[HN Gopher] People had to be convinced of the usefulness of elec...
___________________________________________________________________
People had to be convinced of the usefulness of electricity
Author : olalonde
Score : 203 points
Date : 2023-03-19 15:16 UTC (7 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.smithsonianmag.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.smithsonianmag.com)
| photochemsyn wrote:
| Lightbulbs powered by electricity were a convincing app, and so
| was the electricity-powered washing machine and similar labor-
| saving appliances:
|
| https://penntoday.upenn.edu/news/how-appliance-boom-moved-mo...
|
| Notably, electrification of rural areas lagged well behind that
| of cities and towns until the Rural Electrification
| Administration was created in 1935:
|
| https://livingnewdeal.org/a-light-went-on-new-deal-rural-ele...
|
| > "The REA continued into the postwar era and helped the
| percentage of electrified farms in the United States rise from 11
| percent [1935] to almost 97 percent by 1960. The New Deal had
| helped rural America achieve near-total electrification."
|
| This is comparable to the situation with high-speed internet in
| the US at present:
|
| > "The Federal Communications Commission (FCC), a New Deal agency
| established in 1934, estimates that today a quarter of rural
| Americans and a third on tribal lands do not have access to
| broadband internet, defined as download speeds of at least 25
| megabytes a second. Fewer than 2 percent of urban dwellers have
| this same problem."
|
| This is what you get if you privatize and deregulate basic
| infrastructure services: huge holes in coverage and overpriced
| monopolistic control of the rest of it.
| hyperthesis wrote:
| Agree, infrastructure is worthless, applications are
| everything.
|
| Mr Edison is famous for "the lightbulb" (actually, "a"), but
| what he really did was lightbulbs + power stations (through
| General Electric).
|
| Mr Birdseye is famous for frozen fish, but what [the company
| who bought his patent] really did was frozen fish + freezers in
| supermarkets.
|
| The joke about the first telephone being the hardest sell
| (because there's no-one to call) has another problem, of no
| phone-lines, exchanges or (today's) cell-towers.
|
| \muse I wonder if a solution to holes/monopoly abuse is to ease
| entry-to-market? The standard incumbent response is to deny
| oxygen to entrants, by giving great deals at the low end (like
| today's "free tiers"). Though, historically, regulatory capture
| instead raises barriers to entry.
| photochemsyn wrote:
| I wouldn't say infrastructure is worthless, more that
| infrastructure creates new market opportunities, and without
| it, markets just won't function well. For example, good roads
| allow farmers to transport their produce to distant markets
| in all weather conditions, good electricity distribution
| means farmers start buying washing machines, better broadband
| means rural people might start buying online services and so
| on.
|
| Trying to game basic infrastructure for profits runs counter
| to this notion, and it's thus an area of the economy where
| government management makes the most sense.
| hyperthesis wrote:
| Applications are infrastructure's value - without produce
| to transport (or other applications), what value roads?
| Infrastructure is means to application ends.
|
| So yes, given benefiting applications, infrastructure
| improvements derive value.
|
| Their value is entirely derived. They have no intrinsic
| value. They are, in themselves, worthless.
|
| Just semantics.
|
| I tend to agree with your take on public infrastructure,
| but I haven't thought about it enough to form a definite
| opinion.
|
| \tangentially related: arguing metabolism pathways need to
| exist before genes can improve them
| https://www.quantamagazine.org/a-biochemists-view-of-
| lifes-o...
| GordonS wrote:
| > Mr Birdseye is famous for frozen fish
|
| _ahem_ , that's _Captain_ Birdseye, thank you very much!
| hyperthesis wrote:
| https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Clarence_Birdseye
| WalterBright wrote:
| > power stations (through General Electric)
|
| Edison founded GE.
| messe wrote:
| I don't think the commenter you're replying to is using
| "through" in the sense of "providing power stations with
| the assistance of GE", but rather "providing power by
| founding GE".
| bumby wrote:
| Infrastructure is an enabling function. To claim it's
| worthless is largely missing the point. It reminds me of the
| mechanical engineers I once worked with in rocket engine
| testing. Many claimed software was largely worthless because
| it was only replacing existing analog alternatives.
|
| To the articles point, the problem is about helping people
| connect the dots between the infrastructure and the work they
| really care about.
| asciii wrote:
| > Many claimed software was largely worthless because it
| was only replacing existing analog alternatives.
|
| Reminds me of the famous and unfortunate quotes [1]
|
| [1]https://www.ittc.ku.edu/~evans/stuff/famous.html
| tialaramex wrote:
| The Bill Gates quote at the end is unsourced. In the
| unlikely event Gates ever actually said or wrote that,
| somebody would have a citation.
| OJFord wrote:
| He denies it himself, but a plausible explanation given
| here is that he perhaps meant '~ _in the lifetime of this
| system_ ':
| https://skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/2863/did-
| bill-g...
|
| (It goes back to 1985 apparently, so does seem unlikely
| it came from nowhere, since it wouldn't have seemed so
| ridiculous then.)
| oatmeal1 wrote:
| It isn't by definition a problem that there are holes in
| coverage. People in the US live hugely far apart from each
| other because the government has paved far more roads than they
| should have. Bringing broadband to people in rural areas is
| hundreds of times more expensive than in urban areas because
| people are too far apart.
| nonethewiser wrote:
| How is 11% having electricity comparably to 75% having
| broadband? Feels like you're really reaching to make this
| segway to politics.
| zamnos wrote:
| Because the 11% became 97% via the New Deal and government
| investment, not through market forces. That's not reaching to
| bring up politics, that's the history of what happened. Rural
| areas are more expensive to run physical infrastructure for,
| for fewer people, compared to an urban or suburban
| environment; that underlying fact hasn't changed since the
| 1920's when electricity was being run. How it immediately
| becomes political is the question of who pays for what, and
| how much of my taxes are going towards something that doesn't
| direct benefit me.
| nonethewiser wrote:
| But that proves my point. There was no "new deal" that got
| us to 75% broadband coverage. 75% is clearly way better
| than 11% therefore not a valid parallel.
| zamnos wrote:
| There absolutely has been a _ton_ of government money
| funneled to, basically Verizon and Comcast shareholders
| to try and provide rural Internet service via the
| Telecomms Act of 1996 along with everything else that
| came after that. That the government hasn 't been getting
| good value for its money, and 75%, and at only 25 Mbit,
| compared to 97% for electricity is a whole other topic.
| mauvehaus wrote:
| Arguably, having broadband now is more important than
| having electricity then. The network effects of nearly
| everyone having broadband are reducing access to offline
| alternatives (e.g. bank branches closing), whereas
| anything you can do with electricity can likely be done
| without electricity or any additional infrastructure
| beyond what's on the farm.
| paulryanrogers wrote:
| 75% broadband coverage is a generous interpretation,
| especially as the floor of what is broad has grown. 25MB
| down, 5MB up isn't actually that broad or useful as 4K
| TVs and multiple simultaneous video calls become the
| norm.
| photochemsyn wrote:
| https://www.usda.gov/broadband
|
| > "USDA has been investing in rural telecommunications
| infrastructure for decades. Hundreds of millions of
| dollars are annually available in the RUS programs both
| by loans and grants all to support modern broadband
| e-Connectivity in rural communities."
|
| > "In 2018, USDA introduced the ReConnect Program, which
| has invested over $1 billion to date to expand high-speed
| broadband infrastructure in unserved rural areas and
| tribal lands."
|
| We don't let shady private corporations squat on the
| roads and freeways and charge tolls to anyone who wants
| to drive on them, why should we allow such behavior on
| the internet trunk fiber optic cables either - or on the
| copper/aluminum electricity grid, for that matter?
| dsfyu404ed wrote:
| >Because the 11% became 97% via the New Deal and government
| investment, not through market forces.
|
| That 11% wasn't a static state. Electrification was
| happening, government or not.
|
| The New Deal certainly sped it up but it takes a career
| politician level of dishonesty to take a government program
| that increased the rate of electrification and give said
| program credit all electrification after it's commencement.
| photochemsyn wrote:
| I think it's fairer to say that there was a rural demand
| for electricity, but that privately owned electricity
| grids saw no profit in meeting that demand. Electric
| appliance manufacturers did want to sell their product to
| people in rural areas, and they realized that if
| government built out the electrical grid, they'd benefit
| from it as would rural electricity consumers. That's why
| FDR's Rural Electricification programs were widely
| popular.
|
| The only opponents were the electric power companies who
| realized they might lose their captive markets if the
| idea spread to the cities. Hence they started buying lots
| of politicians.
| oatmeal1 wrote:
| Market forces would have correctly restricted the number of
| people living in inefficient places to live. Rural
| communities are massively more expensive to create
| infrastructure for. Instead we have locked ourselves into
| supporting an abnormally large number of people away from
| where infrastructure can efficiently be provided.
| DangitBobby wrote:
| And those people living in rural areas (which are
| required to sustain societies, unlike urban areas) would
| become poorer and less educated as time went on due to
| the economic inefficiencies of serving them well. You are
| arguing for the emergence of class stratification as if
| that's somehow the desired version of our society, which
| is just insanity. There is a _reason_ we share costs as a
| society! Free market thinking is shallow and should not
| be applied here, full stop.
| ghodith wrote:
| Or some of them would would have moved, or not moved
| there in the first place, or increased the prices of
| their goods.
|
| Something so cynical about such low expectations. "If we
| weren't in charge, they would all devolve into savagery!"
| photochemsyn wrote:
| https://www.broadbandsearch.net/blog/digital-divide-urban-
| ru...
|
| The issue isn't politics (though it is true that the ISPs
| have bought both political parties in Congress), it's
| economics. Building out basic infrastructure is one of the
| core necessities for widespread economic growth, and that
| includes roads and bridges, the electricity grid, the water
| supply, and the fiber-optic network.
|
| It's not a very complicated issue, and I've never seen anyone
| present a coherent argument that privatized infrastructure
| improves economic activity overall, it's generally the
| opposite isn't it?
|
| I suppose if your metric is the concentration of wealth in
| fewer hands, then yes, private infrastructure facilitates
| that outcome, but it shrinks the overall economic activity in
| terms of production of goods and services (i.e. consider the
| farmer who can't get to market because the bridge is washed
| out, the washing machine manufacturer who can't sell to the
| farmer who has no electricity, and so on).
| revelio wrote:
| There's plenty of arguments for privatized infrastructure,
| if you never heard them then you weren't looking for them.
| For example telecoms, energy and TV monopolies have been
| broken repeatedly in the 20th century in countries around
| the world, nobody wants them back. There were way more
| infrastructure monopolies in the early parts of the 20th
| century than there are now.
| photochemsyn wrote:
| I'm sorry, isn't that an argument against privatized
| infrastructure, which always becomes monopolistic control
| of infrastructure by private interests? It's not like
| competing systems of basic infrastructure are at all
| plausible, we're not going to have multiple private roads
| systems are we?
| revelio wrote:
| No? Private infrastructure doesn't always become
| monopoly, that's why most infrastructure monopolies were
| created by nationalization at a time when that was all
| the rage. Railway monopolies, radio (e.g. BBC), telecoms,
| steel, water, electricity ... lots.
|
| _> we 're not going to have multiple private roads
| systems are we?_
|
| Toll roads exist but indeed, roads are one of the cases
| where building and maintaining them is easy so you don't
| lose much from a state monopoly, and they take up a lot
| of space so duplication is unfortunate. But there are
| relatively few cases like that.
| photochemsyn wrote:
| Are competing water companies going to build multiple
| water pipe systems to people's homes? Are competing
| electricity companies going to cover cities with multiple
| independent competing grids? Are competing ISPs going to
| build separate fiber networks to everyone's door? Should
| there be multiple rail networks owned by private parties,
| or just one that everyone uses cooperatively?
|
| These are cases where it only makes sense to build one
| system, and any such system should be under public
| control, not under private monopoly control by some rent-
| extracting shareholder outfit.
| revelio wrote:
| _> > Are competing {water,power,internet} companies going
| to cover cities with multiple independent competing
| {pipes}? _
|
| Sure and they have done in the past. The existing
| networks weren't initially built by governments, they
| were built by private entrepreneurs and then
| nationalized. That's true at least for power and
| internet, admittedly I don't know for water piping, that
| might be old enough to pre-date private companies of any
| significant size.
|
| Now _should they_ is a different question to _will they_.
| In many cases it 's OK to allow that. I think the US
| still has private railway lines. In other places there
| aren't any left. But I agree that for networks that
| require enormous amounts of land and where there's ~no
| scope for innovation, government monopolies can be
| beneficial. Water, power and roads seem clear cut. We can
| add gas and sewerage to that. Rail is a sort of
| interesting middle ground where countries go back and
| forth because there is actually scope for innovation in
| how the signalling works and governments are typically
| extremely slow to deploy improvements. Note that most
| civilized countries don't nationalize the endpoints.
| Power generators, gas wells, trains etc are owned by
| private companies usually. Also, in practice these
| networks are often built and maintained by private
| contractors.
| throwaway33381 wrote:
| Ah just from how this is all written is obvious someone with a
| financial interest is trying to promote GPT-4.
| pessimizer wrote:
| You think this five paragraph article on Smithsonian
| Magazine's site is part of a conspiracy?
| chordalkeyboard wrote:
| 'conspiracy' is a loaded way to refer to
| http://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html
| gcheong wrote:
| This article doesn't read like a PR piece in the way PG
| describes at all though in that there is no discernible
| tie-in to AI or GPT as far as I can tell, so if the goal
| was to promote something other than the idea that people
| can sometimes be hard to convince of the value of new
| technologies that eventually become ubiquitous then I
| think it failed in that respect. I could see a similar
| article being written about the internet itself someday
| after everyone who lived through the initial skepticism
| about its economic and social benefits (still dubious)
| eventually passes on.
| HervalFreire wrote:
| I'm sure the person promoting electricity had financial
| interest in it. You know there is much nuance here yet you
| still had to make this simplistic comment.
|
| Put your real name and email address in your profile and
| respond with your full identity exposed. I want to see how
| history plays out. Then I can go back on these old threads to
| see who was actually wrong.
|
| Who were the idiots against the reality of global warming?
| The people who so fervently used every excuse to deny the
| reality of an impending catastrophe?
|
| There is no difference between those people and the people
| who consistently attempt to use every avenue available to
| attack the abilities of AI. These aren't rational people.
| They are people with an agenda that pushes them to modify
| their perception of reality around them to fit that agenda.
| That agenda is fear. Fear that a machine can surpass us and
| replace the software craft we have spent years honing.
|
| My advice to you is to open up your mind a bit.
|
| Heck I put my full identity and contact info in my profile. I
| stand by my views without hiding behind a throwaway account.
| If history proves me wrong the record is here for everyone to
| see.
| edc117 wrote:
| Some might fall into the category you've described, but I'd
| hazard a guess that a lot more are afraid of the rise of AI
| due to its owners. The cost to develop and operate these
| machines is high, and you can be sure whoever is using them
| to replace work done by people today will capture and hold
| every possible penny.
|
| People are afraid that AI will not serve the common good,
| and will instead serve a very rich few. Why? Because that's
| how it's always been with new advances, and more than ever
| how it is today. The vast gaps in wealth inequality will
| grow much larger with AI - it needs to be addressed first.
| HervalFreire wrote:
| Agreed. But why be delusional? The tool is right at your
| fingertips. Why deny the reality of the situation rather
| then face the truth?
|
| If they fear the AI owners attack the owners directly.
| Don't attack reality itself and say the AIs are just
| stochastic parrots and there's no risk to jobs at all.
| aksss wrote:
| 25 MB?? Holy schnikes..
| fsckboy wrote:
| > _This is what you get if you privatize and deregulate basic
| infrastructure services: huge holes in coverage and overpriced
| monopolistic control of the rest of it._
|
| shouldn't every square inch of Alaska be electrified,
| internetted, and cellphone towered? that way, just in case I
| consider whether to live there, I won't have to think about the
| inconvenience of it, it will make my decision easier.
|
| i.e. spending money on expensive infrastructure to service
| small numbers of customers is not necessarily a brilliant idea.
| Who knows, it may not have even paid itself back for all remote
| communities within the lower 48; many rural communities are
| even smaller now then there were then.
|
| That doesn't mean there weren't net benefits from the rural
| electrification act, but you are wrong to pitch it as "evil
| corporate barons vs everybody else". How about all of us
| together decide what we can afford? Would you accept your kid's
| argument that you pay to electrify (to code, mind you, and
| union electricians) your kid's treehouse in the backyard just
| because he accuses you of being a greedy tyrant if you don't?
| drstewart wrote:
| >deregulate basic infrastructure services
|
| What part of ISPs have been deregulated? Is it the bit where
| they're legal monopolies in many jurisdictions?
| NoZebra120vClip wrote:
| 25 megabytes per second is 209,715,200bps. That's over twice as
| fast as my cable ISP's present downstream connection. Is that
| what they really meant?
| wonnage wrote:
| No, looks like they confused the units. It should be Mbit.
| rhacker wrote:
| Even if they mean MBit, I rarely need more than 8. What are
| some of the things people do that they need something that
| fast?
| simoncion wrote:
| > What are some of the things people do that they need
| something that fast?
|
| Remote programmer work. I push and pull around many GBs
| every day. 8Mb/second would be -at best- difficult to
| bear. I also often do teleconferencing (and screen
| sharing) while pushing around lots of data.
|
| If there were multiple people on my LAN who were doing
| remote programmer work, or who were just -say- watching
| "streaming" video while I was working, or -say- chose to
| patch a video game while I was working, 8Mb/second would
| make working impossible.
|
| Hell, even 40Mb/second is pretty terrible. I recently
| moved from a 1400/40 Mb link to a ~300/300 Mb link.
| Despite the dramatic reduction in download speed, it's
| way, way, way better.
| freedomben wrote:
| If anyone in the household works from home, that 8 will
| be totally saturated by a single video meeting. If there
| are young kids that want to watch netflix, two parents
| needing to work, and if you're a developer who has to
| pull docker images or download a large file, God help
| you. I have 35 Mbps now and it still gets very painful
| sometimes.
| Syonyk wrote:
| "Live within the bounds of what's available" seems to be
| a lost concept these days.
|
| I'm rural, I work remote, and I've done so for quite a
| while on about a 15/3 connection. I've got somewhat
| better now, and I have Starlink for the house right now
| (though at the ever-increasing costs, I'm debating
| dropping it and going back to a rural WISP for bulk
| transfer).
|
| If you're on a lower speed connection... you don't try to
| live life like you're on gigabit. You cache content
| locally (Jellyfin or Plex solves a lot, DVD season pack
| bundles are dirt cheap on eBay and a USB DVD reader can
| read anything), you do lower bandwidth stuff, and you
| work around the availability. I've taken many video calls
| with audio over a cell phone, because my ISP was having a
| crappy day.
|
| You can invent scenarios in which you "need" gigabit, but
| they sound like the artificially constructed situations
| they are, because not everyone has 16 people working from
| home with another 12 insisting on their own individual 4k
| streams.
| Johnny555 wrote:
| >You can invent scenarios in which you "need" gigabit,
|
| If you have to work around slow internet by buying DVD's
| instead of streaming, pre-downloading movies you want to
| watch, or calling in to video calls to get reliable
| audio, I think it's fair to say that you "need" faster
| internet. Maybe not gigabit, but definitely faster than
| whatever you have now.
| freedomben wrote:
| This seems like your position: don't try to improve
| things. just work around the situation.
|
| that seems silly, and I don't think that's ever been a
| widespread driving philosophy. Much more common (and
| sadly, also lost these days) is building a better world
| for our kids and their kids, etc. Trying to improve life
| for us and those around us, with hope that the next
| generation has it better than we did.
| Syonyk wrote:
| I try. Which is why I reject a lot of the digital
| nonsense that's just attention vampires for the sake of
| advertising profits.
| smoldesu wrote:
| Docker.
| rhacker wrote:
| I use that too. And beyond that, the original analogy was
| that the light bulb was so helpful that it spread to all
| the farms and rural lands by 1960. Why do we need 25 MBit
| on all the farms and rural lands?
| randomdata wrote:
| Agriculture moves a fair amount of data around. You
| probably don't _need_ 25 Mbit today, but need more than
| the ancient infrastructure can supply. The infrastructure
| being built to be capable of closing the latter gap is
| able to handle much more both for reasons of
| accommodating future needs and simply where the
| technology is now for modern installations.
|
| And for that reason, as a farmer, I can get gigabit
| service on my farms, but where I live in an urban area
| where the infrastructure isn't as old and is still
| moderately capable I am topped out at 50 Mbit service.
| misnome wrote:
| All that tractor DRM has to phone home somehow!
| smoldesu wrote:
| Well, because people live on those lands. I grew up in a
| rural area, and my limited access to internet almost
| failed me in multiple classes that required online
| testing. My bare-minimum Hughesnet setup would only give
| you 50kbps after you depleted the "Full Speed" 50
| gigabytes a month of 25MBit speeds. No worries though,
| only $10/gigabyte to get back online so you could take
| your Biology quiz without getting kicked off halfway
| through.
|
| Now that stuff like Starlink exists, it's easier to give
| the finger to Hughesnet and exploitative WISPs. Even
| still, the years I spent growing up with bare-minimum
| internet at cable-package prices has made me spiteful. It
| should have been addressed long before the private sector
| got around to fixing it.
| freedomben wrote:
| Fellow ruran here, I've tried explaining to people just
| how good it felt to give Hughesnet the bird (in some
| regions called "the finger") when Starlink rolled in, and
| until you've had nothing else it's hard to imagine how
| much it affects.
|
| Also people forget: farmers have families and kids, etc,
| and while the farmer themselves may not need much
| internet, the kids can't even do basic school anymore
| without it. But that said, farmers still have and watch
| TVs, facetime with their families, stream music, etc.
|
| All that said though, Starlink is up to like $120/month
| and still not reliable enough to fully ditch the backup
| exploitative WISP if you work from home as I do, so
| Starlink is walking dangerously close to the line of
| exploitative. But they're here and working, so I will
| happily pay the money. I just hope that over time the $/b
| will get a lot more competitive.
| michaelmrose wrote:
| Infrastructure is about sufficient capacity for peak not
| average usage. The first thing you have to understand is
| that bandwidth is oversubscribed and largely
| asymmetrical. You may easily only get 70% of bandwidth
| and you'll need to get a LOT down to have even a modest
| up.
|
| 4K streaming video can easily be 25Mbps. A family of 3-4
| people can easily have multiple TVs and each one can be
| using bandwidth even when nobody is attending to it.
| Presumably this family has none because none of them will
| work. The average family has 25 internet using devices
| including computers, laptops, consoles, smart devices
| etc. Meanwhile average websites have ballooned up to 2MB
| or 16Mb per page. If you get 70% of max bandwidth and
| divide it even 10 ways you'll easily be waiting around 10
| seconds per page. It's common now to have a camera out
| front triggered by motion but this requires more upstream
| than your 8Mbps connection from 1999 is liable to have
| since most connections aren't symmetrical. Same with
| video conferencing which will largely be impossible.
|
| What's that you say johnny wants to play the latest
| triple A game? Well its 80GB of data. With over
| subscription and other devices you'll be very lucky to
| average more than 2Mbps over the 4 days this will require
| during which the family connection will suck even more
| than it normally does.
| fullstop wrote:
| Do you live alone?
| wruza wrote:
| I have around 8mbps (1 mbyte/sec) and downloading
| everything big is painful. Nvidia driver - 10min. Vbox
| update - 3min. Linux netinst - feels like forever. Big
| npm/docker/etc updates - few minutes of waiting. Witcher
| 3... ohh.
|
| Also you can't watch 1080p without stutters while
| waiting. You can't watch 1440p60 or 4k in any case.
|
| _Why do we need 25 MBit on all the farms and rural
| lands?_ (quoted from another subthread)
|
| Because otherwise these areas will get stuck with <25mbps
| forever, and there's already no reserve in 8-10mbps.
| NoZebra120vClip wrote:
| Please let's not confuse more units here.
| 8Mbps (please capitalize the "M" for "mega" and lowercase
| the "b" for bits) is 8,000,000 bits per second.
| That translates to about 0.954 MiB/sec (Mebibytes per
| second, see the "i" and the capital "B"?) which is close
| enough to 1.
|
| We must keep in mind that there are two disparate things
| being measured in this thread and by FCC. The FCC is
| ostensibly measuring advertised signaling rates. Your
| Gigabit Ethernet signals at 1,000,000,000 bits per
| second, but can't transfer data that fast. Likewise, my
| cable ISP signals at 100Mbps down and 5Mbps up (yeah,
| it's criminal) but download speeds are a different thing.
|
| Download speeds can, and should, be measured in computer-
| oriented mebibytes per second, rather than bits per
| second, because you are, after all, transferring files.
| (And yeah, disk space is often measured in powers of
| ten...) Your ISP's data cap is undoubtedly measured in
| gibibytes or tebibytes (even though they call them
| gigabytes or terabytes, that's what the units mean.)
|
| So when you run speedtest.net or Ookla or whatever,
| you're measuring the actual throughput that the
| computer's network interface can squeeze through the
| narrowest straw in your link to the server. That is
| necessarily a touch lower than the lowest signaling rate
| of whatever equipment is in-between. Internet connections
| are sold by trumpeting signaling rates, but those are NOT
| download nor upload speeds. Never confuse them, because
| they are overly-optimistic estimates of your maximum
| throughput (which is infeasible given most PHY and link-
| layer frame designs.)
| teaearlgraycold wrote:
| Downloading 50GB Steam games in minutes so you can join
| your friends without having everyone wait around. And,
| most importantly, flexing on people with speed test
| results :D
| shjake wrote:
| 1 Megabyte per second seems like extremely slow. You need
| 6/7x more to stream 4k properly and downloading modern
| games would take forever. If you have a couple of people
| using it simultaneously even HD might not be great..
| gcheong wrote:
| I think you want to be a bit ahead of where the
| technology is now to have some room for future
| possibilities and assuming you're pulling cable you might
| as well pull the "biggest" one you can(i.e. fiber). To
| give an analogy, we recently remodeled our kitchen, which
| required a rewiring of the electrical given current
| standards. That alone used up all the remaining circuits
| of our 100 amp panel. But we have several gas appliances
| that we eventually want to switch to electric heat-pump
| technology (water heater, dryer, furnace) and an EV which
| I'd like to have a level 2 charger for but that would
| most likely mean a service upgrade to 200 amps. On the
| flip-side, we have 1000Mbps; thinking about whether we
| have enough bandwidth to do X isn't even a thing now.
| zamnos wrote:
| The Internet is a utility and flows like water, so in
| this analogy, homes should have enough Internet to meet
| their daily needs, but they don't need so much as to be a
| factory. For a theoretical household of 4, 8 Mbit is way
| too low, but it does say that 10 gigabit might be
| excessive. The thing is though, that the analogy breaks
| down when running fiber allows for future backend
| upgrades and faster future speeds over copper.
| maccard wrote:
| 8Mbps is just about enough to stream netflix in hd. If
| you have other household members doing anything else it's
| inadequate. It's also borderline inadequate for any
| online gaming whatsoever.
|
| Hitting network speed limits doesn't just cap you in
| those scenarios, it degrades very badly very quickly.
| tomnipotent wrote:
| > It's also borderline inadequate for any online gaming
| whatsoever.
|
| 8Mbps is more than enough for a few dozen people to play
| any modern game on the same connection.
| zamnos wrote:
| Not if they're using GeForce NOW or any similar service.
| One person needs 15 Mbit for 720p, never mind a few
| dozen.
| jvanderbot wrote:
| In my experience, a big problem is upload, which is
| sometimes as low as a tenth or hundredth the download.
| That really hurts remote work. Another factor is that
| high speed internet tends to have lower latency, because
| I guess you just have to build our more infra. That helps
| remote work and gaming.
| maccard wrote:
| My job is video game networking. The problem isn't steady
| state usage, it's burst usage combined with other devices
| on the network. 15kbps might be enough for 98% of use
| cases but you occasionally need way more.
| Johnny555 wrote:
| >> "The Federal Communications Commission (FCC), a New Deal
| agency established in 1934, estimates that today a quarter of
| rural Americans and a third on tribal lands do not have access
| to broadband internet, defined as download speeds of at least
| 25 megabytes a second. Fewer than 2 percent of urban dwellers
| have this same problem."
|
| The current FCC broadband speed is 25 megabits/second, not
| bytes.
| itake wrote:
| The alternative of what? Socialize and subsidize infrastructure
| costs even more for rural dwellers so the city folks pay for
| the $20k cable a single rural family requires?
| jjj123 wrote:
| Yes.
|
| Edit: to be less snarky, there are plenty of examples of
| doing something inefficient for the benefit of society as a
| whole. The New Deal and the ADA are two examples that come to
| mind.
|
| Unfortunately, we don't do much of that anymore in the US.
| analog31 wrote:
| We could do better, but there are still some contemporary
| examples. For instance it's costly to provide comprehensive
| medical care in rural areas. One of the effective functions
| of medicare / medicaid is to subsidize rural medical care.
| itake wrote:
| We should minimize our eco-footprint with high density
| living, not subsidizing high environmental impact
| lifestyles.
|
| How does the rural folk having high speed internet benefit
| society?
| gameman144 wrote:
| > How does the rural folk having high speed internet
| benefit society?
|
| How does an urban population having high speed internet
| benefit society? Whatever your answer, that's the benefit
| for rural folks too.
| edmundsauto wrote:
| One difference is that urban areas get that benefit with
| lower cost due to the inherent scaling available in dense
| population. The benefit might be the same _, the cost is
| not.
|
| _ I'd argue the isolated benefit is the same, but the
| network effect amplifies it. When a ton of people do
| music together, it becomes part of the culture. That
| effect is more difficult to scale in low density
| populations, which means their rate of improvement is
| probably lower.
| gameman144 wrote:
| > When a ton of people do music together, it becomes part
| of the culture.
|
| I can't think of a better reason to subsidize the
| additional cost for rural broadband: without it, there is
| no nationally accessible "culture" that unifies us.
| ThrowawayTestr wrote:
| Someone's gotta grow the food. Our farmers deserve
| Netflix.
| scatters wrote:
| Or perhaps they deserve to be treated like adults and
| decide for themselves what infrastructure they want to
| pay for.
| elcritch wrote:
| And eDoctor visits, farmer forums, IoT data services,
| banking, accounting apps, etc
| nibbleshifter wrote:
| Enjoy starving to death then.
| lmm wrote:
| If farmers feel their lifestyle isn't good enough in
| proportion to the work they do, they should raise the
| prices of the food they sell, not get paid by the
| backdoor through subsidies.
| ghaff wrote:
| Let's cut off their electricity and phone too and
| forcibly relocate them. It's not like other countries
| haven't done that in the past. /s
| SamReidHughes wrote:
| We can just make them pay for it instead of mooching off
| everybody else.
| [deleted]
| oatmeal1 wrote:
| Exactly. People in this thread are perfectly happy to
| throw unknown heaps of other people's money at the
| problem until it is solved. And it's not like the
| government has a track record of efficiently spending
| money in the first place.
| scatters wrote:
| When? I can't think of any examples of forced rural-urban
| migration other than the Highland Clearances in the UK,
| which isn't really comparable.
| JaimeThompson wrote:
| How do the food, livestock, minerals, and wood that grows
| in rural areas benefit society?
| compiler-guy wrote:
| A great idea! A terrific plan like this needs a clever
| name.
|
| We could call it the Great Leap Forward, or maybe the
| Cultural Revolution.
| scatters wrote:
| Neither of those had anything to do with moving people
| from the countryside into the cities, as far as I'm
| aware. The Chinese Communist Party is still trying to
| suppress rural-urban migration (e.g., via hukou).
| ghaff wrote:
| I agree with your basic point--and subsidies are a
| complicated topic. Cities can't exist in isolation.
|
| That said, Starlink, and presumably competitors at some
| point, does change the game. As does probably 5G and
| successors. They don't replace last mile/last 10 mile wired
| Internet for all cases but we do increasingly have viable
| alternative for more rural locations.
|
| My brother's house had a 1Mb/s down ADSL wired connection
| and he was the last house on the road that could get
| "broadband" at all. With Starlink, he's able to work,
| stream video, etc. which wouldn't have been possible
| before.
| bumby wrote:
| It's also important to recognize companies like SpaceX
| benefit heavily from socialized infrastructure. For
| example, they lease a pad at Kennedy Space Center and use
| DoD infrastructure at Vandenberg.
| ghaff wrote:
| While there's perhaps some excessive idolatry of SpaceX
| and shade on ULA and NASA initiatives, I'm not sure that
| subsidies--somewhat overt or otherwise--are necessarily a
| bad thing. Certainly DARPA has a long history.
| revelio wrote:
| Strictly speaking, that's doing something inefficient for
| the benefit of people living in rural areas, not society as
| a whole.
| CamperBob2 wrote:
| Not knowing much about the REA, I doubt humanitarian
| arguments were behind it. I imagine it was successfully
| sold to Congress as a farm subsidy. Rural areas were
| where the farms were, and farms needed electricity.
| jjj123 wrote:
| My point was that helping some minority often does help
| society as a whole.
|
| The ADA, strictly speaking, only helps those with
| disabilities. But guess what? Having people with
| disabilities be able to access goods, services, and work
| just like anyone else helps society as a whole.
| revelio wrote:
| I don't really expect a straight answer to this, because
| the sort of people who loftily declare what is best for
| society as a whole usually just get angry instead of
| answering, but how do you justify the claim that this
| helps society as a whole? The ADA helps the minority by
| making the lives of the majority worse (higher costs,
| taxes, more effort etc). Making that tradeoff might be a
| highly moral position and justifiable on that basis
| alone, _but_ there 's no way to justify it on the basis
| of helping society as a whole. Society isn't a single
| thing that can be said to be helped or hindered. It helps
| a few people by hindering the many. It'd be better to
| just admit that and then argue on moral grounds, like via
| reference to religion.
| bumby wrote:
| Sometimes the benefit comes in the form of a stable
| society. The idea that there is a clear a 1-to-1
| transactional benefit is myopic.
| revelio wrote:
| Are you saying farmers would revolt if their internet was
| slow.
| bumby wrote:
| I'm saying society can only tolerate a certain amount of
| inequality.
| revelio wrote:
| Society can clearly tolerate huge amounts of inequality
| and has done in the past, far moreso than what we have
| today (kings vs peasants). Also see my comment above for
| my views on people who claim to speak for all of society.
| bumby wrote:
| I didn't claim society can't tolerate _any_ inequality.
| There's an argument that feudal systems you mentioned are
| now longer the norm because that inequality led to
| alternate systems.
|
| Regarding your first response, you may want to visit the
| HN guidelines regarding shallow dismissals.
| Akronymus wrote:
| With that same argumentation, it can be argued that
| moving food from rural areas into cities is doing
| something for the benefit of people living in cities, not
| society as a whole.
|
| Also, internet and such for rural people benefits society
| as a whole, indirectly. For example, better crop yields
| (Through better access to information) and such.
|
| So, I think your argument is deeply flawed.
| dazc wrote:
| As a rural tax payer I'm paying for some city dwellers to sit
| around all day doing nothing.
|
| All the benefits you enjoy as a result of living in a modern
| society have been paid for by someone other than you.
| hawski wrote:
| Isn't farming (the thing that AFAIK keeps most rural
| places, well, rural) subsidized in the USA to the similar
| level that it is in EU?
| michaelmrose wrote:
| It's vastly more economical to build infrastructure for a
| few million people spread over a metro rather than over a
| state and cities are centers of commerce and industry. Not
| only do cities more than pay for themselves universally
| they also pay for nonproductive rural areas which are very
| expensive to maintain and provided little revenue.
|
| Basically unless you grow food the city folks would be
| economically better off if you didn't exist. Your world
| view is exactly the opposite of reality.
| smolder wrote:
| Some of that is right, but believe it or not farmers also
| need local services like health care workers,
| tradespeople, some semblance of government, etc.
| gameman144 wrote:
| > Basically unless you grow food the city folks would be
| economically better off if you didn't exist.
|
| "Basically, if we didn't need to eat, we'd be better off
| of our digestive system didn't exist."
|
| What a hilariously strange world view. There are
| comparative advantages for both urban and rural areas,
| and both are vitally important.
|
| Urban areas optimize for concentration of labor. Rural
| areas optimize for land-and-resource-dependent
| operations.
|
| You won't build a successful large scale R&D lab in a
| small farm town, but you _also_ won 't build a successful
| mining operation in downtown LA.
|
| (Also as an addendum, there are _so many_ industries
| dependent on land and resources other than just
| agriculture).
| michaelmrose wrote:
| If you want to be mercenary about it farms already
| require only a tiny fraction of the rural population to
| run and will in the future require even fewer. We need
| the land. Virtually all of the folks not so much.
| gameman144 wrote:
| This is absolutely true, and the required subsidies for
| those places with mass exoduses will presumably drop over
| time (though will like increase _per remaining person_
| for those few necessary remaining people).
| ghaff wrote:
| City dwellers also buy things manufactured in rural
| areas. Most of them expect a nationwide transportation
| network that isn't just interstate highways and gas
| stations. In addition to food, there is all the resource
| extraction that needs workers, who have families, and
| need healthcare etc. Basically a lot of people living in
| rural areas are either doing things that, in part,
| support people who live in more urban areas or they're
| supporting supporting those people.
|
| Cities eat up tax dollars too. Boston's Big Dig was
| basically a $10 billion or so gift to Boston from, not
| only Western Massachusetts taxpayers but the rest of the
| country. (The Speaker of the House was from the Boston
| area.)
| lawrenceyan wrote:
| Rural farm land and dense urban cities are equally
| important. We're all fundamentally interconnected.
| bojo wrote:
| I wonder how cities would support themselves without rural
| landmass? The benefit is two way, and a $20k price tag does
| not capture it all all.
| yamtaddle wrote:
| Nobody wants to ban rural living, just stop subsidizing it,
| or subsidize it less. I don't get why responses to these
| suggestions are always framed this way: "but you need the
| countryside!" Well, yes... and that's what _paying for
| goods and services_ is for.
|
| If the situation were reversed, these kinds of defenses
| would _not_ convince the people making them that rural
| dwellers ought to subsidize urban living.
| owisd wrote:
| This argument only makes sense if you're only subsidising
| consumption, but infrastructure increases the productive
| capacity of the economy as a whole, so the government
| gets a return on its subsidy in increased taxes.
| zdragnar wrote:
| So food prices skyrocket to make up for the lack of
| subsidies, and everyone gets a food purchase subsidy to
| make up for the high food prices since nobody wants
| people starving in the streets. Heck, Minnesota just
| became the fourth state to offer breakfast and lunch for
| free to all students regardless of ability to pay.
|
| You can shuffle the board around however you want, but
| the truth is that agriculture (and therefor rural life)
| is going to be paid for one way or another.
| gameman144 wrote:
| Eh, we decided a while ago that certain things are worth
| subsidizing if they benefit the country as a whole.
|
| Education, healthcare, transportation, retirement --
| these are all things where we _could_ say "People can
| just pay for these things if they value them", but
| instead we determined that some subsidies are good for
| the country as a whole (we often even want _more_
| subsidies for some of these).
|
| Likewise, it's important to have a population that's
| willing to live and work in rural industries that supply
| big city centers. Subsidies to provide some of the
| infrastructure that more dense areas have can help the
| nation accomplish that needed population mix more easily.
| justin66 wrote:
| My great-grandfather, when he built his suburban house after
| emigrating to the US from Scotland via Canada, included gas lines
| in the walls for gaslights in spite of the easy availability of
| electricity. Just in case.
| simonh wrote:
| "Communism is Soviet power plus electrification of the whole
| country!" - V Lenin
|
| Russian Joke: "Consequently, Soviet power is communism minus
| electrification, and electrification is communism minus Soviet
| power."
| robbywashere_ wrote:
| Curious about how the blogs and aggregators of the yesteryear
| referred to these proponents of this new technology, was it
| A/C-bros or D/C-bros?
| ithkuil wrote:
| "Electricity will steal all your jobs! "
|
| "You don't need to worry about electricity, but about other
| people knowing to harness electricity better than you!"
|
| Ridiculous and at the same time actually true.
| notahacker wrote:
| I'd say the opposite: electricity actually did see fantastical
| predictions of automation ending work altogether which despite
| it being an enormously useful enabling technology _still_ haven
| 't come to pass, it enabled people to _get_ jobs more than it
| cost them jobs
| ithkuil wrote:
| Your not saying the opposite of what I said :-) I literally
| said that indeed electricity did cause many jobs to go away.
|
| My point was more about the way these predictions are phrased
| and that they may sound absurd, regardless of how they would
| pan out
| notahacker wrote:
| No, I'm saying electricity _didn 't_ "steal people's jobs"
| even taking into account roles that ceased to exist
| altogether, because it phased in slowly, created far more
| jobs than it took away and people whose roles were
| "replaced" by it simply adapted to different (usually
| better) jobs, and the absurd predictions of the time were
| all wrong not because of how they were phrased but because
| as a simple matter of fact electricity neither heralded a
| post-work utopia nor forced workers wages to stay at
| subsistence level.
| ithkuil wrote:
| Ah I see what you mean.
|
| I don't think "stealing jobs" means that there will be
| less jobs in absolute. It usually means (at least that's
| how I usually see it used) that people who current have a
| job and are trained to do that, will no longer be able to
| do it, and switching to another job is not easy: it's not
| just skills, but often also you need to relocate
| somewhere else etc.
|
| The problems with coal miners losing their jobs is not
| because we don't have other jobs available. It's that the
| lives of those people will be upended and it's not
| surprising that people resist that.
| [deleted]
| tgv wrote:
| It did make many jobs and people redundant, though. But because
| the world was growing, the economy grew with it and replaced
| that with other jobs. If growth stagnates, there's no guarantee
| for job replacement.
|
| And any parallel with AI/GPT is completely absurd, even though
| it's the reason why this is upvoted.
| dalbasal wrote:
| >>If growth stagnates, there's no guarantee for job
| replacement.
|
| No guarantees, but no hard rules euther.
|
| PCs are the ultimate clerical and administrative machines.
| You don't need secretaries or typists. Don't need memos and
| mailrooms. Stuff gets filed automatically.
|
| We put one on every desk. Typists and secretaries went away,
| but administration went on a growth spurt. Whether it's
| school admin, corporate HR or hospital billing..
| Administrative work became much more plentiful once PCs
| proliferated.
|
| We write, more letters, file more forms, sign more
| agreements. Maybe that stuff is valuable, and since we can do
| more of it with computers, we do. Maybe it has nothing to do
| with efficiency or value.
|
| Whatever the case, it demonstrates that the "progress Vs
| luddites" debate can't be solved with a simple model.
|
| Absurdity assume a reasonable world. Sometimes the world is
| weird.
| ithkuil wrote:
| Could be a case of Jevons paradox?
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox
|
| Sometimes when things look weird to us, it just means that
| it's counterintuitive and necessarily irrational
| ithkuil wrote:
| The parallel may well be wrong, but I would go as far as
| calling it absurd.
| Vespasian wrote:
| It's unfounded regardless of what you believe will happen.
|
| We are still months / years too early to see how
| transformative exactly GPT based AI opportunities will be.
|
| We are clearly beyond the "Neat academic resarch" phase and
| well into the product building phase of this new technology
| but some things are only clear in hindsight. The spectrum
| goes from "useful niche tools" to "industrial revolution"
| and we must not forget that even very successful
| technological breakthroughs are usually marketed way beyond
| their actual capabilities.
|
| People in the second row who are now betting hard on AI may
| as well be the billionaires of tomorrow or they will be
| forgotten and swallowed up by confirmation bias.
| api wrote:
| It probably wasn't that useful on day one. Took a while to get a
| lot of products out there that required electricity.
| jonplackett wrote:
| I mean, lighting was kind of a killer app
| gpm wrote:
| If I think of everything I use electricity for these days,
| lighting* is pretty far down the list of usefulness. The sun
| can fill 80% of my lighting needs, giving up on the 20%
| really doesn't seem like it would be that painful.
|
| I actually thought the list of items in the ad in the article
| was far more convincing than lighting as a use case.
|
| Today my list of more important use cases would include
| things like long distance communication, refrigeration,
| transportation*, cooking/manufacturing, computing, data
| storage, small cameras, medical uses* _...
|
| _ except in so far as light is how I use electricity to make
| light for information transfer purposes. Something like e-ink
| would be an adequate substitute though.
|
| * ICE engines do fill a lot of this niche, but not all of it.
| Subways, elevators, and the like are made much better via
| electricity.
|
| ** Imaging devices especially come to mind
| totoglazer wrote:
| I think you massively underestimate how annoying not being
| able to see after dark is.
| kayodelycaon wrote:
| Where do you live? For half the year, we have less than 12
| hours of sunlight.
|
| Prior to electricity, humanity has spent a lot of time and
| effort to have light past sundown.
| julienfr112 wrote:
| and electric motors.
| [deleted]
| lbebber wrote:
| We still refer to the electricity bill as the "light bill" in
| Brazil.
| Claude_Shannon wrote:
| Same in Poland
| martinjacobd wrote:
| I'm an American, and this is what my mother calls it,
| though I call it the electric bill.
| Falkon1313 wrote:
| And there were likely multiple competing and incompatible
| formats in the early days. Utility is greatly reduced when some
| of the stuff you want won't work with other stuff.
| cfn wrote:
| Yes, that I recall reading about, there were even competing
| DC grids and AC grids. I think Edison's was DC.
| samtho wrote:
| Edison's was DC. He hated A/C and did public demonstrations
| of killing animals with A/C just to "prove" how dangerous
| it was. The Current Wars was a very interesting blip in
| history, and ultimately Tesla and Westinghouse won with A/C
| because of its ability travel over longer distances with
| minimal loss, the fact that minor variations in frequency
| can be used to determine current the load/demand ratio
| (allowing power plants to respond to load changes), and
| it's voltage can be easily stepped up or down by passive
| devices (transformer).
| slyall wrote:
| FYI the author of the article is Rose Eveleth and she did the
| excellent "Flash Forward" podcast. She's recently wound it up but
| I'd recommend the old episodes (probably don't start with the
| final season though).
|
| https://roseveleth.com/
| zabzonk wrote:
| And one of the first things they did with it was use it as an
| inefficient means of execution.
|
| Marvin the Paranoid Android: "Humans; you've just got to hate
| them"
| tecc501 wrote:
| Crypto dudes be like "this proves that Web 3 ect ect ect"
| k__ wrote:
| It obviously doesn't prove anything.
|
| However: History doesn't repeat, but it rhymes
| stackedinserter wrote:
| Well, people have to be convinced of the usefulness of anything.
| You can't just approach a person with "trust me, it's good for
| you".
| wincy wrote:
| Fun fact, might be off on the details, but Triscuits were called
| that because they were marketed as being cooked by "elecTric"
| ovens which meant uniform heating and no burned Triscuits!
|
| Electric Biscuits! Try Triscuits!
|
| Edit: since people like my fun fact here's the Twitter thread
| where a guy talks about it.
|
| https://twitter.com/sageboggs/status/1242968530250870786?s=4...
| pmalynin wrote:
| Neat, I guess similar to Panko? But that was more of a military
| time necessity
| QuercusMax wrote:
| I assume that the tricuits were cooked by a fairly
| conventional electric oven, not like panko, which was cooked
| by putting electrodes into the dough.
| NoZebra120vClip wrote:
| "was"? Has something changed that they do not use this
| process anymore?
| torstenvl wrote:
| Yes. They're done.
|
| Triscuits and panko both refer to the finished products.
| For the set of all Triscuits, there does not exist any
| element which will ever again be baked. Ditto for panko.
| NoZebra120vClip wrote:
| In English, we use the habitual aspect for things that
| have been, and are still, done on a regular basis. If you
| wish to speak about a currently-implemented process for
| making food, for instance, you say "panko is baked by
| passing an electrical current through it".
|
| If you have a small bag of panko on the counter, you may
| point to it and say "an electrical current was passed
| through this panko to bake it", but you could also
| construct the former sentence and be completely correct.
| But your use of the past tense in a general statement
| about panko implies that it is no longer made by that
| process, which leads those of us who speak English to
| incorrect conclusions. This confusion can be further
| compounded by the fact that we were discussing events of
| many decades past, so Triscuits, for example, may no
| longer be baked in electric ovens, although they
| certainly could still be.
|
| https://twitter.com/sageboggs/status/1242968548949004288/
| pho... Thanks.
| torstenvl wrote:
| > _your use of the past tense in a general statement_
|
| It wasn't my use or my statement.
|
| > _implies that it is no longer made by that process_
|
| No. That's a possible interpretation, but it is by no
| means implied.
|
| > _leads those of us who speak English to incorrect
| conclusions_
|
| I'm a native Standard American English speaker. I did not
| jump to that conclusion. In Standard American English,
| there is a specific construction for expressing that
| idea: "panko, which _used to be_ cooked by putting
| electrodes into the dough "
|
| That construction was not used here.
| Izkata wrote:
| > That construction was not used here.
|
| Except that is how "was" was used by the two people you
| were responding to.
| NoZebra120vClip wrote:
| If you'll refresh your memory about the context of this
| comment thread, you will see several posters using past-
| tense to refer to historical situations and that is the
| context into which you interjected your thing about
| panko. _I_ assumed that you knew that panko had once been
| made that way and was no longer. _Others_ may have
| assumed that as well, given the established context and
| the way you wrote the sentence.
|
| So I hope this clears it up for everyone.
|
| Thanks.
| QuercusMax wrote:
| I have no idea about how either triscuits or panko are
| made nowadays. Thus, I referred to them in the past tense
| talking about how they were made when they were
| originally created.
| sgustard wrote:
| Heh, I always assumed Triscuit was named to be one better than
| a Biscuit. Which itself is one better than the mythical
| Uniscuit.
| sircastor wrote:
| I am now on a quest to create the long lost Uniscuit...
| swimfar wrote:
| Uniscuit would be bread. Biscuit translates to "twice cooked"
| in French. This is similar to biscotti which translates to
| the same thing in Italian. Fun fact that many French and
| Italians don't even realize.
| 1970-01-01 wrote:
| "Don't worry about people stealing an idea. If it's original, you
| will have to ram it down their throats."
|
| Howard H. Aiken
| pmarreck wrote:
| Somehow this doesn't surprise me.
|
| And if I lived then, I'd be the crazy one talking about all the
| possibilities while people look at me dumbfounded. Same as today.
| >..<
| comment_ran wrote:
| "To the electron: May it never be of use to anyone" -- J.J.
| Thompson
| mkoubaa wrote:
| Even a new consumer of heroin needs to be sold it the first time
| GalenErso wrote:
| Note to crypto bros: This doesn't apply to cryptocurrency or
| blockchains. If cryptocurrency or blockchains could be more
| useful for most people than what already exists (fiat currency,
| traditional banks and payment systems), we would know it by now.
| jdminhbg wrote:
| _post from 1965_
|
| Note to AI dorks: This doesn't apply to neural networks. If
| neural nets could be more useful for most applications than
| what already exists (expert systems, human intervention), we
| would know it by now.
| GalenErso wrote:
| I stand by what I said.
| k__ wrote:
| Good that you are able to declare that unilaterally.
| GalenErso wrote:
| I had to get it out of the way because crypto bros rarely
| miss a chance of interjecting their fad into any
| conversation.
|
| I realize the irony of my comment.
|
| I embrace that irony.
| spir wrote:
| HN community member response: Given that Ethereum launched in
| July 2015 and prior to that, no programmatic blockchain
| existed, on what basis did you select your parameter of 7.75
| years as the amount of time necessary to elapse before we're
| sure no valid at-scale use cases exist?
|
| Crypto bro response: loaning my USDC on Notional for a fixed
| rate of 4.6% and then bridging it to Arbitrum Nova to then send
| my friends and family interest-bearing US dollar payments for
| zero transaction fees seems pretty f'ing useful to me.
|
| Degen response: lol ok bro gl with that
| GalenErso wrote:
| > loaning my USDC on Notional for a fixed rate of 4.6% and
| then bridging it to Arbitrum Nova to then send my friends and
| family interest-bearing US dollar payments for zero
| transaction fees seems pretty f'ing useful to me.
|
| /r/ThatHappened.
|
| Nobody does that.
| jondwillis wrote:
| Funny enough, with the current financial meltdown, we might
| find out very soon if BTC will live up to a large part of its
| original intended purpose.
| pclmulqdq wrote:
| As long as BTC has tons of "price action," it can't live up
| to the dream of a stable non-central-bank-backed currency. It
| will continue to be a speculative asset. At this point, the
| only actual "inflation hedge" in the cryptocurrency space
| seems to be Monero. Everything else has "price action" like
| levered NASDAQ.
| jondwillis wrote:
| I hear you and agree that it has always been speculative,
| and has been trading in sympathy/speculative bubble with US
| tech for quite some time.
|
| However, it did de-couple from the NASDAQ after the SVB
| dust began to settle.
| not_enoch_wise wrote:
| Thankfully no one followed with the potentials risks and costs.
| So a century later when the planet is baking & sinking, no one
| could possibly imagine giving up the new "necessity."
|
| Thank you, marketing & public relations.
|
| Now to do it all again, with AI!
| [deleted]
| antoniuschan99 wrote:
| This is classic Ted talk by Jeff Bezos is a good one that
| references electricity if you haven't watched it before
|
| https://youtu.be/vMKNUylmanQ
| ayewo wrote:
| Never seen this one before. Thanks for linking to it!
| fnord77 wrote:
| People Had to Be Convinced of the Usefulness of Cars
|
| People Had to Be Convinced of the Usefulness of Computers
|
| People Had to Be Convinced of the Usefulness of the Internet
|
| People Had to Be Convinced of the Usefulness of LLMs
| rzzzt wrote:
| People Had to Be Convinced of the Usefulness of Flying Cars
|
| If they are not convinced, the thing doesn't happen?
| robotbikes wrote:
| Yeah it reminded me of a 1980s Saturday Morning Cartoon PSA I
| saw as a kid evidently called the Computer Critters that ran on
| ABC. Basically a bunch of attempts to convince people they
| needed to get a computer at home.
| https://youtube.com/watch?v=9rDIPyVqbHs
| jstx1 wrote:
| The thing that's missing from the list are the tools and
| inventions which people had to be conviced of the usefulness of
| and ended up being useless.
|
| "This happened for X so it will happen for Y" isn't an argument
| on its own - you either need to make a connection between X and
| Y, or say something fundamental about Y which makes the
| statement true.
| spir wrote:
| People Had to Be Convinced of the Usefulness of Programmatic
| Decentralized Public Chains (aka Crypto)
| lgas wrote:
| For the most part, they still do.
| HervalFreire wrote:
| Not all people. There is a division of people here. People able
| to rationally see the consequences of a new technology.
|
| And people who have to bend their perception of reality to
| protect a vested interest. For software engineers the skills
| and attributes we take pride in are our software craft and our
| intelligence. So it's normal to see that the attacks on AI are
| especially vicious on HN.
|
| I'd say the division is about 50 50.
|
| Gpt4 will not replace us. But it's a herald for something that
| will. That is reality.
| geraneum wrote:
| > But it's a herald for something that will. That is reality.
|
| This is mostly what the people who described as "rational"
| say all the time, but there's no rationality or even a deep
| conversation about what to do if this happens. I can flip a
| coin and it will half of the times tell me that it's the end!
| Both of this camps are arguing like political sides and the
| conversation is usually a repeated instance of some beliefs
| on both sides.
|
| I believe, instead, we can talk about the practical ways we
| can deal with this change. For example we can start with
| looking at what other fields that got automated did. Unions?
| Regulations? Wild west? Free market capitalism? Monopolies?
| What? Or we can discuss how to take advantage of this new
| change. Just sayin...
| HervalFreire wrote:
| How can we talk about what you're suggesting when half of
| the people don't even believe such a change will ever
| happen?
| geraneum wrote:
| People who believe such a change will happen, are in the
| position to lead the conversation in my opinion. This is
| not the first impactful change in history. It's not even
| clear if it's the biggest one and as any other change,
| people who have a rational understanding of it are in a
| better position to propose solutions to the problems it
| brings.
|
| There is another problem though, which is very important
| to note. As much as this change is impactful, there are
| so much nonsense and bulsh*t going around it because some
| people are financially invested. Sometimes people make
| statements without revealing their true intentions. I
| imagine, that a person who is right now, integrating
| ChatGPT into something and dreaming about getting rich
| fast, is not gonna believe into whatever cautionary tail
| others tell. This specific aspect of the current hype,
| unlike the actual product, is dramatically similar to the
| crypto hype. It doesn't help either.
|
| Edit: fix typo
| stocknoob wrote:
| It's ok if people want to be behind the curve. No skin off my
| back if they want to delay their personal use of a transformative
| technology. Progress will happen with or without them.
| Denvercoder9 wrote:
| > the city of New York City now uses about 100,000 kilowatt-hours
| per minute.
|
| Also known as 6 GW.
| [deleted]
| s0rce wrote:
| kWh per time is a terrible unit and we should stop using it.
| Also kilowatts hours isn't great either, although I guess its
| convenient.
| Syonyk wrote:
| Why is it a terrible unit? And what would you replace it
| with?
|
| It's reasonably human-scale, which is better than Joules...
|
| If you want to pick on a terrible unit, pick on BTU.
| amelius wrote:
| If you want human-scale, then use calories :)
| s1artibartfast wrote:
| >And what would you replace it with
|
| just plain old kW. kW * hr/ hr is just 1 kW.
|
| A kW is relatable. About the same as an electric kettle,
| microwave oven, or 100 lightbulbs.
| Ekaros wrote:
| Watts are the right mental model. Your stuff use some
| amount of power while running. Be it 50W for old
| lightbulb, or 1kW for space heater. You run this stuff
| for some amount during the day. Add all these up over a
| day for a city and you get to some total of power.
| Multiply it by hours and get to energy spend.
|
| And then you can even multiply the watt hours to get
| costs.
| post-it wrote:
| People pay for electricity by the kWh, so kWh/minute is
| easily mentally convertible to $/minute. Watts -> $/minute
| requires multiple conversions.
| Tepix wrote:
| I pay my electricity once per months, not per minute.
| akira2501 wrote:
| "I went 50 miles an hour for 45 minutes."
|
| This conveys useful additional information.
| quickthrower2 wrote:
| Disagree. kWh is a unit most households would be familiar
| with. I bet the average budget-conscious jo knows their price
| per kWh and how many kWh a washing machine run would use up.
| So for a lay audience it is a good term.
| adrianmsmith wrote:
| Honestly I reckon they went for the wrong unit with Watts.
| Most things measure absolute values (e.g. miles) and then the
| speed is the derivative unit (miles/hour). Whereas Watts they
| went the other way. I reckon that's why everyone's confused
| and people expect to see "I use this much [stuff] in total",
| "this appliance uses this much [stuff per unit time] while
| it's on", because that's the way every other unit works.
| Denvercoder9 wrote:
| The SI system has the Joule for that. The real "problem" is
| that 1 Joule of energy is just too small to be practical in
| most situations, so we often resort to larger units such as
| a kWh (equal to 3.6 MJ).
| kiernanmcgowan wrote:
| Or, roughly 5x the amount of energy it takes to send a Delorian
| through time
| [deleted]
| 0x0 wrote:
| "...a brand new power generation facility that could generate
| 770,000 kilowatt-hours" - what does this even mean? Did the
| facility produce a certain amount of electricity and then it had
| to be shut down, after it had produced 770MWh ? Can't produce any
| more kWh so just fire everyone and demolish the facility?
| teaearlgraycold wrote:
| This is an interestingly common units issue. I can understand
| confusing bits per second and bytes per second - most of the
| time the capitalization of the units isn't important. But no
| one confuses miles and miles per hour!
| ulber wrote:
| I bet they forgot to include that it can generate that 770MWh
| every hour.
| varenc wrote:
| 770MWh every hour is just 770MW
|
| The hours cancel outs!
| rzzzt wrote:
| But then the next sentence goes like this: "For reference,
| the city of New York City now uses about 100,000 kilowatt-
| hours per minute."
|
| So...
| varenc wrote:
| And 100,000kWh / minute is just 6 gigawatts or 6,000,000
| kilowatts. Google is great at unit math like this: https:
| //www.google.com/search?q=100000+kWh+%2F+1+minute+in+G...
|
| Journalist consistently use silly or incorrect units when
| discussing power usage. At least for this article the
| units aren't flat out wrong, just silly and I can see how
| "kilowatt-hours per minute" could be a bit more intuitive
| to readers.
|
| (And don't get me started on how USB battery
| manufacturers advertise capacity in obtuse units like
| 27000 mAh @ 3.7 volts instead of just using 99.9 watt-
| hours or 27 amp-hours.)
| stametseater wrote:
| minutes and hours still cancel out, you just have to do a
| little bit more arithmetic in the process.
| rzzzt wrote:
| I forgot for a moment where I was going with this, but
| now back on track: if they wanted to make the two values
| comparable, Edison's plant should also produce 770 MWh
| every minute.
| marcosdumay wrote:
| > if they wanted to make the two values comparable
|
| When was the last time you saw a journalism piece try to
| make units comparable?
|
| That number can mean absolutely anything, there is no
| telling what the people could be thinking on the
| telephone game from transcribing the source all the way
| into a finished and edited design.
| rzzzt wrote:
| You are not wrong, and now I'm more confused.
| Unfortunately the linked report 404s, but an old copy was
| available through the Wayback Machine (it is exploring
| market needs wrt. photovoltaic systems in NYC). The
| introduction states that the city's total electrical
| consumption in 2015 was 52836 GWh.
|
| Math time: (52836 x 1000 x 1000) / (365 x 24 x 60) =
| 100525 kWh of energy consumed in a minute. So that checks
| out.
|
| On the other end of the comparison, by the early 1900s AC
| largely won and plants were appearing left and right like
| flowers in a field. I can't find the exact station nor
| its capabilities just by searching for the 1920 date.
|
| Edison's first commercial station in Pearl Street from
| 1882 (still DC, I think) had 6 dynamos producing 100 kW
| of power each:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pearl_Street_Station Which
| is... let's see... 600 kWh every hour! :) Or 10 kWh per
| minute.
|
| If the author suggests that Edison's plant produced an
| amount of electricity that is enough to cater for present
| day NYC's consumption a mere _seven times_ over, that
| doesn 't seem quite right. 770000 kWh in an hour is 12833
| kWh per minute, in which case you need to build 10
| Edison-plants to match the demand.
|
| (I divided so many numbers in this comment, I sincerely
| hope that I did them right)
| varenc wrote:
| I think the 2015 electric consumption was 10000x of what
| the 600kW edison plant could generate?
|
| This is a great example of how things get simpler if we
| drop the over time part of the units and simplify it to
| just the average power draw.
|
| So in 2015 NYC consumed 52836 GWh. So the average power
| draw is 52836 GWh / 365 days = 6031510 kW . As in, at any
| given moment in 2015 NYC was on average pulling 6031510
| kW or 6.03 GW.
|
| The edison Pearl Street station could output 600kW. (and
| that's the theoretical peak of all 6x dynamos, probably
| less output in practice)
|
| 6031510 kW / 600 kW = 10052.5 so I think our current
| consumption is about 10000x higher not 7x-10x higher than
| the Pearl St station's output!
| greesil wrote:
| That's the joke
| samtho wrote:
| Usually electric generation facilities or devices are described
| as what they can handle at their peak. I feel as if this
| vulgarization of units really makes it harder to understand the
| intangibility not of electrical demand which is also ephemeral
| by nature.
|
| Most of the time we see "watts" it really means "watt hours"
| which measures work. We're used flattening rate-measurements by
| measuring instantaneous points like the speedometer on your
| car, e.g. if you are going 60 miles-per-hour, you can expect to
| travel 60 miles in on hour if you maintain that rate. However,
| A 60 watt appliance will consume that 60 watts over 1 hour of
| use, which is like saying we are going "60 miles" in the
| example above.
| 0x0 wrote:
| What? No. A 60 watt appliance will consume 60 watts for
| however long it is on. If it is on for 1 hour then it will
| have consumed 60 watthours!
| stametseater wrote:
| Rightfully so. If you want people to get hyped about a thing,
| explaining what the thing can do for them should be an obvious
| necessity. But I guess that's an outdated mode of thinking,
| modern advertising campaigns rely more on emotional manipulation
| than a rational exposition of product features and benefits.
| Instead of promoting electricity by showing people light bulbs
| and electric appliances, I expect a modern advertiser would
| instead tell you that popular people all like electricity and
| that if you like electricity too, you might also become popular.
| Instead of showing people electric lights, you could just show
| some young attractive models having a picnicking in a lush city
| park with a narrator saying something about 'trailblazers and
| innovators', maybe referencing famous popular figures like Gandhi
| for no apparent reason.
| akira2501 wrote:
| Demonstration > Explanation.
|
| If you can't do that for one reason or another, you use
| Marketing.
| williamtrask wrote:
| There are plenty of products where people choose marketing
| even though demo and explanation are possible. Most.
| MikePlacid wrote:
| > explaining what the thing can do for them should be an
| obvious necessity.
|
| Obvious?? You are taking too much of American way of life and
| values for granted. The Party can just order something
| progressive and the people will jump with enthusiasm. You just
| need to train them that not jumping with enthusiasm when the
| Party orders something is dangerous for their career or, more
| effectively - for their life.
|
| At the same 1920 time on our side of the ocean, the State Plan
| of Electrification of Russia:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GOELRO.
|
| Communism is Soviet power plus the electrification of the whole
| country.
|
| -- Vladimir Lenin
|
| Works like a charm. The only drawback of this approach is that
| you'll get not the American way of life but the Soviet way life
| and the progressive will mean not what is really progressive,
| but what the Party orders. But well, is it that important?
| LBJsPNS wrote:
| COMMIES!!! COMMIES EVERYWHERE!!!
|
| Seriously, is it 1953 where some of you live?
| MikePlacid wrote:
| My comment describes the presence and practices of
| communists in Russia in 1920.
|
| If something after reading it makes you think that
| communists are somewhere else - this "something" is not my
| comment. I can only guess, but may be this "something" is
| you own living experience. No?
| Isamu wrote:
| Early electric service was less reliable than gas. My house had
| mixed gas lighting and electric, and there were even fixtures
| that were both. Not sure how long this transitional period
| lasted.
|
| Adoption of phone service was even slower. First and second
| generation systems were pretty crappy by today's expectations.
| analog31 wrote:
| When I was in grad school, my cheap old rental house had light
| fixtures that allowed you to choose between electric and gas in
| one fixture. The gas pipe had long ago been disconnected, but
| the electric bulb sockets were stamped "Edison Patent."
|
| What I imagine was that electric lighting could have started
| out in commercial or municipal use, and spread out into the
| general population as it got cheaper and more reliable. The
| same thing happened with cell phones and the Internet.
| Ekaros wrote:
| Also think of process of wiring a house. And because you are
| well enough to do it in first place having it done to look
| nicely. I don't think that is exactly cheap process, back
| then. It is still not. The amount of cabling even for basic
| lights is not that small.
| analog31 wrote:
| Indeed, and it's something that greatly benefits from being
| done before the house is finished.
|
| When I lived in Texas during a housing boom, we had an
| electrician on call for our factory. He told me that he
| would often stop at a construction site on his way home in
| the evening, and quickly make some extra money by
| completely wiring a house.
| plaidfuji wrote:
| I know the analogy of the day is AI, but I'll make the case for
| cryptocurrency as the better analogy. I think everybody sees
| potential use for AI - probably more than it can actually do.
|
| The technology that I hear being called "useless", "pure
| speculative hype" etc is crypto and defi. Maybe today, because of
| lack of infrastructure, network effects, productized apps, etc
| it's not as useful as traditional banking and fiat currency, but
| the reality is that there's a future where we don't need banks
| and nationalized currencies, and that is an enormous value-add
| for society as a whole. It may not happen today, 10 or even 100
| years from now, but we will look back and find the idea that
| people had to be convinced of this absurd.
| k__ wrote:
| While I think that much of what crypto bros did is quite the
| waste of time and money, I believe that it has potential to be
| revolutionary.
|
| If something really different has to start these days,
| centralized services are an easy target for the powers that be.
| The only way to circumvent them are truly decentralised
| systems.
| himinlomax wrote:
| Remind me of the saying: "They laughed at Galileo; but they
| also laughed at Bozo the Clown."
|
| NFT/cryptos are the Bozo the Clown of technological
| innovations.
| pclmulqdq wrote:
| The thing is - AI is a very apt analogy today. People outside
| the tech sphere often think it's a toy, but don't see the real
| productive uses of LLMs, for example.
|
| In contrast, today's version of crypto has had its popular
| moment. Like the dirigible, it got a lot of mainstream coverage
| as a "promising" "revolutionary" technology, and it has made
| its millionaires and billionaires. Like the dirigible, it has
| been found wanting. There is some chance that the future will
| involve CBDCs, but I think most people agree that the ship has
| sailed on the Bitcoin-Ethereum-NFT-based "metaverse" that
| crypto entrepreneurs wanted to create.
| peyton wrote:
| There are billboards everywhere touting AI. My mom talks
| about it.
| pclmulqdq wrote:
| I see you live in the San Francisco bay. If you go outside
| that little bubble, you won't see very many billboards
| advertising anything other than personal injury lawyers,
| restaurants, and casinos.
| jondwillis wrote:
| A friend's sister came into town from Nashville, and I
| had the pleasure of explaining what ChatGPT was to her.
| localplume wrote:
| [dead]
| [deleted]
| EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK wrote:
| Crypto doesn't harm anyone who doesn't choose to buy into the
| get rich quick schemes. If some people somewhere trade crypto
| between them, it's none of your business.
|
| AI, on the other hand, harms millions of people right now - by
| government surveillance, face recognition, spam bots and SEO,
| deep fakes, exam cheating, job losses, killer drones etc., with
| almost no upside for the little guy.
| Tepix wrote:
| It's the other way round: Crypto mining has wasted an awesome
| amount of resources and is still ongoing despite energy
| shortages, mass extinctions, air pollution from coal plants
| and global warming.
| KingLancelot wrote:
| [dead]
| skeltoac wrote:
| Useful electricity was not born suddenly into a world that had
| never heard of electricity. People had been playing with
| electrical toys and scientific equipment for generations before
| advances made industrial electricity possible. Electricity may
| have earned any number of different cultural reputations for its
| associations with aristocrats, magicians and quacks.
|
| Just yesterday I rewatched James Burke's Connections, episode 3,
| Distant Voices, which vividly illustrates some of the ways people
| tried using electricity.
| PHPIsKing wrote:
| [dead]
| quietbritishjim wrote:
| > In 1920, New York Edison built a brand new power generation
| facility that could generate 770,000 kilowatt-hours. For
| reference, the city of New York City now uses about 100,000
| kilowatt-hours per minute.
|
| There must be some units confusion here. Surely they didn't quote
| the lifetime energy output of Edison's power plant? Maybe they
| mean that could generate at a power of 770,000 kilowatts? But
| then they say NYC consumes a power of 6,000,000 kilowatts, and it
| seems unlike Edison's power plant was already running at more
| than 10% of today's NYC needs. Maybe they meant 770,000 kilowatt-
| hours per day (i.e. 32,000 kilowatts)?
| tzm wrote:
| Electric cars are also viewed this way.
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2023-03-19 23:00 UTC)