--&|&------------------------------------------------daily reddit gold goal1%reddit gold gives you extra features and helps keep our servers running. We believe the more reddit can be user-supported, the freer we will be to make reddit the best it can be.Buy gold for yourself to gain access to  and . A month of gold pays for  231.26 minutes of reddit server time!Give gold to thank exemplary people and encourage them to post more.Yesterday's reddit gold goal107%sorted by: newAmazing- will start there
I love the idea of conduit since it future-proofs it and I've got the access - Any good resources in terms of wiring for a smart home? I need to search this subreddit in more detail!
My idea was to run a conduit from each of the bedrooms, office, and any place with a TV to the basement (which will be unfinished). That way I've got access to all the rooms)
My wife laughed out loud (well, snorted air through her nose) when she read your &wine& comment. This was exceptionally helpful, and very thoughtful response - Much appreciated!
Isn't the average household panel 200 amps? We were actually tossing around the idea of getting an electric for one of our cars but I thought most chargers were only 50Amp chargers? Or did you mean 220V?
That's a great idea! I'll look into with him, I'm sure he'd be open to it.
Ohh this is one that I had thought of and forgot- any advice on which cable? Either way I like the idea of a conduit to be able to pull wires in the future. Any advice on what I should run now? I've heard anything from single cat6 to 2 cat5, 2-rg6, and a spkeaer wire for any room with a future use with a Tv....
Hahaha, fair point about the dream home. And I never though about hiring an inspector- how many times is a &reasonable& number to go through- or just at the big phases- foundation, studs/mechanical, etc
We were literally just talking about how many &little& decisions we have to make a few hours ago.
Our builder is thankfully very clear re: what's included vs. Not in his contact and schedules, which (I hope) will make for less surprises later
Great advice- thanks!
Great advice! The lot is literally 800m from our current place so it's easy to keep an eye on things!
Turns out you live and work in Singapore.
To echo OP, I just picked up the yellow and graphite face speedy racing. For the price I could not find a better watch to use for a daily wear. My
Only complaint is at 39mm it's a bit smaller than what I usually wear, but it wears bigger than it's case diameter.
Totally respect that. Then I would also go find the active BMW forums and peruse those as well. I've found them the forums to be way more active than Reddit (for Audi, vw, and Mercedes anyways).
What about another luxury brand? A Lexus will likely be a bit more reliable, and have lovely rides. Unfortunately you can't say you drive a BMW though....
Could also be the white board- this is exactly the reason why I care on my wooden boards
Don't even fucking joke about it
Depending on what your goals are (if you want a new touch screen deck vs just having a Bluetooth interface), it can be a super easy mod for the latter.
Cheap way-Just buy a sat radio or cd changer-aux connector off Amazon or eBay, and then plug in a Bluetooth adapter to it (a hard wired one or a plug in one is nice so you don't have to charge it).
Better way-If you want to go a step up from
Most expensive- buy a badass deck.
1000% Toyota, Honda, or subbie at that price range. I'm no Subaru expert but I expect that the pickings would be slimmer for them compared to the first two
Congrats on the new whip! I still think the mk4 is the sexiest model there is. I miss my 500k little guy.
I don't know as much about the vr6 as I but I wouldn't hesitate to repair that on my (old) tdi. Also if you're amenable the mk4's were reasonably DIY for a lot of things.
Dealership is way more expensive than a decent vw mechanic (my experience is pretty much all decent sized towns have one).
Head over to vwvortex and ask around/search for good mechanics in your area.
Size is very subjective, wear it in good health! The only person's opinion that matters with a purchase Luke that is yours. Happy 30th!
&Oh look, bar of soap&....&I got you good you rookie fuck&
I think it does for that gen, but no to maintenance being the same. Parts alone for the Audi are typically more expensive, that's not including labour
Golf all day long. They're pretty approachable with fixes, there's a decent number of them out there, and they're way cheaper to service than an Audi or a BMW.
All are awesome cars. Xc90 or model X if you want to feel like you're driving a spaceship. Theq7 was redesigned recently but not as nice as the xc or the X. THe Lexus drives wonderfully.
I'm not too familiar with the range mainly because when I was in the market I like to keep my cars longer than the factory warranty, so the reliability scared me off a bit.
If you haven' what about the MB GLE? Also a great ride and decent size!
helpapps & tools&3Use of this site constitutes acceptance of our  and . & 2017 reddit inc. All rights reserved.REDDIT and the ALIEN Logo are registered trademarks of reddit inc.Turkish Food and DrinkI've been away for a few days (family stuff) and the travel gave me a lot of time for thought (you can't type on an inter-city train going at full tilt on our crappy lines). As we seem to be moving into Grim Meathook Future territory with the current government trying to make being poor illegal, I decided to Get With The Program, and invent the most evil business master plan I can think of for capitalizing (heh) on the New Misery.
Note that I am too damned old to play startup chicken all over again, and besides I've got books to write. This is just an exercise in trying to figure out how to make as many people as possible miserable and incrementally diminish the amount of happiness in the world while pretending to be a Force For Good and not actually killing anyone directly&and making money hand over fist. It's a thought experiment, in other words, and I'm not going to do it, and if any sick bastard out there tries to go ahead and patent this as a business practice you can cite this blog entry as prior art.
So. Let me describe first the requirements for the Evil Business Plan of Evil, and then the Plan Itself, in all it's oppressive horror and glory.
Some aspects of modern life look like necessary evils at first, until you realize that some asshole has managed to (a) make it compulsory, and (b) use it for rent-seeking. The goal of this business is to identify a niche that is already mandatory, and where a supply chain exists (that is: someone provides goods or service, and as many people as possible have to use them), then figure out a way to colonize it as a monopolistic intermediary with rent-raising power and the force of law behind it. Sort of like the Post Office, if the Post Office had gotten into the email business in the 1970s and charged postage on SMTP transactions and had made running a private postal service illegal to protect their monopoly.
Here's a better example: speed cameras.
We all know that driving at excessive speed drastically increases the severity of injuries, damage, and deaths resulting from traffic accidents. We also know that employing cops to run speed traps the old-fashioned way, with painted lines and a stop-watch, is very labour-intensive. Therefore, at first glance the modern GATSO or automated speed camera looks like a really good idea. Sitting beside British roads they're mostly painted bright yellow so you can see them coming, and they're emplaced where there's a particular speed-related accident problem, to deter idiots from behaviour likely to kill or injure other people.
However, the idea has legs. Speed cameras go mobile, and can be camouflaged inside vans. Some UK police forces use these to deter drivers from speeding past school gates, where the speed limit typically drops to 20mph (because the difference in outcome between hitting a child at 20mph to hitting them at 30mph is drastic and life-changing at best: one probably causes bruises and contusions, the other breaks bones and often kills). And some towns have been accused of using speed cameras as "revenue enhancement devices", positioning them not to deter bad behaviour but to maximize the revenue from penalty notices by surprising drivers.
This idea maxed out in the US, where the police force of
in South Florida was disbanded after a state investigation into half the town's revenue was coming from speed violations. (Of course: Florida.) US 301 and Highway 24 pass through the W the town applied a very low speed limit to a short stretch of these high-speed roads, and cleaned up.
Here's the commercial outcome of trying to reduce road deaths due to speeding: speed limits are pretty much mandatory worldwide. Demand for tools to deter speeders is therefore pretty much global. Selling speed cameras is an example of supplyi selling radar detectors or SatNav maps with updated speed trap locations is similarly a consumer-side way of cleaning up.
And here's a zinger of a second point: within 30 years at most, possibly a lot sooner, this will be a dead business sector. Tumbleweeds and ghost town dead. Self-driving cars will stick to the speed limit because of manufacturer fears over product liability lawsuits, and speed limits may be changed to reflect the reliability of robots over inattentive humans (self-driving cars don't check their Facebook page while changing lanes). These industry sectors come and go.
Can I identify an existing legally mandated requirement with which the public must comply, and leverage it to (a) provide a law enforcement service at one end, (b) a rent-seeking opportunity at the other, and (c) a natural monopoly that I can milk in the middle? And, wearing my
hat, do so to maximize misery at the same time?
Oh hell yes I can do that ...
is a well-intentioned organization where it comes to protecting its citizens and the natural environment. As they say in their environment notes, "Just in terms of household waste alone, each person in Europe is currently producing, on average, half of tonne of such waste [per year]. Only 40 % of it is reused or recycled and in some countries more than 80% still goes to landfill." They have, helpfully, decided to promulgate a set of standards for recycling waste, to be implemented by governments throughout the EU: the EU Waste Framework Directive "requires all member states to take the necessary measures to ensure waste is recovered or disposed of without endangering human health or causing harm to the environment." (From the .)
Great. Like speed limits, recycling is both inarguably sensible and necessarily mandated by law (because it's a
issue, like speeding). We can work with this!
Here in Edinburgh, we're supposed to separate out our domestic waste into different bins, for separate collection. We have on-street recycling of packaging materials, and, separately, of paper. We have general refuse, and in some areas biomass/garden refuse (not so much in the city centre where I live). Glass recycling ... should be a thing, but they're struggling to separate it out: ditto metals such as cans. (As for
I have no idea what we're supposed to do, which is kind of worrying.) Let's take Edinburgh as a typical case. The city provides refuse collection as one of its services, and this includes sorting and recycling. By pre-sorting their ejecta, citizens are providing a valuable labour input that increases the efficiency of the recycling process and reduces the overheads for the agencies tasked with shifting our shit.
Now, what happens when the mundane reality of household garbage recycling meets the Internet Of Things and Charlie's Evil Business Plan of Evil (and Misery)?
Well, we know that ubiquitous RFID tags are coming to consumer products. They've been coming for years, now, and the applications are endless. More to the point they can be integrated with plastic products and packaging, and printed cheaply enough that they're on course to replace bar codes.
Embedded microcontrollers are als you can buy them in bulk for under US $0.49 each. Cheap enough to embedd in recycling bins, perhaps? Along with a photovoltaic cell for power and a short-range radio transciever for data. I' the point is, if it's cheap enough to embed in paving stones, it's certainly cheap enough to embed in bins, along with a short-range RFID reader and maybe a biosensor that can tell what sort of DNA is contaminating the items dumped in the bins.
The evil business plan of evil (and misery) posits the existence of smart municipality-provided household recycling bins. There's an inductance device around it (probably a coil) to sense ferrous metals, a DNA sniffer to identify plant or animal biomass and
tagged items, and an RFID reader to scan any packaging. The bin has a PV powered microcontroller that can talk to a base station in , and thence to the city government's waste department. The householder sorts their waste into the various recycling bins, and when the bins are full they're added to a pickup list for the waste truck on the nearest routing&so that rather than being collected at a set interval, they're only collected when they're full.
But that's not all.
Householders are lazy or otherwise noncompliant and sometimes dump stuff in the wrong bin, just as drivers sometimes disobey the speed limit.
The overt value proposition for the municipality (who we are selling these bins and their support infrastructure to) is that the bins can sense the presence of the wrong kind of waste. This increases management costs by requiring hand-sorting, so the individual homeowner can be surcharged (or fined). More reasonably, households can be charged a high annual waste recycling and sorting fee, and given a discount for pre-sorting everything properly, before collection&which they forefeit if they screw up too often.
The covert value proposition ... local town governments are under increasing pressure to cut their operating budgets. But by implementing increasingly elaborate waste-sorting requirements and imposing direct fines on households for non-compliance, they can turn the smart recycling bins into a new revenue enhancement channel, much like the speed cameras in Waldo. Churn the recycling criteria just a little bit and rely on tired and over-engaged citizens to accidentally toss a piece of plastic in the metal bin, or some food waste in the packaging bin: it'll make a fine contribution to your city's revenue!
We can also work the other end of the rent pipeline. Sell householders a deluxe bin with multiple compartments and a sorter in the top: they can put their rubbish in, and the bin itself will sort which section it belongs in. Over a year or three the householder will save themselves the price of the deluxe bin in avoided fines&but we don't care, we're not the municipal waste authority, we're the speed camera/radar detector vendor!
There is a side-effect, of course: . But hey, not our problem. And anyway, it's just a sign that our evil scheme is working.
Meanwhile 90% of our waste mountain comes from the business sector, not consumers, but we don't care about that&businesses do not constitute a captive market as their waste collection is already commercialized and outsourced.
Anyway. The true point of this plan is that it's possible to pervert the internet of things to encourage monopolistic rent-seeking and the petty everyday tyranny of regulations designed not to improve our quality of life but to provide grounds for charging fines for petty infringement. Screwtape would be proud, and our investors will be extremely happy.
What other opportunities for using the IoT to immiserate and oppress the general public for pleasure and profit can you think of?
at 21:10 on May 21, 2015
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—a series of essays about the industry I work in.
—my non-writing autobiography, or what I did before becoming a full-time writer.
—an experiment in weblog mediated collaborative fiction.
Shaping the Future—a talk I gave on the social implications of Moore's Law.
& or, what I did on my holidays
the MIT Media Lab—what it’s like to spend a day
wandering around the Media Lab.
& space colonization: feasible or futile?
“Nothing
like this will be built again”—inside a nuclear
reactor complex.
&#06 (RIP)
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