Nvidia CEO: We'll be solving VR immersion problems for the next 20 years - <AUTHOR> http://www.trustedreviews.com/news/nvidia-ceo-good-vr-20-years-away <comment><USER2> The actual quote is excellent (and already on this page). He's right -- the list of things to be done is obvious, and will take time.

And, I'd like to imagine he has some enjoyment at the thought -- if you saw his keynote showing off a precomputed(ish) raytraced walkthrough of their new office space, he was really enjoying himself and the possibilities.

What Hsun has is an incredibly good window into the silicon side of the problem, and he knows how many chip cycles he's got to address the amount of computation needed for physics, visual realism and presumably a latency budget to allow wireless support. Plus he can estimate what screen tech will be doing.

It's a prodigious amount of R&D, and it is a bit breathtaking. Finally having a reason to do it, and a taste of how appealing it can be is pretty cool.

<comment><USER3> You mean how many chip cycles he _needs_ , right? How many he's _got_ we all know: maybe 2. Then CMOS scaling is over. (Not that things will completely stop evolving, but they'll surely slow down.)

<comment><USER4> well TSV have evolved greatly which means that 3D dies can come soon. 3D transistors already expanded the limit of how small parts can get before physics hits you in the face with a baseball bat. On top of that memristors and graphene could open a whole new world for chip designers. If we have only 2 cycles worth of process left we are doomed :)

<comment><USER5> > 3D transistors already expanded the limit of how small parts can get before > physics hits you in the face with a baseball bat.

Yes, but we are just starting 10nm now. Go two more nodes (if I understand correctly that is meant here by cycles) and you are at 5nm.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/5_nanometer](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/5_nanometer)

to put that into perspective: "An Australian team announced that they fabricated a single functional transistor out of 7 atoms that measured 4 nm in length."

Maybe we can make our way down to single atom transistors eventually, but who knows how long it will take to make that commercially viable.

<comment><USER6> We already have a single atom transistor ([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single- atom_transistor](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single-atom_transistor)), but you're right that it's far from commercially viable.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> The really big, really difficult one will be enabling dynamic focal depth. The lack of focal planes makes it difficult to imagine VR providing a lifelike experience.

Some volumetric/panoptic displays are getting closer, along with eye tracking, but this seems like one of those things you cannot fix in software. Just adding higher pixel resolution, improving "physics", or creating a more beautiful environment will not solve this. So, 20 years is probably right.

<comment><USER8> But 'all' you have to do is track the pupil, and push focus on the object they're looking at. We're already rendering the focal length live in most games, there's no reason we couldn't shift the focal length affording to what the viewer's pupils are pointed at.

Alternatively, they could use a modified biology, where the direction the head is pointing chooses the relative DOF, basically you render a fairly wide depth of field around whatever the head is pointed at.

Anyway, you can get a pretty lifelike experience with just some basic atmospheric perspective. Look at photography with very wide depth of field [1], so everything is in focus simultaneously. You sorta just get used to it, and accept it.

[1] [http://cdn.shutterbug.com/images/0814picture03.jpg](http://cdn.shutterbug.com/images/0814picture03.jpg)

<comment><USER9> As someone who works on eye tracking for VR headsets, this is much easier said than done. Doing it well requires levels of accuracy, latency, and reliability that are not available in any eye tracker on the market today.

<comment><USER10> What about SMI already tracking pupils at 250Hz? [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qq09BTmjzRs](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qq09BTmjzRs) That tech is still expensive and I don't know how accurate or reliable but if it is good enough for foveated rendering, I would have expected it to be good enough for focus as well. Care to elaborate as to why it wouldn't work, or is it just beyond your horizon of "today"?

<comment><USER9> It's not accurate or reliable enough (in addition to being very far from a consumer price point). Reliability in particular is difficult to assess and usually lacking in eye tracking systems. Also just because the cameras are running at 250 Hz doesn't mean the latency is 1/250 seconds or even close to that.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Eventually it'll make more sense to just use the human brain as a renderer.

Perfect photorealism is fairly worthless without a solid method of interaction and the ability to literally suspend disbelief.

Direct neural interfaces will be capable of everything, not just rendering.

That said, I can't help but think of a scenario where we have functional neural interfaces but haven't yet mastered the human brain's grammar, and thus resort to "driving" the brain with traditionally-rendered images rather than feeding it the information required to create a scene from scratch.

In such a scenario, the requisite quality of the traditionally rendered images might be interesting. Would photorealism be required, or simply a low-quality rendering to convey general structure? Presumably the brain would enhance the latter case to the point of photorealism—or at least to the dream equivalent.

<comment><USER12> Agreed, considering the amount of processing and information loss that happens in the optic nerve (in people with healthy vision) you could save yourself a lot of processing, and get a higher fidelity result (potentially indistinguishable from reality).

<comment><USER13> I expect it would be some kind of a merge of the two (without severing the optic nerve that is) - neurons work by accumulation so you would effectively have the two realities summed - which would be neat for augmented reality. Two fully immerse you could close your eyes or put on dark glasses. A friend told me this is how visual hallucinations on LSD work ...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I just came across this today (VR Backpacks): [http://www.anandtech.com/show/10370/hp-and-msi- demonstrate-b...](http://www.anandtech.com/show/10370/hp-and-msi-demonstrate- backpack-pcs-for-vr-gaming)

At first I thought the idea was pretty ridiculous, but now that I've given it a bit more thought, I'm beginning to think having to carry around a backpack like this might not be such a bad compromise between the traditional stationary wired VR setup and the holy grail of fully wireless VR.

<comment><USER15> Which makes me think, eventually technology will probably enable the processor to be in the headset itself. Then possibly an implant.

<comment><USER16> The Microsoft Hololens integrates the computer running Windows into a fairly light AR headset.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I think many have misinterpreted what he was saying, especially if they haven't read the actual article. Nvidia's CEO is saying that VR won't be a "completely solved problem" for at least another 20 years. And that's very much true and has already been known by VR enthusiasts.

Carmack was even saying stuff like you need a 12k or 16k display to have the "ideal" resolution in VR, years ago. Well, we're not going to get those kinds of displays in VR headsets anytime soon, and even if we do, that's orders of magnitude more performance that's needed compared to what we're using in today's PCs.

On top of that, you also need "virtual reality" to be as close as possible to actual reality in terms of graphics fidelity, so that's a few orders of magnitude more in terms of performance needed. If you want "Matrix-style VR", then yeah, that won't be achieved for at least another 20 years. The headsets will also have to become "glasses-like" to increase adoption and make them more convenient, which is going to take at least another decade, too.

All of that said, while I do think the 1440p resolution is _way_ too low, and probably even 4k won't be the "optimal" resolution for VR, I do think VR will start becoming "mainstream" within the next 5 years. I think many took his comments to mean that VR won't be mainstream for another 20 years, but that's not what he was saying.

</comment><comment><USER13> How many years from John Logie Baird's first invention did it take to get TV right. Mainstream? Colour? Picture & sound quality? Ditching the cumbersome CRT ... best part of a hundred years but people where ready to use it long before that and pay big wodges of cash for it too. I'd say there'll be a big market for sub optimal VR :)

</comment><comment><USER18> I wander why Huang did not mention -- in my opinion -- the main issue with VR - the fact that many people (including myself) cannot use those headsets for a longer time than say 10 minutes without getting dizzy and sick. Or are these the consequences of those issues he mentioned - like "the physical worlds do not behave according to the laws of physics"?

<comment><USER19> Is this really true with the newer iterations? I've been to VR events and not a single person became dizzy or sick afaik.

<comment><USER20> I don't think it really is. I've had the oculus for a couple of weeks and the only thing that's come close to making me sick has been a wreck while playing Project Cars. I'm fine even with minecrift and ethan carter without comfort controls. There are a few sorts of movements that make me a tiny bit queasy (like moving backwards and then forwards quickly), but they're pretty easy to avoid doing.

<comment><USER21> So what you're saying is that for you, it's true.

<comment><USER19> How else would we measure this if not by peoples' experiences?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> I still think interaction is the major shortcoming and probably will be for the foreseeable future. Most of this seems to be a technology-psychology hybrid. I want to grab a virtual coffee mug with sufficient feedback so I don't grab through it, feel the weight of it etc. Another part is finding good interaction paradigms which I suspect will fall out of better technology being available and in more hands (easy to prototype interactions). Wide spread first gen VR-Headsets and primitive interaction means (controller) will probably be good enough to drive that.

</comment><comment><USER23> Can't remember where I read this, but the idea is that the brain compresses a vast amount of data down to a small amount of meaningful information. VR's current approach is to meticulously spoof that vast datafeed in such a way that the result gets compressed down to something that seems meaningful. Which is a lot of work. Why not go in post-compression and merely spoof the meaningful bits? VR's job could be a lot easier.

I don't know how it would play out, but speculating, you might render a low- poly monochromatic "skeleton" scene and then simply suggest to the brain ways to flesh it out with feeling and texture. Show the user photos of war-torn Europe in 1947 beforehand for example. Even if it means direct neural interfaces, considering that we're 20 years out using the current approach, maybe that isn't so far fetched.

<comment><USER24> I always wondered if you could use adversarial neural networks to find images that the brain recognizes as something else, just like you can fool NNs. You could use this to find low-poly representations of your objects that are indistinguishable from the real ones. Probably you'd have to calibrate this for every user though.

<comment><USER25> You might need to reset the user occasionally during training, otherwise that adversarial neural network would hunt a moving target.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> I suspect that both VR immersion and self-driving cars will always be "just around the corner." We want to believe in them, but in both cases there are obstacles that may be insurmountable or will at least force us to scale back our hopes. In the former (VR) they are technical/biological and in the latter (self-driving cars) they are technical/environmental.

Or visual systems are too tightly integrated with our motion systems and other sensory systems to be handled independently, just as traffic lanes are too exposed to other influences (unpredictable people and things) to allow vehicular autonomy.

In both cases we want to see the thing we want to do by itself but there are deep interdependencies.

<comment><USER27> The difference is that your brain fills in the gaps when there are very minor discrepancies between sensory systems. That's why presence exists with current VR platforms.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> Not interested in Mobile unless it is for autos? That is a pretty big declaration from one of (if not the) worlds biggest GPU manufacturers. Does this spell the end of the Shield or is that not considered mobile?

<comment><USER29> It seems apparent to me that the strengths of desktop chip manufacturers don't translate well to mobile. Both Intel and Nvidia have had tremendous problems to compete against ARM / PowerVR. While Nvidia has done a better job, I imagine they are still loosing money on that front. Maybe this is the time for them to acknowledge that and instead concentrate on markets where local data parallel computations are actually useful _and_ currently feasible (due to power requirements). Maybe mobile might get there as well (real time on-chip image recognition), but it's still years off I think.

<comment><USER30> _Both Intel and Nvidia have had tremendous problems to compete against ARM / PowerVR. While Nvidia has done a better job_

Has Nvidia had _any_ success at all in mobile? At least Intel has managed to get some Atom chips in some obscure Dell tablets and Asus mobile phones.

I'm very curious about this - Nvidia's whole mobile business looks like a flop and Huang's circumspect dismissal of it sounds like sour grapes to me.

<comment><USER29> Well at least they have some performance benchmarks to show for [1] (I wasn't able to find a comprehensive sustained performance-per-watt comparison though, which would be much more interesting) and at least they sold more than half a billion dollars worth of Tegras in 2015. Looking at [2] that's at least substantially more than Intel sold when their mobile business crashed and burned in 2014 [3]. It's however not as much as Intel sold in 2013 and the last quarter of 2015 wasn't good for Nvidia either. Maybe it's fair to say that Nvidia is just learning the same lesson with a bit of delay, but at least they have a very strong pivot going after the car market with rapidly increasing compute requirements.

[1] [http://wccftech.com/nvidia-tegra-x1-benchmarks- apples-a8x/](http://wccftech.com/nvidia-tegra-x1-benchmarks-apples-a8x/)

[2] [http://marketrealist.com/2015/03/why-nvidia-continues-to- foc...](http://marketrealist.com/2015/03/why-nvidia-continues-to-focus-on- tegra/)

[3] [http://www.extremetech.com/computing/227816-how-intel- lost-t...](http://www.extremetech.com/computing/227816-how-intel-lost-the- mobile-market-part-2-the-rise-and-neglect-of-atom)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> In 20 years we might be able to implement something that works with our visualization systems to produce images at will...at least for those of you without Aphantasia.

<comment><USER32> This would likely be undistinguishable from schizophrenia, no? Intrusive images and sounds - no thanks.

<comment><USER33> They're not intrusive if you pay to have them

<comment><USER34> I pay for internet access and also have to install an adblocker.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> I imagine that in 20 years, they will invent something that plugs directly to the optical nerve or your brain to simulate virtual reality.

</comment><comment><USER36> Can anyone paste me the list of shortcomings that VR has to solve according to him?

<comment><USER27> • VR displays are a little too cumbersome. [They have] to be much more elegant, being connected by a wire has to be solved.

• The resolution has to be a lot higher.

• The physical worlds do not behave according to the laws of physics.

• The environment you're in isn't beautiful enough.

<comment><USER36> That's what was in the article... I was expecting a longer list somewhere.

Those are not game killers. If points like that were game killers, we wouldn't have had the Atari or the Nes.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> Is there a video of this talk available?

</comment><comment><USER38> Just got our Vive today. Only 1/3 people threw up.

</comment><comment><USER39> so, what about the need of having a huge open space to appreciate virtual environments in freedom?

<comment><USER27> It shouldn't need to be /too/ huge with smart redirected walking algorithms. But still probably too big for the average person to have available to themselves privately.

This is where I feel most people in the VR space agree that "VR arcades" will become a lucrative industry.

</comment></comment><comment><USER40> what about AR? e.g. a hololens?

<comment><USER17> 30 years. At least if you're talking about mapping everything at the same scale, graphic fidelity, resolution, price, and field of view as in VR, then AR will always be 10 years away compared to VR, in my opinion. If you're going to make it much more limited than VR (like say only show a chess table in front of you, or some text on top of stuff, but not much else), and make it cost several times more, like the Hololens does right now, then yeah, I guess you could make AR _seem_ almost as usable as VR, but it will never be a 1:1 comparison this way.

If you're doing 1:1 comparisons, then it should be about 10 years behind VR because you have to transpose the same world that you do in VR but over the real world.

</comment></comment><comment><USER41> The actual quote was:

"First of all, VR displays are a little too cumbersome. It has to be much more elegant, being connected by a wire has to be solved. The resolution has to be a lot higher. The physical worlds do not behave according to the laws of physics. The environment you're in isn't beautiful enough. We're going to be solving this problem for the next 20 years."

"Solving over 20 years" / "20 years from being solved" are very different things.

<comment><USER42> Once I read the quote I probably had the same reaction as you. Bad journalism.

</comment></comment><comment><USER43> Nvidia of course has a stock price incentive to pitch a very long period of further development ahead.

</comment><comment><USER44> Some of this may be misdirection. VR is getting tremendous attention and will be very competitive. Look how he backed away from mobile. Complaining about wires and resolution? They're getting new revs every 12-18 months now. Look for hidef wireless hmds in 20-36 months, not 20 years. No physics? Look again. I think he wants to avoid competitive low margin businesses when better choices are available.

<comment><USER27> >Look for hidef wireless hmds in 20-36 months, not 20 years.

How do you suppose that will happen? On-device computing hardware or a wireless tether?

The latter appears to only be maybe possible with microwave radio, but requires constant line of sight which is a huge issue.

The former may be possible depending on your definition of hidef. IMO I doubt it though, much of what makes VR immersive is having a HMD lightweight/comfortable enough that you forget it's on. That's hard enough when the only hardware in the HMD is essentially screens and an IMU. I can't imagine the added weight of CPU/GPU/batteries/etc not making a significant enough impact on comfort to make it not worth it, in the next 20-36 months.

For reference, my standard of hidef VR right now, not in 20-36 months, is Vive level resolution/FOV/tracking accuracy and latency; I wouldn't put GearVR in that group, or any platform without submillimeter positional tracking for that matter.

</comment></comment><comment><USER45> _the piggy trough is so full of cash, cream and credit, that they ignore credible assessment(s)_

about the VR industry from the top comment of that page

Edit: Thanks for the downvote

</comment><comment><USER46> Ha, 20 years. I'd guess more around 100, and graphics card companies, unless they pivot, won't really be a part of it. If we're talking about true VR, it's the replacement of reality, e.g. piping experience directly into your neurons. For instance, how are we going to augment smell or touch with a headset and a video card?

Sensory augmentation will probably start with dream augmenting tech (headsets that are able to give you "good" dreams by learning your neural firing patterns), then as delivery systems, nanotech, processing and brain knowledge gets better, we'll see it evolve into waking experience augmentation.

<comment><USER47> > If we're talking about true VR, it's the replacement of reality, e.g. piping > experience directly into your neurons

Yeah that's not what anyone here is talking about.

<comment><USER46> I'm sorry, what was your definition of virtual reality? I sort of read it as "a reality that is virtually reality itself."

My point was those problems might be on the horizon of nvidia in the next 20 years, but its not even scratching the surface of what VR needs to be.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER48> And then you have the fundamental design problems of VR, where it blocks out your environmental awareness, causing people to crash into walls, leading to liability issues: [https://imgur.com/umYTJP1](https://imgur.com/umYTJP1)

The first generation VR also faced the same liability issues. Specifically, the Atari Jaguar VR was cancelled because of this.

VR will never make it as a consumer product.

Ever.

<comment><USER49> I own a Vive and have not once crashed into a wall. The software knows where your physical boundaries are and warns you when you're too close by fading in a virtual wall (sort of looks like a blue mesh).

Take your uninformed nonsense elsewhere.

<comment><USER48> I posted a video of people running into walls. And there are lots of other videos of the same.

Are you implying it doesn't happen?

Also, how do you make something like Call of Duty when you're limited in your movement by walls?

<comment><USER50> > Also, how do you make something like Call of Duty when you're limited in > your movement by walls?

You don't. Many existing game genres don't map well to VR in a direct port of existing mechanics.

From a game developer's perspective that is one thing that makes it exciting. It's a blue ocean of new design possibilities. I'm an optimistic person but I believe we'll find new designs that are equally compelling to the most popular games on 2d screens. Different games for different platforms.

<comment><USER51> Platforms like Virtuix and Infinadeck are interesting designs for this problem.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Why Is It So Hard to Detect Keyup Event on Linux? - <AUTHOR> http://blog.robertelder.org/detect-keyup-event-linux-terminal/ <comment><USER2> It would evidently be useful to have a keyboard-event daemon for Linux, independent of X or Wayland.

It would run with root privilege, and enforce access rights, allowing user- level code access to events they deserve to see.</comment>


Car campers in beach parking lots - <AUTHOR> https://www.bakersfield.com/ap/national/living-on-pennies-with-a-million-dollar-view-how-car/article_edf4971c-045a-5265-b772-b857df180d4b.html <comment><USER3> I talked with a guy living in a motorhome in Mountain View California, he works for Google. He could certainly afford an apartment but said his payments on the motorhome are about $600 a month, and an apartment close to Google would be $2500 a month at least, so he feels like its a free $2000 a month to save or spend. He's fortunate that Google also has nice showers, free food, and laundry. Things he might otherwise have to find other options for.

I can't argue with the logic. It means $24,000 a year to apply toward student loans or what have you isn't a bad deal. And he will eventually pay off the motorhome giving him some security there.

Sadly, most people won't talk about their situation (I tried by walking down a road and knocking on doors) I was hoping to get a sense of how many people were living in motorhomes because they wanted to (like the guy I talked to) and how many were there because they felt they had no choice. I don't have any good ideas on how to get that information.

I did enough research to know that building a small lifestyle business out of offering black/grey water pumping and garbage collection services for the folks who were doing this by choice was probably viable. You would need a couple of custom trucks[1] that were capable of being mobile RV dumping stations and a business with sewer rights to dump (the City of Sunnyvale will license a business to have an RV dumping station on site, so starting there would work.) I think it would be a "pump and dump" scheme that would be both good for the neighborhood and probably make enough money to employ a few folks.

[1] To be full service you'd probably want a fresh water tank, a propane tank, and a sewage collection tank. Then you could dump the grey/black tanks, refill fresh water and refill propane. Personally I think it makes way more sense than these companies that were sending trucks out to refill your gas tank.

<comment><USER4> Actually a better business is to start having more RV parks in the SV. The last 5 years has been record breaking sales history for RVs. Yet the rest of the industry (RV parks specifically) isn't catching up. Most of the people buying RVs are now surprised that no RV parks have availability. I've watched for the past 5 years bay area periphery cities go from having tons of space any time of the year, to being completely full all the time, no matter what they do to their monthly price. It's kinda crazy.

<comment><USER3> Sort of, sort of not. I agree that it would be better to create more RV parks but the zoning issues are pretty extreme in that most cities are not big fans of RV parks for more historical reasons than actual ones. Sunnyvale, as a city, has preserved its mobile home parks in an effort to keep housing more affordable.

I have an inquiry out to a developer on the cost of building a 'multi-story' RV park. Not trying to recreate the "stacks" here (if you're a Ready Player One fan), but wondering if you could increase the available parking spots while not consuming additional acreage. It has to be a better use than 'public storage' buildings.

<comment><USER4> These fifth wheels and class As can weigh up to 24000 pounds (even if they where never legally allowed to). A moving object at that weight would make a multi-story RV park an architecture/safety nightmare.

I'm talking about east-bay area that still has space. Not sunnyvale.

\- Just checked out the ready player one images - holy mother of guacamole.

<comment><USER3> I agree they are heavy, and even more heavy than the bus chassis they are built on top of, but I see that as an engineering problem right? There are bus depot parking structures where unused commercial buses are parked. And my civil engineering friends are fond of saying that with enough steel and concrete you can hold up anything :-). So as a mental exercise in scaling density by going vertical, in my sketchbook using lot "sizes" that were similar to a KOA RV campground as a baseline (about 30' x 60' per space), an 8 story parking complex on a 5 acre lot could hold 250+ spaces.

Ok, and the idea isn't even original, see this: [https://99percentinvisible.org/article/mobile-home- skyscrape...](https://99percentinvisible.org/article/mobile-home-skyscrapers- elusive-dream-vertical-urban-trailer-parks/)

<comment><USER5> It's certainly possible, but with a lot less steel and concrete you could just build walls and have, you know, apartments. My guess is it's easier to find investors for that, too.

The only reason I can imagine a multi-storey RV park making sense would be to take advantage of some weird zoning quirk or something. But that's a lot of money to throw at what's effectively a legal vulnerability that will probably quickly be fixed.

<comment><USER3> I don't disagree, the changes that a multi-level RV park bring are a more flexible pricing structure, a lower cost facilities budget, and perhaps a lower cost maintenance load.

From a cash flow perspective I started with parking garages as a business model. The typical 'monthly parking' type garage is a concrete and steel affair with sprinklers and elevators as its biggest operational expense, a bit more if you add an on-site office for an attendant to capture additional revenue from special events.

All the space that requires maintenance in an apartment building that is 'non- apartment' doesn't exist in an RV park. You don't repaint or re-carpet, you don't send HVAC dollars on cooling or heating, Etc.

My assumption (and I'm open minded about missing things) are that using the ratio of comparing of a traditional RV park to a one story apartment complex is a valid way to estimate expenses and cash flow. Then to extrapolate by adding additional layers to the RV park. There are also different tax treatments but I suspect that if the difference there appears to exploitable that it will be quickly changed.

The biggest complaint about RV parks are that they are RV parks and they are an "eyesore". By enclosing the park you can improve the optics, and by increasing the density you grow the ROI relative to an apartment by the cost ratio. But is it a $5M project, a $10M project, or a $25M project that I don't know yet. And while a casual polling of city folks about which would they prefer, RV's parked on the street or parked in an externally attractive structure set aside for them, polls favorably, it isn't clear that is enough to get final approval.

<comment><USER6> Put the RV parks underground and pump in fresh air and fiber-optic daylight.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Our public policy often chooses to subsidize free parking by making large chunks of land available for free use by automobiles.

Modern technology allows permanent structures to be much more space-efficient for housing by building many stories high. However, the use of such technology is often banned and structures are limited to one or two stories. Also, even for one-story structures, rules often require eg. 6000 sqft of land to be used for a 1500 sqft house. These rules all result in significant surplus land wealth being required (or expensively rented) for people to obtain permanent housing.

Is it any wonder that, faced with these constraints, people are choosing to live in one-story homes on free land? Government policy is practically begging for it.

<comment><USER8> And this "technology" is banned for the right reasons.

It is demonstrably harmful to the enviroment, physical and mind health and the society in general.

I'm all for this:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LtSf69vjrVM](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LtSf69vjrVM)

<comment><USER9> Do you have a source for that? Not disagreeing, but I'd be very interested in reading up on how a high-rise might negatively impact my health seeing as I live in one right now.

<comment><USER8> Source? Hah. My life.

I lived most of it in the high-rises, and not slums at all. "Respectable neighbourhoods".

I'm not talking about slums.

I pity the people who choose to live in those anthills.

I hate people who advocate to force other people to live in those.

I'm talking about overcrowding. Not enough private space, not enough public space, not enough transport. And it's a death trap if something goes just slightly wrong with the infrastructure. Have you witnessed shit fountains out of you r toilet? I did. Have you seen what a gas explosion does to those? A section or three just collapses, top to bottom, and everyone there is dead. What if water mains gets cut off because the electricity cut off and so there are no lifts? What if it's 15F outsite and the heaters die?

This is no way to live.

<comment><USER7> Nobody is trying to force someone to live in a high-rise. If more people are in high-rises, that leaves more room for everyone else who doesn't live in one.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> > _In December, Cheatham, her children and their father qualified for a three- > bedroom, two-bathroom house in Mountain View._

> _The couple isn't completely reconciled, but they came together to provide a > roof — one that's not welded to a chassis — over their children's heads._

> _"We're working things out," said Cheatham, 37. "The most important thing is > to have a stable place for our kids."_

It's amazing to me to see / hear of parents, who _even after disagreeing badly enough to divorce_ , are able to come together to care for their children. It's hard for me to even fathom how much work and humility that would take. That they were willing to talk to each other at all is, in its own right, remarkable.

I have been fortunate enough to have always lived in a secure home, and I've never needed to sleep in a car out of necessity- the only times I've _gone camping_ are as a Boy Scout (okay, Scouts BSA member), when a warm shower was only a day or two away. As for the policies: Cars are, besides being a little awkward to sleep in, a lot more secure than a tent is (and more fireproof, to boot). With the understanding that all it takes is one mistake for a poor family to become an even poorer, homeless family, I feel like a lot of these "parking overnight, or being homeless = vagrance = illegal = fines" laws can be a little out of touch- they're generally written by college-educated _politicians_ , many of whom have never had to do anything of the like, and who don't understand that a $50 fine _when you can 't even pay rent_ is really bad.

Why does it seem to be that we, at least in America, punish the poor for being poor, instead of, or even at the same time that we try to help them up?

<comment><USER11> >Why does it seem to be that we, at least in America, punish the poor for being poor, instead of, or even at the same time that we try to help them up?

I think that's the natural consequence of having spent years pushing the idea that being poor is a personal choice or a lack of character. Once you make the connection that it's directly linked to a lack of character, you can be punitive instead of providing a safety net, and punitive is much cheaper for those of us with high moral character.

<comment><USER12> > and punitive is much cheaper for those of us with high moral character.

I didn't understand this assertion. Could you expand on it a bit?

<comment><USER13> The commenter is just being sarcastic. It's easier to penalize others and self-justify than to care and help others.

<comment><USER14> [https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~sef/sefSmiley.htm](https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~sef/sefSmiley.htm) :-)

<comment><USER15> I propose a technological solution to this problem: HN needs a sarcasm checkbox on each comment.

<comment><USER16> Yes that will really help those of us who can't read English.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I had a stint of about six months when I lived in a camper and worked full- time as an engineer. I was amazed at the kinds of places I could get away with staying for free (coast in oregon, ski resorts, national forests). I would drive around public lands looking for LTE on verizon/AT&T and then post up for days.

It wasn't without its precarity. Sometimes I'd get woken up by sheriffs at 2AM, have mechanical issues, and generally struggled to conform and relate to friends and coworkers. Also, sleeping in SF was terrible. Buses waking you up at 2am, and after meeting others living living in their vans on Division due to hardship, I couldn't help but feel guilty and privileged in my solar paneled, cassette toiled equipped, expedition vehicle. People would joke that I was gentrifying the streets.

Eventually I sold it and moved on. Worthwhile experience though.

</comment><comment><USER18> I rented one of those expensive Ocean Beach ocean-view houses right by the parking lot they are talking about for a few months once. I've also lived out of a van in San Diego for some range of years (I used to do Oceanographic research and traveled 3-5 months a year). I quite literally have lived both sides of this story -- although I never once stayed in the parking lot in question in my van. I honestly can't imagine why anyone would want to stay in a van in that parking lot -- it is much too exposed and intrusive both in terms of the outside world coming in and in your inside world going out. It would also be very annoying to comply with the parking requirements ...

I think regulation to provide a path to legality for people to van dwell should happen but it should also take into account the needs of the communities and home-dwellers in an area. I never parked overnight in residential areas -- it seems to me a strange van parked overnight in a neighborhood could easily impact somebody who lived nearby, especially if they saw someone climbing in or out. Making someone nervous when they go for a walk in their own neighborhood is more than high enough cost to be worth avoiding.

The reality though is that there is a _lot_ of space in a most American cities that _nobody uses at night_ -- and its often not far from desirable places to be. Opening up small pockets of space sufficiently close to desirable locations for legal and safe use by van dwellers, in conjunction with other regulatory approaches (special vehicle registration, possibly even innovation via things like ODBC-gps appliances to allow local municipalities to collect van-dwelling taxes) could really curtail the negative effects residents experience while also enabling people the freedom to pursue the lifestyles they are already pursuing ...

Its possible to do all of (1) limit impact of van dwellers on communities (2) make van dwelling safer and more convenient (3) keep costs of van-dwelling lower than traditional housing and viable for people on a range of incomes

<comment><USER6> OBD-II :)

<comment><USER18> That's the one! I really hope that ODBC is not introduced as a required part of vehicle safety regulations!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Here it is on the wayback machine for EU users getting a 451 error.

[https://web.archive.org/web/20190322180054/https://www.baker...](https://web.archive.org/web/20190322180054/https://www.bakersfield.com/ap/national/living- on-pennies-with-a-million-dollar-view-how- car/article_edf4971c-045a-5265-b772-b857df180d4b.html)

<comment><USER20> So either

      1) They are targetting EU users and serving to EU users and thus the block is pointless
      2) They aren't targetting EU users and thus the block is pointless

<comment><USER21> Or (1) they aren't sure if they would count as targeting EU users, because the rules are fuzzy and might be interpreted differently by each country's regulators, and (2) they don't have any need to target EU users since their content, and their monetization, is mostly of interest to non-EU users.

In that situation, there are two cautious ways to proceed.

One approach is to assume that you might be targeting EU users and so comply with GDPR. Even if you aren't doing anything with data that would make compliance hard, this is somewhat annoying because GDPR requires that you have a representative _in_ the Union as a point of contact for users and regulators.

The other approach is to make a good faith effort to block EU users.

If you have little or no income directly or indirectly from EU users, the second approach has a lot to recommend it, especially until there is a good body of regulatory rulings on what GDPR actually means.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> I'm against live-in vehicles and this life-style choice. On paper it sounds fine but in reality horrible for many reasons. For the most part, people in this situation are in a challenging state and the least of their worries is the environment around them. Is a mother of 2 living in a small RV who relies on donations going to pay for disposal service?

I live in Portland, a city that used to known for being a clean city. In the last 8 years we have had a large increase of car live-in residents and homeless population. I would not call Portland a clean city anymore. In-fact it's far from it. Homeless make up about 3% of the population, but according to a recent article they make up half of the arrests. Personally I've had car camping people outside of my house and we've been afraid of retaliation for call them in and try not to make contact.

I understand that these people have nowhere to go, but cities should create a homeless car shelter of sorts or some other solution other than just hoping for the best of people living on the edge.

2011 article on how clean Portland is(was) - [http://www.digitaljournal.com/article/308068](http://www.digitaljournal.com/article/308068)

RV issue in Portland -[https://www.kgw.com/article/news/local/portland- neighbors-fe...](https://www.kgw.com/article/news/local/portland-neighbors- fed-up-with-abandoned-rvs/431476525) Homeless issue -[https://katu.com/news/local/neighbors-say-theyre-getting- now...](https://katu.com/news/local/neighbors-say-theyre-getting-nowhere-with- city-on-homeless-camp-cleanup) Half of the Police arrests are Homeless - [https://www.oregonlive.com/portland/2018/07/portland_mayor_t...](https://www.oregonlive.com/portland/2018/07/portland_mayor_ted_wheeler.html)

<comment><USER23> This comes off as super NIMBYish.

The rise of this lifestyle is a direct result of rising inequality in our society. Yeah, that mother of 2 living in a vehicle probably has way bigger problems than paying for disposal service. But people utilizing services they can't pay for is what concerns you, not the fact that so many people are in such dire financial straits that living in a car makes economic sense.

<comment><USER24> Use of the word "NIMBY", which is clearly a pejorative, is not an argument. I don't see why that diminishes the parent comment at all.

The rise of this lifestyle is a direct result of people feeling entitled. Take the musician in the article ("Lily"). She's trying to make a career in indie rock, playing local gigs. That can't be your full-time job unless you are exceptionally talented, to a degree where others value your creation/contributions enough to pay you a lot for it. This takes more than just musical talent - it requires experience, marketing, networking, business, and other skills. And it is of course, a highly-competitive line of work - after all, who wouldn't want their work to also be their passion.

Lily lived in Nashville before, which is a lot more affordable than California cities like San Diego, Los Angeles, San Francisco, etc. San Diego is a full 55% pricier than Nashville ([https://www.bankrate.com/calculators/savings/moving-cost- of-...](https://www.bankrate.com/calculators/savings/moving-cost-of-living- calculator.aspx)). So in effect, Lily made a conscious choice to move to a pricier area without having a plan for how to live there. A responsible way of making that move would be to work for a few years in Nashville, build up savings, identify jobs in your destination that pay enough, and then make the move.

What gives Lily the right to expect she'd be accommodated in whatever city she moves to? If her work is not producing enough earning to pay for housing locally, it is because her work is not valued by society to a great enough extent to live in a very desirable (and thus expensive) area. I don't think the local community is obligated to provide lower-cost housing (either through subsidy or greater supply) to enable her choices, which squarely fall under the realm of "personal responsibility".

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> I've been living in a shuttle bus I converted for almost two years. I'm fortunate enough for it to be a choice, many aren't as fortunate. I'm better equipped than an RV, hot and cold water, toilet, shower, 1600W of solar, AC, standing desk workstation.

I'm very respectful of others. I never park overnight in front of a house and don't like parking in one street spot for more than 12h. I often pick up trash in the area I park.

For those who complain about us, keep in mind there is a minority of assholes in every population. Don't judge everyone by the assholes.

Feel free to ask me anything.

<comment><USER26> It seems like most van conversions are optimized to be inconspicuous. It's no schoolie, but a shuttle bus is certainly more eye-catching than an Econoline. Do you have issues blending in or getting additional (unwanted) attention?

<comment><USER25> My bus is very obvious. In general it hasn't been a problem. I had someone complain once when I was parked somewhere I shouldn't have been but didn't know.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> It's great that this law has been struck down as unconstitutional.

I've slept in my car numerous times along the PCH in the past, and in SoCal it's particularly irritating how much CHP harrasses folks just trying to get some shut-eye on a road trip.

I've had CHP wake me at 3AM then force me to drive half asleep down a winding cliff-top road I had pulled over specifically to avoid driving sleepily down.

But I fully expect there to be new laws introduced to prevent these streets from becoming trailer parks. The judge already criticized the vagueness, they'll just get more specific targeting persistent occupancies.

The concern for sanitation is very legitimate. Especially for folks in cars and vans, there's no holding tank infrastructure in these vehicles. A person spending a day somewhere in a car with no public restrooms nearby is either urinating in a bottle or on the ground. And if in a bottle, the bottle is very likely getting emptied on the ground nearby.

Even people in RVs and campers have fairly limited holding capacity. It doesn't take much laziness to exhaust the capacity and regress into the same pattern of a car/van-dweller. Not to mention those systems are failure-prone and often neglected because who wants to do maintenance on a sewage system?

</comment><comment><USER28> It's amazing how little I truly need. I haven't paid rent since 2015 by choice. I can afford it, but see no reason to. I went to a camping store and bought the most comfortable air sleeping pad and other gear. My 4" thick sleeping pad is more comfortable than my bed. My total spend was less than $500.

While working on my software, I make money as a field engineer. I drive to my next client and just park nearby overnight. To the rest of the world, my minivan looks like any other parked vehicle. It's not an RV, so it's completely invisible. There are no signs I am there after I convert the interior into sleep mode. Since I have no commute, I don't waste fuel or time in rush hour traffic.

You would never know I do this unless I told you. :)

I met many others like me, usually by fixing their car.

<comment><USER29> Where do eat and bathe?

<comment><USER28> Gym membership to 24hour fitness. I have another $20/mo membership for Planet Fitness, for its massage chairs and in case I am in a state like Arizona without 24, but 24 is everywhere in California. 2 years for $650 at Costco. That's 2000+ options nationwide. Do a workout, go for a swim at 24 and chill in a massage chair at PF while my equipment recharges. :)

Eat? Wherever. I have plenty of money.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> Van Life is becoming super popular, not just for the homeless, but for a generation of people who want to live on a limited income and travel. Theres people building out buses/vans and living in california, working tech, banking their money to retire early. About 20 years ago, I was working at ATT and we had contractors living in their travel trailers parked in the work parking lot at our datacenters, so its not a new occurance.

The big thing I found interesting was the lawsuit angle that it discrimination for disabled homeless, that living in a tent is legal, but living in an RV is illegal. RV's and Tents are spreading all around major cities, its getting quite bad up here in Seattle, tourists are mentioning it all the time, its visibile from the highways.

<comment><USER31> _Van Life is becoming super popular_

I'm as intrigued as the next outdoors-loving fellow, but is it actually "super popular"? Do that many people, proportionately, take up van life? I suspect in the big picture it's still extremely niche, especially if you drill down to just people who are voluntary van dwellers.

<comment><USER32> Yes,mit's getting pretty popular.

I read Nomadland by Jessica Bruder earlier this year. A significant number of baby-boomers have taken to the road, often because of a lack of retirement funds.

Having gotten a travel trailer 18 mos ago and travelled a bit in CAlifornia, it's amazing what you see when your eyes are tuned to it a bit.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> This whole camping trend, whether on beaches or in parks or on other public property, makes no sense to me. Society is built on the expectation of protected property (reserved for certain uses), enforcement of laws (such as litter laws), and earning of privileges (rather than feeling entitled to live wherever one wants). I don't think it is fair that law-abiding residents who pay taxes and have worked to earn those pricey homes can have their public amenities, which are meant for day-use, instead crowded-up by transient residents. It just defies common sense.

In Seattle, we see the effects of similar permissive laws all around us. Property crime has gone up significantly alongside our recent lax enforcement of littering laws and due to the allowance of "urban camping". We have induced a large homeless population from elsewhere due to our permissiveness - <USER2> from cities immediately next door ([https://q13fox.com/2019/02/26/did-federal- way-bus-its-homele...](https://q13fox.com/2019/02/26/did-federal-way-bus-its- homeless-to-seattle/)). The rise of RVs taking up parking spaces is another problem - it is essentially freeloading off of spaces meant for use by residents of that neighborhood and for temporary day-use. And of course, these RVs are a blight - they are often in shoddy condition, they make the neighborhood look less safe, and they leave trash all around them (or worse, sewage runoff). Many have needles around them and are clearly used to deal drugs. With burglaries happening often, I can't tell you how anxiety-inducing it can be to have someone pitch a tent on the sidewalk in front of your home, camping there all day everyday, watching all residents' movements, etc. This city used to be beautiful and it is trended towards a trashy Mad Max like situation.

I don't agree with arguments that this is due to cost of housing or supply issues. This is due to people feeling entitled. If one can't afford to live in some area, then they should consider finding a different area to live in, or a different line of work that enables them to live in that area. No one is entitled to live wherever they want, doing whatever job they want (e.g. the musician quoted in the article), at whatever wages they are able to earn in that job. That's simply not tenable. There are plenty of affordable places in America where people can make a living and thrive. And yes, it may require that you look outside of the most-desirable locations, or that you do work that isn't your "passion", but that type of compromise is simply a part of life.

<comment><USER33> I have a lot of sympathy for your argument that this problem is making it worse for everyone. I live in SOMA in San Francisco and regularly encounter many of the issues you describe. It makes the quality of living worse for the whole neighborhood, and I do think it is in part caused by very lax rules about what is acceptable in public spaces.

That said, I think you under-estimate how hard it is for someone to move once they are experiencing homelessness. I doubt the majority of people in this situation are doing to to pursue a music career...

This isn't about entitlement.

If your only option is to live in a van, your day to day existence is going to be very stress-full trying to scratch out enough income for your basic needs, and parking tickets, impound, etc could put you into an even worse spot that you can't recover from.

The idea that you should just up and move to a cheaper place to live sounds reasonable on the surface. But imagine all you have is that Van, you don't have enough money for any major repairs, let alone hundreds of dollars in gas to get to some cheaper place. You don't have a network there, and you don't know your way around, so what are your job prospects?

The reality is that when you're living this close to the edge, you're only thinking day to day, because you're always one problem away from ending up in an even worse situation. Packing up and going some place cheaper is far from a viable option.

Finally, most people who are now homeless in an area were previously housed in that area, so they probably know people there. They may also have some kind of public benefit, and have some clue about how to navigate that system. Packing up and leaving, especially to another state, starts them back at zero.

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> Why are some of these people staying in California? These people have cars and jobs. Why would they stay in a place they can't afford to live? There are plenty of places in the US that have lower costs of living or better services for the impoverished and disabled.

Not to mention the mother was going to college for acting while her 3 kids were living in a cockroach and bugbed infested car. Talk about priorities, there are plenty of majors people can take that actually have the prospect of a positive income.

</comment><comment><USER35> I lived in a van I converted for about 18 months, purely by choice. I had been living in luxury high rises in SF for many years before , excepting the 6 months I spent living in a house in South Bay while converting the van, and afterwards in on campus housing when I went back to graduate school afterwards.

My van was nicer than may of the places one could rent around the bay area. Oak floors, oak countertops, modern high end sink and faucet, designer light switches, high gloss push open cabinets (with electromagnetic locks when in motion).

I did it because I wanted to build something and I had the time to do it nights and weekends while working. There's nothing like learning multiple disciplines from woodworking to electrical, from insulation to plumbing, and applying it all to create something physical and comprehensive.

I parked mostly in my company parking lot during the weekdays. On the weekends, I parked in the Mission, where many others in vans did as well. In SF, it was clear that I was abusing a public good, but couldn't easily find a way around it. I would have happily paid for a monthly parking spot if there was one around the area, but there was no monthly surface parking available in the area.

I don't think van life is an answer to the untenable housing situation in california. It's a niche lifestyle, unsuitable and undesirable for most. However, I do think we need to get over this obsession with space. Space efficiency is something so entirely foreign to most Americans. Having excess space is culturally desired and fetishized. This is a cultural phenomenon, not necessarily good or bad. In a less densely populated region, having extra space is not a luxury. However, when space is so sparse, I do think we could, as a culture, benefit from a shift towards loving space efficiency more.

</comment><comment><USER36> There is whole subculture for this: #vanlife

It's rather interesting. I had considered this lifestyle too. Freedom to roam. Digital nomad.

[https://www.reddit.com/r/vandwellers/](https://www.reddit.com/r/vandwellers/)

</comment><comment><USER37> >(EDITORS: STORY CAN END HERE)

Looks like someone forgot to proofread.

<comment><USER38> Looks like it's a story that came in from a wire service, particularly since the writer and story are both from San Diego, but this is an LA publication.

I guess that's the risk of just mindlessly hooking up your CMS to someone else's feed.

(Yup, there are lots of other hits for this exact story published elsewhere; other publications seem to have done a better job filtering out these notes to the editor: [https://www.google.com/search?q=%22to+leave+its+usual+spot+i...](https://www.google.com/search?q=%22to+leave+its+usual+spot+in+a+public+parking+lot+beside+the+sand+dunes+of+Ocean+Beach%22))

<comment><USER39> This seems to be the original. It even has a picture! [https://www.sandiegouniontribune.com/news/public- safety/sd-m...](https://www.sandiegouniontribune.com/news/public-safety/sd-me- living-and-parking-at-the-beach-20190317-story.html)

<comment><USER40> Another 451 anti-EU block. ^sigh^

Here's the wayback link for us poor Europeans:

[https://web.archive.org/web/20190322191045/https://www.sandi...](https://web.archive.org/web/20190322191045/https://www.sandiegouniontribune.com/news/public- safety/sd-me-living-and-parking-at-the-beach-20190317-story.html)

<comment><USER41> I read about the status code this week, but this is the first time I've seen one in the wild.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> Could the link be changed to the original article? [https://www.sandiegouniontribune.com/news/public- safety/sd-m...](https://www.sandiegouniontribune.com/news/public-safety/sd-me- living-and-parking-at-the-beach-20190317-story.html)

</comment><comment><USER42> Really disappointed there aren't any pictures

<comment><USER43> They aren't just going to give a million dollar view away for nothing!

</comment></comment><comment><USER44> I don't need to live in a van, but I _have_ thought about building out a van that I could drive around the country to different cities and then leave there and fly home. This way, if I ever wanted to fly out to that city on a whim I'd already have a place to stay. Might even be useful to have two such vehicles on opposite ends of the country.

I'd probably keep some cameras hooked up so I could drop in and see what's going on around the van remotely, and maybe a server I could ssh into and run some commands for the vehicle.

Only question is finding suitable places to park it that don't require a long commitment.

<comment><USER27> I think anywhere you could park a vehicle unattended for extended periods without fees/fines you could probably afford to buy a small plot of undeveloped land in cash instead. Then just build some small utility structures on your properties, they'll be more comfortable than a vehicle (and you could park vehicles on them if desired, without concerns for tickets).

It's a far better investment IMHO, and as the years go by you may find yourself slowly adding infrastructure and before you know it you have multiple small off-grid homes.

Also keep in mind a small shed requires a lot less maintenance than an automobile to serve its purpose. Leaving automobiles unused for months or years tends to break them. A shed needs a coat of paint or shingles replaced occasionally (corrugated metal roofs last > 50 years).

</comment></comment><comment><USER45> Even back in 1999, rents were already high in the are compared to the rest of country. When I got my first job, rents for a 1br place were about $1,000/mo near Emeryville, where my job was. But it turns out boat payments were only about $525/mo. I did serious research and almost bought a boat, until I found out you aren't allowed to sleep on your boat in the dock without a special permit, and the waitlist for that permit was 10 years.

I supposed I could have floated out in the Bay every night, but I suspect that would have made my costs go up significantly from the extra maintenance and fuel.

But the point is, California seems to be very against alternate forms of housing, and this isn't a new thing.

</comment><comment><USER46> It seems like an organized approach to homelessness that allowed vehicle camping but put systematic restrictions on it could be fairly effective. There could even be something like a "white list" where people could apply for a camping permit and have it revoked for bad behavior.

Of course, you could also allow camps on private property with provisions to meet basic health and conditions.

Both these measures would undermine the scarcity of housing itself, which goes against the interests of both landlords and homeowners. So I doubt either will happen soon.

<comment><USER47> People living in cars isn't so bad if they run on electricity. But having people heating their "homes" with a size-optimized ICE burning gasoline is terrible for air quality. Car engines aren't designed to be heaters.

I had imagined at one point having parking garages constructed for this very purpose to be used as homeless shelters.

<comment><USER46> Obviously, if you were allowing camping in a regulated fashion, you would want to require motorhomes designed for the purpose of camping. These usually have propane furnaces.

There would be quite a few considerations. I would pretty say that these hypothetically could be worked but in reality those who just didn't want this at all would object and the situation could never happen in modern reality.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER48> For EU users: [https://web.archive.org/web/20190322233025/https://www.baker...](https://web.archive.org/web/20190322233025/https://www.bakersfield.com/ap/national/living- on-pennies-with-a-million-dollar-view-how- car/article_edf4971c-045a-5265-b772-b857df180d4b.html)

</comment><comment><USER49> Just an idea that popped up. One could probably develop a couchsurfing/airbnd style app so to speak where people with rvs/motorhomes could find rental spots to go hook up for the night. That probably wouldn't do much for people short on money, but it could be helpful for people traveling around the country and finding that RV parks have no vacancy. Just a thought.

<comment><USER17> Not a super hip site but boondockerswelcome.com has been around for a while. It seems mostly targeted toward the boomer/florida snowbird crowd.

<comment><USER49> Neat. Thanks for sharing. If you look at airbnd, vrbo was around before just wasnt marketed the same way. So there probably is room for an additional competitor etc. Especially if done right.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER50> Living in Berkeley/Oakland area I'm torn on this one we have a growing problem with tent encampments (in SF too) I don't know if this is anything but a cosmetic solution but its an interesting tact allowing people to overnight in vehicles.

<comment><AUTHOR> sucks for your property value. No one with a $million home wants a camp near it, lets be honest. The govt can move the hot potatoes around until someone gets stuck with it. I wonder what this does for crime rates?

<comment><USER51> Well maybe if the people with their million dollar homes let some more housing be built in the general area (shock & horror) there wouldn't be this problem.

This is largely a self inflicted problem that California has caused for itself.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER52> my wife and i ran the numbers on living out of a van in Silicon Valley but found with a gym membership and the temptation to eat out all the time, we probably wouldn't save as much as we thought. Van life is tempting though, the thought of saving an extra 24k per year sounds like the right path to eventual home ownership (obviously not anywhere near the valley).

</comment><comment><USER53> > 451: Unavailable due to legal reasons

> We recognize you are attempting to access this website from a country > belonging to the European Economic Area (EEA) including the EU which > enforces the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and therefore access > cannot be granted at this time. For any issues, contact > firstname.lastname@example.com or call (661) 395-7500.

Another reason to support article 11, 13 or 17.

<comment><USER54> How could those possibly solve the problem? They won't remove the cost of complying with GDPR.

[Edit: sorry, I didn't get the sarcasm :) ]

<comment><USER53> It was sarcasm, all 3 articles once implemented on EU scale will make web even worse than GDPR made it.

<comment><USER55> Only when the politicians have a low enough average age that they actually use computers themselves (and find out how unusable the web is already) will they possible revise or eliminate the restrictions.

One big problem with tech regulation right now, particular that which involves the internet, is that the old farts making the rules are barely skilled enough to send emails. Not only do they have no concept of how they're ruining things, but they don't have to suffer the consequences.

Imagine if every time they changed the channel on their TV, they had to stop and drive a cursor to _somewhere_ on the screen to find the correct button to press to get past the popup and watch the channel they were hoping to watch.

<comment><USER54> Yep, there is a divide between the old people in power who know economics, markets and regulation but have no idea how "technology" works, and the young voters who understand the technology, but without an understanding of how the economics work.

<comment><USER55> I think you're much too generous. You can look at political decisions in most countries and see that politicians don't, on average, understand economics. For that matter, a great many economic theories (which are often presented as facts) don't hold up when tested.

In summary, economics is hard. But making something (internet/web) increasingly unusable is just pure ignorance.

<comment><USER54> > I think you're much too generous.

Oh, definitely! Those in power don't understand that much of economics, and those voting don't really understand that much of technology.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER56> Tried to visit the site from Europe:

451: Unavailable due to legal reasons We recognize you are attempting to access this website from a country belonging to the European Economic Area (EEA) including the EU which enforces the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and therefore access cannot be granted at this time. For any issues, contact email@example.com or call (661) 395-7500.

<comment><USER57> [https://web.archive.org/web/20190322182840/https://www.baker...](https://web.archive.org/web/20190322182840/https://www.bakersfield.com/ap/national/living- on-pennies-with-a-million-dollar-view-how- car/article_edf4971c-045a-5265-b772-b857df180d4b.html)

<comment><USER58> I respect their (bakersfield.com) right to piss all over the regulation of 500 million people, and respectfully decide to ignore them and equally blacklist them.

GDOR is the mitigating effor after years of abusing Safe Harbor both by state agents as well as from private companies. Instead of fixing their deal, they prefer to black list EU? Seriously?

Go .... yourself, and I am returning the favor of black listing you 'dear' bakersfield.com. I know that this is not the first site to do this, but to give us this really shitty behaviour is just plain rude and arrogant.

<comment><USER59> Can you blame them? EU traffic probably accounts for a tiny fraction of their overall traffic. Rather than pay their (probably minuscule) engineering team to fix it, bakersfield.com probably ran the numbers are realized it would cost much less to just not serve traffic to the EU.

I'm sure this is hugely annoying and unexpected for EU visitors, but you gotta understand that you are not obligated to use their website, and the website is not obligated to serve its content to you.

<comment><USER60> They don't need to do anything, they're not covered by GDPR.

It's a shame they're losing traffic because they chose to believe people spreading lies and misinformation.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER61> until you have to take a dump...

</comment><comment><USER62>
        451: Unavailable due to legal reasons

        We recognize you are attempting to access this website from a country belonging
        to the European Economic Area (EEA) including the EU which enforces the
        General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and therefore access cannot be
        granted at this time. For any issues, contact firstname.lastname@example.com
        or call (661) 395-7500.

fuck you.

</comment><comment><USER63> > "If you allow people to sleep in their vehicles, you will eventually have > open camping all along our view corridors"

Reminds me of the whole Vinod Khosla drama up in NorCal [1]. Seems like muscling in on access to a beautiful view / beach and trying to gatekeep it is a common pastime for more than one wealthy Californian.

1: [https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/01/technology/california- bea...](https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/01/technology/california-beach-access- khosla.html)

<comment><USER31> It's terribly phrased, but shanty towns present a host of problems no matter where they are.</comment></comment>


FanDuel charging inactive users $3 per month for not playing - <AUTHOR> https://techcrunch.com/2019/05/01/fanduel-is-now-charging-inactive-users-3-per-month-for-not-playing/ <comment><AUTHOR> This strikes me as an attempt to skim a tiny amount of money from forgotten accounts in the hopes that a substantial portion of these users won't even notice their credit/debit cards being charged $2.99/mo.</comment>


Government Says Secret Court Opinion on Law Underlying PRISM Must Stay Secret - <AUTHOR> https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2013/06/government-says-secret-court-opinion-law-underlying-prism-program-needs-stay

<comment><USER2> Wow. Just wow.

Not only do we have a star chamber, but we can't even be allowed to see what laws they have concluded are Unconstitutional.

Any facade of a functioning democracy, or of a commitment to transparency by this government, is swept away.

It also gets to something Scalia said in oral argument in Clapper v. Amnesty International, namely that we should trust the FISC to address 4th Amendment issues. It makes me wonder if he knew about the decision before the case reached the court.

But without such access to case law determining what is Unconstitutional, how can we know what the law is? Where is due notice in this?

<comment><USER3> > Any facade of a functioning democracy, or of a commitment to transparency by > this government, is swept away.

The same was true of the Alien and Sedition Acts.

<comment><USER2> Not really. These were repealed right around the time of Marbury v. Madison so we never got a chance to see them in court.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> > The government's bottom line is this: their rules trump the public's > statutory rights.

Mind boggling. And this is the same government that's invading sovereign countries, has its agencies undertake black operations to overthrow foreign democratically elected bodies that don't serve its interests [1], all in the name of bringing "democracy" to those regions. Here we have that same government making a fool out of the very people that elected it.

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Covert_United_States_foreign_r...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Covert_United_States_foreign_regime_change_actions)

</comment><comment><USER5> Here is the source:

[https://www.eff.org/sites/default/files/filenode/doj_opposit...](https://www.eff.org/sites/default/files/filenode/doj_opposition_to_eff_motion_06-07-13.pdf)

I. This Court Does Not Have Jurisdiction Over This Motion II. The Opinion at Issue Is Sealed Pursuant to This Court's Rules III. This Court Should Not Vacate the Seal on the Opinion IV. The Fact That Movant May Be Unsuccessful in the District Court in Compelling the Department of Justice to Release a Classified, Sealed FISC Opinion Does Not Mean That Plaintiff Faces a "Catch-22"

The release is really sticky though, this part really caugh my attention:

>"Moreover, even if this Court had jurisdiction over this Motion, it should deny it, rather than allow another court to determine whether any portions of its opinion should be released under FOIA. Any such release would be incomplete and quite possibly misleading to the public about the role of this Court and the issues discussed in the opinion."

</comment><comment><USER6> We the people are now we the unimportant nimrods. When the rule of law no longer matters, we no longer matter.

<comment><USER7> The blatant disregard for us shown by our government is really the worst part about all this. No way to make an informed decision about anything.

This whole "we know better than you" thing:

Well of course you do, you're spying on us and doing all sorts of other horrible things in secret and not telling us!

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> To me, a secret court of justice is equivalent to a secret amendment of the Constitution: there is no way to protect yourself lawfully against it. Funny that it exists in the US ans nobody seems to care.

</comment><comment><USER9> As you read the first paragraph, remember that the "Justice Department" is the executive branch.

</comment><comment><USER10> US justice system in 'calamitous' collapse

</comment><comment><USER11> Laws that are interpreted in secret can only be subject to massive abuse. The problem isn't the survellance its the lack of public oversight

<comment><USER12> You ever know someone whose parents always said "because I said so?" It doesn't turn out well, and this is what they're doing to the country.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> EFF's link to its previous story is broken.</comment>


Ed Felten: Finding and Fixing Errors in Google's Book Catalog - <AUTHOR> http://www.freedom-to-tinker.com/blog/felten/finding-and-fixing-errors-googles-book-catalog

<comment><AUTHOR> The best part, I think, is Jon Orwant's response (<http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=1701#comment-41758> , link is from the 3rd paragraph of Felten's post) to Nunberg's rant (the errors are real and widespread, but the tone of Nunberg's original post was excessive).</comment>