Geopolitical butterfly effects in modern world are scary :(

[Cheb]

(even when you do your best to hide from politics, politics finds you. Yes, even under your blanket)

- last september, China banned bitcoin mining.
- when someone uses bug spray, roaches stampede to their neighbors’ kitchens.
- the dislodged miners set shop in closest regions: our far east and Kazakhstan, overwhelming local power grids.
-our afflicted region gets its power from hydro of mighty Siberian rivers, nothing happened but local disruptions.
- Kazakhstan is a flat steppe with no notable rivers. It has no hydro, no nuclear, gets its power from coal and natural gas. The country is also economically small. !Suddenly! it became the second in the world in crypto mining. Poor, poor power grid.
- the complacent regime kept sleeping on its laurels, lulled by three decades of stability, failing to control prices of energy sources.
- lo and behold, their vaunted stability became like the calm of a supercritical liquid.
- there is *always* someone willing to poke a teetering country. For evulz, or profit, or genuine thirst for justice, doesn’t matter.
- BOOM [sounds of gunfire and people dying]

Conclusion: China is a… massive buterfly. When it flaps you’d better be sure your important stuff is nailed down well. And hold onto your hat.

P.S. Too grim.

My mum holding Vyenchik. He is 10 years old, his old owner succumbed to alcoholism. He has one tooth, he often holds his front right paw aloft (it had been broken once), we had to turn him into a shaved rat because his fur was irrecoverable, he has a severe morning wood problem, to the point he has trouble walking.
He is also very smart, optimistic and assertive, he enjoys his new life so much. He made friends with our three cats in no time (they are three times bigger! ) and loves the neighbor's dogs so much my ears ring from his joy when they visit.

[Neko-]

I was wondering where you were going with this...

China and bitcoins... Right.
Then roaches... Wait, what? What do insect have to do with bitcoins or China?
Miners? does he mean coal miners? Kazachstan? Wait, I saw that on the news, so does this link up with that?
Ah wait... Powergrid... I recall the energy prices were the trigger for the unrest in Kazachstan.
So must mean bitcoin miners... And roaches fleeing China... Ah, now I get it... Metaphore.

Bitcoin miners moving from China to cheap-electricity country Kazachstan, usurping power there thus hiking energycosts for every citizen of Kazachstan, and thus igniting the powderkeg of a revolt/revolution.

Not sure if you're in Kazachstan, but if you are: STAY SAFE!

Saw on the news what's going on there, and they started with the fact that the country has just slighly more people living in it than the Netherlands does, but it's 65 times bigger than the Netherlands. Which was what stuck with me. And I feel the pain of just coal and gas. Same here (tho we do have rivers, the flat land doesn't allow for efficient hydro power). Only have one nuclear powerplant, tho the government here _finally_ is going tolook into the feasability of two (or more) extra plants. Solar and wind just won't trump fossil fuels.

The butterfly effect on that scale is often not being overseen by the one initiating the effect. Most people can do is conjugate to try and see what might happen, but it's hard to get explicit what will actually happen the further along you go. I mean, banning bitcoin in China leading to revolt in Kazachstan isn't something you could easily predict. Tho looking back on things it seems a logical chain of events.

Or if the one initiating it does oversee the possible fallout, that's a level of power and control that is downright scary.

[Cheb]

Not sure if you're in Kazachstan, but if you are: STAY SAFE!

Thank you. I, personally, am sitting in Moscow (as most of my life) but relatives of our acquaintances are in Kazakhstan - they are fine so far, sitting tight.

I don't think China was ever interested in more instability in that region. It's more like that drawing I once seen: a whole section of a wall had fallen onto the street exposing a second floor room where a man is standing on a stool, his hand with a hammer still upraised, a nail in his other hand, his expression . He was just hanging a curtain.
Or that time when I completed a test task while applying for a new job in 2011, rolled it into production -- and the whole database just crashed (that was a *wonderful* system, no test server, everything had to be done on the production one, the scripting language so "advanced" it had no loop operator which had to be concocted via hacks, no syntax checking and a single syntax error could lead to the script getting caught in an infinite loop and the whole server freezing).

I agree that nuclear is the *only* viable clean energy that is really sustainable. And much safer. I like that one video on Kurzgesagt of youtube where they compare victims of nuclear to victims of coal. Drop in a ocean. Wind may be a good supplement that lets you throttle your nuclear powerplant way down but they have hidden prices (image of a helicopter flying around a wind turbine deicing its blades. A helicopter running on hydrocarbon ) and solar -- we need a different technology or the footprint of manufacturing the panels defeats their very purpose.

[Té Rowan]

Then roaches... Wait, what? What do insect have to do with bitcoins or China?

Human roaches, I suspect.

I don't think China was ever interested in more instability in that region. It's more like that drawing I once seen: a whole section of a wall had fallen onto the street exposing a second floor room where a man is standing on a stool, his hand with a hammer still upraised, a nail in his other hand, his expression . He was just hanging a curtain.

I recall a very similar cartoon by Roland Fiddy; found it in "The Crazy World of the Handyman": Guy on third floor (ground floor is first floor here) drives a nail into housefront wall which begins to fall away.

[CRBWildcat]

My mum holding Vyenchik. He is 10 years old, his old owner succumbed to alcoholism. He has one tooth, he often holds his front right paw aloft (it had been broken once), we had to turn him into a shaved rat because his fur was irrecoverable, he has a severe morning wood problem, to the point he has trouble walking.
He is also very smart, optimistic and assertive, he enjoys his new life so much. He made friends with our three cats in no time (they are three times bigger! ) and loves the neighbor's dogs so much my ears ring from his joy when they visit.

Now that is something I can get behind. >^_^<

[Spica75]

I agree that nuclear is the *only* viable clean energy that is really sustainable. And much safer.

Nowadays, when next generation nuclear power that CAN be built either 100% safe or nearly so but also capable of reducing the amount of longterm dangerous waste to near zero, even "burn" most of the already existing waste and get energy from it while reducing it to slag that is about as dangerous as a rock from a region with slightly above average levels of radioactive materials in the ground. Yes, we could really use a bit of an "upgrade" so to speak...

we need a different technology or the footprint of manufacturing the panels defeats their very purpose.

That's very much a problem right now yeah.

(even when you do your best to hide from politics, politics finds you. Yes, even under your blanket)

Well, that actually explains a few things. Thanks for posting it, interesting and disturbing.