashs at the rate of 1TH/joule...

 This does not look supportable below  1 btc = $5. Now perhaps the bitcoin 8-fold subdivision trick might help!
Any way I look at this though, the btc adds a computational cost (e.g. a tax) to every transaction, which means that only Moore's law could save us in the long run.

What am I missing here?

EDIT:
Two years later, I ran across  Christopher Malmo's article in Motherboard that approaches the idea from the cost of electricity standpoint, and comes up with some better figures than my back-of-the-envelope calculations.

Perhaps there should be some sort of process which would strip professional engineers of their accreditation if they decided to design something malignantly. For example, lets take the case of a power steering pump that's held in place with three bolts (safety in numbers?*), which are two different sizes: 2 of 5/8" and 1 of 14mm.

Seriously, imperial and metric on the same attachment? It might have been a badly manufactured or worn 9/16th, which might have made a bit more sense. Not much sense though, and the socket fit very nicely.
There are those who would call for ritual suicide for such a designer, but I think that is a little harsh.

Perhaps just a  public flogging, to underscore the foolishness of such a decision.

Because when I'm lying on my back underneath a rusting old machine, cursing the fact that I can't conceivably reach the pump from above, even if I was Reed Richards**, I don't like the thought that such a design choice went unpunished. Unless designing '90s midrange passenger vans was a punishment in its own right. In which case, across the inside of the hood should be stamped: WELCOME TO THE FIRST LEVEL OF HELL.



* It can't be a degrees of constraint thing, because they were all in the same plane.(If I was actually awake right now, I could work in a 'Snakes on a Plane' joke here.)

**Maybe that is why Dr. Richards got so damn much work done -- he could bend and contort to reach into any machinery on earth!

I geuss that when the Chilton's manual says 'be careful when removing the wheel hub retaining bolts ,because the drive-axle might come out of the transmission' they know what they are talking about.
One little twist, and I'm holding a completely detached axle, while blood-like transmission fluid splatters onto the ground.
A strangely disconcerting moment, as if I had shook somebody's hand, and their ears had fallen off.

"In Department of a criminal investigation -- department of the Ministry of Internal Affairs of Russia,
located in Moscow in street Zhitnoj;
the safe with operatively-investigatory documents was gone.

On the given fact check, and, predictably,
is spent guilty will incur corresponding punishment.

Two safes with confidential operatively-investigatory documents
of department of a criminal investigation department have thrown out by mistake during carrying out of repair. The safes temporarily exposed in a corridor, stirred to the workers doing repair of a building. They have lowered them in a court yard, and therefrom, having accepted for written off, military men of internal armies who bore unnecessary property from a building, have carried them on item of gathering of scrap metal directly together with classified documents stored them. When documents it were necessary, found out, that boxes are not present."


This could become an artform, you know. Writing careful rulesets for translation programs to generate baroque phrasing. And of course, obsessive humans trying to outdo the machines.

Antagonapatagonal Physicist - my new job title?

The most common examples of  practical 'pataphysics would be some forms of computer hacking.
Consider techniques such as white-noise flooding, which exploit anomalous reactions.
Consider speedrunning tricks in videogames such as Quake.

...The in-game physics could be logically referred to as 'agonophysics' i.e. 'game physics', which would make certain speedrunning techniques ' 'patagonophysics', and a speedrunner a ' 'patagonal physicist'.

Oh, and does anyone remember that scene in the Animatrix where the kids are jumping at the spot that has a gravity bug, so they don't hit the floor? Those kids were engaging in ' 'patagony'.

So I've coined three words today - not a bad start to the evening.