The The will always be under appreciated.

That is a beautiful obituary.

Perhaps reputation measures could become standard, like a kind of on-line driving license. Start with 10 gold stars and lose one every time you behave like a thug on Facebook or Twitter. You earn your stars back if you behave nicely for a while. And you can’t post comments unless you’re five stars or above.

Who takes the stars away?

More work on the painting:

I also built a shelf with two of those reclaimed wood boards:

I removed user promotion when I added email activation to the sign up, but it seems that spam bots are getting through more easily. I'm going to think of something...

To make matters worse, socially-defined beliefs add tremendous bias. Whereas most people stop believing in Santa, the Tooth Fairy, etc., because of implausability or lack of evidence, peer expectations can override that doubt.

Religious doctrine is an example. No one believes it physically possible that Noah could have made an ark that big, or crammed two of every species on the boat, but that doesn't prevent many people from believing that the story is true.

Ironically, people use knowledge of this susceptibility to irrational belief to support their own irrational belief systems (i.e. "Anthropogenic global warming is a mass delusion"), because their own belief is that an opposing group is irrational. Even more ironically, they are correct because the other group has an irrational majority. Most people do not believe that anthropogenic global warming is real because of the evidence, but because their peers have convinced them so.

Just because someone is correct, it doesn't mean that they arrived at their conclusion rationally. Also, just because someone has a socially-defined belief, it doesn't mean they are incorrect.

Generalizable relationship advice seems like a fool's errand, whatever the prescription.

Unless things go awry after the London hardfork next month, the plan is all-hands-on-deck will be working on the Merge, which AFAIK is actually not as complex as it sounds. I expect February or March 2022, although it could be sooner. It is very likely to happen within the next year.

They really won't need to. With the transition to Proof of Stake, ETH isn't going to use any appreciable energy. Proof of Work is going to be an existential threat for Bitcoin.

I started in on a new painting. It's of some copper mining related ruins in the UP of MI. Just putting in the shadows and base layers atm.

Last week we were at the cottage, and got everything done with the sauna except for the stove and chimney, which I'll install in July. It's being manufactured by a metal-working guy up there.

The stove will look like this:

All of that breezeway wood is reclaimed wood from a local scrapyard. I got this much for $150:

Better ROI than $DOGE, I think. I am going to be building with it for a while. I am making a bench atm.

The cedar OTOH, holy fuck.

I've got a lot of shit going on. I usually do, but I have a lot of shit going on for me. I need to put some things down before I pick anything else up. Not a complaint.

Spending a shit ton on the mentally ill would never be noteable financially, but we would likely notice some positive changes about us in time. There is so much demonization going around in the name of grand political strategy that we don't have free empathy to allocate.

We think we can't afford to take care of mentally ill people. That's fucked up.

My gut.

Also BTC is nearing the bear phase of it's 4-year boom bust cycle based upon its reward halving. Meanwhile ETH is being pulled off exchanges, locked into DeFi for yield, into ETH2 staking contracts, and due to the EIP-1559 in the July fork, will have a ~30% reduction in issuance. Late this year, more likely early next, ETH will transition to proof-of-stake, which will cut issuance far more drastically.

In short, BTC is going into a bear, and ETH is going into a scarcity-driven bull.