given that by The Paris Agreement we need to be carbon neutral world wide at the latest by 2040. As we probably cannot eradicate peat/coal burning everywhere in the world by that date, the industrialized countries need to be carbon neutral ten years earlier and decidedly carbon negative by 2040. Having any private transport based on fossil fuels in 2040 in the west seems to be totally out of question.
Why are there 'other markets'? A stock exchange has become part of the infrastructure of a country, it seems to me. So IMHO this has two consequences. First, the (there can be only one per country) stock exchange is not a private company but is run by the state and secnd every trade has to be made through the stock exchange. If you trade anything secretly and it is found you are out of business. I think this will solve most of the current problems: No HFT because there is no incentive for the stock exachange to have first class customers. It is not supposed to make profits anyway. The transaction fees/taxes can not be circumvented. You could easily enforce that every new 'financial product' you want to introduce has to be certified first. I imagine this could be done similar to how drugs are introduced. As a bak, you would have to prove convincingly that your product can not have any harmfull effects and the stock exchange would check your documents and then possibly approve your product. A nice side effect of a stock exchange run by bureaucrats would be that all of this would be so complicated, expensive and slow that banks would probably not try to get more than a handfull of derivatives certified.
I am still not sure about the benefits I get from a smart meter in exchange for the dangers imposed by the pontential privacy invasions and the increased hackability of the system. Besides the fridge, the water heater is only the second example that I can come up with, where there might regularly be some choice in when to use electricity. For the wahsing machine and the dryer I usually want them to be as fast as possible. I sometimes run them overnight (which I guess about 90% of the people living in rented appartments cannot do because of the nieghbours) and in that case I would not mind if they started in the early morning. But this could also be done right know with a simple timer in the machine. It may even exist. All in all I do not think that more than a few percent of my electricity are flexible in time. Last year I paid 200 Euros for electricity. That means we are talking about maybe 20-50 Euros I could save. On the other hand I paid 1200 Euros for heating. So not forgetting to turn down the heat before I go to work a couple of times would probably buy me as much. And I am too lazy for that.
I would not follow your heater example because there is a good reason for the 140 degrees. If you stay below that for a significant time, you are breeding all sorts of nasty germs. Again I would not trade the risk they pose for a couple of bucks.
Thanks for all the fish, indeed (ATM that is a tag of this story).
I started reading/. about one year after I had my first internet connection (A 14k modem which I shared with about 100 people such that 40B/s (yes, bytes, not kilo bytes) was considered to be quite fast and downloading the newest winamp (about 1MB) was quite challenging) but registered for an account much later which spoiled my ID. I think it was about the first useful thing I found on the Internet. Since then I read/. almost every day. It will be a tough change if one day there will be no/. (as we knew it) anymore.
Unfortunately I do not have a reference handy but some time ago I read about a study that found the exact opposite of what you claim. The result was that even rich people are happier in countries where the range of wealth is relatively narrow than in countries with a large inequality. They argued that your perceived risk of becoming poor contributes to your stress
While this approach to figuring out how to build safe bridges might be perfectly reasonable from an engineering point of view, the senate of Rome should have been able to figure out that the mistake was in the way it was commercialized.
The way it was done ruined it for a long time if not forever where it would have been easy avoid this mistake. They should have given the engineeres enough money to research bridge building for a few decades. During that time they could have performed experiments on a few experimental tree bridges and later stone bridges. Many safty nets and standby rescue boats could have been used for those research bridges until they had figured out all possible dangers and how to mitigate them. Then after maybe 50 or 100 years they could have started increadibly safe commercial bridges without the need for all the expensive safty nets and boats that are much too expensive for a widespread use but that are not necessary any more. From then on everybody would like those handy new bridges that make river crossings both easier and safer. Because bridges are supposed to be used for the next couple thousand years, it is completely irrelevant that the first commercial bridge would have been delayed by maybe 100 years compared to the approach that actually happened.
Your and the GP's arguments are actually philosophically quite relevant. A famous* paper by Nagel, "What is it like to be a bat?", The Philosophical Review 83, 435 (1978) discusses more or less exactly this question.
* According to Google Scholar it is cited 2461 times
With high quality fine clay you could probably make 50 bits per square centimeter including ECC. If we make the panels 50 by 50 centimeter this amounts to about 16 kB per panel. Let them be 1 cm thick including padding. Wikipedia says that the Library of congress has 1200 km of shelves which means it could hold about 2 TB. Compared to the estimate of 20 TB it is holding now this is only one order of magnitude lower. Maybe it would be worthwile to backup everything in clay.
This might be an averaged result but as such it might have little value. I would expect that the creative times of day vary widely between individuals. For me, e.g., it is quite the other way round. I can only do routine tasks before noon and I rarely come up with realy creative ideas before about 4pm. I wish I could be creative earlier in the day because as a theoretical physicist I should be creative for as long as possible but my personal experience strongly favours the afternoon.
Sounds a bit like the Emacs. You have to actively go looking for a specific functionality if you want to use it. If you do not, it is invisible and you are not distracted by it. And finally, if you are a power user you can customize everything to your hearts desire.
Well, I'd rather say politics is isomorphic to a dense subset of the universe. Some subjects are indeed not political but arbitrarly close to being so.
What's the advantage of these super-atms? I'd much prefer a bank with real people, enough counters and reasonable opening hours (like 6am to 10pm or some such). Why do I have to know PINs and TANs? Where is the service in our "service oriented" society. That does not rule out the occaisonal basic atm for when I need money at 2am.
Now I need to do everything on my own plus I am to a large degree responsible for a lot of security issues that simply would not exist if I could deal with a real person that would know me personally in no time.
Some time ago I pondered wether it would be an improvement in this direction if one seperated the front end business from the back end. I.e. Have several companies that are solely responsibel for the customer interaction for all banks and let the actual banks only offer their products (accounts, fonts, etc.)
That way this front end companies had an interest in providing a good customer experience and the actual banks had to make good offer too, because knowledgeable people at the front end would be the one that choose what is appropriate.
Pretty interesting read. I did not know all the details about the US voting process
Using the the 'X in the box' system would mean a ballot that was probably 50 pages long, and hand counting would be slow and tedious.
Well, 50 pages might be a lot. But we once had an
local election (I do not remember exactly what it was) were they introduced a new system. You had like 10 (or 20? dunno) points you could distribute between candidates (To be able to express: I do not want this candidad but it were the best of the bad). And we voted for several positions too. So there may easily have been like 50 X's plus they had to check that you used exactly 10 points (not more). This was hand-counted to and it took like 2 days or so. The manual solution scales well, just use more people.
Yeah, it's the same in Germany. I do not see why this should be such a problem for the USA
It works like this
The state sends a postcard to everyone allowed to vote. You'll have to bring it with you. So no double voting
You make your cross on a sheet of paper. Just try to make it remotely possible to guess which choice you wanted to vote for.
In parallel you can enlist as a 'counter' for the election. This job is open to anyone. If you wish to do that you are going to help organizing your local ballot and after the election is over you immediately start counting the votes. By hand! Believe it or not. This is really fast because it is done in every community in parallel. This is safe because you are not alone. The counting process is even open to any spectator. So if you are in doubt, watch the counting and if you see some serious problems they may have to count again, maybe with different people.
All the paper trails are kept for some years so if any doubt arises they can be countet again at any time. Plus IIRC some random portion is recountetd by some offical organ anyway, just to be sure.
I do not see why you need any sort of voting machine. The manula process is easy, fast and maximally safe
I did not deal with the practical problems (or the practicality) of the problem. If you only look at this side of the problem it is easy: Give everybody the pill once they cost more than they give back (money-wise and/or emotional).
Neither you nor I want to tackle it that way. So IMHO you have to look at the ethical side first. From this POV the surveillance approach is out of discussion. Your milleage may vary.
Independently of those two POVs I think you should always analyze what your real problem is and then find a solution for that problem. And not for the problem as it appeared to you at first sight and/or the problem that is the easiest to solve (i.e. you already have a solution: think cameras)
In my original post I tried to argue that they took the need of support of the elderly people and claimed that they had solution for it, while what they solved was how to economically stop them (the old people) bothering you.
This isn't about a nursing home where you don't even get out of bed, and need constant human attention.. it's about being elderly but active, and wanting your PRIVACY, but being able to get help when you need it.
All the more I would not want to be tracked everywhere
Would you feel your privacy was less violated if they posted a guard at every door to make sure you don't wander off?
Definitely. Actually I think there would be no need to have one at every door. But if you had someone sitting in sort of a community room who hears if anything odd is going on and can take a quick look and/or ask if everything is ok that would be sufficient. That "guard" could clarify/resolve all the small problems, reorient you etc. And you have the advantage of being able to make deals like: "Do not tell my @#?! son that I almost fell down the stairs for the forth time this week. This is what keeps your privacy. Privacy is not about stealth but about knowing and controlling who knows what and whome you trust
And again. The problem is not how to keep them calm and in the stable like a herd of cattle. The problem is how to help them and solve their problems. Cameras and RFID do not solve the latter but the former. IMHO
There is possibly no way to show more clearly that you want to deprieve elderly people of their human rights, to show that they are second class at best.
Somebody else here wrote that old people themselves like to have some support in living once it gets tough. Those that I know judge their ability to handle daily live as being wastly better than their relatives. But their are definitely some of those self-reflecting types.
So suppose you want to have help coping with your every day life. That means you want people to help you and you want them to do the hard part. Those things you tell them you do not feel capable of. And maybe someone who takes care of your partner who picked up the habit of wandering away at night. But this involves real people too. Not a camera and some remote operator. You definitely do not want to loose your privacy.
So basically you have the problem: Old people need a lot of help and care. Things that are expensive in terms of human resources by definition. Because you consciouly or not do not consider them worth the effort you try to find some cheap fake-solutions. In this case by reducing the help-and-care-problem to the fact of people tending to get lost and defining that the problem is them getting lost. Not them being disoriented or maybe basically being just lonesome or depressive.
I could rant on and on about how short-sighted, inhuman and plainly disgusting materialistic this is.
Why should the (end) user treat spam so sereously?
I never understood this. First of all most spam is easily recognizable by the subject line. Back in the early days of spam I got like 10 spam messages a day and it took me only about 10sec of my precious time to delete them.
Then came the spam filters. No most of my mail is filtered by gmx then by my university's email relay and finaly by Opera/Mozilla. That leaves me with like 3 spam messages a _week_. Still fairly easy detectable. And all this based on these general filters that surely are more designed not to block _any_ valuable mail. If I sereously trained my Opera filter I surely could get even better results.
So where is the problem for me? There is none. I can see that it might be a problem for the providers which don't want the additional traffic. But it's none of their bussines. It's not up to them to judge if the traffic is valuable or not. I even might like to recieve spam. There are people that read printed advertisments too. Even tough I do not.
Bottom line: Install a decent filter and forget about spam
About half a year ago my power supply died because of some glitches on the wire. It took my 45G Western Digital Caviar drive down too (backups are only for loosers:-)). Everything else was ok so I thought it could not possibly have killed the motors but only the chips.
So I went to ebay an tried to get the exact same drive (they were still quite expensive). I asked the guys for exact manufacturing date, revision number of the board and some such and finally I found one.
Switching the board was damn easy once I got these special torx (sp?) screw drivers. I plugged it in and it simply worked. I quickly backed up everything but it is in daily use ever since.
I'll always give it a try. Unfortunately this sounds like a head crash. Didn't have one of those up to now:)
Slashdot Mirror
Fuel efficiency cannot have any effect in 2040 given that we need to be carbon neutral worldwide by 2030 at the latest
given that by The Paris Agreement we need to be carbon neutral world wide at the latest by 2040. As we probably cannot eradicate peat/coal burning everywhere in the world by that date, the industrialized countries need to be carbon neutral ten years earlier and decidedly carbon negative by 2040. Having any private transport based on fossil fuels in 2040 in the west seems to be totally out of question.
326 000 years. Not sure what the business model for this would be.
Why are there 'other markets'? A stock exchange has become part of the infrastructure of a country, it seems to me. So IMHO this has two consequences. First, the (there can be only one per country) stock exchange is not a private company but is run by the state and secnd every trade has to be made through the stock exchange. If you trade anything secretly and it is found you are out of business. I think this will solve most of the current problems: No HFT because there is no incentive for the stock exachange to have first class customers. It is not supposed to make profits anyway. The transaction fees/taxes can not be circumvented. You could easily enforce that every new 'financial product' you want to introduce has to be certified first. I imagine this could be done similar to how drugs are introduced. As a bak, you would have to prove convincingly that your product can not have any harmfull effects and the stock exchange would check your documents and then possibly approve your product. A nice side effect of a stock exchange run by bureaucrats would be that all of this would be so complicated, expensive and slow that banks would probably not try to get more than a handfull of derivatives certified.
I would not follow your heater example because there is a good reason for the 140 degrees. If you stay below that for a significant time, you are breeding all sorts of nasty germs. Again I would not trade the risk they pose for a couple of bucks.
Well, at least in Germany deer must wear headlights and reflective gear if they want to cross a street at night.
Thanks for all the fish, indeed (ATM that is a tag of this story).
I started reading /. about one year after I had my first internet connection (A 14k modem which I shared with about 100 people such that 40B/s (yes, bytes, not kilo bytes) was considered to be quite fast and downloading the newest winamp (about 1MB) was quite challenging) but registered for an account much later which spoiled my ID. I think it was about the first useful thing I found on the Internet. Since then I read /. almost every day. It will be a tough change if one day there will be no /. (as we knew it) anymore.
Thanks a lot for starting and managing this site
Unfortunately I do not have a reference handy but some time ago I read about a study that found the exact opposite of what you claim. The result was that even rich people are happier in countries where the range of wealth is relatively narrow than in countries with a large inequality. They argued that your perceived risk of becoming poor contributes to your stress
The way it was done ruined it for a long time if not forever where it would have been easy avoid this mistake. They should have given the engineeres enough money to research bridge building for a few decades. During that time they could have performed experiments on a few experimental tree bridges and later stone bridges. Many safty nets and standby rescue boats could have been used for those research bridges until they had figured out all possible dangers and how to mitigate them. Then after maybe 50 or 100 years they could have started increadibly safe commercial bridges without the need for all the expensive safty nets and boats that are much too expensive for a widespread use but that are not necessary any more. From then on everybody would like those handy new bridges that make river crossings both easier and safer. Because bridges are supposed to be used for the next couple thousand years, it is completely irrelevant that the first commercial bridge would have been delayed by maybe 100 years compared to the approach that actually happened.
that is, ... almost as loud as dropping a frying pan. Very impressive.
* According to Google Scholar it is cited 2461 times
With high quality fine clay you could probably make 50 bits per square centimeter including ECC. If we make the panels 50 by 50 centimeter this amounts to about 16 kB per panel. Let them be 1 cm thick including padding. Wikipedia says that the Library of congress has 1200 km of shelves which means it could hold about 2 TB. Compared to the estimate of 20 TB it is holding now this is only one order of magnitude lower. Maybe it would be worthwile to backup everything in clay.
and in the same list with "watching grass grow"
This might be an averaged result but as such it might have little value. I would expect that the creative times of day vary widely between individuals. For me, e.g., it is quite the other way round. I can only do routine tasks before noon and I rarely come up with realy creative ideas before about 4pm. I wish I could be creative earlier in the day because as a theoretical physicist I should be creative for as long as possible but my personal experience strongly favours the afternoon.
Sounds a bit like the Emacs. You have to actively go looking for a specific functionality if you want to use it. If you do not, it is invisible and you are not distracted by it. And finally, if you are a power user you can customize everything to your hearts desire.
Well, I'd rather say politics is isomorphic to a dense subset of the universe. Some subjects are indeed not political but arbitrarly close to being so.
Now I need to do everything on my own plus I am to a large degree responsible for a lot of security issues that simply would not exist if I could deal with a real person that would know me personally in no time.
Some time ago I pondered wether it would be an improvement in this direction if one seperated the front end business from the back end. I.e. Have several companies that are solely responsibel for the customer interaction for all banks and let the actual banks only offer their products (accounts, fonts, etc.)
That way this front end companies had an interest in providing a good customer experience and the actual banks had to make good offer too, because knowledgeable people at the front end would be the one that choose what is appropriate.
just my 2 euro cent
Pretty interesting read. I did not know all the details about the US voting process Using the the 'X in the box' system would mean a ballot that was probably 50 pages long, and hand counting would be slow and tedious. Well, 50 pages might be a lot. But we once had an local election (I do not remember exactly what it was) were they introduced a new system. You had like 10 (or 20? dunno) points you could distribute between candidates (To be able to express: I do not want this candidad but it were the best of the bad). And we voted for several positions too. So there may easily have been like 50 X's plus they had to check that you used exactly 10 points (not more). This was hand-counted to and it took like 2 days or so. The manual solution scales well, just use more people.
It works like this
- The state sends a postcard to everyone allowed to vote. You'll have to bring it with you. So no double voting
- You make your cross on a sheet of paper. Just try to make it remotely possible to guess which choice you wanted to vote for.
- In parallel you can enlist as a 'counter' for the election. This job is open to anyone. If you wish to do that you are going to help organizing your local ballot and after the election is over you immediately start counting the votes. By hand! Believe it or not. This is really fast because it is done in every community in parallel. This is safe because you are not alone. The counting process is even open to any spectator. So if you are in doubt, watch the counting and if you see some serious problems they may have to count again, maybe with different people.
- All the paper trails are kept for some years so if any doubt arises they can be countet again at any time. Plus IIRC some random portion is recountetd by some offical organ anyway, just to be sure.
I do not see why you need any sort of voting machine. The manula process is easy, fast and maximally safeNeither you nor I want to tackle it that way. So IMHO you have to look at the ethical side first. From this POV the surveillance approach is out of discussion. Your milleage may vary.
Independently of those two POVs I think you should always analyze what your real problem is and then find a solution for that problem. And not for the problem as it appeared to you at first sight and/or the problem that is the easiest to solve (i.e. you already have a solution: think cameras)
In my original post I tried to argue that they took the need of support of the elderly people and claimed that they had solution for it, while what they solved was how to economically stop them (the old people) bothering you.
All the more I would not want to be tracked everywhere
Would you feel your privacy was less violated if they posted a guard at every door to make sure you don't wander off?
Definitely. Actually I think there would be no need to have one at every door. But if you had someone sitting in sort of a community room who hears if anything odd is going on and can take a quick look and/or ask if everything is ok that would be sufficient. That "guard" could clarify/resolve all the small problems, reorient you etc. And you have the advantage of being able to make deals like: "Do not tell my @#?! son that I almost fell down the stairs for the forth time this week. This is what keeps your privacy. Privacy is not about stealth but about knowing and controlling who knows what and whome you trust
And again. The problem is not how to keep them calm and in the stable like a herd of cattle. The problem is how to help them and solve their problems. Cameras and RFID do not solve the latter but the former. IMHO
There is possibly no way to show more clearly that you want to deprieve elderly people of their human rights, to show that they are second class at best.
Somebody else here wrote that old people themselves like to have some support in living once it gets tough. Those that I know judge their ability to handle daily live as being wastly better than their relatives. But their are definitely some of those self-reflecting types.
So suppose you want to have help coping with your every day life. That means you want people to help you and you want them to do the hard part. Those things you tell them you do not feel capable of. And maybe someone who takes care of your partner who picked up the habit of wandering away at night. But this involves real people too. Not a camera and some remote operator. You definitely do not want to loose your privacy.
So basically you have the problem: Old people need a lot of help and care. Things that are expensive in terms of human resources by definition. Because you consciouly or not do not consider them worth the effort you try to find some cheap fake-solutions. In this case by reducing the help-and-care-problem to the fact of people tending to get lost and defining that the problem is them getting lost. Not them being disoriented or maybe basically being just lonesome or depressive.
I could rant on and on about how short-sighted, inhuman and plainly disgusting materialistic this is.
So long and thanks for all the fish
Funny, I think I actualy eat more chocolate than potatoes
Why should the (end) user treat spam so sereously?
I never understood this. First of all most spam is easily recognizable by the subject line. Back in the early days of spam I got like 10 spam messages a day and it took me only about 10sec of my precious time to delete them.
Then came the spam filters. No most of my mail is filtered by gmx then by my university's email relay and finaly by Opera/Mozilla. That leaves me with like 3 spam messages a _week_. Still fairly easy detectable. And all this based on these general filters that surely are more designed not to block _any_ valuable mail. If I sereously trained my Opera filter I surely could get even better results.
So where is the problem for me? There is none. I can see that it might be a problem for the providers which don't want the additional traffic. But it's none of their bussines. It's not up to them to judge if the traffic is valuable or not. I even might like to recieve spam. There are people that read printed advertisments too. Even tough I do not.
Bottom line: Install a decent filter and forget about spam
So I went to ebay an tried to get the exact same drive (they were still quite expensive). I asked the guys for exact manufacturing date, revision number of the board and some such and finally I found one.
Switching the board was damn easy once I got these special torx (sp?) screw drivers. I plugged it in and it simply worked. I quickly backed up everything but it is in daily use ever since.
I'll always give it a try. Unfortunately this sounds like a head crash. Didn't have one of those up to now :)