A Global Times article says that China has 3,000,000 public EV chargers[0]
US Department of Energy data has the number for the USA and Canada combined as 66,650[1]
This might not be Apples to Apples as the USA numbers might be "sites" and the china number might be "chargers", but I don't think there's anywhere close to an average of 45 chargers per site to make up the difference.
EU directives never had any direct legal force in the UK, or any other member state. The point of the directive is to say "all EU members need national legislation which meets these standards". It's then up to the member states to implement national laws using their own unique systems which meet the requirements of the directive.
As you said, the Working Time Regulations Act 1998 is the UK law implementation of the EU Working Time Directive 2003.
This is fantastic! Somehow I hadn't heard about vertically mounted solar panels until now but it sounds great. There are so many advantages to vertical mounts I would expect them to become the norm.
> vote on policy matters in real time to make things more democratic
Discussion, debades and more generally exchanging opinions with others and pondering the options before committing to a decision are important if not essential for proper functioning of democracy. This necessarily takes time. How would real-time voting make things more democratic? I see no advantage in making the process hasty. If anything, it would trivialize the process, like voting for a game show on television, which would definitely be bad.
We can get to that when we pick the low hanging fruit first.
In Switzerland, they hold votes 4 times per year, in municipal, cantonal and federal referendums.
Talk about any issue you know a lot about to someone who knows nothing about it, and you will quickly understand why more direct democracy is an horrible idea.
Suppose for the sake of the argument we implement such methods that bring the level of security of the digital vote to be mostly equivalent to paper voting (though I do not think this is possible). Then why do you think it would be better to use a harder method of counting votes? I do not see a strong argument to justify the change. The burden of proof is on the new technology, not on the old one that has been working so far.
Why do you think it's harder to count votes? I'm not sure what belenios uses, but in the process I envision a ballot is a publicly accessible encrypted ledger, where the votes exist publicly.
>> Something being hard does not mean that it should not be tried.
As opposed to paper voting, which does not have the issues raised by Tom Scott. If that is not what you meant, don't you agree that a more high-tech solution, complete with unspecified but granted methods that mitigate the security problems, requires more expertise and makes the process of voting as a whole more difficult than the low tech one? (eg infra / software maintenance, robustness to outage, educating people on how to use it, ... everything discussed by other threads)
> ballot is a publicly accessible encrypted ledger, where the votes exist publicly
It is cool, but I do not see how this improves upon voting on paper by mail.
> don't you agree that a more high-tech solution, ... requires more expertise and makes the process of voting as a whole more difficult than the low tech one
Sure, it takes more expertise to run a ballot, but not more expertise to cast a ballot. And that's where the democratic process fails in most of the western world at the moment. Entire demographics are not interested in voting due to the higher bar of going through the motions of going to a ballot booth and casting a paper ballot.
In a world where it's possible to vote from your personal mobile device there doesn't need to be a whole circus and the entire country needs to stop in its tracks for the election day. It can be just another day, another weekend, or another week. You can vote for the smallest things that are interesting for you. Local issues need not to be left to the latitude of mayors or councils, but you could now vote on them from the comfort of your own home.
Voting with pencil and paper is easy, everybody can participate in the voting process and understand it. Also, paper and pencil are more sustainable (can be made from recycled paper and trees, which you can plant, as opposed of mining minerals, shipping, and maintaining thoudsands of computers, with batteries in case there is a power outage).
Especially with something like voting, it is worth considering those who actually can't use paper and pencil.
In college I worked in a research lab building accessible voting systems. We regularly ran test elections with the deaf and blind community. Its both amazing to see how adapted a person can become to living in a world that assumes a certain level of physical ability. Its also amazing to see how horribly inaccessible most voting systems are.
With paper ballots, for example, you are usually limited to sitting in a booth with a poll worker and telling them how to fill in your ballot. That does technically work, but breaks voter privacy and you have no way of knowing if they filled it in right because, well, you can't see the ballot.
> We regularly ran test elections with the deaf and blind community.
Already a solved problem, e.g.:
> On election day and at advance polls, your polling station will have tactile and braille voting templates that you can use to mark your ballot. Simply fit your ballot into the template and use the braille and embossed numbers to find the space next to your chosen candidate's name.
Sure. I don't know if those specific devices were around 20 years ago, but there are various options.
Another part of our goal was to build a voting system that was accessible by default, meaning everyone was able to use the same device regardless of any disabilities they may have.
everyone _that can make it to the ballot_ can participate. also most people have computers already, so you don't need to ship anything. from a sustainable perspective, I'm assuming it's better to have everyone stay home instead of travel to the nearest ballot, and just use their anyway-always-on device.
Also "everyone that can be arsed" to make it to the ballot. Which is a notorious problem that democracies are faced with today. Younger demographics don't get involved considering the election process too much of a chore in comparison with the outcomes.
Not really, one of the goals in contradictory to the stated goal of an electronic voting system of voter verifiability.
The problem is that when you can verify that your own vote has been counted a certain way, that can be used to influence the vote. $100 Amazon gift card if you verify that you have voted Purple. Lack of verifiability has been a feature to prevent a voter from willingly participating in manipulation.
One way to achieve verifiability is through deniable tracking numbers computed locally in network-disconnected devices. To ensure that they are deniable, they can only be computed after all tracking numbers along the votes are made publically available, which can be realised by publishing a secret code that the voter inputs into the device. That way, when the coercer/briber asks for a vote to be cast in a certain way, the voter can select another tracking number from a public list and show it to them. Meanwhile, computation on the device ensures that it does not have access to resulting tracking numbers and corresponding votes with which it could deceive the voter. Meanwhile, the cryptographic proofs ensure that every voter has one unique tracking number. This is the general idea of the Selene system.
That genuinely doesn't seem to solve anything to me.
Sure you can generate all these secret codes but then why wouldn't a briber ask for you to take a picture or video of the screen with all the codes and secret? OCR and computer vision is quite good nowadays and most people are carrying a video camera in their pocket, so the process can potentially be scaled. Bonus points if its install the Purple App and ask the voter to point their camera at the screen with all the codes. Double bonus points if the app generates a nice easy password for the used to plug in to be used as your secret.
And the thing is that it doesn't need to be super accurate. Even if its only budgeted with $10 million worth of $100 gift cards and it's only about 70% of the cards were getting the desired outcome, that's still 70,000 votes going purple. Especially if you limit it to being the first 100,000 confirmed voters, you'll still get people participating if they think there is still hope for getting a card. Even more if you're convincing voters that are only voting for the sake of a gift card and don't actually care about the result of the election.
And ultimately that's just one of several attack vectors I can think of. And I'm not a smart person; I'd go as far to say that I'm actually pretty stupid. I can't imagine what a room full of actually smart folks with NSA-like budget and NSA-like permissions can come up with. Remember the gigantic mess with Dual_EC_DRBG in the FIPS 140-2 standard?
It is tough to convince oneself that all attack vectors are being considered. The key idea is that a coercer or briber cannot always monitor their subjects, which leaves a window of opportunity for voters to cast their desired vote and set up fake credentials for their devices. This assumption, however, falls apart when the coercer or briber asks for voters’ devices and corresponding PIN codes during the voting period. I am motivated by the belief that such an attack vector is, in most cases, unrealistic.
Regarding your suggested attack vector, where the briber asks for a video of the screen showing how the number is displayed on the screen, this can be resolved with fake credentials. When creating a fake PIN code, the voter can specify inputs and outputs to the device with which the video can be taken. Fake credentials can further create fake credentials, so it is not possible to distinguish them.
I have a different comment where I'm stating that one way to counter the influencing of votes is through allowing the voter to cast their ballot any number of times until it ends.
I can think of a method that allows a voter to decrypt the ballot payload only coupled with one or more keys from the parties that organized it. Ie, if I as an individual want to see the vote, I can't. But if I suspect my vote has been tampered with I can ask the organizers to audit it, and with both our keys, I can see the payload. (This is just back of the napkin theorizing, it might have other issues)
I'm looking at the problem through the lens of "why does a voter want to see their ballot". The answer which prevents the issue of vote buying is "to audit the validity of the vote", which then is ensured through putting some stop-gaps in front of viewing the vote in the form of requiring intervention from the entities organizing the ballot.
Ie, if a malicious entity wants to make sure that the votes they have bought are corresponding with what they asked, they need to go through a more difficult process than just asking the people they bought from to reveal their vote.
The criticisms in the videos do not appropriately counter the solution in the linked article. Scott's superficial discussion of blockchain at the end misses the entire ethos of blockchain. We agree that servers, devices, software and networks cannot be trusted, and possibly never will be. So we ignore them and instead rely solely on the output. Every stakeholder audits the final official "blockchain" (for lack of a better term) using their own tools, engineers, and techniques to verify its credibility. I'm not claiming that this has been solved, although Belenios seems damn close. But it definitely seems conceivable that we can one day come up with a functional scheme that distrusts the machines as a first principle. What specific problems do you see with the Belenios attempt?
Blockchains are only verifiable and reliable in so far as everything that exists exits in the blockchain. As soon as it interfaces with the real world you start hitting the Oracle problem [1]. That you are not aware of this and still push for even considering it as an alternative to paper ballots is part of the problem. We need constitutional amendments that ban all forms of electronic voting in every democracy.
The main issue is that centralized electronic systems can be hacked at scale. That's what the paper solves, it slows everything down making it difficult compromise results en-masse. Verification is much simpler and cheaper than voting itself, and can be distributed. A distrusting community, for example, can build their own easily auditable tools, running on their own random machines, to verify the integrity of their community's votes. Thousands of communities around the country can do the same - again each using completely independent hardware, software and networks, all of which would have to be hacked. You may also be overlooking that we have the benefit of a reliable root of trust in the form of manually provided government documents and IDs that are carefully provisioned. You think in 10,000 years it will still be impossible to run a vote electronically?
> You may also be overlooking that we have the benefit of a reliable root of trust in the form of manually provided government documents and IDs that are carefully provisioned.
I'm not overlooking it, self-interested political parties are, but you are conflating the authentication problem with the voting problem. Moving to electronic voting does not solve the authentication problem, it just adds one more problem.
> You think in 10,000 years it will still be impossible to run a vote electronically?
Always have a contract, even for smaller bits of work. That’s the foundation of a good business relationship.
If they have the money to pay, but are ignoring you then escalate from your contact at the company to someone higher in the chain. If that doesn’t work and it’s a relatively small amount of money then you can try to enforce the contact.
I’m in the UK and there’s a small claims court for specifically this. I’ve not gone through it myself but from those that have it’s simple enough to do yourself without paying a lawyer, but it’s time consuming. Im not sure where you are but look into if there’s in in your jurisdiction.
If the client likely doesn’t have the money to pay, then it’s likely a waste of time to pursue it. I had this happen recently when a client went under and ended up just writing it off as a loss. Luckily it was only my time that was wasted so not the end of the world.
The UK has smart energy meters for a lot of customers. Octopus are an energy supplier which is using them to great effect for data nerds and people who want to save money.
To get the data out, you can just call their API to get daily consuption figures, split into half hourly blocks[0]. They also allow you to just download a CVS file directly from the energy use section of their website.
The data in the API is only update daily, but they can give you a tiny addon device[1] for free which will allow you to access live usage in realtime (updates ever 10 seconds I think).
I use a Home Assistant integration to collect all this data live there.
To make use of the smart meter, they also have a series of tarrifs which change price dynamically. The simplist is Tracker[2] which charges you a different price per unit every day based on the wholesale price. There's also Agile[3] which is the same concept but the price changes every 30 minutes with higher highs and lower lows. That one is great if you can shift your energy usage outside of peak times.
They also have "intelligent" tarrifs where you allow them to control your car charger[4] or home battery[5] so it charges when it's cheapest.
Octopus are doing really great things in the UK and part of their business is that they sell the backend as a service to other energy companies who were previously stuck in the stone age as Kraken[6].
Octopus is currently trying to set up in France. They've got a pretty amazing advertising campaign where you don't know what they're selling except for a pink mascot.
Alternative suppliers to EDF have a very bad reputation in France. Their contracts are often unclear and subject to major price variations (+100% after the start of the war in Ukraine). Some use unscrupulous prospectors who take advantage of elderly people to get them to change their contract (Total Energy, I'm thinking of you).
The majority just buy Mw/h from EDF to resell and speculate on future production contracts. They don't invest a single euro in production facilities.
The founder of Octopus was from a software background and has claimed that Octopus (the energy company) was initially just to demo the potential of the software.
Ironic that their software is so terrible then - it took over two years for their support to do 'something' to my account so I could actually pay my bills.
Their hiring is awful too, they took 2 months to get back to me with feedback on my takehome task. I'd already been in a new job for three weeks when they finally came back.
Split panes without using something like tmux for me. I like having long running processes like a bundler in watch mode visibile, but with a keyboard shortcut to "maximise" a single pane if I need more space (cmd+shift+Enter).
It doesn't look like there's the ability to change the URL. The only options are to change the API key, model name (from a predefined list), the prompt, and the token limit.
US Department of Energy data has the number for the USA and Canada combined as 66,650[1]
This might not be Apples to Apples as the USA numbers might be "sites" and the china number might be "chargers", but I don't think there's anywhere close to an average of 45 chargers per site to make up the difference.
[0] https://www.globaltimes.cn/page/202406/1314382.shtml
[1]https://afdc.energy.gov/fuels/electricity-locations