https://www.autonocion.com/us/tower-china-wind-farm-power/ claims it is the first commercial one. I can't find others that are not either prototypes, trials or failed commercially. This design looks to be rolling out in several countries already, which is pretty good as these things go considering their prototype was built in 2020.
My parents spend a huge chunk of their day doing their laundry and soon won't even be able to handle that. Age sucks. Being disabled sucks too. Lots of tasks people think are trivial are mountains to climb.
Yes, like most things you can certainly get a cheaper service that provides less. As you say, the price is merely competitive if you only make use of the service twice a week. But for anyone who needs daily service, such as in-home aged care or disabled support, it is a bargain.
$450 USD / month to have a human turn up every day? $15 USD per day, including weekends? Around here you might just about get the minimum of 1 hour/day for 10 times that.
This will be life changing for the elderly and disabled if they can pull it off. If you have socialized care, the government would even probably pay since it will be cheaper than aged care facilities.
I think that is backwards. If you are replacing full time staff you need a system that works just as fast for the same or less money. For home use, you don't care if it takes 3 hours to make your bed or just stops for a while when waiting for a teleoperator to become available.
I doubt it will ever be cheaper than doing it yourself, like most things in life. The market is for people unable or unwilling to do it themselves.
Outsourcing can be difficult and expensive in many regions. The lack of an actual human might even be considered a benefit in some cases, such as nursing homes (although you have to weigh the benefits of human contact with the benefits of fewer humans spreading plagues).
> Suspiciously absent: a rough idea of what percentage of tasks need the assistance.
This will almost certainly depend on the customer and residence. I don't think subscription pricing will be fair, but it can at least be budgeted for out of pensions and such for the people needing to pay for assistance.
Hopefully they can pull this off. Aged care is already a problem in many countries, and getting worse with an aging population and lack of workers such as cleaners. Even just laundry could keep people living in their own homes for a few extra years.
Absolutely nothing will prevent this. The situation is the same, and the same policing and laws about fraud and impersonation and 'enabling an underage person to...' will apply.
What is interesting is that checking physical ID places a burden on the bar. Bars get fined or worse if they do a poor job, or even just take the fall if the kids are more capable than the bouncers. With these attestations though, the government is takes responsibility. The connection is attested by gov to be legal, the gov can't turn around and claim it was illegal. They can't go after you, just the person who enabled the fraud.
This is why age verification cannot be implemented by the vested interests. Rollout in Australia involved making the laws, but leaving the implementation up to the vested interests, and is a mess because of it. A privacy nightmare uploading government documentation to strangers, and companies just just punting responsibility to a designated fall guy ('3rd party trusted verification service'). And most of them don't want to implement things this way, because they don't want to be the next company taking a hit in the stock market because of a public data breach, but have no choice. When governments and societies want age verification, they need to actually take responsibility for it. Which seems to be what the EU is trying to do.
This already happens with the existing system. Even before the internet, drivers licenses would get shared so under aged people could buy beer. The same laws, punishments and policing apply and really the best we can do unless you want to start tattooing id on people at birth.
So not a perfect system, but an improvement over the status quo.
The attestation should be at least the same level of security as access to your government services. ie. you trust it as least as much as you trust a scan of a passport.
The trick is that you don't need to prove anything. The government hands out an attestation that the holder meets criteria required to meet a government regulation. The government has taken responsibility. It is why you would require an EU attestation from EU users, and a US attestation from US users.
Sure. At the heart of it, the system just attests that a document is true. That document might say 'the holder of this token is over 18' or 'the holder of this token is a meat popsicle' or 'the holder of this token should look like this photo and is licensed to drive'. It could even attest your actual identity, which might be useful for banking purposes. The trick to preserving privacy is to only reveal the minimum necessary information.
It is an interesting idea you bring up. These sort of disinformation campaigns are making news everywhere, over and over, and this mechanism easily adapted. Like a blue check mark but actually useful, being able to tell social media posts written by a bot farm apart from social media posts written by an arsehole.
But it is being implemented that way, and will hopefully remain that way if people who care keep paying attention. The article is pointing to the EU system currently being put together by a number of European countries.
The 'it can't be done' arguments are the worse. By spreading the idea that age verification can only be done by violating privacy means, we will end up with a system that violates privacy controlled by vested interests. Like the one already in place where you upload id. Politicians can easily sell out and will be cheered on as they entrench the system. But if that energy was spent pointing out the alternative, that we can do this in a privacy protecting way, then it can force politicians to legislate the right way. I'm looking forward to the EU system actually being rolled out, hopefully reaching their goal of remaining privacy protecting, so I can point to it and insist to my government that we can do better.
These absolutist arguments will never be taken seriously. Almost everyone can find some form of information they want held back, criminalized and punished for enabling. 'Information wants to be free' died in the 90s when people realized some of the extreme crap this meant and decided to cast out from their societies. Of course it can't be stopped, but it can certainly be outlawed.
Yes, of course. All credentials implicitly disclose the issuer by nature. A credential is by definition an attestation by an authoritative source, and meaningless without specifying that source.
Yes, any age verification or identity verification system can be used to implement geoblocking. It actually improves the situation. Currently services who want or need to block access to foreigners have no alternative than to block access to VPNs. With a suitable attestation, a service could choose to allow access from VPNs that come with such.
If the outdoor temperature is cool enough (maybe 30C?), you just pipe the liquid outside through a large enough loop or heat exchanger to get it back down to under 45C. Even better if you can put the loop in a lake and dump the heat there (maybe not better from an ecological POV though). The pumps moving all that liquid becomes the noisiest component.
Household batteries work wonders for residential consumption. It is interesting what happened once subsidies for batteries was introduced in Australia. The uptake was huge (because free or cheap electricity in off peak periods). Average install size went up, covering about 24 hours of winter usage. Subsidies needed to be tweaked, to reduce the number of 50+ kWh installations. It is not unreasonable to use current technology to have 24 hours or maybe 48 in most or all residences, with an investment payback time to consumers of around 5 years. With dynamic pricing, most consumption switches to non-peak. All distributed, rather than large scale battery facilities. As long as you are prepared to import from China, manufacturing is available. What is needed is political backing to make it a good investment for consumers via subsidies, and loans to ensure people without spare cash can also benefit. And maybe the numbers work out well, with less subsidies going to fossil fuel generation.