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[Reelya]

The printer used would definitely be different. Bioprinters are a far more specialized type of things vs the ones for printing basic plastic objects.

[Bumber]

Heh - I almost concluded my post with "who's with me to start a company to make standard battery packs!"  But then I realized I'm lazy and would rather just complain and hint that "they" are part of a conspiracy of planned obsolescence and vendor lock-in for rechargeable battery packs.   

https://xkcd.com/927/

[Imic]

There really is an XKCD for everything.

Everything.

[McTraveller]

UC Berkeley has some report that says

Even with no policy changes, they predict that by 2035 America will have achieved 55% clean energy usage (due to increases in solar and wind power) while experiencing a 10% reduction in electricity costs. But under their 90% Clean (carbon-free) scenario, "all existing coal plants are retired by 2035, and no new fossil fuel plants are built," meaning the country "avoids over $1.2 trillion in health and environmental costs, including 85,000 avoided premature deaths, through 2050."

Wow talk about a new high in using long time periods to make numbers sound big:

$1.2 trillion over 30 years is only $40B a year, which spread across the 240M insured people is only $167 per year per insured person.  This is nothing.  It's actually probably less than that even, given that $1.2 trillion probably has some inflation rate attached.  My premiums are almost $500 a month - saving $15 a month is not really a meaningful personal improvement.

This is the reason why these changes have to be through public policy: there is not enough incentive for the individual to make changes.

[Reelya]

That's actually unlikely about the inflation. If they're doing the math today, they're almost certainly calculating it in today-dollars rather than hypotetical actual 2050 dollars. There's no way that could be part of their calculation.

And that is not the full cost saved, it's the incremental saving of doing that policy change. The good news is that economics is doing some of the heavy-lifting for us already. Additionally, those costs wouldn't be evenly distributed among the years, they'd be more costly towards the end. So assuming the policy takes 15 years to be enacted (since it says 2035 to kick in) then the saving are after that, so 15 years = $333 per year per person in higher taxes and/or premiums. But you'd have to account for inflation on that figure too, and young people will be boomer-aged by then, so it's coming out of the money you're earning now, but with inflation, and at a time when saving interest rates are basically in the toilet. Damn straight and extra $333 per year in costs would fuck over a lot of people. Additionally "health and environmental costs" only covers a part of the impact. There's lost employment and productivity associated too, plenty of other externalities we're not taking into account for not dealing with the problem. Those other costs may dwarf the direct health and environmental costs.

Although I don't actually think the scale of the savings is the reason people don't do these things. Remember stuff like Nash Equilibriums etc. Even if the overall savings are HUGE, nobody has a specific incentive to be the one that starts it. The reason they don't is that if I reduce my emissions, it helps me a little, but less than the amount it costs me to reduce my emissions. But my emission reduction also helps everyone else out a little, and the fact is that if we all do it, we all save a lot of money overall. However, when you do a pay-off matrix from any one person's point of view, it's always economically better to not go along with the emission reductions. Either short term or long term.

Say as an example that your health insurance costs $10000, and emission-reduction costs $100, and if every did that, then insurance costs would be reduced to $5000, also say that the health savings from any one choice are spread over 5000 people. So, overall everyone spending $100 each sounds like a good idea right? Everyone saves 50 times as much as the investment costs. Yet, the Nash Equilibrium says otherwise:

Scenario 1) Say nobody else gets the emission reduction tech. You could spend nothing, and pay $10000 on premiums, or you could spend $100 and pay $9999 on premiums. You work out you're saving $99 by not getting emissions reduction tech.

Scenario 2) Say everyone else gets the emission reduction tech. Now, if you do spend the $100 yourself, then your premiums become $5000, but if you don't your premium only goes up to $5001. Again, it's not worth spending the money, so you stop doing it.

Scenario 3) Say exactly 50% of people have the emission-reduction tech. Then you can either get or not get the tech yourself, and the $100 will make the difference between premiums of $7500 or $7501. Again, everyone does the math, and decides that the reduction tech isn't worth it.

So, game theory shows that there can be paradoxical outcomes. In the scenario above, everyone choosing to spend $100 saves $5000 each a 50:1 gain, yet any one person choosing to spend the $100 only sees a benefit of $1, a 100:1 loss.

You can also see this as a variant of "tragedy of the commons". Say for example we shared a house and decided to split the electricity bill. I've worked out that I can spend $1 on electricity and generate $0.60 worth of bitcoin. Since you're paying half my bill, i decide that's a good idea (i am an asshole in other words). You then escalate by also setting up a mining rig too, offloading half your costs onto me. We keep escalating in this fashion, as whenever you do the math "will *I* benefit from adding 1 more mining rig" always turns up a "yes" answer. It's not about their being too small payoffs, it's that doing the dumb thing is always profitable for the individual, but it fucks it over for everyone else, and everyone chooses the profitable option, because that's the most "rational" from a self-interest point of view. So, these kinds of problems don't go away until you fundamentally change the perspective and decision-making process.

[McTraveller]

I think my argument is the same as yours - things like this are tragedy of the commons exactly because the effects are so diffuse an require a critical mass of investment, which is why it takes public policy to do it and relying on the "individual consumer" to make the decisions likely will not work well.

[Reelya]

Yeah, although the "critical mass" idea is one you hear mentioned, that if enough people already do it, then the rest will just be swept along, organically.

However I specifically covered why no such critical mass holds true by showing three scenarios in the previous post, where it's not worth it for yourself to reduce emissions whether 0%, 50%, or 100% of other people are doing it. So there's no magic number where it becomes worth it to join in, as long as the economics stays the same. Which explains why these things are hard.

The problem is that the *direct* effect on yourself of the pollution you're personally putting out is unlikely to ever get high enough that the cost of reducing emissions is less than the individual benefit. So there is no "critical mass" of people where that starts being true.

For solar as an example, the critical point isn't the amount of other people who have solar, it's that solar panels are a cheaper form of production than competing forms. That then inverts the Nash Equilibrium calculations. The other way it happens is if regulations or laws remove the option to not reduce emissions: it takes that column of the payoff matrix out so it's not possible to make that choice anymore. In effect that would be the point that people start complaining that they can't buy gasoline cars anymore, due to various factors.

[Reelya]

Well here's an idea that will definitely piss people off. BMW are trying to turn basic features of their cars such as heating into subscription services. So you buy the car and you get 1 month of free use of the seat heating technology, and after that it shuts off and you freeze your ass off unless you purchase a subscription to use the hardware.

https://arstechnica.com/cars/2020/07/heated-seats-as-a-service-bmw-wants-to-sell-car-features-on-demand/

EDIT: thinking about it the most likely reason they're keen on this idea of subscription services to use the car is that it would help kill off the second-hand market value of the car, if basic features of the car could only be used by the registered owner, while also guaranteeing a cut of the revenue for BMW in the post second hand market. Trying the idea out with something small like heated seats is testing the waters and get people used to the idea of having subscription-based features.

[Naturegirl1999]

I do not see the purpose of buying a vehicle you can’t use the parts of. Cars are not Netflix.

[MrRoboto75]

Jokes on them, I can't afford a BMW anyway.

[IcyTea31]

What's to stop one from swapping out the seats? I checked, and you can get an aftermarket heated car seat cover for about twenty dollars on Amazon, for example.

[Iduno]

Well here's an idea that will definitely piss people off. BMW are trying to turn basic features of their cars such as heating into subscription services. So you buy the car and you get 1 month of free use of the seat heating technology, and after that it shuts off and you freeze your ass off unless you purchase a subscription to use the hardware.

https://arstechnica.com/cars/2020/07/heated-seats-as-a-service-bmw-wants-to-sell-car-features-on-demand/

EDIT: thinking about it the most likely reason they're keen on this idea of subscription services to use the car is that it would help kill off the second-hand market value of the car, if basic features of the car could only be used by the registered owner, while also guaranteeing a cut of the revenue for BMW in the post second hand market. Trying the idea out with something small like heated seats is testing the waters and get people used to the idea of having subscription-based features.

On-disc DLC for cars! Brilliant!

[wierd]

All this will do is build a hacking community for cars, which will spawn a dark-web(+) as people seek to bull their way in(*) on this purposefully engineered cudgel against the consumer.

* Hacker demands money out of people that they manage to compromise, in exchange for using basically any and all features of the car.  Such as say, being compromised through a malicious android app being paired with the car's entertainment center, or through a MitM attack against a map software update, etc-- How they get into the car is unimportant, that the car is designed to deny users access to basic features is what the blackhats will use to compel payments from unwary consumers.

(+) The whitehat groups will be all about giving control back to consumers, but the information they collect will inform blackhats, who will use the research that the whitehats publish about these locked down systems to better compromise those systems with exploits, for the sole purpose of harming consumers for profit.



Whoever the fuck is deciding that these kinds of things are desirable (Vendor lock-out and rent-seeking) needs to get taken out behind the shed and horse-whipped until their skin comes off.

[Egan_BW]

It should be illegal to sell thing that aren't services "as a service".

[Reelya]

It should be illegal to sell thing that aren't services "as a service".

The "service" is that they don't remotely cut off the service.