sapote

This is a topic that has a lot of noise but there are two relatively easy to explain things to tell people (I am discounting the usual 27% of the population who will never be interested):

1. There is a policy that is simple to explain and has some bipartisan appeal: Fee and Dividend (also known as the Clean Energy Dividend). It puts an increasing price on carbon per ton at the source (e.g., oil well, port of entry, etc.) and distributes 100% of the proceeds to the people. That's it. No tricks, no back-door subsidies. And because it is redistributed it's also not a tax in the usual sense, which helps win over those who are open to climate policy but anti-tax.

2. Things are indeed more dire than even most climate aware folks realize. Watch climate scientist Kevin Anderson break down the numbers -- it's sobering how disconnected our climate discourse is from reality:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BX1r8OAmz9I

There are studies that have found that the net carbon impact of such desert solar arrays can actually be detrimental -- that is, installing the solar arrays in the desert causes an imbalance in desert soil ecology causing a release of soil carbon that exceeds the carbon benefit of the solar array. Here's one article on it, but I'm sure you can find others:

http://www.sfgate.com/science/article/California-solar-proje...

That's correct.

Credit where I think it's due -- Bruce Schneier was one of the first to introduce the metaphor of feudalism in this context:

https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2012/12/feudal_sec.ht...

Two things:

* Sure, seeds germinate with water and warmth. But that's true today. In the words of an Australian farmer quoted in a research paper a few years ago: "Mate, we don't need a chip to tell us the soil's dry."

* There are other paradigms of agriculture that are actually sustainable. Agroecology is a good example of an alternative scientific paradigm for agriculture, one that thinks of agriculture in ecological terms.

And largely these sensors are unnecessary. Such "precision agriculture" efforts are just doubling down on a broken agricultural paradigm.

Hmm. I think I'd agree only to the second half of that. Just considering Kennedy's examples alone there are many things that cannot be bought at any price: consider the joy of a child's play or the integrity of public officials.

I was responding to this statement:

Everything that is desired takes resources to get

Kennedy made the good point (as others have, less eloquently) that there are many things that are desired that neither take resources to get nor are measured by conventional metrics.

In my view that's a misconception, one that's quite common in the tech world (and also to a certain extent in the broader culture). Robert Kennedy commented on this (in a different context) in a speech in 1968:

And this is one of the great tasks of leadership for us, as individuals and citizens this year. But even if we act to erase material poverty, there is another greater task, it is to confront the poverty of satisfaction - purpose and dignity - that afflicts us all. Too much and for too long, we seemed to have surrendered personal excellence and community values in the mere accumulation of material things. Our Gross National Product, now, is over $800 billion dollars a year, but that Gross National Product - if we judge the United States of America by that - that Gross National Product counts air pollution and cigarette advertising, and ambulances to clear our highways of carnage. It counts special locks for our doors and the jails for the people who break them. It counts the destruction of the redwood and the loss of our natural wonder in chaotic sprawl. It counts napalm and counts nuclear warheads and armored cars for the police to fight the riots in our cities. It counts Whitman's rifle and Speck's knife, and the television programs which glorify violence in order to sell toys to our children. Yet the gross national product does not allow for the health of our children, the quality of their education or the joy of their play. It does not include the beauty of our poetry or the strength of our marriages, the intelligence of our public debate or the integrity of our public officials. It measures neither our wit nor our courage, neither our wisdom nor our learning, neither our compassion nor our devotion to our country, it measures everything in short, except that which makes life worthwhile. And it can tell us everything about America except why we are proud that we are Americans.

https://www.jfklibrary.org/Research/Research-Aids/Ready-Refe...

It's a moving metaphor but of course cells within us have the same genome whereas different humans have different genomes. So it's hard to consider them part of one living system, unless one accepts the Gaia Hypothesis.

Except recent studies have found that even our own cells often have different DNA from each other (not just due to mutation), and that what makes us function is a careful dance of countless microbes.

And my favorite group, the ones confusing technology with science

This. It's far too common here at HN.

That's actually a feature, not a bug -- 11th hour news stories are rarely accurate, seldom have sufficient context, etc.

Given that, I wonder how has Oregon has managed to have such smooth elections.

I remember someone saying here that a key shift in framing in Germany was to call them voting computers rather than voting machines (since the broader public understands that computers can be hacked). I think we might adopt that as well.

I was expecting that response. The only solution, then, is to ban all mail in ballots. Right now California, for example, has optional mail-in voting. Wouldn't you expect that anyone who can be coerced to vote some way could be coerced whether the mail-in voting is optional or mandatory?

Agreed. And to add to it, we should switch to a system in which we have:

* 100% mail-in paper ballots, like Oregon -- no long lines, no games about which districts get which machines, no polling place intimidation

* Mandatory random-sample hand recounts (this has been shown to only need to be on the order of thousands of ballots out of millions for most races, given the statistical confidence you get with it)

"The anti-use would be in any sort of cryptographic implementation, since any "entropy" you'd be gaining by using this data as a source of randomness is completely counteracted by the fact that the source is known. Randomness becomes deterministic once the source of the randomness is disclosed and broadcast ... "

In this design, that's true. But Rabin's hyper-encryption is an example of how a strongly secure encryption system can be built using a very high-bandwidth source of public randomness.

Organic food raised like industrial food will often take more land. But organic food raised in polyculture can sometimes take dramatically less space. Look up Land Equivalent Ratio and intercropping.

Agreed. I'm surprised at the support for this article...

I somehow got downvoted for saying that growing one's own food is a great alternative to the narrow perspective the article is pushing.

It is free. The time you spend in the garden is time you would have otherwise spent exercising in some other form and (to a lesser extent) shopping.

This article smacks of narrow-minded contrarianism for its own sake.

The cheapest thing one can do -- and healthier than the option of eating Lucky Charms daily -- is to grow one's own food. The space requirements are actually tiny -- it's possible to grow all of one's own veggies in something like 300 sq ft of space (in a mid-latitude region) and all one's own calories in something like 800 sq ft of space. It's cheaper to do it without sprays too, so you end up organic by default. I'd recommend interested folks check out ... Grow More Vegetables ... by John Jeavons and One Circle by David Duhon for how to do space-efficient veggie gardening.

Edited to add: I should have mentioned: I'm opposed to the fad diets that the article is attacking as much as I am to the contrarian posture the article takes. Growing food and eating it, and eating a variety of such homegrown foods with a mix of other things, seems sensible to me, and it's also cheaper than either highly-processed industrial food products or fad-oriented yuppie foods.

Yeah, like I said in another comment, I'm focused on CS research -- this other stuff, while it might be called research for the sake of the story, isn't the same thing. And the story neatly omits any mention of how much money Google has put into law research vs. CS research (for example).

I'm talking about CS research. I don't really consider law research and public policy research as real research -- that's lobbying and conflating the two is just for a headline.

Edited to add: the WSJ went on a fishing expedition -- while the story is on a few law grant tidbits that they could make into a headline, they actually were trying to get access to the private email of many CS professors. What probably happened is that they got some of that email (which I don't think they should have access to, but that's another story) and found there was nothing interesting to write about, so they found a few lobbying tidbits and painted it all with a broad brush.

That's absolutely not the case. Government-funded research review processes are actually more prescriptive and restrictive and political than Google is. I know this first hand. It shouldn't be that way, but it is. Oddly, what ends up happening in a lot of government-funded research review systems is that those reviewing proposals are trying to guess "what kind of research would industry like to see?" so you get the worst of both worlds.

Also, Google is largely funding CS research -- this isn't the kind of thing where there's a double blind study going on. It's usually work on a new algorithm or protocol or architecture or ... -- things that are constructive engineering tasks that can be replicated by others when the researchers' papers are published.

This reflects a lack of understanding about academic research. All researchers look for future funding from the same sources, and the same effect occurs. Oddly, given the small size of Google grants (compared to other sources) and the fact that it's rare to get them one after another, they really are very close to no-strings-attached grants.

Also, Google grants, oddly, are actually less intellectually restrictive than NSF grants. Sure, neither type of grant places any restriction, but there is actually more of a chilling effect of the NSF process than the Google one. The process Google uses for giving out grants is if there is a senior engineer or two who like your proposal, you get some funds (I'm simplifying a bit, but it's actually not much more complex than that). The NSF, on the other hand, is much more likely to consider things that I think most folks would agree shouldn't be considered, such as the political views of senior government officials.

I don't deny that Google has engineers more interested in certain problems than others, but the work that gets funded results in open research papers, so people are free to look at the work even if they don't work at Google. And that's better than Google just hiring the researchers -- as they and many other companies do -- and keeping the work for themselves.

I know that the story is nonsense -- I am part of a research group that's gotten such grants before. This is basically a story aiming to confuse those who don't understand how research works. Google is funding work that aligns with what they do, but the grants they give are no-strings-attached and are tiny. (Government grants are much bigger.)

Sure, Google only funds things that are related to what they care about, but of course that's the case. And these days the NSF is partnering with Intel, VMware, and others to give out grants on things that align with those companies.

The WSJ has been sniffing around for this for a long time, and actually was trying to get professors' private email claiming that their email should be in the public domain. (I don't know if they succeeded.) I actually see this as part of the larger trend of trying to discredit research.

Edited to add: the story focuses on policy and law research, which is easier to attack, and I don't have any interest in defending that. But I'm willing to bet that the amount of grant money Google gives out for that work is probably tiny compared to funding they give for CS research. And it's the latter I'm familiar with.

Might work on the East Coast or in water-intensive gardens elsewhere, but in California almost any reasonable garden will have a layer of rough mulch to reduce evaporation (and suppress weeds). Maybe this robot could navigate my mulch but I'm doubtful.

Random-sample verified paper balloting is probably the hardest to hack system there is, and is super simple which matters in an election -- not only must the election be secure but everyone needs to trust that it is.

It's not an either-or situation. The apartment building can have many large, fast-growing deciduous (ideally fruit-bearing) trees planted on their sunny side.

And trees can make a big difference -- just think about the temperature drop when you step into a dense forest from an open meadow.

Simple but incomplete solution: plant a deciduous tree on the sunny side(s) of your house.