Seaspiracy
Daily Ramble
I rarely watch a film that drives me to change my behavior, but Seaspiracy just did. It’s a powerful documentary diving into the global fishing industry and its impact on our oceans. Notice the word our in that last sentence.
I grew up in a coastal Oregon community and have never strayed more than a 30-minute drive from the ocean anywhere I’ve lived. Surfing has been in my blood since I was 14 catching my first waves on a bodyboard in Hawaii. The sea’s my oldest natural friend, and despite its volatile nature, it’s been the most consistent thing in my life. If I didn’t know it was within driving distance, I think I would literally go mad — I have zero desire to test that theory.
Although I grew up on a cranberry farm, my pop’s undergrad was in Fishery and Wildlife Sciences from Oregon State. He worked in the fishing industry long before the cranberry farm. It left him with strong opinions on the way the oceans and fishing industry were being managed. He would fume at the policies being enacted on rivers to save the Oregon salmon runs, while just past the international border, 12 miles offshore where the salmon lived most of their adult life, mammoth foreign fishing vessels were drag-netting entire schools of salmon into their hulls. Of course, it was easier to regulate farmers and loggers impacting rivers than it was to get into an international trade dispute with Japan and China, so guess what would happen?
To be fair, I wouldn’t be surprised if US fishing vessels were hoovering up ocean life just outside Chinese and Japanese international waters. But, the point that stuck with me is that there’s a vast, lawless, common ground in the middle of the ocean. No one controls it, and no single entity has a vested interest in protecting what’s being plundered, though it impacts us all. (Remember that our?) Ali Tabrizi, the young documentarian behind Seaspiracy, does an incredible job of bringing this lawless common ground to light. The situation is exactly as pops described all those years ago — except much worse with more boats in the water feeding more mouths.
Mouths to feed. That’s it at its core. What we put into our gobblers is magnified by at least a few billion others doing the same. Cost-effectively filling our bellies with fish and other animal protein is imperiling our ability to continue to harvest them in the future. If there’s a reason we self-destruct on our planet, our inability to alter our eating to more sustainable behavior is high on the list of likely causes. I’m not convinced regulating ourselves top-down is going to work in our current chaotic environment. Still, I do know that I will be much more cautious about the quantity of fish I consume going forward. And I’ll encourage you, dear reader, to watch Seaspiracy as well: here.
Favorite Things on the Interwebs Today
This caught my eye today… I still can’t tell if I like it, but I was stuck for a bit.
Bitcoin Price Prediction
Yesterday: $56.5k - $65k
Today: $55k - $60k
Tomorrow: $55k - $65k
The knock on the $60k door didn’t happen yesterday, and indeed the bulls are looking tired today. Since yesterday, we’ve seen the price grind down from a high of $59.6k to a low of $57k, where the bulls are again trying to turn the tide. The fundamentals are insanely bullish now, so despite the bulls looking tired, it’s hard to imagine much of a pullback. Why? In the last week, $1.5B in bitcoin has exited exchanges. AND! AND! Coinbase just released pre-IPO data showing they’re larger than all but the biggest banks in the United States. If the banking industry wasn’t adjusting to a Bitcoin reality, the Coinbase IPO is likely the last nail in their coffin. What does that mean for the price? I anticipate as much as a $55k pullback today or tomorrow before we shift and push back for $60k…again.
Bitcoin Q & A
Q: How do fees work on the Bitcoin network?
A: Fees are paid to the miner who includes your transaction in a block.
When you send some bitcoin to another person, the transaction includes a fee denominated in sats or fractions of a bitcoin. The fee is what you’re willing to pay to have your transaction included in a block. The fees are measured in sats per byte. That means that the larger your transaction is in bytes, the higher the fee. It doesn’t matter if the value of the bitcoin being sent is $1 or $1B; it’s the size of the bytes in the transaction in bytes that counts. You’re paying for space in the Bitcoin blockchain, not for the value being transacted.
Miners order the transactions by fees to choose what to include in the next block. The higher the fee, the quicker it’s included in a block. Bitcoinfees is a website that gives up-to-date information on how quickly your transaction will be included in a block. At the moment, any transaction sent with at least 100 sats/byte will be included in the next block.
Thanks for reading,
Kent
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