- Electricity transfer is orders of magnitude more cheaply transmitted than any physical quantity of gas as the power is up-converted to around 750kV which only wastes a few hundred watts in the actual transmission (across thousands of miles).
California Air Emission Regulatory which is already on the books cannot comply with the plants so it makes sense that they are being built outside the state.
Natural Gas has the benefit of being simple to start up and shut down the needed turbines, compressor, exchanger, 1st and secondary loops based on demand. There's still some pollution, but compared to coal the pollution is a few percent in comparison (afaik). It burns more cleanly. Newer plants usually use the most efficient equipment at that time (within the tradeoffs chosen) so costs are often less (though poor material choices may offset this when corruption/fraud is found).
- I don't think there is a valid rationale for this.
Unfortunately, there are a lot of armchair spectators that don't understand how the economy actually functions; and they've got brigades that go after people that do actually know who speak out (based on certain keywords).
As a result, its totally not worth talking about since the point of no return has largely already come and gone and we're stuck in a hysteresis trap.
People don't see how the things we are seeing today were predictable outcomes given choices made at the money-printer level (i.e. Fed/Private Banking).
No deposit requirement, is no reserve money-printing. It always fails, but I'm sure someone will say... but this time will be different. Needless to say, any discussion on economics is basically flame bait these days with a lot of delusional people on both sides of the aisle.
Fractional Banking (RIP, Circa 2020).
- You seem to have not understood what I said conflating academia with whitepapers and then construct the rest on an improper foundation from there.
Whitepapers aren't the sole domain of academia. What we are talking about aren't hosted on Arxiv. We are talking about industry working groups.
The M3AAWG working group, and browser/CA forum publish RFCs and Whitepapers that professionals in this area do read regularly.
There's been insufficient/no professional outreach about PSL. You can't just do things at large players without disclosure for interop, because you harm others by doing so neglecting the imposing fallout from lack of disclosure on everyone else that's impacted within your sphere of influence which as a company running the second most popular browser is global.
When you do so without first doing certain reasonable and expected things (of any professional organization), you are being grossly negligent. This is sufficient to prove general intent for malice in many cases, a reasonable person in such circumstances should have known better.
This paves the way for proving tortuous or vexatious interference of a contract which is a tort and punishable by law when brought against the entity.
> The PSL is surely an imperfect solution but its solving the problem for the moment.
It is not, because the disclosure hasn't happened properly for interop, and in such circumstances it predictably creates a mountain of problems without visibility; a timebomb/poison pill where crisis arises from the brittle structure later following shock doctrine utilizing the snowball effect (a common tactic of the corrupt and deceiver alike).
Your entire line of reasoning which you constructed is critically flawed. You presume trust is important to this, and that such systems require trust, but trust doesn't have anything to do with the reputational metrics which the systems we are talking about are using to impose cost. Apples to Oranges.
You can't enumerate badness. Lots of professionals know this. Historic reputational blacklists also punish those that are innocent after-the-fact when not properly disclosed, or engineered for due process. A permanent record deprives anyone from using a blacklisted entry after it changes hands from the criminal to some unsuspecting person.
Your reasoning specifically frames a false dichotomy about security. This follows almost identically the same reasoning the Nazi's used (ref at the bottom).
No one is arguing that Safe Browsing and other mechanisms are useful as mitigation, but they are temporary solutions that must be disclosed to a detailed level that allows interoperability to become possible.
If you only tell your friends, and impose those draconian costs on everyone else, you are abusing your privileged position of trust for personal gain (a form of corruption), and causing harm on others even if you can't see it.
Chrome does not have an opt-out. You have to re-compile the browser from scratch to turn those subsystems off. Same with Firefox. That is not allowing you to disable that feature since users aren't reasonably expected to be able to recompile their software to change a setting.
There is no idealism/pacifism here. I'm strictly being pragmatic.
You neglect the harm you don't directly see, in the costs imposed on business. Second, Third, and n-order effects must be considered but have not been (this must necessarily grow in consideration based on the scope/scale of impact).
There are a few areas where doing such blind things may directly threaten existential matters (i.e. food production where failure of logistics lead to shortages, which whipsaw into chaos). It won't happen immediately, and we live in a growingly brittle but still somewhat resilient society, but it will happen eventually if such harm is adopted and allowed as standard practice; though the method is indirect the scope starts off large.
If you only look through a lens at a small part of the cycle of the dynamics that favors your argument which you set in motion, ignoring everything else; that is called cherry-picking or also commonly known as the fallacy of isolation.
Practically speaking, that line of reasoning is without foundational support and unsound. Its important to properly discern and reason about things as they actually exist in reality.
Competent professionalism is not an idealistic perspective. The harm naturally comes when one doesn't meet well established professional requirements. When the rule of law fails to hold destructive people to account for their actions; that's a three-alarm fire as a warning sign of impending societal collapse. The harms of which are incalculable.
Ref: "Of course the people don't want war. But after all, it's the leaders of the country who determine the policy, and it's always a simple matter to drag the people along whether it's a democracy, a fascist dictatorship, or a parliament, or a communist dictatorship. Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders.
(Your implications follow this part closely): That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism, and exposing the country to greater danger."
-- Herman Goering at the Nuremberg trials - I agree this isn't knowledge that takes a lot. The problem is these companies don't explain why they do what they do, in fact a lot of security stuff along these lines in the past has been tight-lipped secrecy bound stuff. You can wonder, but the answer isn't out there unless you know an insider willing to break a broadly worded NDA (not gonna happen, and some are quite broad).
The idea to segment certain types of traffic to different domains isn't that new. For example segmenting certain mail servers by marketing or transactional types into subdomains was done as far back as 2010, but it wasn't explained in whitepapers until around 2016 or 2017, where there was already gathered irrefutable evidence that reputational systems had been put in place and the rules for those damaged people running small email servers who were being illegitimately blocked from delivery; for years with no recourse or disclosure just imposed cost.
Once they published the whitepapers on that, professionals were on board because they specified what they were looking for, and how it should function. Basic Engineering stuff that people who manage and build these systems need to know to interoperate.
These things need professional outreach that standardizes it in some form or another, that's not a one-off blog post imo, and that must fully specify function, requirement, feedback mechanisms, and expectations of how its supposed to work; basic engineering stuff.
The PSL is just the same thing all over again. Big Tech just starts doing something silently that directly imposes cost on others, they don't say what they are doing. Then when it becomes too costly they try to offload it to others calling for support, though if they only do halfsies in a blog post buried in noise, they are only looking for plausible deniability.
The benefit in doing this is in anti-competitive behavior.
Incidentally, while separating subdomains for email servers has been standard practice for awhile now, recently these companies once again changed the reputational weights for things, and they aren't talking. Now its a whole domain as a single reputational namespace not just breakage at the subdomain (bb.aa.com.). No outreach on that as far as I've seen.
There are ways to do things correctly, and then there are ways to do things anti-competitively and coercively. The incentives matched to the outcomes point to which one that happens to be.
How you do something is more important than that you did something in these cases.
If you as a company don't do professional outreach about such changes or standards, and you arbitrarily choose to require something that isn't properly disclosed punishing everyone that hasn't received disclosure; that in my mind is a fair and reasonable case for either gross negligence (for general intent to prove malice) or tortuous interference with third-party companies businesses.
That question which you mentioned about asking in an interview (iirc) was actually asked in an Ignite interview, but was cut out from the recordings later, and the answer was we can't talk about what other departments are doing. They may have followed-up on that elsewhere but I never saw anything related to it.
It is critically important to know the reasons why things are structured a certain way or happen; in order to be able to interoperate. This is and has been known and repeated many times since the adoption of OSI & TCP in the 80s/90s with regards to interoperability of systems.
Blindly copying what others do is a recipe for disaster and isn't justifiable in terms of cost, and competent professional's don't roll the dice like that on large projects of that caliber of expense.
This stuff isn't straight forward either. Like knowing where the reputational namespace stops, what the ramp-up time (dm/dt) is for volume metrics to warm up a server at each provider, and objective indicators associated with when you go above that arbitrarily designed rate. (hint: non-deterministic hidden states) If it takes a month to perfectly warm a new server up without reputational consequences by an insider that knows, that's extra cost imposed on the company by that platform (whom you are competing against for email services).
No disclosure means starting over every time trying to guess at what they are doing, and having breakage later when they change things.
> reddit...
A lot of professionals no longer use reddit anymore because its a bot filled echo chamber that wastes valuable time.
Moderators there often remove posts regularly for simple disagreement, conflicts of interest, or to remove access to detailed solutions or methodology.
For an example of all that's wrong there, look to that CodingBootCamp reddit. There's a guy that's a moderator there that's been, in all probability, using a bot to destroy a competitors reputation and harass them for years, attacking the owners, execs, and going so far as to harass and stalk their children; while violating the Moderator Code of Contact. Crazy and toxic stuff. ---
You can't ever meet professional standards if you don't communicate or properly disclose interop requirements when complex systems are involved.
- > There should be a concept....
There is. It is called ponzi, and its illegal, but in most cases its become indirect enough in the consequences without proper guard rails/accountability that its now allowed by most publicly traded business today (through clever deception).
Generally, it involves three phases:
1st: Front-loaded benefits in CapEx funding meeting customer/investor expectations regardless of cost.
2nd: Inflection point of momentum where CapEx falls off, a brief period where income meets costs.
3rd: Enshittification - momentum/acceleration reverses to the negative, failure of services as the system is continually hollowed out and cost exceeds income.
This is seen in the S-growth or S-adoption curves in business starting to become visible towards the late 1970s and progressively increasing exponentially thereafter in time.
Most companies jettison (sell/off or merge) or close down services before they hit the 3rd stage where the service objectively can be seen as unprofitable by associated investors. The ones that don't are state-funded apparatus.
This concept drives almost everything we see today in modern society and in the market there are parallels and indirect consequences fully described back in the 1950's by Mises with regards to money-printing regardless of its form (i.e. debt that is not reserve backed (Basel3), synthetic shares, paper warrants (Comex), Bonds (with reporting loophole hold to maturity), flier miles, credit card rewards, etc).
The structure and its flaws remain foundationally intractable. This is how you profit and grow bigger off destroying the market. Eventually consolidation leaves state apparatus in place of a market.
No market can compete with slave labor, which is what state-funded apparatus use indirectly through money-printing/currency debasement. Its not considered a tax, and its not given willingly. Its extracted labor.
Those that have lived through these times see the drastic reduction of options in available products that have naturally sieved to the point where shortages are now regularly occuring (for those with a discerning eye). There are a lot of moving factors, but the structure and their inevitable trends are well known structures, at least in certain circles.
In seriousness, the totality of Socio-economic collapse is more probable than a lot of other potential futures, as a result of this. Collapse has happened many times throughout history in relation to money-printing.
Always before, we were not in ecological overshoot for our population, let alone being in this state for 2 full generations. Catton/Malthus paint a grim picture of the outcomes but no one of action pays attention to these things. Its all largely drowned out by the noise of bots.
- > But you're right, complaining about big tech surveillance didn't help with making that point at all.
I disagree. Everyone with a brain is thinking it. Its important to address what your audience may be thinking especially given the other factors in this which I've mentioned in other responses related to gross negligence.
Technical capability exists to narrowly define blacklists, and they chose a gross negligence route (baby with bathwater), without providing notice.
- Eric, I think it appropriate to mention, and I'd like to point out the lack of any real documentation (reaching a professional level) related to PSL on the professional working groups touching on these things (i.e. M3AAWG).
There are only two blog posts on M3AAWG in 2023 where it had been used silently (apparently for years), but was calling for support. I would think if it were an industry recognized initiative it would have the appropriate documents/whitepapers published on it in the industry working group tasked with these things. These people are supposed to be engineer's after all. AFAIK this hasn't happened aside from a brief-after-action with requests for support which is highly problematic.
When there is no professional outreach (via working group or trade group), its real hard to say that this isn't just gross negligence on google's part. M3AAWG has hundreds if not thousand's of whitepapers each hundreds of pages. A single blog post or two that mention it insufficiently, won't rationally negate this claim supporting gross negligence.
Why do I mention Gross negligence?, when coupled with loss, it is sufficient in many cases to support a finding of 'malice' without specific intent (i.e. general intent), especially when such an entity has little/no credibility, but is overshadowed by power/authority that is undeserved. Deceitful people that reasonably should know the consequences will go bad, often purposefully structure towards general intent to avoid legal complications and the legal system has evolved. I am not a lawyer, but this paraphrase about gross negligence/general intent/malice did come from a lawyer, its not meant or intended for use as legal advice in paraphrase form, so standard IANAL disclaimer applies. If the that is needed, consult a qualified professional for a specific distinction on this.
The company is more than technically capable of narrowly defining blacklists and providing due process and appropriate noticing requirements.
The situation begs questions of torturous interference, and whether the PSL is being used as an anti-competive mechanistic moat to prevent competitors from entering the market by imposing additional cost arbitrarily on competitors that is assymetric to the costs such companies have with competing services (as oligopoly/monopoly).
- I disagree, as a professional in this field for over a decade.
For this to be a legitimately backed statement, professional's would have needed to know about the PSL. This is largely unmet.
For it to be met, there would need to be documentation in the form of RFC's and whitepapers in industry working groups which would be needed. This didn't happen.
M3AAWG only has two blog post mentions, and that's only after the great layoffs of 2023, and only that its being used by volunteers and needs support. No discussion about organization, what its being used for, process/due process, etc.
It wholly lacks the needed outreach to professionals in order to make such a statement and have it be true.
- Yes, its generally good advice to keep user content on a separate domain.
That said, there are a number of IT professionals that aren't aware of the PSL as these are largely initiatives that didn't exist prior to 2023 and don't get a lot of advertisement, or even a requirement. They largely just started being used silently by big players which itself presents issues.
There are hundreds if not thousands of whitepapers on industry, and afaik there's only one or two places its mentioned in industry working groups, and those were in blog posts, not whitepapers (at M3AAWG). There's no real documentation of the organization, what its for, and how it should be used in any of the working group whitepapers. Just that it is being used and needs support; not something professional's would pay attention to imo.
> Second, they should be using the public suffix list
This is flawed reasoning as is. Its hard to claim this with a basis when professionals don't know about this, a small subset just arbitrarily started doing this, and seems more like false justification after-the-fact for throwing the baby out with the bath water.
Security is everyone's responsibility, and Google could have narrowly tailored the offending domain name accesses instead of blocking the top-level. They didn't do that, and worse that behavior could even be automated in a way that the process could be extended and there could be a noticing period to the toplevel provider before it started hitting everyone's devices. They also didn't do that apparently.
Regardless, no single entity should be able to dictate what other people perceive or see arbitrarily from their devices (without a choice; opt-in) but that is what they've designed these systems to do.
Enumerating badness doesn't work. Worse, say the domain names get reassigned to another unrelated customer.
Those people are different people, but they are still blocked as happens with small mail servers quite often. Who is responsible when someone who hasn't been engaged with phishing is being arbitrarily punished without due process. Who is to say that google isn't doing this purposefully to retain their monopolies for services they also provide.
Its a perilous torturous path where trust cannot be given because they've violated that trust in the past, and have little credibility with all net incentives towards their own profit at the expense of others. They are even willing to regularly break the law, and have never been held to account for it. (i.e. Google Maps WIFI wiretapping).
Hanlon's razor is a joke intended as a joke, but there are people that use it literally and inappropriately to deceitfully take advantage of others.
Gross negligence coupled with some form of loss is sufficient for general intent which makes the associated actions malicious/malice.
Throwing out the baby with the bath water without telling anyone or without warning, is gross negligence.
- Unfortunately that is just how it is on biased platforms, but its not like that everywhere yet. It is like a page out of Atlas Shrugged though.
All the parasites ended up dying in that book when all the intelligent people decided to just step back and let natural human tendency and the momentum they created do what it was always going to do. All those people were deluded into thinking they could just make a law without paying respect to the mechanics that made things work. Ayn Rand though is also quite deluded in that her ideas don't work without eliminating inheritance and money-printing.
Slavery is intolerable in any form.
Any potential engineer watches this as part of their assignments in Intro to Engineering. Lecture 12 iirc.
They referenced a study showing Natural gas power plants emit 0.2% Sulfur Dioxide, 7% NOx, 60% of CO2 compared to coal power plants, and the study only compared single cycle plants, where most are combined cycle that further lower pollution per kWH metrics.
The CO2 in most combined cycle plants is captured as a valuable feedstock for other industrial uses, or sale.
> I'm not sure what California Air Emission Regulatory is.
Its a generalization for the state of Regulatory in California with regards to air standards.
Specifically, I'm referencing the untenable and ever growing sprawl of ad-hoc legislation that is driving the last two refinery's (Chevron) out of California, as well as the bans on any use of certain chemicals like natural gas.
Last I checked there were at least 6-10 partially overlapping AB/SBs that have been passed and are awaiting implementation deadlines. The cost to do anything as a direct result of runaway regulatory is part of why California is having so many problems. The legislature's actions show they don't want people to be able to do business for certain things within California.