In this case, yes. For one, the original title has them. Secondly, as stated in the article, Reddit denies the allegations:
> [...] admin u/landoflobsters explains that it was not the company’s intention to remove any mention of Knight’s name, but that there had been “overzealous automaton” when it came to preventing doxxing and harassment. The admin explained that an internal error had led to the suspension of a moderator who had posted Knight’s name, and that the company had “communicated clearly” with the affected party as they resolved the situation.
A now fixed error would not count as censorship. He might be lying, but there's enough reasonable doubt to allow for quotes IMO.
On a side note, though, it's funny that the article choose to put quotes around “communicated clearly” as well.
I moderate a reddit community with ~200k users, and if I didn't use strict filtering along with a slew of Automoderator rules I'd spend half of my day removing spam, shitposts, and submissions that break our posting rules. A few posts a day get caught by mistake, but it's a lot easier to free those posts than it is to remove the dozens of bad ones that would have made it through otherwise. I think it's at least plausible that the same type of thing happens at a site-wide level.
The post was removed after a few hours, not immediately. It was also removed because Challenor was referenced at the bottom of the article, not because of anything in the Reddit post itself
Reddit needs to fire their entire PR team and just start communicating directly and frankly. The community would be a lot less upset without all the PR speak.
That's mismanagement that doesn't even see it's mismanagement.
A policy problem that affects a person in leadership affects everyone in the group. They should have communicated with the affected parties and it sounds like they left it to the moderator to sort everybody else out.
It seems like online companies go through all sorts of contortions to avoid saying what they need to say with respect to content moderation:
> We will try to moderate our platform fairly, but we reserve the absolute right to do so arbitrarily and capriciously. Users are not entitled to any explanation or recourse.
That should be the extent of any social media platform's content policy. I think we'd all be better off setting expectations properly and honestly.
I agree. As long as they own the website, they will own the ability to censor. In the beginning, there wasn't a need to censor. In fact, anti-censorship views were held by both the admins and the users [0].
>Cries to censor it would sound out, to be almost inevitably beaten back by cries of "free speech!" The idea of free speech is sacred to many Reddit users, a product of the free-wheeling online message board culture from which Reddit springs.
>Some people would argue that "censorship" would not apply to a private company owned platform.
You're mistaking the argument here. The argument is that a private company exercising censorship isn't violating a US person's constitutional right to free speech because the two things are different. It doesn't mean its not censorship and it doesn't mean it can't be unethical. It just means that the company has the legal right to censor whatever they want.
Many tech enthusiasts are stuck living in 1999 when the internet was this mythical paradise of unrestricted freedom.
The problem is, it's 2021, and the raging dumpster fire of social media platforms has created a world where extremist insanity has become mainstream public discourse. People who believe that reptiles posing as human beings run the earth are have a platform and some sort of earnest following!
People like to scream "censorship" and social media companies rally behind that and their protection from liability. Arguments are made that making editorial decisions about what gets purchased is a moral or legal risk. That's a bunk argument, because social platforms have no problem at all promoting dangerous, wrong or even illegal content to maximize engagement. Let's be real here -- for all of the weighty principles brought up here, a significant chunk of reddit engagement is porn.
> People who believe that reptiles posing as human beings run the earth are have a platform and some sort of earnest following
Those people have always existed. When I was a kid in the 80's, supermarkets carried tabloid newspapers with headlines like "Boy born with head of a bat" or "leading telekinetics agree that world will end in six days". The difference now is that while most of us just shook our heads and dismissed those tabloid newspapers, nobody was pressuring the supermarkets themselves to ban their sale.
There’s a big difference, “Weekly World News” was in the grocery aisle between Archie comics and celebrity gossip. It was a fun distraction. Similarly, crazy public access programs were on a specific channel for the purpose of allowing local viewpoints.
Editorial standards in the normal media didn’t allow for the type of propaganda that is mainstream today. The NY Times didn’t write about Bigfoot, because it’s silly and would detract from their reputation. Who would take a publication talking about batboy seriously?
Reddit/Twitter/Facebook specifically denies accountability for anything - they hijack the credibility of organizations AND you to drive engagement, period. If the content is gross, it’s not “their fault”.
The difference is that in the 80s the few people that believed this nonsense were unable to instantly find hundreds or thousands or millions of equally deluded people to reinforce and amplify their beliefs and subsequently amplify the harm they can cause.
There was a lot of that silly content in 1980s and 1990s BBS's, as well as on Usenet and the early Web. People could definitely find an audience for it. What we didn't have was "social" media and its pervasive matching of online with IRL identity and social ties.
So when deluded people read something outlandish online, they're now left free to assume that some halfway-trustworthy real-world entity must be endorsing those claims. There's no expectation of critical thinking or skeptical debate about what we see online because real-world norms are very different, and it all gets conflated as "what's mainstream".
> Many tech enthusiasts are stuck living in 1999 when the internet was this mythical paradise of unrestricted freedom. The problem is, it's 2021, and the raging dumpster fire of social media platforms has created a world where extremist insanity has become mainstream public discourse. People who believe that reptiles posing as human beings run the earth are have a platform and some sort of earnest following!
"You know, a free press is not freedom for the thought you love, but rather for the thought you hate the most. People need to tolerate the Larry Flynts of the world so they can be free." -Larry Flynt
> Some people would argue that "censorship" would not apply to a private company owned platform.
These people would deliberately enable corporations to restrict your freedoms, and are simply seeking justification after the fact for it by hiding in the letter of the law, and ignoring its spirit. This goes against the fundamental values of the West and goes against what anyone who ever wrote a free speech law would have intended.
Reddit is one of the public squares of the internet. The only content that should be banned sitewide should be content that is expressly illegal in the countries that host their servers. That's it. Subreddit moderators should have a much firmer hand, because if you don't like a sub, you can create another one. The site as a platform, which was created expressly to be a bastion of free speech originally, should not be in the business of banning people for their ideas.
Reddit instead picks and chooses what people can say and think, and can't even hide behind 'obscenity' as they allow plenty of porn but don't allow anyone who doesn't abide by their strange new set of ill-defined postmodern values. Can we get a list of the concepts that fall into their new wrongthink? Hardly.
I'd prefer they just state their policy aloud, in clear terms, rather than couching it. Just say you can't advocate for or even argue in favour of white people, for men, for heterosexual cisgendered people on the platform. Just be honest and say it like it is. It would be much less insulting and much easier to deal with conceptually if there was even a shred of honour in their approach.
So now we've reached the point where we're arguing over the semantic meaning of the word "censorship." While we're here, can you please inform us which word we are allowed to use to describe what reddit is doing?
"moderation", "anti-harassment protection" ( I think that one was used for justifying action against a specific subreddit ), of course reddit would not use a term as bad as "censorship" knowing how much it would cost them.
However, I really feel to clarify that I feel that reddit is in the wrong in endorsing the action of an admin that was clearly censoring mention of their name from the news.
This is a little more nuanced than you imply. In the end, it seems they fixed the automod rule, but sub's are still actively blacking out as we speak. We'll see how far it goes, I guess!
Anyone who believes that "master" is some kind of slur and takes the opportunity to take offense over it is not someone you want causing problems in your organization.
I dont know, I was taught from a very young age to be nice. And honestly, I kinda of kept it as a close part of my personality to not make anyone feel uncomfortable for any reason. Although I can argue most of these things from a political angle, I also feel like "making people feel more welcome" is a goal in and of itself, and therefor can't be overlooked.
Honestly, I feel like if you would have a problem with a particular community you would like to have it resolved too right? I just don't think that it's ever been about terminology because you never had to feel uncomfortable because of it. That's not bad however, but it's easy to forget that if you don't relate to someone subjective reality, doesn't mean it's any less real.
If someone still struggles to get behind it, think of the few chars that will be shorter to type and also think how it is much easier to compare the branch concept a real tree, and talk about the main branch. Maybe they could have gone for trunk? (If you care so much about main vs trunk, then choose whatever makes you happy)
It's very smart.
Trunk is a better term than "main" and reflects very well the logic with the tree and historical naming (including CVS, SVN, and the trunk software itself).
main implies that one branch is more important than the others.
This could be offending to some.
> main implies that one branch is more important than the others. This could be offending to some.
What if one branch is actually more important than others? What about weighted graphs? Stochastic dominance? You can't blindly project social concepts on math/computing science, it's a blind alley.
It's HN so it may not be. In Japan, main family is the superior family while branch families are treated as lower class. This imperial system is still very much prevalent and map to skin too.
“I am personally not offended by this, therefore anyone that is offended is a problem to be removed”
People have different life experiences and backgrounds. The cost to you of renaming is near zero, if you’re the one loudly opposing something that makes your coworkers more comfortable then you’re the one causing problems in the organisation.
I have yet to hear of anyone being actually offended by this.
> The cost to you of renaming is near zero
Not true. I just had to update a load of tests for a git client I'm working on that assume the default branch name is `master` (I wrote them before this mess), and now I have to configure Git on every system I use to use a default name of master. It's not a huge pain, sure, but it isn't nothing and I don't get any benefit from it either.
Sounds like a flaw in your git client. It was always possible to change the default branch name, so hardcoding master was never right. You’re far from alone in making that assumption though! The good news is this makes everyone’s git tools more resilient.
> It’s not a huge pain, sure, but it isn’t nothing and I don’t get any benefit from it either
The entire notion here is accommodating people. It doesn’t benefit you personally but it does benefit others. And it’s not a huge pain. At a certain point we’re expending more energy debating doing this than if everyone just did it and moved on with their lives.
It wasn't in the client, it was in the tests. You know like, here's a script that makes a test repo:
git init
git add foo.txt
git commit -m "A"
git switch -c develop
git add bar.txt
git commit -m "B"
git merge master # This will break soon.
> The entire notion here is accommodating people.
Is it though? It seems to me like the notion is appearing to accommodate people. I still haven't seen a single person say "my great grandfather was a slave and this offends me", only people saying "this might offend someone".
> I still haven't seen a single person say "my great grandfather was a slave and this offends me", only people saying "this might offend someone".
In today's world, it's enough for many companies. Si vis pacem, para bellum. You don't want to passively wait until you're attacked, you need to prepare the defenses first so your enemies don't even have a ground to stand.
If you strip away all the political outrage what’s actually happening on a technical level is that git is adding a new feature: customisable default branches. I imagine they will provide an option to use it (“git checkout —-default” or whatever) and yes, you’ll have to update your tests to accommodate it. I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve had to tweak code because of an external API change that doesn’t benefit me personally. Often it involves using an entire new API because the old one is being retired! Compared to that this is a walk in the park. A couple of hours at most. And yet everyone is expending hours upon hours arguing about it.
Right but people are arguing about it because it is unnecessary! I bet if an API you use broke backwards compatibility just so it could `color` to `colour` you'd be arguing against it too!
OK so we’re finally at the actual core of the matter: the technical arguments aren’t actually valid, it’s that you don’t think it’s worth the minimal effort because you don’t personally know of anyone that is offended by the master/slave connotation of “master” branches. That’s always the actual core of the complaint yet everyone dances around it.
We all know exactly the kind of people driving this change. We've worked with them. We know how they function on teams and in the office. We know they aren't particularly good at what they do, barring a few exceptions. And we know what they will do to us, to our jobs, and to our companies if we don't bow to their demands.
I don't know, seems like a very weird subjective reality you're trying to push in an objective one. I am one of those people, yet I haven't had any significant problems with my work ethic.
Pushing a narrative that these people are "gonna do something to us" is a weird one to push. What's gonna happen? We're gonna be kinder to one another? We would want to make people around us happy in a profoundly human way rather than a shallow one?
Just to follow you along in your way of thinking. What are "we" gonna do to your job and your companies? I honestly fail to see what you mean.
Claiming without evidence that African Americans are offended (not to mention it is patronizing to them) by a term like "master" is subjective reality.
If an employer or coworker doesn’t agree to whatever is your latest demand, “you” would start a campaign to get them fired or contact their customers to try to lose them business. Happens regularly.
I mean, that would imply you would prefer a term that is in a way discriminatory to a particular group right? Not in bad faith, but it seems you kind off admitted that there is some evil in doing so, and that you're willing to do it.
Also, I wouldn't do that. Emancipating an actual workforce or colleagues would be my solution, not making the company suffer under it.
They just don't understand that Asian families work their kid harder? It's a different world. When I was a kid, there were only 3 acceptable outcomes: becoming a lawyer, a doctor, or a professor. Then I discovered coding - sorry mom :)
So I went to a bottom of the barrel districts for school, but still aced it. I got admitted in a great US school, and a semester later I had proved my worth enough to get a full scholarship. What if you had put me in a better system? I would have only excelled more!
The problem is not the school environment, but the families. From what I have seen, only military-style schools, with the students living in, can provide better chances for disadvantaged students. The best school environment will do nothing against a toxic family and toxic friends that use racist monikers to attack those that have a chance to succeed ("crab mentality").
And BTW the comment below "I miss the days when the schools in the wealthier part of town had things like advanced classes and air conditioning, and the rest of us just sucked it up and didn't whine" makes no sense. I went to school in a tropical country, with no AC. Yes I did sweat a lot in class and I took 2 showers per day minimum, but I didn't die.
Since the lack of amenities like AC or computers will do nothing to prevent people that are pushed up by their family, I think they will likewise do nothing to help people succeed when they are held back by their social group. Amenities are just a highly visible distraction, correlated, but not causal.
> "Diversity substantively means fewer whites and asians."
So here's what I fail to understand: why punish Asians? They (or perhaps I should say we) had nothing to do with the history of white vs black oppression in the United States. Many of us weren't even here until well after the civil rights movement of the '60s and '70s. This sort of "diversity" is basically progressives being willing to be racist to Asians to compensate blacks for the past injustices perpetrated by whites, which is basically robbing Peter to pay Paul any way you look at it.
So here's what I fail to understand: why punish Whites? The students had nothing to do with the history of white vs black oppression in the United States. None of them were even here until well after the civil rights movement of the '60s and '70s. This sort of "diversity" is basically progressives being willing to be racist to Whites to compensate blacks for the past injustices, which is basically robbing Peter to pay Paul any way you look at it.
If I wanted to take a critical view of your comment, you're basically saying "Sure, punish white people.. but how dare you punish Asians!"
The goal of any diversity program - ignoring whether or not that goal is good - is to increase representation among historically under-represented groups. At least as far as academics and education are concerned, Asians are objectively not under-represented. If you're looking at diversity programs in the urban United States, this translated pretty directly into "more black and brown kids."
It's hard to ride that line between equality of opportunity and equality of outcome. But it seems to be that just saying "wow there's not enough black and brown kids in these classes, so we better cancel them rather than see what went wrong (or if anything actually went wrong)" is a pretty ass-backwards way to handle things.
Because Asians broadly speaking do not depend on favors from the ruling elite for their position, thus they are politically unreliable (although currently mostly aligned with them).
Because Asians perform better and that would contradict the narrative that without systemic racism the outcome would reflect the overall demographics of the population, so 50% men/women, 60% whites, 18% latinos, 13% blacks, 6% asians etc.
Because Asians blow up their entire "critical race theory". If racism is truly the cause of certain minorities poor outcomes, then why are Asian outcomes as good or better than whites?
How in the space of seventy years or so did equal rights go from 'Stop Segregation' to 'Everybody Should be Segregated Based On Race or Other Physical Factors'?
"Now, what does all of this mean in this great period of history? It means that we've got to stay together. We've got to stay together and maintain unity. You know, whenever Pharaoh wanted to prolong the period of slavery in Egypt, he had a favorite, favorite formula for doing it. What was that? He kept the slaves fighting among themselves. But whenever the slaves get together, something happens in Pharaoh's court, and he cannot hold the slaves in slavery. When the slaves get together, that's the beginning of getting out of slavery. Now let us maintain unity."
-MLK, I've Been To The Mountaintop, last speech given the night before assasination
Please add this to the column of "things evil right wing twitter anons were investigating years beforehand", so you can update your estimates of their future credibility.
20% of all dollars were created in 2020. The only thing preventing that from translating into the broader price level is that money velocity collapsed due to the Covid shutdowns. Instead most of that has channeled into financial and property asset prices.
Once velocity increases, as is the plan if you assume 2021 is the year we "recover" from Covid restrictions, the Fed will have a choice between inflation and deflating the money supply (eg by selling a huge portion of their accumulated financial assets). The latter implies a rise in interest rates that harms economic recovery and government borrowing costs, potentially reducing available fiscal stimulus.
I would like to read an analysis of how they plan on veeeery carefully extricating themselves from this situation but as far as I can tell the strategy is to wing it.
It's not velocity - that's a red herring (complete misunderstanding of monetary behaviour by Rothbard et. al.)
There are a few things going on simultaneously, one is that a lot of the new money is going into the finance sector, so there is inflation, but it's in share prices which doesn´t get captured by the CPI measurement. The other thing is that banking regulation no longer depends on the reserve requirement, but on the capital reserve requirement which controls how much lending the banks can do (and through that the amount of money creation.) So the inflationary spiral is now, banks increase capital, which increases lending, which increases the money supply, which increases the value of existing capital, etc. It is fortunately a lot slower than what would have happened if the old asset reserve requirement was still all that controlled the system. You can see it starting to affect M2, but it will take a while to feed through.
The FED strategy is to do enough to keep the recovery going, but not so much that it overheats. GDP growth will over time make the debt burden bearable as interest rates tick higher.
With 10 million unemployed and 44% of households being behind on mortgage/rent/bills the economy is not going to roar back to life. With demand depressed because the actual economy hurting badly inflation will be moderate and temporary and deflation will remain the top concern of the Fed.
Of course we do see prices in some areas going up. Houses for instance. But that makes sense when you think about it. Nobody wants to move to a smaller house/apartment during a pandemic, and millions are simply not paying their mortgage instead of downsizing. Meanwhile those with money are moving away from cities and buying bigger places. The implications for housing prices are obvious. But this asymmetry won't last because the relief programs are temporary.
Burry believes that rising prices and some inflation proves we are at the cusp of Weimar Germany style hyperinflation. That is, at least for now, not borne out by the data in the slightest.
And what happens when inflation rises and they need to control it with non-zero interest rates? Then stocks, real estate etc crash and we're back in another recession, which they try to solve with... more money and lower interest rates. We've already seen this story a few times.
Inflating away debt is fine if it is done slowly and has been done for centuries.
The extreme asset valuations we've seen after a decade of QE are unprecedented.
ZIRP and QE are not fine and are not working for the stated purpose, if anything they're making the economy more fragile. There's an interesting overview of the choices here from Lyn Alden, none are without complications but it does sound like they'll try to aim for moderate inflation and hope they can control it, but if they need to put the brakes on in a hurry the traditional methods of doing so could have extreme effects on overvalued assets:
Yeah I don't disagree with Lyn, low rates are underwriting our entire bubble ad not necc the monetary policy I'd prefer.
Rather than pushing up financial assets and then jamming everyone into more interest rate sensitive debt, why not print the money, give it to poor people, and create a bit of inflation.
> Run inflation higher than interest rates to push down the nominal value of debt.
MMT [with apologies to The Matrix]: “Do not try and inflate away the fiscal deficit. That's impossible. Instead only try to realise the Truth... There is no debt, and no ‘fisc’.”
While you can preprogram spending and call it “debt” in MMT, you can't understand MMT from within the metaphor of the fisc, the limited public purse which must be filled by revenue and/or borrowing to enable spending.
MMT isn't really about how you use blunt-instrument monetary policy like fed target rates, it's about not needing the separation between sharp-tool “fiscal” and blunt-instrument monetary policy, because “fiscal” policy actually lacks fiscal constraints and has only monetary constraints, and therefore can and should be used instead of blunt-instrument monetary policy. While conventional economists tend to criticize the US for being overreliant on monetary policy because of Congressional failure to deploy fiscal stimulus in recent downturns, MMT dial that up to 11, viewing the divide between fiscally-constrained but more targetable policy and monetary policy which has no fiscal constraints as artificial and unnecessary, as the constraints actually applicable to either are the same and purely monetary.
MMT does not depend on or imply the relation between debt and inflation, it addresses the metaphysics of "government debt" as such. In fact it suggests you should not "inflate away the debt", as if governments were subject to an actual fiscal constraint of spending = taxes + borrowing (the premise MMT rejects).
Under MMT, you can inflate away other debts (mortages, student debts, etc.) To do so, it separates taxes from spending. It does away with borrowing to simply create money out of thin air, and return any money collected the same way. Any difference between spending and taxation increases the money supply, causing inflation.
That lets you tune the inflation rate more directly than the Fed's rather distant lever arm. The Fed has been trying to increase inflation, but doing so mostly by pumping it into the financial sector, in the hopes it would trickle down. It hasn't. So all of the inflation is confined to the financial sector, in the form of the stock market (and a few other investments, these days including crypto).
Under MMT you could give the same cash directly to people as stimulus checks or UBI, and know that it will go around at least once or twice before ending up in the financials. Then you can control inflation with taxation, removing as much money as you need to, and simply burning it.
The public debt doesn't matter. Inflation gradually eats away at private debt -- assuming it's distributed properly, which it may not be.
It's flexible and elegant. Whether it actually works is less clear, but its roots are a lot like conventional economic theory. In theory, theory and practice are the same...
> Under MMT, you can inflate away other debts (mortages, student debts, etc.) To do so, it separates taxes from spending.
Taxes are separated from spending, that's just an observable fact
MMT poses a (actually, quite conventional) explanation of the constraints that actually apply to that. It also tends to be adhered to by people with particular policy preferences, but that's not really all that tightly tied to the descriptive elements of the theory. (Though most argument against “MMT” is actually against the policy preferences, not the theory itself.)@
> It does away with borrowing to simply create money out of thin air, and return any money collected the same way.
Well, it doesn't do away with it so much as point out that it is an act of artifice. You can borrow or not, MMT doesn't care: government created money when it runs a deficit and destroys it when it runs a surplus, and reallocated it all the time. All borrowing does is preprogram in an allocation of certain spending in the future, it doesn't change the monetary effects of current “fiscal” balance. (“fiscal” in quotes because the central tenet of MMT is that the metaphor of the “fisc”, the finite government purse, is inapt for modern government finances denominated in fiat controlled by the government involved.)
It's already well above 3%, if you could include the stock market in the metric.
That's the problem facing Yellen: not just doing enough, but doing something that won't just end up inflating the kinds of assets owned by the wealthy. Consumer prices have been stable because despite the increase in money supply, consumers as a whole were treading water (at best) even before the pandemic.
She would be happy to do something that caused CPI to get above 3%. It would mean the Fed could finally take the punch bowl away. They've been refilling it for well north of a decade, and it drains as fast as they fill.
Why does it make a mockery? It’s included in CPI and for a large swath of America housing isn’t growing by 10% each year, so we’d expect housing inflation to be moderate on average.
Yes, they do. It's 8.833% of the index. Health insurance makes up 13% of that part, or about 1% of the overall CPI. So even a large increase in health care contributes only a tiny amount to inflation.
They account for health insurance in a different way than you might think just looking at those 13% / 1% numbers might suggest. The short version is that if you pay $10000 in insurance premiums, but get $8000 of health care costs covered, they call that $2000 of insurance cost (since youd be paying the $8000 out of pocket otherwise). Of course, with the state of insurance in the US, its more complicated that that in reality.
I think the overall 8.8% figure is probably reasonably accurate for total health care costs, on average.
> The only thing preventing that from translating into the broader price level is that money velocity collapsed due to the Covid shutdowns.
Hum... Money management 101 says that if velocity goes down, you must print more money to compensate. Otherwise you get a deflationary crisis added into your real world one. (And fiscal policy should intervene increasing the velocity, but fiscal policy is a fraud everywhere, so nothing new here.)
The real test on the seriousness of the US monetary policy is whether they will drain the market once the velocity increases. I do expect them to, but well, anything may happen.
Anyway, that part of the comment on the title is a case of "well, duh?!?" What else could we expect any central bank to do right now? But the data is still interesting.
MV=PQ is popular in some circles, but it doesn't describe casual links.
You can't reason about how those quantities behave from the equation, which is a mere accounting tautology.
Both recently and in QE post-global financial crisis, V went down because M increased without any reason for why the right-hand side of the equation should change.
> V went down because M increased without any reason
Wait, if we are talking about 2017-2019, that's a different story. But right now, V got to the floor (everywhere, not just the US) because of the pandemic.
You bring up an interesting point about the velocity of money. Two things come to mind:
1) If wealth distribution in the US is getting more top heavy, is a certain percentage of the currency slowing down in velocity as it is held by wealthier people who aren't spending it?
2) What is the rate of population change vs. the change in money supply? If the population is growing at 5% a year, the money supply growing at 5% a year should be net neutral for inflation. I think the US population is growing less than 1% per year so maybe this isn't really a hedge against inflation.
To expand on "money velocity": Inflation reaches high-priced assets and those which are largely bought by institutional investors first - Real estate and equity.
Did you know that vanilla financial securities also require upkeep? Approximately 0.5% of the value of all financial assets is burned every year (and potentially an order of magnitude more, depending on what asset and packaging you're talking about).
That's a heck of a figure you're not providing a reference or explanation for at all. Or even an explanation of what you mean by financial securities and "burned".
Mutual funds, the most legible way to get an estimate of the holding cost of securities (since they are required to transact at net asset value) routinely charge between 0.2-1% fees, depending on size and asset class.
Clearinghouses, transfer agents, and cash management firms don't work for free, which is the problem that cryptocurrencies explicitly solve; neither do compliance, KYC, fraud, etc., which most cryptocurrency protocols elide altogether.
They also have an entire corpus of regulation surrounding them and coordination overhead that allows sovereign states to compare apples to apples, and ensure that these respective sovereign State's financial systems are not utilized to facilitate patterns of behavior those respective State's citizens define as criminal.
Oh wait.. You don't want that functionality, and you're still using up the energy footprint in the event you are correct. One of these delivers significantly less versatility than the other for the same energy investment.
