3
points
apo
Joined 7,823 karma
- 2 points
- Wave was a perfect example of leading with technology rather than the problem to be solved. Nothing I ever saw or read about it spoke to a specific user problem. Sure, Google has problems in spades that can be solved by Wave (engaging users, crushing upstart social media companies to name two). But in terms of eliminating something costing large numbers of computer time or money, Wave brought absolutely nothing to the table.
I remember seeing the hyperventilating response to Wave by tech people at the time and wondering what they were actually experiencing. Because what I saw was yet another Google initiative that would be shut down and forgotten fairly quickly.
- > “What Elon Musk wants to produce is a lifestyle,” Zulkifli said Wednesday when asked about the entrepreneur’s comments. “We are not interested in a lifestyle. We are interested in proper solutions that will address climate problems.”
Electric cars are poor, even counterproductive stand-ins for long term solutions such as public transportation and the elimination of the suburban commuter lifestyle. They hide a multitude of externalities forced on the public and not paid for directly by owners or manufacturers.
Climate change aside, it's not hard to imagine a country as densely populated as Singapore opposing electric cars.
- 1 point
- Given the dwindling space for burials:
https://www.forbes.com/sites/bisnow/2017/11/03/urban-cemeter...
and the energy/greenhouse gas emission costs of cremation, I can see this taking off.
There's a picture and caption not discussed in the text:
> Katrina Spade, upper left, the founder and CEO of Recompose, a company that hopes to use composting as an alternative to burying or cremating human remains, looks on Tuesday, May 21, 2019, as Washington Gov. Jay Inslee, centre, signs a bill into law at the Capitol in Olympia, Wash., that allows licensed facilities to offer "natural organic reduction," which turns a body into soil in a span of several weeks. (Ted S. Warren/AP Photo)
Was Spade involved in bringing that legislation about?
- 2 points
- I'm sure the emotions are genuine, but articles like this leave me with a sense that those concerned are waiting for others (especially "leaders") to make something happen. They want electric cars to be mandated so they can continue their addiction to the automobile despite the severe environmental effects of car culture regardless of the fuel source. They want government to force companies to develop carbon neutral everything so that they can continue their lives of consumption uninterrupted.
We control our own actions. Our continued individual consumption leads to CO2 emissions. It's in our power to radically reduce our own carbon footprint by scaling back our lives. Not seeking out environmentally-friendly alternatives, but by curbing our out-of-control consumption urges which lie at the heart of this entire mess.
However, this requires painful, life-changing choices for many. Foregoing the house in the burbs for a walkable/rideable commute. Shunning unsustainable locations like Silicon Valley, even if that means reduction in income. Scaling way back on air travel. Avoiding foods grown in rainforest whose consumption encourages deforestation (e.g., coffee). Living far below our means, in other words.
Stop blaming Trump. Rejoining the Paris Accords won't solve the problem. Far more radical adjustments will be needed to prevent even the mildest effects now being predicted.
I want to see people voicing climate change concerns recommending the only thing that audience members can directly control - live a far simpler life and start doing it now. Stop complaining about how impractical this option is. This is what every "leader" is doing, from CEOs to presidents. Act - just like you are expecting others to do so.
- > This was the sharpest downward revision in jobs totals since 2009, when the economy was just starting to emerge from the Great Recession.
It's not clear what number the article is talking about. Assuming nonfarm payroll, the BLS has this data set of revisions going back to 1979:
https://www.bls.gov/web/empsit/cesnaicsrev.htm
Assuming these figures report thousands, nothing really jumps out as being >500, expansion year or not - 2009 included.
Edit:
I suspect the article is reporting total jobs, not jobs change, but I'm not sure. The BLS link appears to be reporting change in nonfarm employment. Surprisingly poor labeling of data sets in both cases.
- For those wondering why anyone would buy such a thing, consider:
- Many financial institutions are required to hold a certain percent of portfolio in safe assets. German bunds are among the safest in the world.
- A holder of a bond earns a capital gain (bond goes up in price) when interest rates fall. In that sense, zero is no limit at all because there can always be a buyer willing to accept an even lower (more negative) yield.
- Bond investors are well-aware of the two points above. When they sense that interest rates and/or inflation are headed lower, they know they can profit by buying, regardless of yield.
- Anticipated rate of inflation matters a lot because investors seeking return through yield focus on real interest rates (nominal rate - inflation). Inflation can be negative as well (deflation). If inflation is lower (more negative) than the bond's nominal return, that's a real positive yield. And that positive yield is locked in for the term of the bond, which in the case of the story is 30 years.
- The European Central Bank has repeatedly signaled its belief that zero is no barrier and that negative yields will be tolerated indefinitely. The ECB stands ready for quantitative easing (QE), in which the central bank buys bonds with money it creates from thin air. Investors know this and this compounds the incentive to pile on and buy bonds to enjoy the capital gains (and real returns if the investor believes that deflation is inevitable).
It's likely that all these factors combine to create the current environment. How long all of this can continue is anybody's guess because the situation is without precedent.
It's as if the financial crisis of 2008 was never resolved - just papered over through massive central bank purchases of treasuries and stocks (Japan's central bank owns a major fraction of the value of the Japanese stock market at this point).
- > Some $2.5 billion worth of subprime loans, those with FICO credit scores below 690, ended up in mortgage bonds in the first quarter of 2019. That is more than double a year earlier and the highest level since the end of 2007, according to Inside Mortgage Finance. There was $1.9 billion worth of subprime mortgage bonds in the second quarter.
Statements like this are hard to evaluate without knowing the denominator: the total value of new mortgage bonds in each period.
All too often, an author who should know better throws the reader a scrap like the following sentence:
> The market for unconventional home loans is still tiny compared with the rest of the mortgage market as well as its precrisis past, when unconventional borrowing peaked at more than $1 trillion.
But this still doesn't convey what percentage of the loans are to sub-690 FICO borrowers.
I see this all the time and wonder to what extent it has contributed to mistrust of the traditional media.
If we find out that the percentage in 2019 is 1% but in 2007 it was 56%, that casts the entire story in a different light.
- The draft document here:
https://www.desmogblog.com/sites/beta.desmogblog.com/files/G...
appears to be incomplete. Specifically, pages 3-7 appear to be missing.
From the article:
> Suess [the state’s Spill Investigation Program Manager] defended his agency’s methods. “What I believe the North Dakota public wants to know is not how big is it, but is this spill a risk to me,” he said. “Personally, I have actually been told by others that we are one of the most transparent agencies out there. My boss is the North Dakota taxpayer, and my door is always open, any citizen can walk in at any time and talk to me.”
That statement sets off all kinds of alarm bells. Forget the facts. You can count on us to tell you what you need to know.
- > ‘We thought that, in general, all of these amino acids would react similarly because they are structurally similar,’ says Leman. But while almost all the experiments did produce oligomers, the three proteinogenic amino acids reacted more efficiently and produced fewer side products compared with their non-proteinogenic counterparts. ‘That came as a real surprise. We thought “Is this for real?”,’ Leman says.
Looking at the structures, I would not expect similar reactivity:
https://www.pnas.org/content/pnas/116/33/16338/F1.large.jpg?...
They differ in both size and shape. More importantly, they differ in the length of the tether to the positively charged group which could easily play a role in carbonyl activation by this unit, either in the forward direction (peptide formation) or reverse (peptide hydrolysis).
The paper doesn't mention autocatalysis (catalysis of external amino acids or short peptides themselves), but this is also a possibility. There's a large body of synthetic chemistry in which amino acids and short peptides show remarkable catalytic activity.
But the main problem with this study is that peptides are made biologically through catalysis. What we observe in isolated system reactivity has no reason to translate into what's seen in nature because enzymes offer lower-energy transition states.
- Warren's blog uses the Microsoft antitrust case as a precedent:
> In the 1990s, Microsoft — the tech giant of its time — was trying to parlay its dominance in computer operating systems into dominance in the new area of web browsing. The federal government sued Microsoft for violating anti-monopoly laws and eventually reached a settlement. The government’s antitrust case against Microsoft helped clear a path for Internet companies like Google and Facebook to emerge.
https://medium.com/@teamwarren/heres-how-we-can-break-up-big...
And then goes on to confuse the Web browser with search:
> .. Aren’t we all glad that now we have the option of using Google instead of being stuck with Bing?
There are three reasons I'd avoid this comparison as a selling point:
1. Little of substance came from the Microsoft case:
> On November 2, 2001, the DOJ reached an agreement with Microsoft to settle the case. The proposed settlement required Microsoft to share its application programming interfaces with third-party companies and appoint a panel of three people who would have full access to Microsoft's systems, records, and source code for five years in order to ensure compliance.[30] However, the DOJ did not require Microsoft to change any of its code nor prevent Microsoft from tying other software with Windows in the future.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Microsoft_Cor....
2. The market handed Microsoft its richly-deserved smack upside the head with the introduction of the iPhone in 2007. There's no reason to believe that Google, Amazon, or Facebook will be immune to this process of marketplace disruption.
3. The AT&T Anititrust case seems more applicable in that it deals with a network. After the successful breakup, long distance rate fell.
> The breakup led to a surge of competition in the long distance telecommunications market by companies such as Sprint and MCI.[5] ...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breakup_of_the_Bell_System
From Warren's blog again:
> First, by passing legislation that requires large tech platforms to be designated as “Platform Utilities” and broken apart from any participant on that platform.
This raises the question: what's actually new here? What about the named companies is so different from previous monopolies that new laws are required?
The discussion in the New Yorker doesn't seem to address this issue. There are antitrust laws on the books. They have been used in the past. What specifically prevents them from being applied today, other than political will?
- > We are disclosing a significant state-backed information operation focused on the situation in Hong Kong, specifically the protest movement and their calls for political change.
Two points:
1. The post presents no evidence that this is a "state-backed" operation.
2. Censorship seems like a wonderful tool when applied to your opponents. That support dries up pretty quickly when the censor targets you.
- > Firstly, China has devalued the yuan to offset the rising tariffs that the United States has been imposing. In fact, China has devalued the yuan significantly since the Trump administration first placed a 10% tariff on Chinese goods – effectively negating the tariffs. And with the new 10% tariffs that Trump has promised to imposed on a wider range of goods China has in response devalued their currency further.
I keep seeing claims that China is devaluing without numbers or context.
Here's a 10-year chart of the USD/CNY exchange rate:
https://www.xe.com/currencycharts/?from=USD&to=CNY&view=10Y
At the start of the current administration (Jan 2017), the rate stood at about 6.96. Today it stands at 7.04.
In the two years after the 2016 election (April 2018), the yuan had strengthened to 6.28.
According to this timeline, the first round of US tariffs hit on April 7, 2017.
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-trade-china-timeline/...
From the announcement of the first round of tariffs, the yuan actually strengthened. It has only "weakened" in the last year, and then only back to a level that slightly exceeds that of Jan 2016.
Yet to hear the president and others tell it, China is on a currency devaluation bender the likes of which the world has never seen. Well, I'm not seeing it at least.
It seems that the 7.0 level was broadly seen as a line in the sand. But like all psychological levels, they rarely mean anything in the long term.
The trend is clearly for more yuan weakness based on the chart alone. Perhaps we'll even see even massive devaluation.
But so far that's just speculation. The chart tells a story of a massive bowl formation (strongest yuan point in Jan 2014) hinting at severe weakness ahead, but we're nowhere close to that at the moment.
- 1 point
- > Surprisingly, the root cause of bad software has less to do with specific engineering choices, and more to do with how development projects are managed. The worst software projects often proceed in a very particular way:
> The project owners start out wanting to build a specific solution and never explicitly identify the problem they are trying to solve. ...
At this point, it looks like the article will reveal specific techniques for problem identification. Instead, it wraps this nugget in a lasagna of other stuff (hiring good developers, software reuse, the value of iteration), without explicitly keeping the main idea in the spotlight at all times.
Take the first sentences in the section "Reusing Software Lets You Build Good Things Quickly":
> Software is easy to copy. At a mechanical level, lines of code can literally be copied and pasted onto another computer. ...
By the time the author has finished talking about open source and cloud computing, it's easy to have forgotten the promise the article seemed to make: teaching you how to identify the problem to be solved.
The section returns to this idea in the last paragraph, but by then it's too little too late:
> You cannot make technological progress if all your time is spent on rebuilding existing technology. Software engineering is about building automated systems, and one of the first things that gets automated away is routine software engineering work. The point is to understand what the right systems to reuse are, how to customise them to fit your unique requirements, and fixing novel problems discovered along the way.
I would re-write this section by starting with a sentence that clearly states the goal - something like:
"Paradoxically, identifying a software problem will require your team to write software. But the software you write early will be quite different than the software you put into production. Your first software iteration will be a guess, more or less, designed to elicit feedback from your target audience and will deliberately built in great haste. Later iterations will solve the real problem you uncover and will emphasize quality. Still, you cannot make technical progress, particularly at the crucial fact-gathering stage, if all your time is spent on rebuilding existing technology. Fortunately, there are two powerful sources of prefabricated software you can draw from: open source and cloud computing."
The remainder of the section would then give specific examples, and skip the weirdly simpleminded introductory talk.
More problematically, though, the article lacks an overview of the process the author will be teaching. Its lack makes the remaining discussion even harder to follow. I'll admit to guessing the author's intent for the section above.
Unfortunately, the entire article is structured so as to prevent the main message ("find the problem first") from getting through. As a result, the reader is left without any specific action to take today. S/he might feel good after having read the article, but won't be able to turn the author's clear experience with the topic into something that prevents more bad software from entering the world.
- 2 points
- > In recent years I’ve been using an open source, federated alternative to Twitter that uses a protocol called ActivityPub. I run my own server for myself and my friends. People on my server can communicate with other servers that support ActivityPub, similar to e-mail. If people on my server don’t like the way I manage it, they can always export their content and start their own, or transfer to someone else’s server.
Twitter is a for-profit company offering a product (its customers) to advertisers. As such, they get to delete any content whatsoever, regardless of the reason. They happen to be using a policy that will cause some accounts to be locked. This is going to get a lot worse because advertisers loath anything that doesn't conform.
Twitter and Facebook aren't the problem - they're symptoms of the terrible, low-hanging monetization fruit on today's web.
There are solutions. One is to stop criticizing Twitter for being beholden to its advertisers and instead build/participate in censorship-resistant platforms.
That's going to result in loss of reach, at least for a time. Then again, so does getting blocked.
- It's not really a question of hard way vs easy way. It's more like the difference between having a balloon filled with helium and making a single helium atom in a collider. One you can buy at the grocery store, the other requires a team of trained scientists and a facility full of equipment.
A milllimole (10^20 moleculess) is considered small scale by many chemists. Working with a single molecule as described in the artice is just short of science fiction, and hardly any chemists have ever done it. It requires one of the most expensive instruments in the world.
- > The U.S. has sought to derail Chinese efforts to gain an economic foothold in Greenland. The Pentagon worked successfully in 2018 to block China from financing three airports on the island.
This is where the story takes a dark turn.
Global warming and the reduction of arctic sea ice is making this marginally interesting place more interesting all the time. In 10-20 years Greenland could become the center of a power struggle among countries seeking to obtain it.
Would the US allow China or Russia, for example to buy it? No need to sell the whole thing, either - how about a few tens of thousands of square miles? What if countries started pressuring Denmark to part with some or all of Greenland through various channels?
How would such advances be perceived by the US and how far would the US go to prevent it?
Of all the crazy ways for WWIII to start, a land grab over Greenland would be one of the strangest - at least from today's vantage point. But in just a few years, Greenland could become a flashpoint in world politics.
Also, why was this story flagged?
- > Gawel and his collaborators have now created and imaged the long-sought ring molecule carbon-18. Using standard ‘wet’ chemistry, his collaborator Lorel Scriven, an Oxford chemist, first synthesized molecules that included four-carbon squares coming off the ring with oxygen atoms attached to squares. The team then sent their samples to IBM laboratories in Zurich, Switzerland, where collaborators put the oxygen–carbon molecules on a layer of sodium chloride, inside a high-vacuum chamber. They manipulated the rings one at a time with electric currents (using an atomic-force microscope that can also act as a scanning-transmission microscope), to remove the extraneous, oxygen-containing parts. After much trial-and-error, micrograph scans revealed the 18-carbon structure. “I never thought I would see this,” says Scriven.
The molecule (an all-carbon cycle of 18 atoms) was prepared in a very unusual way - by directly manipulating the atoms using an atomic force microscope.
In other words, each molecule is made individually. This is not the way that chemists typically work, and will not result in quantities of material that can be seen.
The abstract says nothing about chemical stability, but I suspect C-18 quite unstable and may never be prepared in gram quantities.
Higher cycles containing more carbons may be more stable, but this is likely to remain a curiosity for some time.
Still, this is a new kind of "allotrope" of carbon. The cyclic, relatively rigid nature of the structure and the potential for electrons to circulate under applied fields could lead to some unusual applications.
It's also highly actionable. Here's how to apply it right now. Close your browser and all other applications. Open a text editor (or a can of paint or whatever). Reflect on something, anything. Then give yourself permission to make the worst possible version of something you like consuming. Write one sentence (or make one stroke), then another, and another. Eventually, rework the mess you've created.
Having forced myself to do this on several occasions, I can say it becomes addictive after a few days. And tiring. Which is why I also know it's easy to relapse on an off day. Finding a way to keep motivated independent of external praise is critical.