Exactly this. People who buy crypto with Real Money only do so in the expectation that they’ll later be able to sell it for more Real Money. By design, it doesn’t represent labor, materials, services, anything of actual worth, it just sucks the value out of fiat currency like a parasite.

What do Reddit’s management and my confidence in my own heterosexuality have in common?

Yeah, a lot of people say things like “a BloingCoin is worth €1000” or “1 PissBux is worth more than a barrel of oil” but, like, so what? I know how many apples I can buy with €1 (about two). How many apples can I buy with a BloingCoin or a PissBux? Or, for that matter, a barrel of oil?

Can I introduce you to your new best friend, Yunohost? It’s a self-hosting platform based on Linux designed to run on a shitty old laptop, SBC, USFF PC or such plugged into your router. Browser-based, loads of extensions and tools, the hardest part it installing it - it’s no more or less tricky that installing Ubuntu, but that’s still involved for many people.

The books were clearer about this, in fairness. Bond wasn’t a spy so much as an agent provocateur and a major part of his role was to cause disruption, panic and general fuss, but in a controlled way.

It’s amazing how stuff that was simple even twenty years ago is so unusual now. I’m in the UK and we simply do not have cheques any more, for example. About ten years ago I had to pay a supplier in the US by cheque and I actually had to go to my bank and get them to print one for me - the staff member who helped me said they’d worked there two years and it was the first cheque he’d had to produce. When I was a kid people paid with cheque constantly, everyone had a chequebook, though I’ve got to say I’m glad to see the back of them. If guess that withdrawing specific denominations of cash is the same. If I just wanted to withdraw an amount of money, I’d use my nearest cash machine, but to specifically ask for this quantity of that denomination is, presumably, a bit left field.

Oh my god FUCK OFF, KAREN. That first paragraph is entirely a product of a situation you - and you alone - imagined, based your own self-indulgent righteousness and prejudice. If the bank has bullshit processes, even the most egregious simpleton would see that by throwing a tantrum at the working class labourer who is as bound by them as you are, all you’re doing is succeeding at making their life worse while utterly failing to address the systemic issue causing the problem. You want to write a letter to their boss, complaining that the worker was hesitant to address an unusual query, you UTTER FUCKING NARK? Get a sense of perspective. You soulless husk.

All the people who bluster and huff about Microsoft’s stranglehold on enterprise, education, government, etc all absolutely fail to grasp how utterly manageable Windows specifically (and MS products in general) is/are. If you’re familiar with Group Policy, you know; if you’re not, your really, really dont. A moderately competent Windows admin with a single Windows Server can make ten thousand Windows workstations work seamlessley in fifty countries, twenty data protection doctrines and ten languages with hundreds of customisations, tweaks, automations and deployments tailored to each combination of device/user/location, if that’s what they need. I wish that was the case with any FOSS OS, but it absolutely isn’t and even MacOS and ChromeOS don’t come even vaugley close.