This is the thing for me. If your company has a fully-stocked kitchen, quality chairs, monitors, adjustable desk, and noise cancelling headphones, it might be a comparable to a good home office setup in terms of comfort. What kills me though is commuting. All told, I spend 3-4 extra hours on days I go to the office, and that time comes out of my free time, effectively turning a 40 hour job into a 60 hour job.
An under-represented argument for a carbon tax is the fact that it would encourage companies to innovate, both with respect to efficiency as well as using renewable energy.
I predict that industries in countries that adopt a carbon tax earlier will end up with a competitive advantage.
I'll go further with the example of the U.S. car industry in the 60s, when the evidence was clear that consumers preferred safe, reliable, affordable, efficient cars -- from increasing sales for Volkswagen and Toyota, and most of all from the success of Unsafe at Any Speed.
I doubt anyone then would have predicted that two of the U.S. big three would declare bankruptcy and that Toyota, then manufacturer of podunk little cars, would become the #1 manufacturer, but it happened.
Had U.S. regulations met consumer demand, U.S. manufacturers may have innovated what consumers wanted instead of more chrome, tail fins, size, etc. Regulation came eventually, but too late for the industry to avoid bankruptcies, unemployment, and so on.
In fact, regulation didn't stifle innovation but directed it. Engineers can innovate around safety and efficiency as much as on speed and tail fins. I'd rather have 100,000 mile warranties and electric cars than more chrome, which U.S. market forces created.
Today, regarding the environment, the governments that regulate to reflect citizen demand for clean air, land, and water will create markets and companies that beat ones that don't. I hope current U.S. policy doesn't bankrupt more future U.S. markets and companies.
I don't think the comparison to cigarette taxes is completely fair. Cigarettes are relatively inelastic w.r.t. price as they are addictive, and have no real competing product.
Electricity and power generated from carbon emitting sources on the other hand have a much more elastic demand curve. E.g. if your energy bill is cheaper with renewables, no one would choose to go with fossil fuels. Likewise with electric vehicles. If the cost of tanking up an EV is significantly lower than an internal combustion vehicle, people will switch for purely economic reasons.
You can look at the lack of a carbon tax as an incentive on fossil fuels which socializes the externalities.
Science and technology are generally agnostic to their usage, and will be used to both positive and negative ends whose magnitude is proportional to the power of the underlying technology.*
AI has the potential for massive positive effects as well as massive negative effects.
What saddens me is that we have systems and incentives in place which encourage governments and corporations to use powerful technologies to negative ends.
* Obviously there is room to quibble about the positive/negative balance of individual technologies, e.g. gunpowder, bio-weapons, etc., however I am sure a circumspect analysis could find positives even in things developed primarily to improve the efficiency of war.
are you serious? there is no way to do research on massive amounts of data at the public level anymore. if you want to change things its in the private. + money is also good
I had a number theory professor who said there are a number of deceptively promising avenues of attack using simpler methods than Wiles, but that end up being dead ends. He said mathematicians are now mostly of the opinion that Fermat was probably onto one of these.
I'm ever so slightly optimistic in this regard. As soon as we see a few GDPR-related penalties assessed, the risk-reward calculation will change drastically.
According to their 2017 annual report [1], Marriot had $22.9bn in worldwide revenue. A 4% penalty on that would be $900M.
I read that there was some kind of grace period involving GDPR penalties. Has the EU handed out any fines yet, or is it still letting companies adjust?
The question is probably if it is state of the art to encrypt passport numbers. If yes, then Marriot could be fine with a similiar argument of "the company knowingly violated its duty to ensure data security".
$50bn/year would be more revenue than fb had in 2017, though of course the majority of their 2.23bn monthly users would disappear if asked for $.01/mo.
It is an interesting thought experiment, though, to consider what facebook would look like if its revenue was derived from convincing users that it was worth a monthly subscription.
I remember when Facebook was still figuring itself out, back in the day, users could purchase digital gimmicks directly there, to send to other users. Some "pokes" or emojis or something like that,
I topped up my FB balance with like $2 or $5 dollars, in ?2006?. When Facebook (quickly) discontinued that silliness, my account silently disappeared. MARK ZUCKERBERG, YOU OWE ME MONEY!
Running Facebook would become much cheaper if they could focus on being a social network instead of being an ad selling business. Right now they have to do both.
Looks like a summer school program at University of Waterloo:
"The Quantum Cryptography School for Young Students (QCSYS) is a unique, eight-day enrichment program for students hosted by the Institute for Quantum Computing (IQC) at the University of Waterloo. QCSYS will run August 10-17, 2018 with students arriving August 9 and departing August 18.
The school offers an interesting blend of lectures, hands-on experiments and group work focused on quantum cryptography"
I think an important aspect not mentioned in this article is the environment in which the computer and internet wunderkind founders got their starts.
You had a perfect storm of brand new, super powerful tools (the internet providing dirt-cheap distribution, cheap computation, beginner friendly programming languages -- php for facebook, java and python for google, etc.). There was so much low-hanging fruit with relatively little competition.
A very similar thing happened in physics in the early 20th century, and led to the same notion that genius is a fleeting trait concentrated in the young. To quote this BBC article: https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-37578899
It was like discovering a new toolkit which could quickly yield discoveries. Or, less charitably, as one scientist said: "mediocre physicists could discover great physics".
