blue_devil

EU-wide regulation might make sense to give a "stick" to existing giants, but what about creating an EU-wide "carrot" for European companies to become giants (in the form of unified market and capital)?

Ms. Vestager kind of glosses over this (2:40 min into the interview video).

Question is: why restrict the # of providers shown at all?

They could show a semi-random segmented ranking: - split all companies into X buckets by ranking - pick the top from each bucket from 1 to X, then the second best from each bucket etc.

Save the grounds in a bag and use for your (home) plants, they love it.

Humans are cognitively extremely bad at comprehending (visualising) the big effects that can accrue from small things (hence the magic of compound interest). We expect big effects to come from big things.

They also use this technique in Japan in stores - confirming the amount of money received, pointing to the money, to the cash register etc. I think it serves the same purpose, though it probably feels less awkward as it's directed towards another person (though people don't usually respond to the assistant talking).

I think it's because pointing into space gives your actions physical coordinates that organize them similarly as in memory. In fact, a popular mnemonic technique is to envision the stuff you need to remember "positioned" along a street route or another physical space you know very well (it's called the Method of Loci).

I'm for buying slightly more expensive butter if that would incentivize breeding cows for milk rather than meat. Butter still being more of a small treat than main source of fats.

Perhaps off-topic: if you have not read "The mind's eye" by Oliver Sacks, you may find it helpful, emotionally. Keeping an (audio) journal might help also to cope with anxiety.

We've created a lightweight app that creates a custom format of audio + photo + your metadata (tags, notes etc): https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=app.pointo

You can share a specific recording by creating a link valid for 24 hours, intended for p2p sharing.

We've heard people use this for similar things: teachers teaching kids, journaling, voice memos, tracking investment decisions, recipes etc. Limitation is that there's one photo per recording atm.

Which makes it all the more scary.

>>I'm tempted to say the impact is very little, given that there aren't that many ski resorts. Of those that make snow, they might have less than 100 machines making snow, and only when it's needed.

There are quite a few ski resorts in the world, but more importantly they are - logically - situated in places with massive ecological importance. And you may be surprised how high-tech snow making has become, at least in the European Alps:

"One morning in 1995, Mattis, who was then a 28-year-old ski-lift engineer, was told he was being redeployed to look after the resort’s handful of snow machines. Four years later, he began building his snow-making factory, or atelier neige, installing a 70km network of pipes beneath the mountain that now, after years of expansion and improvement, can cover 65 sq km of slopes in artificial snow at the touch of a button. It is one of the most sophisticated snow-making operations in the world."

Source: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/dec/19/snow-machines-...

>>it gives me actually confidence in the justice system of the nation I currently live in: if they even defend the rights of a murderer, this indicates they will also take the privacy of everybody else seriously.

He murdered people on a yacht - maybe he's rich? At least an alternative explanation for why his case was honoured by the highest court.

Suing in Europe is pricey and time-consuming, so I would not say your privacy would be taken seriously "by default" so to say.

>>So our goal was to make an interactive doc that had the silly, sarcastic, collaged aesthetic of a vlogger video — and our central tech trick — using AI to tell you secrets about yourself — was designed to function like one of those viral BuzzFeed personality quizzes.

It definitely hits some kind of addictive pattern. I felt the pull to "try it out". But I didn't. Just imagined what I'd learn from it if I shared my data (likely nothing), and that dampened my enthusiasm.

At least the EU has a very good tool for grey area scenarios like this where evidence is still lacking either way: the Precautionary Principle.

>>We conclude that, because scientific knowledge is incomplete, a precautionary approach is better suited to State obligations under international human rights law.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S14629...

>>Little is known the effects of exposure to 4G, a 10-year-old technology, because governments have been remiss in funding this research.

One thing's for sure: there _is_ paucity of research on this topic - judging by a brief search on scholar.google.com for "4G technology health effects humans".

The interviewee is _always_ more vulnerable than the hiring manager/employer. And the interviewee does _not_ have the luxury of finding out about whether the manager/team/company is "normal" by asking a bunch of euphemistic questions, because the interviewee is judged _even_ on the questions they ask.

>>The recourse to the EU's Precautionary Principle to stop the distribution of 5G products appears too drastic a measure. We first need to see how this new technology will be applied and how the scientific evidence will evolve.

This is so facetious. The Precautionary Principle is always going to appear a drastic measure - that is its purpose - to be used for large-scale changes like this that are difficult to reverse (another example being GMO).

Meditation can be a double-edge sword because it's an attention training practice. You can think of it as a torchlight - you learn to regulate the torchlight, but what comes in focus is still controlled by something else.

The process relies on a circle of attention-interpretation and so on and so forth. So merely training attention without changing associations and interpretations may not be very helpful for some people.

It's important to understand that realism is an "interpretation" stage. Before we get there, we selectively _attend_ to and process stimuli. It is at this attention stage, and usually for (personally) emotional stimuli that depression can affect the things which we "see" (attend to).

Biases in attention and interpretation in adolescents with varying levels of anxiety and depression https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/02699931.2017.1...

Well put. Apple _pushes_ OS updates to OEMs/Telcos. Google _hopes_ the OEMs/Telcos _pull_ the updates.

The lagging updates has nothing to do with users, it's a corollary of Google having strategically chosen to build a fragmented ecosystem, whereas Apple built their walled off garden.

Apple can incentivise updates much better because they control the whole ecosystem. To achieve this, Google would need to somehow _force_ OEMs to update Android, but the fragmentation makes this a herculean task.

That is the point though - fragmentation on Android. Keeping an old device should not mean you get "stuck" with an old OS - I have the latest OS on my 2013 Macbook.

Here're a couple videos about Prof Wolfe's method:

Wheat Populations at Wakelyns Agroforestry Farm https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EDV_tLmeeFE

The story of Wakelyns Agroforestry https://vimeo.com/256082580

Or perhaps the new Mac Pro is a reincarnation of the Lisa cock-up.

Keep your dough warm and cosy by wrapping it up. Conversely, if you live in a hot climate, put your dough in the fridge so as not to overproof it.

>>A very big issue is that they assume a linear correlation between transferred data and power use.

Right, so they do have to make lots of assumptions (same as all reports I've seen that are trying to estimate carbon footprint) - e.g., about the type of network, the device, the energy mix supplying DCs etc etc. For instance, only 2% of networks in a country like Germany go over fibre, rest is copper. In Italy lots of people outside major cities use LTE for regular Internet access - absolutely insane in terms of energy use.

>>any report that tries to tell me Google or Amazon, who spend millions on DC energy improvements, are wasting orders of magnitude of energy more, is not a serious report.

You're talking past the point here, seems to me. The report is _not_ claiming that any specific technology is "wasting energy" in terms of efficiency - it poses the question of whether this energy is spent "wisely", seeing that supposedly the world is trying to reduce global emissions, and the consumption of say DCs or online video is growing constantly. Surely, not an unreasonable question to be raised, don't you think?

Amazon may be efficient but their energy comes mostly from non-renewable sources. On a scale of 1-10 how important do you think this use of dirty energy is?

>>No, I'm literally counting those requirements. Hence routers + server (+100% for overhead, like cooling).

I would not say you're "counting", you're rather doing a back-of-the-envelope calculation with eye-balled numbers.

These estimations are difficult by nature. I don't "trust" the report per se, but they do provide sources, from which I can inform myself. Which is more than I can say about your calculations, which come without sources.

Digital tech is one of the fastest growing carbon polluters, and data centres alone account for almost 50% of the emissions. Now, the specific attribution to online video may be less clear-cut, but the trends have been replicated in multiple studies. You may also be interested in this recent report: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S095965261...

Can you point me to this inconsistency? >>Why do you trust that report? The numbers don't even make sense; just as an example, dividing the watched VoD time by the consumed VoD data, you get 24Mb/s, yet they say on the same row, "Average Bitrate : 3 Mbps". That's a 8x difference!

You're forgetting about networks' and data centres' energy requirements. A recent report estimates currently use of the carbon footprint of digital technologies is about 4% of global emissions, and in a worst case scenario by 2025, digital technologies may amount to 7% of global carbon emissions. For reference, global emissions as of 2018 grew to 37 billion tonnes CO2 equivalent.

>>Digital technologies now emit 4% of greenhouse gas emissions (GHG), and its energy consumption is increasing by 9% a year. [...] only one form of digital use, online video, generates 60% of world data flows and thus over 300 million tons of CO2 per year. This use is far from being “dematerialized”. On the contrary, it represents 20% of the greenhouse gas emissions of all digital devices (use and production included), and 1% of global emissions, i.e. as much as Spain.

https://theshiftproject.org/en/article/unsustainable-use-onl...

The worst part is most of this packaging is really high quality - I've reused paper bags and what not endlessly, it'd take ages for the stuff to fall apart. Mottainai.

The Internet works fine for getting good information on fast-changing things - like programming. Otherwise, I'd stick to libraries (the book ones).

Unfortunately, while we're staring at the "Miasma", the real miasma has been wreaking havoc in the real world - climate change. And the Internet is literally contributing to this miasma now with online video traffic for entertainment burning up data centres and networks around the world.