I don’t think it’s so much as critical but has potential to help close the loop on crime. Big box stores love this service. The can easily identify the car type and license and out out a bolo with the police. Police put this into flock and track movement. You don’t have to pursue chases as aggressively. You can just track the car next time it pops up. I think flock is a net positive in this sense.
I am always on the fence with flock. I can absolutely see how it goes wrong and wish there was more oversight into the ability to track people. On the other hand I see these as a very effective way to assist local law enforcement who across the country are struggling with budgets.
I would be surprised it costs more. I am sure there are false positives but flock is generally pretty effective for local pd. I for one would rather have them to save police resources. This can also help in not pursuing folks that run. You get the license plate and you will see it soon enough.
There are no reliable studies. There have been multiple demonstrated examples that user data has been shared, and systems have been hacked.
We have plenty of evidence of harm and no good evidence for effectiveness. We don't need to "save police resources" we need more well-trained capable police officers who are doing good police work AND good community work
"Austin spent $1.2 million on Flock cameras. They scanned 113 million license plates and got 165 arrests. That's $7,300 per arrest"
I had to go back and look. The quote you have does not seem correct. That 165 is coming from an audit for a trial of both flock and axon patrol car cameras. Only 40 flock cameras. Flock has pretty transparent pricing it’s about $3k per camera for cities. So let’s call it $150k for that test. They installed patrol car cameras in 500 cars. On volume alone the cost is with the cars not flock.
Again I don’t know where that 1.2 million number is coming from. That should get you over 300 cameras deployed in the first year.
7300 per arrest sounds cheap so I am not sure if you are for or against.
I agree there needs to be better safe guards. I still believe it’s worth figuring out a balanced path forward, I like having cameras track public streets.
Maybe? But the bigger problem is this number of 7300 is being made up in thin air. It’s bad math because it’s conflating too many things in the underlying audit.
Do flock reps even need to fly out? They have massive contracts with the Walmarts of the world and the underlying commercial property owners. You don’t need to have a rep when it’s already in your area.
Those are pretty old cases that I think the courts have moved away from and even in those cases it was a TOS violation and explicit c&d that the company ignored.
Recycling is such a sham. I wish we as a nation (US) would come to terms that most products are not economical to recycle. It could actually move the needle on consumption when you know that’s it’s going to be thrown away. About the only thing worth recycling in the US is metal. The rest including glass are just junk. Most folks don’t realize that glass they throw in their recycling is often going to the landfill because they live too far away from a glass manufacturer for it to be economical to use.
I don’t say this as someone who is suggesting we not think about consumption but rather it’s a fake feeling that it’s going somewhere other than the landfill. I would be curious in other countries how economical it really is to recycle.my favorite is Japan where some areas will incinerate certain qualities of plastic for energy. I think that is a useful way to reuse it.
Glass is not entirely useless to recycle, but it's marginal. If the goal is to keep it out of landfills, then separating it can make sense, even if the recycling is just downcycling to a lower value use (like road aggregate or fiberglass insulation).
I've heard Glass Beach in California is nice; maybe we should create some more of those by dumping waste glass on a shore with wave action and waiting a few decades? (not entirely unserious)
You’re not wrong but the whole story is not being told. For most glass to be recycled and used it needs to go to a processing plant to make the cullet. There are geographical constrains on weight so if you don’t happen to live close enough to one, that glass is going in the landfill my gripe is we have created a catch all recycling is good no matter what.
It could otherwise be reused? A lot of glass containers come with a deposit and then are reused once returned. This happens with some glass milk containers (exactly why I dont know). If container shape and size became somewhat standardized this could work better. Glass can be reused while not shedding microplastic everywhere in the process.
I learned this a decade ago when I learned that a lot of recycling lots were bought by China and other countries who are no longer buying our recyclables. Probably for the reasons you mentioned. Metals are about the only thing worth recycling. Everything else, the transportation costs out weigh the economics.
That said, there are smaller plastic filament recyclers that are making their way onto the market that I’m super keen on. Being able to take plastics, shred them up, put them in this extruder and make a new filament spool for printing is awesome.
Is that form of plastic reuse really all that great? Perhaps new plastic doesn't need to get produced. But it's still plastic and it's still going to just shed microplastics everywhere and eventually end up in a landfill.
> How much depends on the local facilities and how they handle it?
None of it. With a few exceptions, non-metals take significantly more energy to recycle than to make from scratch and the end result is lower quality than the recycled material. Since that energy usually comes from fossil fuels, it's just pumping more CO2 in the atmosphere to save a tiny bit of landfill space, which isn't even remotely a pressing issue for our civilization (we have lots of space!)
Metals like aluminum and steel take more energy to make from scratch (ore) than to recycle, so they're worth recycling and anywhere from 50-80% of the steel and aluminum feedstock in the world is from scrap metal.
It also makes sense to recycle stuff like old tires because those turn into massive ecological hazards when they burn.
There is more to recycling than energy consumption.
For example, wood is a limited resource. In many parts of the world, almost all growth outside protected areas is harvested and used. By recycling paper and cardboard, you make wood available for higher-value uses.
Household waste is often incinerated. Even if you are not going to recycle glass, it can make sense to separate it from general waste.
Energy is only one part. The full dollar cost should be accounted for. Wood is abundant in parts of the world. For those parts it probably makes no sense to recycling but we should let the market figure it out.
Wood is abundant in Canada, Russia, and some developing countries. Other developed countries (including the US) are densely populated enough to use everything they manage to grow.
Here in Finland, paper recycling started in the 1920s, and it was first purely for economic reasons. Household paper collection started soon after WW2.
Metals, especially aluminum, are useful enough to recycle that it's sometimes worth extracting them from the municipal waste stream (this is a no-brainer if your waste is incinerated, rather than sent to a landfill directly).
Glass, plastic, and paper are generally at best marginal for recycling, especially because they can be sensitive to contamination in the recycling process (oops, somebody threw a greasy pizza box in the recycling!). Glass and some kinds of plastic products work really well for reuse rather than recycling, but a municipal recycling stream isn't conducive to reuse; you're probably more likely to see them ground up and 'recycled' as some kind of aggregate. For plastic, I'd expect that just about only a plastic water bottle or the like is close to practicably recyclable.
And this is where I wish local collection agencies and companies focused on. Be clear. That paper, throw in the trash. Collect metals, glass if it’s feasible because you are close to a glass manufacturer. But nothing else.
That’s my gripe there is no clear rule set and it’s highly localized and in those localized areas there are no clear guidelines. Most collection companies just say they take everything when it fact some or a lot of what’s being collected gets sent to the landfill.
If there's really no tape or anything and it's just the cardboard without printing or gloss, these will compost just fine. If our paper towels don't have chemicals on them (ie, we used them as napkins) we actually just put them right in the chicken coop.
Plastic bags separated from other trash/recycables brought to the store wouldn’t be much of a problem for Kroger. I don’t think consumers would bother unless a deposit was involved.
Metals, eWaste, Batteries ... all profitable to recycle.
Paper & cardboard ... depends on market price.
Plastics ... depends on oil prices, market price and type of plastic.
Tires ... usually profitable, usually involves a hauling fee.
AMP's robotic solution is going to face immense competition from general edge models, probably very soon. The mechanical piece is simple engineering. All the magic is (was) recognition.
Everything here other than Metals and Tires are basically only useful in the extremes where your inputs are exceedingly clean.
Sure, if you somehow have 99.9% cleaned and sorted plastic it can be maybe worth recycling at the margins. Same with paper and cardboard. The quality of these input streams needs to be so good it basically is nonexistent.
This might work somewhere like Japan, but in a major US city with "single stream" recycling it's a joke. One person tossing a bag of fast food trash into a recycling bin ruins the entire thing. Or a pizza box. You name it.
I'd be surprised if even 10% of the stuff put into the "blue bin" recycling bins here in Chicago actually makes it to recycling. The metals are near 100% since scrappers drive the alleys and scavenge anything of value before it even makes it to the recycling truck.
The amount of human labor to make recycling "worth it" makes it uneconomical. Either that labor can be done on the consumer side (like Japan seems to do) - or centralized - but most things only pencil out when you assume this cleaning and sorting labor is effectively free.
It is a mixed bag but the way it’s handled and marketed in the US is absolutely a sham. Consumers are led to feel good that they are recycling when often that item is getting tossed in the landfill.
But your callouts don’t make sense to me. Paper is rarely economical. We were mostly shipping it to China for the longest time. Only like 8% of plastics in the US are recycled. Most local waste systems don’t bother because the cost to sort far exceeds the value of the plastic. That’s the sham part and it’s prevalent across the country. The only reason tires work is because of government programs.
Again I am not saying recycling is bad but I wish in the US it was clearer and more strict. I would rather my local trash pickup tell me exactly what they want instead of following the propaganda that I can throw in paper and plastics when I know they are mostly throwing those in the dump.
Is repair really economical? I would think the time and money it takes makes that impractical too. Not buying as much stuff feels like the only real solution
While I welcome the places where it is bringing value, I’m more worried about all the places it’s being shoehorned in that are a waste of money, fueling the bubble. The blast radius is going to be spectacular.
That is just absurd. You are stuck in your head if you genuinely think that is true. Reminds me of some of the “10x engineers” I have worked with in the past that were so arrogant they ignored reality.
It creates a lot of value though. You may not see it but it exists. People so easily forget what you he financial systems looked like historically. Everything from having fluid loans of all type that don’t discriminate, to ipos, it’s easy to sell a business or to buy one. If I am buying stock it’s never been easier and modern spreads are some of the lowest in history.
We know over the long term it is exceptionally hard to beat the market, timing the market is near impossible. Everyone keeps talking about a bubble but we don’t know how big of one it is or when/if it will pop.
You are better off being in the market than betting on an idea that you don’t know will even happen or when.
I definitely think there is over enthusiasm in the space but at the same time I am not convinced that the demand for compute has let off yet.
My take is always you could build up some cash reserve in treasuries or somewhere like that and deploy it if a pop does happen. You will miss out on the potential growth but if you wanted to participate that is one way imo.
> You are better off being in the market than betting on an idea that you don’t know will even happen or when.
This is true if you're willing to wait forever, but if you have near- and medium-term goals, you should not be investing money in the market if you believe there will be a crash. I have such goals and I'm putting my money into treasuries instead of putting more into what I believe is a very overvalued market.
Look at stocks: everything is synchronizing, for years now. Either something like 85% of stocks all go up, with a predictable difference between them (meaning, e.g. META moves about double GOOG does, whichever way it goes, up or down), or 85% of stocks all go down. SPY, VOO. And in fact the only ones that make a move to speak of are the MAG7. It isn't just that they're the fastest to rise, they're the only ones that beat the market.
Zoom out and you'll see that in recent years you can include even non-stock-market assets in this argument. Housing ... same (of course there I understand), Gold, surprisingly, same.
And that's ignoring the warnings European authorities are issuing these days. It's pretty public information at this point that European authorities expect open ("kinetic" if you will) hostilities between Germany, France and Russia to open somewhere between March 2026 and Jan 2027. That will crash the stock market. That will crash the housing market. That will probably even crash the gold market, AI or no AI. Imho, that will crash the value of fucking Trump tower. The places these warnings are coming from are very serious and not known for joking on these matters (like the German chancillary, which if anything is far too conservative, or the French department of health, which has literally never issued a warning like this)
But isn’t what in the past? The market has always over time gone up to the right.
Very serious and not joking? Ok go time the market. My point stands market timing is impossible. Historically you have always been best suited by being in the market. Could that change? Sure but I don’t think you can time that or be prepared for it.
The idea that you can build in safety against stock market crashes by investing in treasury funds or the more general stocks vs bonds. They have synchronized and if something goes wrong it will be a total disaster for people and pension funds regardless of the traditional wisdom.
About time. They never iterated and made a better product. All of the roombas end up being bump sensor machines, the mapping is garbage. My $200 Roborock has lidar and works flawlessly compared to my roomba I bought 3 years prior for $700. Sure there is a gap on years but the difference is light years apart.
Too late and unless pricing changed too expensive.
I was amazed when I got this Roborock a year ago it was 2-250 on sale via Amazon. Just a vacuum but it has lidar. I remember it mapping the floor and was amazed how well it worked.
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