Category: Uncategorized

This post describes well the interaction design principles perfected by social media services to build anxiety, fear of missing out and dopamine rewards: https://medium.com/swlh/user-engagement-is-code-for-addiction-a2f50d36d7ac

Ultimately, the writer asks:

When looking back at this era of humanity future humans will say, “How could they have just scrolled and scrolled all day? Didn’t they know what it was doing to them?” Social media is the new cigarettes. Everyone does it, it’s addictive, it’s harmful, and you should quit.

There are no pathbreaking revelations here, just well known ones laid out as plainly as can be for you and me to see.

In the context of Apple lobbying the Indian government to improve incentives for moving some manufacturing there:

Apple assembles a bulk of its iPads in China, but is fast diversifying production to markets such as India and Vietnam to minimise the impact of the U.S.-China trade war and the coronavirus crisis…

It was not immediately clear which of Apple’s three contractors in India – Foxconn, Wistron and Pegatron – would assemble iPads.

– Apple lobbies for India incentives as it plans iPad assembly: sources

It’s interesting that each of these three companies is an Indian subsidiary of a Taiwanese manufacturer. And that each of these companies has had factories in China for a long time now. And that China and Taiwan have a strained relationship, to put it mildly.

It’s going to be interesting watching corporation-states and nation-states interact this century.

It seems to me that the most aggressive use of renewable energy is actually is going to be to mine cryptocurrency.

The author of this twitter thread cites a number of sources to show that renewables account for ~78% of the energy used to mine bitcoin:

I hadn’t thought about this, has anyone looked into the energy consumption that goes into Fiats vs just assuming it is zero cuz we don’t track it? https://t.co/ztVXWsLTil

— Jason Jacobs (@jjacobs22) February 19, 2021

As this article in an oil-industry-focused website says,

Gazpromneft recently began a cryptocurrency mining operation based in one of its Siberian oil drilling sites, “unlocking the power of Russia’s oil and gas resources for the needs of bitcoin mining”… Instead of paying a premium to use energy from the grid, locating the cryptocurrency mining on-site at an oil field means that a steady supply of natural gas is virtually free.

Also, generation of renewable energy is independent of demand: the sun shines regardless of whether there is demand or not. Similarly, there will be unusually windy days or stormy seas.

Now, humanity hasn’t yet cracked the problem of large-scale energy storage as of 2021. Which means at times when energy from renewable sources outstrips demand, energy is simply ‘wasted’.

People quickly figured that mining cryptocurrency is an excellent way to harness that excess energy. Indeed, as the well-argued shareholder letter of the new Norwegian crypto investment company Seetee says, [PDF]

Seetee will establish mining operations that transfer stranded or intermittent electricity without stable demand locally—wind, solar, hydro power— to economic assets that can be used anywhere. Bitcoin is, in our eyes, a load-balancing economic battery, and batteries are essential to the energy transition required to reach the targets of the Paris Agreement. Our ambition is to be a valuable partner in new renewable projects.

(Part 1 – what I mean by sustainable accessories)

From yesterday’s post,

Three, it needs to be long-lasting. Specifically, I’m not a fan of accessories that need proprietary software to work… need to connect to the internet to work… have built-in batteries in them.

It’s this constraint (can you really call it that?) that leaves no good options today.

• Mice with proprietary bluetooth dongles don’t always work with the iPad. And it’s not clear which ones support multitouch at all, and even when they do, which multitouch gestures
• Apple’s own second-generation Magic Mouse and Magic Trackpad, which – unlike the first-generation ones – support multitouch, have a built-in battery, and as this iFixit teardown shows, it’s really not easy to get to it, leave alone replace it.

That leaves my ancient (by computing standards) IBM optical mouse from 2005.

This is from before IBM sold its consumer hardware division (including Thinkpads)to Lenovo.

The mouse plugs into an external powered USB hub that itself connects to the iPad via the USB-A port of the multi-port dongle. This way the mouse doesn’t draw power from the iPad.

The mouse has no power source or battery. It is wired and needs no software to work. Its LED will be one of the last components to fail – one of the buttons or the scroll wheel will likely go first.

Now it doesn’t support multitouch per se, but I can simulate swipe up and down with the scroll wheel, and swipe left and right with shift + scroll. And I can manipulate split view with the grab-bars on the top of the left and right windows, resize with the vertical grab-bar. Along with left and right click, it’s brought down the need to use the touchscreen down to a minimum.

But it’s still nowhere close to the slick multitouch experience of the first-generation Magic Trackpad on Mac OS, or the iPad’s touchscreen itself.

End note: It’s unfortunate that more manufacturers – and Apple in particular – don’t make either wired versions of their products or wireless versions with replaceable batteries. Most computer accessories don’t need to be any thinner or lighter. They do, however, need to last much longer than they do today. With Apple’s build quality, its accessories should last a couple of decades at least. It’s too bad the battery is the limiting factor.

(ends)

https://twitter.com/Ben_Reinhardt/status/1302657377573965832

This interview with a lecturer in finance at Harvard business school talks about the impact of climate change on the financial system, a linkage not often made – so far, at least. Specifically, the lecturer posits that insurers don’t yet accurately price the risk of extreme weather events due to climate change. Therefore, many properties are being built today in the USA in high-climate-risk zones that are under-insured for these climate events. That low insurance encourages property buying, causing property prices in these high risk areas to rise. People paying more for houses in such areas are at risk of financial ruin should they lose those houses without adequate insurance coverage.

What’s also notable is the parallels the lecturer draws to the financial instruments that causes the 2008 financial crisis, which was also linked to housing in the USA:

Homeowners buy their property/casualty and fire/flood insurance policies through brand-name companies, such as Allstate or Progressive. But these companies often don’t retain all of the exposure to pay for loss events. In particular, they don’t mind being exposed if say one house burns down – the other premiums collected cover that cost.

But if an entire county or part of a state gets hit hard by a hurricane, they can’t cover losses to all of those homes on their own. They often contract, in bulk, with another tier of insurers called reinsurance companies. These firms include giant but lesser-known companies like Swiss Re, Munich Re, and General Re. Those international firms attempt to spread their exposure across the globe and across many categories of peril like tornado, hurricane, earthquake, wind, and flood.

In addition to diversifying the risks, the reinsurers also can slice off some of the risk into insurance-linked securities — including weather derivatives sometimes known as “catastrophe bonds.” The probability of an event happening and the likely cost of the event are rated by several specialty companies then bought and sold by financial investors — who have zero knowledge of or interest in your particular home or city — who can be paid to accept financial exposure of a defined nature for a fixed period of time in the event that one of the named events occurs.

This means we have a situation where whoever is buying or selling the risk is multiple steps away from the actual property.

This one resonated today.

"A lot of problems happen because of your internal state.

When you’re calm, happy, and fulfilled you don’t pick fights, create drama, or keep score."

— @ShaneAParrish

— Gina Gotthilf (@ginag) November 9, 2020

But it’s hard to be calm when we’re in a state of mindless scrolling or when we’re interrupted by notifications. Especially news and social notifications.

If you can watch yourself as you interact with your phone, iPad, TV – watch even for a few seconds – you’ll very likely find yourself physically tense and mentally anxious.

And you’ll see how far from calm we are most of our day.

How much of the unhelpful behaviours that the tweet mentions – casual combativeness, compulsive competitiveness – are simply because we can’t help ourselves use our phones?

It sounds crazy. And it is.

The Verge:

The MacBook Air is now only available with Apple silicon chips. It’s no longer possible to buy a MacBook Air with an Intel CPU.

That was fast.