Summer-notes: physical stuff
The internet and metaverses and things may be exciting, but you still need stuff, and it has to move around.
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| https://twitter.com/EytanBuchman/status/1430574930161242114 |
Weirdly there's been more fuss about the lack of milkshakes in fast food restaurants than this -
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| https://twitter.com/globalhlthtwit/status/1431829158179622912 |
A fascinating thread on the life of an HGV driver, from someone who switched career into it. There are a lot of factors deterring folks from driving (and the hours/conditions make the roads with trucks on seem even scarier). The suggestions at the end of the thread for better minimum pay, limited working hours, and a shift of liabilities seem reasonable.
Cars have grown a lot. I think they are longer, too - at electric car charging stations, especially the new, bigger plazas such as Rugby services, it's amazing how few of the cars actually fit in the bays.
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| https://twitter.com/anotherJon/status/1413518756404412417 |
Thanks to George Dibb for summarising the report of the Innovation, Growth and Regulatory Reform task force. There's some interesting insights in the Twitter thread, including bits of weird self-contradictory content, and no mention of how businesses might need to comply with 2 sets of regulations.
I found that thread via Jack Stilgoe, who reviews the claim in the report that Connected and Automated Vehicles is "predicted [to create] an additional 320,000 jobs." If you've ever wondered where headline numbers come from, this is a nice illustration! A 2015 report predicted jobs by 2030, based on a bunch of assumptions which may or may not be coming true.
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| https://twitter.com/Jackstilgoe/status/1405833193446641673 |
Thanks Peter Wells for sharing the news about Google shutting down "Streams," an app used in the NHS via various deals with DeepMind, despite Streams not actually being an AI product. As that TechCrunch article notes, it was a weird project from the start, even without the data sharing scandal.
Mark Hurst writes about how crap Google is these days as a search engine:
Google Search is now a pay-to-play wasteland. And that’s exactly what was predicted by Larry Page and Sergey Brin, the founders of Google, in their 1998 academic paper on search engine design. From Appendix A:
Advertising funded search engines will be inherently biased towards the advertisers and away from the needs of the consumers. . . . advertising income often provides an incentive to provide poor quality search results.
Google, which today rakes in more advertising dollars than ever, is lousy with the “poor quality search results” that Larry and Sergey wrote about.
... Whether you consider Google’s decrepit search engine, the vast graveyard of past launches, or the underlying business model of surveillance and manipulation, the smell of rot is so intense that it’s a wonder Google is still considered a tech leader. Sure, the money machine is still churning within Search, as well as in YouTube...
I spoke [...] with Shannon Mattern, professor at the New School and author of the new book A City Is Not a Computer. Among other things, we talked about the public library as a superior alternative to Google. In her book, Mattern quotes Safiya Noble [...], who writes:
What we need is greater investment by taxpayers in civic alternatives, which would help us understand digital advertising platforms like Google, Facebook, and others for what they are, rather than thinking of them as the public library, which they are not.
Noble is exactly right. Google, as the platform that practically invented surveillance capitalism, is not a library. We might more accurately describe it as the antithesis of a civic institution, in that its ultimate aim is exploitation, rather than service, of the community. Regardless of how many pages are captured in its search index, or how many tech sectors it monopolizes, Google deserves no trust, and no authority, in the public sphere.
It’s important to understand the mismatch between how Google presents itself to society, and what it actually intends to do.
Tommaso Valletti (Chief Competition Economist of the European Commission
between 2016 and 2019) writes about big tech acquisitions:
Most tech acquisitions are approved without a hitch, despite growing evidence that they bring little benefit, because regulators are waging an uphill battle to get information in the face of obfuscation by dominant firms. The solution is to reverse the burden of proof: Instead of making the regulator prove that a merger will cause harm, make the merging parties prove that it won’t.
As you read this, please remember two numbers: 1,000 and zero. The former number represents the 1,000 acquisitions made by GAFAM (Google, Amazon, Facebook, Apple, and Microsoft) in the past 20 years. The latter is the number of those acquisitions actually blocked by regulators worldwide.
... My team of 30 (really excellent) economists, supervising the economic analysis of every major merger, antitrust, and state aid case in Europe, faced dominant companies that could hire any number of lawyers against us. They paid an army of consultancies to create doubt around an issue, while the burden of proof was on us to dismiss their claims. This burden was made worse by asymmetric information: the companies had all the incentives to hide vast amounts of information from us and use it selectively to create more obfuscating smoke.
... economics tells us that once you are a large company, further concentration creates little benefit to consumers, and the social gains from having strong alternatives to Google, Facebook or Amazon would be immense.
...The advocates of Big Tech will, of course, attack this proposal. “It will punish Big Tech firms for their success!” Seriously? These companies have never been so profitable. Why should Google have been allowed to buy Fitbit? Couldn’t it have achieved the same technological result itself, leaving Fitbit to compete with it (either alone or purchased by another firm)? Prove to us, Google, that you really cannot do it without buying Fitbit.
“It will kill the small entrepreneurs!,” they will also cry. Well, small, successful, innovative startups currently get purchased and then help dominant companies entrench their positions. Entrepreneurs have started talking openly of “kill zones,” where venture capitalists are reluctant to fund entrants that might compete with dominant platforms.
The article goes on to describe how remedies imposed on big mergers are evaded or avoided later on. Thanks to Julia Powles for the link.
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| https://twitter.com/RDBinns/status/1405861029066776576 |
FairTEC brings together different consumer phone offerings to provide more sustainable and privacy-focussed systems, in a single arrangement. Fairphone hardware, a co-operative mobile network, a lease model with a focus on repair, and an open source privacy-centric operating system. Interesting!
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| https://twitter.com/iotwatch/status/1426957367053275139 |
The 2017 UK battery recycling plant pilot didn't work out - I wonder why. Anyway, presumably we export all the dead batteries, to somewhere, still.
In any case, that seems better than this -
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| https://twitter.com/F_Kaltheuner/status/1406905503452700674 |
Alex is right here as ever - we've been playing with connected hardware & "smart" things for ages, but the joy has left so much of the space:
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| https://twitter.com/iotwatch/status/1433122919589294086 |
Finally, another tale where something turns out not to be what you think. Leo Murray's Twitter thread looks into whether low-traffic areas (LTNs) mean it takes longer for emergency vehicles to respond, and finds out that it doesn't (although it feels like it should) and that a couple of newspapers misquoted the Police Commissioner on this matter, but don't fancy making a correction, and the regulator doesn't care either.