I suppose a significant number of yoga teachers/influencers could be secret dittoheads, but the idea kind of beggars belief.

One of the interesting things about QAnon is that it offered on-ramps to groups outside the stereotype of people would go for such a theory (e.g. "save the children"). People in right-wing echo chambers were definitely more susceptible, but it's a mistake to be reassured by that.

Also, particular echo chambers aren't some kind of primordial entity. They start all the time and they often grow. So even if something like QAnon requires one, that just means there's one more step.

That's not true, for instance:

https://www.startribune.com/conspiracy-theories-of-qanon-fin...

> Conspiracy theories of QAnon find fertile ground in an unexpected place – the yoga world

> QAnon's conspiracy theories have taken root among yogis and other adherents of natural medicine.

Keep this in mind: Q is literally some dude on 4chan/8chan with a tripcode.

> There might be a few nutters out there who are so predisposed to hate JFK that they'll believe anything negative about him, but most people - even those who dislike him - would rightfully question such an outlandish statement made by someone with no credentials.

I make no claim that my example lie is a good example of misinformation/disinformation. It was only meant to show the asymmetry of effort implicit in "more discussion."

The key thing about getting a lie to stick is to hitting the right emotional buttons with it. And it's so easy broadcast lies nowadays that you can even discover those buttons stochastically, by just throwing random lies out there and seeing what sticks.

Furthermore, if your goal is not to convince anyone of anything in particular, but to just to gum up a society (which is the goal of disinformation, properly understood), you don't event need to find particular lies with a broad appeal across society. You just need enough lies that enough people fall for one or two.

The problem with that idea is that it takes more effort to debunk a lie than to tell one. It also takes more effort to absorb a debunking than a lie. That's why disinformation works.

Here's an example: JFK ate babies occasionally, and the media hushed it up. Oswald was actually a secret high-level CIA operative, and was so outraged by this that he assassinated JFK for it.

It took me two seconds to write that. How much effort would it take you to debunk it?

It's just not practical to put all the burden of combating misinformation on each individual's shoulders. It's also necessary to stop the spread of misinformation. That doesn't need to be done by a central authority, but people who've been convinced by a lie will perceive that as "censorship" by one.

> scientific consensus is not arrived at when every scientific paper says the same thing. this is a fundamentally wrong view of science and also reality. on any given topic, the corpus includes opposing conclusions. eventually we figure out why and discern the underlying principles.

Scientific consensus is also not arrived at by publishing literally every crackpot idea, and answering each with "more discussion." Science has several mechanisms for "censoring" bullshit and misinformation (e.g. peer review), and it couldn't function without it. "More discussion" is saved for cases where those mechanisms failed.

You're misremembering. Russian collusion was an allegation that needed to be investigated because of 1) the actions of Russian intelligence agencies to influence the election in ways advantageous to Trump, and 2) weird things members of the Trump campaign did that were suspicious. However, the major media outlets only reported on that, and it didn't go on to claim that there was actual collusion.

For instance, here's the first page of results from major media outlet search for "Russian collusion" (ending the day before the Mueller report):

https://www.nytimes.com/search?dropmab=true&endDate=20190321...

> BRIEFING Judge Doubles Down on Scrutiny of Roger Stone’s Book

> POLITICS Roger Stone’s New Instagram Post and Book Draw Scrutiny After Gag Order

> POLITICS Trump Lawyer ‘Vehemently’ Denies Russian Collusion

> POLITICS ‘Collusion Delusion’: Trump’s CPAC Speech Mocks Mueller Inquiry

> POLITICS Trump Says There Was ‘No Collusion’ With the Russians

> OPINION The Russians Were Involved. But It Wasn’t About Collusion.

> POLITICS Indictment Details Collusion Between Cyberthief and 2 Russian Spies

> OPINION How Will ‘Collusion’ Play in the Midterms?

> OPINION Can We Please Stop Talking About ‘Collusion’?

> OPINION Oh, Wait. Maybe It Was Collusion.

That last piece sounds like it's the closest to saying there was collusion, lets see what it says:

> What remains to be determined is whether the Russians also attempted to suborn members of the Trump team in an effort to gain their cooperation. This is why the investigation by the special counsel, Robert Mueller, is so important.

That's not pushing a conspiracy theory.

On the other hand, Fox News, OANN, NewsMax, etc. lied to the extent that they're legitimately worried about the conspiracy theories they were pushing costing them a lot of money from defamation lawsuits:

https://www.cnn.com/2020/12/19/business/fox-smartmatic-news-...

https://www.cnn.com/2021/02/05/media/lou-dobbs-fox-show-canc...

https://www.cnn.com/videos/business/2021/02/03/newsmax-mike-...

However, I don't fault you too much for this confusion. There are a lot of liars out there who've found a lot of success "arguing" with false equivalencies to keep their followers loyal to the cause.

The probably is, but I'm guessing the really definitive records would probably require a subpoena to obtain (e.g. business records of the domain registrar or hosting company).

I think it's pretty likely that the person (or people) who went by Satoshi is dead, and probably died before their Bitcoin hoard was worth much.

If not, you'd have to explain why someone is giving up the opportunity to never have to work for someone else to support themselves ever again. And those are less believable to me: e.g. 1) already having so much FU money they're secure in their lifestyle w/o the Bitcoin, 2) being either extremely ascetic or happy to work for someone else to support themselves, 3) deliberately choosing to destroy it for some reason, 4) losing the all keys in an accident (more understandable for a rando playing around than the creator), etc.

IIRC, a downward facing camera is useful for precisely locating the landing location, but I'm having trouble seeing a purpose for the upward facing camera besides getting cool sky-crane video.

What was the model? The recording was garbled, and all I could hear was "...we're using a commercial computer, an Intel ???? PC. It's running Linux...

It's not reasonable to expect households to monitor their electricity rates or alert emails that closely nor be prepared to drop everything to switch providers at a moment's notice for an entirely unexpected reason. I know I don't immediately read every email I get.

An even if someone was monitoring that closely, or was ready to jump, there's no guarantee they'll be able to switch:

https://6abc.com/griddy-gridy-texas-power-bills-what-is-ener...:

> In a rare move Sunday night, Griddy sent out an email to all 29,000 of its customers, urging them to switch to a different provider. Thigpen says she tried Monday morning, but no one was taking new customers....

> We reached out to a few providers here in Texas. They are not taking customers. Some say they may accept new customers by next Wednesday, when they say the weather has improved. That was the earliest 'maybe' answer we could get.

It also sounds awful. It would objectively be a regression from reliable electricity to unreliable electricity, like in an undeveloped country.

The only thing such a technology would do is give the power companies a BS way to shift the blame for their planning fuck ups onto consumers, because technically it would be the consumer's equipment that killed the power.

Not all rich people, though. It might be interesting to characterize the one's that have built a utopian city, and see if they conform to some common type. Maybe they share important characteristics with modern-day "tech moguls"?

The OP didn't really establish it (e.g. take an inventory of all Americans building utopian cities, and see if tech moguls are over-represented), but I wouldn't be surprised if it was true. The combination of experience with disruptive innovation, engineer's syndrome, and power would seem like a recipe for these kinds of cities, though a less productive one than near-absolute power over some polity.

Also, a lot of the towns mentioned in the comments pre-date tech moguls.

The idea of building a utopian city doesn't need to be a brand new thing for tech moguls to have a greater interest in creating them than other types of contemporary moguls.

Also, I don't think a company town is really the same thing as a utopian city. In my mind a "company town" is mainly an attempt to maximize exploitation of a set of workers, while a "utopian city" is built as a pure expression of some subset of someone's ideals, relatively unsullied by competing ideas, which usually aren't so crass as "maximal exploitation of the residents."

>> It is disgraceful to watch people such as Elon Musk and most of the VCs put money ahead of the environment.

> I am sorry you did not buy it when it was cheaper. No need to hate it now because you were stupid back then.

You're obviously defensively making some false assumptions. The big one is probably assuming that people are primarily motivated by greed and jealousy, and that other motivations are fake and meant to disguise that.

And for the record, I agree with the GP, and I've made quite a bit of money off of this bubble by selling some bitcoins I mined a decade ago.

Being "smart" often doesn't translate into making good decisions or having good judgment. Sometimes intelligence only amounts to better capabilities at rationalizing whatever harebrained thing you already wanted to do, instead of giving up on it.

I think Bitcoin hits a bunch of special-interest buttons in some people that make it very difficult to put aside, for instance: truly innovative technology, startup thinking/wanting to be in on the "ground floor" of a big success, sci-fi made real, libertarianism, etc.

Also, Gold has literally thousands of years of cultural precedent as being a "valuable thing." Bitcoin, not so much.

That's making a lot of assumptions which I don't think there are good grounds to assume. For instance, that Bitcoin tax revenue is something the Chinese government cares enough about for it to affect its decision-making, or that Bitcoin is a "thorn in the side of dollar hegemony."

I think the reality is that Bitcoin (and cryptocurrency in general) is a niche thing that isn't nearly as important as its fans like to think it is, so there's little for a state-actor to gain by making the effort to disrupt it.