> The only place monopolies tend to emerge is heavily regulated areas that allow for regulatory capture (laying fiber is a great example of this).
No, actually laying fiber is a great example of the problem with a free market.
It's not regulations that make it hard to put down fiber, it's property rights. Without some sort of regulation or government action (such as eminent domain) it's impossible to build out modern infrastructure. There will always be some person with property right in the way of a cable line. You can beg and plead with them to let you bury a line (including pointing out that it's very temporary disruption of soil) and they can still just say no.
It isn't unusual for a phone company that's looking at a difficult land owner to say "ok, screw it, we'll just have to take a 90 mile detour because the guy that owns that 500 yard strip won't let us bury here". Imagine how much harder that is if the land owner is related to or owns stock in a competitor company.
We have been able to lay as much fiber as we have in the US because there's a bunch of regulations around right of way that ultimately grants burying rights near public roads to utilities companies like ISPs. Without those, it'd be almost impossible.
Fences work, really really well. And cows are quite easy animals to herd. They have a natural tendency to just follow along with the group. You can literally move hundreds of head of cattle with about 4 people (I've done it).
There is some value in collecting biometrics and location information. But the entire "move the cow with a vibrator" thing isn't an innovation I think any rancher really wants or needs.
I just have a hard time seeing this as being something that actually solves a need. The "20% savings" seems really fishy. The majority of the labor for a herd is feeding them.
Nz farmers will milk twice a day, early morning and afternoon. In the middle of the day the cows return to their paddock from the morning. In the evening they’re moved to a new paddock.
Grass consumption is the aim of the game. If you let cows out on a full paddock for the day they’ll partially graze and then starve themselves (relatively speaking) in the afternoon.
This is bad for milk production and also pasture quality for the next rotation.
The solution to this is to set a break, a temporary electric fence in the middle of the paddock. So, they arrive to half a paddock then in the morning the farm worker takes it down for the afternoon and sets it up in the next paddock for the night. Probably takes 30-45 minutes depending on paddock size, weather and enthusiasm of the farm hand.
x2 for 2 herds, 7 days a week for 8 months a year.
Now, my brother just draws a line on a map and it takes care of itself.
Once you get them together, sure, but it appears from TFA that this is about gathering them from mountain meadows or other far flung environs. A herd could be spread over thousands of acres, canyons, mountains, all sorts of places to be out of site.
These are operations that don’t use fences. The article mentions this is a NZ company, but the American West would have a similar issue where ranchers can run cattle on land leased from BLM. I would imagine Australia would have a similar problem to solve.
It's called a herd for a reason. Usually if you've found one cow you've found them all. In the wild any cow with genes for aloofness quickly got culled by predators.
The exceptions are the lame & sick ones, but no fancy gadget is going to bring them in; you've got to take a truck to them.
We put our cows out to pasture in the mountains in the spring/summer.
Without the fancy tech it takes about a day to gather them all up.
But you have to realize, this is a job we do once a year. Gathering the cows from the winter pasture is easy because it's a lot smaller.
This is why I said the location information could be useful. But, we used horses and anywhere the cows can go a horse can go.
> These are operations that don’t use fences.
Nope, ranchers own (or lease) the land they put their cows out to pasture on. It's all fenced.
> but the American West would have a similar issue where ranchers can run cattle on land leased from BLM.
I'm in the american west. And BLM land that is used for grazing is fenced. In fact, that's part of what you are paying for when you buy a lease from the BLM is to maintain the fence.
> Livestock theft, agricultural gear theft, is a real thing in AU/NZ as I suspect it is where you work.
I mean, I don't want to jinx it, but it's not really been an issue for us. The main theft we've had to deal with is feed theft and that was solved by switching from 50lbs bales to 1 ton bales.
> And these collars are principally targeted to dairy operations that move herds about on a daily basis.
Yeah, makes sense why it'd doesn't make sense to us. We didn't raise dairy cattle.
We did have a couple of dairy cows, but that was more for my family and a few members of the community. Not for any sort of actual real production. I could see how it'd be a time saver in that case as you do have to twice daily gather the cows to get milked.
On an IT aside, the challenge facing yard, barn, and road security cameras in Australia is parrots .. flocks of several thousand intelligent airborne can openers that follow grain rail lines and rivers and love nothing more than tearing wiring apart.
You have to build to extreme anti vandal standards.
Changing bale sizes works well to deter casual thieves .. serious shitheads turn up with their own trucks and lifting gear.
> flocks of several thousand intelligent airborne can openers that follow grain rail lines and rivers and love nothing more than tearing wiring apart.
Lol, oh that stinks. Yeah not a problem in the PNW. We have some woodpeckers that are annoying if you own wood paneled things (like barns and homes) but otherwise there's not a lot of fighting against nature beyond infections.
> serious shitheads turn up with their own trucks and lifting gear.
It may just be the location and community where I'm from that makes that somewhat unlikely. There's enough people along the roads that someone would see you trying to make off with a giant bale and where I'm from everyone waves at everyone when you drive by :).
It's a combination of being rural enough that everyone knows everyone else yet not so rural that you see the extreme sort of isolation that I believe is possible in Australia.
There's massive amounts of community support in rural Australia .. and occasional opportunistic teabags (thieves), we all wave and coordinate on fire fighting and harvests, keep an eye out for carpet baggers, and rescue outsiders that keep getting lost / stranded.
> someone would see you trying to make off with a giant bale
If you ever get into high luxury car theft, in London one crew pattern was to all wear high vis jackets, someone has a clip board, and the team lifts a high end car straight into a Faraday cage lined truck in plain and open sight.
If the alarm goes off and people look, someone on the crew just visibly shrugs and mimes putting their hands over their ears and gets back to knicking a car.
Point being, successful thieves often look like they're supposed to be doing what they're doing and they don't register .. unless someone specifically knows that hay bale and the owner of that land .. but that's an aside.
> the extreme sort of isolation that I believe is possible in Australia.
The vast majority of people in Australia live near the coast and to each other, it's quite bunched up.
My state is 3x the size of Texas, has a bit over 2 million in population now, but they mostly all live in and around Perth, the Capital city (and famously described by one US astronaut as the most isolated city on the planet) - I'm from quite some distance from that City in a region with considerably less people.
Still, I got to travel the planet doing geophysics and related things.
I think the advantage is being able to move the cows on a daily basis. If I had to guess, the 20% savings comes from rotation grazing. Rotation grazing is a lot easier on your pasture, allowing you to have more cows per acre. Rotation grazing can easily be done manually -- it doesn't take much training before moving cows between paddocks is as easy as opening the gate between the two paddocks and yelling out "I've put your tasty bribe in the next paddock, come and get it". Well that's not what you yell at them, but that's what they hear.
But just because it's easy if you do it daily it quickly adds up to a lot of hours.
And the small paddocks of rotation grazing take a lot of expensive wire.
Fences need to be maintained and are not always where you want them. Cows are big, mostly they are gentle but they can accidentally kill you without trying. Pasture rotation is a big thing but that increases labor costs.
Some ranchers love these because they enable things they should do but won't.
these big names at the top (thiel, musk, etc) ive really just started to tune them out. they're all bored, have too much money, and are obsessed with futurism & getting people to follow them into their lame visions of the future at all costs. they're p much entirely decoupled from the economic plights you and i face, they just play a different game altogether and any potential gamble for savings is never framed as a "this can make things better for everyone" but more or less just funneled through ... uh, i dont know shareholder opportunity or something.
i don't doubt there's plenty of upside in agriculture/farming to be had with technology, i just no longer find it meaningful when people from this social class are trying talking about them. something is really off putting now when silicon valley types try to be authority figures on completely different industries, it's super presumptuous. think they've lost the plot quite a bit here, i dont think anyone should be interested in their ideas of the future at all. they've done enough damage. all these dudes ever needed was to go to therapy, all we need now is for them to leave us alone. the incessant need to be the guy with the big ideas these guys are constantly displaying is just so exhausting at this point. wish they'd just go buy a beach and drink liquor out of coconuts and disappear, no one needs to move fast and break things and shake cows
This isn't a Thiel / Musk idea though .. not in the slightest.
This is a decade old New Zealand idea, spawned ground up from dairy farmer adjacent New Zealanders, that has recently sought funding and are now being backed by Thiel et al.
I'm saddened to see them now being in the pocket of SV venture caps .. good for them for fast, easy, large amounts of development and FU money .. but ultimately likely a loss for the AU/NZ dairy industries who will wake up to being controlled via subscription services piped through offshore clouds and having their owns cows being held to ransom and potentially forced to walk off cliffs by bored hackers or indignant Iranians.
I'd have guessed the biometrics and location information was the most useful part.
But as others have pointed out these are primarily for dairy cows, which is pretty different from raising beef cattle (which is what I did).
There is a need to twice daily gather the cows to have them milked. And the pasture rotation is much more of an involved process than what we needed to deal with. We just plopped a gaint bale of hay down for the cows to munch on.
As far as the product is at the moment, it's not that clear - [1] they're not saying much apart from noise, sounds, or "how it actually works" - I see instead cotton candy pages - the sort of stuff not mentioning the important stuff but rather touting a chorus of AI This sort of site page promoting what sets them apart - might work for some high end cattle managers that don't have a hard or long background in cattle management and more have a business only background. For those who have been in the agriculture industry here in Australia I doubt many would recognise Halter as a brand of product that has something to do with farming cattle as leading; when Gallagher would surely be recognised by the farmers here who have a bit of age on them and around the industry for some time. [To put in context, Gallagher for most cattle folk in Australia would be synonymous in familiarity as IBM or mainframe for most HN readers]
Gallagher does have a virtual fencing system as well, [2], and for any perspective customers, clearly inform in regard to the basics or premise of their e-shepherd system. Noise to prompt ... but eventually if ignored electrical stimulation - yeah that works
Virtual fencing is an untapped market, even if one is not aiming for the whole herd, but just as a representative of the herd, or perhaps the ring leaders and trouble makers.
I'm not sure too many run of the mill cattle farmers in my parts would appreciate the cattle being monitored via AI or even systems that are probably at some point going to be subscription based or require online access to function [3]
I like real fences but I do like the idea of an adjustable virtual fence, virtual drover via a collar, but as someone (in Queensland, Aust.) who has seen the issues with a supposedly unobtrusive NLIS tag, where a small percentage get snagged and pull out, the idea having to chase up a collar which has stopped working or later found the beast has actually managed to lose it somewhere ... replacement costs would need to be low.
What I would like to see is a programmable cattle minding drone solution (flying shepherd) with their own solar power recharging stations - ideally not only mind the herd, but arseholes who've ignored the biosecurity or no entry signage
Yeah, any time something farming related comes up here there's a bunch of comments from tech bros who clearly think farmers are just idiots waiting around to be rescued by the tech bros' superior understanding of what farming is and what technology it needs, based on...
Possibly you're just not cynical enough to appreciate the need it could solve. Get it working on cows then move on to people. This is Peter Thiel we're talking about.
> it just refuses to adjudicate any dispute that doesn't involve a noble
Oh I got news for you, that already happened.
Anyone that's had their car broken into, bike stolen, or house burgled can tell you that cops won't do anything.
And if you look at serious crimes like homicide, you'll find a clearance rate of about 66%. And that's their self reported clearance rate. It's not successful prosecution. That's just the "we've looked into this enough and have decreed we think this person did it". It's a lot worse if you look at crimes like rape.
The crimes that police actually police are property crimes. Specifically for the nobles. Cops are pretty good at responding to stores being robbed or a crime against a wealthy and well connected person. Steal $1000 from a target and you'll get the book thrown at you. Steal a $1000 bike in front of the same target and cops will shrug and say there's nothing they can do about it.
Your example is flawed because Target has cameras and a security staff watching for shoplifters, and they will detain you as you walk out the door, and they will provide video and eyewitness testimony to the prosecutor. It's a slam dunk case.
The shoplifters who do manage to walk out undetected are of no interest to the police, as there's no basis for a case against them.
Target has security cameras on the outside and staff constantly walking around wrangling carts. That's why I picked this exact example. The evidence is pretty much the same.
At many locations, cars at grocery stores get broken into pretty frequently. Yet it's unusual for cops to ever do anything about those cases. That's not due to a lack of evidence, most grocery stores have cameras throughout the lot.
Hell, it's even less of an excuse today due to the amount of surveillance via flock cameras cities have adopted. Yet cops still don't do a thing about this sort of theft.
Cops don't do anything about theft if it does not rise to level of a felony period. Most shoplifters don't get arrested until they hit felony level either.
Reason they get arrested for felony shoplifting is big box stores gift wrap those convictions. They have watched them, tracked exact items they have stolen down to UPC with price, have all the video/spreadsheet and it's all handed to cop/prosecutor on DVD. Those cases are so easy for prosecutor because conviction rate is ~100% and any testifying required is all paid for by big box store.
On bigger note, as society, we don't know how to handle people who have antisocial behavior. I'm not talking big stuff but low-level stuff that still impacts quality of life.
Vast majority of time when shoplifters get arrested, it's because they are still at scene of the "crime". AKA, they enter big box store, facial recognition fires and off duty cop there is notified or cops are called. They show up, take the person into custody and get their gift wrap.
Person stealing the bike is long gone before cops are notified.
> On bigger note, as society, we don't know how to handle people who have antisocial behavior. I'm not talking big stuff but low-level stuff that still impacts quality of life.
Singapore has it figured out but nobody here likes to admit it. Fines are broadly ineffective and imprisonment too costly, when what most people really need is to get get smacked hard with a stick a few times.
Kids picking up carts aren't going to detain anyone. It's the detaining that makes it work. The cops just come pick them up, they have eyewitnesses and video. Easy work.
The security guards that do the actual detaining are often off-duty LEO picking up extra hours. Even Kroger here has an armed officer at the exit door. So they can legally detain you and even arrest you.
True that they don't care about the bike outside. It's not their property.
They cannot detain you. Cops can detain you, Target staff can insist you have to stay, but they cannot easily and practically bar you from leaving.
They can initiate a citizen's arrest, which would permit them to detain you But if they are wrong, and you've committed no felony, that guard is civilly and criminally liable for false imprisonment -- a pretty serious charge. Most store security are unwilling to risk their own personal necks to protect the company's interest in $20 of shampoo or whatever.
In IL, a "shopkeeper" can definitely detain someone:
> (a) Detention. Any merchant who has reasonable grounds to believe that a person has committed retail theft may detain the person, on or off the premises of a retail mercantile establishment, in a reasonable manner and for a reasonable length of time for all or any of the following purposes:
> (1) To request identification;
> (2) To verify such identification;
> (3) To make reasonable inquiry as to whether such person has in his possession unpurchased merchandise and to make reasonable investigation of the ownership of such merchandise;
> (4) To inform a peace officer of the detention of the person and surrender that person to the custody of a peace officer;
> (5) In the case of a minor, to immediately make a reasonable attempt to inform the parents, guardian or other private person interested in the welfare of that minor and, at the merchant's discretion, a peace officer, of this detention and to surrender custody of such minor to such person.
Hah, my phone was stolen and being sold on eBay. I found it because the person who bought it on eBay got my contact info and asked me to unlock the phone, I refused, he demanded a refund from the seller and gave me the seller's info, who lived about ten minutes away from me.
I found my phone. On my phone, and each and every phone I bothered to try, the IMEI failed checksumming because the last two digits had been transposed. Effect: seller looked "legit" (hah), and I couldn't find the listing by searching my actual IMEI.
What was on his page of listings? 100+ phones, most "activation locked", all "no chargers, cables, accessories.
Same with laptops. "No chargers, no cables, no accessories", many "locked".
All ridiculous prices (like $500 for a 'like new' m3 pro MBP).
Gave this info to the police.
They could not care less.
"Well, he probably didn't steal them himself..." (i.e. even they felt pretty sure it was all stolen).
"Isn't it still a crime to knowingly sell stolen property?"
"..."
"..."
Could not care less. They had a slam dunk case in mine alone. My phone had been stolen, a police report had been filed with them, and it had shown up in California where someone who bought it on eBay gave them the seller's info, someone who lived near me.
The speed which enables the most fair outcome overall is subject to interpretation. More time to prepare your case is probably good, but the longer the process drags out, the greater portion of your finite life you've lost to the process. Weighing these two factors, with all the other various factors, can't be done objectively for a generalized case that can apply to all real cases, hence giving the accused some amount of say over the matter.
The performance was reduced without a settings change. That is still a regression even if huge pages mitigates the problem.
I'd be curious to know if there's still a regression with hugepages turned on in older kernels.
If you are benchmarking something and the only changed variable between benchmarks is the kernel, that is useful information. Even if your environment isn't correctly setup.
It might, but I'm not sure how much of an issue a false positive is. It's not like Iran has an airforce and it's not like there a bunch of civilian planes flying over head.
Also, modern radar can't always tell the difference between a bird and a plane. Especially when dealing with stealth vehicles.
Especially since it takes like 2 seconds to make said classes unfinal and there are no negative consequences of doing this.
But 1999, that was peak "inheritance is how we fix everything" thinking.
About the only reason to not do this is if you are writing a library. Even then, it's better to make extensions available through things like closures (not really available in 1999).
> We haven't been building much battery storage to go along with that solar power
That too has pretty recently changed. Even my home state of Idaho is deploying pretty big batteries. It takes almost no time to deploy it's all permitting and public comment at this point that takes the time.
Batteries have gotten so cheap that the other electronics and equipement at this point are bigger drivers of the cost of installation.
Here's an 800MWh station that's being built in my city [1].
I think people are just generally stuck with the perception of where things are currently at. They are thinking of batteries and solar like it's 2010 or even 2000. But a lot has changed very rapidly even since 2018.
For full house backup, it sort of sucks right now. They are all charging a premium over what you can otherwise get if it's not specifically a whole home product.
What I've done and would suggest is right now looking for battery banks for big ticket important items that you'd want to stay on anyways in terms of an outage. A lot of those can function as a UPS. You can get a 1kWh battery pack for $400 right now. A comparable home battery backup is charging $1300 per kWh of installed storage.
I currently have a 2kWh battery pack for my computer/server/tv and a 500Wh pack for my fridge. Works great and it's pretty reasonably priced. The 500Wh gives my fridge an extra 6 hours of runtime after a power outage.
If I wanted to power shift, I have smart switches setup so I can toggle when I want to.
You will get a battery and BMS for that price. Decent inverters are expensive, however, so you won't get a whole 10kWh setup with appropriately sized inverter for under US$2K. Probably twice that.
I hesitate to offer any brand advice, because that is very situational, depends on what you're after, what experience level you have, what trade-offs you want to make, etc.
I don't know if the market has improved but when I looked at this a year or two ago I concluded that the consumer market here was utter crap with hugely inflated prices.
The cheapest per kwh way I could find to buy a home battery (that didn't involve diy stuff) was to literally buy an EV car with an inverter... by a factor of at least two... I ended up not buying one.
Unfortunately cheap batteries doesn't translate to reputable companies packaging them in cheap high quality packages for consumers instantly.
No, actually laying fiber is a great example of the problem with a free market.
It's not regulations that make it hard to put down fiber, it's property rights. Without some sort of regulation or government action (such as eminent domain) it's impossible to build out modern infrastructure. There will always be some person with property right in the way of a cable line. You can beg and plead with them to let you bury a line (including pointing out that it's very temporary disruption of soil) and they can still just say no.
It isn't unusual for a phone company that's looking at a difficult land owner to say "ok, screw it, we'll just have to take a 90 mile detour because the guy that owns that 500 yard strip won't let us bury here". Imagine how much harder that is if the land owner is related to or owns stock in a competitor company.
We have been able to lay as much fiber as we have in the US because there's a bunch of regulations around right of way that ultimately grants burying rights near public roads to utilities companies like ISPs. Without those, it'd be almost impossible.
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