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Comment by doctor_eval | Hacker News Reader

I didn’t read the whole article and honestly I’m not qualified to even comment about the materiality of it, but it certainly reminded me of Bob Metcalfe saying, quite loudly, that the internet was going to “catastrophically collapse” in 1996 or he would “eat his words”[0].

This is the guy who invented Ethernet, who knew in great technical detail what he was talking about.

But just like the internet in 1996, I’m sure there are plenty of people in the industry who can also foresee what problems there are going to be with renewables - and an increasingly large number of those people have jobs that depend on solving them.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Metcalfe#Web_prediction...

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I’m not really that qualified either but fwiw the quotes in the article from the NREL paper on grid stability in low inertia settings ignore that the NREL also mentions that ERCOT has managed to deal with higher renewables penetration successfully using load response, and that we likely won’t see this as an issue in the US in the next decade.

Rest assured that ancillary services markets absolutely incentivize frequency regulation (if not inertia directly), and in fact a significant portion of energy storage returns so far has been from providing frequency control (and getting paid for it). Overall I also found this post to be fear-mongering.

He had other colorful pronouncements:

1991 "Microsoft is abusing its monopoly"

1993 "Wireless computing will flop permanently"

1994 "What the Internet needs now is more competition among greedy entrepreneurs"

1995 "I predict the Internet's catastrophic collapse in 1996"

1996 "Everything on the Internet should be strongly encrypted all the time"

1997 "E-postage is a good thing"

1998 "The skunk is, like Microsoft, an exquisite survival machine"

1999 "Linux will fizzle against Windows"

> 1991 "Microsoft is abusing its monopoly"

Not really a prediction, more of a fact

> 1994 "What the Internet needs now is more competition among greedy entrepreneurs"

Competition is definitely good.

> 1996 "Everything on the Internet should be strongly encrypted all the time"

That pretty much came to pass. HTTPS, encryption and signatures are everywhere.

> 1997 "E-postage is a good thing"

What does that mean exactly?

> 1998 "The skunk is, like Microsoft, an exquisite survival machine"

That's not even a prediction

> 1999 "Linux will fizzle against Windows"

Kinda did in the desktop space, it did great by moving into all sorts of mobile devices and the cloud.

"E-postage is a good thing": over the decades, many people have tried to solve spam by charging for messages. This always fails, as people vastly prefer to switch to a free system, whose network effects then dominate.

It's weakly linked to cryptocurrency. One of the early schemes was "proof of waste" for sending email, where you'd have to show some expensive mining-like calculation to send an email. Occasionally cryptocurrency people try to suggest charging for email or social media posts again.

There's actually a bigger problem with e-postage: even if people switched to it, spammers are already using compromised machines and accounts for sending spam, so it won't stop them

Does anyone recall why he said that?

There was also a lot of y2k doomerism and a lot of work put into preventing it.

Best I could find.[1] I think he had valid concerns that still plague us today. He was a little too far on the doom and gloom side.

>Metcalfe offered several reasons for the collapse. For example, he believed that the internet’s crucial data links would be overloaded, and the “naïve flat-rate business model is incapable of financing the new capacity it would need to serve continued growth”. He contended that investor’s would be unwilling to “absorb projected continuing losses”. He thought that “another series of major security breaches will drive the rest of the productive Internet to safety and out of reach.” Yet, he was incorrect, and internet continued to grow exponentially in 1996.

[1]https://quoteinvestigator.com/2020/03/09/collapse/?amp=1

So perhaps the investors who lost everything in the .com boom and bust absorbed the cost of upgrading the data links even though they did it unintentionally? I've never looked at a breakdown of the .com market around that time with any sort of estimate about how much investor "wealth" was lost during the bust phase.

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