Comment by TaylorAlexander | Hacker News Reader

Comment by TaylorAlexander | Hacker News Reader

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TaylorAlexander

I mean at a minimum their CO2 usage must be astronomical. Likely some of the highest per capita CO2 usage of any human beings ever.

Of course they also use their money to invest in development projects which will I would imagine have significant environmental effects.

In the case of Gates he has been widely criticized by people like Vandana Shiva for his agricultural ambitions pushing chemical intensive agriculture all over the developing world, which Shiva says will have massive negative environmental effects.

Gates also pushes in I believe the WTO for stronger intellectual property restrictions, which has a side effect of more products in the landfill as they are harder to repair.

Bezos has constructed a machine which consumes huge amounts of CO2 (Amazon) in the form of delivery trucks and a flood of cheap flimsy goods which consume energy when constructed and soon end up in landfills.

There’s a lot that billionaires do, by virtue of the power they have in this world, which damages the environment.

> In the case of Gates he has been widely criticized by people like Vandana Shiva for his agricultural ambitions pushing chemical intensive agriculture all over the developing world, which Shiva says will have massive negative environmental effects.

The alternative being more labor intensive agriculture (so requiring more people) and less buffer in case of a bad harvest (so potential famine and instability).

> Gates also pushes in I believe the WTO for stronger intellectual property restrictions, which has a side effect of more products in the landfill as they are harder to repair.

The alternative is a slowdown in research and development since now the research you paid millions for in payroll and time can now be copied by your competitor with one or two engineers.

Shiva argues that the methods pushed by industry are what weaken food security. Patent protected seeds that cannot legally be collected put big industry between farmers and their food production.

She argues for a more resilient food system through seed collection and sharing, biodynamic farming practices that promote healthy disease resistant soil, and an end to fossil fuel inputs in farming.

She is advocating for a stronger food system less susceptible to disease and economic disruption.

Regarding intellectual property restrictions: I’m sorry but you’ve bought in to the widely held belief that patents promote innovation. Of course the main function of the patent is to strictly regulate innovation. Large corporations buy up every new idea they can, and use their patent portfolios to threaten anyone who might dare tread on their turf.

Economically, a world without patents would have more smaller incremental investments as innovation occurs in parallel across many companies in industry. With patents, much fewer players buy up rights to yesterday’s ideas and prevent a sea of competition.

Think of the 3D printer. $50,000 when release under patent. $25,000 12 years later when still under patent. $2,000 from many companies three years after the patents expired. $250 and available worldwide from hundreds of companies ten years after the patents expired. There was a LOT of innovation that occurred in the 3D printing space in that decade after the patents expired!

I’m sorry I’m in a rush but here is some further reading:

https://www.bunniestudios.com/blog/?p=284

https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/africaatlse/2013/03/08/neoliberal-pl...

https://inmotionmagazine.com/global/vshiva4_int.html

http://www.dklevine.com/general/intellectual/againstfinal.ht...

What do patents (which I oppose, btw) have to do with environmental degradation? and Bill Gates being rich?

I believe patents reduce the likelihood of companies building things with compatible, interchangeable parts which makes them harder to repair and thus they are disposed of sooner. I also think it leads to less durable goods such that they come to need repair sooner. For my 3D printer for example compatible parts are available from a number of suppliers and it is easy to repair. Now look at power tools. Proprietary batteries and chargers that change year over year so customers always need to throw out old tools and buy new ones. I assume the battery connectors are patent protected though adapters from China are starting to hit the market anyway. Still grey markets are a bandaid over the real problems.

Shiva has interesting arguments.

> Economically, a world without patents would have more smaller incremental investments as innovation occurs in parallel across many companies in industry.

And a complete stagnation in some areas due to the cost barrier of certain research since, as soon as the product will be out someone will start to improve it incrementally without having to recoup the R&D costs.

A few things:

The world would be vastly better without patents in my opinion. Faster innovation, cheaper goods, less environmental waste. Medical technology would be better and cheaper. High technology like MRI machines would become cheaper, health care would become cheaper, etc. Really massive benefits.

It could be that there are certain fields where patents actually help to some degree. In other words an artificial monopoly is the only way to secure enough funds to cross some threshold for viability. Well, fine. We shouldn’t throw out all of the benefits of open innovation just because a few areas will need help. We can recognize what those areas are and provide government funding for investment, like in health care. Then we still get all the benefits of open innovation and we can distort the market with cash injections instead of planet wide distortions on copying.

> Medical technology would be better and cheaper

That's the first sector where research will grind to a halt. It's extremely costly to bring something to the finish line due to regulations. Think drug research where testing and clinical trials take years. But once the molecule has been synthesized, it's trivial to do so at scale. So what smarter players will do is simply wait for someone to spend years on R&D then copy at the finish line and flood the market.

> We can recognize what those areas are and provide government funding for investment, like in health care

So bureaucrats will have even more say in who/what project gets funding. See how wonderful that has been for the EU tech sector.

e-ink is another area where progress is glacial because of the way a certain patents holder has decided to monetize.

This has been covered repeatedly on HN. There's no evidence of this. Electrophoresis is slow because of the laws of physics! That's why a 2007 kindle panel's update speed is the same as a 2021 kindle but the contrast ratio and cost is vastly superior since those are things that aren't violating physics! Companies like ClearInk are trying different methods to get faster speed but to achieve that they are forced to sacrifice bistability. Not sure why this factually incorrect trope about patents keeps getting repeated. You can look at my comment history to see that I've been trying to address this issue repeatedly.

We are talking about two issues - progress and existing availability:

1. Improvement on panels - you are right, physics is holding us back here. It is debatable whether cross-licensing so prevalent elsewhere in the industry would help. Even then I'd say Eink is holding industry back because they've closed avenues for other companies to iterate on Eink's core patents. (Again maybe good for Eink, but not good for everyone else)

2. Variety, use, licensing of existing technology - here Eink corporation is holding everyone else back.

They decide on what to manufacture and how to sell it. How can this be good for the consumer / small time startup?

There is plenty of anecdata on how hard it is to make a new product with Eink. They are very protective of their technology. LG can't just decide to make 32inch eink panels and license the tech from Eink.

Eink practically holds a monopoly in their niche.

They've bought most of their competitors in eink industry. SiPix was one of them. They are heavily pushing for vertical integration.

My argument is that with more open patent situation in e-ink world, we would see more/different manufacturers, we would see more interesting devices with different sizes/ratios at a lower cost.

PS I own 10+ e-ink readers in sizes from 5 inches to 13.3 inches and everything in between that Eink has allowed makers to use.

I am convinced that with more competition we would see better variety in large size e-ink device market.

I have an open mind, and would love to see an example of some company being a sole patent holder/monopoly for 20+ years in some industry being good for everyone else.

> I'd say Eink is holding industry back because they've closed avenues for other companies to iterate on Eink's core patents.

As I mentioned in my past comments, I work in the display industry and the only people I've heard the above comment from are people who are not in the display industry. It is the equivalent of someone outside software development making an accusation like Microsoft is holding back operating system development because of Microsoft's patents. I hope you can see the point. If not, perhaps you could give some evidence.

The rest of your post (monopoly, lack of competition, lack of variety) is based on the same fundamental claim you've made above.

It is good to hear from someone in the display industry!

Please do provide some evidence. (not a snark)

So often here on HN we hear from experts in some field that common wisdom is wrong but we do not see the evidence. (HFT insiders come to mind)

I have been hearing the lamentations on the consumer side of eink for over 10 years .

My observation is that there is a dearth of competition and innovation in e-ink display industry.

What are the causes? Physics okay, but what else?

My hypothesis is that it is caused by Eink corporation choosing to go after a big slice of a relatively small pie. They are trying to grow this pie very slowly in a controlled matter not willing to sacrifice any market share.

I would love to hear otherwise.

Why are we as consumers only now getting one choice of a 20+ inch eink screen?

Analogy would be Mac:PC in the 1980s and their experiences with compatibles. Both Apple and IBM regretted allowing compatible devices. There is also Xerox and before-mentioned 3D printing.

So to me it seems E-ink has taken those lessons(closed system good/open bad) to heart.

I'm confused by your comment. You're making a claim that E-Ink is suppressing innovation. I state that doesn't seem to be the case in my industry, ie: the display industry. And you're asking me for evidence? Shouldn't the person making a claim that a company is suppressing innovation (ie: you) be the one to provide evidence? This is equivalent to someone saying Microsoft is suppressing innovation in operating systems. I would then respond saying I know a bit about operating systems and I don't see that. Then that person saying where is the proof that there isn't suppression by Microsoft. Do you see how your comment comes across?

> Why are we as consumers only now getting one choice of a 20+ inch eink screen?

You as a consumer can buy a mile of E Ink fpl if you like. They'll sell it to you. Then you can go and figure out how to laminate a >20" TFT backplane to it. Good luck getting that size in less than 1 million unit MOQ quantities especially now with all the backplane shortages. Good luck trying to convince VCs to fund your display startup with the billions you'll need to construct a physical factory. If they say they'd rather fund an AI, machine learning, internet services startup, tell us what convincing argument you'd use to convince them otherwise. No snark. Genuinely interested to see how you'll solve this problem that we in the display industry genuinely face.

I am making a claim that there has been insufficient progress in e-ink space.

I would love to hear your expert opinion on the causes.

We have not had the explosion in devices and the reduction in prices that has happened in other areas(scanners, various types of printers including 3D,LCD monitors, digital cameras, mobile phones, etc etc). E-ink is stagnating, this has been the constant lament on mobileread forums for 10 years.

Eink corporation usually gets the blame. Maybe they shouldn't and it would be interesting to hear it.

People want high quality color, people want lower prices, and we are not getting it.

https://wiki.mobileread.com/wiki/EBook_Reader_Matrix is rather limited.

Only recently we've had some larger devices. Why is only Dasung able to offer a very limited sized monitors and at a very high price to the consumer?

When/if ever will we have $200 e-ink monitors?

> I am making a claim that there has been insufficient progress in e-ink space.

Insufficient progress? How does one know what is sufficient progress? To provide an analogy to software, you're saying the equivalent of there has been insufficient progress in Linux desktop.

Perhaps E Ink set too high an expectation? I never thought they'd even reach their current level of achievement. In my opinion, they're achieving about as much as what they can achieve with the physics of their material and the level of demand the market provides to them. For example, the most common request I've heard is when are they going to have bistable color. The response I would have is they had that at SID2019 but then nobody wanted to pay $2000 for a 16 color display that peaked at 16" diagonal. That's not 16-bit color, that's 16 colors! So they pivoted to adjust to what the market was willing to accept which was about $100 for a 7 color 6" display. That's what the market was willing to buy. Last I heard even that's thin pickings with no high volume products. In the display industry, if you're not able to sell at least a million displays a month, you're a niche player who won't be able to support having a factory with a fully tuned production line. Backplane vendors will treat you like a red haired stepchild and you'll be perpetually on the bottom of their manufacturing queue.

> E-ink is stagnating, this has been the constant lament on mobileread forums for 10 years.

Physics is a bitch ain't it? Perhaps you can invent a way for a fast moving pigment particle to achieve bistable and consistent positioning. You have access to E Ink displays after all, you could invent your own drive scheme if you believe they aren't doing the best that physics allows.

> People want high quality color, people want lower prices, and we are not getting it.

Yes, I want a $100 iPhone 12 and a $1000 ferrari and I'm not getting it. Why is that?

> Only recently we've had some larger devices. Why is only Dasung able to offer a very limited sized monitors and at a very high price to the consumer?

Volume. How many people are buying? Not a million a month? Then who wants to make it? Price correlates with volume. If you want prices to go down, go find a million buyers and put down the order so that manufacturers can afford to build up a production line for that device.

> When/if ever will we have $200 e-ink monitors?

When a million people a month are buying it.

>The alternative is a slowdown in research and development since now the research you paid millions for in payroll and time can now be copied by your competitor with one or two engineers.

I'm not going to argue regarding the merit of IP laws, but most analysis indicates that market players ignore most intellectual property, and that replication costs for technology are roughly 60-70% of the cost of the initial research. So you spend a bit more, but end up with a first mover advantage; in network-effect or capital intensive industries, these normally end up being determinative of overall success.

But layer that on with other R&D incentives placed in the market. Canadian SR&ED credits subsidize research costs by 15-35%, for instance, so the total delta between first mover and copy-cat implementations drops further.

The assumption that IP laws actually increase R&D rates is NOT something that is shown by the academic literature.

The rate of innovation to me seems key. In my view, the rate of innovation for 3D printing shot through the roof after the patents expired. Do you have any reading recommendations you care to share? Thanks!

> their CO2 usage must be astronomical

Why? Does money produce CO2?

> which Shiva says

Never heard of Shiva.

> chemical intensive agriculture

About half the planet will die without chemical fertilizers.

> I believe

I need better than that.

> Besos has

Amazon (not Bezos' wealth) has displaced a number of other companies that provided goods to consumers. I haven't seen any evidence that Amazon produces, on the net, more CO2 than them. It arguably produces less, because it replaces innumerable car trips to the mall with one truck that drives far fewer miles per delivery.

> by virtue of the power they have

Doesn't remotely compare to the power government wields and accretes daily. Bill Gates has zero power over my life.

If you are genuinely curious, you might try this book [1].

On the other hand, if you were genuinely curious, you could have figured out who Vandana Shiva was.

[1]: https://www.sciencedirect.com/book/9780128176740/inequality-...

I checked your link. Shiva is not mentioned on the front page, and is not in the author index.

> you could have

If someone is indulging in Appeal to Authority, it is incumbent upon them to provide a reference, not the reader.

> it is incumbent upon them to provide a reference, not the reader.

According to who? This is not a debate class. If you are motivated to understand another you may well want to look up what they are saying. What are you adding when you reply with “never heard of her” instead of doing a quick search?

I regularly put sources in my comments but this time I was in the middle of other things.

> According to who?

To have claims to be taken seriously, back it up. That's expected of anyone making a claim.

You keep using passive language “it is incumbent” and “that’s expected of anyone”. You haven’t told me who is doing the expecting, but it’s you.

In a debate, sure, the other party isn’t going to do any work to understand you unless they can use it to make you look bad.

But if two curious people are talking, either party will do work to fill in the blanks. And I’m afraid you’re treating this as a debate.

> Why? Does money produce CO2?

Seems pretty obvious, no? Private jets, multiple huge residences all over the world (full of air conditioners, furniture, manicured lawns etc).

I won't make the Amazon argument, but I'd be surprised if their personal emissions aren't many many times more than the average American.

"many times" is probably accurate. Enough to make a significant effect? Nope.

Gates also invests heavily in environmental technologies.

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