There are two ways to improve fuel economy. The first is technology (fuel injection, aerodynamics, hybrids, etc.). The second is to make the vehicle smaller.
The first one is a trade off against cost, but the market is already pretty good at handling that one on its own. Fuel injection and aerodynamics don't add much to the cost of a car, so pretty much everything has that now. Hybrid batteries are more expensive, but the price is coming down, and as it does the percentage of hybrid cars is going up. You don't really need a law for this; people buy it when the fuel savings exceeds the cost of the technology.
The second one is a trade off against things like cargo capacity. If you say that "cars" have to get >35 MPG at the point before hybrids are cost effective, or keep raising the number as the technology improves, it's essentially just a ban on station wagons. And then what do the people who used to buy station wagons do instead? They buy SUVs.
The entire premise is dumb. If you want more efficient vehicles then do a carbon tax which gets refunded to the population as checks, and then let people buy whatever they want, but now the break even point for hybrids and electric cars makes it worth it for more people.
> How do you square those facts with your view here?
"Richer" countries generally have a higher cost of living. If you get paid twice as much but each sq ft of real estate costs 50% more, what does that do when someone with multiple kids needs 2000 sq ft instead of 750? Worse, what if you get paid twice as much but real estate costs three times as much because land owners keep lobbying for restrictive zoning to impose artificial scarcity?
Maybe it's more important that you be able to get a three bedroom to begin with than that the three bedrooms on the market have new kitchens; more important if you can't afford to send your kids to college in a country where a higher percentage of the people they're competing with in the labor market will have a degree.
> Statistically immigrants from Latin America have lower crime rates than the average American. It is possible to increase population AND decrease the crime rate by allowing immigrants into the country.
Except that Latin America also has a fertility rate below population replacement and taking working-aged people from countries that are already in that position is likely to be extremely destabilizing, not to mention unsustainable because it implies those countries would be undergoing long-term depopulation.
We need to figure out why people aren't having more kids everywhere and there's not really anything else for it.
> Even if the back door wasn't there, you wouldn't want nation state hackers anywhere near telecoms since they're critical infrastructure.
This is only because of the design defect that "lawful intercept" requires.
Telecoms should be completely untrusted because everything is end-to-end encrypted. Compromising a telecom shouldn't allow you to do anything other than bring about a denial of service, and even that would only be effective against anyone who didn't have a redundant link with a different provider, which all actually critical infrastructure should. And a denial of service is conspicuous, as opposed to spying on required-to-be-unencrypted traffic which can continue undetected indefinitely and is a significant national security risk.
Our need to not be spied on is greater than our need to spy on ourselves and requiring designs that assume the opposite of that is a major self-imposed security vulnerability.
Even if let's say lawful intercept is done away with and calls are end-to-end encrypted, the telco would still be in control of key management and distribution... and if those clowns can't secure lawful intercept, why do you think the key distribution infrastructure would fare any better?
Why should they be in charge of key management? They should be in charge of physical plant and leave all of that to someone else. We should be discontinuing the legacy PSTN and making "phone" an IETF protocol where your "phone number" is user@domain.
It seems like the answer is pretty obvious. That subset of the community stops using it and uses something else, and the others either follow them or don't.
You, if you're not in the first group, can continue to use both to communicate with everyone, but some of them lose the ability to communicate with each other.
The ideal outcome is for everyone to stop using the intolerable thing and switch to a tolerable thing. That's even what often happens over time, but not always immediately. Probably do anything you can to make it happen faster.
Whether AI training in general is fair use and whether an AI that spits out a verbatim copy of something from the training data has produced an infringing copy are two different questions.
If there is some copyrighted art in the background in a scene from a movie, maybe that's fair use. If you take a high resolution copy of the movie, extract only the art from the background and want to start distributing that on its own, what do you expect then?
> I've seen many discussions stating patent hoarding has gone too far, and also that copyright for companies have gone way too far (even so much that Amazon can remove items from your purchase library if they lose their license to it).
The main arguments against the current patent system are these:
1) The patent office issues obvious or excessively broad patents when it shouldn't and then you can end up being sued for "copying" something you've never even heard of.
2) Patents are allowed on interfaces between systems and then used to leverage a dominant market position in one market into control over another market, which ought to be an antitrust violation but isn't enforced as one.
The main arguments against the current copyright system are these:
1) The copyright terms are too long. In the Back To The Future movies they went 30 years forward from 1985 to 2015 and Hollywood was still making sequels to Jaws. "The future" is now more than 10 years in the past and not only are none of the Back To The Future movies in the public domain yet, neither is the first Jaws from 1970, nor even the movies that predate Jaws by 30 years. It's ridiculous.
2) Many of the copyright enforcement mechanisms are draconian or susceptible to abuse. DMCA 1201 is used to constrain the market for playback devices and is used by the likes of Google and Apple to suppress competition for mobile app distribution and by John Deere to lock farmers out of their tractors. DMCA 512 makes it easy and essentially consequence-free to issue fraudulent takedowns and gives platforms the incentive to execute them with little or no validation, leading to widespread abuse. The statutory damages amounts in the Copyright Act are unreasonably high, especially for non-commercial use, and can result in absurd damages calculations vastly exceeding any plausible estimate of actual damages.
LLMs don't solve any of that. Making it easier to copy recent works that would still be under copyright even with reasonable copyright terms is not something we needed help with. If you wanted to copy something still under copyright, that was never that hard, and doing that when you don't know about it or want it is actively unhelpful.
There are much better (worse!) examples of ridiculously long copyrights.
Take Shaw's play Arms and the Man, written in 1894. In most life +70 countries it only went out of copyright in 2020. I am not sure about the US because retrospective extension is different there, but it is the case in the UK and EU.
You give the developer time to develop a patch. Once the patch is out, attackers can already deduce the vulnerability by looking at what changed and at that point you either want to immediately install the patch or you want to know what the vulnerability actually is so you can do something to mitigate it if there is some reason you can't immediately install the patch.
And it would even still work for the CEO, they would just have to charge more than $1.
The real problem is we don't have a low-friction digital payment system that allows individuals to automate sending payment requests for small amounts of money to each other without requiring everyone to sign up for a merchant account with a financial bureaucracy.
> The real problem is we don't have a low-friction digital payment system that allows individuals to automate sending payment requests for small amounts of money to each other without requiring everyone to sign up for a merchant account with a financial bureaucracy.
>First you have to make it low-friction. If I want Joe Average to send me $1 in cryptocurrency, how is he getting $1 in cryptocurrency to send me?
Absolutely. You're 1000% correct. Cryptocurrency is way too high friction for stuff like that. When I wish to spend crypto, I need to:
[If you don't have an exchange account already, you'll need the 0.x steps too!]
0.0 Create an account on an exchange which is legally allowed to operate in your state/country;
0.1 Provide all sorts of KYC/AML info including photos of yourself and your government ID;
0.2 Wait hours/days/weeks for the exchange to "validate" your KYC/AML info and allow you to purchase crypto;
1. Log in to an exchange which is actually allowed to operate in the place where one resides;
2. Purchase Bitcoin or other coin the exchange deems appropriate (leaving aside the hefty fee charged for using fiat currency/traditional credit card);
3. Wait days/weeks until the exchange allows you to transfer the purchased cryptocurrency out of your exchange-hosted wallet;
4. Transfer crypto to a wallet you actually control;
5. Convert the crypto purchased on the exchange to the crypto coin required for whatever your purpose may be;
6. Transmit the crypto to the destination wallet.
Total time (not including setting up the exchange account, which can take anywhere from 1-10 days): 3-10 days.
All the setup is no worse than setting up a bank account
And technically it can be avoided through back channels if you know someone who already has it - can just pay them cash or whatever and they can send crypto to you
Crypto is very easy to transfer once you have a wallet
Its the exchange to/from real world currency where the friction is.
> All the setup is no worse than setting up a bank account
Which is a huge pain in the butt. If someone invented a new lower-spam email ecosystem that required everyone to make a new bank account, very few people would join.
I would say something about a combined account but many countries have already figured out free bank transfers without needing crypto so maybe do that?
> No, the perverse incentive is that there will be RepoCoin, and the people involved will be incentivized to make the price of that as high as possible.
Isn't this problem unrelated to cryptocurrency?
There will be the US dollar, and the people involved will be incentivized to keep its value high, e.g. by pressuring or invading other countries to prevent them from switching to other currencies. Or they'll be incentivized to adopt policies that cause consumer and government debt to become unreasonably excessive to create a large enough pool of debts denominated in that currency that they can create an inordinate amount of it without crashing its value.
Or on the other side of the coin, there will be countries with currencies they knowingly devalue, either because they can force the people in that country to accept them anyway or because devaluing their currency makes their exports more competitive and simultaneously allows them to spend the currency they printed.
If anything cryptocurrency could hypothetically be better at reducing these perverse incentives, because if good rules are chosen at the outset and get ossified into the protocol then it's harder for bad actors to corrupt something that requires broad consensus to change.
Sure, but your average developer doesn't have a lot of agency in if the US invades another country in order to increase the value of the coin they got for having a PR merged.
But with crypto they do. See for example all the BAGS coins that get created for random opensource projects and the behavior that occurs because of that.
Just use a stablecoin, don't float a "utility token" those things are stupid. Have a smart contract receive a USDC deposit. If the maintainer "times out" reviewing your PR, the contract returns all the deposit. If the maintainer does not accept your PR, the contract burns 0.5x of the deposit and returns the rest. Maintainers can decide to turn off the time-out for very popular projects where you probably would have devs trying to spam PRs for fame/recognition, but hopefully the deposit price can accurately reflect the amount of spam the project gets.
Utility tokens are fundamentally equities and you need to firewall equity from an organization the same way companies in most market economies are regulated.
The average developer also doesn't have a lot of agency with respect to how major chains like Ethereum are run either, but they can use them.
Creating your own chain just because you can rather than because you actually have a reason to implement the technology in a different way than anybody else should be disfavored and viewed with suspicion.
The first one is a trade off against cost, but the market is already pretty good at handling that one on its own. Fuel injection and aerodynamics don't add much to the cost of a car, so pretty much everything has that now. Hybrid batteries are more expensive, but the price is coming down, and as it does the percentage of hybrid cars is going up. You don't really need a law for this; people buy it when the fuel savings exceeds the cost of the technology.
The second one is a trade off against things like cargo capacity. If you say that "cars" have to get >35 MPG at the point before hybrids are cost effective, or keep raising the number as the technology improves, it's essentially just a ban on station wagons. And then what do the people who used to buy station wagons do instead? They buy SUVs.
The entire premise is dumb. If you want more efficient vehicles then do a carbon tax which gets refunded to the population as checks, and then let people buy whatever they want, but now the break even point for hybrids and electric cars makes it worth it for more people.
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