1x71: Divisions

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42

Stuart, I think this particular directive is wrongly thought through. What matters here is not what percentage of energy comes from renewable sources, though renewable sources are undoubtedly a clear part of the solution. What matters is the reduction of the use of our natural resources and there are several ways this could, at least theoretically, be achieved.

One method is to replace a large part of our energy supply with renewable sources but it’s not the only way.

We could through social engineering encourage society to become less consumerist with people insisting on better quality products but expecting to keep and use them for longer. In this way more energy may be used to make each product but with less products produced the the total energy usage is reduced.

Alternatively we may be able to find efficiency savings either by finding more efficient ways to produce and store energy or by producing products that need less in the first place. One example: if my home heating and cooling systems were linked to say weather forecasts via the internet they could take this into account and use less energy to heat the house if it was going to be a hot day.

You make a number of good points however, and I believe that tackling some of the bigger problems we face as a planet such as climate change, workers pay and safety (including the working time directive) require international cooperation which is why I voted to remain - Britain has a stronger voice as part of a large community.

I fully accept that the EU is a less than perfect institution, but no institution is, I still believe we were better in than out. I fear that once the UK has left the EU they will join a race to the bottom with the poor, the unemployed and disabled being amongst the hardest hit.

43

A digression:

This is a great source of irritation for me. For example, my kitchen stove. It’s about 8 years old and and 3 out of 4 top burners either don’t work at all or improperly. Can manufacturers make stoves that will last? Oh, yes. There are stoves that are decades old that run just fine, but, if manufacturers continued on that course, they sell less stoves, which stock holders don’t like! It was the same with light bulbs. There are Edison bulbs that still work. I’m sure I could rant on and on about other examples. I like energy efficiency and long life of products because, first of all, I’m cheap. Others may have other motivations, and that’s just fine with me. But, for an old curmudgeon, cheap counts!

End of digression. :smile:

Sounds good, but just how would that work? (me scratching head, but having a head cold at the moment isn’t helping matters) I guess this is the end of the digression. Maybe. Sorry, don’t mean to hijack the discussion any, but that just sounds intriguing.

44

Greg, I fully understand this argument but manufactures can only sell what we will buy, today most consumer electronics has a two year warranty - at least in the UK - I have designed products for the aviation and space industries with much longer 30+ year warranties. Its not impossible but does cost more. Given the choice you can make more stoves but nobody will buy them or you can make fewer better ones, which cost more, but will sell what would you choose as a shareholder?

Again there are very few stupid questions, and this certainly isn’t one, my central heating will boil water to feed the radiators just in case it’s needed when it may be the case that I don’t want any heat but cooling (air con) instead. I can override this but that requires me to plan ahead. It probably should be but it’s not always one of my highest priorities.

I appreciate this is not easy to achieve as an individual but if we all said we would only deal with white good vendors (stoves, fridges, washing machines, etc) where a 20 year (new for old) warranty is an absolute minimum then things would change. Hence my reference to social engineering.

45

Hi,
thanks again for the talk about whether or not to open source.

The bit about brexit outshone it a bit, but rightfully so. Btw, as a german consumer of mostly german mainstream media (I also checked out bbc.com and cnn.com but didn’t find the coverage to be very different), I’m happy that you conciously tried to make the segment in a balanced way and also happy that some british leavers shared their reasons here in the forum. Because I feel that even the attempt to make reasonable pro-leave coverage was largely missing in the media I get to consume usually. Still I would have wished for a different outcome for the vote.
For the future, I wish us all the best, and let’s hope that this brexit is not turned into a shin-kicking-contest.

Now, about open source. Ok, the conclusion that there isn’t a hard-and-fast answer to be had was kind of expected :slight_smile: .
But most of the aspects you talked about I hadn’t yet considered. I think I can complement what you said to a degree.

I have the impression that you are very cautious about going open source for a company…Jono talked about the need to actually invest effort into community-building.
Maybe you skipped over it because it’s already covered a lot and didn’t want to bore many listeners,
but I’m interested into your (possibly anecdotal) views on the benefits which a company can draw from that investment.
I guess this is over-simplyfied, but it boils down to this: Should I hire a community manager or a PR-agency?
Also, how much value do “external” contributors really add. I’m aware that “it depends a lot”.
But again, maybe you have own anecdotal experiences from particular projects you saw or even worked with in the past.

Stuart outlined how open-sourcing might be good for the customer and bad for the company:

  • it’s easier for customers to leave,
  • harder to manage the strategic direction,
  • Makers of 3rd-party clients might not want to display my ads or support all features of the protocol.

I would like to try and complement this a bit by adding two benefits for the company (leaving out benefits around marketing and “for-free” contributions):

  • the liberty to walk away to a competitor also lowers the threshold for a customer to commit and invest time&money in the first place. Even for the worst case, they will be able to salvage at least some of their investment.
  • as a company, if “we” open-source our stuff, then “we” are instantly the leader of the pack, with the most experience about all the subtleties and the biggest expertise of which future directions are promising.
    That means, while other groups might need to invest less time and effort into getting where “we” are now, “we” will already be some way ahead when “they” get there.
    On the other hand,
    if “they” catch up quickly and even surpass “us” with great stuff (against a lot of odds),
    then “we” still won’t have failed but in turn will have the benefit of being able to follow more easily - ok, depending of the license I guess. Let’s assume here that we have the GPL (question: is it reasonable to assume that the GPL is a preprequisite here?). Further, with someone else doing the heavy-lifting now, “we” would even have the option to reorientate and shift our efforts to other aspects (let’s say do more training and consulting as opposed to developing) and make our money there, and still extend our existing customer base.

There is also one con I want to share, which played a big role in my own thinking for a long time:
We are a small company, and we work a lot to provide services to our customers and clients.
Now, the fear of going open was that someone else could just take our work and put some amount of time and money into

  • polishing it up,
  • rebranding it,
  • doing marketing

i.e. do all the things which we didn’t get to do because we are just a few devs and consultants, busy working for our existing clients. Then our baby would take off with the other company and all the publicity, credits, kudos and money would be theirs.

This notion contains some irrational feelings, but I think there is also a valid core somewhere inside. Did you actually see such a scenario playing out somewhere?

About the fun-section “email us a product that should go open source”.
I like that, and maybe it would also be interesting to speculare a bit.
E.g.: what if microsoft wanted to open-source windows10.
Who might sue them and why, which strategic goals might be put in danger, which ways of making money wouldn’t work anymore, what benefits could they reap and so on.

Also, I don’t know if this could be a segment, but what I’m actually also wondering is, why does sharing code seems to work out so well for everybody lately?
Why was it a thing in the 60s, but not in the 80s when the FSF started?
I sometimes feel like a humming-bird in the jungle, whose beak has a particular shape, and all of a sudden, there is an abundance of blossoms that are perfect for my particular beak.
I’m happy but also a bit nervous about where they came from and how long that abundance will last.

I think that’s all I have to write for now, I would be happy about anybody’s feedback.

Best regards
Tobias

PS: my compliments to Stuart for pronouncing my family name with “Schö” and everything :wink: (no, seriously!)

46

This really cuts to the heart of the matter. In response, I would simply say that it is unwise to accept an undemocratic and unaccountable system merely because it currently happens to be producing results you like. If you do, then you will have no reasonable grounds for objection when the situation changes and it starts producing results you don’t like. And if you do object at that point, you will be a massive hypocrite.

(And I agree your examples were examples; I just feel that it would have been appropriate to have thought a bit more and chosen examples of equal weight, to avoid the appearance of trivialising the destruction of someone’s livelihood.)

47

This comments made me wonder about another undemocratic and unaccountable system.

The House of Commons makes it unaccountable to its electoral body through the first-past-the-post voting system. For instance, UKIP has one seat in the current house of commons although they got 3.8M votes (12.7%)! An even starker result is '83 election where the SDP/Liberals got 22% of the votes and 3.4% of the seats.

Likewise, the other major institution in the UK, the House of Lords, have inheritable seats. That seems rather undemocratic.

Based on your truism, should we stop to accept the UK?

48

I agree. However, the counterargument is that a democratic system is vulnerable to the tyranny of the majority. My inclination, therefore, is to have a mix of the two things – viz, the UK and the EU, or the Commons and the Lords.

49

I’m not a fan of first-past-the-post; it was defensible 10 or 15 years ago, but with the rise of proper multi-party politics, not now. The Greens and UKIP have legitimate complaints about how their voters are not properly represented. (But AV remains a “grubby little compromise”, to quote Nick Clegg.)

I think that the House of Lords, if it were working well, and if its powers are appropriately scoped, would be a great thing. The inheritability of the seats is not a problem as long as (as used to be the case, and I believe mostly still is) those inheriting them had a strong familial obligation to public service. Better such people than ex-politicians kicked upstairs to play a numbers game. The HoL should not be permitted to permanently block the will of the Commons (as, basically, it isn’t). If that’s true, then I think there is value in it, done right. However, recent massive expansion has not really lead to an improvement in the quality of its work.

50

Ah, I didn’t think of boilers. Now I understand how that could work!

51

The inheritability of the seats is not a problem as long as (as used to
be the case, and I believe mostly still is) those inheriting them had a
strong familial obligation to public service.

I think alot of people outside England would disagree with this. The House of Lords is actually the same class system that Cameron, Osbourne, Hunt etc belong to which many object to. Alot of the rest of the representatives who are not “born to the position” are given their seats because of party donations e.g. Alan Sugar. Instead the House of Lords might be better if we had a House of Citizens who came from the people and were selected by a jury system. It would stop us drawing our government from a narrow cross section of the OxBridge population which we currently do.

At least this referendum has shaken up our stale politics which we should be grateful for. Hopefully we have finally got rid of a Labour party that lectures the population and instead reflects the beliefs of the population. Perhaps we can also learn more from our European cousins and value education instead of going for the American model of debt and maybe get rid of this class system the permeates England.

52

Have a read of this, then come back and comment: Is the EU undemocratic? | European Union | The Guardian

53

Nothing said there is untrue, but a lot of it is misleading by omission, or doesn’t take sufficient account of what else is true. It’s also hardly a ringing endorsement even on its own terms.

“The Commission drafts laws” - yes, and having the ability to frame the initial version of a law is a big power for an unelected body. It also decides which laws are created or amended, and which are not - yes, the other bits can put pressure on, but the Commission has the final say. And it’s far more Euro-integrationist than the people of Europe are.

“But it does not pass laws” - in a narrow sense that’s true, but many laws only get passed after passing the co-decision procedure, in which the Commission is one of the 3 participants which has to agree on the text.

“In this case, more than three quarters of the British public, including 68% of Conservative voters, supported the EU proposal.” - see my previous comment about it being unwise to accept undemocratic decisions because you happen to agree with them.

Pointing out the problems with the UK’s democracy is the logical fallacy of “tu quoque”.

The yellow card and red card procedures are either so unwieldy as to be unusable, or they just get ignored. (The yellow card procedure has been used all of twice, and it was ignored one of those times.)

“The EU has many serious democratic flaws. But the deficit can be tackled.” – yeah, good luck with that. See how much change we managed to achieve when we were actually genuinely threatening to leave.

54

I’ll be strongly biased in this situation, not because I voted (i’m not in or from UK), but because I think leave voters were mostly going with anti-polish sentiment and I was unlucky enough to be born in Poland.

55

Poland, another place I wish I could visit. The food looks good and I’ve seen some stunning pictures of the land. Unfortunately, the internet, a cookbook and some good friends are about as close I ever get.

56

I’m sorry you feel like this but while I can’t pretend that there is no racism here in the UK I think the number of people voting to leave from some anti-polish or any other xenophobic reason is a tiny minority. Where I live in Cambridgeshire we have a number of Polish families and I have always found them to be polite and friendly, I think in general Polish people are well liked here.

To be fair however, where I live most people voted to remain, it may be a different story in parts of the country that had a high percentage of exit voters. If anyone has any evidence that racism was a significant factor I would like to hear it but it is certainly not my experience.

57

I guess it might be an OK place to visit. If you ever and for any reason decide to come to Cracow, drop me a line. I was raised here, and my actual education was archaeology so should be able to show you a lot of historical sites.

It’s a good thing you feel that way about your neighborhood. I do not intend to single out UK people, if anything I’d say the xenophobia/racism of Poles most likely trumps anything the island has to offer. And I’m not proud about it. I was (till very recently) working with some people from UK regularly over the phone, and at least one of them was disgusted with the xenophobic sentiment he started noticing. Maybe that’s what made me think that way.

Do I believe xenophobia played a major role in the Brexit vote? Yes.
Is it possible I’m totally wrong about it? - Also Yes.

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58

I live in Switzerland, well I am swiss.

I listen to this podcast twice, because it is not only about this brexit, but also about history.
If this person tells BS, so it still made sense to me from a logical perspective.

He gives you a good example i.e. - if you have free trade with CHINA, do all the people from China have free movement to Europe ?

Just free up your mind and listen to it.

Welcome to freedom britain

1 Like
59

If Bill Gates walks into a bank and says, I want an account in this bank, but I want my bank card to be bright red… then the bank will probably do their best to sort that out. But that doesn’t work if you are, for example, me. Similarly, the UK is not China; cutting off trade with the UK would be bad but not ruinous for the EU, but China’s not like that. Switzerland is an interesting example, though, and evidence that you can be in Europe and not in the EU and still manage… but Switzerland is also a bit of a weird special case and all sorts of rules have Switzerland-shaped holes in them :slight_smile:

60

Well, you have to be careful not just trying to protect /defend your idea.
If someone is convinced of something, this person will try to defend its opinon no matter what.

Not only Switzerland - open your eyes:
Switzerland, Norway, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Serbia, Kosovo, Albania, Macedonia, Ukraine, Moldova, Iceland, Belarus,
are not in the European Union.

This elite in Europe spends more time himself to pat on the back, than to tackle an important problems.
Furthermore, the lobbyists are a real danger - she is from the liberal sweden and works for the EU - please read it

After you heard the podcast above I am sure you think about changing your mind.
Just because of facts.

61

I think http://blogs.lse.ac.uk/brexitvote/2016/07/03/alan-skeds-case-for-brexit-a-six-point-rebuttal/ is an interesting counterpoint to that talk – mentions Switzerland, too. I’m not sure about all the arguments myself, but that may be interesting reading.