Oceans Yet to Burn

[Oceans Yet to Burn]

If large corporations had to carry insurance which paid out in the event of a security breach exposing users’ data, they might take it more seriously.  It converts the small annual risk of such a breach, which managers can gamble on, into a measurable monthly or annual cost which can be lowered through preventative measures.

[Oceans Yet to Burn]

[bambamramfan]

a reminder that the reason nuclear power has not grown in the US is not overzealous safety fears, but because building a plant is an extremely capital-intensive investment with a large tail risk of extremely high costs. (quotes you see about the cheapness of nuclear power are about the *marginal* cost of the power, not including the fixed costs like the plant.)

no one wants to insure that. so, the government has to subsidize nuclear power with below-rate insurance. which is akin to the government insuring major investment firms - usually they won’t have to pay out, but the one time they do, it will be ugly.

the states with a flourishing nuclear power industry (such as France) are characterized by more government involvement because that’s what it takes to subsidize such risks. nuclear power does not flourish in a free market.

[mitigatedchaos]

It isn’t the insurance. The US government would cover it if the price of the power were right. The issue is very cheap natural gas combined with uncertainty about the future price of renewables. A carbon price could make a big difference in the first. As for the second, there currently seems to be a saturation point on renewables before it starts needing too much backup power generation, and the real question is battery technology. That will remain uncertain.

[Oceans Yet to Burn]

huffingtonpost.com

Coming Home To A Trump Town

DELPHI, IND. — Flyover country is a term I’ve always hated. From a plane, the Midwestern fields look like an endless stretch of grids and circles, dotted...

[johnbrownsbodyy]

This is a pretty good article about the town next to the one I grew up in. I knew the young mayor, who is quoted in the article, as an even younger man, goofy and occasionally annoying to me, but definitely a good dude. I dated his sister and their family always made me feel accepted.

But there’s no hope here. Delphi is slightly bigger than my town, but it shrinks every year. As the article points out, there is an incredible generational gap here. It’s not just that the town is run down and kind of boring (beautiful as it actually is), there are also less and less opportunities to scrape a living out of the dirt or off the factory floor. There are sharp racial divisions as well, which this article doesn’t explore. The hog processing plant mentioned in the article employs a lot of immigrants and there is certainly some lingering resentment toward them, maybe for supposedly taking some of the few jobs, maybe for their inability or refusal to integrate. Probably both. The entire county is sharply segregated.

I really encourage reading this if you have a while. Living in small town America, at least there in central Indiana, feels a lot like dying- because that’s what it is. It’s the slow withering death of hope and promise.

Of course I’m not saying that I don’t think it’s worth living there. Having just moved out to Sandy, OR from Portland, I can say that I’ve actually really missed living in a rural area. The truth is, life itself is looking more and more bleak no matter where you are, so you should just stay wherever feels like home.

[isaacsapphire]

I’ve lived in towns that were slowly dying and in economically vibrant towns. There’s a difference, in the psychology, in the politics, in everything.

And, on paper, on a meta level, the Left absolutely should have something to offer the citizens of failing local communities.

But, the Left didn’t.

And, Indiana feels like dying, and it feels like nobody cares.

[marcusseldon]

I mean, what could the left have offered these communities that they didn’t already offer (even if they potentially failed to deliver on due to divided government)?

The standard Democratic politician supports more infrastructure spending, renegotiating trade deals, bolstering unions, job re-education programs, more funding for public schools (which would probably disproportionately benefit poor rural areas that can’t easily fund their own schools), bailing out the car manufacturers, tax incentives for rural development, more access to health care, and the (broadly defined) welfare state.

Sure, these communities probably were going to economically decline anyway even if all those policies were done 100% as their designers had hoped, but I don’t see anything short of extremely inefficient and absurd crony capitalist subsidies for companies to stay put and absurd regulations against automation saving these towns economically, and if those things were done they would amount to basically be a very large (indirect) handout for the very same people who despise handouts when smaller amounts of money than it would take to save these towns are given to black and brown people in the cities who are also struggling and feel like nobody cares.

Which is why I can’t help but conclude that the resentment of the left of these rural flyover communities is more (though not entirely) cultural/racial/religious/ethno-nationalist.

[bambamramfan]

It’s true there’s nothing (ie, not a lot) reasonable that technocratic center-leftism can offer dying communities. And because the Democratic party has a lot of fact-checking instincts that prevents outright lying, there’s not much they would.

But you don’t need to resort to ulterior motives to understand that people will vote for the party that DOES offer a solution (even if its a lie) over the one who says “we can’t solve your problem.”

And if a significant politically-dominant block of your country has an insoluble problem, then guess what, your country will keep voting for outright liars until something resolves their crisis.

A lot of the Trump angst focuses too much on specific American factors or the moral failings of various politicians in not reacting appropriately (it’s not the fault of Democratic messaging or their various small ball policy proposals). But we can see with the rise of an isolationist far-right across among almost every developed Western country, that it’s a fundamental reaction to trends across the whole world in the last few decades.

[marcusseldon]

I should clarify that I don’t think economic distress is not a factor in this, it absolutely is. Maybe I downplayed it above. I believe that it is a necessary condition for the rise of the populist-nationalist-isolationist right. It doesn’t seem to be sufficient to explain what has happened, though. Especially when poor immigrants and poor racial and religious minorities aren’t flocking to these populist parties despite equal or greater economic distress. Especially when it seems like education rather than income is more predictive of support of support for these parties.

There are a lot of lefty politicians who will pretend that technocratic center-leftism will save these communities, and offer it up as a solution, and yet that wasn’t the message that resonated. I don’t think (most of) these people are racist or xenophobic, at least not in the harsh colloquial sense of those words, but I just can’t explain Trump or Brexit or LePen or Alternative for Germany without there being some sort of intense cultural/demographic anxiety involved (not all of which is irrational, I do think for instance that Germany probably took in too many refugees). Why this anxiety crosses borders is simply that, for good and for ill, globalization and neoliberalism allow for more cultural and demographic change than is normal in the west.

[bambamramfan]

Yeah for certain there are a lot of center-left politicians offering lamppost solutions* when none might exist. And as we saw from America to Greece, much of the technocratic establishment is extremely eager to knee-cap far-left parties which precludes finding out whether their solutions would quell this uprising.

But the answer might be nihilism. In a society structured on identity-through-job, modernity (including increasing financialization, free trade, and automation) might just kill enough communities that the entire democratic consensus falls apart. I think it’s important to remove “having a job” as a necessary part of social identity (both for individuals and emergent structures like small towns) in the face of this capitalist revolution, but that’s not exactly easy to implement as a federalized governing agenda.

*As in when a drunk loses his keys on the street at night, and assumes they are under the lamppost, because if they aren’t he can’t find them anyway.

[mitigatedchaos]

Wage subsidies might have been able to do the trick, and economists like them.  They don’t seem to be on anyone’s radar, however, and the EITC is yearly which isn’t often enough to work.  

Some part of me suspects the reason they aren’t on peoples’ radars is that rural whites were used as the fulcrum for identity politics, but maybe they’re simultaneously too boring while being too left wing.

[Oceans Yet to Burn]

[argumate]

you: eww, I don’t want chemicals in my food!

an intellectual: everything you eat is made of chemicals.

another intellectual: “chemicals” as used in colloquial speech typically refers to isolated compounds created by industrial processes that are not commonly found in the natural environment, some of which we know are toxic to humans and have been banned for use in food production and some of which we still use but suspect are not conducive to good health.

[Oceans Yet to Burn]

The great thing about prison, in comparison to execution, is that you can always release someone if they’re still alive.

[Oceans Yet to Burn]

[thathopeyetlives]

Seriously. 

IT/IP Capitalism is well past incompatible with private property. 

The goverment should fdxorce Keurig to provide free reusable K-cup modules and compensate all Keurig owners for all the genuine K-cups they have ever bought since the DRM was introduced. 

Intel? Get your mask data, VHDL, process flow information, chipfab design documentation, etc on Github in 72 hours or we take it from you and put your criminal leadership in America Prison with the muggers and brutes. And then provide an independently verifiable way to kill the Mangement Engine to everybody. 

Everybody who ever had a device bricked? You’re fixing it, or replacing it. I don’t care if you have to go bankrupt calling up custom re-implementations for decade-old discontinued chips. My garnishment of your wages shall sit with you for seven times seven generations. 

Thou shalt not suffer software to be closed-source. And you shall simply have to find a way to deal with it. 

We did not oppose Communism with fire and sword in foreign lands to have a degraded shadow of its indignities enacted in our own country by self-interested corporations. 

[isaacsapphire]

This is an interesting approach, and one I find quite interesting. I am disinclined to find most attacks on IP very moving, since I know too many people who mostly seem profoundly offended that they can’t be free riders on the creative and technical efforts of others.

This approach focuses on ownership rights though, and more of what I consider “copy trolling” and otherwise engaging in a government enforced captured “razor business” with eg. Kcups, which doesn’t seem to outright forbid the inventor of the kcup system from continuing to sell the machines?

[thathopeyetlives]

Toning down the aggression yet another notch… 

The big thing I want to establish is that you can rent stuff, or you can sell it, but you can’t fake-sell it. More realistically, I propose a “hardware ownership act”  and heavy encouragement  of an abandonment license. 

(I have no idea whether this has the slightest chance of being constitutional. Doubt it.)

The abandonment license law would: 

- Make “dead” intellectual property that is not being used pass into the public domain. 

- Make patent trolling illegal (since it revolves around not using the IP)

- Require various documentation (not neccessarily full source, but definitely API documentation and permissions) to be released when manufacturer support (such as cloud servers or the sale of consumables) ends. 

The hardware ownership law would establish that if a piece of tangible hardware is sold to somebody for a lump sum without personally negotiated contracts, and the buyer is not required to relinquish it under any ordinary circumstances, then that piece of hardware is the alloidal property of the buyer. They have a fairly broad degree of rights to hack it, destroy it, reverse-engineer it, or use it in ways other than intended by the seller and the worst that the seller can do is to have the warranty and tech support department tell them to kindly shove it. They also have the right to be furnished with various documentation and not to have their hardware keep secrets from them (beyond very narrowly-drawn “root certificate” type stuff.)

Keurig can still sell coffemakers and K-cups. They can release new versions of coffeemakers with new types of K-cups and they will have a K-cup monopoly until knockoffs can catch up. They can void warranty for anybody who uses third party K-cups. 

But they can’t keep the interface totally secret and they especially can’t use licensing, IP law, or other methods to prevent people from making knock-off K-cups. 

They also can’t choke off third-party replacement parts as long as said parts are accurately labelled. 

The thing that specifically got me angry was Samsung bricking all of a specific model of phone. There was  reason behind this (the phone is a recalled product due to risk of exploding) but this is still to me a spectacular violation of the folk contract of selling durable goods, whatever the unnegotiated license terms state. 

Other things this is meant to target: 

- Modding or jailbreaking of all kinds. Google’s Nexus phones present a good example of how you can act liberally w/r/t this but still get many of the security benefits of a locked down system (basically, you can choose between “root access” and “locked-down, certified Google system” and change between them, but some features that rely on Google’s cloud infrastructure or auto-updates only work when locked/certified). 

- Microsoft going after people who tried to make a hacker’s driver for the Kinect (before they realized that they could make money on this)

- Modding/jailbreaking Playstations and the older Xboxes

- Hacking, decompilation, and the like of hardware drivers for various devices. 

- DRM on consumables and wear items for operating durable equipment (ink cartridges, 3D printer cartridges, K-cups, etc)

[mitigatedchaos]

Likewise, I’m typically suspicious of people who want to attack IP, but this proposal is quite interesting, and could shift market incentives away from planned obsolescence.