Interesting Links for 23-11-2018

[andrewducker]

'He's like Al Capone': turkey on the loose ruffles feathers in Rhode Island town

"The turkey can also fly, which animal control officers are unable to do"
(tags: ViaDrCross turkey usa )

Salvation Army warns staff to keep their homophobia quiet

(tags: lgbt religion charity homophobia bigotry )

Buses and taxis to lead UK self-driving public transport push in Edinburgh and London

(tags: driving automation Edinburgh London UK )

Nuisance calls: new UK law provides for director liability

(tags: UK phones law )

The act of drawing something has a “massive” benefit for memory compared with writing it down

(tags: art memory )

Downing Street says there will be no new Brexit referendum while Theresa May is prime minister. So if the will of parliament is for a referendum, she resigns or is ousted

(tags: europe uk referendum )

6 Strange Facts about the Interstellar Visitor 'Oumuamua

(tags: space weird )

More conferences should do this

(tags: conference )

Automated Couture: Using Robots to Make Clothing

(tags: clothing automation )

The coal industry is in a lot of trouble

(tags: coal economics )

When the servers go down people can't control their central heating. And it's getting cold outside...

(tags: heating Internet OhForFucksSake )

The Watchmen movie proves you can be faithful to a comic and still miss its whole damn point

(tags: Watchmen movies ZackSnyder alanmoore comics superheroes )

We’re heading for a second referendum – and maybe a third

(tags: UK europe referendum )

Comments

[jack]

"6 Strange Facts about the Interstellar Visitor 'Oumuamua"

It's amazing that "aliens" is still even a possibility.

"The coal industry is in a lot of trouble"

If they're going to support coal workers, couldn't they just give them money and we could leave the devil's fuel in the ground where it won't destroy the planet?

"When the servers go down people can't control their central heating. And it's getting cold outside..."

Oh god! How the everloving fuck did they design these things so they need a server connection? What if the company went bust or got DDOS'd?

Automated Buses

[danieldwilliam]

If the self-driving public transport projects are at all successful then I think Uber is bankrupt.

They haven't yet completed the establishment of their monopoly and regulatory capture and the bottom is going to drop out of the TAAS market before they can.

The Watchmen movie proves you can be faithful to a comic and still miss its whole damn point

[jack]

Although given that review, Snyder seems even more unfortunately ironic: in 300, he really lauded the characters; in Watchmen they were heroic but screwed up; and in the DCU films, he undercut them with bitterness and cynicism; but if those interpretations had been one earlier in the sequence they'd have been just right!

I'd previously thought his visuals were always amazing, but the heart of his films was hit and miss. Now I wonder if something else was going on. 300 shows an uplifting heroic story which would work for almost all films, if it hadn't been applied to a vile bigoted story. So he CAN do that. Then in watchmen I think there was somewhere between the despair of the original and a standard film. And then Superman was all grimdark. Was that him, or was he constrained by the studios somehow? Or what?

Re: The Watchmen movie proves you can be faithful to a comic and still miss its whole damn point

[jack]

I also have caveats for his fight scenes being "good". Some of them were -- the opening fight with the comedian was pretty well done, and he did sometimes do as the review describes, making the fights seem weighty. But I think too many of them -- some in watchmen, and basically the entirety of sucker punch, suffer from the problem of everything being done right but the fight being really boring, with no doubt as to the outcome, nothing to cheer for, no interest.

Coal

[danieldwilliam]

The long-term value of coal might depend on whether there is any technological scope for reducing the cost of extraction. Which probably means automation of strip mining, which in turns mean less employment.

My guess is that someone somewhere is working out how to make money by shorting coal companies and then tipping them in to bankruptcy. I'd suggest it was the leadership of the current US administration, whose talk of supporting coal is a bit like the magnatges of Wall Street talking about "organised support" in 1929, but a scheme that complicated doesn't seem their style.

Referendums

[danieldwilliam]

If we were going for a two-stage referendum I wonder if the first question should be Deal or No Deal, followed by Remain vs the result of the first stage.

[jack]

Oh god, surely if we're choosing between "remain" "bad deal" and "no deal" even the british electorate can see the sense of using a voting system other than FPTP? I guess maybe not :(

[calimac]

It seems to me that the article on Watchmen misunderstands Moore's work as seriously as it claims the movie does, but I haven't seen the movie so maybe I should just keep quiet.

[andrewducker]

Happy to have your opinion on their opinion of the comic!

[mtbc]

It's not like these are new IoT discoveries either. I still remember not being able to buy stuff at Jewson in the 1980s in Cornwall because their link to London had gone down.

Re: Coal

[nojay]

Coal mining in most countries is pretty much mechanised to the hilt. It sometimes costs more to transport coal to where it is consumed. Jobs are minimised today, automation is king. It's cheap as it's going to get, pretty much -- there have been attempts to do things like underground gasification to make it even cheaper but they've generally not panned out for various reasons.

The problem is really energy poverty, it's the countries that can't afford other forms of energy or don't have the right geography and infrastructure who want energy on tap and if that energy involves burning coal then that's what they'll do. Coal, like oil and gas is free energy in the ground, it's like free money just lying there waiting to be picked up.

China is exporting its high-efficiency coal-burning technology to a number of developing markets in Africa and elsewhere as well as apparently restarting a lot of half-finished coal generating plants within its own borders since they want more electricity generating capacity to meet consumer demand. Coal is not dead, not even in the US where there has been an uptick in production over the past couple of years coupled with increasing exports, not something that was a big thing in the US in the past due to its own insatiable demand for energy.

https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=34992

[calimac]

Well - I knew something was wrong when the author wrote "Moore does not like these guys." Actually, the virtue of Watchmen lies primarily in the evaluation of the characters being mixed and ambiguous.

Even the Comedian - such a nasty piece of work that we only meet him in flashbacks, so we never have to confront his appallingness directly - turns out, rather to his own surprise, to have a moral conscience: which vitally turns out (spoiler alert!) to be the reason he's murdered.

Ozymandias is a brilliant depiction of someone moved to do great evil for what he perceives as a greater good; and unlike most such characters in fiction, he isn't a straw-man; his greater good really is a greater good. Instead of being unlikable, he's a personally likable character who forces the reader to think hard about what actions are justifiable for such goals.

And he gets away with it, succeeds in his goal - until the final panel of the book throws an ambiguity into that. Leaving the reader even more conscious of how mixed and questionable everything is.

And who's responsible for throwing in that ambiguity? Rorschach, whom the article dismisses as "basically a force for evil," acknowledging only that he's competent at what he does. But Rorschach only applies his ruthless methods at truly reprehensible characters. If you're not feeling both satisfied and disgusted by his actions at the same time, you're missing the point.

How much more subtle a depiction of the fascist impulse this is than Frank Miller's. The article describes Miller's 300 as "a nakedly fascistic work." I haven't read 300, but that's how I felt about The Dark Knight - brilliantly written, but loaded and heavy-handed in a way that Watchmen totally isn't.

And so, returning to the ending, if you consider Ozymandias's plan evil, who's going to save the world from it? Rorschach, who sacrifices his life to do it. On that account, he's the hero of the story - but such an ambiguous and nutty one. And is destroying Ozy's plan after it's been carried out an unambiguously good idea? Nobody else is trying to do that. More questions, uncertainties, ambiguities.

Lastly, the article describes Nite Owl as "a clueless pud who’s never not in over his head." This makes me wonder if the writer actually read Watchmen. True enough that Nite Owl feels that his superhero career has been pointless and futile - his sexual impotence is a metaphor for this - but he's no pud or doof, and while not a match in combat with, say, Ozymandias, he is generally competent and knows what he's doing. He's not the Tick or something like that, which is what the description makes him sound like.

Re: Automated Buses

[armiphlage]

Uber will need to pin their future on serving the last mile, for rides where it is inconvenient to walk to the nearest bus stop. Grocery runs and inclement weather will be where they make their profit.

Interestingly, Uber has partnered with the UP Express in Toronto. The public-transportation train carries passengers away from the busy Pearson Airport, and Uber carries them from the train stations to their doorsteps. Useful when you have too much luggage to take on the subway or streetcar.

https://mobilesyrup.com/2018/10/03/uber-partners-torontos-up-express-train/

[armiphlage]

"Oh god! How the everloving fuck did they design these things so they need a server connection?"

Without the server connection, you cannot sell the profitable user information.

Re: Coal

[armiphlage]

In-situ gasification (as Nojay mentioned) is a definite possibility for low-cost extraction. Set a coal seam on fire, spray in water, and extract "producer gas", run it through a rubidium catalyst bed to convert to natural gas. However, its many failure modes (including the ground crumbling and local towns falling into pits of fire) reduces its use in real life.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Underground_coal_gasification#Environmental_and_social_impacts

Re: Automated Buses

[danieldwilliam]

I don't see Uber ever making a profit.

They're not, in my view, a tech firm. Their ride hailing app isn't particularly novel or hard to replicate and has been replicated in whole or in part by other firms.

They are not a strong player in ground vehicle automation. I don't think they make a top-ten behind the likes of Google, MIT, several car companies, Waymo and the like. The fact that there is a top-ten of ground vehicle automation is instructive.

Taxi services seem to have about 85% fixed direct cost. I.e. 85% of the total cost of running a taxi business is the cost of providing the car, the driver and the fuel. That leaves 15% available for economies of scale. Uber are selling taxi services at about a 45% discount. Even if they reduced the 15% back office costs by half and then spread them over twice as much direct cost they are still selling taxi services that cost $90 for $55.

I think Uber hoped to grab enouigh of a monopoly on taxi services that they could either / or bully their driver in to taking lower wages, bully the regulators in to allow them to lower labour standards or gouge their customers from a monopoly position. This is a charitable interpretation of their business model. The less charitable intepretation is that they have persuaded a bunch of investors that Uber is a tech firm with a unique opportunity to reduce taxi costs which doesn't exist.

As Uber don't have a particularly strong position on autonomy they won't be able to capture much of the profit from removing drivers. More interestingly as there are quite a few firms who do have a good autonomy offering I'm expecting autonomy of taxi and bus services not to be a monopoly and therefore for most of the value to go to consumers and pretty quickly too. So nothing for Uber to get their hands on.

Re: Coal

[danieldwilliam]

Aye there was some talk about doing in-situ coal gassifcation in the older coal fields in Scotland which stopped when someone pointed out that basically the plan was to set fire to the ground underneath Edinburgh to generate millions of tonnes of poisonous and explosive gas and hope nothing went wrong.

Re: Automated Buses

[andrewducker]

Agreed with all of this.

Uber is a great way for investors and drivers to subsidise cheap taxi rides, but I don't see how uber can ever make a long term profit.

Re: Automated Buses

[andrewducker]

I do think there's value in taxi apps. And in providing a known brand to visitors to a new city, so that they can find a reliable taxi company easily.

If Uber had stuck to that they might have had something viable.

Re: Automated Buses

[armiphlage]

Uber keeps spamming me with $5-off coupons, which is nearly the entire price to carry groceries from my local grocery to my apartment, so there are definitely some shenanigans going on with their business. They seem to really want to pump up the number of rides taken at quarter-end, even if there is no hope of profit.

I am impressed with their UberPoolExpress service in Toronto, though. Their algorithm is very good at having drivers zip through the city and keep the car packed with passengers. Instead of door-to-door service, passengers each walk a few hundred steps to a pickup point that minimizes detours. The fare is half that of a taxi, but there are up to four people paying separate fares in the car at all times. From my driver's screen, it looks like they are driving in a continual fare-absorbing loop (at least during busy periods).

Re: Automated Buses

[andrewducker]

Ooh, that does sound worthwhile.

Re: Automated Buses

[danieldwilliam]

I agree. There is a value to taxi apps. I think that taxi apps are pretty easy to do. Therefore most of the value will go to the users of taxi apps rather than the makers. So either the taxi firms or the taxi drivers or the customers or the recipient of taxi licence revenues.

For sure there is value in an international brand or even a national brand. Get off the plane or train, find a reliable taxi. I think the value is probably not huge. I think most taxi rides in a given city will be by locals. There are steps most cities take to ensure getting a taxi from the airport or station is lower risked for the consumer, such as special licences or regulated monopolies. Hotels offer transfers. I think the cost of buildling up a global brand is quite high. Cheaper if you can get lots of articles talking about your high-tech solution to the problem of finding a taxi. So there might be a long-term business model there but I don't think there is huge long term profit in it.

Re: Automated Buses

[danieldwilliam]

Are customers okay with ride sharing?

Re: Automated Buses

[armiphlage]

In Toronto, you pick from multiple options, ranging from big luxury vehicles all to yourself, to regular cars all to yourself, to ridesharing, to ridesharing where you have to walk to a pickup point. So, you can decide not to share if you want.

45 kilometers north, in Newmarket, there is only the option for luxury vehicles or regular cars, all to yourself.

Re: Automated Buses

[armiphlage]

If I'm hauling groceries, I select a private Uber. If I am running late and need to get to the subway station quickly, ridesharing only adds a few minutes to the trip and cuts the price a lot. If I'm running really late, a private Uber gets me there fastest, without pickup and dropoff detours. So, it depends on the customer, and their needs at the time.

Re: Automated Buses

[danieldwilliam]

That sounds like quite a flexible model. I'd be happy if we had something like that in Edinburgh.

Although, we're a small enough and dense enough city that if we have autonomous ground vehicles then an expanded municipal bus system probably covers off the ride-share from a fixed collection point near pretty much any two points.