AnthonyMouse

EVs with 300 miles of range are pretty common. The average round trip commute is 42 miles, i.e. you have on average more than 7 days before you run out from a full charge. Turning that into ~5.5 days in exchange for chopping tens of dollars a month off of your own electric bill because you're paying the daytime solar price instead of the nighttime something more expensive price is going to be very popular.

And when you know you're taking a long trip you can still do a full charge without needing to do that the other 99% of the time.

> The problem isn't that we don't know how (solved issue: UBI, higher pay for less work, high marginal income tax rate, unrealized capital gains tax above a minimum, land tax, etc.).

Part of the problem is that there are people who think all rather than only some of those things are a good idea.

High marginal tax rates and taxing unrealized gains are both unintended consequences factories. Especially the second one, but even the first one is basically a trade off between creating perverse incentives and arbitrage opportunities (i.e. massive loopholes) because the high rates don't apply to everything, or supercharging offshoring because the high rates do apply to everything.

Conversely, a UBI is a good idea, and doesn't actually require oppressive tax rates because it replaces most of the existing system of government benefits and subsidies -- which impose even higher de facto marginal tax rates on most of the middle class in the form of benefits phase outs. US federal spending is already >$20,000 per capita.

Not all of that is assistance programs, but a large proportion of it is. And most of those programs are a net negative compared to reallocating their budgets to a UBI. Having separate bureaucracies to administer separate programs for food assistance, housing assistance, education assistance, etc. is foolish even before they create weird marginal rate cliffs and higher marginal rates on lower income people by having arbitrarily overlapping phase out rates.

It isn't about the source of the money. Converting those things to a UBI would cost less money to give people more money because you'd save the amount spent on administration, while improving economic efficiency by not imposing arbitrary restrictions on how it's spent. The primary reason we don't do that isn't upper middle class people demanding a status quo in their own interest -- it isn't in their interest.

It's a combination of ordinary incompetence and bad structural incentives because politicians like to claim credit for creating new programs instead of just indexing the amount of a cash payment everybody gets to GDP per capita and then sending them all home.

> Even in daytime, I think you need storage to get rid of those, right?

Suppose that solar generates only during the day and only when it's not cloudy, and it's cloudy e.g. 10% of the time. Then you're using natural gas at night, but those natural gas plants still exist during the day, so you can also use them on the 10% of days that are cloudy and you're still replacing 90% of the daytime demand.

If you want sooner demand for storage in the form of batteries then electrify transportation.

That's when the government is the one bringing the case to begin with. The issue is, if the government e.g. kills your spouse, why should the perpetrators get off scott free because the perpetrators want to keep something a secret?

Imagine the public tried to do that. Sorry, IRS/DoJ, the defendant is refusing warrants and subpoenas because it's a secret and without that you can't prosecute them.

> What his "briefing" was we can only guess. But there is a pattern on BOTH sides of the aisle they people are against mass surveillance, until they are put into positions of power and access to compartmentalized, classified info - and then they aren't.

It seems like there are two plausible explanations for this.

The first is that they have a list of atrocities allegedly prevented by the system and most politicians are too witless or spineless to ask the question of whether they could also have been prevented in a variety of other ways.

The second is that they're using the system to e.g. influence public opinion / elections and then once they feast their eyes on the one ring, most politicians aren't sufficiently inclined to throw it into the volcano.

Inventing the term "enemy combatants" as a label for people who don't wear uniforms isn't the problem. The problem is not even affording them the rights guaranteed to prisoners of war.

The real problem here is that if someone files a claim against the government and the government wants to keep the facts of the case a secret, you still need the case to have an outcome, and then you have two options.

The first is that you assume whatever is being kept a secret is something that doesn't favor the government, and then the government loses the case by default. This is the more reasonable option, because it mitigates the perverse incentive for the government to declare something a secret whenever it makes them look bad. But it has the obvious problem that then the government would lose some cases it should have won if the information could be published.

The second is that you assume whatever is being kept a secret is something that favors the government, and then the government wins the case by default. But that doesn't solve the problem -- you then have members of the public losing cases they should have won if the information could be published. And doing this makes the perverse incentive worse.

So why do we accept the second one instead of the first one?

> Imagine, for example, a case is about someone disclosing the location of nuclear arms to their spouse.

The location of most US nuclear weapons are public. Moreover, if you suspect that the location of some you intend to be secret may have been compromised then the obvious sensible response is "move them" rather than "keep even the legal theory of the case a secret forever".

This is why the primary ones whose location is intended to be a secret are on submarines -- submarines are easy to move around.

> Solar is cool but solar that can make it through the night and a couple cloudy days is way cooler

The fun part is that we're still well before the point when this even matters.

Almost 60% of the US grid is still fossil fuels, with around half of that still happening during the day. Which means you can get down to ~30% fossil fuels without any storage at all because all you do is go from burning fossil fuels during the day and at night to burning fossil fuels only at night.

> It's significantly easier to make money when you are at worst doing grey area stuff and stay mostly legal (or even "better" is to lobby your thing into being legal).

Look at the stuff Apple does, openly and in front of everybody, in response to laws they don't like, e.g. EU DMA. Now what is a scummy surveillance corporation going to do in the face of a law which there is no easy way to tell if they're violating?

> And any info known by more than 2 people is no longer a secret, and you ain't paying enough to your employees to lie under oath for their employer.

Consider how a large company works. Suppose as many as 95% of the employees are honest and/or risk-averse. Those 95% don't do it. When the remaining 5% do it without even being asked to because it's the thing that makes number go up and number going up is what gets them a bonus, they aren't going to tell on themselves and the other 95% don't even know that it's happening. Really the other >99% because 5% of people being willing to do it doesn't require 5% of people to be in on it.

> even if it does happen it's mostly out of ignorance, not a deliberate attempt to go against the law.

Getting screwed by ignorance rather than malice is still getting screwed.

> But I think it’s also misleading to look at prices in a fixed location over time, which ignores that places can become relatively more desirable and move upmarket.

That's fine if there is then some other place with equivalent housing prices and job opportunities to what the parents had at the time.

> The average FHA mortgage rate in 1984 was 13.2%. Today’s it’s 6.8%. The more expensive house with a cheaper mortgage costs $482 per month less and $173,000 less over the lifetime of the loan.

Mostly because 1984 (the oldest date the graph had for median income) was a period with historically high interest rates:

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/mortgage30us

They were more like 8% in the 1970s and basically where they are now in the 1990s.

> When you open the app on your phone, the phone probably needed to be unlocked first, though not everyone sets a PIN or biometric lock on their phone.

The same is true for PCs. They've supported that sort of thing for decades, and it's optional for both the phone and the PC.

On top of that, a phone that people carry around everywhere is dramatically more likely to be lost or stolen than a desktop PC that never leaves their house.

> With the web app, people will often save their bank website login credentials in the browser.

If the bank actually cares about this then there are various ways to disable or impede it.

> However, when you look at the demographics of banking app vs website use

This is just the thing where you make something worse so fewer people use it and then use that as an excuse to keep making it worse. Nobody needs an app that could have been a web page, people use them because it's what get shoved down their throat if they don't go out of their way to do something else.

The way chip cards work is that a challenge is issued to the card and it sends back a response. The challenge is just a random number that makes it so you can't replay a previous response to a future challenge. The bank can then verify that the response came from the card, i.e. that you have the card right now.

Your computer doesn't need to have any keys to do this. The card has a secret key, but it doesn't give it to the reader, it just responds to the challenge. The challenge often comes from a point of sale terminal, but it could just as easily come from the bank's web servers, and it isn't really a secret.

The only thing which resembles a secret here is the response from the card, which is the thing anyone can get regardless when have the card. Also, the entire premise of the card is that the attacker doesn't have it, so if they do then you've already lost that part of the game.

> And the reasons why they are vacant is much more complex "because city regulations on rents make them unprofitable to rent out".

Is it actually more complex than that? If the regulation that makes it unprofitable to rent them out is rent control, that's still an accurate statement of why they're not being rented out.

> The share of income people spend on housing has been very stable over 40 years

That's a misleading metric for two reasons. First, "people" includes all the people who bought a house decades ago before the prices went up, and correspondingly paid the old prices instead of the current prices. And second, it assumes that if housing becomes more expensive what people all do is pay more for housing rather than being unable to afford it and then having to take a longer commute to access housing they can afford, live with their parents, become homeless, etc., which negatively impact the amount or type of housing they get instead of the amount they pay for it.

Meanwhile between 1984 and today median income increased by ~290% while median new home prices increased by ~425%:

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MSPUS https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MEHOINUSA646N

And that's with the gap having reduced a bit in the last couple of years, since home prices have declined slightly since the peak in 2022 while median income continued its usual trend.

> You can check what data is getting collected (e.g. decompile their distributed app at different versions)

Which only helps if you're trying to prevent them from collecting the data rather than use it for a given thing, which is the thing they're not doing.

As an obvious example, if they keep all your files/messages on their cloud storage by default, they have all your files/messages by default.

> and you can - as a government - actually just go to their servers and check what they are doing (with necessary permits and lawful action)

Which generally only happens when you have reason to suspect they're doing something, which is the thing you wouldn't have when they're the only ones who know that they're doing it.

And even if you do go to look at the servers they have in your jurisdiction, there is no way to tell that the data hasn't been copied to servers outside of your jurisdiction, or what is happening to it over there.

Modern cards and phones support NFC, so you would only need a "gadget" (NFC reader) when using a PC that doesn't already have one, and a USB one is ~$20.

What this really needs is better browser support for NFC:

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Web_NFC_API

But so let's do that then.

Companies tend not to do illegal things when they're likely to get caught.

The trouble with data laws is that once they have your data, they're the only ones who actually know what they're doing with it. Which means the thing you need to prevent is them having it, which is typically not the thing those laws do.

> In the UK, the bank is liable for any transactions on your account that you didn't approve.

The question isn't whether they have to refund the money when the customer gets defrauded. The question is whether preventing the customer from using a less popular OS in any way prevents them from being defrauded.

To which the answer is somewhere between "negligible difference" and "it's actually anti-correlated with that because the custom ROM is more up to date".

Notice that requiring the attacker to use a phone doesn't do any good, because the attacker can just use a phone.

So get them to remove support for device attestation from the spec, or don't use passkeys.

If you have Bitcoin in a self-custody wallet, is there a bank corporation to "restrict your withdrawals and bail-in funds from your account to save their own hides"?

This is one of the strongest arguments for why ordinary users need the ability to do this. Not only because they would actually benefit from it (e.g. better ad blockers), but because things like that have a network effect that you can't get from the four people who root own their iPhone with a PDF being the only ones able to install a third party browser engine.

> Effectively, to offer free public transport, you have to reduce the power of lobbyists and dark money in politics.

Do you actually though? Or do you just have to do it in a way that they won't stop you?

There are at least three ways to do that. You can do it in a way that it actually doesn't cause trouble for them, you can do it in a way where they can't stop you (e.g. at a different level of government where they have less influence), or you can do it in a way where they can't see what you're trying to do until after it's already done.

"Reduce the influence of lobbyists and money" doesn't even mean anything. If you want something to happen or not happen, you're lobbying. If you spend time or resources trying to achieve your goals, that's money. What people mean is they want to reduce the influence of people they don't like. It's fully generic, you might as well say that in order to win you have to defeat your opponents.

> Classic liberal economics (from e.g. John Stuart Mill and on) generally acknowledges that natural monopolies exist and that it's generally beneficial for everyone if they are publicly owned.

The general problem here is that the "natural monopoly" tends to get drawn far too broadly.

For example, people call the telephone network a natural monopoly, which was Ma Bell's argument for making it a monopoly. But which part exactly is the "natural monopoly"? They were telling you what kind of telephone you could use (and requiring you to rent it from them), and tying not just local phone service but long distance service to the use of their last mile lines etc.

Even when they got broken up, the thing that kept the AT&T name was the (solitary, still a monopoly) long distance carrier, as if that was unquestionably still a natural monopoly. Then the internet came and proved otherwise. It turns out if you want to make a connection between New York and Los Angeles, it doesn't matter very much whether it's routed through Houston or Denver or Chicago, and if you have to you can even use a route that goes through Orlando and then Seattle. So transit is a competitive market and "long distance service is a natural monopoly" is BS.

The actual natural monopoly is the trench or utility pole on the road that carries the cable. At worst the cable itself, but installing the pole or digging the trench is way more expensive than adding another cable to an existing one (in the absence of some regulatory capture or inefficient incentives making it otherwise). And it's certainly not the things at either end of it. The other end of the cable that goes to your house should be at a local peering exchange where different companies compete to patch your cable into their equipment.

It's the same for electricity. The natural monopoly is last mile distribution, not generation or even really transmission.

And then if you give a private company a monopoly on something that isn't even a natural monopoly, of course the results are stupid. The thing that causes good results in markets is competition. So what you want in order is competitive market > local government monopoly > private monopoly. But you still don't want the second for any part of the system where you could have the first.

At which point being unable to solve it because it's uneconomical is a form of being unable to solve it, and the centralized system forfeits the alleged advantage.

> to offer free public transport to people, we now have to solve housing at a societal level. To solve housing, we have to fix zoning laws. to fix zoning laws, we have to fix NIMBY-ism which needs partisanship to be solved. To fix partisanship...

Aren't half of these wrong?

NIMBY-ism isn't particularly partisan. Find a suburb and it's probably full of NIMBY zoning rules regardless of which party has the majority there. This is one of the things which isn't red vs. blue, it's "got mine" vs. the people who don't get a vote because they can't afford to live there because they don't get a vote.

You also don't have to "solve housing the societal level" to keep the homeless from using the subway as a bedroom. That's the better way to do that, but you can also do things like build homeless shelters that resemble (and therefore have the density of) college dorms in places where the "neighbors" are auto salvage yards, warehouses, prisons, abandoned buildings or the like and are correspondingly less likely to object to putting them there. And then anyone you catch being disruptive on the subway gets a free one-way ticket to the shelter.

Being able to roll it back isn't really a difference, you can revert to the previous version of a package too.

The trouble is if the WAF change e.g. messes up a redirect or turns a success response into an error response or vice versa, which confuses some other system into giving multiple users the same session cookie and gives them access to one another's accounts or writes corrupt entries to the database or whatever it is. You can revert the rule but that doesn't revert the state changes that have already happened.

There is inherently a trade off between keeping the system online, keeping the system patched and testing the patch before applying it.

Mitigations and patches are in the same category, so now you're applying mitigations without testing. What if your new WAF detection signature has false positives etc.?

Someone with a single gigabit internet connection can scan the entire IPv4 address space in less than a day. When you have public RCE vulnerabilities like this, your options are "apply the patch", "take the system offline until you can apply the patch" or "get pwned".