[verisimi]

The consumer element is the sugar to help the masses swallow the pill. If it was just about the consumer, the unit would never report its findings back to base. But blurting back your information is integral to, well, all smart devices. That is the point.

Once the government has that info, it will be able to come up with bespoke taxes for you according to what it ordains as fair use. 'Your showers are too long', 'your toolshed is too big a draw on the electric' therefore 'you need to buy carbon credits to offset the environmental damage you are causing'.

It's the slow descent to greater tyranny, and loss of personal control. It's amazing that people put up with it, but a slight discount in the short term, or visibility of your own data, is probably enough to get most people to accept spying infrastructure in their lives forever.

[concordDance]

> Once the government has that info, it will be able to come up with bespoke taxes for you according to what it ordains as fair use. 'Your showers are too long', 'your toolshed is too big a draw on the electric' therefore 'you need to buy carbon credits to offset the environmental damage you are causing'.

This is likely to happen and is economically awful (far better to have constant carbon taxes), but it will be done because the majority supports it, not due to some government plot against the people.

[smolder]

Elected officials get into office with majority support of a constituency, but that's very far away from the majority of people supporting their collective actions while in office. In the US, politicians do what money wants them to, not voters. Consent of voters is often manufactured and misinformed.

[gambiting]

I don't understand your point - these meters only report your overal usage, not what is using the energy/water. It's letting you skip the step where you manually upload the reads every couple months or whatever, or worse, where the energy company employee has to visit your house to read them in person. Why does it matter if I upload my meter reads to my provider every month or if the device reports it automatically? The end result is the same.

(At least that's how it works in the UK - the "smart" meters don't report live usage back to providers, they just submit kWh reads, the live readout is local device only)

[CaptainMarvel]

That’s not quite right. All new smart meters have the ability to report electricity usage minute-by-minute.

You _currently_ have the choice to only report month-by-month, by kindly asking them to only do that. However, I agree with verisimi, and I believe that it’s only a matter of time before the government via energy suppliers can monitor your real time electricity usage.

It’ll be dressed up, of course, as being in your best interest, but you won’t have a choice. Smart meters were sold as being beneficial for customers, but in reality they take power away from people and consolidate it in energy suppliers.

At the most basic level this is a history of when you are at home or not.

[gambiting]

>>but in reality they take power away from people and consolidate it in energy suppliers.

What kind of power did you have before the introduction of smart meters, exactly?

[lazide]

The power to not have someone know if you’re at home and how much electricity you’re using at any given moment - and for any given moment over an arbitrary period in the past I guess?

[userbinator]

the "smart" meters don't report live usage back to providers

Either they can be easily upgraded to do that, or they already are and the energy company merely gives you the total every month to maintain the impression that they aren't.

If the meter-reader needs to visit periodically, you know with much greater certainty that they aren't gathering live data.

[gambiting]

>>Either they can be easily upgraded to do that

I mean no offence, but you are literally just guessing and not talking about technologies that people have in their houses. The smart meters here in UK, the latest SMET2 standard ones, cannot broadcast live data back to the grid because they simply don't have the bandwidth to do so, they use low frequency communication back to the area controller and they can barely report the kWh number roughly every hour or so. The live communication with the display you have in your house is done over ZigBee and unless the energy company parks the van outside of your house to get those reads, they aren't getting them.

Like, your points about surveilance are true, sure - but they address an imaginary situation you built in your head, not the actual technical solution that exists in the real world.

>>If the meter-reader needs to visit periodically, you know with much greater certainty that they aren't gathering live data.

Yeah and I need to let them into my house, which to me personally is a far greater invasion of my privacy than my meter automatically uploading kWh numbers to the grid.

Also just as a general remark - on HN I think people are likely to divide into two groups - nerds who want ALL the data and they would gladly upload live data to an online system if they could just so they could monitor it live, and people who think any IoT functionality is a massive invasion of privacy and that it's some greater ploy by government to control you. The truth - as always - is somewhere in the middle.

[michaelt]

Maybe your installation is different, but usually the electricity meter uses normal GPRS to talk to the electricity company. They literally have SIM cards inside.

The low energy 'HAN' stuff is used for the gas meter, so it can run for 10 years on a battery, allowing it to be installed without installing wired power. The electricity meter has plenty of electricity available, so it acts as a bridge. The portable screen thingy also uses the 'HAN'.

However, it's pretty clear the policy intent isn't only to let people monitor their usage. If that was all that was needed, there are much cheaper options designed for consumer self-install. Why did they go for the much more expensive and inconvenient smart meter+gprs option, if not to enable time-of-use tariffs?

[sofixa]

> Maybe your installation is different, but usually the electricity meter uses normal GPRS to talk to the electricity company. They literally have SIM cards inside.

Where? In France the devices, called Linky and manufactured to a common standard by a few different companies, and mandatory, communicate via the grid itself over the CPL protocol. There are no SIM cards inside, and thankfully, lunatics have been suing to refuse to get their meter upgraded to Linky "BECAUSE WAVES 5G COVID CHIPS" bullshit which doesn't have any basis in reality.

[didntcheck]

> BECAUSE WAVES 5G COVID CHIPS

Is that really the main line, or is that just the media smear being used against a majority who have fair concerns, such as privacy or a move to phase out fixed-rate tariffs? This Wikipedia article has a good summary, and while the "Health" section is bullshit, the rest is mostly valid points https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smart_meter#Opposition_and_con...

[gambiting]

Is that in the UK or somewhere else?

>>However, it's pretty clear the policy intent isn't only to let people monitor their usage.

Of course - but I contest OP's claim that it has enough granularity to tell you that you're showering too much or that your tool shed uses too much energy - it doesn't allow that in the slightest.

[michaelt]

In the UK, yes.

You can see a UK smart meter being taken apart here [1] with the GPRS module shown at around the 2 minute mark. And you can look at meter datasheets [2] which list GPRS WAN as a feature.

Smart meters often send a reading every 30 minutes. Some energy companies will then show a breakdown on their website that purports to show how much you're spending on lighting, fridges, appliances and things like that [3].

I suspect they use a lot of guesswork to arrive at that breakdown, given the limited input data. Although it's probably fairly easy to recognise certain multi-hour-and-distinctively-large loads, like EV charging and heat pumps.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G32NYQpvy8Q [2] https://www.securemeters.com/sea/wp-content/uploads/sites/15... [3] https://imgur.com/a/L0xwWEo

[CaptainMarvel]

I mean no offence, but you are literally just guessing and not talking about technologies that people have in their houses.

Hilarious that I’m sending your own words back to you.

I worked at an energy supplier. I saw minutely energy readings from customers with my own eyes. It was a lot of data!

[gambiting]

>>Hilarious that I’m sending your own words back to you.

I don't know if it's hilarious, more like unhelpful at best, rude at worst .

>>I saw minutely energy readings from customers with my own eyes. It was a lot of data

It wasn't "live" data though, was it? Just a breakdown of usage per-minute, but uploaded in batches, right? And which energy supplier was that? Because with Octopus you can only get live data by installing an extra(and optional) device called Octopus mini, their SMET2 meters have no such capability.

[beebeepka]

> Once the government has that info, it will be able to come up with bespoke taxes for you according to what it ordains as fair use. 'Your showers are too long', 'your toolshed is too big a draw on the electric' therefore 'you need to buy carbon credits to offset the environmental damage you are causing'.

I am very conflicted. Deeply share your concerns regarding misuse of such info. It will be used as a weapon. But I am totally in favour of making wasters pay up, and not just fixed amounts.

I hate wasting resources.

[concordDance]

"Waster" isn't really a coherent concept when taken outside of an individual's value system. What might be waste for one person might simply be a sensible use of resources for another.

Doing for a drive to the countryside for a walk? Having a long and relaxing bath? Go-karting? Using a heated pool? Keeping the heater on a single house-level timer so they don't have to think about it rather than planning ahead what rooms they will be in later?

Everyone will have a different place they draw the "waste" vs sensible expenditure line.

The correct economic solution to this is CO2-offsetting taxes and letting each individual decide how they want to spend their resources. Trying to centrally plan for a hundred million diverse people with different things they like and care about is a recipe for unneeded misery.

[hgomersall]

Taxes just push the problem into poor people. If you want a fair solution we should have carbon/resource rationing. In fact, I'd prefer a solution in which the governments work hard (much harder than they are) to bootstrap the brave new world so everyone can benefit from a sustainable world.

[CaptainMarvel]

Taxes don't have to push the problem onto poor people at all. For example, the proceeds can be directly given to everyone equally which will usually disproportionately benefit poor people.

So why would you say that taxes would harm poor people? I think I know why.

In practice, the legislative, executive and judicial branches of government, and the media have been almost completely captured by the wealthy to disproportionately benefit themselves.

Wealth is essentially zero sum game despite what many would say. Power is certainly a zero-sum game. When you have power over another, they have less power over you. I believe wealth is another form of power, a little indirect and not perfect, but the correlation is strong enough.

This means that there is no practical solution that won't harm poor people. This includes your proposal where you would like the government to "benefit everyone".

[concordDance]

Rationing is ridiculously inefficient.

People's desire for heavily carbon consuming things vs lightly carbon consuming things varies massively. If you're worried about the poor don't ignore the externalities of their consumption but subsidise them directly via UBI or somesuch.

Rationing is a very worst of all possible worlds solution, losing you all the benefits of trade.

[ImPostingOnHN]

Just as a thought exercise, if anything was possible:

UBI seems to work towards the goal of making sure people don't die due to lack of resources (it is a basic income, after all). It's less clear how it works towards the goal of reducing carbon emissions.

Rationing, on the other hand, has the potential: Natural resources (publicly owned ones anyways), and perhaps natural limits like how much CO2 the skies can take, are collectively owned by the people. So it could make sense to distribute those amongst the people. The people could then sell them in a free® market. This means we can work towards both goals at once: Those seeking to pollute more, could simply buy the carbon credits from their fellow people, who can now better afford to live. And, at the same time, total pollution is capped-ish, depending on the scheme.

As a fun note, UBI is just rationing out the available funds for UBI, so it would suffer from any rationing-specific failings that carbon rationing would suffer from.

[concordDance]

A tradeable carbon rationing is indeed equivalent to a UBI, but with side effects. In particular, if the market is efficient then the consumption of CO2 credits will exactly equal production, but the price will be unrelated to the actual externality cost or mitigation cost of the marginal CO2 release. So you either get more CO2 released than you would with an externality tax or you get less CO2 released than you should given that you can mitigate against that particular CO2 release.

Ideally you'd have credits being available for purchase at prices that correspond to the costs of mitigating their externalities (CO2 emission is not in and of itself evil, its the consequences that we don't want).

[hgomersall]

We don't want trade. We want people to reduce their carbon consumption. In any case, you could always allow trading of rations.

[concordDance]

> We want people to reduce their carbon consumption

Remember that this isn't the end goal. What we want is not to feel the effects of releasing CO2.

A CO2 tax that costs as much as it costs to mitigate the effects of that CO2 release reduces CO2 production to exactly the amount its worth emitting. Rationing means you either get more or less CO2 than this number.

[userbinator]

You do. Many others don't.

[CaptainMarvel]

It’s up to individuals to decide if they are wasting their own resources. Everyone has a different perspective. Personally, I think SUVs are a waste and should be banned, but wouldn’t that be overreaching?

Individuals don’t pay for their waste when they aren’t paying for negative externalities.

That’s why a carbon tax is a better solution - it ensures people are paying the true price for a resource. Let people decide their own life after that, they’ll do a better of job of it than someone else deciding their life for them.

(You probably need more than just a carbon tax to fairly price the resource. For example, mining fossil fuels causes health issues for workers, and impacts the local environment.

[beebeepka]

It's a slippery slope for sure but you have to draw the line somewhere.

For example, if there's a water shortage and someone decides they can afford (financially) to use as much as they please, that's not going to end well.

I don't quite understand the obsession with carbon. Not everything can be mapped to carbon without some mental gymnastics.

[CaptainMarvel]

During a water shortage, if most of the water is being taken up by few wealthy individuals, then there are negative externalities being created: people dying, falling sick, being hospitalised, protests and violence that takes policing resources, etc.

The market has failed to fully price the external effects generated by some economic activities, thus the government must step in and impose a tax on all water use so that they can correct the negative externality.

At the simplest level, the government can use the proceeds to buy the water themselves and distribute it to those in need. For example, to reduce bureaucracy during a crisis, they could pay for the first 5 litres of daily residential water use for each individual directly on their bills.

The problem is again: the resource is not being priced correctly.

[avgcorrection]

We’re all (well you know) a bunch of primates who travel from single home suburbs in metal boxes in order to work in front of a screen. Going around worrying about who waters their lawn the most excessively[1] is largely a waste of time.

There are exceptions though for things like droughts. But largely this goes beyond this obsession with looking over each other’s hedges (digitally or actually).

[1] Because the agricultural lobby would like to redirect the focus from them to random suburbanites (see California).

[autoexec]

You don't even have to worry about the government (it seems unlikely that most of us will see a "10min showers only" law anytime soon), but it's usually private companies collecting and selling the data and they're happy to use that data against you in any way that they can.

[ZeroGravitas]

Fossil fuel interests have really rotted a lot of minds with their propaganda.

In some ways this may turn out to be a bigger crime than the carbon issues you think are just a conspiracy to control shower length.

[concordDance]

I don't think this is fair to him. He's not alleging carbon stuff is a conspiracy to control shower length, merely that moralizers will want to control everything they see as "waste".

[avgcorrection]

Rotting minds, really?

[ZeroGravitas]

If someone close to me said that they fear an authoritarian government because the length of their showers might be curtailed, or the power draw of their shed might be outlawed, I'd be genuinely worried about their mental health.

[avgcorrection]

> close to me said

Public forum though. No one has seen a psychologist because a text box intervened about their “rotting [brain]”.