Indeed I am a bit puzzled by the Shapiro quote. Any design/software requires an understanding of human behaviour.

Do technology sometimes get that wrong? Of course, but it's not exactly a new thing. My personal favourite was when Microsoft switched Office to the Ribbon bar. I literally could not find out how to saveAs or print. Had to google to find that little circle button that brings up a new menu.

Authentication can be vastly improved from an engineering solution via 2FA, proper storage... Yes, it is still a human problem as people still complain about 2FA.

Monitoring can be another one. Alerting if you do something that you don't normally do. This happened to me this weekend when I bought something from a website I rarely do. My mastercared issuer called me to verify it. Again balancing it to be convenient with secure.

Firewalls and keeping things off the internet are also practical engineering solution that need to keep the human factor at the forefront.

I don't see anything new here except perhaps if there are people thinking they can just sell a box and then all security is solved. Yes, I guess people need to be reminded of that as usual.

You need to continuously create better engineering solutions and better interactions with human behaviour.

The other issue is who is the target of the encryption.

If we're talking people worthy of such risk that they're willing to get rid of privacy, then this law is not going to do it as those types can and probably will make their own private app. Heck, I think the EU made this easier forcing Apple to allow side-loading. Criminal organization, terrorist groups, child porn rings... should all have the resources. It's not really complex to get a very basic E2E encrypted system going.

So by in large, adding back-doors is mainly going to impact low-level crime. Yes, even in the case of child porn. It might get the casual down loader, but not anyone on the inside actually creating/mass distributing it. Might get the young impressionable teen curious about terrorism, but not that actual terrorists...

Whether they like it or not, given the world we live in with open source, relatively open mobile phone markets, reasonably available tech talent, it secure communications are simply a reality.

This is really the key.

Child abuse has been there since forever and is not new due to technology. Let's not forget the actual crime is the child being abused. If it's done in secret and only 10 perverts see it gathering in a basement on a projector, versus 1000 due to whatspp... the actual abuse of the child has not changed.

While possession of child porn is a crime, we should always remember the metric for success of a policy should be on reducing the number of children being abused.

I guess one really valid possibility is that tracking images might lead to the actual abusers, assuming they download/share as well. Although my hunch would be they probably don't use Whatsapp or signal as they're not really sharing platforms like say Torrents.

Abstract arguments can be made about increasing demand or such things which may or may not be valid (I have no idea), but I've not seen a whole lot of actual 'save the children' action from most governments.

The idea of maybe sending a message or hash of a message to a scanner before a message is E2E encrypted might be viable technically. It would basically break whatever trust is in the system because now you're having to trust whatever government monitoring system is there and they don't change their criteria...

As a former South African, let me just add some nuance here.

The biggest crime of colonialism was not colonialism itself, but incomplete colonialism. What I mean by this is colonialism typically destroys the existing leadership in a society and tries to replace it with the colonizers or some variation thereof.

What happened in Africa was particularly bad as the existing leadership was destroyed (even if you think it was tribal and backwards), Sometimes they were at best pushed to ceremonial positions. And the Europeans left before putting in place sustainable new leadership.

Case in point is talking about Ethiopia being 'the best by African standards' Any coincidence that it was also one of few areas NOT colonized. Closer to South Africa, you'll notice much better leadership in Botswana... because the Botswana leadership was less destroyed.

So while you can point to a slice of history and say black societies were 'backwards' or indigenous societies were backwards and it would be a true statement. I think a far more important point as it relates to government is their traditional leadership was often destroyed and left incomplete. They're often a worse spot than they were pre-colonization.

Technology and what not can be adapted to pretty quickly. That's actually the easy part of the equation. Social and leadership structures are much harder.

This is very true. One of the most problematic things about EVs is that people have 'settled' on them as the solution. There's still so much innovation out there that we don't know the answer. Maybe it is EVs. Maybe it is hydrogen. Maybe it is synthetic carbon neutral fuel. Maybe it's XYZ. Even within EVs, there are all kinds of different battery types that we have to wait and see.

Let things play out.

Synthetic carbon neutral fuels should definitely be legal. Now what controls can be put in place to ensure it is not used as just an excuse to have cars around that can run regular gasoline? That's a better question. For one I think we're already taxing gasoline and most likely those rates will go up. I would hope synthetic carbon neutral gasoline would not have carbon taxes on it. So that would be an incentive to use the carbon neutral fuel. Or we could look at maybe enforcing synthetic gasoline at the pump (maybe a different connector or something). Maybe with an override if you run out of gas and need to refuel using regular gasoline.

It's not really about confusing, it is about the brand.

I've never heard of this 'bad spaniel,' but if I was to every call Jack Daniel's shit, I would definitely make that joke now. How about some shitty Bad Spaniels?

That's not a good thing to be associated with the brand.
Now how that plays out between trademarks or free speach... I have no clue.

But I'd say it's hard to suggest it has potential/harm to them.
Imagine a play on the trademark FORD. Imagine someone released a toy call Fix Or Repair Daily, where you get play fix a toy car. That's a bad association to have with your brand.

I'm no historian, just a brown person living in Canada. Of all the major wars I've seen on the news in my life (Iraq, Bosnia, Rwanda, Syria, Russia-Ukraine, Sri Lanka, Somalia... I'm sure I missed many), it just appears to me the Russian people get a pretty short end of the stick.

It's just weird. As much as Saddam was 'evil', I don't remember rich Iraqis or Iraqi business people (even well connected ones), being sanctioned and hunted down. I'm sure some rich Russian oligarch is not a saint, but I mean... chasing them down on their luxury yachts? It's almost comically weird. Finland building a fence to prevent Russian draft dodgers from leaving Russia? I mean really?

I understand the purpose of sanctions. Sometimes they say it's to make life bad for people so they overthrow the government or whatever. I did grow up in South Africa under apartheid, so I know it can have an impact.

It's just fascinating to me. Russians are really the 'bad guys' in the eyes of so many people. It's like a movie.

It's way more complex than that. There's several threads that are often not talked about.

1. Yes, their main feature was email. But their technology was really something that was at best a stop-gap measure. They had their servers talking to your exchange/novell (but mainly exchange) server doing all kinds of integration work. Once Microsoft built in mobile into exchange, the main benefits of BlackBerry email were gone.

2. Similar to 1, they had their own private Blackberry server/network. Hence their cashcow of the system access fee. Again, once exchange came built in with mobile and general internet browsing became popular on the cell phone, this network became increasingly useless except for perhaps some government entities.

3. They tried to optimize everything, which WAS great. Unless mobile operators decided more data was actually great as they could see people higher data packages and overage fees. So they missed this change in the mobile operator space. Their general relationship with mobile operators was also one from a very 'weak' standpoint. They bent over backwards to make mobile operators happy. If you look at what apple did, they basically built a 'great phone' and then came to the table with ISPs with some power to dictate. Blackberry never/couldn't do that, so every feature or thing they wanted to do was always filtered via what mobile operators wanted... which was often not in the phones best desire

4. Of course then they bungled the transition to the good mobile OS and apps ecosystem that Android and IOS both just dominated. This was a more thing that was beyond their domain. Even Microsoft which built their bread and butter on OS couldn't find a home there. I don't fault them as much here, even though they failed. They tried to keep it up to date, but they were just outclassed here. They couldn't build the app community or development community. It's possible if they had jumped to android earlier and integrated their stuff, more could have happened.

5. Lastly of course... the obsession with the keyboard. Apple just changed the market by released a touch screen only phone that worked. They could never quite hit that market in time.

The problem is everything is priorities. You didn't need a think-tank to write that up.

Emission Reduction or Support War in the Ukraine?
I'm pretty sure that war is releasing a lot of greenhouse gasses (fires, fuel...)

Emission Reduction or Healthcare?
I'm in Canada right now and the 'big deal' on the table is healthcare funding. The US was similar. Did Obama prioritize healthcare as well? Was that his major legacy?

We could go on and on. I'm not saying ALL funding should go to climate change. However, we gotta look at what we the public and the government are prioritizing. Even among the most progressive governments, it is NOT climate change. It would be like if during WW2, the United States didn't make the war it's priority and instead focused on pensions or healthcare or Space. These are all good things, but if we are truly in an emergency, then... the priorities should line up.

We're seeing this right now in even small policies. Due to Covid most of my team was moved remote. We've been great at it. Now there's a variety of things trying to get us back to the office. Making sure the city stays 'alive' by making sure people are commuting and spending money downtown. Having some notion of a team in the physical sense. Again, I'm not suggesting any of that is not a valid goal. But spending whatever on electric cars or encouraging more WFH?

Even things like transit. I'm a big supporter. Heck, I think it would be 'fair' if those who are afforded to WFH (like myself) pay an additional fee to support transit to keep the system running. But we still have politicians penny pinching transit (even in Canada...) while spending on everything else.

This right here. You do need grading. Is it imperfect? Of course. Yet, it also serves a selection criteria. Who gets to enter certain fields or get certain positions. You need something quantifiable so it isn't just who knows who or who has money.

Performance metrics are trickier because they often come with perverse incentives that have very tangible real world consequences.

This is an absolutely true story. I was working for a networking company way back and they outsourced part of the stack development. It literally came back with repeated blocks of code that should have been in a loop. I queried and they literally paid the contractor by line of code. Or you have the example in the article about doctors prescribing tests to make their numbers look better. Or even school/medical care classifying people with 'greater' disabilities or ailments so they get more funding...

In this respect, I do think we need a greater respect for just doing an honest days work. We at times have to accept it's too difficult to properly and perfectly metric something and just rely on people doing their job and being monitored by managers and coworkers and 'customers' for doing their job. Maybe you are an amazing developer, but maybe you're not paid 10x a regular developer. Maybe you're an amazing police officer, but you're paid in the same pay band as just a regular police officer. That's just part of the job. If you try and apply metrics to it like number of tickets or arrests made, that can have some bad legal consequences for citizens. Same with teachers.

This idea of always rewarding the 'best' according to some 'metrics' to make it seem objective is perhaps not the best solution.

I emphasize the term 'seem objective' because it's often not correct or is used to force something against other opinions because of metrics.

I'll give another related topic on metrics. I'm in Toronto, Canada and we've had a massive transit investment in the past few years. Of course deciding where or what kind of transit to build is complicated. What bothered me is the number of 'reports' that were provided and politicians basically using these 'reports' to push a political view point under the guise of it being objective and 'science' based.

The one that hit me was debating LRT versus subways. I actually went through these reports and basically they revolve around what you choose to weight.

If the report chose to give a high weight to having more stations close to people... guess what LRT wins because there are typically more stops.

If the report chose to give a high weight to time to destination... guess what subway wins as it's removed from traffic and typically fewer stops.

You basically didn't even need the report. All you needed was what the 'academic' doing the report chose to weight things. If you know their 'values', you know their 'weights', and you know the result of the report.

Instead of having a values discussion, which is actually what was at play (more people close to a stop VS time to destination), both sides just bashed pointless reports at each other claiming to be 'objective'.

This right here. There are so many 'easy' wins.

The easiest one for me is say laundry detergent. I switched to laundry strips which come in a paper/cardboard packaging. Works great. Now even if you want 'Tide' or something, why can't tide make a 'Tide' laundry strip. They do have Tide Pods. But again, why do Tide Pods come in a plastic container. Just throw it in a cardboard box.

Even say deodorant/anti antiperspirant. Many 'natural' brands come in paper push sticks. I can't figure out why antiperspirant can't be packaged the same way. Or just have refills sold. I sadly need antiperspirant with the evil aluminum, but I can't find it in good packaging (in Canada).

These are easy wins. As we go through item by item, we can definitely start cracking away at the problem. Some will be easy wins. Some will have some costs like greater spoilage/safety or something. For example, I know there is a safety issue with kids eating tide pods. I mean sure, a plastic locking container might help that... but I mean... surely parents can handle that more responsibly for the environmental benefit.

But I hate the reality that there are easy wins that aren't being done.

Oddly enough many of the more popular bans on plastic are not on the top of my list of easy wins. Plastic bags for example are just too useful around the house. We reuse them for garbage bags. Even why I buy reusable ones, they might break at some point then I have to replace it and throw out the old one. I do like that they normally ask you if you want a bag these days.

I agree with the article. It's just hard to find what you need on Amazon beyond just searching for keywords. So you will often find some products on what you need, but it doesn't feel like a shopping experience. You also tend not get all the 'official products'.

For example.
One of things I like to do is see all similarly categorized options. Say I am shopping for pants. If I go to most clothing stores, I can search for pants. I click on one, and generally they have breadcrumbs (I think it is the word) that will take you to the stores listing of ALL their pants. You can be pretty confident that you can reasonably browse all the available pants from that store.

Amazon does have categories, but it's just not very well organized and the way you search rarely leads to the nice breadcrumbs. You also generally lack complete collections from known name brands.

This has resulted in me generally buying from the official site or more targeted websites when I'm looking for a specific thing. Example, I bought some Ralph Lauren clothes recently. I did search on Amazon and it had some stuff (even stuff that looked official), but I couldn't find what I was looking for. The official Ralph Lauren website didn't ship to Canada, so I ended up ordering from the website of a Canadian retailer.

Amazon is still my first entry point because if it finds what I am looking for, it is just so convenient and free shipping. Like I bought an air fryer and I found the specific model by searching for that model and that worked like a charm. But more often that not, it fails at the actual shopping/browsing experience.

I think general retailers can definitely catch up to Amazon in a variety of ways.

1. Using existing logins, like Google Login. I just can't bring myself to create accounts for every website.

2. Using good shipping. As amazing as next day is, you don't even need to be that awesome. Just keep the customer informed and be prompt about it. I ordered recently from simons (Canadian retailer) and I was impressed with their shipping. They used intelcom (never even heard of it), but it was quick and they sent an email saying it would be delivered in the next 3 hours. It was pretty good. I'm not missing much from amazon with that kind of shipping. I didn't order enough to get free shipping, but it was cheap. I think like $10 or something. To contrast that good experience, I bought something from another retailer recently and they literally kept the order for like 2 months before cancelling the order saying they had no stock. That's just shitty. At least with Amazon they typically say how much they have in stock when there is low stock.

3. Have the good browsing experience. Keep things organized by category, so you can find all the options and curated. It's so much better seeing brands you recognize rather than ZWIFFD Amazon China brand. Honestly, I can't figure out why these China brands can't even just start uniting under 1 brand name. There's gotta be some business majors there or here who can organize it all.

You can't really solve this issue with money. Countries have tried making life easier for parents with baby bonuses or childcare. It doesn't really solve the problem. Even places like Sweden with very generous child benefits are declining. More closer to home, in Quebec, Canada, they have universal childcare and it hasn't solved their birth rate issues.

People like to blame it on money because it is the easy answer, but really is a set of very deeply entrenched and complex societal management.

1. Time is a big one. I'm married with 2 kids. Just the way we live our life makes it very hard to have more than 2 kids. Both my wife and I followed a pretty boring path as far as things go. Go to university. Get a job. Get married. Have kids. I got married around 30. Wife was 28. Had 1 kid a few years after. Had trouble getting the second. Got the second one. By then, we just looked at our life and decided we're done. Risk of pregnancy issues goes up with a woman past 35-40ish. What magical time do you have to have a lot more kids. I'd say maybe you can squeeze out 3 if you follow society's model.

2. People have kids for themselves. This is a big one. We're not having kids for the government. In the culture we have, we live for ourselves. We're not nationalistic joining the army to make our country great or out-breeed our enemies. Kids are great, but I've got my fill with 2 kids in terms of enjoyment. I wouldn't say I'd enjoy things exponentially more if I had 3 or 4 or 10 kids.

3. Further to 2, how much your kids are your own has changed. There is a feeling that your kids aren't even yours yours. Child rights are a much bigger thing. When you have actual laws that will override a parent on things like their views on things like religion, LGBTQ+ issues...

4. Role of men/woman. Again, this is a huge cultural change. People take a long time to mature and grow and overcome whatever struggles they have in life. You can't just marry some young woman and work and run your home. That's way too much risk and terms of divorce, problems... You have to learn to pick a good spouse and figure it all out to stay. My parents had no idea what they were doing getting married. They probably hated each other, yet culturally, they stayed together to raise 3 kids. If either my mom or dad was 'modern enough', they'd have divorced. Our laws very much tilt towards individual lifestyles instead of family and children. This also makes it more risky for both men and women to 'commit' to the family unit for better or worse. You talk about having it so one parent can stay home. Maybe I was just risk averse, but myself and most of my friends actually went for working women because none of us wanted to deal with a divorce where we get killed financially in a divorce.

I don't think we know what the 'solution' is. Immigration has costs. Not increasing population has costs. Maybe we focus on automation and robots. Maybe we just learn to deal with lower population. Maybe increased healthcare costs. But lesser educational costs. Lesser housing costs. What happens to the economy or banking or funding for public services. Who knows.

Pretty much. I now work at a major bank.

In as much as banks are ruthless, they do think about things like this. They don't want to have the risk of key things being owned or only known by one person.

They also play pretty hard ball with vendors making sure they're not too dependent on a particular vendor.

They also have policies of segregation of duties. On a basic level, the person verifying something (like QA) cannot be the same as the person doing the task (developer). It extends to all roles at the bank. Obviously part of it is regulatory and many of the processes derive from that.

I've learned so much here in terms of bureaucratic long term management. Maybe the MBAs that work here just get it better or think more long term. Things just make a lot more sense when you think about it like this.

This is all true, but I don't quite know where your tone is (seriously).

Being so efficient as a tech worker at a startup is nothing to really be proud of. I've done it myself when I was younger. It's also bad for our industry. Some 'bloat' is good. Part of it is redundancy. Part of it is training the next generation of people. Part of it is dedicated skills development...

More tech companies should be as 'inefficient' as Microsoft. More people jobs. More redundancy. More training. They're still profitable. You don't want to get too inefficient and bloated that you don't do anything. But they still release products and life has progressed.

The first time I realized how 'silly' the tech industry is was when I worked at a major telecom equipment provider as a software engineer. Literally in my first few months, I'm leading an incident where one of our routers went down in a major country in the Middle East. I was a pretty capable person, but this just seemed ridiculous to me. Shouldn't this kind of major situation be in the hands of the companies most senior engineers? I was a pretty recent new grad at the time and it really hit me how silly the industry is. Technology is at the center of so much of our society today and yet, it's treated like a startup even in some of our major companies.