For various reasons I don't consult Backblaze stats much nowadays, but I wish this kind of reliability and failure rate information were more available for other products, especially LED light bulbs.
I still use Backblaze drive stats and lifetime annual failure rates to help me decide which make and models of drive I might want to buy for my NAS upgrades.
Why did you stop using them?
Outside of drives, I rely on Consumer Reports for reliability reports. They’ve got the longest history of any organization I know of that gathers data like this, across the widest array of product types.
I don’t necessarily trust their reviews on what is the best product in a given field of technology equipment, but I do trust their longitudinal reliability statistics. I try to take both sets of factors into consideration any time I am looking at buying products.
No kidding! About twelve years ago, I outfitted a house with LED bulbs for about $5 a pop (a bargain at the time!) and those lasted for six years, until I moved. In the new house, LEDs were all less expensive but now they also fail quickly. I'd HAPPILY pay $5 for eternal bulbs again.
I don't know much about sociology, so I found it interesting to read a sociologist critique his own field. This part stood out to me:
> To make a loose statistical analogy, it is a little like continuing to add
variables to a regression on the grounds that the explained variance keeps increasing.
Like a statistical model having parameters, a theory should have some nuance, but too much nuance is analogous to overfitting. It reminds me of the maxim that a theory should be as simple as possible but no simpler
> This sort of breathless outrage rhetoric would be a lot easier to take seriously if it spent even a minute acknowledging the very real risk to users that this is meant to mitigate: tech support scams where people are walked through installing an app that takes over their phone and steals their money, private data, and identity.
1. Is requiring developers to submit government ID actually an effective way to prevent tech support scams? Will scammers actually be deterred by a government ID requirement in addition to the existing developer registration process?
2. Is requiring developers to submit government ID the best option to prevent tech support scams? Are there other options that Google could use to make Android user less susceptible to tech support scams?
> You can disagree with the tradeoff, but if you don't acknowledge it you're just doing propaganda.
The tradeoff, such as it is, is acknowledged on keepandroidopen.org under the "But wait, isn't this...just about security?" section:
> The security rationale is a smokescreen. Google Play Protect already scans for malware independent of developer identity. Requiring a government ID doesn't make code safer.
Finally:
> Personally, I think the 24h cooldown is an excellent compromise to allow user freedom while slowing down attackers sufficiently to mitigate the harm.
I don't think this is an excellent compromise. Scammers are persistent. I'm not convinced a 24 hour cooldown is enough to deter them in any meaningful way. I, on the other hand, am not persistent enough to wait 24 hours to install an Android app from F-Droid just to try it out.
> Blue-collar workers, in general, have successfully ridden the waves of technological change. If you can manage a crew of manual carpenters, you can also manage a warehouse full of woodworking robots.
Uh, what? This hypothetical is literally an example of an entire crew of manual carpenters being fired and replaced by robots, leaving only the manager. That sure doesn't sound like successfully riding the waves of technological change.
> It’s usually the white-collar workers who bear the most economic disruption from major technological innovations.
Citation needed. This is not the prevailing wisdom I have heard, and certainly not the experience of e.g. longshoremen replaced by shipping container technology in the 1960s and 1970s.
This blog post is odd because it keeps on hinting about a difference between `-r' and `-R' and links to the source code but never actually says what it is. I'll quote the OpenBSD manual that the post mentions but does not link to for some reason:
> Historic versions of the cp utility had an -r option. This implementation supports that option; however, its use is strongly discouraged, as it does not correctly copy special files, symbolic links or FIFOs.
You can see it in the code, lstat vs stat and copy_special, copy_fifo vs copy_file. They're all in utils.c.
from the lstat man page:
The lstat() function is identical to stat() except when the named file is
a symbolic link, in which case lstat() returns information about the link
itself, not the file the link references.
Only clear to those with a heavy UNIX background-- I understood and correctly interpreted it on first read, but the concept of a "regular file" is a bit in the wonk territory for most users, though the implication on symbolic links is a very practical one that surely lead to the removal (in the implementations where it was removed) of this option, since its very surprising that copying a directory heirarchy would cause symbolic links to become copies of what they linked to, instead of remaining symbolic links in the resulting directory.
My first thought was 'regular expression'. I've also never heard of the classification of a 'special' file in *nix land either (at least as utility flags go).
There's a lot here to absorb, but one thing I've always wondered about Georgism and Land Value Tax is whether land supply is actually inelastic:
> Land, however, is not built. Land is inelastic in supply, and landowners don’t “provide” land the way laborers provide labor and investors provide capital; they un-provide land by excluding others from using it. Building supply can change in response to a tax change, but land supply cannot.
But many cities actually can increase their land supply via land reclamation. This can be done by filling in waterways or otherwise altering the landscape to make it suitable to build on. Chicago, for example, built the land under the Adler Planetarium by filling in rubble along the shore of Lake Michigan. Boston is an even more impressive example; Back Bay used to be a bay of the Atlantic Ocean, not an entire neighborhood of a city with very high cost of living.
Cities can also lose land. Sometimes this is due to natural causes like erosion, sea level rise, or disasters like earthquakes and volcanic eruptions. Other times a lack of regulation might permit pollution to make land unlivable or infeasible to build on. Land owners can't create natural disasters, but they can advocate for policies that strongly influence effective land supply, such as whether building codes allow building on certain kinds or soil or require resistance to earthquakes.
Does this change the calculus from a Georgist economic perspective? If not, why?
Land means location in this context. Filling in seabed (which are literally termed "water parcels" as a term of art) to make dry land is technically improving it. The straightforward policy recommendation is therefore to exempt reclaimed land from taxation (perfectly in line with a policy of not taxing improvements) for e.g. the first 50 or so years (well past the investment horizon) and begin taxing it as conventional land thereafter -- this comports with George's philosophy for how to handle edge cases like e.g. landscaping that start off as improvements but over a long enough time horizon eventually become regarded as part of the permanent landscape.
Alternatively, reclaimed land is usually a state initiated enterprise in most cases. In those situations, the land can simply be leased out by the state. This is literally what NYC did with Battery Park city!
But you can multpliy location by building up (there is some energy and time inefficiency in having to go up and down but in theory you can also build multiple layers of transportation), so how that works?
I see how it works but all you're doing is making more efficient use of the given parcel of land. The value of the land already prices in its development potential. A parcel that could legally, physically, and feasibly accommodate a high rise will be worth more.
> one thing I've always wondered about Georgism and Land Value Tax is whether land supply is actually inelastic
It isn't actually perfectly inelastic, but looking at land reclamation (and erosion!) relative to the ease with which places to live can be added to a locale, the supply of land is relatively inelastic. Even then, that kind of misses the core of George's argument about land value.
George himself distinguished land from labor and capital by looking at it through the lens of whether the economic value of a piece of land needed to be attributable entirely to improvements undertaken on that land. This is his "all natural opportunities or forces," and those are where the constraint lies.
For land reclamation in particular, there are two things to look at: (1) the value attributable to the land reclamation effort; and (2) the residual site value. (2) is land rent, and the Georgist model really is predicated on the relationship the surrounding community has with a piece of land. As it goes, if the community's feelings toward, say, a reclaimed waterfront are tepid, that reclaimed land won't have much value (even if the land reclamation were undertaken at great expense!), and won't command high land rents.
When georgists refer to land, they are referring to locations - not dirt.
Locations refer to the sections of physical 2D space that makes up a country. Why 2D when the world is 3D? Because parcels are allocated and segmented based on a 2D model.
Locations are best thought of as being similar to "spectrum" (what typically gets auctioned off every few years to the highest bidder) - there is a total fixed amount. Nobody made the physical space, and nobody will make more of it in the future. It all existed before life even began on this planet, and it will exist long after all of us are dead.
I think this is actually the problem with Georgism. The world has plenty of dirt. Locations are in short supply. Georgism taxes away the gain from the creation of Locations, which is an important economic activity. For example, most of London's suburbia was created by the building of the metropolitan railways around 100-150 years ago. Places that were too far from London to be useful suddenly became Locations, and the railway companies made back the money they spent to build the railways by selling these new Locations for home building (now known as Metroland).
Although we don't have LVT in the UK, it interesting that we have another restriction on the creation of Locations: Planning laws in the UK are extremely hard and expensive to navigate and get permission to build pretty much anything, so the creation of new Locations is pretty much impossible. And that doesn't seem to be a good thing.
> Georgism taxes away the gain from the creation of Locations
The premise of Georgism is that there is no creation of locations (at least unless you're in the business of creating planets).
> Places that were too far from London to be useful suddenly became Locations
No, those were always locations, before and after the construction of railways made them more valuable. Accordingly, Georgists ain't interested in taxing the gains of the railways themselves; we're only interested in taxing the gains of the landowners profiting off of their land suddenly being more valuable from no contribution of their own. Under LVT the railway companies still would've made their money back in droves — probably moreso if they're only paying taxes on the land under the railroads instead of the actual railroads themselves!
Take the Netherlands as an extreme example of this; something like 17% of the country is reclaimed land. There's not many places you could do that.
Since unreclaimed "land" if it can be owned, can not generate any rents, it won't be taxed at all. But if all the additional value of making it usable were taxed away with a full LVT, it creates very little incentive to reclaim it and make it usable.
I think the best thing to do would be to exempt reclaimed land from land value tax for a period of time. Just like we grant monopolies for patents for a fixed value of time to incentivize sharing of the secrets.
If you got 50 years on reclaimed land without tax, it would heavily incentivize its creation.
> Cities can also lose land. Sometimes this is due to natural causes like erosion, sea level rise,
When there's a full LVT, the transactional sale price for land is very close to $0, because your land rents are taxed away. That leaves only the buildings as something that's lost to the natural disaster, so in many ways this might be far better for property owners.
It would also alleviate many of the challenges with relocation when necessary, from flooding, etc. Since the land is no longer the valuable part of the relationship estate, only the building must be moved/replaced.
All that is true and I suppose there could be tax policies to encourage land reclamation, but this is more likely to run into environmental concerns. It’s literally an edge case.
The key is that land is accidental in a way - people don’t want “land” per se they want to DO something with the land - and if the valuations are high enough you get multiple uses.
The reality is that in the vast majority of places the valuations just aren’t there.
The context of Jensen Huang's comments and Tante's commentary is in teaching children the multiplication table, long division, and square roots. As adults we might use a calculator to multiply or divide large numbers to high precision but we understand what we're doing because of practicing easier arithmetic by hand.
> How are these bad things ? We have tools for a reason
The bad thing is not bothering to learn basic arithmetic. If kids don't learn that they won't understand what the tools are doing.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10387962
https://www.backblaze.com/blog/hard-drive-reliability-q3-201...
For various reasons I don't consult Backblaze stats much nowadays, but I wish this kind of reliability and failure rate information were more available for other products, especially LED light bulbs.
reply