Join us as we gather around the hedge,
where we dig into technology,
business, and culture with the finest minds in
computer networking.
Well, hello, Tom.
Hello, Russ.
You need to turn the plant. I can
tell from the leaves.
It looks remarkably healthy today. I think. It
does.
But one side is definitely low. I can
see the plant leaning into the sunlight.
Yes. Yes.
It's a symbol. It's a symbol of life.
But you need to turn to the other
side so it doesn't get too sunburned on
one side. Right. I hear sunburns really bad
for you, so, you know.
Especially for plants.
So Yvonne's over here rolling her eyes at
us.
Hey. So I have picked my middle aged
lady hobby,
and it is plants.
So
we we're we're planning a wedding in my
family that's gonna happen in a couple weeks.
And after that's done,
you're going to start seeing a lot of
the plants I've been propagating
and tending to in the house make their
way
out here onto the bookshelf behind me. So
we'll we'll watch watch Twitter.
You'll you'll start to see some
some different varieties of pothos and maybe
an arrowhead plant and
a pink lady maybe. Yeah.
Becoming that person. So
So when my wife walks through the plant
section at Home Depot or Lowe's,
the plants kind
of
sway away from her.
Even got a few orchids I'm working on,
so that's a Oh, we that's a yeah.
We'll see how it turns out. Yeah. We
have an orchid and she does really well
with that, but, you know, I don't know
why. We always just joke about her and
the plants.
Yeah. I'm becoming a houseplant person, but, you
know, everybody's gotta do something. Better than becoming
a houseplant.
I don't know. They've got it pretty good.
They sit around, they get light, they get
water.
They get all sorts of food. Yeah. You
know, it's fine.
So today, we're talking about Jevon's paradox in
relation to
an article that
Jeff Houston wrote.
So I think we're gonna start with Yvonne
explaining Jevon's paradox to us because
I think she understands
how to explain it better than than
than I do.
Well, what I what I
what I love about Jevons paradox is it's
this idea. First of
all, William Stanley Jevons was a nineteenth century
economist,
and and he was paying attention as coal
mines were expanding,
as we were getting steam engines, and those
there were make these major economic upheavals going
on.
And there was this huge increase in efficiency
happening.
And anytime we see increase in efficiency, people
get nervous, they get scared, they get concerned.
Oh,
you know, well, if if we get more
efficient at producing
x, does that mean that there will be
less of it?
And and what his paradox says is that
often when you improve the efficiency of a
resource,
that it actually increases
that resources'
consumption.
And so what you end up with, even
though you've
made production of that thing more efficient, people
consume more of it because it's
less expensive,
it's more accessible, and so folks use more
of it. I think this is,
especially
and and Jeff's article is,
really about communications and connectivity and those sorts
of things.
But also as we think about what does
this mean in an AI world where
it's easier to create code, for example.
It's easier
to to to create,
I think code is probably the best example.
I don't wanna go into, like, the creative
arena because that's a completely different problem.
Yeah.
Not that code isn't creative. Man, I'm stumbling
today. Anyway,
you know, that ultimately, it's entirely possible that
we could end up in a world not
where we need
less
programmers, less coders, where there's less code, but
there's actually more of it because we've increased
the efficiency for creating that thing. So I
think it's it's a it's a interesting concept
to think about and to keep in the
back of our mind when there's like, oh,
this thing's getting more efficient so the industry's
gonna die.
Right? And I think Jevons paradox gives us
a mental construct to to think about that
and why that might not be the case.
Yeah. So so Jeff says,
improvements in efficiency of resource utilization
acts as a positive incentive
to increase resource consumption.
Efficiency lowers cost, which lowers prices, which increases
demand. And sometimes this increase in demand is
disproportionately large
with the result that overall consumption actually grows.
So the
the questions that that we would need to
ask to know, like, is this gonna happen
here, are
will the decrease
in cost of say writing code
actually increase
the amount of code that's consumed?
And I think that's the question is from
a market perspective,
is the market flexible? What is that called?
It reacts to price price variance? Elasticity?
Yeah. Put price elasticity.
And that's, I guess, the question that
we need to ask before we decide or
we can understand of Chavon's paradox. Because, like,
processors,
he use it Jeff uses
the number of gates
and Moore's law as an example.
But you know, way back way back in
the early days, everybody said,
I gee, I can remember this. When I
was working
on the, AS 400 and the, the the,
Harris mainframe, Burroughs mainframe
at Maguire Air Force Base was like, nobody
ever needs a computer.
Like, who the heck really needs it? Like,
that's crazy
that you would want a computer in your
house. What would you ever use this for?
But yet, when processors became cheap, everyone suddenly
found
a good reason to use processing power.
And so I think there's, I think there's,
maybe a network protocol example as well.
If you think about how things have changed
in network design,
best practices from now,
let's just talk about number of routers in
an OSPF area. Right? This used to be
a thing that, like, you've got an itty
bitty processor on your router, and so you
should only have whatever the number was, a
thousand or 50 or whatever. 40. I remember.
40 was on Cisco online for many years.
40. Right. Right. 40. And it persisted way
beyond its useful life. That particular number. Right.
And but but but the idea then was,
well, we there's a huge cost of putting
a router in here that's more than just
the cost of the box. Right? We gotta
think about all the impact on all the
other processors.
But then as processors become cheap, it's like,
well, it doesn't matter anymore.
From that perspective, from the protocol efficiency and
convergence, like, who cares? We've got we have
plenty of processor.
And so now you could you could you
could make the argument that more routers
may make your design better, not worse. Yeah.
So this is one,
one place where I see it. Yeah. I
was thinking, you know,
we can actually relate this back
to
the OPEX versus CAPEX question.
And used to be,
CAPEX was really expensive. Like you said, Tom,
it was expensive to buy a router. Now,
routers are so cheap. I can if I
can buy five routers and have my OPEX,
I'm doing it.
Immediately, I'm jumping there. Right?
And Yvonne, back to your point about coding,
does it come to the point where we
say,
you know what?
The optics of maintaining my own custom application
is so much cheaper
than dealing with an outside contract and having
features that I don't really care about, or
not having
an application that's attuned to my environment and
the way I do business.
So I'm just gonna write my own
because it just doesn't cost that much.
Well and and and the difference
is the barrier of entry is so much
lower, right, because of the increased availability and
efficiency.
When when I was explaining
Jayvon,
like, ultimately, like, he was he was studying
efficiency
in
coal fired systems.
Right? And so there was this deep concern
when we made
electricity
generation
more efficient with coal that it would decrease
the demand for coal.
What he ultimately found though was the efficiency
actually increased the demand
because it enabled us to make so much
more.
And then there were,
in our terminology,
new use cases.
Right? Yeah. I mean, so now that electricity
is cheaper, well,
we're we're not just using it in industrial,
situations. We're using it for small kitchen appliances.
We're using it to light our homes. We're
using it in so many different ways. And,
of course, this is the turn of
the twentieth century,
you know, the the, nineteenth to twentieth century
when all this was going on. We see
the same things now, and cell phones is
a great example. Right? I mean, now, you
know, the five year olds wanna be walking
around with a computer in their pocket. We
could debate whether or not that's wise. Yeah.
Exactly. But but they have that opportunity.
Right? Yeah. Which we couldn't have imagined
forty, fifty years ago. And
and he makes a point Jeff makes a
point here that this Javon seems to work
in best in demand
pull markets, which are price elastic.
Whereas,
he seems to say that in the centralized
digital space,
we have what he considers to be supply
push dynamics.
Now
I think he's probably right in some realms
of network engineering
and of digital
stuff, but he's probably not right in others.
Code is a prime example, I think, demand
pull
might actually
be a better model
than supply push.
And there's always a question of network connectivity.
If we ever get to the point where
we say network connectivity is,
is truly a commodity,
that there's absolutely no difference
or very, very minimal difference between multiple Internet
connectivity schemes,
then
you can see where it could become a
demand pull market
very quickly.
Well, in the, and and I and connectivity
directly affects how consumable,
things that write code for you are. Right?
Mhmm. We can't we can't use chat GPT
or whatever if we don't have, connectivity. And
so,
there's a dependency there that probably I don't
know if there was a if there was
a corresponding element in Davon's day. Maybe I
don't know. Maybe the railways or something between
between, you know, coal mines and and the
places that made steam and electricity. But
there's a there's an interrelatedness.
Yeah. Well, I mean,
go ahead. Go ahead. Well, I was just
gonna say, I think it's easy for us
to look at
innovations
or changes in the market and feel like
we can predict what's coming.
Or, oh, this is going to mean,
you
know, all these people are gonna be out
of jobs or all these changes are going
to happen or this industry is doomed.
And
I think this is why economics is hard,
right?
It's just a multi variable problem.
And,
it's
very unpredictable and there are so many variables
and human behavior is one of them, right?
So,
yeah.
Which which makes me wanna sit back and
and look at what's happening with more curiosity
as opposed to
to fear.
And I and I think it's important to
just keep an eye out and go, oh,
wait. What is there more demand for that
there wasn't? Certainly power,
certainly,
shifts toward focus on
physical infrastructure and the importance of that where
we that wasn't the case, you know, a
few years ago. So, it's interesting times. Yeah.
So I would there's a couple of real
world examples here that might help people other
than just like network chip sets. Okay. So
it turns out it's cheaper to build network
devices like routers and switches and etcetera
than it was twenty or thirty years ago,
so or even five years ago. So we
we we run more of them. We don't
care as much
about designing a network with twice as many
routers or whatever it is.
As Tom said, there was a time, the
first time I saw a thousand router network,
I was like,
what?
That's crazy.
Now I work on thousand router networks and
I'm like,
whatever, who cares?
Like, that's a transition point between multiple topology
types at this point in time. That's like
crazy.
But another place where this runs into in
consumer side is things like video.
So
largely, I always say
that social media that not social media, but
video, like television,
streaming video,
is largely an entertainment based market. This is
not me, by the way. This is,
what's his name? The,
who wrote about this, about
about media having
a particular resonance.
Post Neil Postman talks about how
television's resonance is entertainment.
And entertainment is very attention driven.
And at some point, you run out of
hours of the day that you can pay
attention.
This is why somebody like the CEO of
Netflix says, our competitor is sleep.
It's not the other it's not the other
streaming services. It's sleep
because people can't pay attention.
So at some point, these demand pull markets
meet a physical reality, a feast physical point
where they say no more,
and you start seeing people push more radical
stuff to get your attention because it's an
attention driven market.
Now the same is true of social media.
From a human behavior perspective,
I always say the resonance of social media
is
performance.
And so people don't go to enter to
entertain, they go to perform
because they want attention from the performance.
And so the performances are entertaining sometimes,
but people will perform in more and more
radical ways because, again,
the attention
is a limited resource.
And that's just the way things work.
So another place where I think this is
really interesting is security.
That may sound really strange,
but
do credit card companies really care
if
you have a $5
charge on your credit card
that was
fraudulent?
How much time will they spend chasing down
a $5 fraudulent car charge on your credit
card?
Zero minutes and zero seconds,
they just refund you the money
and say it ain't worth the time.
And this, I think, comes down to
they are so awash in a resource
money, and credit,
that for them,
like, there's no
there's no there's no there's no trade off
in the GED. But the cost to track
it down is greater than the cost to
eat it. Yeah.
Right? And
and so they're they're making a a calculation
there. Yeah. Exactly.
And also,
they're, you know, constantly building and improving their
systems to try
and provide systems level solutions to that as
opposed to
and and and that's actually a good example
in this conversation
because the, you know,
the proliferation of of credit cards, of digital
currencies, of all those things,
of easy to purchase
and interact
and do business online has
radically increased our need for
credit, those services, which has increased the fraud,
which has increased the need for those prevention
systems.
And,
you know, and we've made purchasing easier,
which means people purchase more,
which, you know, creates this whole cycle that
we're talking about. Yeah. Yeah.
So
another another thing where security
and these types of trade offs and demand
pull
seem to show up to me as like
Ubuntu just disabled their spectrum, their specter protections.
So I don't know if you know what
spectrum remember specter, but like, yeah, I'm sure
Tom does
because you probably dealt with it, unfortunately,
where
one process can change
the registers in a or read the registers
from another process
across the CPU,
and it becomes a security thing. Like,
well, there's a trade off
there. Like,
you're reducing performance.
How much can you withstand reducing performance
in order to give yourself this particular
piece of security.
And I think this is where you come
into push and pull demand, supply push and
pull demand, is that
it would seem like there's always a pull
demand market for security. If you can make
security better, people will buy it. It. And
I think we're at the point where that's
just not true anymore.
And I think I think the paradox is
going to
stop working in the security perspective because people
are always gonna produce better security stuff, but
people are like,
buyers are
like, okay, I'm kinda done with this. I'd
just rather pay the $5.
You know, that's that's kind of where and
so
Jeff's one of Jeff's points here is that
this causes centralization,
That when we're not in j in Javon's
paradox,
when we're in a push supply push dynamic
economy,
this is one of the drivers of centralization
and ossification.
Any thoughts on that before we
wow.
Well, the
so
I think a chief aim of,
centralization is efficiency. Right? Mhmm. Yep. This is
this is why we go we go there
because efficiency drives down cost.
And,
so so yeah. I mean, that seems to
that seems to fit.
But
but the but the idea of Geovance paradox
is that efficiency drives more consumption,
which would it would see unless unless the
centralized
entity can scale infinitely,
it would seem that more,
say, email, people need people want more email.
Right? Gmail is like the world's
mailbox. Right?
So does that mean that we add a
million more users to Gmail or does that
mean that,
somebody
the Gmail competitor pops up?
Jayvon's Peritects would seem to seem to indicate
that the competitor would pop up, if I'm
understanding it correctly.
Well, not not necessarily there's a competitor,
but that, again, as you just said, as
long as the
incumbent can scale
Right. Right. They they they contain they grab
more of the business.
So more consumption leads to more scale and
which leads to more centralization.
Right. Exactly.
And so one of the points I think
Jeff is making in this article is
there's no real solution for this problem of
increasing scale,
which also increases centralization
as long as things like Moore's law
are true.
When we get Because in the absence of
Moore's law, we lose efficiency. Right? Right. Is
that is that what you're saying? Exactly.
And so you You can't keep up with
the growth. Right? That's that's the thing. The
efficiency drives the growth. And if Moore's law
continues, then we can then we can scale
with the growth. But
if for some reason we stop
if if something breaks the efficiency cycle,
then it changes
the equation. Right? Exactly. Efficiency makes things cheaper,
which makes us
less thoughtful or less careful in the deployment
of that thing, and and it creates a
cycle. If something happens
and breaks that cycle and makes the thing
more expensive,
less efficient,
then
all bets are off, right? And it changes
the dynamic.
Right. For instance, with the railroad people,
with the railroads in early America,
it was government action that went in and
said, stop.
You can't have these monopolies.
And so therefore that basically broke Dravon's paradox.
And in many ways led to the numb
the amount of roads that we have in
The United States,
and private transportation over the road
freight hauling rather than
building yet more railroads.
So
would that happen
in the cloud market? Would that happen into
the provider market? Would that happen in the
computer production market?
I don't see the government doing anything with
it, but it is possible to see
Moore's law
or some optical thing showing up and saying,
physically, you just can't go anymore.
You're done.
You're you're not gonna have any more increases
in efficiency.
And that could disrupt the entire market.
Now,
it could ossify the market
into being
the people who
were the winners are the winners permanently,
or it could break the market apart. And
there's really no way of knowing
at this point. For for me, the the
other
potential there is, yes, we hit some sort
of physical boundary where the ways we've been
getting efficiency gains no longer work.
Ultimately,
there will be some innovation
either there or in another area,
which
shifts
the point of efficiency
and then restarts the whole cycle again. Right.
But
it may be tangential to the original thing,
right? That's right.
That's the key is we don't know where
that's gonna happen. So for instance,
when the railroads,
you know, started getting broken up by the
government in The United States,
it was taken over that job was taken
over largely by over the road transport's
large trucks.
Nobody would have anticipated ten years before that
that you could build a truck that could
pull 40 tons.
You know? That's, like,
crazy.
Well, and kind of going back to something
Yvonne said earlier,
what what were the people laying railroads
thinking
when
all this was happening?
Say they had the
the the gift of prophecy and they could
see ten years in the future. No. This
is all gonna be on trucks, on asphalt
roads, not on railroads.
Like what? What were those people thinking? Were
they panicking? Were they saying, oh, someone predicted
that these road thing is going to make
me,
is going to make me not useful and
unemployable.
I I, you know, I wonder about that.
But then also, if you know how to
work steel, surely you can you can work
steel in another context. Right? Mhmm. And you
can and you can bring expertise and,
it's not over.
Yeah. Well, there there is there is a
dual danger too, like stagflation. Right?
Where it's it's almost the worst of both
worlds. If we look at what's happened in
taxi business and car services. Right?
Used to be, and I say this and
people think I'm crazy, they think I'm insane.
When I was in the air force, now
this of course is, you know, I'm an
old man, so this is many years ago.
Back when the earth was cooling. Yes, it
is.
When I was in the air force,
I knew a guy whose father
owned a house in Philadelphia,
had four kids,
they ate well, they went out to dinner
two or three times a week,
they went fishing, they went on vacations.
They had a fairly good life,
and he was a taxi driver.
That's what he did for a living.
You could, as a taxi cab as a
cabby in New York City, in Philadelphia, he
switched back and forth between the two cities
because he had licenses in both places and
he could do both,
he could make basically a middle class living
taxi driving.
You can't do that today.
Yet,
the demand for taxi like services is through
the roof
because it's because of all the rideshares,
basically, all the ridesharing services.
I mean,
I live in this little bitty town,
but I don't know. It's not it's not
timing. I live in Knoxville, but not really
in Knoxville. I live in a a suburb
of Knoxville.
And, yeah, I do live next to the
airport, but the amount of Uber Uber and
Lyft traffic, Uber traffic, that we get on
our road
is
it's a lot more than you would expect.
I mean, seriously,
we have one little mall, and it doesn't
even have a food court.
Come on, people. This is a little town.
You know? Like, Knoxville Airport has 12 gates,
and yet everybody takes Uber and Lyft to
the airport.
Like, it's it's so cheap to reuse those,
but yet somehow
you can't really make a living doing Uber
or Lyft any longer.
So there is this this part of Jevon's
paradox that always worries me
that demand for coders is gonna go way
up, but they're gonna be Vibe coders.
They're not gonna be real coders, right? Not
what I not may I say that and
people are gonna get mad at me for
saying Vibe coding is not real coding. But
you know what I mean, like, down in
the dirt technical understanding
the code
rather than
throw the problem at an AI and see
what comes out.
And that's
there's like this stagflation situation that could happen
too.
I don't
it could be centralizing,
decentralizing,
this intermediate
bad, what I consider to be, like, this
horrible state.
I don't know.
What's what's your crystal ball? Grow my plants
and
celebrate when they sprout new leaves, and that's
that's my plan.
Are you gonna attach an AI water to
your plants?
So
I did
use
a use Gemini.
I use AI Studio
to build an app to help me track
and manage my plants.
Five codes of
Yes. Yes. So it's it's,
it's still very rudimentary.
It's still very elementary.
And, like I said, I'm wedding planning, so
I haven't had a ton of time to
dig into it yet. But it's interesting, and
it gives me an opportunity to play around
with the technology. So I'll I'll keep you
posted on how my,
tracking my plant
app
created via VibeCoding goes. But, I mean, that's
an example. Right? Whereas
I historically, I would have gone and looked
and been like, okay. Is there some sort
of app out there that can help me
track and, you know,
take keep track pictures and keep the date
when I repot it and help me, you
know, like, keep track of when I water
or when I fertilize or any of those
things? Right now,
I'm actually thinking,
hey.
Could I could I use a tool to
build this thing myself and have it do
exactly what I want?
And and I think we're gonna see more
of that. So, anyway, yes. I'm bob coating
of and I have to track my plants.
I actually think that's a good point because
that's one of the things that will happen
at least is that we will see,
I believe, Ethernet has ruled the roost
for however many years.
I'm not sure how much longer that's gonna
last and how much more we're gonna get
back to the origin days of network engineering,
where we had token bus and token ring,
and
God forbid, some of the other technologies that
we used, Arkanet,
please, please, yeah, please, please not Arkanet,
but, yeah. Bring back IPX. Yeah, bring back
IPX.
When I was a Cisco tech in the
IP in the IP back line TOT for
IP,
we used to get IPX calls. We were
like,
why is the front end why are the
front end people sending us IPX?
Well, IPX just stands for IP extended. Right?
So it's a new IP technology.
So therefore, the routing protocols, IP team should
get it. We were like This is this
is why you have a bless your heart
song on your head, so you can just
look at and point to in those moments.
My gosh. It's just stuff already.
I mean, yeah.
Which sadly enough, I know IPX and Vines,
VIP.
Probably still well enough to answer questions about
them.
That kinda stinks. But anyway
yeah. So yeah. And and Jeff points out
that physics, like I said before, the the
Moore's law and stuff, has this thing about,
okay, the feature size elements of a silicon
wafer get down to around one nanometer,
further reductions
in a planar process can't be achieved.
You you you have electronic tunnel you have
electron tunneling. You have all this other stuff.
Quantum effects take over at one nanometer or
start to become a problem. They're always there.
They're present much higher than that. Have you
ever heard of capacitive reactants or inductive reactants?
Those are,
in effect,
not really quantum, but they're very similar to
what we're seeing in the quantum world right
now with smaller and smaller processor,
scales. But anyway,
that
the question is what happens when we hit
the wall?
Do we
end up in a
an Uber situation
where nobody can make a living doing it,
but there's lots of demands, so there's lots
of people doing it part time?
Is it
musical chairs, as Jeff says, where,
oh, the winners won and that's the end
of the game?
Or
does it actually tangentially
split off, like Yvonne's talking about, and we
suddenly have an innovation someplace else
that causes people to go do something different.
I I don't know.
My crystal ball broke many years ago, so
I don't I don't know the answer to
this.
Yeah. I think well, and, I'm I am
less confident than I than probably have ever
been, but more just self aware
also of of my lack of ability to
predict what's gonna happen. So Yeah. Yeah. It's
it's But, I I mean, I think there
are gonna be opportunities for people that that
wanna take them
and that are paying attention.
But, you know, I think the world is
gonna look different in the next twenty years
than it looked twenty years ago. And,
and and that
rate of change, I think, is gonna increase
for a bit.
And then I think it'll stall again.
Yeah. I kinda hope we get a break
from the rate of change, honestly. Just personally,
I'm just tired sometimes. Oh, I would love
it, but I don't know that it's gonna
happen.
I
don't know that I could vote.
Thanks for bursting my sixty year old bubble
there.
Oh my god. That's what I'm here for.
I'm the bubble buster
for children, and so I bust bubbles all
day every day. Yeah. Thanks.
Alright. It's good stuff. Yep. Great stuff. Alright.
Do you have anything else to add, Tom,
before we log off?
No. I think we're good. Alright. And you,
Yvonne, anything else?
All good. Okay. Yvonne, if people wanna reach
you or follow you, I know you have
your own podcast now.
Yeah. Let us know about how to find
you.
Yeah. I'm on x at Sharp Network,
formerly known as Twitter. I still can't quite
let the name go.
You can find me on LinkedIn at Yvonne
Sharp, and the Cloud Gambit is joining the
Packet Pushers Network. So that will will launch
at the July, and so you can see
the Cloud Gambit over,
and find it over the Packet Pushers.
Alright. Cool. Tom, just say it. One word.
Yeah. I was gonna say the one the
one word answer.
There it is. The one word answer. Alright.
Cool. And I'm Russ White. You can always
find me here at the head. You can
find me on rule11.tech.
Find me on LinkedIn,
and I actually log in to x every
now and again mostly to say, oh, by
the way, I'm teaching a class today, and
I totally forgot to tell anybody about it.
You need a social media manager, Russ. I
actually do. Yes.
But I could just write an AI to
do that, couldn't
I? You could. You could vibe code you
an AI to be your social media manager.
Okay. There's your next project. I would love
to see the social media hallucinations
of Rust.
I don't know. My project right now is
is probably some Python or bash scripting around
DNS. I guess some stuff I gotta work
on. So that's probably and it's not gonna
be vibe coding. I don't think I think
it'll be actually
in the dirt trying to figure out how
to make this thing work that I wanna
get done
for work. Anyway, alright. So you can find
me all those places we know we live
in an attention driven economy. Like I said
here, attention is
what is very hard to
get nowadays. It's like the fixed resource that
everybody's trying to buy or get a hold
of.
So we appreciate you spending the time listening
to this episode of the hedge, and we
will catch you next time.