“Make it your goal to life a quiet life, minding your own business and working with your hands, just as we instructed you before. Then people who are not believers will respect the way you live, and you will not need to depend on others.”

Admittedly I haven’t made much of a search, but various search engines and autocorrects seem really convinced that I mean “defragmenter” instead of “fragmenter,” despite myself…

It reminds me of Neue Grafik/Swiss Style, and Vignelli:

https://designreviewed.com/series/neue-grafik-new-graphic-de...

https://www.printmag.com/featured/swiss-style-principles-typ...

https://www.designculture.it/interview/massimo-vignelli.html

https://andrewclark.co.uk/all-media/the-vignelli-canon

I think what made me throw in the towel was “Figure 2 — Two Instruments, One Shape” [0]. That chart comparing when contracts reset. Weirdly consistent norms! [looks at the sourcing] Oh… it’s… not from data at all… it’s just notional…

Is there anything here other than “the people financing the factory are betting that it’ll be able to sell what it makes once it’s built”?

I mean… isn’t “an instrument that splits time in two” kind of… what capital financing is? And this risk is what earns investors their interest, and the rest of the financial system involves different ways for people to calibrate their bets on the risk materializing?

Including derivative instruments that allow investors to smear out the point-in-time “cliffs” this writer is concerned about? If you think the revenue is never going to come, you can bet on that now. Or go into the distressed datacenter acquisition business to prepare! Conversely if Payment Day comes and you think they just need a couple more months, you can adjust the loan or make them a new loan to cover those first few months’ payments, etc., right? Since both parties stand to lose if it blows up completely, unless it’d be worth more to sell to somebody else?

These are also not individual homeowners’ “investments.” The risk is coordinated, and it’s big, but we know that already, right? Yes we know the revenue, yes it’s different from the costs of paying down their capital investments, yes both are reported on the financial disclosures.

How is the claim here any stronger than “all this depends on them actually being able to sell this crap once they get it built”?

[0] https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!-2DS!,f_auto,q_auto:...

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=N0VrHQ-cHUA&

It doesn’t really bother me. At many of the places I work and volunteer, our norm is to establish a rota, so as not to shove the job onto whoever’s lowest paid, least experienced, or most willing to be bullied into it.

If a muscular Soviet art scene embarrassed the Americans into juicing up their own art scene, isn’t that good and healthy for both?

I can’t imagine that kind of race to the bottom is too fun for the low level employers laboring under it. It sounds like gaming the system involves a lot of operational stress. And a manager who’s willing to cheat to screw the people above or beside them tends to be willing to screw the people beneath them too—whether the manager got that way on their own or whether the system forced them into it.

I could especially see it working to the low-level employees’ disadvantage if “the metrics” “prove” they don’t need as much help in order to “hit their numbers.”

But as long as everyone else is doing it, they realistically have no choice but to join in the chaos or be culled. That’s a letter the low-level employees can’t write themselves without jeopardizing themselves, but that an outside party could.

Applying group statistics to judge individual people is almost never proper, and lies at the root of an awful lot of inhumanity. I hope and imagine the women in question are capable of thinking (and judging) for themselves.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domestic_violence_in_lesbian_r...

[1] https://www.cawc.org/news/socioeconomic-risk-factors-for-dom...

[2] https://bjs.ojp.gov/violent-victimization-race-or-hispanic-o...

[3] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10087409/#hsc14028-...

What, you don’t like “sharing”? It would be selfish not to “share”!

Truly the move from “send copies to” to “share” is one of the great linguistic dirty tricks the social-media-era firms have pulled.

Especially here, where what’s being “shared” is, in a meaningful sense, operational control and enforcement prerogative.

And don’t get me started on the minimizing formulation “third-party companies and federal agencies”…

And plus, their duty is to a higher cause! All humanity needs them to win, so that the superintelligence is “aligned” to their superior values… like “all’s fair in love and war”! (/s)

…rumblings of “divine mandate” in there somewhere…

If it were anybody but @lazide I’d have flagged it too, but… I can’t help but grimace and nod.

To hazard a loosely-informed guess at their subtext… and politely ignoring your opening salvo of calorie-free populism… I’m not speaking from a place of certainty, but my impression is that there seem to be elements of “not even wrong” here. Some contra- lines of argument:

* code, especially in the huge fundamental aspects, tends to flow from the NEC downward, rather than from municipal experiments in playing with literal fire. Not insurmountable, I guess, but it seems like a pretty big chicken-and-egg kind of obstacle to your proposed course of action;

* individual household demand is several orders of magnitude removed from the considerations informing grid design and operations;

* the last thing a grid needs is a meaningful amount of random feed-in that it can’t centrally (and near-instantly) manage;

* the costs of home-scale labor/permits/whatever are only the biggest ones from the perspective of toting up individual homeowners considering uneconomical projects, not from utility-scale (much less whole-polity-scale) scratchwork… would an army of volunteer homeowners’ labor really still outperform specialist labor installing hundreds-of-homes’ worth of capacity per day at an energy facility somewhere?

* the thing holding back the “explosion of products,” consumerist-salvation overtones aside, seems more likely to be {physics vs the existing built environment} than permits—that, plus the lack of a mass market;

* one barrier to “plug and play” is that said plugs are safe only because of an interlocking set of assumptions upstream of said plugs—which definitely do not contemplate feeding back in whole-home current from a random convenience outlet on your front porch;

* Rate tiers are an economic device to influence consumption patterns under the status quo. As the Californians are learning, there’s a hard floor on the price of “having a grid” vs “not having a grid”; as consumption patterns shift, rate schemes can and must shift too;

* building codes care about safety, grids and ISOs and energy providers care about capacity and stability. Players on grids can realize enormous economies of scale with respect to pretty much any generation or storage technology. The bottleneck you describe is…

I dunno, man… the only bottleneck to energy too cheap to meter is fusion, obviously all we have to do is just go crack fusion and we’ll have a fusion pot on every stove!

I love your sense of empowerment; I’d encourage you to bring it to bear at a scale where it matters— much bigger than a home, much smaller than a whole polity… I think there are benefits to decentralization and to independence but I don’t think those are the benefits you’re emphasizing here.

If I recall correctly they’re not certified for use during taxi takeoff and landing, I’d imagine due to orderly-evacuation kinds of requirements.

Linkbait title as published: “Google Just Ruined One of Its Most Important Tools”

Corresponding Google press release—I’m not sure whether or not we’d consider it a more appropriate/neutral source:

https://blog.google/products-and-platforms/products/earth/na...

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49137405

Points: 5

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