canvia

I had an idea the other day of using electrolysis at the bottom of an extremely deep water filled shaft to generate gas bubbles that could be harnessed to turn turbines as they rose to the surface.

Whether that could ever be more efficient than other power generation methods I have no idea. I guess the initial construction and ongoing maintenance requirements might make it not cost efficient. It was a fun idea to think about though!

The train of thought that has me leaning towards becoming vegetarian is along the lines of:

If an advanced alien species came to Earth, how would I want them to treat humans? How about in the case that they are advanced to a level that comparing their abilities and technology to humans would be the same as comparing human technology and abilities to that of birds or dogs or cows?

Would I want them to dismiss our primitive (from their perspective) nests as the work of an unintelligent beast? Would I want them to corral us into pens and feed us fattening foods before harvesting our bodies? Would I want them to feed us hormones and genetically modify our bodies to produce more milk or grow larger muscles for consumption? Would I want them to breed the outliers of our species to create extremely large and extremely small "pure-breeds" of humans as a novelty? Would I want them to dismiss our primitive verbal communication as nothing more than cheerful song and make no attempt at all to understand what we are trying to express?

That article has a lot of fear mongering about artificial sweeteners and then at the bottom an ad for "certifiedorganicevaporatedcanejuice.com". Maybe it's not the most objective source of information?

The mic would also record the sound of keystrokes.

Every news source is biased. Your job is to understand what that bias is and compensate. By following multiple news sources with different bias you can discern somewhat the truth of matters is as it lies somewhere in the center. Some outlets are more predictably and openly biased towards one direction.

I think bitcoin will be incredibly useful in the digital goods economy. Global digital marketplaces need payment solutions that transcend nationalities. If you create an album of music and want to sell digital copies online you should be able to accept payments from customers anywhere in the world using any currency. Bitcoin allows that to happen. If you want to create a video content channel and let people pay a monthly subscription there should not be any type of restriction because of what country the viewer lives in. All of these borders and constraints are artificial and unnecessary in a digital economy. If you want to create a digital service that operates entirely on the internet, why should you be restricted to using a subset of currencies? Bitcoin can be the transaction layer that makes all the human constraints irrelevant. Digital goods also offer essentially no cost of replication so the only real limitation on the size of the digital economy is the number of agents participating in it, which increases daily. The tools needed to create and consume digital products are becoming cheaper every year and more people are gaining access to them globally. IMO the future of the world economy is going to be increasingly digital, and increasingly created by independent producers. Games, books, education, movies, short format shows, PC and mobile applications, web services, photography, art, comics, all will be available to anyone in the world at very low cost and with no necessity for restriction. As I see it the only thing holding back this digital revolution is that consumers are largely ignorant as to it's existence and continue to support antiquated development and delivery systems. I do not think that the rising young generations have this impediment in their habits. What really seems to be missing is a global system for independent content discovery. I'd like to see a universal amazon style digital product aggregation and distribution system that only uses digital currency. The store would provide discovery and distribution (maybe digital currency exchange as well) to a global audience for a transaction fee that beats traditional payment methods. A wiki style product information page that allows users to provide additional product details and translations for localization would be interesting to see (while difficult to moderate).

tl;dr with bitcoin anyone in the world can create a digital product with nearly zero replication or distribution costs and sell it to anyone else in the world basically instantly. That infrastructure exists today but is underutilized.