People had to be convinced of the usefulness of electricity
smithsonianmag.com
smithsonianmag.com
https://penntoday.upenn.edu/news/how-appliance-boom-moved-mo...
Notably, electrification of rural areas lagged well behind that of cities and towns until the Rural Electrification Administration was created in 1935:
https://livingnewdeal.org/a-light-went-on-new-deal-rural-ele...
> "The REA continued into the postwar era and helped the percentage of electrified farms in the United States rise from 11 percent [1935] to almost 97 percent by 1960. The New Deal had helped rural America achieve near-total electrification."
This is comparable to the situation with high-speed internet in the US at present:
> "The Federal Communications Commission (FCC), a New Deal agency established in 1934, estimates that today a quarter of rural Americans and a third on tribal lands do not have access to broadband internet, defined as download speeds of at least 25 megabytes a second. Fewer than 2 percent of urban dwellers have this same problem."
This is what you get if you privatize and deregulate basic infrastructure services: huge holes in coverage and overpriced monopolistic control of the rest of it.
Put your real name and email address in your profile and respond with your full identity exposed. I want to see how history plays out. Then I can go back on these old threads to see who was actually wrong.
Who were the idiots against the reality of global warming? The people who so fervently used every excuse to deny the reality of an impending catastrophe?
There is no difference between those people and the people who consistently attempt to use every avenue available to attack the abilities of AI. These aren't rational people. They are people with an agenda that pushes them to modify their perception of reality around them to fit that agenda. That agenda is fear. Fear that a machine can surpass us and replace the software craft we have spent years honing.
My advice to you is to open up your mind a bit.
Heck I put my full identity and contact info in my profile. I stand by my views without hiding behind a throwaway account. If history proves me wrong the record is here for everyone to see.
People are afraid that AI will not serve the common good, and will instead serve a very rich few. Why? Because that's how it's always been with new advances, and more than ever how it is today. The vast gaps in wealth inequality will grow much larger with AI - it needs to be addressed first.
If they fear the AI owners attack the owners directly. Don't attack reality itself and say the AIs are just stochastic parrots and there's no risk to jobs at all.
Now that stuff like Starlink exists, it's easier to give the finger to Hughesnet and exploitative WISPs. Even still, the years I spent growing up with bare-minimum internet at cable-package prices has made me spiteful. It should have been addressed long before the private sector got around to fixing it.
Also people forget: farmers have families and kids, etc, and while the farmer themselves may not need much internet, the kids can't even do basic school anymore without it. But that said, farmers still have and watch TVs, facetime with their families, stream music, etc.
All that said though, Starlink is up to like $120/month and still not reliable enough to fully ditch the backup exploitative WISP if you work from home as I do, so Starlink is walking dangerously close to the line of exploitative. But they're here and working, so I will happily pay the money. I just hope that over time the $/b will get a lot more competitive.
And for that reason, as a farmer, I can get gigabit service on my farms, but where I live in an urban area where the infrastructure isn't as old and is still moderately capable I am topped out at 50 Mbit service.
Also you can’t watch 1080p without stutters while waiting. You can’t watch 1440p60 or 4k in any case.
Why do we need 25 MBit on all the farms and rural lands? (quoted from another subthread)
Because otherwise these areas will get stuck with <25mbps forever, and there’s already no reserve in 8-10mbps.
8Mbps (please capitalize the "M" for "mega" and lowercase the "b" for bits) is 8,000,000 bits per second.
That translates to about 0.954 MiB/sec (Mebibytes per second, see the "i" and the capital "B"?) which is close enough to 1.
Download speeds can, and should, be measured in computer-oriented mebibytes per second, rather than bits per second, because you are, after all, transferring files. (And yeah, disk space is often measured in powers of ten...) Your ISP's data cap is undoubtedly measured in gibibytes or tebibytes (even though they call them gigabytes or terabytes, that's what the units mean.)
So when you run speedtest.net or Ookla or whatever, you're measuring the actual throughput that the computer's network interface can squeeze through the narrowest straw in your link to the server. That is necessarily a touch lower than the lowest signaling rate of whatever equipment is in-between. Internet connections are sold by trumpeting signaling rates, but those are NOT download nor upload speeds. Never confuse them, because they are overly-optimistic estimates of your maximum throughput (which is infeasible given most PHY and link-layer frame designs.)
Hitting network speed limits doesn't just cap you in those scenarios, it degrades very badly very quickly.
8Mbps is more than enough for a few dozen people to play any modern game on the same connection.
I mean, I guess if your chief usage of traffic is to the outside world, a really snappy LAN doesn't mean much at all; it's not your bottleneck. But I'm confused about your post which appears to contradict itself. Perhaps I misunderstood, and your kitchen remodel only involved AC electrical and no networking. No IoT fridge yet?
If I were pulling network cabling today for a remodel, it'd surely be multi-mode fiber in the 100Gbit range, right? Right?
Remote programmer work. I push and pull around many GBs every day. 8Mb/second would be -at best- difficult to bear. I also often do teleconferencing (and screen sharing) while pushing around lots of data.
If there were multiple people on my LAN who were doing remote programmer work, or who were just -say- watching "streaming" video while I was working, or -say- chose to patch a video game while I was working, 8Mb/second would make working impossible.
Hell, even 40Mb/second is pretty terrible. I recently moved from a 1400/40 Mb link to a ~300/300 Mb link. Despite the dramatic reduction in download speed, it's way, way, way better.
4K streaming video can easily be 25Mbps. A family of 3-4 people can easily have multiple TVs and each one can be using bandwidth even when nobody is attending to it. Presumably this family has none because none of them will work. The average family has 25 internet using devices including computers, laptops, consoles, smart devices etc. Meanwhile average websites have ballooned up to 2MB or 16Mb per page. If you get 70% of max bandwidth and divide it even 10 ways you'll easily be waiting around 10 seconds per page. It's common now to have a camera out front triggered by motion but this requires more upstream than your 8Mbps connection from 1999 is liable to have since most connections aren't symmetrical. Same with video conferencing which will largely be impossible.
What's that you say johnny wants to play the latest triple A game? Well its 80GB of data. With over subscription and other devices you'll be very lucky to average more than 2Mbps over the 4 days this will require during which the family connection will suck even more than it normally does.
I'm rural, I work remote, and I've done so for quite a while on about a 15/3 connection. I've got somewhat better now, and I have Starlink for the house right now (though at the ever-increasing costs, I'm debating dropping it and going back to a rural WISP for bulk transfer).
If you're on a lower speed connection... you don't try to live life like you're on gigabit. You cache content locally (Jellyfin or Plex solves a lot, DVD season pack bundles are dirt cheap on eBay and a USB DVD reader can read anything), you do lower bandwidth stuff, and you work around the availability. I've taken many video calls with audio over a cell phone, because my ISP was having a crappy day.
You can invent scenarios in which you "need" gigabit, but they sound like the artificially constructed situations they are, because not everyone has 16 people working from home with another 12 insisting on their own individual 4k streams.
that seems silly, and I don't think that's ever been a widespread driving philosophy. Much more common (and sadly, also lost these days) is building a better world for our kids and their kids, etc. Trying to improve life for us and those around us, with hope that the next generation has it better than we did.
If you have to work around slow internet by buying DVD's instead of streaming, pre-downloading movies you want to watch, or calling in to video calls to get reliable audio, I think it's fair to say that you "need" faster internet. Maybe not gigabit, but definitely faster than whatever you have now.
The current FCC broadband speed is 25 megabits/second, not bytes.
Edit: to be less snarky, there are plenty of examples of doing something inefficient for the benefit of society as a whole. The New Deal and the ADA are two examples that come to mind.
Unfortunately, we don’t do much of that anymore in the US.
How does the rural folk having high speed internet benefit society?
We could call it the Great Leap Forward, or maybe the Cultural Revolution.
Handing rural people an extra $50k in addition of the payment for the goods ands services to install the infrastructure doesn't seem right to me.
How does an urban population having high speed internet benefit society? Whatever your answer, that's the benefit for rural folks too.
I’d argue the isolated benefit is the same, but the network effect amplifies it. When a ton of people do music together, it becomes part of the culture. That effect is more difficult to scale in low density populations, which means their rate of improvement is probably lower.
I can't think of a better reason to subsidize the additional cost for rural broadband: without it, there is no nationally accessible "culture" that unifies us.
That said, Starlink, and presumably competitors at some point, does change the game. As does probably 5G and successors. They don't replace last mile/last 10 mile wired Internet for all cases but we do increasingly have viable alternative for more rural locations.
My brother's house had a 1Mb/s down ADSL wired connection and he was the last house on the road that could get "broadband" at all. With Starlink, he's able to work, stream video, etc. which wouldn't have been possible before.
Regarding your first response, you may want to visit the HN guidelines regarding shallow dismissals.
Feudal systems didn't end because of inequality, they were the opposite: the feudal system ended when serfs were allowed to enclose their communal land and were given it as private property. It went from an equal system that suffered a tragedy of the commons ("the commons" literally referring to the common land that existed under the feudal system), to a system of private farmers who were able to capture some of the wealth from their effort and land.
Again, I'm not sure if the intent of this is another shallow dismissal or if you're failing to make the connection I'm trying to communicate.
>the feudal system ended when serfs were allowed to enclose their communal land and were given it as private property.
Why do you think the nobility allowed this? History tells us it's rare that a consolidated power willingly gives up that power. Is it possible that the inequality of rights and taxation led to the nobility's hand being forced here?
Anyway you look at it, many historic societies existed for hundreds of years with levels of inequality vastly greater than experienced currently by any farmer in the U.S.
You are using the current situation of a farmer (who has access to the internet and other regulated monopolies) as evidence for the case against those very services. If you remove that level of access, I don't think you have the point you think you do.
It's like pointing to someone who gets government assistance and saying "See? There isn't enough quality of life differential to warrant them getting assistance." The very fact that they receive assistance is exactly why that level of discrepancy is lower.
If you're saying that its possible that greater inequality can be tolerated, it's missing the point. I'm not stating a claim about an absolute level; I'm saying society should be aware that a tipping point exists. The same is said for taxation; people can point to past eras where people paid a higher effective tax rate and claim that as evidence that the current level should be raised. We can probably debate what the appropriate level is (but I doubt anyone actually knows), but that wasn't the point. Arguing the "right level" of inequality doesn't negate the point that there is some level that will make society relatively unstable.
Besides, the historical comparison may not be as apt as you think. There are many reasons why the same comparison is disrupted; technology for one allows for easier and more effective coordination. I don't think many feudal peasants could organize quickly via carrier pigeon while today we have social media; Peasants couldn’t vote to overturn their govt etc, etc.
Why do you believe such a thing exists in the U.S.?
I personally find the arguments for mutually assured destruction very plausible.
Whether it's between countries or between factions within a country with WMDs, a real fighting war will practically wipe nearly everyone out.
Because it exists for every civilization and essentially every system. The U.S. is not inherently exceptional in this regard.
And, yes, MAD is plausible and also a strong deterrent. But a central crux of the theory is that the system is inhabited by rational agents. Humans can even be modeled as rational agents most of the time, but I don't believe they adhere to this model all of the time. Behavioral psychology seems to bear this out.
How does that follow? Clearly the presence of WMDs changed the game.
I also don't see how rationality, or it's absence, relates to this point?
The ADA, strictly speaking, only helps those with disabilities. But guess what? Having people with disabilities be able to access goods, services, and work just like anyone else helps society as a whole.
For example, I would want to make sure you still have access to voting even if it costs a disproportionately high amount of money to ensure that right for you or if it's much more probable that you would vote against my personal selfish interest. We generally want a society with a shared set of core principles rather than just a purely transactional society.
1. More people are able to contribute to society in ways they were unable to before. Personally, my life is better because I’ve learned from people of various abilities. That wouldn’t be possible if my school and workplaces were unable to accommodate them.
2. We all get older, we all lose abilities as we age. The ADA is helpful to literally every elderly person. Not to mention all able-bodied people are one accident away from requiring ADA amenities.
3. As other comments mentioned, some ADA regulations help more than just the disabled.
4. I don’t expect this to be a majority HN perspective, but I believe we’re only as free as the worst off in our society. Lifting the floor is always a good thing, in my opinion.
Also, internet and such for rural people benefits society as a whole, indirectly. For example, better crop yields (Through better access to information) and such.
So, I think your argument is deeply flawed.
Having a disability isn't a choice. Living rurally is.
Because rural/urban living is a choice, this means people can come in and out in response to supply and demand via the price mechanism. If rural areas are viewed as undesirable, rural wages will rise until it justifies people being there.
All the benefits you enjoy as a result of living in a modern society have been paid for by someone other than you.
Basically unless you grow food the city folks would be economically better off if you didn't exist. Your world view is exactly the opposite of reality.
Cities eat up tax dollars too. Boston's Big Dig was basically a $10 billion or so gift to Boston from, not only Western Massachusetts taxpayers but the rest of the country. (The Speaker of the House was from the Boston area.)
> As a rural tax payer I'm paying for some city dwellers to sit around all day doing nothing. All the benefits you enjoy as a result of living in a modern society have been paid for by someone other than you.
No part of that is right. Economically rural areas are a drain justified only by farming, votes, and a charitable desire to serve our fellow man. The idea that a handful of farmers are somehow paying for the teeming masses in the city to sit on their hands is wrong on its face.
"Basically, if we didn't need to eat, we'd be better off of our digestive system didn't exist."
What a hilariously strange world view. There are comparative advantages for both urban and rural areas, and both are vitally important.
Urban areas optimize for concentration of labor. Rural areas optimize for land-and-resource-dependent operations.
You won't build a successful large scale R&D lab in a small farm town, but you also won't build a successful mining operation in downtown LA.
(Also as an addendum, there are so many industries dependent on land and resources other than just agriculture).
If the situation were reversed, these kinds of defenses would not convince the people making them that rural dwellers ought to subsidize urban living.
Education, healthcare, transportation, retirement -- these are all things where we could say "People can just pay for these things if they value them", but instead we determined that some subsidies are good for the country as a whole (we often even want more subsidies for some of these).
Likewise, it's important to have a population that's willing to live and work in rural industries that supply big city centers. Subsidies to provide some of the infrastructure that more dense areas have can help the nation accomplish that needed population mix more easily.
You can shuffle the board around however you want, but the truth is that agriculture (and therefor rural life) is going to be paid for one way or another.
The status quo is that people indirectly pay for food through taxes, higher service cost, and other distortions that have no relation to how much food they consume. They are forced to pay a subsidy whether they like it or not.
Don't forget foreigners: If your country has a subsidized food production system and you're exporting food, then foreigners are benefiting from your subsidies. (This is actually a debate in Canada vs. USA regarding milk.)
"Let them eat cake"
Mr Edison is famous for "the lightbulb" (actually, "a"), but what he really did was lightbulbs + power stations (through General Electric).
Mr Birdseye is famous for frozen fish, but what [the company who bought his patent] really did was frozen fish + freezers in supermarkets.
The joke about the first telephone being the hardest sell (because there's no-one to call) has another problem, of no phone-lines, exchanges or (today's) cell-towers.
\muse I wonder if a solution to holes/monopoly abuse is to ease entry-to-market? The standard incumbent response is to deny oxygen to entrants, by giving great deals at the low end (like today's "free tiers"). Though, historically, regulatory capture instead raises barriers to entry.
To the articles point, the problem is about helping people connect the dots between the infrastructure and the work they really care about.
Reminds me of the famous and unfortunate quotes [1]
(It goes back to 1985 apparently, so does seem unlikely it came from nowhere, since it wouldn't have seemed so ridiculous then.)
The most glaring flaw in that argument, especially with that specific context, is that those rockets would not exist without software.
ahem, that's Captain Birdseye, thank you very much!
Trying to game basic infrastructure for profits runs counter to this notion, and it's thus an area of the economy where government management makes the most sense.
So yes, given benefiting applications, infrastructure improvements derive value.
Their value is entirely derived. They have no intrinsic value. They are, in themselves, worthless.
Just semantics.
I tend to agree with your take on public infrastructure, but I haven't thought about it enough to form a definite opinion.
\tangentially related: arguing metabolism pathways need to exist before genes can improve them https://www.quantamagazine.org/a-biochemists-view-of-lifes-o...
Edison founded GE.
> "USDA has been investing in rural telecommunications infrastructure for decades. Hundreds of millions of dollars are annually available in the RUS programs both by loans and grants all to support modern broadband e-Connectivity in rural communities."
> "In 2018, USDA introduced the ReConnect Program, which has invested over $1 billion to date to expand high-speed broadband infrastructure in unserved rural areas and tribal lands."
We don't let shady private corporations squat on the roads and freeways and charge tolls to anyone who wants to drive on them, why should we allow such behavior on the internet trunk fiber optic cables either - or on the copper/aluminum electricity grid, for that matter?
That 11% wasn't a static state. Electrification was happening, government or not.
The New Deal certainly sped it up but it takes a career politician level of dishonesty to take a government program that increased the rate of electrification and give said program credit all electrification after it's commencement.
The only opponents were the electric power companies who realized they might lose their captive markets if the idea spread to the cities. Hence they started buying lots of politicians.
Something so cynical about such low expectations. "If we weren't in charge, they would all devolve into savagery!"
The issue isn't politics (though it is true that the ISPs have bought both political parties in Congress), it's economics. Building out basic infrastructure is one of the core necessities for widespread economic growth, and that includes roads and bridges, the electricity grid, the water supply, and the fiber-optic network.
It's not a very complicated issue, and I've never seen anyone present a coherent argument that privatized infrastructure improves economic activity overall, it's generally the opposite isn't it?
I suppose if your metric is the concentration of wealth in fewer hands, then yes, private infrastructure facilitates that outcome, but it shrinks the overall economic activity in terms of production of goods and services (i.e. consider the farmer who can't get to market because the bridge is washed out, the washing machine manufacturer who can't sell to the farmer who has no electricity, and so on).
> we're not going to have multiple private roads systems are we?
Toll roads exist but indeed, roads are one of the cases where building and maintaining them is easy so you don't lose much from a state monopoly, and they take up a lot of space so duplication is unfortunate. But there are relatively few cases like that.
These are cases where it only makes sense to build one system, and any such system should be under public control, not under private monopoly control by some rent-extracting shareholder outfit.
Sure and they have done in the past. The existing networks weren't initially built by governments, they were built by private entrepreneurs and then nationalized. That's true at least for power and internet, admittedly I don't know for water piping, that might be old enough to pre-date private companies of any significant size.
Now should they is a different question to will they. In many cases it's OK to allow that. I think the US still has private railway lines. In other places there aren't any left. But I agree that for networks that require enormous amounts of land and where there's ~no scope for innovation, government monopolies can be beneficial. Water, power and roads seem clear cut. We can add gas and sewerage to that. Rail is a sort of interesting middle ground where countries go back and forth because there is actually scope for innovation in how the signalling works and governments are typically extremely slow to deploy improvements. Note that most civilized countries don't nationalize the endpoints. Power generators, gas wells, trains etc are owned by private companies usually. Also, in practice these networks are often built and maintained by private contractors.
This is simply not true in many cases, and the Rural Electrification program is Exhibit A, isn't it? Exhibit B is the national freeway system. The takeover of the government-built Hetch Hetchey to CA power grid by PG&E is exhibit C, granted a complicated story:
https://www.dailyjournal.com/articles/293699-a-hundred-years...
Certainly the private sector has a role to play, i.e. the production of water pipe itself is a competitive business, so is the production of fiber optic cable, and of tools and equipment - but the systems themselves should never be privately owned.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turnpike_trust
(well, semi-private at least, corporations didn't exist in the same way that far back)
And the internet was all private and still is, with no change on the horizon.
What part of ISPs have been deregulated? Is it the bit where they're legal monopolies in many jurisdictions?
shouldn't every square inch of Alaska be electrified, internetted, and cellphone towered? that way, just in case I consider whether to live there, I won't have to think about the inconvenience of it, it will make my decision easier.
i.e. spending money on expensive infrastructure to service small numbers of customers is not necessarily a brilliant idea. Who knows, it may not have even paid itself back for all remote communities within the lower 48; many rural communities are even smaller now then there were then.
That doesn't mean there weren't net benefits from the rural electrification act, but you are wrong to pitch it as "evil corporate barons vs everybody else". How about all of us together decide what we can afford? Would you accept your kid's argument that you pay to electrify (to code, mind you, and union electricians) your kid's treehouse in the backyard just because he accuses you of being a greedy tyrant if you don't?
But what rural worker wants to leave their children to unfair advantage? These things have value beyond economics, they are required to maintain population and workers of absolutely essential jobs.
(Otherwise, these areas further depopulate, and you have to provide other incentives to get people to do said work.)
What I will agree with, is that while it could be wrapped into an economic decision, if so, then "making sure there are hospitals there", or police, or schools is also an economic decision.
Which pretty much means that with such reasoning, all centralized planning is. Many economists might disagree.
Electric Biscuits! Try Triscuits!
Edit: since people like my fun fact here’s the Twitter thread where a guy talks about it.
https://twitter.com/sageboggs/status/1242968530250870786?s=4...
Triscuits and panko both refer to the finished products. For the set of all Triscuits, there does not exist any element which will ever again be baked. Ditto for panko.
If you have a small bag of panko on the counter, you may point to it and say "an electrical current was passed through this panko to bake it", but you could also construct the former sentence and be completely correct. But your use of the past tense in a general statement about panko implies that it is no longer made by that process, which leads those of us who speak English to incorrect conclusions. This confusion can be further compounded by the fact that we were discussing events of many decades past, so Triscuits, for example, may no longer be baked in electric ovens, although they certainly could still be.
https://twitter.com/sageboggs/status/1242968548949004288/pho... Thanks.
It wasn't my use or my statement.
> implies that it is no longer made by that process
No. That's a possible interpretation, but it is by no means implied.
> leads those of us who speak English to incorrect conclusions
I'm a native Standard American English speaker. I did not jump to that conclusion. In Standard American English, there is a specific construction for expressing that idea: "panko, which used to be cooked by putting electrodes into the dough"
That construction was not used here.
So I hope this clears it up for everyone.
Thanks.
Again, I was not the one who made the comment. Please stop with the inappropriate behavior.
> Thanks.
Don't do this, please.
Except that is how "was" was used by the two people you were responding to.
One letter too many: bi-cuit.
There must be some units confusion here. Surely they didn't quote the lifetime energy output of Edison's power plant? Maybe they mean that could generate at a power of 770,000 kilowatts? But then they say NYC consumes a power of 6,000,000 kilowatts, and it seems unlike Edison's power plant was already running at more than 10% of today's NYC needs. Maybe they meant 770,000 kilowatt-hours per day (i.e. 32,000 kilowatts)?
Howard H. Aiken
"You don't need to worry about electricity, but about other people knowing to harness electricity better than you!"
Ridiculous and at the same time actually true.
And any parallel with AI/GPT is completely absurd, even though it's the reason why this is upvoted.
We are still months / years too early to see how transformative exactly GPT based AI opportunities will be.
We are clearly beyond the "Neat academic resarch" phase and well into the product building phase of this new technology but some things are only clear in hindsight. The spectrum goes from "useful niche tools" to "industrial revolution" and we must not forget that even very successful technological breakthroughs are usually marketed way beyond their actual capabilities.
People in the second row who are now betting hard on AI may as well be the billionaires of tomorrow or they will be forgotten and swallowed up by confirmation bias.
No guarantees, but no hard rules euther.
PCs are the ultimate clerical and administrative machines. You don't need secretaries or typists. Don't need memos and mailrooms. Stuff gets filed automatically.
We put one on every desk. Typists and secretaries went away, but administration went on a growth spurt. Whether it's school admin, corporate HR or hospital billing.. Administrative work became much more plentiful once PCs proliferated.
We write, more letters, file more forms, sign more agreements. Maybe that stuff is valuable, and since we can do more of it with computers, we do. Maybe it has nothing to do with efficiency or value.
Whatever the case, it demonstrates that the "progress Vs luddites" debate can't be solved with a simple model.
Absurdity assume a reasonable world. Sometimes the world is weird.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox
Sometimes when things look weird to us, it just means that it's counterintuitive and necessarily irrational
My point was more about the way these predictions are phrased and that they may sound absurd, regardless of how they would pan out
I don't think "stealing jobs" means that there will be less jobs in absolute. It usually means (at least that's how I usually see it used) that people who current have a job and are trained to do that, will no longer be able to do it, and switching to another job is not easy: it's not just skills, but often also you need to relocate somewhere else etc.
The problems with coal miners losing their jobs is not because we don't have other jobs available. It's that the lives of those people will be upended and it's not surprising that people resist that.
Also known as 6 GW.
For virtually all applications, the instant power is of overriding utility: power is how bright your light bulb is, how fast your hairdryer dries, how large a wire is required when building your house. (Since Voltage is constant, this could even be given as Amps!). In addition, most home appliances don't have a meterable output aside from operation time: if your run your lightbulb for an hour, you get an hour of light but that's not really something you can measure. If you run your bicycle for an hour, you've gone somewhere which is a distance you can measure!
Accumulative consumption of electricity is not really important for anything save for billing, so if you all you know is Watts and hours, Wh is a useful unit.
For transmission and distribution networks, even the Watt and Wh are relegated to secondary position, the VA (volt-amp) and VAh are more useful (since Vrms x Arms != Wrms, due to power factor/phase shift). For one bit of infrastructure, the Amps are the most important operational consideration (as V is approximately constant) and reporting as VA is useful to compare with other equipment running at a different voltage.
This conveys useful additional information.
It's reasonably human-scale, which is better than Joules...
If you want to pick on a terrible unit, pick on BTU.
just plain old kW. kW * hr/ hr is just 1 kW.
A kW is relatable. About the same as an electric kettle, microwave oven, or 100 lightbulbs.
And then you can even multiply the watt hours to get costs.
kWh/{time} is a useless and just confusing unit. So yes, I think we all agree kWh/s is a bad unit, but kWh (or gWh or similar) are all useful units.
The technology that I hear being called “useless”, “pure speculative hype” etc is crypto and defi. Maybe today, because of lack of infrastructure, network effects, productized apps, etc it’s not as useful as traditional banking and fiat currency, but the reality is that there’s a future where we don’t need banks and nationalized currencies, and that is an enormous value-add for society as a whole. It may not happen today, 10 or even 100 years from now, but we will look back and find the idea that people had to be convinced of this absurd.
In contrast, today's version of crypto has had its popular moment. Like the dirigible, it got a lot of mainstream coverage as a "promising" "revolutionary" technology, and it has made its millionaires and billionaires. Like the dirigible, it has been found wanting. There is some chance that the future will involve CBDCs, but I think most people agree that the ship has sailed on the Bitcoin-Ethereum-NFT-based "metaverse" that crypto entrepreneurs wanted to create.
If something really different has to start these days, centralized services are an easy target for the powers that be. The only way to circumvent them are truly decentralised systems.
NFT/cryptos are the Bozo the Clown of technological innovations.
AI, on the other hand, harms millions of people right now - by government surveillance, face recognition, spam bots and SEO, deep fakes, exam cheating, job losses, killer drones etc., with almost no upside for the little guy.
It’s here because people are projecting their feelings about today’s disruptive technologies onto this example about electricity, with the implication that people will one day look back and wonder why anyone doubted <technology X>.
Here’s what I’m saying: AI is a part of our future, and very few people doubt that. AR/metaverse may not be perfect today but I think most people would agree it’s bound to be part of our future. Green tech stuff like electric cars, renewable energy, etc most people agree are part of the future and won’t argue with you.
But for some reason, when you so much as whisper “crypto” on HN, people shout you down with rude and dismissive comments (not yours, but take a look around). I don’t work in crypto, I don’t have substantial holdings in crypto, I’m not shilling.
I’m just saying that as a technology, it feels the most misunderstood despite its (to me) obvious transformative potential, which I think makes it the best analogy for electricity in the early 1900s of the available options. Does that argument hinge on the assumption that crypto is an inevitable part of future life? Yes - but so does every other argument here.
Just yesterday I rewatched James Burke’s Connections, episode 3, Distant Voices, which vividly illustrates some of the ways people tried using electricity.
Adoption of phone service was even slower. First and second generation systems were pretty crappy by today’s expectations.
What I imagine was that electric lighting could have started out in commercial or municipal use, and spread out into the general population as it got cheaper and more reliable. The same thing happened with cell phones and the Internet.
When I lived in Texas during a housing boom, we had an electrician on call for our factory. He told me that he would often stop at a construction site on his way home in the evening, and quickly make some extra money by completely wiring a house.
The hours cancel outs!
So...
When was the last time you saw a journalism piece try to make units comparable?
That number can mean absolutely anything, there is no telling what the people could be thinking on the telephone game from transcribing the source all the way into a finished and edited design.
Math time: (52836 × 1000 × 1000) / (365 × 24 × 60) = 100525 kWh of energy consumed in a minute. So that checks out.
On the other end of the comparison, by the early 1900s AC largely won and plants were appearing left and right like flowers in a field. I can't find the exact station nor its capabilities just by searching for the 1920 date.
Edison's first commercial station in Pearl Street from 1882 (still DC, I think) had 6 dynamos producing 100 kW of power each: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pearl_Street_Station Which is... let's see... 600 kWh every hour! :) Or 10 kWh per minute.
If the author suggests that Edison's plant produced an amount of electricity that is enough to cater for present day NYC's consumption a mere seven times over, that doesn't seem quite right. 770000 kWh in an hour is 12833 kWh per minute, in which case you need to build 10 Edison-plants to match the demand.
(I divided so many numbers in this comment, I sincerely hope that I did them right)
This is a great example of how things get simpler if we drop the over time part of the units and simplify it to just the average power draw.
So in 2015 NYC consumed 52836 GWh. So the average power draw is 52836 GWh / 365 days = 6031510 kW . As in, at any given moment in 2015 NYC was on average pulling 6031510 kW or 6.03 GW.
The edison Pearl Street station could output 600kW. (and that's the theoretical peak of all 6x dynamos, probably less output in practice)
6031510 kW / 600 kW = 10052.5 so I think our current consumption is about 10000x higher not 7x-10x higher than the Pearl St station's output!
Journalist consistently use silly or incorrect units when discussing power usage. At least for this article the units aren't flat out wrong, just silly and I can see how "kilowatt-hours per minute" could be a bit more intuitive to readers.
(And don't get me started on how USB battery manufacturers advertise capacity in obtuse units like 27000 mAh @ 3.7 volts instead of just using 99.9 watt-hours or 27 amp-hours.)
Most of the time we see “watts” it really means “watt hours” which measures work. We’re used flattening rate-measurements by measuring instantaneous points like the speedometer on your car, e.g. if you are going 60 miles-per-hour, you can expect to travel 60 miles in on hour if you maintain that rate. However, A 60 watt appliance will consume that 60 watts over 1 hour of use, which is like saying we are going “60 miles” in the example above.
The gas companies of course fought the adoption of electricity. They would send people to electricity demonstrations. These people would have metal bars sewn into their sleeves and they would lean them against the bus are causing frightening sparks, fires, etc.
In response, Edison suggested putting the wires in “conduits” — the gas lines already in the house! This both addressed the fear and kicked gas out.
(This anecdote is in Utterbach’s “Mastering the Dynamics of Innovation”)
I actually thought the list of items in the ad in the article was far more convincing than lighting as a use case.
Today my list of more important use cases would include things like long distance communication, refrigeration, transportation*, cooking/manufacturing, computing, data storage, small cameras, medical uses*...
except in so far as light is how I use electricity to make light for information transfer purposes. Something like e-ink would be an adequate substitute though.
* ICE engines do fill a lot of this niche, but not all of it. Subways, elevators, and the like are made much better via electricity.
** Imaging devices especially come to mind
Prior to electricity, humanity has spent a lot of time and effort to have light past sundown.
People Had to Be Convinced of the Usefulness of Computers
People Had to Be Convinced of the Usefulness of the Internet
People Had to Be Convinced of the Usefulness of LLMs
"This happened for X so it will happen for Y" isn't an argument on its own - you either need to make a connection between X and Y, or say something fundamental about Y which makes the statement true.
And people who have to bend their perception of reality to protect a vested interest. For software engineers the skills and attributes we take pride in are our software craft and our intelligence. So it's normal to see that the attacks on AI are especially vicious on HN.
I'd say the division is about 50 50.
Gpt4 will not replace us. But it's a herald for something that will. That is reality.
This is mostly what the people who described as “rational” say all the time, but there’s no rationality or even a deep conversation about what to do if this happens. I can flip a coin and it will half of the times tell me that it’s the end! Both of this camps are arguing like political sides and the conversation is usually a repeated instance of some beliefs on both sides.
I believe, instead, we can talk about the practical ways we can deal with this change. For example we can start with looking at what other fields that got automated did. Unions? Regulations? Wild west? Free market capitalism? Monopolies? What? Or we can discuss how to take advantage of this new change. Just sayin…
There is another problem though, which is very important to note. As much as this change is impactful, there are so much nonsense and bulsh*t going around it because some people are financially invested. Sometimes people make statements without revealing their true intentions. I imagine, that a person who is right now, integrating ChatGPT into something and dreaming about getting rich fast, is not gonna believe into whatever cautionary tail others tell. This specific aspect of the current hype, unlike the actual product, is dramatically similar to the crypto hype. It doesn't help either.
Edit: fix typo
If they are not convinced, the thing doesn't happen?
Looking back, the skepticism seems laughable, but it underscores a recurring theme throughout history: people's irrational resistance to change, even when the benefits are as clear as day. It takes those with true vision to push past the naysayers and bring transformative technologies into the mainstream.
I mean, just look at the internet or smartphones. The masses were skeptical, but visionaries like Steve Jobs and Tim Berners-Lee paved the way for the indispensable tech we enjoy today. It's almost too easy to predict that many of the technologies we doubt today will become cornerstones of tomorrow's society. But, of course, only a select few have the foresight to see that.
In more recent examples, people didn’t have to be convinced that mobile phones were useful, they had to be convinced that it was worth paying 100€ upfront + €30/month to use one of these.
One area where the usefulness of the technology vs investment is abundantly clear is EVs. Everybody knows they’re better for the environment, way cheaper to recharge, less vibrating, noiseless and gearless. But they’re almost three times as expensive than non-EV!
Marvin the Paranoid Android: "Humans; you've just got to hate them"
Russian Joke: "Consequently, Soviet power is communism minus electrification, and electrification is communism minus Soviet power."
Obvious?? You are taking too much of American way of life and values for granted. The Party can just order something progressive and the people will jump with enthusiasm. You just need to train them that not jumping with enthusiasm when the Party orders something is dangerous for their career or, more effectively - for their life.
At the same 1920 time on our side of the ocean, the State Plan of Electrification of Russia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GOELRO.
Communism is Soviet power plus the electrification of the whole country.
— Vladimir Lenin
Works like a charm. The only drawback of this approach is that you’ll get not the American way of life but the Soviet way life and the progressive will mean not what is really progressive, but what the Party orders. But well, is it that important?
Seriously, is it 1953 where some of you live?
If something after reading it makes you think that communists are somewhere else - this “something” is not my comment. I can only guess, but may be this “something” is you own living experience. No?
If you can't do that for one reason or another, you use Marketing.
However: History doesn't repeat, but it rhymes
And if I lived then, I'd be the crazy one talking about all the possibilities while people look at me dumbfounded. Same as today. >..<
Thank you, marketing & public relations.
Now to do it all again, with AI!
I realize the irony of my comment.
I embrace that irony.
However, it did de-couple from the NASDAQ after the SVB dust began to settle.
Note to AI dorks: This doesn’t apply to neural networks. If neural nets could be more useful for most applications than what already exists (expert systems, human intervention), we would know it by now.
Crypto bro response: loaning my USDC on Notional for a fixed rate of 4.6% and then bridging it to Arbitrum Nova to then send my friends and family interest-bearing US dollar payments for zero transaction fees seems pretty f'ing useful to me.
Degen response: lol ok bro gl with that
/r/ThatHappened.
Nobody does that.