This used to be true but was adjusted with a correction to the internation postage rates. These days things like AliExpress have stopped using local postal delivery and instead use their own local logistics partners for last mile delivery, and it's surprisingly still just about as cheap.
I'm guessing these last mile deliveries are gig workers, considering I seem to get deliveries from people in unmarked personal vehicles nowadays.
The US is already far behind the economies of scale of Chinese production, and has higher labor costs and higher regulatory costs (both good and bad), so it's fundamentally not possible to compete on price alone, regardless of any postal treaty issues, which, again, are not a huge factor these days.
The new logistics services have been pretty interesting, and don't bode well for UPS/FedEx who have been content to focus only on large packages and charge ridiculous fees for a long time without innovating.
Having no expectation of privacy in public used to be a reasonable stance when there was a real time+money cost to extended surveillance, which meant that you still had a moderate amount of privacy unless someone was willing to personally target you and spend significant resources.
You either had to have a cop or a PI tail you, or spend time and effort talking to neighbors and acquaintances collecting information and correlating it, and it was much harder to do so secretly.
Technology has reduced the cost of surveillance by several orders of magnitude, and although the premise is unchanged - that you've never had privacy in public - the practical impact has changed in an extremely disturbing way.
I think we're long overdue to rethink and strengthen privacy protections in public in the US. Technological limits, and policy limits on specific implementations are better than nothing, but it's clear to me that surveillance will continue to get cheaper and thus your effective privacy in public will continue to erode until a culture and legal shift in public privacy expectations. I'm not optimistic about that.
I agree with your historical analysis, and I'm also uncomfortable with the total surveillance, but I'm not sure I buy there exist effective legal solutions. The truth is that everyone carries a camera, that all vehicles have cameras and will to a greater and greater degree be using those cameras all the time. I don't know what kind of limits we can put on the lack of privacy there that aren't incredibly intrusive attempts to control everyone's behavior or stop all technology.
But that "everyone" isn't a single entity recording everywhere in public with the intent of providing tracking information of everyone else. If I'm in the background of someone's selfie and posts it online, it could be used to get my location at a specific time, sure, but their intent wasn't to do so and the scope of their recording is dramatically more limited than Flock.
To add to this: you being in the background of anyone's selfie is not a problem of itself. It is the aggregation of everyone's selfies that is a surveillance hazard, the risk associated with each individual picture is minimal.
Europe provides plenty of examples of how this can work. The implementation varies from country to country, but the common thread is that you need a lot of subtlety. Rules like "it's fine to photograph a street full of people, but if you focus on a single person you need their consent" and "you can photograph a busy street for artistic reasons, but the same photograph is illegal if the intent is collecting data about the people or vehicles in the shot, unless it's for research or education"
Those strike me as problematic. It strikes me as a big problem if I've got to navigate some fuzzy line about how much I am perceived to focus on someone every time I take a photo in public. Who decides too much focus is too much? How do they decide? How do I defend my artistic intent for every photo in public?
I understand how if you wave away all concepts of fallibility or enforceability, you can say to people, "It's cool that all this data exists, just don't be creepy," but you can't wave those concepts away.
When you make bad law that involves trying to apply a fuzzy rule to a fuzzy situation, judges make bad calls. And you also make it possible for people to be very harassed by bringing cases to court where it's not possible to easily dismiss them (because the rule is fuzzy and there isn't a clear standard to dismiss) so even if the judge makes a good call, you've punished good behavior.
Almost all of our laws fall into this categorizations.
The idea that laws are clear-cut is largely a programmers fantasy.
Related: there's a lot of people who think that if you don't technically break the law then you're off the hook.
Uh, no, not how law works. The letter of the law doesn't matter, the spirit does. Being an asshole but not technically breaking the law is still illegal.
Yes, that's a lot different than code, isnt it? But it has to be.
Are you going to expand on me being wrong or is "nuh uh!!" all you can offer?
The reason I'm smug is that technical people think they're hyper intelligent and cracked the code.
Ha! Those silly law makers! Don't they know I perfectly followed the laws algorithm and hit an edge case? Now they HAVE to let me off the hook!
No they don't. Why would they have to do that? Laws aren't algorithms, they're natural language intended to curb bad behavior.
If your behavior is bad, and a judge or jury thinks it's bad, you're getting curbed.
The inverse of that is you can actually break the law and get away with it, if the behavior isn't bad. Maybe it's justified, maybe you're a struggling single mother or something... the jury can just say "nahhh" and you go home.
If you really want me to, sure. Here's the expansion:
You discovered that there are certain amounts of judgment calls and subjectivity in the legal system, and then you seemed to get really excited, stop thinking, and start patting yourself on the back for your incredible insight. This whole, "Boom, sometimes people use human judgment legal cases, bet you NEVER THOUGHT OF THAT you STUPID TECH PERSON" is the world's most banal insight and the fact that you seem to think it's the entire analysis of the situation suggests that you're a stupid person.
Go find a lawyer (ie, not a tech person), and try this out on them.
Of course there is an element of subjectivity in every law and every case. But there is also a serious and deliberate attempt by the entire apparatus of the legal system to in fact systematize the way that the legal code is applied to human behavior. Yes, there are limits both to how far that systematization can go based on the complexity of real life and how far people want to let it go. But it's a matter of degree, and your whole line about how judges and juries just think that they can and should punish any behavior they think is "bad" without reference to a systemic law is stupid and incorrect.
Sometimes of course laws are written to be extremely vague and judgment based. Those laws have objectively bad outcomes, and are usually either quietly dustbinned, reformed, or the legal system attempts to systematize them, creating judicial doctrines that apply actual rules to how they work. (And, because again it seems like I'm talking to a very naive person, I'll caveat that of course such systems do not remove all ambiguity -- they merely manage it). And this is because the lawyers and judges that you want to imagine as agreeing with you recognize that a system in which you go in front of a judge and he just decides if you're "bad" is a terrible system.
And now I predict that you're going to answer this with some kind of big "nuh-uh, you're dumb." Here's what I suggest instead: I'm done with this thread. If you actually want to improve your understanding of the world instead of trying to shore up your ego, go and find someone in the legal world and ask them what they think of your takes here.
This has always been a false narrative. There's always been some expectation of privacy in public. It's just that it got messier. You should expect to not be overheard by walking away from others. You should expect not to be seen by entering the stall of a public restroom. The thing that changed is now we can see without eyes and hear without ears.
People have been getting more risk-averse, as well as nosier over time. Both of these changes increase the push for surveillance. I agree with your intuition that people shouldn't have to worry about being constantly monitored, but if you look at the recent internet pile-on after both the Coldplay concert and tennis match incidents, I am not sure the (voting) public agrees.
>"Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard."
Break the system. Non-trivial for various reasons but flood the market with low cost microwave imaging devices. I wonder how people would react if Flock camera sized devices that could see through clothes existed at a competitive price point?
Oh lord, think of the children folks. We're going to have to shut it all down.
No expectation of privacy in public is tautological, that’s what public means. Your feelings of embarrassment or paranoia don’t trump my right to observe what’s going on in the public domain.
Absolutist stances like this generally lead to undesirable outcomes as technology advances and changes the scale-per-dollar practical limitations of surveillance, which is exactly my point around our need to adjust how absolutely we consider the lack of privacy expectations in public.
The absolutist "no public privacy" stance suggests that I would be ok (legally and morally) to create a widespread camera system that tracks cellphone screens in public and automatically records any passwords that are being entered within view of the cameras and sends them to me. This is ok because, in the absolutist view, your screen and finger movements were visible in public. This feels pretty wrong to me.
It's the difference between targeted surveillance and dragnet surveillance. Technology has made things that were previously only possible through targeted surveillance to be cheaply achieved through dragnet means, both to governments and individual citizens.
This statement "Tesla and Musk are very good about privacy and leaving control with the user" is pretty clearly false [1]:
> between 2019 and 2022, groups of Tesla employees privately shared via an internal messaging system sometimes highly invasive videos and images recorded by customers’ car cameras, according to interviews by Reuters with nine former employees.
Clamp meters are completely safe. The only risk is if you DIY your power cable so you can clamp one lead, but that's not necessary if you just buy an AC line splitter plug. And those often come with the hot looped around so you can get a 10x reading for better fidelity at lower current draw.
But these days I just skip the clamp meter and throw Ikea Inspelning zigbee plugs anywhere I want power measurement.
This is such an odd statement. Just because it's electric doesn't mean there's no concept of efficiency.
Large EVs are pretty silly for exactly that efficiency reason - they may have "400" miles of range, but they do so by packing the biggest possible battery which weighs a ton, wasting even more range per kilowatt-hour beyond the worse aerodynamics.
And then because the battery is so massive, it takes way longer to charge for the same range, so now you need a higher current charger at home and maybe even need to upgrade your home electric service instead of just using a standard 15A circuit to top up a small EV every night enough for a typical day's commute.
It's not that there is no concept of efficiency, it's that an electric car gets a free 2x reduction in emissions.
And sure you can't use a normal plug very well, whatever. Even without any amp increase, going up to 240 volts will let you charge up that commute and more.
Two bits of advice: just jump in, and set reasonable expectations for yourself.
Robotics is a field filled with layers upon layers of complexity, theory, and real-world problems. Those at the top of the game (think robust dog robots, walking bipedal star wars droids, high-speed and high-torque many-DOF arm platforms) are leveraging learnings and expensive prototypes from decades of work/research to achieve those feats. This is not to be discouraging, but to say - they all started somewhere - you too can start, and maybe you won't build things like that today, but you can get there.
And the cool thing is all that robotics work by experts has made the barrier to entry much lower - today you can choose to apply money to solve problems you don't want to learn and focus on the things you do want to learn, in ways that weren't possible 10 years ago. Need a powerful closed loop motor system? Buy an ODrive or closed-loop stepper platform off the shelf, and focus on how to apply those systems to build something higher level.
But the big difference with learning hardware/robotics compared to software (speaking from experience having watched a lot of really smart people struggle to get robots working when I ran an MIT robotics competition, 6.270, and was a lab assistant for another course, 6.141) is that the real world is unforgiving in a way that software is generally not. So if you come from a software background, you will find that robotics can have so many more setbacks because nothing ever moves/behaves/reacts in a precisely predictable way in physical space. This is why I say just jump in - you'll have fun learning all the ways things go wrong, and they faster you get that learning out of the way, the sooner you can build things that work reliably!
Try things and figure out how and why they don't work, and iterate. But don't set unrealistically high expectations or it will just be frustrating.
The other good reason to choose congestion pricing as the start to breaking the chicken/egg problem is that, outside of NYC and maybe Chicago, public transit in the US is primarily buses on streets shared with car traffic. It's hard to attract ridership and improve buses when they're always stuck in car traffic, so starting by reducing traffic via congestion pricing is particularly pragmatic.
Google has a history of creating first-party-only APIs to give their own Android apps an edge.
In 2014 Google split their drive app into multiple separate Android apps for docs, sheets, etc. Obviously getting users to install and migrate to new apps would be a burden, so they designed a 1-click install modal that Drive could use instead of the typical redirect-to-Play-Store flow. Neat!
Around that time the company I worked for (large competitor of Drive) was about to split out some core functionality into a standalone app and wanted to use a similar flow for similar reasons - Nope! Google locked that API behind an app signature verification (not even a permission) so only Google signed apps could use it. No possibility to request the permission or appeal - just a hard-coded monopoly.
There ARE legitimate reasons that things like this can be risky and abuse needs to be mitigated, but there's a line that Google regularly crosses between abuse mitigation and anti-competitive behavior.
None of Google apps use the permission Nexcloud wants. The only exception is the preloaded "Files" file explorer app which doesn't integrate with clouds.
You're attacking a strawman; anti-competitive behavior doesn't require that you do exactly the thing you prohibit others from doing. It can be anti-competitive to use your market control to restrict competition in ways that break competitors product but do not impact your own product.
In any case, you've also ignored most of my comment which WAS an example of Google going that extra step of directly blocking APIs that they leverage themselves.
Let's do both! In neighborhoods, street design is going to be far more effective than things like electronic speed limiting, speed cameras, etc. But for dedicated rights of way for high throughout vehicle traffic, limiting speeds to engineering-based safe limits seems pretty reasonable as well.
Sure. Or if you don't want to have to tow a non-street-legal vehicle to move it on public streets, we could probably include a provision for GPS/vision-based dynamic speed limiting, allowing you to make your vehicle automatically street legally-speed-limited on public streets where others are at risk, and unlimited off public streets. The technology already exists and is very reliable for this.
I'm guessing these last mile deliveries are gig workers, considering I seem to get deliveries from people in unmarked personal vehicles nowadays.
The US is already far behind the economies of scale of Chinese production, and has higher labor costs and higher regulatory costs (both good and bad), so it's fundamentally not possible to compete on price alone, regardless of any postal treaty issues, which, again, are not a huge factor these days.
The new logistics services have been pretty interesting, and don't bode well for UPS/FedEx who have been content to focus only on large packages and charge ridiculous fees for a long time without innovating.