No Food for Thought

Les effets pervers sont innombrables. Il est ainsi bien connu que l'utilisation d'antibiotiques en agriculture rend l'humain beaucoup plus vulnérable aux bactéries en raison de l'antibiorésistance.

Malheureusement, les effets pervers débordent largement la sphère privée. De nombreuses politiques publiques peuvent ainsi causer de nouveaux problèmes. Obliger l'utilisation d'un casque à vélo peut ainsi nuire à la santé publique en réduisant l'utilisation des vélos.

Mais l'effet pervers le moins pardonnable est l'effet cobra, qui survient lorsqu'une mesure empire le problème même qu'elle devait mitiger.

Si l'effet cobra est loin d'être nouveau, ses leçons sont toujours bien mal assimilées. Aujourd'hui encore, l'enfer est pavé de bonnes intentions. Même dans les pays développés, les incitatifs pervers sont monnaie courante, surtout dans le domaine de l'environnement. Par exemple, en voulant décourager l'utilisation de l'automobile, un nombre incalculable de juridictions subventionne les autobus, encourageant bien entendu une augmentation des émissions causées par les autobus, et diminuant le prix de l'essence, encourageant l'utilisation des automobiles.

Ce genre de mesures à priori loufoques est devenu si courant qu'on ne les remarque plus. Ainsi, la filiale Hilo de Hydro-Québec a inauguré son nouveau concept de « défis Hilo ». La formule est présentée comme « simple » :

Très bien... mais qu'est-ce qu'un « kilowattheure non consommé »? Combien d'énergie un client ne consomme-t-il pas?

La réponse à cette question absurde est - bien sûr - soit inexistante, soit arbitraire et imparfaite. Surtout, difficile de trouver une réponse le moindrement juste qui ne soit pas sujette à manipulation. Alors que Hilo publicise encore à grands frais ces « défis », ceux qui y ont adhéré ont déjà commencé à exploiter le concept. Ainsi, non seulement le gouvernement se ruine encore davantage, mais on gaspille l'électricité qu'on tentait de préserver.

Si le gouvernement blâme ce qu'il appelle des « tricheurs », quel être raisonnable accepterait de se faire avoir par les autres sans faire de même? Les « tricheurs » sont en réalité des enseignants forcés de faire la leçon à un gouvernement ignorant. On se dirige en effet vers un effet cobra si Hydro-Québec ne recule pas.

Malheureusement, l'échec de Hilo est un symptôme d'un mal qui a contaminé le monde démocratique. La solution est connue depuis des décennies : compenser les externalités négatives par le principe pollueur-payeur; et plus généralement le principe utilisateur-payeur. Le problème, c'est que le juste prix est un dissuasif. Les décideurs se retrouvent ainsi face à 3 options :

1. ne rien faire
2. prendre une mesure dissuasive, comme augmenter le prix pour refléter les coûts réels, qui sera fort probablement remarquée par leur électorat et risque de leur coûter des votes
3. ou créer un incitatif qui semble tenter de régler le problème, tellement perverti qu'il risque de déclencher un effet cobra

Voulant éviter de se faire reprocher n'avoir rien fait et ayant peur de l'option #2, trop de politiciens sans courage se réfugient dans la dernière, comme leurs électeurs ne leur reprocheront pas (tant qu'ils ne réaliseront pas le déficit ainsi créé).

Le vrai défi ici ne devrait donc pas être lancé aux consommateurs, mais plutôt à la démocratie : combler notre déficit en éducation économique pour se permettre des mesures rationnelles, soutenables et—surtout—efficaces. De sorte qu'on puisse enfin imposer une tarification variable, même si certains l'interprètent comme une mesure dissuasive.

Dans la vie, responsabiliser ses semblables demande du courage. Et de l'énergie, ressource qui est limitée. Comme on dit, il faut « choisir ses combats », sachant que certains combats sont bien plus épuisants que d'autres.

C'est pourquoi, dans certains cas, il est très rare que quelqu'un ait le courage de s'opposer réellement. Critiquer son employeur même à l'interne peut être difficile. Pour un conseiller politique qui est témoin de magouilles dans son parti, il est plus facile de laisser aller, quitte à devenir plus ou moins volontairement complice. Imaginez-vous dénoncer publiquement votre employeur, lorsque celui-ci est un parti politique qui vous emploie depuis des années. Il faut carrément être prêt à renoncer à son emploi, à l'amitié de la plupart de ses collègues, et à un projet auquel on a donné tant d'énergie.

Jean-Benoit Ratté, héros Kune ni povos de l'année 2021. Tous droits réservés

Jean-Benoit Ratté n'a pas fait les choses à moitié (comme l'aurait fait le projet de loi 39). Non seulement il a démissionné au printemps 2021, a révélé dans plus d'une entrevue ce qui s'était passé dans l'ombre, mais il a aussi joint le Mouvement Démocratie Nouvelle pour poursuivre le travail. Je félicite le véritable héros qu'est M. Ratté. Il est clair que la CAQ ne méritait plus une personne d'une telle intelligence, éloquence et intégrité.

M. Ratté n'a pas seulement choisi le Québec en n'embarquant pas dans les supercheries. Il a aussi choisi de conserver sa bonne conscience. Si seulement nous étions davantage à réaliser toute la valeur de la bonne conscience. Ce n'est pas juste le mode de scrutin que M. Ratté a servi en choisissant l'intégrité. Par sa décision, il montre à la CAQ que ses membres ne se tairont pas nécessairement tous quand elle s'adonnera aux prochaines manigances. On peut même espérer que chaque fois où quelqu'un sacrifie ses intérêts pour le bien commun, ce sont tous les partis qui prennent note et y penseront à 2 fois avant de recourir aux tromperies (ne serait-ce que pour éviter de perdre la face).

Notre vie est formée par nos choix. Celui d'écouter CHOI ou Radio-Canada. Celui de ne prendre en considération que sa famille, ou de penser aussi à ses amis, à tous les Québécois, ou même à l'ensemble de l'humanité. Et le choix de prévoir jusqu'à la semaine prochaine, ou jusqu'au siècle prochain. M. Ratté a eu le courage de ne pas s'arrêter au court terme. Espérons qu'en 2026, le Québec ait le courage de faire respecter ses choix, en choisissant un mode de scrutin décent. Et espérons que cette fois, il choisira non pas la CAQ, mais un (ensemble de) parti(s) qui aura/auront ne serait-ce que le dixième de l'intégrité et du courage de Jean-Benoit Ratté, pour enfin s'offrir une démocratie imputable.

Former Russian soldier Pavel Filatyev became KNP's September Hero of the Month after denouncing the Russian army and helping understand why so few will do the same.

This week, Andrei Medvedev, a former commander of Russia's Wagner mercenary group, also fled Russia, in a risky run to Norway. But doing so, he also denounced and contributed to explain why few will do the same: even deserting Wagner is enough for it to kill you.

Congratulations to Andrei Medvedev, KNP's January 2023 Hero of the Month

Competition matters. When antitrust law appeared, its target was—well—trusts. At least theoretically, capitalism couldn't prevent the appearance of monopolies. Antitrust law had at least the merit of allowing to control that threat.

It didn't take long until antitrust laws were invoked against so-called "monopolies". As years went by though, the public got more and more envious, until the USA got to the point of suing... a software corporation. To the USA's defence, it is true that at the time, Microsoft might have appeared to the ignorant as a monopoly, being highly dominant in a highly strategic market. But the case had the effect of banalizing grave market interventions. Today's chaotic software ecosystem may in part be an unintended consequence of that action and the fear it created in the industry. Yet, the scenario keeps repeating over and over again, often targeting completely legitimate software companies.

Unfortunately, in fact, the movie is not quite a repetition of the same sequence. A couple years ago, No Food for Thought warned that even Facebook, a corporation which doesn't even have 1% of world market cap, was threatened by so-called antitrust measures, after acquiring... Giphy, the short videos database! And it turns out the threat was most real, now that Facebook's appeal of the terrible decision of the UK’s Competition and Markets Authority resulted in UK's Competition Appeals Tribunal simply upholding it. Antitrust law has infected most of the developed world, and now threatens even the entertainment industry.

"Moore's law" is unequivocally dead and the world keeps complexifying, innovation becoming more and more expensive. As short-termism and populism slowly replace entrepreneurship and competition, the future of innovation looks bleaker than ever. But hey, at least you can still use Giphy without having a Facebook account... that is, until it goes bankrupt.

via GIPHY

May 2023 Update: Meta Sells Giphy

Giphy is not going bankrupt at this time. Meta is selling it to Shutterstock, wasting merely 5/6 of Giphy's value.

I haven't had the need to bring one of my PCs to a repair shop in the last 20 years. And after reading the appalling results of a study about privacy in computer repair shops, I feel quite fortunate. Curiosity, visibly, is a trait common to all humans, but even more in IT people.

Thanks to my IT friends for helping me maintain my PCs, and here's hoping this highly interesting study will be followed by action to somewhat control that curiosity.

I'm not the first one to observe that Reactive Extensions For JavaScript have quite a learning curve. It's likely that you will discover RxJS at the same time as you discover "Observables", reactive programming, Angular, and whatever software project using those you'll actually work on. Good luck. And you may also have to understand where your colleagues used RxJS correctly or incorrectly.

One would expect you could do better than your colleagues consulting documentation. Unfortunately, while that documentation exists, it was already criticized in 2017, even before going through a difficult rewrite.

So how many more years will this last? Judging from my own attempt at mitigating, quite a few.

Oh, RxJS surely is quite reactive. The same day I reported 3 bugs in the documentation, RxJS core team member OJ Kwon had already reacted to the reports. Unfortunately, more than a year later, to my knowledge, all of these issues persist. The one excuse provided? RxJS is free.

Well, unfortunately for RxJS and its "millions" of users, my time is not free. My employer certainly can't afford to waste any more resources in that way, so this will remain my last contribution to RxJS.

I honestly don't know if there is a superior alternative to RxJS. But if you are evaluating it, don't rely on its issue tracker to evaluate its status. Believe it or not, as if GitHub's Issues feature was not bad enough already, RxJS now has a Report issues other than bug[sic] discussion category... good luck filtering the outdated from that.

And if you have courage extensive enough to adopt and fix it, be aware you will first have to tame a surprisingly reactive—and in some aspects quite unreactive—community.

The height of the COVID-19 pandemic was an interesting social experiment, for a middle-aged adult like myself who has never lived through a major war. Watching even high quality mass media like CBC's televised news made me realize what propaganda really means. In times of crisis, with extreme polarization and a sense of "war against the virus", the same journalists which usually provide quite critical information, perhaps by fear of being labelled as anti-war, reached the point of providing exaggerated news which could almost be qualified as misinformation.

The pandemic and sanitary measures themselves caused important mental distress and increased misinformation. But could the excesses of mass media not have had a toll on their own? This evening's Tout le monde en parle featured an interesting interview with David Morin and Marie-Ève Carignan which answered that question. Propaganda from mass media pushed away many, which ended up into the arms of conspiracism. Repairing the damage will be a long and painful process.

Most importantly, as co-author David Morin mentions in the same interview, we are already forecasting major crises (some have already started). If even state media doesn't get enough resources, independence and nuance to remain reliable in times of even moderate crises, the future of information—and the societies who now depend on it—will be bleak.

A couple decades ago, free software was the target of much FUD, notably regarding its security. But free software evangelists could easily reply to Microsoft and other vendors that Mozilla's browser had much less flaws than Internet Explorer.

In fact, the reality was that many more flaws were being discovered in MSIE than in Firefox. Mostly because people had much less interest in finding flaws in Firefox than in MSIE. Firefox's rise would prove in just a few years that Mozilla was far from immune to security flaws.

The continued flood of free software has meant free software vulnerabilities now have an impact similar to those in proprietary software. Catastrophic flaws from the last decade in OpenSSL and Log4j have started to show some of the FUD was quite accurate.

KNP has been decrying software mediocrity for years, but things don't change overnight. I was involved in projects for which quality, including security, is - at best - an afterthought. Even (internally) known security flaws can remain for years, while fresh ones are being added.

There are lots of free software components which vary a lot in quality and in so many aspects, but most have something in common: either their quality is mediocre, or they don't exist. And while many users may be willing to put up with mediocre quality in many ways, organizations may have difficulty ignoring bad security track records.

Research suggesting some 40% of professionals have already scaled back their use of OSS may be worrying, but the timing matters, and the importance of that decline was not measured.
Better late than never. It's still time to react, and OpenSSF's promises are good reason for hope, but many open source projects need to perform a fundamental reprioritization.

When you hear about Ukraine's invasion, you can't help but wonder why some Russian soldiers won't quit and denounce. Pavel Filatyev may be the first one to quit completely, and have the courage and fortune to denounce successfully. And by doing so, he helps understand why so few will manage to do the same.

Pavel Filatyev had the fortune to get sick during the invasion and to be evacuated. He then managed to contact dissident organizations for help fleeing, and only succeeded to reach France after going through Tunisia. Western countries demonize suicide, but everything is relative. Filatyev's account makes me admire those of his comrades who—perhaps unable to leave the battleground—had the courage to shoot themselves instead.

Man can choose to become a monster, and Man can be raised as a monster. But even those made into monsters can turn into heroes. For following that path, Pavel Filatyev is my Hero of the month.

Filatyev's life may not resist the long-reaching arms of Russia's powerful secret services. But the reconciliation facilitated by his memoir Zov, and the inspiration of his bravery will always remain.

There are several ways to commute. By foot, by subway, by car, by bicycle, by bus, or by a mix of these. By tramway or boat, by skateboard, by motorcycle or scooter too.

As a resident of Quebec City who usually commutes by bicycle, I am often qualified as courageous for sticking to bicycle even in our cold and icy winters. And I got to admit that in a sense, winter cycling here does unfortunately require important determination.

Commuting by bicycle during winter used to be rare here back when I started, 20 years ago. Still, I don't feel so original if I compare myself with Brent Hobbs. Swimming wouldn't accelerate my current commute, but even if it did, I highly doubt I would be courageous enough for that.

Congratulations M. Hobbs!