The Megawatt standard

Thursday, 12 May, Year 8 d.Tr. | Author: Mircea Popescu

An off the cuff remarki set me thinking.

You know perhaps that worldwide energy consumption is somewhere around 6 * 1020 Joules a year. This would mean, abstractly speaking, a power aperture of about 6 * 1020 / 3600 / 24 / 365 = 19 or so T[era]W[atts]. Meanwhile, world population is something like 7 1/8 billion heads and twice as many feet, which means that average per capita energy consumption is about 2.67 K[ilo]W[atts] (per secondii).

Just how much is 2 2/3 KW ? Well... the average desktop PSU eats about 400 Wiii these days, if the monitor's another 100iv that means you could be running five boxes out of the 2 2/3. Except when the washing machine eats its 1.5 KW, of course, or the dryer its 2.5, or the AC unit its 3 KW. By and large, average people eat the average.

Obviously not all the people in the world eat this much. 2 2/3 KW means half a dollar a second or thereabouts at current electricity pricesv, which comes to 12 bucks or so a day - a degree of magnitude above that fabled dollar-a-day most of this world lives on.

One way to think about this is to say that the difference is soaked up by the government. Specifically : about a billionvi real people eat the 2 2/3 KW average ; about six billion subhumans don't, but their share is eaten up by the various corporations, whether they call themselves USG or whatever else. All in all, SSvii eat up six sevenths, with actual people eating the remaining seventh and so the numbers work out just right.

The battle for supremacy then becomes quite directly stated : how much energy over the average do you yourself consume, for your own, independent but productive purposes, and in so doing deny it to the SS ? It should suddenly be obvious why the SS strategy is to push for a diminution of consumption, but obviously yours, not theirs. Less for you means more for them! It should also be obvious why the SS tactics are always related to attacking consumers - going around with infrared goggles looking home invasion targets makes perfect sense in this context, whatever ridiculous pretext may be flimsily proffered.viii

Perhaps unsurprisingly, Bitcoin is a major energy consumer. It would be, considering its fundamental function in SS supression. Perhaps just as unsurprisingly, one of the [rather numerous] properties of Bitcoin the SS doesn't like is its unyielding profile on the energy front.

The only important point here is : if humans increased their consumption seven fold, the SS would simply die overnight.ix Can you deploy energy in such a manner that a bill of about $100 a day is something you can cover from the proceeds, while retaining control of the whole chain ?x

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  1. In the logs, of course. []
  2. Watts measure power. Power is energy per second. Watts are thus Joules / second, and thus "per second" is entirely spurious there. Nevertheless, because of the common "KWh" nonsense (the energy equivalent of running 1KW of power for one hour, ie 3.6 mn Joules) I prefer to leave crumbs for people. []
  3. Yes, I'm aware the letters printed on your PSU box read different. Get a grip. []
  4. Used to be CRT display ate more than the CPU, but since the LCD revolution that much is fixed, at least. []
  5. Note that electricity only accounts for about a fifth globally ; and that it's a lot cheaper to burn fossils for the same output. One gallon of gasoline, for instance, is about 120 M[ega]J[oules], meaning that if you burn ten gallons a day on average you're really eating up 1.392 KW that way, roughly half the average above. It's true that those ten gallons would cost you 20 bucks, which seemingly exceeds the 12 ; nevertheless 90% of that is excise (read - stolen by the government) in Europe (about 70% in the US), meaning that the true cost is a lot closer to a coupla bucks. []
  6. 300mn or so in America (2/3 of those in the North) plus 500mn or so in ~Europe plus a few more millions scattered here and there. []
  7. subhumans + socialism []
  8. War on drugs, seriously ? The only war the SS is engaged in is the war against humanity. []
  9. The naive thing to say here is that "oh no, if humans increased consumption the SS would just increase the excise to compensante. This is ridiculous. For one thing, raising the excise hurts the subhuman part of the SS. For the other, a very pronounced "Bitcoin infection"* process is at work - the higher the excise, the less "popular" the socialism. Driving a wedge between S and S is a perfectly legitimate strategy towards the eventual destruction of the SS.
    ------
    * See the NSA-satoshi problem as well as the USG agent problem, or this general discussion. []
  10. No, buying stock in Alcoa does not serve this purpose - Alcoa is USG.Alcoa. Running a clandestine anything does serve this purpose, in spades, and clandestine doesn't just mean unregistered hydroponic farm. Hiring undocumented workers works the same way, which is why Argentina is a better place of residence than Europe : every peso you spend here feeds the black market at least fifty cents ; every euro you spend there feeds it maybe twelve cents. Since you can control where to spend, it is rather your moral obligation to spend your money in Argentina rather than in Europe - imposing that 35% or so excise on the income of the SS is by far the largest, cheapest, simplest way to hurt the abomination.

    Moreover, as republican interest is very well informed and very mobile by definition, the more determinedly everyone follows this moral principle the more likely it is for SS policies to fail, because whenever they manage to "persuade" (usually by force of arms) some third world place to join their insanity, the immediate and painful loss of income from deserting republicans could, in principle, readily overwhelm the lure of whatever golden future the SS may be promising. []

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6 Responses

  1. Mircea Popescu`s avatar
    1
    Mircea Popescu 
    Thursday, 14 February 2019

    In "unexpected" / "nobody could have predicted" continuations :

    mircea_popescu to continue the http://btcbase.org/log/2019-02-10#1894616 discussion / produce a benchmark for the republic's development : taking mining efficiency at 20 GH/joule (slightly above the antiminer s9) 40 exahash would be ~2 Gjoules. ☝︎
    a111: Logged on 2019-02-10 15:40 mircea_popescu in other news, bitcoin difficulty looks like it's finally come out of the crazy and into economic coupling, check it out, past six months it's been evidently kept in place by fiat exchange rates.
    mircea_popescu at this same time, world energy consumption (instantaneous) is about 10-20 terajoules (on the basis of primary energy generation/consumption for 2015 standing at 170/110 PWh) ;
    mircea_popescu consequently bitcoin is merely using 0.02 to 0.01% of world energy generation, less than the 50%+1 it's supposed to use by a margin of say 5000.
    mircea_popescu ie, bitcoin is 0.02% complete. yet something tells me the next ten years are going to see a lot more completion than the first ten.
    mircea_popescu (the situation is actually better than that, seeing how most of those PWh are low quality energy in the shape of low temperature heat.)

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