> This is so true. I really wonder about all the people installing these WiFi enabled light bulbs into lamps that end up being connected to some regular dumb switch next to the door in the wall...
Personally, for the bulbs that are smart, I simply don't use the switches, save for restarting the smart bulbs (haven't had to yet, though) but the smart stuff I have is smart for a reason:
The living room recessed lights are Hue bulbs, and that's so we can change the color on the fly, automatically when watching a movie, and schedule off when we've gone to bed and I've forgotten to turn them off.
The bedroom ones turn on automatically when we go to bed, and when we go to sleep, I use my siri shortcut to dim them to almost off completely, but just enough to provide a night light while starting some music we listen to while sleeping.
I have a smart light in the basement that turns on at dusk because it gets too dark down there to walk, and turns off when I trigger my bedtime shortcut.
I would never advise someone to smart everything in their home, but if you have reasons to add automation or have a desire for enhanced functionality, why not? Do your due diligence, know what you're buying, and know how to hook it up safely. I have a number of IP cameras on my property that are explicitly blocked from the Internet, and are only accessible to my home made DVR. I have all smart devices, where able, on a guest wifi that has no access to my computers or other devices, and has location services disabled. This stuff can be used safely and securely, and frankly the wider community looks ridiculous with the impression being they have a printer from the 90's on their desk, it's the smartest thing in their home, and they keep a loaded gun next to it in case it makes a noise they didn't expect.
It blows my mind that a company the size of and with the resources of Google can't get this right, even after all this time. It reeks of apathy to me. And even though I've been a dedicated iPhone user since the 6 Plus, I'd genuinely hoped Android would get better eventually since it's much more open and I enjoy customization, but as it stands, I have no compelling reasons to leave Apple's walled garden.
It seems lately that the only time Google can be deigned to do anything radical to solve problems is when it has one regulatory agency or another breathing down it's neck. It's genuinely disheartening to see a company that, when it started, looked to be ready to change how business was done succumb to the same forces that grind up so many others.
Google is first and foremost an ad company. Everything else is a distant second.
Having been the primary POC for Google corporate account things have improved a little - they at least pretend to care now and you can occasionally get a human if you are persistent enough.
If you have to deal with them in a professional capacity the underlying message is pretty clear - ad's and search that drives ads are their main focus.
> The government is elected by the people, it doesn't fit that definition.
At the risk of invoking Godwin's law, the Furher was elected by the people. It's a disservice to society at large to so casually brush off judgements about whether a Government is "authoritarian," especially when the question deserves a nuanced answer.
I would say the United States can be quite authoritarian, when it's given the leeway to. The militarization of the police comes to mind. Overpolicing of certain communities, the ongoing struggle for many marginalized groups to attain the same rights and freedoms as the majority, the way the United States swings it's foreign influence and military around worldwide to get what it wants, etc.
I mean our current President was elected on a platform of building a wall on our southern border to solve a completely imaginary problem, and the Government is now trying to seize privately owned property to make that happen.
Is that authoritarianism on the level of China or North Korea? No, not even close. Is it authoritarian? I would say yes, it absolutely is, and that should be a warning to future generations so it never has the opportunity to become authoritarian like China.
Markets created this mess. Markets will not solve it. Single payer takes insurance out of the game entirely, just run the entire industry out of town and be done with it. Doctors fix people, Doctors are paid by the Government what is reliably determined to be going rates for their services.
We (the United States) are the SOLE western country that does not have state sponsored healthcare, and it shows and it's ridiculous. I don't know how anyone can feel we are the greatest or great in any capacity when a car accident can send a family into poverty.
Markets are not responsible for insane health care regulation that restrict competition. Those exist locally and by state for insurances and providers. I could go on a whole list of all of these insane regulation that exist in the US. The US law going back to World War 2 that essentially forces people to get health insurance threw your employer is one one example of one of the dumbest ever laws and incredibly harmful to people.
The point is that everything that's outside of the regulated insurance market, such as plastic or lasik surgery and a whole list of other things are actually getting consistently cheaper while operations that are captured in a totally degenerate insurance market go the opposite direction.
We don't have many western countries that have ever even tried a more market style of health care. Singapore is the most market oriented system in the world and its by far the cheapest when looking at % of GDP.
A community is not a business. In fact it's hard for me to conceive of two conceptual entities further away from each other.
A business is interested in profit. Apple is no different. If you're not paying in, they're directly incentivized to make your experience suck as much as they can without crossing legal lines, to get you to do so.
I'm not saying I want to be in the fee-gating communities, I agree with you on that point. I'm just saying expecting a multi-billion dollar corporation to be interested in fostering that same sense of community is ridiculous.
The answer to this question is far too vast and complex for a hacker news comment. The real problem is that the people who hold the levers of power to create change are far too invested in the status quo. They may have an ethical and humanitarian reason to respond to the scientific communities concerns and data, but they have literally every other single interest pointed in the exact opposite direction.
I think we're rapidly approaching the point where the youngest people are going to abandon "civil" methods of change. They're being faced with a world they won't be able to live in, and are derided, mocked, parodied, and of course denied any kind of power to exact the changes needed.
The UN council on climate change and all of the world's climate researchers could be a signal worth paying someind to.
By their account, we need to change the basis of our economy, and we should have started 10 or 20 years ago, so today would be the latest that can save some areas.
The power to enact this change is denied to everyone who will suffer from it.
If you're sincerely asking these questions, I suggest you read up on climate change at large. This an incredibly large and dense topic and simply asking "how do we fix the planet" as though it's some busted code isn't productive for anyone involved.
It is an honest question. I have read a bunch about the subject and I can’t find any answer that tells individuals what they can personally do without forcing anything into others.
Your question is fundamentally in bad faith, and it’s like asking, “What can individuals do to stay safe on roads without forcing others to abide by driving laws?”
Individuals can’t, by and large, make the minds of changes necessary to avert the oncoming climate disaster.
A big part of the issue is that individual incentives are misaligned, which is exactly where government is supposed to step in: realign incentives such that the individually optimal choice is compatible with averting global catastrophe. Expecting billions of individuals to act against their own individual self-interest is lunacy.
> I take as a premise, my only premise in life, that what’s mine is mine and what’s yours is yours. Anything that violates this premise is, according to my own opinion and set of values, wrong.
What's yours is yours and what's mine is mine, but the planet and the presumption of a climate compatible with civilization are shared. It is owned neither by you nor me, and this necessitates an agreement where neither of us agree to exploit it for our own self-benefit at the detriment of others.
Is it against your set of values that we both agree to drive on same side of the road? If one of of us fails to do so, the government will step in and deprive the offender of their property and freedoms. As a result, we both benefit from the increased reliability and safety of transportation afforded by us agreeing to abide by the same set of rules.
> By that value, I’m ok with life as we know it ending if that means that individuals liberties will be kept.
>
> On the other hand, it seems like you don’t mind if a few million people die when we force third world countries to reduce their carbon emission by asking them to shut down coal plants and other processes generating carbon.
You literally state you're okay with "life as we know it ending" as a result of your absurdly rigid philosophy, but somehow you project me as being okay with millions of people dying.
As a sibling commenter said, your entire reply is essentially you clarifying that—yes—you are indeed arguing in bad faith. You've declared as ground rules a completely indefensible moral philosophy and have declared that anything opposing it is inherently wrong. This isn't a path to a productive conversation, and while I suspect you know that, it's a great way to make yourself feel superior and feel like you've "won" the argument when others don't agree to play by your rigged set of rules.
Your liberty ends where it impacts others, which is where extreme libertarianism has to stop and we start creating laws. Your freedom to pollute ends when it poisons someone else, etc.
As to your point about third world countries, as we saw from reporting of the COP25 the other week, it is the poor (third world) countries complaining not enough is being done. It is the wealthier nations who are being difficult.
Libertarianism is a philosophy only the wealthy and safe can afford because it is so ill suited for the survival of a nation due to the extreme stupidity of individual members of the human race.
Please explicate how you believe millions of people will die by virtue of shutting down foreign coal plants?
All the really big ones require legal restrictions on emissions. I had a bit of an epiphany about this recently when I saw the local ethylene plant flaring - visible from twenty miles away in the middle of the day. There's no amount of personal cuts in consumption that can match up to a hundred foot column of flame pumping carbon dioxide directly into the atmosphere. Flaring needs to be stopped, and no amount of "individual" action is going to do that.
Civilization is that thing we all impose upon each other because we all individually lack the perspective to moderate our behaviors in a fashion so as to bring about our own and others well being. Rather than we each muddle through experts in every field compose recommendations that become regulations that allows us to shape society in such a fashion as to bring about our health and wealth.
You can't drive as fast as you like or run an unsafe factory, or lock all the fire exits. It's not merely that one may not act in such a way as would immediately harm or impose upon the other. One also may not act in such a way as will ultimately on the overall bring about harm even indirectly by changing the parameters of the system.
At our present trajectory of each nation choosing the head morons in a myriad ways every n years and trying to respond only to immediate needs it seems likely that our actions will degrade our planet and with it our and our children's and their children's chances at health and wealth or even existence.
We need therefore a critical mass of citizens all over the world to make our continued survival as a species a priority. This will at some point logically in any given nation at some point be a minority, then a slim majority then an solid one. Any action undertaken will by definition be imposed on the ones that disagree and there will always be dissenters in any action under the sun. Some 30% of the US for example believes the earth is 6000 years old and we heading towards a future in which Jesus will either fix everything or take us somewhere else. They are as fundamentally unfit to make decisions about our future as crazy people on a life boat and we cannot all survive if we allow them to eat all the food and poke holes in the boat.
There are some individuals who have the power to make meaningful change (mostly board members and such) but they are actually more bound then anyone by the tragedy of the commons. Without organized cooperation that has the ability to punish cheaters who benefit, the tragedy cannot be overcome.
You are not an island. Neither am I. If we only act in our own individual best interests, we denigrate society as a whole. We are social animals. We do our best work and are at our most capable when we work together.
Individualism is fine enough for small communities. On the world stage, we need to get past our petty bullshit if we want to continue living the way we do on this planet. And the worst part is failure to do so will not affect those who failed, but their children, and their grandchildren.
I don't think humanity will die off. We're too clever for that. But our world will look quite different in many ways in a few hundred years, and good luck explaining to our children that, well, Amazon Prime was just too good to let go of.
A metaphor: You and your fellow fishermen live in a bog. The bog's water level is kept just so to allow for optimum fishing, and this is accomplished with a dam that was installed many years ago by your ancestors. However, one year the fishing isn't great, and you and your fellow fishermen are now working extra long days to make up for the bad fishing, and to keep your output strong and your family fed. One of the villagers explains that the dam is leaking; it's causing the water to rise, which is messing with the fishing and also threatening the village at large.
Your individual interest is to keep fishing, because you're already having trouble meeting your goals for fish to sell. Now more than ever. You might say something like "I can't help fix the dam, I'm barely making ends meet as it is! I don't have time!" And your fellow fishermen will say the same. But the fishermen are the only ones who know how to patch leaks in boats, so no one else in the village can do the work.
In this example, your individual needs are legitimate, and your objection to fixing the dam is correct; if you take time to fix the dam instead of fish, your family will go hungry. However, if no one fixes the damn, then everyone's home could be flooded, the fishing will continue to get worse, until the entire village is destroyed.
This would be where some kind of authority would come into play, either a tribal leader, or some elected official, who could step in and say "No fishermen. Today you will fix the dam, and in return, we will feed your families while you do so with the village food stocks." It's directly opposed to their individual interests, but is in alignment with the group's interests. And nobody goes hungry.
This incredibly simple stuff is what has made mankind the dominant species on the planet. The ability to not just group together, but to perceive and understand larger threats to that group and react accordingly with proactive solutions, and is the lack of that activity, because, as Greta Thunberg best put it I think, the leaders are too busy telling each other fairy tales of infinite economic growth, that we are now in trouble.
There is enough of everything including food for all the world. If not killing the planet requires a transfer of wealth so that foreigners can both eat and help us achieve our goals I don't see why this would be an extreme barrier.
Practice self sufficiency. Stop relying on companies to gather your food, distill your water, even bring the water to your tap. Expect it all to shut off. No fixing it now, get ready for when it hits the fan. We will adapt or die. Let's hope we can keep some of this knowledge around, oh and those of you with your nice bunkers, dont forget to pass it on to your kids. Lets try not to make the same mistakes next time eh? Good luck and have fun all.
Ever seen the painting "Bastille Day"? There are always options when the powerful fail the powerless. Large amounts of modern society were put in place to prevent this sort of thing from happening, but if the leadership is intent on making those protections ineffective, well, there's always guillotines again.
For those who consider this uncouth or believe there must be another way: even if the answer is to come through reforms, having a tangible threat of revolution on the table helps bring meaningful concessions from those who have thus far preferred symbolic gestures to placate.
Right? Any of those photos that they composited together into the final would've been great, or to just release them as a collection of wallpapers. Instead they took them all and rammed them together into something that looked less interesting.
This is really a good demonstration of the law of diminishing returns relative to art. Sometimes less is more. A more complicated and weird process doesn't always, and in fact very rarely, increases the value of the output work.
Except the guesses need to be good. I make it a point to avoid criticizing applications for not being power usery enough but there's a line you can draw where it becomes clear that the guesses are too frequent and consuming too much computing power, just to be ignored.
I've seen this a lot with my mother in particular, who is certainly not a power user but knows enough to get by, struggle to use software that's trying too damn hard to guess what she wants, instead of letting her just tell it what she freaking wants.
It's like how Microsoft announced they were going to use advanced AI to predict when would be a good time to reboot people's PCs for updates instead of, you know, just fucking letting them pick.
Or the myriad of ways I struggle with my Apple products that are almost universally black boxes in which stuff goes and functionality comes out, without any way to change or debug behaviors.
Apple seems to get it right pretty consistently, which is why I keep their stuff. But when it does manage to go wrong, holy shit debugging it is an absolute nightmare.
Pretty much any social media job like this, be it YouTuber or Instagram influencer or whatever, seems to be all life-consuming. I would never advise any friend to enter this business. Burnout is practically guaranteed with the level of content the services demand.
The key difference is celebrities (at least now) have staff; publicists, assistants, and all manner of other support. And a influencer I guess could, but how many will hire one? How many can even afford to?
Being Internet-famous seems like the worst of both worlds; the celebrity of a big name and the costs that come with it, but not the wealth to help manage those costs.
I still think most celebs have it worse, even with the support staff.
An influencer isn't going to be spotted and followed every waking moment of their life the minute they leave their house, like Kanye West might. It's also a life you can drop entirely one day on a lark, unlike being Kanye West.
I mean, PewDiePie remarked several times over the years of moving house because his fans would regularly stalk him to find his address.
I think they have it better in this specific regard because their fans are younger and therefore have more limited resources, but that wouldn't help me personally sleep much better at night.
