Stuart Langridge, Jono Bacon, and Jeremy Garcia present Bad Voltage, in which apparently it is Coventry’s turn in the barrel, and:

[00:02:20] And Now This: it is possible that the MMR vaccine helps protect you from coronavirus, game over antivaxxers, in cyberpunk dystopia news Microsoft want to use your body heat for mining cryptocurrency, Belgians have been urged to eat fries twice a week, and the FDA say: don’t eat or inject yourself with disinfectant, which is a relief…

[00:09:10] News: 74% of UK IT pros are getting less than the recommended 7-8 hours’ shut-eye on a weeknight; a quarter of the sample said they got 3-4h (!); more than half of IT pros wake up still feeling tired, sleepy or groggy, leaving them less motivated, less productive, more error-prone and less happy. (65% of director/CIOs are satisfied with their work/life balance; only 36% less senior say the same.) The solution, apparently, is cloud technologies. “There’s a positive link between the adoption of cloud technologies and people’s work/life balance, with 57 per cent of those whose organisations have embraced cloud technologies feeling satisfied with their work/life balance”. And in more tech stuff, Britain’s NHS want to take centralized approach to COVID tracking, and seem to be disregarding that nobody trusts the government’s assurances that this will never be misused, at least partially because they expressed the secret desire to deanonymise users which is exactly what everyone’s afraid of…

[00:19:27] What’s digital fiat currency? It’s not cryptocurrency, and it’s not just avoiding cash. China and Sweden are looking into changing to digital fiat currency and some smaller countries have already done so, but why? As promised, we dive into this world, with an explainer of what this concept is, what some of the motives for wanting it are, and how it might affect the populace, restaurants and cash businesses, crime, trust, the economy, Facebook, and cocktails to be made at home. (The detail document Jeremy mentions is The Case for Digital Legal Tender.)

Come chat with us and the community in our Slack channel via https://badvoltage-slack.herokuapp.com/!

https://community.badvoltage.org/t/3×03-massive-quantities-of-potatoes/12354

News music: [http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/Robbero/59218](Long Live Blind Joe by Robbero), used with attribution.