People with young children do worry about them drowning in the bath and take steps to prevent it. A better example of underfocused deaths, to contrast with the overfocus on unusual murders, would be car accidents.
I think that article is based on outdated information. More recently people have started to look at plastic released on the open sea through fishing, and found it to be bigger than all land-based sources.
Well that's some confusing reporting. The title is "Dumped fishing gear is biggest plastic polluter in ocean, finds report" yet does go on to say 10%.
Greenpeace: "Ghost gear makes up an estimated 10% of the plastic waste in our oceans, but represents a much higher proportion of large plastics found floating at the surface."
We pay other countries to take our garbage only because we prefer to imagine it is being recycled. It's not like we don't have enough landfill space here, if we were willing to treat it as the trash that it is.
Yea there was a great two part planet money series on recycling this year. And the economic take away is that the current state of recycling in the US is broken and we have more than enough landfill space for thousands of years. One idea was to just burn it which this mentioned is what some European countries are doing.
Bridge engineers don't have to fear the progress of science working against them, but computer security is not alone here. Consider designing body armor or military aircraft and hoping that the state of the art will stay the same! An adversary who can use the progress of science against you is always dangerous. Computer security has been rather lucky so far: the asymmetry between hashing and cracking a hash, for example, is much more favorable to the defense than the balance between bulletproof vests and bullets.
On a long enough time scale Bridge Engineers still have to worry about decay, entropy, collisions. Some of that can even be attributed to the "progress of science", as bridges have collapsed because earlier assumptions were invalidated by larger trucks, for instance.
An issue so far for computer security is less that decay and entropy happen, but that they happen so fast that the timescales are decades or even years rather than lifetimes.
This is a great point in general: sometimes the problem isn't an adversary using knowledge in your field against you, it's the unintended consequences of progress / changes in adjacent fields.
It also underscores that, when dealing with things like passwords, it's helpful to be able to seamlessly upgrade to more robust methods down the line, e.g. "if this password hash was generated using the old method, check the login using that method but rehash and update the database using the new method after authentication."
Just to clarify why these aren't used everywhere: heat-to-power devices act as insulation (compared to just letting the heat escape). If you have something that you're trying to keep cool, like a CPU, a system that shunts heat straight to the surroundings will always give better cooling than a system that puts layers in between. Contrariwise, if you have a need for electricity, mechanical heat engines will almost always be more efficient. Solid-state heat-to-power only makes sense in a narrow set of cases which aren't suitable for direct cooling or heat engines.
But there are some pretty cool applications. Apparently the heat difference between a buried water-pipe and the surrounding earth is already enough to power a wireless sensor, which can transmit data to localize leaks, for example.
There are a lot of factors you're not considering. Reducing heat output is good, yes, but putting a layer between your chips and their heat sink is bad! Even though the total heat output is lower, the chip temperature will be higher, because it will be more insulated. There is no way around this; any heat-to-power device acts as insulation compared to a plain heat conductor. You will also have added weight and cost. In a phone, where the heat differences are small, the electricity gained will be almost nothing. So actually we're not likely to see this in phones.
In my field, computational chemistry, you are definitely right: when we have more parallelism available, we go for increased accuracy and scope, not reduced latency. The latency is set by human schedules (a coffee break, overnight, etc). So Amdahl's Law does not apply.
Their primary business is not keeping recordings and publishing neatly organized transparency records. Because (a) it's not what the people working for them are interested in, (b) they're heavily volunteer supported, & (c) they don't / can't spend the money to hire someone to do that work.
In the same way someone on Etsy wants to make jewelry, not run a C-corp.
End result... good charities look a lot like bad charities, with limited ability for bystanders to distinguish. In fact, possibly negatively, as actively malicious charities can spend time and money optimizing for externally visible attributes.
The solution is, as you noted, to lean on someone who does have the time to externally audit various charities.
When I give to charity I want to known that almost all the money is going to a cause and not spent on overhead
As for charities being run by volunteers
The American Red Cross paid its CEO ~700k in 2018 and spent ~110m on administrative expenses with ~89% of their income spent on programs, hardly a loose bunch of people
Just saying and people should make their minds on if the overhead of their favorite charity is appropriate.
And they are one of the better ones there are widely known charities with 20/30 % overhead. There was a charity that had most of its income spent on raising money !
You're optimizing only one of the three important things about a charity. True, the absolute worst charities are those with massive overhead, basically scams. But just avoiding those scams doesn't mean your donation will do the most good. Also crucial are: is the charity directed at an evidence-based goal? And is the charity prepared to handle more money? These are the things GiveWell checks into.
This is historically doubtful. The most famous anti-heliocentric researcher, Galileo, was a professor at the University of Padua. This university relied on the Church at least as much as a modern US university relies on the NSF. Furthermore the Church had vastly more power over publication than any institution in any free country today. Yet, the truth still shone through. If Renaissance Italian research funding had been greater, we would have gotten more empty treatises on heliocentrism, but also more chances at a Galileo.
