IMHO, there's no point in individual action, we need collective political action in the form of massive government intervention, pretty much like in a total war economy. The free market clearly has failed here:
- Carbon tax.
- Carbon tariffs.
- Expropriation of all oil fields, the oil has to stay in the ground.
- Criminal prosecution of executives and shareholders of Oil companies much like what should have happened to the Tobacco industry.
- Job program (right to employment) to re-train the workforce in green technologies, specially in areas that will be affected by the aforementioned measures.
Sorry, but that will never work and isn't feasible to implement.
The real problem is that billions of people want to drive and buy products that require burning oil to produce. Oil companies are just giving people what they want.
Shutting down oil companies before dealing with the massive demand is a recipe for failure.
A variation of that is what controlling carbon emissions is about. But no country wants to commit to it, because no other competing country wants to commit to it.
Basically any body who will do it, gives away the economic edge to a competing country. On a longer run these things will add up and then you end up handing over the thrown of geo political control to that country. Basically the existing super power(s) can't and won't do it because, doing so will create new super powers, and loss of their own standing in the world. And the aspiring super powers won't do it because, obviously it's hypocritical to ask others to cut down on emissions, when you won't do it personally yourself.
There is no reason for any developing economy to believe why the existing super powers should have the sole right to run an industrialized developed economy with first world benefits, while developing economies should be even prevented from giving their people a good life.
Brilliant - combine this with Russia economically benefiting from climate change - emerging artic shipping routes / oil drilling opportunities from ice melting[0] - and people wonder why climate change cynicism is on the rise.
Criminal prosecution of shareholders of oil companies? You do realize this basically includes every human with pension, mutual fund or ETF holdings right? The notion is unfounded. Shareholders are not breaking any laws.
It is up to the government to set the rules and allow the market to play within them. Expropriation of oilfields would imply the government pick winners and losers and would be a devastating blow to property rights. If you advocate change, you should focus on advocating (fair) change in the regulatory framework.
Why not simply let the market decide which carbon emissions are of the most marginal value to society. You do this through cap and trade or carbon taxes, not from picking winners and losers.
I do believe that if there are internal company reports that their activities are causing global warming and the board decides to go with business as usual, it's a criminal activity [1].
It's indeed a blow against property rights, that's why I'm saying it's a measure of a total war economy, which is something reserved for the most dire circumstances. The reason for expropriation is that it's not enough to have a single or a couple measures against global warming, we need all of them. We need as much carbon to stay in the ground as possible [2].
There is no law against "causing global warming", and it's not caused by one oil company.
Carbon tax doesn't address energy sustainability, or force people to stop polluting. They just have to pay to pollute, or switch to non-Co2 pollution. Co2 isn't the only form of pollution. Pumping it into the ground like we do with nuclear waste isn't a sustainable solution either.
Seizing oil fields and carbon tariffs would wreck havoc on innocent people, since getting food and being able to survive is entirely dependent on the global economy in all developed nations.
We could power all of the US with solar with 0.5% of the land we have. Solar is already feasible with the will, and improving.
If causing global warming is a crime, then wouldn’t causing global cooling also have to be a crime? There is a logical quagmire in this thought process.
Very much disagree. You can both take individual action and push for systemic change, for two reasons.
Individual action can make a meaningful difference, maybe not in curbing climate change, but at least in supporting biodiversity in your little corner of the world, if ever so small. In the case of the monarchs, you can help by preserving their habitat by planting milkweed. There's a lot of examples of other small scale conservation efforts that make a real difference.
If you have some time to spare, Jonathan Franzen wrote an article about your defeatist attitude https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/04/06/carbon-capture, contrasting it to the meaningful work that can be done, and should be done by people of all means. It's well written, if not his message, you may enjoy his prose.
Second, taking individual action, however small, is the right thing to do. Eventually, somebody needs to be the first to step up. Some people already do, by making choices that reduce their carbon footprint, lowering their daily driving needs, travelling less by airplane, living smaller, whatever it may be.. Be that first person. When you lead by example, advocating for systemic change might actually work, as more and more people may follow in your footsteps.
This bill https://energyinnovationact.org/ (also [1]) is in the US Congress right now. It includes a carbon fee-and-dividend (both a tax and tariffs, the proceeds of which are distributed among all residents of the nation).
Please call your representative and tell them supporting this policy is the most important thing they'll ever do. Also get everyone you know to do the same.
Second:
Criminal prosecution of executives and shareholders of Oil companies,
- Will never be politically tractable
- Is equivalent to prosecution of someone for loading a gun, rather than the person who pulled the trigger
- Does divesting from a company even hurt that company? I mean if the company is not trying to raise cash by selling shares? If they aren't trying to sell stock, why do they care about the share price?
That may seem like a feasible way forward but you can look at what happened when France took a step in this direction. Theyve since stepped all the way back and the protests are still ongoing.
And rightly so. The reason it's unfair is because the general population shouldn't be the ones to pay for the disaster that is our environment. They bought the cars because they needed them to survive in this economy. The people who should be punished are the big players that pushed the economy in this direction in the first place. They should be the ones to carry this load for everyone, and nobody else.
> That may seem like a feasible way forward but you can look at what happened when France took a step in this direction. They've since stepped all the way back and the protests are still ongoing.
Except that in the case of France, the proposed tax really was an austerity measure masqueraded under the idealogical tazer of Save_The_Environment (a classic, these days): in fact, only 15% of the tax was actually going to the budget of the ministry of ecology.
That said, I largely agree with you with regards to who should bear the costs of these things, but in this case, the social consequences are such an unexpected gift that I would urge Washington politicians to attempt such a move :)
I have a feeling that people who perform individual actions are more likely to vote for collective ones. And the campaigns to promote individual actions can be a much easier sell.
I once read that the way to get people to donate to the red cross is first ask them if they would like to wear a free red cross ribbon. Then a week later ask them if they would like to donate. I suspect environmentalism could work the same way.
I second this. I'm 41 and have seen how privatization has mainly only led to decline in the areas I care about like the environment and workers' rights. Sure we have a good economy currently, but I feel that's in spite of rampant capitalism, not because of it.
As a kid here in Idaho, I remember seeing lots of Monarch butterflies and the others that imitate them. Today I see only moths and smaller white butterflies (we still have some large wood moths in the forests thankfully).
I think the problem is that young people today think that this is how things are supposed to be. They aren't old enough to remember pre-Reagan, or the fellowships, mens/womens groups and even religious volunteer groups of my grandparents' generation - which remembered the dangers of the Great Depression when there was no social safety net, and fascism in WWII.
Just for a poll, does anyone here believe that the free market can provide solutions to the externalities listed in this thread? Please include your age and why.
Probably true, but individual action is a way of stating, "I will do this much without the government, so obviously I support collective action". Also if, say, the government is engaged in genocide, a change in government policy is certainly called for, but you should still shelter/hide individuals that come your way, as best you can.
Not usually comfortable with bringing genocide into a discussion about political theory, since it rarely adds understanding to the discussion, but in this case it seems literally to be the most apt analogy.
Agreed. To rephrase, I just think that people spend too much time arguing what they can do on an individual/moral level (i.e. veganism, etc) and too little time discussing political solutions, and I believe this is mostly a political issue.
I do feel guilty about my carbon footprint and have been trying to decrease it. For instance, I would love to not drive to work but there's simply not good public transportation where I live, what can I personally do about that?
If, for instance, a corporation dumps toxic waste on a river because it's cheaper than the fines, what can I do about that besides political action?
I see the authors are hanging out here so would like to make a question :)
Do you believe that with the proper audit systems in place (e.g. open-source, open-hardware, not rolling your own crypto, etc) it would still be possible to have a secure electronic voting system?
Optical scanners have a very good cost-benefit in terms of accuracy, complexity, transparency and usability.
If you refer to paperless electronic voting, it will be always vulnerable to malicious insiders. In order to possibly prevent that, you would have to lock it down in such a way that no one would be able to audit the result after the fact, undermining the sole purpose of a public election.
What is the value proposition of electronic voting machines?
I'm not an expert on the technology but I would say that in 2018 and for the forseeable future there is no way to make an electronic voting machine that the public will trust.
Arguably that is far more important than the tech stack.
The paper mentioned that the Brazilians considered electronic voting machines would be something to help fight against fraud.
Besides that you could consider speed. The election results in Brazil are usually released on the same day of the election. In Brazil the election happens in a single day (on a Sunday) where the whole country is focused in doing one single thing - vote! :)
Speed, scaling, and ease of use to those who like touch screens. Schneier mentions those benefits in a nice essay that argues against electronic voting:
Accuracy. If you could somehow prove that every vote could accurately be tied to a human pulling a lever, confidence in election results would be higher. Also instantaneous results and no issues of a recount (like in the 2000 election, where the refusal of a recount in a state cost Al Gore the election).
On the other hand, the way votes were counted back in the days of the paper ballot were not something to be proud of either.
Anyone who's been involved in counting votes has seen more vote count fraud than they could possibly try to explain to others. Everybody used to be involved in that, from the people counting who didn't want to be there and would do anything just to get over with it, to the party delegates, to the people in charge of the sections.
I understand all the criticism and I praise your work in pushing for a more secure and auditable stack but it's hard to argue that the previous system was better in any way.
I don't really see how that's superior to anything. It adds complexity to a system that's already hard to understand to large slices of the voters, and provides nearly no actual advantage to either the old paper ballot or the new electronic system.
A potentially better approach would be to have the systems themselves publicly auditable and somehow have the live ballot devices verifiable.
VVPATs do not add complexity, they cheaply allow a layman to verify if a proper record of his/her vote was produced.
I can't parse your last sentence, sorry.
PS: Yes, I would prefer to redesign the whole thing from scratch and tightly integrate physical and electronic records, as in an optical scanner, but this is very unlikely to happen anytime soon.
and that's why governments should hire software engineers that can be in the loop and understand not only the technical but the policy side. Hiring an army of contractors earning 300k/year to deliver "something" in the waterfall model is a recipe for disaster.
Have you actually tried what you are saying ? Because it's a nice idea just completely unrealistic.
Software engineers who are not just technical but SMEs as well as having excellent skills in stakeholder engagement are incredibly rare. And most of them know how good they are and are contracting at, you guessed it, around 300k/year. Talented engineers are usually quite savvy when it comes to money.
Also for most projects like this it is Waterfall for the overall project (Requirements, Design, Development, UAT, Production) and Agile for the Design/Development parts. It's really the only way since the client does Requirements/UAT/Production and the vendor does Design/Development.
This is what the US Digital Service is doing. Recruiting these folks /is/ damn hard, but one thing that helps is being able to offer the opportunity to make truly meaningful large-scale impacts. It's a pretty unique environment with some interesting challenges...
> Have you actually tried what you are saying ? Because it's a nice idea just completely unrealistic.
I've been in places where it's done. In fact, I've been involved for a long time in a public sector environment with three key systems, one of which is a central claims adjudication system, and two of which are accounting and tracking systems that interface with it, performing similar functions to each other but for two separate programs that share the adjudication system. Those three systems, for historical reasons, have three separate models:
The adjudication is state-owned (that is, the code belongs to the state) and operated, developed almost entirely by a team of contractors with some involvement by state programming staff and a state development lead and also tight integration state-staff IT team that does requirements analysis and acceptance testing and manages most of the interface with state business users.
One of the accounting/tracking systems is, and has been from the beginning, developed and maintained almost entirely in-house by state staff (and almost solely with programming staff.) Because of subsequent organizational consolidation, the state team working on this system overlaps the one working on the prior system.
The other is a vendor-maintained MOTS system, with state IT oversight.
Each has it's strengths and weaknesses, but the MOTS system is consistently the one that is the roadblock to adapting to changing business requirements, and both before and after consolidation the all-internal one was the one with the quickest best-case requirementd to delivery speed, and by far the least expensive for the value delivered.
One of the things people grossly underestimate when dealing with government is that nobody ever really has enough power to make unilateral decisions.
I'm not even putting the bar at a correct decision, simply A decision.
Just try terminating a person or a contract with the government. Good luck getting the 12 signatures you need.
Even IF IBM screwed up this badly, who with sufficient power in the government is going to sign off on the order to fire IBM? It's a small world, and if you piss off somebody more powerful than you, your position is toast.
The cardinal rule of bureaucracy is to never sign off on anything unless you absolutely have to.
The best project by far is osm2vectortiles.org. It pretty much allows you to have a global OSM map on a USB stick, or render it live from a 4 GB VPS.
There is one critical issue which needs to be solved though, Mapbox reached out to them and asked them to rebuild everything from scratch [2], which means that it'll be a few more months before it's legally "safe" to use vector tiles produced by this project.
Depending on the application, you can get pretty far with the Data Science Toolkit's geo data[1], some boundary data [2], and something like Leaflet JS[3]. It won't support pathfinding out of the box, but you can do (bidirectional) geocoding, map rendering, state/county/city-level labelling/border-drawing, and lots of other cool stuff.
People, remember how many successful companies have been founded by immigrants (Sergey Brin comes to mind). This is not a zero-sum game, if innovation doesn't happen here in this country it will happen eventually elsewhere. The US is actually very lucky of having hard-working qualified people wanting to immigrate and contribute to the local economy.
Not really an option right now. The current generation of cameras out there are basically a Raspberry-Pi level computer with a better camera and a hardware h264 encoder. The moment you start doing something fancy, like running any non-trivial motion-detection algorithm, you are bound to run into performance or thermal (read: overheating) issues. Let's not even talk about machine learning.
Just think how much money Nest would save in server time with such a setup :)
My intuition says we are not anywhere near there yet, but do you know if any video processing algorithms exist that can reasonably be executed on encrypted data? Basically, I know fully-homomorphic encryption is ridiculously inefficient in the general case. At the same time, I know of specialized homomorphic encryption algorithms that can operate on encrypted data of specific formats. There are efficient-ish algorithms for encrypted (social-network-type) graphs, and encrypted vote ballots.
I was wondering if you or anyone in your team has come across any work on privacy-preserving encrypted audio/image/video processing? I assume this is a very hard problem, but I imagine someone has tried looking into it.
I'm not really the person to answer that (I'm a lowly software engineer keeping the cogs greased m'lord!) I know at some point Larry (https://github.com/lwneal) was looking into that, at least cursorily. I'll refer to him as the authority on anything encryption-related at Dropcam (or anything, in general. Brilliant guy!)
Isn't HN supposed to be a forum popular with entrepreneurs? You sell the high-computation device as an optional extra.
For full privacy, buy our turn-key home server!
(optional video display available)
If you're the DIY technical types who already
runs a home server, may prefer our inexpensive
software package that provides most of the features
at much lower cost (some assembly required).
(or something like that)
The idea that a remote network is somehow a requirement is patently absurd.
People overestimate the size of the hobbyist/geek market. Sure, in the Valley everyone and their dog can configure a NAS using a terminal from their latest generation iPad, but that's not the case outside of the Bay Area. I'd suggest you go to Sacramento and ask people on the street if they even know what a NAS or home server is (I once was dumb enough to start a startup there... you are one hour out of SF, but when it came to adversity to technology you might as well be in rural Alabama. This is the capital of California we are talking about!)
Providing these "geek-to-geek" options (term isn't mine) looks like a great business idea when all your friends would use it. But again, the financial incentive is not there if it takes equivalent (or even less) effort to design something that can be used by millions of people instead of hundreds of thousands.
> I'd suggest you go to Sacramento and ask people on the street if they even know what a NAS or home server is
Does Woodland count? I'll ask a few people.
/me steps outside
Well, my landlady and a few neighbors know what they are. You'll have to wait until tomorrow for Sacramento, but I've talked to a lot of people in that area too and very few would have had a problem with my addon server.
If you treat people like idiots, they will respond in kind.
> "geek-to-geek" options
I may have included a geek option (the source code), but a turn-key server isn't any harder to setup than Nest's current devices.
You think people can buy and install Nest's current thermostats, but won't be able to install a turn-key local server that needs literally the same WiFi information?
> the financial incentive is not there
Is this a euphemism for "cannot monetize their data"?
> Is this a euphemism for "cannot monetize their data"?
I find it fascinating that people keep obsessing on how Nest is "monetizing the user's data" through Google.
I won't go into details, but believe me when I say there's way more effort being put in guaranteeing customer privacy than in integrating Nest data into Google's platform. In fact, if you Google around you'll find press announcements describing, in much more detail than I could go here, the kind of arrangement Google and Nest arrived at when the acquisition happened. The data separation clause was a huge part of it. Nest wasn't acquired for the consumer data they could bring over, but rather because... you know, biggest company in the (then booming) IoT sector. Investments on projected revenue are made all the time, but when Google makes one people cook up all kinds of theories about nefarious purposes ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
So, no. What I meant is there wouldn't be enough people buying this "expert" versions of Nest Cams to justify building them. That's all. If you have solid research to the contrary, I'm sure our PMs would love to talk to you.
> If you treat people like idiots, they will respond in kind.
That's a big assumption you are making about how I treated potential customers of my own startup that I put over a year and a half of effort in. It's not about "idiocy", it's just not the same crowd you have in the Bay Area, were store owners will gladly try anything to attract more customers. Leaflets and "neighborhood bulletins" are still a thing there, even when it gives you 0 visibility on how effective they are as a marketing tool and it costs thousands of dollars per month. Anyway, if you want the details, we can discuss them offline.
> You think people can buy and install Nest's current thermostats, but won't be able to install a turn-key local server that needs literally the same WiFi information?
It's not just the server, then you have to setup the camera to point it to the server, provide some rigging to make the video consumable, create credentials in the server if you want any kind of protection against MitM/Spoofing, etc. etc. etc. The very reason Dropcam was founded was because the CEO's dad, an EE, couldn't figure out how to setup one of those "expert" systems. Greg Duffy saw the potential business opportunity and went for it.
I understand if it's not the product you want. We don't pretend to be the perfect product for everyone. My personal opinion - not reflecting Nest's policy on this opinion at all - is that I'd rather sacrifice a 5% increase in sales than increase engineering/operations/marketing/sales effort a 15%. It's just bad business.
I see, Thanks for the insightful answer! Regarding machine learning it would be nice to be able do the training in your desktop/laptop when it's idle or something like that.
But it's very good to know this is a technological issue (as opposed to a business issue). Well, hope you smart folks solve this. Meanwhile, I'll keep tinkering with my raspberry pi and raspberry pi camera :)
Can you share any reference on what the Nest servers actually do that a smartphone chipset isn't capable of? Various apps manage (from my limited knowledge about the field) quite impressive things.
Can't really discuss specifics, but training machine learning models that share data between all your cameras would be pretty difficult, for example. Also, the lifespan of the processor would be highly reduced if you were constantly hammering it (thermal implications, etc. etc.) Again, in a few years that might not be an issue anymore :)
Not that I know of. I know some cities have made associations to create cable television in the past in The Netherlands. And there are internet exchanges like AMS-X that are owned by a group of companies, but not by the public.
For me that kind of story gives extra justification to abolish copyrights in the way they currently are. Our culture is being held hostage by all these games and the real artists get paid very little.
Meanwhile, we technologists should just torrent stuff to make a point and continue to innovate with systems that make copyright obsolete.
Assuming you're a developer or designer, why don't you start by telling your employer you're morally opposed to copyright and would like to see all fruits of your labor to be in the public domain.
That's an interesting one. Let's say copyright was cut down to maybe 10 years. How much software that's running the world right now would be out of copyright protection? I suspect a significant percentage of the fundamentally important code for our economy is at least 10 years old.
- Carbon tax.
- Carbon tariffs.
- Expropriation of all oil fields, the oil has to stay in the ground.
- Criminal prosecution of executives and shareholders of Oil companies much like what should have happened to the Tobacco industry.
- Job program (right to employment) to re-train the workforce in green technologies, specially in areas that will be affected by the aforementioned measures.