Facebook to ask everyone to accept being tracked so they can keep using it - <AUTHOR> https://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/gadgets-and-tech/news/facebook-gdpr-latest-data-ad-tracking-opt-out-stop-ads-marketing-a8310031.html <comment><USER2> _The screens will not give Facebook users the option to hit "decline." Instead, they will guide users to either "accept and continue" or "manage data setting."_

Also known as "Hobson's Choice": a free choice in which only one thing is offered.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hobson%27s_choice](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hobson%27s_choice)

Naturally the vast majority will just click through and accept the defaults.

But what if a small number does not? Could Facebook see 6% or 4% or 2% attrition because of this?

2% attrition of 2.2 billion users is like the entire population of California and Oregon.

This many people leaving the network makes it a little less connected and a little less valuable for the 98% who remain.

That's a lot of people wandering about, discovering new alternatives to connect with their friends and family.

Facebook will be with us for a long time, but reducing their influence would be a big net positive.

<comment><USER3> I don't know if Facebook's influence hasn't been reduced already, and how many users it actually has.

I still have an account for instance, but I log in only once/mo. and keep it solely for the API keys.

My friends seem to be a little less active then 10 years ago, as well.

<comment><USER4> Don't relate your experience to everyone else's. My friends are more active than ever on FB today for instance.

Also, FB revenue and users are increasing - which indicates they are not seeing any downturn like what you are talking about here.

<comment><USER5> More active? Really?

The number of facebook user accounts never goes down with new bots getting accounts constantly but people activty logging in and sharing, posting or caring is down.

<comment><USER4> Yes - more active.

You are suffering from confirmation bias at this point. What data apart, apart from your anecdotal experience, do you have which shows that sharing and caring about FB post is down?

<comment><USER3> You seem great at diagnosing why what we're saying doesn't make sense, but you don't have anything to back whatever your point is.

Since we don't have access to Facebook logs and can't know how many times people sign in and to what percentage are bots wandering around the site, we can only talk about our impressions.

<comment><USER4> They have public data which clearly states that their monthly active users and earnings are trending positively.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I think a lot of lawyers are poring over provision 42 of GDPR these days:

"(42) Where processing is based on the data subject's consent, the controller should be able to demonstrate that the data subject has given consent to the processing operation. [...] For consent to be informed, the data subject should be aware at least of the identity of the controller and the purposes of the processing for which the personal data are intended. Consent should not be regarded as freely given if the data subject has no genuine or free choice or is unable to refuse or withdraw consent without detriment."

Are people free to leave Facebook?

Me, I need an account with Google for my job. Will they now only be allowed to demand I consent to the parts of the data processing necessary to provide the services I use? Or in other words, since I don't rely on their advertising, does GDPR mandate that opt-in to tracking for ads must be optional?

<comment><USER7> You can delete your account, yes.

<comment><USER6> I can't delete my account with Google without detriment.

<comment><USER8> Your employer will agree to their terms on your behalf, and if you are not comfortable with either that process or the terms, you are welcome to terminate your employment. This is no different from companies accepting ToS/EULA from any other technology vendor.

FWIW, Google's commercial terms are not the same as consumer terms ... again, like every other software vendor.

<comment><USER9> > you are welcome to terminate your employment.

That fails the test:

> Consent should not be regarded as freely given if the data subject has no > genuine or free choice or is unable to refuse or withdraw consent without > detriment.

<comment><USER10> I suspect "genuine" and "free" are _terms of art_. Not to mention "detriment". Reading it with common sense in mind may not be productive.

<comment><USER9> While this is certainly possible, I would have to see a (legal dictionary?) to change my mind.

Any links?

<comment><USER11> The words are probably defined within the document, not in the legal dictionary.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> My adblocker detects approximately 44 trackers on that page, including one from connect.facebook.net.

<comment><USER13> The article isn't "Independent to ask everyone to accept being tracked".

<comment><USER14> bottom of the page says:

> We use cookies to enhance your visit to our site and to bring you > advertisements that might interest you. Read our Privacy and Cookie Policies > to find out more.

<comment><USER15> Ironically, the FB opt-in approach from the article is more privacy-forward than the publisher's automatically implied consent...

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> This action directly violates GDPR, the consent is not freely given and as such not valid. Trackwall is not acceptible, that's why "freely given" is written in Article 7.4.

Bottom line, even if you give them consent in such forced manner, they will pay the fine if they use the data. Not only that, I bet that in this moment there is a lawyer preparing class action against FB for forcing the consent (And they will win! After 25th of May, FB is breaking the EU law). Max Schrems gave FB hard time before and I bet he is just waiting for new chance, this is his site [https://noyb.eu/](https://noyb.eu/) , check it and check how many donations he got. I am stockpiling myself with popcorns as this is going to be fun to watch. I really thought that FB is going to be smarter, probably Zuck got another of his tantrums and did another really stupid business mistake, that will cost him a lot.

But, as FB user, please consider something else: Facebook is trying to downplay your rights, which directly proves that don't care about you. Do you really want to continue using such service? Do you really value yourself so low that you are prepared to bend over?

<comment><USER16> Just to back it up, I have missed this in news, Max Schrems already tryed (with class action of 25000 FB users), but had no legislation to back it up, with GDPR he got the green light:

[https://www.politico.eu/article/facebook-ecj-european- court-...](https://www.politico.eu/article/facebook-ecj-european-court- justice-max-schrems-austria-lawsuit-classaction-privacy-data-protection-max- schrems/)

"Europeans will in future be able to bring US-style class actions for (alleged) privacy violations, instead of having to sue individually and expensively. It's thanks to a little-known clause of the EU's GDPR, which comes into force in May."

And maybe for non-EU users, don't complain about GDPR, back it up, you will give your legislators a powerfull signal and you might also get the protection of your fundamential human right.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> This does not discuss whether nonusers will be asked to opt-in. Curious how GDPR will change tracking people w/out FB accounts.

<comment><USER18> You can already see it on many sites. They're basically just a more forceful version of cookie notifications with language about third party tracking thrown in that force you to say "OK" or tell you to leave. Here's an example:

[http://prntscr.com/j67usw](http://prntscr.com/j67usw)

FB, as with all third party trackers, isn't the one actually responsible for notifying you about the use of their pixels etc. on third party sites. The site operator using it is. See [https://developers.facebook.com/docs/privacy](https://developers.facebook.com/docs/privacy)

<comment><USER19> this is fundamentally insufficient, though.

if there's a hosted image from a facebook domain (e.g. a like button), unless that image is loaded after consent is given, facebook can already associate that users' IP address with having visited that web site by nature of sending the image over. in other words, facebook is tracking pre-consent (unless those images are loaded post-hoc, which is just not happening in today's world)

as a result, it's fundamentally impossible to consent before visiting a particular website, because there's no way to know what other domains will be triggered by visiting that website.

the only way i've found to defeat this behavior is by using ublock's origin's default deny policy which prevents all 3rd party domains from being accessed by default. it's a bit of a usability pain as one often has to add e.g. stack overflow's CDN to use its website "well", but does prevent visiting a website which has an embedded image hosted on a FB domain from being loaded, which defeats the more nefarious FB tracking.

[https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/wiki/Dynamic- filtering:-de...](https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/wiki/Dynamic- filtering:-default-deny)

<comment><USER18> Yeah, but that's easy enough to deal with. You simply don't load any third party stuff (or allow them to see your content) until they click "OK". Some simple javascript is all it takes to delay loading of everything not on the current server.

So basically prior to serving any content, you do an IP check. If they are from a GDPR country, you serve the delay loading script. If they aren't, you just load as normal. Pretty straightforward. I don't think you'd want to do it universally for all users, as you'd be at a competitive disadvantage to other sites. But you can easily enough just do it for EU countries. The other option is to just block them entirely if you have no need for EU traffic. Many sites - US local businesses etc. have no use for EU traffic or the liability that comes with it.

On a side note, with all the walled garden stuff that will be going on due to GDPR, I'll be interested to see how badly the SERPs get fractured, since every site will have a different scheme to require consent and not all of them will have people behind them that are savvy enough to make it not ask Googlebot for affirmative consent. This will put smaller businesses in the EU that don't have the resources to hire someone to deal with these issues at a serious disadvantage if they can no longer be indexed.

<comment><USER19> what you've suggested seems OK technically, but i feel like you're making an assumption that originating source of traffic determines citizenship of the user.

it could very well be that an EU citizen in Asia or the US is collected upon given your algorithm. if that's the case, are you not in violation of GDPR?

but, at the risk of rabbit-holing, your suggestion would be a pretty fundamental change to how the web works. in effect, you'd be moving toward a splintered web, where content is basically region locked.

to be fair, i don't have anything else to offer here; it just doesn't seem so easy to me.

<comment><USER18> _but, at the risk of rabbit-holing, your suggestion would be a pretty fundamental change to how the web works. in effect, you 'd be moving toward a splintered web, where content is basically region locked. _

I think you're spot on, but that was the danger of implementing heavy-handed legislation like GDPR all along. I believe that EU citizens are going to find themselves locked out of a whole world of content. But that's the world they've chosen to create for themselves. Further, if the overwhelming support that GDPR has on HN is representative of that of the entire EU population, they welcome this newly splintered world and its consequences - both good and bad (though I believe that this support is the product of the mistaken belief that the world will simply play ball and be dictated to by the EU, rather than the rest of the world simply taking their ball and going home).

<comment><USER20> Hmm. I'm not sure about that. If Apple and Google won't pull out of China even though China makes them do all sorts of business stuff they disagree with, I highly doubt they (web companies) would pull out of the entire EU.

It would be absolutely incredible if Facebook et al "took their ball and went home" throwing away _500 million customers_.

<comment><USER18> Of course not, because Apple, Google, Facebook et al have the resources to spend millions on attorneys to implement the GDPR. My comment comes from the perspective of an operator of several small sites that get a total of a few million visitors per month combined. I'm not spending millions on attorneys, and EU traffic is only incidental to my sites anyway, so I am indeed taking my ball and going home.

This will make a difference for some users on some of the forums I run, as they will be banned with an apology and an invitation to come back if they ever move out of the EU. But it's not worth taking on the liability of potentially millions of dollars in fines for accidental non-compliance with a heavy handed, massively complex law that is up for different interpretations in the courts of no less than 28 unique countries. Unless you're in the EU or are a multi-billion dollar company with a large legal department, accepting EU traffic post-GDPR is an act of insanity.

<comment><USER21> Are you hosted in Europe, and/or do you do business from the EU?

No? Don't bother instituting a stupid ban like that, then. And stop scaremongering.

GDPR applies to _businesses_.

Besides, compliance isn't too bad for something like a forum. Just purge the relevant user records and posts, if requested to or when a user deletes their account.

Source: I am doing GDPR compliance on web applications for a major telco.

<comment><USER18> _GDPR applies to businesses._

I have a business. And yes, I have spoken to GSPR compliance people, so GDPR has already cost me enough money. Compliance is a murky proposition at best, since this law can be interpreted in different ways in 28 different countries - all of whom will be looking for ways to maximize the fines they collect under it from foreign companies.

Since you are in the GDPR compliance space, surely you know that it does apply not just to businesses that are hosted in the EU or do business there. Rather, anyone that knowingly accepts traffic/data from the EU is vulnerable to it.

<comment><USER21> And that's a _good_ thing. Privacy is a basic human right, and it's about time we got some regulation of this area.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> I just added the "Facebook Container" extension to my Firefox browser. I am hoping it will prevent most of Facebook's tracking, but I do know that it probably won't block all the tracking.

<comment><USER23> Won't ublock [1] solve that by blocking that kind of scripts from loading?

[1] [https://www.ublock.org/](https://www.ublock.org/)

<comment><USER24> I recommend Privacy Badger, sponsored by the EFF, which is supposed to block trackers. I prefer it over Ghostery, which is backed by some company.

uBlock Origin is great for blocking Ads though. If you really need to block scripts, there's NoScript.

I recommend using at least the adblocker and the tracker blocker, even if only to reduce memory usage of the browser and take back a couple of CPU cycles from your computer stolen by pesky ads.

<comment><USER25> uBlock Origin + Privacy Badger are my combo of choice. They play nicely together, and are easy enough to deal with that my non-web-savvy father-in-law surfs comfortably with them. Privacy Badger's most glaring weakness is that it takes a new install of the plugin awhile to learn that Facebook, fbcdn, etc are up to no good, but once it catches on, it's great.

<comment><USER26> Privacy Badger is also based on AdBlock Plus's code, which is a weakness in itself. The entire reason uBlock Origin exists is because of inefficiencies with ABP that the author thought could be avoided.

I just check the privacy list options in uBlock Origin.

[https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/wiki/uBlock- vs.-ABP:-effic...](https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/wiki/uBlock- vs.-ABP:-efficiency-compared)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Considering that Facebook makes its revenue from ads and that providing relevant ads needs data and tracking, this move is not so bad.

Users that don't accept the terms or use various tech to block this, would receive misappropriated ads. Bad ads make companies lose revenue while annoying the users with extremely irrelevant info.

This method should be extremely effective in removing false positives.

Personal observation: ads are never going to go away and I personally prefer receiving ads about some local beer brand and not about lipstick or sake in Japan.

<comment><USER28> Why can't we simply choose relevant ad categories that we would prefer to see? Why do the options need to be (i) see random advertisements that are likely irrelevant, or (ii) allow us to track your every move, including your location, each site you visit with the Facebook widget, your message and call history, and your every click.

Or non-Facebook related, why can't my smart TV just let me choose PC Gaming, Technology, and Concert advertisements as highest priority. I might actually look forward to watching an Oculus or Vive advertisement, instead of putting the TV on mute, or leaving the room when I see another health insurance commercial for someone 60+.

<comment><USER29> Why can't ads be relevant to the content of the page like they used to be in the good old days?

As an example of stupid targeted ads: I bought a Casper mattress a couple of months ago and pretty much every single ad I've seen since then (on devices where I don't have them blocked) has been for mattresses. How many mattresses does the internet think I need?

If I'm reading about something on the internet it's generally because I'm interested in it. Why not try to sell me something related to that rather than something I already bought!?

<comment><USER28> I see these all the time too.

1\. I bought one of those spinning face brushes for my girlfriend. A few minutes after purchasing online, I started seeing advertisements from that same store, for the same exact brush. Literally 90% of the page views were showing that advertisement.

2\. I was browsing Airbnb accommodation for a trip to let's say Mexico. I was checking apartments on and off for weeks. I didn't see any Airbnb advertisements during that time. The minute I book that accommodation, Airbnb starts showing advertisements for rooms in Mexico.

3\. I'm browsing barbers in a new city. No advertisements until I book an appointment with one online. Then, I start seeing advertisements for the same barbershop. Now, that has potential, but the advertisements stopped after a week. Why do I need to book a second hair appointment in the same week? Why not recognize I booked a men's haircut, and start showing me ads in a few weeks?

For all the tracking, privacy invasion, and fancy "machine learning", advertising sure is dumb.

<comment><USER30> Maybe it's optimizing for the wrong thing. Maybe the goal of targeted advertising is to find the people who were about to buy something anyways, shove an ad for it in front of them just in time, and take a cut[1]:

> Our results indicate that more sophisticated targeting algorithms might not > gain, and might even harm, the advertiser as those seeing the ad would > convert in the absence of advertising.

There are a bunch of ad-tech people on this site; maybe some of them could chime in and share how many more sales they make using total surveillance versus basic keyword-in-page.

[1] [https://poseidon01.ssrn.com/delivery.php?ID=7020000840130690...](https://poseidon01.ssrn.com/delivery.php?ID=702000084013069010070108023069026065061037007020071061119066025014064121077101112101058020007125050109119004024119006119116008030071029038092100112009121006071007120062020054099017030090086016084011091006005014090089066121107124081027066026064068111112&EXT=pdf)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> Nicely juxtapositioned with the Independent's ad for their Facebook Bitcoin group. Facebook groups really are the antithesis of the Internet, being closed and unindexable.

Anyway perhaps these no-decline 'permission' screens will cause a few people to reconsider their presence on Facebook. After all the company's Chief Privacy Officer endorses it! "People can choose to not be on Facebook if they want"

<comment><USER32> "Chief Privacy Officer" at a company that wouldn't exist were _real_ privacy to be present in their products.

<comment><USER33> Heh, funny. Unfortunately also nonsense. A CFO also exists and not because a company doesn't handle finances responsibly. Or a CEO implies no engineering?

<comment><USER34> I think you misread. The implication was that Facebook would not exist with real privacy in the product, not the role of CPO within Facebook.

<comment><USER32> Yes, this is correct. Thanks for clarifying.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> Australians may wish to refer it to the ACCC if Facebook offers them a "take it or leave" choice. Even if the laws regarding unfair consumer contracts turn out not to apply, it would be interesting to get the ACCC's formal response on it.

[https://www.accc.gov.au/consumers/contracts- agreements/unfai...](https://www.accc.gov.au/consumers/contracts- agreements/unfair-contract-terms)

</comment><comment><USER36> They track me. I don't accept it. I have no facebook account. They are crooks.

</comment><comment><USER37> I'm a member of a facebook group for Irish game developers. Very good group, pretty much the only reason I use fb. Though I am logged on all day as I dont want to miss anything on it.

I tabled the idea of the group leaving fb for somewhere else, as now would be the time people would be receptive to that idea.

The consensus was, nah, dont bother, this is fine... welp.

<comment><USER38> Unrelated to your post for the most part, but just to clarify for readers; tabling an idea in American English is to postpone a decision (potentially indefinitely), while in British English this is the exact opposite and means that the idea is being presented for review at the current moment.

<comment><USER39> I've lived in America most of my life, but I've only ever heard (or assumed?) the latter usage, which I assumed related to the phrase "is on the table". I wonder what the origin of the former is.

edit: I suppose it comes from how optimistically/pessimistically you view someone saying that a decision is on the table, I guess. Funny.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> Google already does this anytime I clear my cookies. Why would they allow someone using the service if they didn't get something back?

<comment><USER41> Good question - though half of the internet has been built by pretending to offer your service for free. So either we keep doing that or we have to admit that our whole industry has been lying to their users.

<comment><USER36> The mental model for most people for so called free media is broadcast tv.

Yes there are ads. Yes I dislike those ads but they pay for the tv programming and broadcast.

No, broadcast tv does not keep a massive dossier on me or even know I exist.

Almost nobody expected nor understood that they are now "free from having privacy." It's not usual nor expected nor was it ever made clear. It was also done where there was no consent (shadow profiles for people without facebook accounts) and where consent was expressly withdrawn ("I now know what facebook does and would like you to close my account and delete all data and all backups of data relating to me"). Wildly evil stuff going on there, argue about what the law "says" all you like it's foul and should be illegal. It probably is illegal too if you haven't got billions to buy out of the problem. Que the apologists...

There are plenty of other media consumption businesses paid by advertising where you aren't being monitored in a manner the stasi could only dream of. Free printed newspapers supported by advertising have been around my entire life. This was the expectation.

Could facebook and google have grown if they had stated on their front page, every login that they were keeping records of everywhere you went on the internet? They wouldn't have got any traction whatsoever so they lied. Android will keep track of everywhere you go physically and add that to our file on you. Apple are better is just _such_ BS you have to be a huge fanboy to swallow it.

Everyone concerned should be facing criminal charges for that kind of lying. Trying to claim they didn't know they were lying at the time and it was a bait and switch fraud instead.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER42> Facebook was already on a decline as it was becoming the social media platform for senior citizens.

I do wonder how this will affect Instagram, which is where most of my peers and friends are.

</comment><comment><USER43> Does the GDPR allow sites to have a "pay real money or subsidize your experience through tracking" option?

</comment><comment><USER44> Where is the "go fuck yourself mark zuckerberg" option

</comment><comment><USER45> so whos tried mastodon?</comment>


Legacies undermine merit-based admissions - <AUTHOR> http://www.reason.com/news/show/123910.html

<comment> daniel-cussen It's weird how articles like this one get upvoted so much, but don't get discussed. I looked for comments several times, and even though I read it and thought about it, I was always hoping someone else had posted about it. I guess it just speaks for itself.

<comment><USER2> I wonder about this too. Sometimes you come across thought provoking articles that cry out for comments, but there are none. If the article is already a few hours old and fallen off the front page, and you do post a comment, it probably won't get a response. This greatly decreases the incentive to comment (since what you want in the first place is to discuss it with others).

I now try and leave a comment if I find a good article that has slipped through the cracks.</comment></comment>


Bitcoin is unfolding like the dotcom crash – just 15 times faster - <AUTHOR> https://www.cnbc.com/2018/03/19/bitcoin-is-unfolding-like-the-dotcom-crash--just-15-times-faster.htm <comment><USER2> "We're sorry, the page you were looking for isn't found here." 1x fast</comment>


Inside Bill's Brain - <AUTHOR> https://www.netflix.com/title/80184771?s=i&trkid=13747225 <comment><USER2> Bill wrote about this on his blog yesterday:

[https://www.gatesnotes.com/About-Bill-Gates/From-the- cutting...](https://www.gatesnotes.com/About-Bill-Gates/From-the-cutting-room- floor)

It's unfortunate that they were ready to build the TerraPower pilot nuclear plant in China and the recent trade war prevented it.

[https://www.popularmechanics.com/science/energy/a25728221/te...](https://www.popularmechanics.com/science/energy/a25728221/terrapower- china-bill-gates-trump/)

<comment><USER3> The sad thing is that the States aren't interested in this technology or why does it take so long to get it done there? It would be great to use waste material to get more energy out before burying it again. I'm from Germany, sadly thou, most of the people are to uneducated and scared to push atomic power station to the next level. Great documentation btw.

<comment><USER4> The US is bifurcated between people who see no problem with current nuclear plants and those who see any nuclear plant as an abomination in need of removal.

It's hard to have a reasonable debate about this issue when the sides are so diametrically opposed due to their dogmatic beliefs.

<comment><USER5> The question is do we need nuclear and the risks? Can renewables like wind, hydro, and solar provide what we need cheaper and without the dangers associated with nuclear? If so, then why even mess with it?

<comment><USER6> It makes enormous sense to have some diversity in the electrical generation system, along with the essentially guaranteed & dependable output of nuclear. It's an excellent backbone. The US could very easily get to 30% renewables (17-18% now), 30% nuclear (19%-20% now), 40% natural gas (35%-36% now), from where the figures are at today. That ends coal. Then push forward on reducing the natural gas share thereafter. 30%-40% nuclear and 60%-70% renewables long- term, would perhaps be ideal.

We could trivially float ~$200 billion to build new nuclear plants and rapidly wipe out all the remaining coal power along with a modest increase in renewables and natural gas, rather than following the gradual coal decline route.

60 nuclear plants are giving us 19-20% of our power base now. It'd cost ~$200-$250 billion to take that up to 30%, assuming $7 billion each. Even if the cost were $10b each ($300b total), it'd be fine. The nuclear plants buy us many decades to keep pushing renewables higher. It's an irrelevant dollar price to pay, shouldered over decades (low yield debt), for the benefits. And it keeps our generation diversity intact.

<comment><USER7> $10B seems cheap. Hinkley Point C is currently estimated at $25B.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> My problem with the documentary series is that they gave Bill Gates credit for inventing DOS. This starts at 34:00 in episode two.

There was no mention at all that Microsoft bought it. [https://www.windowscentral.com/microsoft-bought-ms-dos-os- ea...](https://www.windowscentral.com/microsoft-bought-ms-dos-os-early-ibm- pcs-july-27-1981)

This happens frequently in business and tech. CEOs look like geniuses when they can take credit for the work of others.

<comment><USER9> I normally agree with this, but it can be distracting to an audience which may not be completely familiar with the ins-and-outs of the details.

It's the same as when people say that Elon Musk is the founder of Tesla, and most people have never heard of Martin Eberhardt (who I think had another partner who's name I can't remember!).

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> I'm not a fan of documentaries, but I liked this one (all three parts). It's Bill essentially saying "You know - this is what matters, the Microsoft stuff is secondary." And I respect that.

The Steve Jobs documentaries were more like "Hey, this guy was a douche, but people worship the cult he made from peddling computer stuff, and that is good, right?"

Definitely a difference in approach.

<comment><USER11> I don't understand your logic here. He is using his money, influence, and platform to rewrite history. That is called propaganda in certain contexts.

<comment><USER12> What is being rewritten exactly? I don't see where they are claiming Microsoft didn't happen.

<comment><USER11> I'm commenting on OP's respect for someone using his money and influence to release a documentary where he writes off that one time he broke the law to crush his competitors as "secondary" to his charitable work.

It's especially interesting since we're becoming acutely aware of how the rich regularly wash their reputations through charitable work e.g. Epstein and the Sacklers.

Only the wealthy get to influence the public perception of their legacy. I don't understand what is so admirable about that.

<comment><USER13> Many of the things that he is doing also have huge political implications.

From the U.S. that isn't obvious. Some wealthy guy can dole out cash but the system is stable, so that is fine. Outside of the U.S. the opposite is true. Wealthy guy comes in and starts handing out cash, and that occurs within a political context (which is often the issue: these places often don't lack money or tech, what they lack is stable politics). Even something as simple as building hospital or a library is huge politically (i.e. what contractors and suppliers you choose).

Given Gates' record for disregarding law, there should definitely be far greater oversight from home governments. One cautionary tale is Soros in Russia: he believed, even after he worked out that Yeltsin was horribly corrupt, that he could keep donating to "neutral" causes...this turned out to be quite wrong (as Soros has admitted). And Soros is many times smarter than Gates about these issues, and at that time was choosing donations personally (I have not heard great things about the "disciples" that Gates has on the ground).

Again, this is really something that Gates should not be in a position to do. You can't just outsource foreign policy to wealthy people.

<comment><USER14> There are big implications inside the US too. Gates favors large-scale privatization of American public schools and de-professionalization of schoolteachers, and his "philanthropy" is actively harmful to US students.

Public policy should be decided by the public, not by the whims of unaccountable billionaires, however pure their intentions might be.

<comment><USER13> But the point is that if you do that within the U.S. that occurs within a stable policy context.

I accept the idea that this spending feels uncontrolled. Education policy is one area where you see this kind of activity because power is often local and fragmented which makes it easier to control. But there is still a relatively stable context with good oversight.

Imagine that occurring but there is no oversight: no teacher unions, no state govts, no opposition govt, no media, no oversight or reporting of meetings with NGOs, no reporting of donations, and (potentially) some level of govt that is captive.

And it doesn't need to be about Gates aiming to influence public policy directly. But actions that seem neutral, building a school or providing vaccinations, often occur in a political context (Mugabe was notorious for controlling the provision of aid around elections).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I tried to watch it, but it just felt like a 'Bill Gates' public profile PR piece. Basically just espousing how great Bill and his family are and were at all points in history.

<comment><USER16> I regularly get downvoted for pointing out that Saint Bill the Philanthropist refuses to acknowledge all the shitty behavior and the damage he left behind to earn him that fortune in the first place.

<comment><USER17> Not to mention his philanthropy work frequently causes considerable damage itself, like the malaria nets[0] that poisoned the local food supply, the failed public school overhaul[1] and common core[2][3].

[0]: [https://www.nytimes.com/2015/01/25/world/africa/mosquito- net...](https://www.nytimes.com/2015/01/25/world/africa/mosquito-nets-for- malaria-spawn-new-epidemic-overfishing.html)

[1]: [https://nancyebailey.com/2018/07/04/gatess-blunders- destroy-...](https://nancyebailey.com/2018/07/04/gatess-blunders-destroy- teachers-and-public-schools/)

[2]: [https://www.philanthropydaily.com/gates-philanthropy- failure...](https://www.philanthropydaily.com/gates-philanthropy-failure- common-core/)

[3]: [https://www.learningsuccessblog.com/blog/dyscalculia/common-...](https://www.learningsuccessblog.com/blog/dyscalculia/common- core-update-feelings-more-important-accuracy-math-answers-dyscalculia)

<comment><USER18> Can't do anything to please you people, even spending 35 billion a year on charity wouldn't suffice.

<comment><USER19> Donate the money to someone completely independent, and stop talking about it.

<comment><USER18> don't sell yourself short, I'm sure you could find an issue with it even if he did that.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> I just binge watched this. It was a really nice documentary.

Some of the things I didn't know about Bill Gates -

1\. He loves diet coke! At one time he opens a refrigerator and it's only stacked with diet coke cans.

2\. He reads a crazy amount of books. And he reads them, takes notes and is able to retain all that information. I found that remarkable.

3\. He works hard. Really hard. And he takes on problems which seem insurmountable. Whether it's polio eradication, clean water, or nuclear reactors. And he approaches the problems from a technical point of view.

Some of the lines which I liked -

Director: I looked into the most prevalent criticisms of you, and this one actually seems the most relevant. "He's a technophile that thinks that technology will solve everything."

Bill: Yeah, I'm basically guilty of that. Any problem... I will look at how technical innovation can help solve that problem. It's the one thing I know and the one thing I'm good at. And so, you know, that's my hammer. And so lots of problems look like nails because I've got a hammer.

Director: Is there a part where you say, "This is way too hard, I took on too much, I quit".

Bill: Sometimes, you really do have to say, "Let's give up". And sometimes, you have to just say, "I need to work harder"

Mary Gates (Bill's mother): "Each one of us has to start out with developing his or her own definition of success. And when we have these specific expectations of ourselves, we're more like to live up to them. Ultimately, it's not what you get or even what you give. It's what you become."

</comment><comment><USER21> Maybe this is unfair, but I hope they at least touch on the halloween documents and the antitrust suite. Anything that touches on microsoft's history should at least mention the anti-competitive practices they used to cripple competition.

<comment><USER22> From my understanding, the documentary is about what Bill Gates is doing, and what inspired him.

IMHO his cutthroat tactics leading Microsoft are already well documented and have nothing to do with the great work he's doing now.

<comment><USER23> Without entering the debate regarding whether Gates foundation does more good than damage, it seems a bit of a stretch to say that this is unrelated to his earlier business practices. It's fair to imagine that those practices have contributed to put him in a situation where he can do what he does now.

<comment><USER24> Conversely, those same practices prevented others from being in a position where they could have likewise been generous. The iron fist of concentrated power, even when wrapped in a velvet glove of generosity, is simply bad for society.

<comment><USER25> Interestingly, one of the things short sellers noticed from investigating corrupt and dishonest companies is that they frequently use charitable deeds to compensate for the damage they do as a company.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> I found it pretty surprising how much they romanticized his years of working instead of sleeping. That's a dangerous thing to promote.

<comment><USER27> It's supposed to be an honest raw look at his life. And frankly, it makes a lot of sense that he had poor work life balance. It's to be expected that extraordinary effort is required to build extraordinary things.

<comment><USER26> They could've told it honestly without making it seem like sleep deprivation is noble. Great things can be achieved with proper sleep and not falling asleep at your keyboard just to wake up and keep coding "right where you left off" as they claim.

<comment><USER28> Thats rarely true. No extraordinary thing was made with a 9 to 5 and then zone out.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> I binged this yesterday. I didn't particularly enjoy the way they mixed Gate's early story with his current endeavours with the foundation, but all in all it's still interesting enough.

<comment><USER30> to me it made sense. it was a parallel between his early years and what he was doing now - basically applying the same way of thinking/working just for a different class of problems.

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> Carmack just tweeted this about Gates:

 _I only met Bill Gates once, but I was very impressed — I was going on about problems in the windows graphics stack, and despite it not being his expertise, I thought he "got it" faster than his domain experts in the room._

The replies are filled with similar anecdotes.

tweet: [https://twitter.com/ID_AA_Carmack/status/1175405258975141893](https://twitter.com/ID_AA_Carmack/status/1175405258975141893)

</comment><comment><USER32> now let me ask this: is Gates smarter and harder working in proportion to his wealth than Knuth ?

<comment><USER28> How does it matter ? You may be both but unlucky or not market your skills.

<comment><USER32> because he has been awarded by the putative meritocratic competition a vast sum of money for his mediocre operating system

<comment><USER28> Wohoo Year of the Linux Desktop. Best Desktop OS ever.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> It's sad that there is an extremely interesting documentary that could be done about Bill Gates, but all we get is his propaganda.

Gates is turning into a Soros like figure, and there are all sorts of interesting and controversial wrinkles in the story of the man.

Even just looking at the story of Gates's influence at Vox would be interesting, without even trying to make hay of his relationship with Stephen Pinker.

Anyway, Citations Needed did a couple episodes (45 & 46) on Gates that are a good introduction.

[https://soundcloud.com/citationsneeded/episode-45-the-not- so...](https://soundcloud.com/citationsneeded/episode-45-the-not-so- benevolent-billionaire-bill-gates-and-western-media)

<comment><USER34> Will you guys please stop with the Soros bashing? There's literally no basis for all the BS being spewed about a self-made man like that.

<comment><USER35> Calling for a more nuanced rendering of someone's character isn't "bashing", nor does being a "self-made" man disqualify one from criticism.

<comment><USER36> The whole Soros story is an anti-Semitic smear made up by Orbans team to win elections in Hungary. Nobody would give two shits about Soros if it wasn't for that. No matter how true it might be that he earned some of his money to the detriment of others, the only reason why it's being discussed is is so that Orbans has a virtual enemy to win against.

<comment><USER37> Which parts of

 _CEU was founded in 1991 by hedge fund manager, political activist, and philanthropist George Soros [..] A central tenet of the university 's philosophy is the promotion of open societies._ [1]

 _major donations from some of the nation's wealthiest liberal foundations, including [..] the Open Society Foundations of the financier George Soros [..]. Over the past decade those donors have invested more than $300 million in immigrant organizations, including many fighting for a pathway to citizenship for immigrants here illegally._ [2]

are made up?

When China opens their Confucius Institutes to expand their soft power and propaganda, this is seen as problematic. But when Soros does the same, it's OK, because you agree with his goals? It shouldn't surprise you that people who don't share his goals view him with hostility.

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

[2] [https://www.nytimes.com/2014/11/15/us/obama-immigration- poli...](https://www.nytimes.com/2014/11/15/us/obama-immigration-policy- changes.html)

<comment><USER36> It's not about disagreeing with his goals, it's about stylizing him as a Boogeyman using anti-Semitic tropes for political gains.

The people who call Soros their enemy are literally fighting against liberal democracy. Orban himself states as his goal a illiberal democracy.

You can disagree with Soros views on immigration, but there is no way in hell you can defend what has been done to him. What Soros advocates is a viable political position, what Orban advocates is the death of democracy.

<comment><USER37> > The people who call Soros their enemy are literally fighting against liberal > democracy.

I haven't kept up with all the things Soros has been accused of (falsely or not), but isn't this statement also making them into boogeymen? They can't possibly be just against a handful of policies he's pushing in their country - they must be against liberal democracy itself? Why are the only two choices Soros, or enemies of liberal democracy? Assuming you didn't use "people who call Soros their enemy" to only refer to Orban's government.

I'll agree that Orban (and others) fabricated smears against Soros, but it's false to extend that to "the whole Soros story".

<comment><USER36> Well, let's try: shoe me one valid point of critisim against Soros promoted ideas that is not illiberal.

<comment><USER37> I'm not sure if it's liberal or not, but opposition to immigration seems perfectly legitimate to me, and is directly opposed to Soros' goals.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


The most complete brain map: a fly's 'connectome' - <AUTHOR> https://www.wired.com/story/most-complete-brain-map-ever-is-here-a-flys-connectome/ <comment><USER2> For anyone with an interest in this field, I would highly recommend Vehicles by Valentino Braiteberg. [1]

A very nice intro into how these structures could give rise to actual behaviours.

[1] [https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/483485.Vehicles](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/483485.Vehicles)

</comment><comment><USER3> I highly recommend this lecture by Jeff Lichtman, where he describes the machine they've built to slice the brain and the software they have written to visualize and make sense of this vast amount of data:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2QVy0n_rdBI](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2QVy0n_rdBI)

</comment><comment><USER4> So, how far are we from a fly simulation that works?

<comment><USER5> This is theoretically all the data about a flys nervous system, which would be the hardest data collection part of building a fly simulation.

<comment><USER6> This seems to be more simply all the data about the physical orientations and positions of neurons in a fly's nervous system.

I'd guess there is still humongous amounts of data missing that would be necessary for a simulation:

\- the exact biological and chemical makeup of each neuron

\- the biological and chemical environment in which those neurons exist

\- the exact physics that govern the biological and chemical reactions happening in and around the neurons (and the ability to accurately simulate those physics)

\- maybe most importantly, even if we have all those above (i.e. the ability to fully and accurately simulate biological systems as complex as individual cells), we may still missing the electro-chemical activation "state" of the neurons that allows the fly to operate as a cohesive whole. (as if we had all of the hardware of a computer, but none of the software)

<comment><USER7> The GP asked about "a fly simulation that works", and I think we won't need anything similar to your proposed demands. I'd wager that we can approach this decently well with a "basic" mathematical model run at discrete steps on the order of 0.1ms.

I suppose that we'll hit a big wall once we reach simulation time frames which involves changes in protein expression, but I think we'll have a decent simulation of what a "static" fly long before the end of the decade.

<comment><USER8> If the model has no data on the neuro-chemistry of the fly brain, why would you think it is even remotely close to simulating the behavior of the fly?

<comment><USER9> You don't necessarily need to understand something to a deep degree in order to simulate it. Ptolemy created a very accurate simulation of the solar system with a wildly poor understanding of how things moved, just because the system was simple and very consistent.

Simulating a fly is obviously a much larger task, but "we can't possibly simulate it unless we understand X" seems to me a misguided criticism.

<comment><USER10> It seems to me that fundamentally people assume that simulating a neuron is vastly, _vastly_ simpler than simulating a bacterium. Ok, you can assume that. But what gives you confidence in that? Do you think that simulating a bacterium is less complex than simulating a fly, or about the same?

<comment><USER7> It all depends on what questions you want to answer with your simulation. If what you care about is where in the room the thing will be after 10 seconds at a resolution of 1 cubic centimeter, then yes, simulating a bacterium is vastly simpler.

<comment><USER10> Ok. I thought it was understood that more detail was of interest with neurons than "1 cubic cm".

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> That's awesome but...where are the images???

<comment><USER12> [https://www.janelia.org/project- team/flyem/hemibrain](https://www.janelia.org/project-team/flyem/hemibrain)

<comment><USER13> To view the pictures you have to let this.. thing load 40 (forty) scripts.

Screw it. I won't view the pictures.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Would this map of neuronal connections be the same on all fruit flies of that species?

Or does it vary between individuals?

<comment><USER15> I'd be shocked if there wasn't some variation across individuals, but suspect that at a high level, the major structures are the same.

<comment><USER14> correct me if I'm wrong, but I thought this map isn't at the high level. It is a map of every single neuron connection for this region of the fly's brain. As low-level as it gets.

<comment><USER15> Sure. But the question was - is every brain the same. I would say it's similar, but not identical.

Kind of like the first human genome sequenced. It's just one humans DNA, but any give human has very similar DNA. Small differences matter greatly though.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> what software is being used for the 3d reconstruction and visualization? The images used to make the movie are incredibly impressive.</comment>


Brad Feld talks to students about St. Louis startup communities - <AUTHOR> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CnkeR4MGRm4

<comment><USER2> Man is it me or does that video have one of the worst echoes ever? I couldn't understand what he was saying, and he claimed to have posted a URL to a book and it never appeared in the video.

Anyway I live in the St. Louis MO Area, I can't seem to get a break in the startup community. I am told I am too old, I am in my 40's they want 20something people. I am told that because I am mentally ill, they don't want me involved with a startup. It seems most of these feeder companies take advantage of young people and work them really hard to produce stuff and then take a majority of their stock, the entrepreneurs seem to play a role in recruiting the labor for the feeders and managing them for them for exchange of stock and credit for their work. He seems to forget to put in the labor or the talent the people who do most of the work, get the least of the credit, and get the least of the stock, and at the first sign of trouble are expendable and downsized.

I just want to talk about what is happening in the St. Louis Startup community, so it can be addressed and fixed.

<comment><AUTHOR> Sorry, we ran the event using Google+ on air. With his audio in the auditorium, we could hear no feedback, but apparently the Google server was picking some up.

From my notes, these are main URLs he shared:

URL to his book -> <http://www.startuprev.com/books-communities/>

URL to Colorado "startups pitch to students" -> <http://Csuac.com/tagged/s2s>

LinkSmart URL -> <http://linksmart.com>

I'm a student in St. Louis and involved with the community in multiple ways (including organizing this speech). Hit me up for coffee, if you want to get involved or talk about the community: firstname.lastname@example.com.

<comment><USER2> Thanks nobody reached out to me this way yet. I've been trying for ten years, only to be excluded. I am one of those people who say "I want to help" but nobody seems to want my help.

I am disabled and cannot drive a car anymore, I am mentally ill and that means not a very good public speaker. I am not sure if I can meet you for coffee unless I can find a ride somewhere. Since I've become disabled I've been family oriented because I've basically been rejected by the industry and community. When I was young I wanted to start a silicon valley type community in St. Louis in the 1980's and people laughed at me back then. I was a teenager who taught myself how to program on a Commodore 64 because that is all my father could afford to buy me. In high school I learned USCD Pascal and Turbo Pascal. I hold two degrees one in computers and one in business management.

I ran two small businesses in the past, and while they didn't become successes I learned from my failures. At jobs I had I would mentor the new programmers and tutor them to get them up to speed.</comment></comment></comment>


Findings: Your lab notebook, reinvented - <AUTHOR> http://findingsapp.com

<comment> dan-g Looks really cool. How do you simulate the permanence that paper laboratory notebooks have? I was always trained to write out everything, and if I ended up not using a particular procedure, striking it out so it was obvious it wasn't used but could be read by a third party whenever necessary (for legal reasons).

There's always the honor code, but my understanding was the lack of paper trail is one of the big issues with switching to computational means for keeping track of scientific results.

<comment><USER2> I'm not sure if this is what they do, but it seems like a solution would be the git commit hashing procedure. So at the end of a day/worksession have the app take the hash of ( what you entered today + yesterday's hash) so you create a provable trail of changes.

<comment><USER3> I'm not sure I see why hashing is necessary nor why it provides any "proof" of what was changed. Perhaps it's the git analogy that's tripping me up because you can easily forge commits to appear as being from any user at any time.

<comment><USER4> The problem evoked here is for your institution at which you work, to know that their researchers are not changing the data afterwards and following best practices. In this scheme, the user would submit the hashes to a central server controlled by the institution. Then, the user have no way of changing the content without them knowing.

And yes, you would need to add some authentication to know it's always the same user, but that's a different, orthogonal issue.

For actual proof e.g. in court, you'd need a third party with a private key used to sign the content. A little more involved... But the main point of that would be patent litigation, and with the new 'first to file' rule in the US, it is much less relevant.

<comment><USER3> If you have a trusted third party that can hold content for you, why not just have them store the actual data? Unless of course it's very large, but that seems unlikely to be the case in this scenario.

<comment><USER4> You could actually have quite a lot of data generated in a lab, depending on what you do. By only storing the signatures, you can have a much cheaper service that what would be needed to store GB of data, and really focus on other aspects that are critical for this: security, backup, user interface, speed,... Having only to worry about backup of a bunch of signatures is a much easier task than having to worry about backing up the actual data.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Great idea! You should find a partner to print to physical books - this may be a simpler export option (and added feature) while you work on your sqlite- based export. You should provide some sort of verification that notes that I claim to have entered on a certain date were indeed entered on that date, for inventions (although the US is now first-to-file). And you should allow me to scribble notes on a tablet.

<comment><USER4> Thanks for the feedback! Nice idea about printing. The export will be here very soon, it simply did not make the cut for 1.0 because it needs more testing.

Yes, the 'first to file' thing is still new enough that many scientists still think it is useful to sign their notebooks for that purpose. There are still subtleties to those rules, though, that we need to investigate a bit.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Makes no sense to do this as anything but a web app, IMO. Certainly not as a Mac-specific native app.

<comment><USER7> On the contrary, it makes perfect sense. Labs work with all kinds of data, including samples and information obtained from human trials where privacy is mandated by law. Sync that to the cloud, and you open a huge can of legal- compliance worms.

By keeping local data in a local DB, this is avoided. I see on the website that sync is coming soon. If the developer is smart, they'll allow selective sync so that labs can choose what to upload and what to keep local, or will offer some sort of non-cloud p2p sync solution.

<comment><USER4> We do plan to allow syncing to a local network drive, if that can work. The idea is that it will be file-based, and can leverage Dropbox, Google Drive or... a local networked drive. Still working on it, though! See PARStore on github for some of the basic ideas, as this is what we use for document storage.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> How do they avoid lock-in? The site makes no mention of the concept whatsoever, and I don't see anything about an ability to export, in a non- bespoke form, all the data you've painstakingly collected in Findings.

<comment><USER4> We definitely want to make sure you can always export your data. At this stage, you have of course to take our word for it, since we do not have export working yet. However, we also have a section in our intial user guide about the format used to store those documents. It is SQLite-based, and is a simple key-value store (using the open-source PARStore implementation). Also, it's not store "in the cloud", it is on your local hard drive, and you can easily get to that library via the preferences of the app.</comment></comment>


How Scientists Got Climate Change So Wrong - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2019/11/08/opinion/sunday/science-climate-change.html <comment><USER2> I really don't understand. We're told the scientists have a consensus and we must believe them. (I'm inclined to do so!) But at least the IPCC has projected changes that weren't so bad. Is there a new consensus? Were the scientists who were supposed to be right actually wrong? Who are we supposed to believe? This is not denialism. I'm firmly inclined to believe the IPCC consensus. But it's disconcerting to see a new narrative where those same scientists are incorrect. It seems to amount to "panic even more than the scientific consensus warrants." Maybe that's true but it's an odd argument.

> More likely, a separate United Nations report concluded, we are headed for > warming of at least 5.4 degrees Fahrenheit. That will come with almost > unimaginable damage to economies and ecosystems. Unfortunately, this dose of > reality arrives more than 30 years after human-caused climate change became > a mainstream issue.

5.4F is 3C. The cost of 3C change is projected to be up to 13% of GDP relative to keeping to 1.5C. See: [https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2018/may/23/hitting-...](https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2018/may/23/hitting- toughest-climate-target-will-save-world-30tn-in-damages-analysis-shows). Over the 30 year time horizon of the calculation, world GDP will grow by 140%. (Climate change will cost just 1/10 of total growth by that time. )

<comment><USER3> It seems pretty fool-hardy to me to think that we shouldn't act on climate change on the chance that we can simply spend a few dozen trillion a few decades down the road to try to mop up the problem.

Perhaps we should find a report that also analyzes how much human suffering and ecological damage would occur with a 3 degree C increase versus a 1.5 increase?

One point that isn't stressed enough is how much humanity depends on rich ecosystems for so much of our technology, medicine, and science. Life would be much harder for us on an ecologically devastated Earth.

<comment><USER2> > It seems pretty fool-hardy to me to think that we shouldn't act on climate > change on the chance that we can simply spend a few dozen trillion a few > decades down the road to try to mop up the problem.

That's not what the UN report means. What they're saying is that GDP will be that much lower from the effects of climate change (extreme weather events, loss of farm land, rising water, etc.)

If we're really looking at a 10-15% reduction in GDP, that suggests we shouldn't take drastic steps in response to climate change. Massive restructuring of the economy like the Green New Deal could easily cost us more than 10-15% in GDP. And most likely it won't work, so we'll suffer the double whammy of reduced growth plus the effects of climate change.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I suspect that the problem will end up being something quite 'simple.' Our time didn't have the horsepower nor know how to accurately compute feedback loops in our environment. We didn't understand the numerous and unforeseeable tipping points that we tipped. We didn't understand the dance of nature and how disparate events tied into the pattern of our actions.

The deliberations, however, are over and the verdict is in. We have done fucked up. There's no point in lamenting our failure. We've made the mess and now we need to fix it. The only real question facing us is how.

Whether it's carbon sinks in the form of olivine and 20 million trees, new methods to suck carbon out of the air, or some desperate act of geoengineering. Humanity needs to come to grips with the situation and act quickly and decisively. Like we did with nuclear weapons and space races. An Earth Race (so that we don't regress), if you will.

<comment><USER5> What does "quickly and decisively" mean in term of timeframe?

<comment><USER6> The IPCC's 2014 AR5 WG3 report is the latest to provide a detailed mitigations response. That would be the concensus view. There are a wide range of others.

I've only just now looked it up, so while I can't answer your question directly, it's all but certainly the most comrepensive concensus answer you'll find.

[https://www.ipcc.ch/report/ar5/wg3/](https://www.ipcc.ch/report/ar5/wg3/)

For the Paris accords: _net negative_ emissions by 2050, now 30 years away.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_warming#/media/File%3AM...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_warming#/media/File%3AMitigation_pathways.svg)

<comment><USER7> When people riot in the streets and demand their luxuries back, what will you do to stop it? Authoritarian repression? Massacres?

Yellow vest protests in France were caused by a modest increase in fuel taxes. Serious belt-tightening to stop global warming is going to be far worse in most countries - heck, France already generates most of their energy from nuclear and renewables so they are way ahead of the US and others.

<comment><USER8> Meanwhile in the UK, nearly half of Conservative voters and a majority of the country think we should be aiming to decarbonise far faster[1]. Namely by 2030 and not kicked off into the long grass of 2050 as the government committed to. Committed to purely because they don't have to _do_ anything. Apparently even their voters aren't properly signed up to the denial hymn sheet.

Yellow vest protests were far more about inequality than a modest increase in fuel taxes. If government makes an equitable policy that spares the poorest in society the disproportionate impact that would naturally fall on them, there need be no riots - especially if they had a warm, well insulated house for the first time. The middle classes don't, generally speaking, riot.

So what luxuries are you expecting to be taken? Decarbonising doesn't mean deindustrialising. It means winding back some of the excesses of capitalism and consumerism. Done properly we should expect better made, longer lasting but sustainable products. Which I suppose should have the multinationals rioting if we take away planned obsolescence... :)

[1] [https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/nov/07/majority...](https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/nov/07/majority- of-uk-public-back-2030-zero-carbon-target-poll)

<comment><USER7> In terms of luxuries being taken away, I'd point to electricity and transportation as the #1. For those calling for immediate decarbonization, that would mean shutting down all our coal, gas, and oil burning power plants and scrapping our gas burning cars. Electric heating costs more than gas heating, electric cars cost more than gas cars, and so on. All of these costs hit ordinary people directly in the pocketbook.

Economists estimate a carbon tax high enough to force fossil fuel plants offline in a couple decades would need to be quite high. Meanwhile, in democratic societies like the USA it's very difficult to even raise the gas tax a few cents to fund needed repairs to bridges and other infrastructure. To get people out of their SUV's and into Teslas, for instance, you'd need to put multi-dollar taxes on gas to make it make sense (e.g. Norway where Tesla is doing well because they put a 100% tax on normal gas cars). Democratic elections often result in the rejection of such taxes because voters value their immediate standard of living over that of future decades (e.g. WA state initiatives for carbon taxes, which were soundly rejected at the ballot box in 2016 and 2018).

And to do all this without affecting the standard of living of the poor and middle classes, and without slowing down the growth of developing countries and China - I think it's a bit of a dream. There's a reason market-based societies selected to use fossil fuel technology and it's because it's cheaper than other energy generation tech. Transitioning off of it is now a massive capital investment and will hurt.

You say the yellow vest protest were about inequality - but the result of them was that the fuel tax was put on hold and the speed limit was kept high.

<comment><USER8> That doesn't make sense though. If you're outside the USA, ending coal is coming. It might just take a little longer in the US and Poland. The UK has, I think, five remaining coal plants - all spending 90% of their time idling as source of last resort. They'll all be gone before 2025. Offshore wind is already competitive with gas, and the expectation is it will be cheaper than _existing_ gas in the next round of auctions, i.e. electricity will cost less from closing and demolishing gas plants and building new offshore wind.

There we do get to a slight issue - UK doesn't currently have enough pumped hydro or other storage to underpin 100% renewables, so gas will probably survive a while as the fill in source, in lieu of batteries and pumped storage.

That has been done with a low carbon tax - $25 per ton[1][2]. Brought in under the Conservative coalition government - not one you'd expect to tax excessively. Democratic societies in Europe manage to tax petrol and diesel enough to bring it to double or more the US price.

You're conflating far too much though. Elections come with hundreds of promises and policies - there are multiple issues, and multiple often conflicting policies that get or lose a vote. It is _exceptionally_ rare for a single point to swing a vote one way or another. Thus despite winning politicians of every nation trying to claim 100% support of every controversial policy, nothing could be further from the truth.

As far as being equitable is concerned, it's perfectly feasible to bring a carbon tax that spends the take subsidising the poorest to enable them to insulate their home, get solar panels, or replace their car with an EV. Maybe with a policy to build out or subsidise more public transport. Car taxes based on a combination of weight and emissions should help push the rest toward EVs. If voters consistently claim they want more action, and far faster, then it's reasonable to suppose that at least most realise that will come with a cost, whether in increased state borrowing or adjusted taxes. The magic money tree only gets brought out for illegal military adventures in Iraq.

Without going into growth as an unwise Ponzi scheme, there's no reason to suppose huge spending on modern sustainable infrastructure would hurt economies - it would boost a new and growing sector in place of an incumbent. Growth would probably surge due to the additional government funded activity. The New Deal was an attempt to boost the economy though didn't spend enough - ultimately it was spending on WW2 rearming that brought the necessary effect. Little wonder some transition policies have been labelled Green New Deal - attempting to achieve similar during a transition to sustainability. The logic is sound, though I don't know enough detail to know if the numbers add up.

Fossil simply isn't the cheapest fuel any more, far from it. Which is why the transition is happening anyway, even without policies to encourage or require it.

[1] [https://arstechnica.com/science/2019/10/uk-renewables-out- ge...](https://arstechnica.com/science/2019/10/uk-renewables-out-generate- fossil-fuels-for-an-entire-quarter/)

[2] [https://www.carbonbrief.org/analysis-uk-renewables- generate-...](https://www.carbonbrief.org/analysis-uk-renewables-generate- more-electricity-than-fossil-fuels-for-first-time)

<comment><USER7> The transition is happening, but we're nowhere near on pace for negative carbon by 2050. Here in the US, most of our emissions reduction has been switching from coal to gas, while energy consumption continues to rise and politicians block offshore wind farms for aesthetic reasons (e.g. Cape wind in MA).

Once the coal->gas transition completes, the easy gains on emissions reduction are gone - now it's cheap, already built gas plants with cheap fracked gas that need to be out competed by renewables + as yet to be invented cost- effective storage technologies.

GND policies don't add up as far as I can tell, in fact they are probably counter productive since they promise voters that they can have carbon friendly policies and everything else they want too.

I'd be happy to see a tax on carbon and more subsidies for green cars and so on (right now, a gas car is still a better deal despite the tax subsidy on electric, especially with our low US gas prices). But I'm skeptical that we're anywhere near on track to convincing voters to get behind it.

[1] [https://www.forbes.com/sites/rogerpielke/2019/11/10/the- surp...](https://www.forbes.com/sites/rogerpielke/2019/11/10/the-surprising- energy-math-behind-us-climate-policy-failure/#31af9da734b7)

<comment><USER8> Now there I agree, but that appears down to the unique success anti-science lobbying is having in the US right now. The US has long had a political structure that is not amenable to regulation -- so it comes particularly slowly, and often later than elsewhere.

Forbes piece is correct that much coal has been replaced by gas, but it is not (necessarily) as bad as it tries to make out. That mirrors the UK experience 10 or so years ago, when we had a dash for gas. Already those gas plants are becoming uneconomic -- so much for their expected 50+ year life. We've already had a couple of closures, and one of the gas generators are busy trying to pivot to renewables. This under a Conservative government that has outlawed cheaper onshore wind and backed fracking, two decisions even their own membership disagree with.

So it may well be gas starts dropping out of US generation in a decade, not ideal, but potentially OK on course for 2050 neutrality. US gas prices and love of the car may prove more intractable, but I haven't quite lost hope yet.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I really hate this headline and I don't think it should be rewarded with clicks. NYT knows that a certain population is going to read that headline, and nothing else, and then take away that "they were right all along and climate change isn't real". It does absolutely nothing to help move things in the right direction and just further fuels the fire of false "debate" over the issue.

<comment><USER10> I hate clickbait as much as the next person but in this case... aren't the people you're talking about the people you want to read the article?

<comment><USER9> Most people don't actually read the articles. They just scan the headlines and take away whatever they want from that. This would have been much better if the headline was more like: Scientists grossly underestimated the impact of climate change. That would have been sensationalistic while also conveying the main point of the article to those people.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> My understanding is that many climate scientists want to avoid a kind of paralyzing alarmism/catastrophic fatalism, and that this might be where the conservative consensus comes from.

</comment><comment><USER12> Just as a thought experiment, suppose the best prediction that could be made right now would see the earth's carrying capacity drop to under a billion people in the next 50 years. What would you expect to see different, in media, in papers in top journals, in public discourse, than we see right now? I think the world might look just as we see it today.

</comment><comment><USER13> There is no going back, our entire way of living is unsustainable, climate change is going to happen. Good news is, planet Earth will be fine, give it a few thousand years, it has survived far worse.

<comment><USER14> It is sustainable, barely, with major reinvestment into nuclear, renewable and electric battery storage, for about 300 years. (Taking into consideration countries catching up on development and increased demands for air conditioning and water purification. This is a conservative time estimate, there are more nuclear fuel sources.)

That's not too long of a time, but maybe enough to solve these problems in any number of available ways, from biotechnology through cybernetics, nanotechnology, new advanced energy sources (some of which are being developed right now), even perhaps space travel or mega structures.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> [https://outline.com/BX3pHp](https://outline.com/BX3pHp)

</comment><comment><USER6> An element of this story and challenge is the nature of technology. I've spent a few years on the problem of what technology _is_ , or more specifically, what technolgical _mechanisms_ are. There several obvious ones: new fuel sources, materials, better understandings of processes, and information flows -- acquisition, processing, storage and retrieval, transmission, and controls. I've come up with a list of eight.

It wasn't until some time that I hit on a ninth element, what I've called "hygiene factors", in that the address the overall health of a system or the human technosphere and environent. They're based on _unintended consequences_ , a term introduced in 1936 by the sociologist Robert K. Merckton, which he describes (I'm just realising) using the same term I'd landed on: _manifest_ and _latent_ functions and dysfunctions.[1][2][3]

Hygiene factors tend to be saturation of sinks, exhaustion of sources, or disruptions of endogenous or exogenous systems on which we rely -- say, urban filth and public health (endogenous) or ecosystem disruption affecting resources, food supply, or disease reservoirs (external).

A specific technology might be thought of as _some cluster of effects_ , both positive (or intended) and negative (or unintended), both manifest and latent. A specific technology -- a device, technique, management method, practice, convention -- approaches some theoretical physical limit of efficiency, also introducing unintended consequences.

We're pretty good at choosing technologies which have manifest positive effects, and at rejecting those with manifest negative effects. We're less good about adopting technologies with _latent_ positive effects or _rejecting_ those with latent _negative_ effects.[4]

We can think of an entire technosphere as the set of interactions between _all technologies_ and the environment.

As both our technology _and_ role within the environment extend, we find ourselves running up against inherent limits. That is, the capacities of either fixed-capacity or rate-based sinks to absorb effluents, of fixed-stock or flow-based sources to provide resources, or disruptions of either our own endogenous or exogenous systems on which healthy function rely.

The problem is that as we start hitting one set of limits, we tend to spill over to others. In agricultural science, there's the notion of Leibig's Law of the Minimum: "growth is dictated not by total resources available, but by the scarcest resource (limiting factor)." It seems that this should have some reciprocal principle, that _health_ is dictated not by the total sinks available, but of the most currently binding one. As the first contraint(s) are lifted -- low-hanging fruit -- subsequent constraints of greater effect, or more difficult mitigation or management, emerge. (I'm not aware of any named principle matching this, though I strongly suspect it exists.)

We also end up with interactions between the consequences -- one system interacts with another, producing their own sets of effects.

It's the latent negative consequences which catch up with you. Since they're _not_ apparent, they're not evident and available for planning or modeling when looking at future direction. As systems generally become more optimised, the odds of any _further_ change tends to fall -- you've exhausted most of the good interactions, the remaining ones are bad.

And the worst of all is a set of compounding, latent, negative 2nd and higher- order interactions. These are conceptually, and probably statistically, inevitable. We can't point to them specifically, as we don't know what they are. There's a tremendous tendency in human nature to dismiss and minimise future and latent risks (though yes, also benefits), especially where personal or private interests are served by optimism bias.

The result then would be that increasingly complex circumstances in which the tolerances of multiple systems are stressed to their limits, an apparent zone of stability is actually an illusion as still-fermenting latent negative interactions are developing, beyond the realm of detection.

Which seems to be exemplified in the global warming case.

I struggle with whether this is tremendously insightful or blindingly obvious, or possibly a case of overfitting to available information. Responses have been rather all over the map, though the "blindingly obvious" criticisms frequently seem to come from those afflicted with blindness to latent benefits and risks.

But I'm fearful.

________________________________

Notes:

1\. Bio: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_K._Merton](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_K._Merton)

2\. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manifest_and_latent_functions_...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manifest_and_latent_functions_and_dysfunctions)

3\. I'd been working with the notion of "manifestation", though I'd not settled on a good term for its opposite. "Covert", "emergent", and "latent" were optons. And this is a reason why I research and footnote my HN (and other) comments and posts. I'm learning.

4\. For concreteness, some possible examples:

\- Manifest positive: Movable type, water wheel, medical anaesthesia.

\- Manifest negative: Hydrochloric acid skin treatment. Taunting lions.

\- Latent positive: Medical hygiene, handwashing. Seismic building standards. Limiting building to above the Tsunami line.

\- Latent negative: Lead plumbing, asbestos insulation, CFC refrigerants and aerosol propellants, residential laundry chutes.

5\. See: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liebig%27s_law_of_the_minimum](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liebig%27s_law_of_the_minimum)

</comment><comment><USER16> I dont think anyone really cares what the scientists predict. Its the tragedy of the commons, no one will really change their behaviour anyway, even when it becomes unbearable to live in many parts of the world.

<comment><USER17> You're talking in generalities. Even if it's not the majority of people, _some_ people will change their lifestyles, or at least parts of it (buying eco friendly cars, using less AC, eating less meat, etc.) But in general, you're right, most people won't do enough. That's why there need to be _institutional_ changes, like investments into green energy/tech and incentives for companies to pollute less.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Meta: Why are paywalled articles doing so well on HN lately? I know about the "web" link, but it never works for me. It's frustrating to want to participate in the comments on a subject, but not have access to the specific content that everyone seems to be discussing (and no, I am not paying for an NYT subscription).

<comment><USER19> Reader view on iPhone gets past New York Times paywall for now

<comment><USER20> Or use the uMatrix browser add-on to block cookies and JavaScript on NY Times domains.</comment></comment></comment>


Administrative Bloat in Higher Education - <AUTHOR> https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2939915 <comment><AUTHOR> This is a very discouraging paper, it discusses how administrative costs are sucking up all the money in higher education at the expense of professors and students.

That said, I expect it also means that by exposing the 'efficiency' of an educational institution (much like we rank charities) and give a figure of merit of how much of your tuition dollar goes to your education.</comment>