Don’t be distracted by the shiny suburbs — pay attention to the ideas contained within the broader comment.

My favorite example is to describe a suburb. A lot of people in the world do not know how dystopian an American suburb is: many residents do not know their neighbors, acquiring food requires driving a car or paying someone else to drive, there exists a strict separation from nature/outdoors, depression and other preventable illness rates are high, life expectancy in some regions is declining, there is no plaza/piazza/"downtown." And yet, there are all of these buildings with concrete and glass (and vinyl siding) and more, with plumbing and electricity and often natural gas. The suburb despite its immense resources is simply not subject to a design process and not well-implemented.

This is the deal that Americans unwittingly signed up for. It is not a very good deal, and if we were willing to more intelligently engage our political processes we could — as the article suggests — have a much more favorable arrangement. However, if Americans writ large remain ignorant to how good it could be, the healthy political engagement will not materialize.

So here is a contrasting perspective, shared in hopes of spurring some healthy negotiation from my fellow Americans -> Imagine walkable residential neighborhoods with cafes/restaurants/shops where neighbors interact and by interacting reduce premature mortality, education is not just free but comes with a humble stipend, more than half the population commutes via passive transit, retail businesses are allowed to operate at almost any size, there is a guaranteed basic income for anyone disabled or simply unlucky, neighbors share resources like food and tools, police are trained and police officer candidates are screened to prevent those with exceptionally low IQ's from entering the field, administrators go to prison for violating laws, traffic systems are routinely redesigned and upgraded for safety and efficiency... And if any of this sounds like a pipe dream then I urge the skeptics to travel – every example above has been successfully implemented somewhere, in Thailand or Switzerland or Japan etc.

Naivety is the common trait that currently holds America back from what it really quite easily could accomplish.

1. Apple/Google exposure notifications during the latest pandemic. 2. The Signal Protocol. 3. Differential Privacy (DWork et al) deployed by the US Census and Apple/Google. 4. Examine David Chaum’s body of work. 5. PIR motion sensors. 6. Elder care monitors. 7. Cities selecting lidar over cameras in traffic applications (motivated by privacy). 8. Retail foot-traffic counters. 9. Stickfigure/silhouette masking in Japanese elder care recordings. 10. Those traffic signs that read, “your speed is X.” 11. On-air or active-session indicators in recording studios.

Jeez it turns out that when you go looking for examples of designed-for-privacy monitors they are EVERYWHERE. Sounds to me like it is a completely reasonable expectation.

The purpose is very clear: reduce roadway mortality by reducing distracted driving. Frankly, I want OTHER PEOPLE to have this system in their car, while they are driving around me. Half of the cars I've driven over the past 3 or so years feature this system, and it is a good one: only occasionally invoked, and effective at observing driver attention. I'm very glad that my family members drive cars with this system.

Now to the privacy concern – yes, that is absolutely a concern. While generally my solution is to have no cameras at all, surely there are other solutions. Car makers have an incredible ability to spy on their customers, and rather than making that impossible by dumbing down the cars, I'd hope lawmakers and public advocates can devise solutions that allow both safe cars and secure data practices. This is not a case where safety in one domain needs to be traded for safety in another.

How much should the essay be expanded? Surely we don't want a 1:1 scale model of reality. We probably should not factor in the conductivity of water and compare against the cost of 1 liter of milk; although if I wanted to attack the integrity of the essay I might lament those factors' absence.

Snark aside, I like that the author chose to compare Switzerland, Germany, and the US. It elegantly illustrated the similarities and differences.

> "That's not a capitalism problem"

It literally is a capitalism problem, as clarified by the essay; capitalism requires competition to work, and the essay eloquently describes how to accomplish competition in internet service provision.

(Also, what are you talking about, California with "shit internet"?)

This is a perfect example of my earlier comment: you are talking around the subject, cynically dismissing the point of the essay without even addressing it.

The US really does have a capitalism crisis with declining competition — it does not require any form of special intelligence to see that.

Switzerland really does have vastly superior infrastructure — it does not take some stroke of brilliance to see that.

The essay elegantly articulates the why. Even if the anti-public commentariat doesn’t like Switzerland’s strong governance, even if there is a varying spread of speeds/competition or whatever else is being measured, even if one small country is out-performing a big one on many metrics… it doesn’t change the underlying insights of the essay, insights that the US desperately needs to understand.

(Also, the internet connection actually is phenomenally good.)

(I share your cynicism/pessimism regarding the state of the web right now, but as a realist I insist on recognizing continuous change and try to personally overcome the common “end state” fallacy/delusion.)

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48750579

Points: 7

# Comments: 7

"Fully closing" a process is not necessarily cleaner than letting the system allocate intelligently, despite what one's puritanical upbringing might make them believe. (Consider how artists often need a messy space to optimally hold their processes.)

Recall the notion of a bottleneck, and this distinction will become clear. Those prior technological changes never inverted a bottleneck, and this one does.

A question for economists... It seems plainly clear to me that information and information processing is commodifying (for the first time in human history?). Without the age-old bottlenecks at the top of the value chain, capital will surely flow downwards, right?