2,135 karma · joined December 21, 2014
On the topic of economic metrics - I believe that at this point, in the UK at least, GDP, unemployment, median wage, inflation, and possibly more indicators are irrelevant, and the focus on them misplaced, primarily because housing (capital) costs have exploded whilst other (operational) costs have shrunk.
What about whether a PhD helps people with romantic relationships, sense of belonging in the community, happiness, social ranking, whatever other goals they might have in their lives?
In light of that I think the topic should be changed on HN - I expected a much more balanced analysis. The current headline on the site itself is "The Ever-Tightening Job Market for Ph.D.s".
>>> shareholders or innocent executives may lose their jobs
Shareholders are unlikely to be affected to a large extent because their holdings in Enron would probably make up a small portion of their net worth.
Executives are paid large salaries and so can deal with the effects anyway.
I'd be much more concerned with the rank and file.
WRT disabling telemetry - probably the best way to go about it would be to set up a firewall or similar and try to kill all outgoing to microsoft.com. Turn it back on for updates and hope that they don't just send everything then, I guess. Disabling individual parts sounds like a losing game - you're running an MS kernel, if they want to do it they'll just do it.
Has anyone attempted such a thing? For example, on my commute to work I might pass a security camera, tap in my smart card, pass a few more cameras, spend 50 mins on a predefined route (unless I jumped a fence which a camera would probably see me doing), etc etc.
So on the left side of the 'video', you would have me walking about doing stuff, and on the right side, you can have a google-maps overlay of what's actually happening, little pop ups 'stegosaurus buys a pack of chewing gum', etc.
The idea has been floating around in my head for a while, I don't know why or what I'd hope it would achieve, just seems like a fun way to illustrate the problem, if it even is a problem and not just a natural progression.
I just gave invented details both times.
So now it's impossible, eh?
A mobile phone might be a 'new invention' that you can get away with not using, but what about transport? In my city it's been game over for years, decades even.
The London Underground is the one subway in London. It uses a smart card, the cash fares are a multiple of the cost, and there are CCTV cameras everywhere anyway so you're tracked.
The red buses removed cash fares and now smart card/contactless bank card are the only way of paying.
The central region is plastered in car licence plate recognition cameras so you can't drive. (They exist ostensibly because there is a congestion charge for driving in the central region).
You can cycle or walk but facial recognition kills that eventually.
So yeah, existing in London basically means the authorities know, or have the ability to know, where you are at all times within a few metres regardless of whether you use a phone or not, it's just a matter of how integrated these databases are and whether anyone can be bothered.
To me it feels a lot like, in major cities anyway, this privacy battle is just completely lost, because there are attacks on all fronts. You can have your anonymous phone, but are you wearing face paints? Do you ever drive? Do you ever take public transport?
The further you go out of the city, assuming you don't have a mobile phone, I suppose there are fewer data points available. You can roam about in farmer's fields or something, no cameras there yet. Maybe the minor cities have analogue cameras, or they're turned off due to funding, or whatever.
It's gone beyond something to be depressed or feel a call to action about at this point I feel - it's a bit like a lion chasing a gazelle - it just is. Fighting against this individual initiative feels good, but is it ultimately futile?
The actions required in order to attempt not to fall into these databases seem to have gone from "don't use your real name online" to "don't drive a car" to "don't take trains with your bank card" to "pay cash on the bus" to... eventually it's just done, all of it's tracked, I can pay with cash at the local store but there's a digital IP camera in the corner so sooner or later they know it anyway.
And the rational amongst us know that it's not about us. It means nothing that I can go 'off the grid'. What means something is that society as a whole is able to appreciate this, and I think the number of intrusions is high enough now that they simply can't. It's like asking people to go without oxygen. It's everywhere.
The fight I'm really concerned with is privacy within the home, in private establishments. I want to know that conversations between me and my friends stay within that box, that private sphere. Miniaturization and propagation of technology just seems to make that an impossible goal, though.
I don't want it, but I really feel like privacy is dead, we just don't fully know it yet.
I clicked the Start Menu. Fully half of it was made up of flashing animated crap - things moving about, very colourful adverts, the actual things I wanted to do were obscured by it.
I tried a few machines. They did the same thing. Maybe it's a manufacturer default.
Hey, maybe it's customizable. I don't know. It just struck me as being so far from what I think of a computer as being - not a tool to be used, but a flashy, childish entertainment box, like a children's rainbow cake.
My ego betrays me at this point, I suppose. I don't understand how the engineers at Microsoft got to this point.
It reminds me a lot of the Xbox 360 dashboard. That was the point I left 'mainstream' video gaming - it felt like my hackery, fun world had turned into a world of consuming advertising, of subscribing, of being someone else's plaything. Perhaps it was always like that, and I was too young to see?
It feels like the ultimate endgame of all of this is either that the technology industry just freezes (because innovation is killed by bureaucracy), or that we end up in some cryptopunk space in which the only interesting stuff happens over Tor/Freenet/whatever else.
And of course, the latter becomes harder every day with hardware backdoors.
I think that fundamentally the idea of the state regulating commerce is flawed.
Individuals want to be able to make choices, but at the moment they can't because economics forces their hand. Apart from a few radicals, everyone has to use a car, has to use the subway with its' smart card, has to use their mobile phone for business, because otherwise society doesn't have a role for you any more.
Can UBI help here? Or are we really just doomed to basically disable the Internet we created because it's too powerful?
Is it necessary for the average person to be able to instantaneously spend hundreds of pounds? I don't see why all retailers need such high security (e.g. sandwich shops).
I personally rarely spend more than 50GBP in a store. Large amounts of groceries in bulk, full fuel tank when I owned a car.
The contactless limit is 30GBP and that makes sense to me. If I cared about losing that amount of money I wouldn't go outside. I can sit on the metro and see that 25%+ of the people there are playing with smartphones worth 300GBP+.
Given all of that I don't find the US stance on security very odd. I want large payments to be verified, I don't care if someone buys a sandwich on my card, even if I never get that back from the bank.
To put it another way - huge payments should not be possible using a physical object that is used all over the place. I'd be happy for my bank to call me (2FA) for all payments above 100GBP, and for them to freeze payments if many many small payments happen in a short time span.
Otherwise, I'll see problems on my statement, cancel the card, and carry on with life.
The universal basic income would be paid for by the upper and middle classes, and taken by the working class.
At least in the UK these groups are seperated enough that there's very little socialization between them, very little overlap in voting preferences, etcetera. Different cultures, within the same country.
I wouldn't even really say 'most' of the news. Unless you're in high finance or a journalist, it really is just trivia.
Weather forecasts and crosswords are probably the best bits. For the rest, you're better off reading classic novels, all scandals are history playing itself.
It feels a bit 'tragedy of the commons' to me. It's important that someone is reading the news (because otherwise democracy falls apart). But my personal utility is maximised by reading a book about tax law rather than an article about the Panama Papers.
If we define the poor as a group which relies on regular labour to survive, and the wealthy as a group who does not, then many income sources of the wealthy dry up if the poor cease to exist.
One fairly obvious example is renting. The existence of a rental market is not undesirable. People will always want to live in a place temporarily, as a trial, as a holiday, as a stepping stone. But I'd imagine a huge majority of the rental market exists solely because the tenants either cannot afford, or have too little financial security to risk a mortgage.
More broadly, the cost of labour is reduced by the existence of poverty. The minimum wage is an attempt to alleviate this - in a world without poverty, a minimum wage would be unnecessary.
The question is whether we can do better. Axiomatically wealth inequality is good for those on top, at least in a direct sense.
I don't know what pay packages are like in London nowadays. Five years ago or so my understanding was ~40-60K starting.
When an apartment anywhere costs 300K+ it doesn't seem as good a deal any more. It feels like the junior investment banker of the 1990s could have been considered to be on a path to persistent wealth, whereas now it's a fair bit more ephemeral.
Working 100 hour weeks, after the initial excitement dies down, might ultimately only really be justifiable as a path to great riches or early retirement, not an upper middle class existence.
Would I work 100 hours a week for ten times the amount I'd expect at 10 hours? No, you'd have to give me FU money for that, because the idea there is that I work until I'm burned out and then retire.
Almost all of the solutions that are actually currently on the table already do help mass surveillance, already does give more control to the government.
If we can get the general public to use open hardware without backdoors and a cryptocurrency or similar, we might be able to come close to the privacy of cash. But is that a realistic goal? Anyone knows how to use cash in a reasonably private way. Barely anyone knows how to use digital technology in a reasonably private way. It may not even be possible (are our systems backdoored? is x86 secure?)
Taxation is always the problem hailed here. I think that fundamentally people should have the power to withhold information from the government. That action may result in negative consequences, but it should be possible nonetheless.
There is a huge distinction between choosing to disobey the law and potentially being punished for it (civil disobedience), and having literally no choice because all other avenues have become impossible.
That is what people are fighting for, that is what freedom is all about. Perfect enforcement is not desirable.
Imagine a world in which homosexuality is impossible. Not illegal, but impossible. That's what perfect enforcement would have looked like in the 50s.
What happens if I hack into your machine and plant something? I might have reason not to like you. I might just be a troll. It might give me a competitive advantage in some market to take you out. Perhaps we're both candidates for local government and I want to win.
Strict liability crimes are poisonous, illegal numbers are simply absurd.
How many bytes do I need? In the countries that have laws against cartoons, can I make an illegal favicon? Can I design a neural network which generates illegal favicons?
More seriously, criminalizing data is a terrible, terrible idea, simply because it provides a backdoor into the justice system.
Paid leave seems a bit.. hackish, though.
If I don't turn up for work, for whatever reason, I think any money given to me by my employer should be considered a gift. I haven't rendered services, why would I expect payment? It's a kind gesture and I'd expect anyone interested in retention / morale to do so, but coercion?
It seems more like a budgeting issue or an indication that salaries are too low to me.
Then again, I find it difficult to conceive of putting myself in a situation in which I couldn't survive for a few months without pay. Living under a bridge is more fun than making a 5% return on employment.
Basically, it's all very nice, and is better than nothing, but why are people so insecure to begin with? Can we fix that?
We'll have to agree to disagree. :)
Remember 09 F9?
Perhaps the current one is fine. What about the one after that?
What about the 'Bitcoin' that launches in 20 years? Do we have any mass market free platforms left then?
Workstations may always exist - servers may always exist - but right now, the masses have general purpose computers on their desks, in their messenger bags. I want that to last.
The general public can whilst the 'allow untrusted sources' box exists.
But once that box goes, the vast majority of the audience for software outside of Google Play is gone. F-Droid is already tiny as it stands!
The major computing platforms now have gatekeepers (Google Play, iOS App Store).
Personal computers with attached storage are disappearing and giving way to thin clients attached to the mainframe - without computing power, individuals have less choice.
I think we need to focus far more on hardware - it's never looked darker - Secure Boot and the ME make me worried for the future of x86, even.
I'll be fine as long as my old machines survive - but how are businesses going to produce mass market software when all the popular hardware is locked down?
Just to pick an arbitrary example - how does a project like Bitcoin take off when all we have are tivoized devices that won't run un"trusted" code? The community of a few hundred hardware hackers isn't big enough.
Not only that, despite the fact that 256GB of flash can be had for ~40GBP, the latest smartphones come with piffling amounts of storage and seemingly no expandable slots. It's a deliberate design decision to force the use of the network.
The IBM compatible desktop computer produced the revolution we see today. What's the next step?
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11422763
It probably makes sense for me to formulate the argument properly and write it up at some point.
In this particular instance - I'm not sure that the amount paid is relevant - the desires of the publishers would be, which doesn't necessarily include payment (otherwise no-one would publish under GPL). It's potentially a violation of the ToS of YouTube - I wouldn't know, I use a commandline tool which bypasses the web interface entirely.
Sorry Google! I'm sure you'll do OK. (Do you have a donation address? :P)
If no-one uses them, great.
If everyone uses them, you have a lower effective tax rate and different policy outcomes to the ones expected, so there might be distortions.
If others use them but you don't, you're at a competitive disadvantage.
An analogy for the everyman - imagine that there's a loophole me and everyone else in my city could use as individuals to completely avoid tax. If I choose not to do so, I'm receiving, say, 20-30% less income than I would annually, putting me at a huge disadvantage when performing normal activities such as buying a home, say.
I don't think that tax avoidance is immoral, I do think it should be fixed because of the distortion (favouring large businesses, which already generally have advantages due to scale).
It's a bit like how one can be a marxist whilst also choosing to own private property. You can't exist without mimicing society to some extent.
Unprotected streams are not an issue.
I'm not sure that the creation and dissemination of knowledge works well as a capitalistic business. I'm not sure that it leads to optimal outcomes WRT the dissemination of said material.
I don't know how we deal with the edge case of trading scarce resources like food and land for unlimited resources like data, but I don't think advertising is it.
When you think about it, it's really quite odd. The deal is that you can view this web page, if in the abstract you commit to buying some portion of a physical item or service from someone else later on.
To me, it feels a lot like an inefficient form of tax.
I don't particularly care about whether they can buy flash cars, but I do care about them being able to live without stress and continue to do the things they love and are best at.
As far as I'm concerned, the problem looks like this:
1. Society isn't providing them with a way to live, so it's down to me (and others like me) to help out.
Which leads to:
2. I'm not wealthy enough to feel like I can give back to them, or there's no reasonable interface to do so
Which leads to:
3. Out of desperation, they try to force my hand by employing advertising (so that indirectly there's a cashflow).
I'd rather work on #1 and #2 directly than look at #3. I'm not that interested in short term solutions, and advertising is a particularly ugly one.
Not to mention, if my hard drives and backups fail, I have bigger problems than my video hoard!
Additionally, I can bookmark _and_ download; that would take what, 0.5 seconds longer? :)