We had targeted policies under Biden to increase US production of grid components. This entailed invoking the DPA and setting aside millions for manufacturing improvements. Trump paused all that and created blanket tariffs that don’t seem like they’re designed to onshore US manufacturing of these very specific components but do increase all the material costs. This is not an easy thing to fix with dumb tariffs, and it’s really easy to make everything worse.
The Biden administration invoked the Defense Production Act and used $250m of IRA funds to increase production of grid transformers. Guess what happened when Trump took office.
If we require every whistleblower to be a saint, then we’ll never hear a whistle. If you have a serious criticism of their credibility, that’s potentially different, but arbitrary criticisms of someone’s moral worth is mostly irrelevant.
Borking up the indices has been inevitable since index investing rose. Think of index investors like a bunch of entirely undefended prey surrounded by predators. If we had a working SEC somebody might do something, but we don't.
My understanding is that China is planning to build a coal-backed renewable grid. Renewables, including storage, will provide the majority of the electricity generation, and then coal will step in when renewables aren't available. This involves building modern coal plants that can be spun up and down as needed, and then paying them not to generate. This is why actual emissions have plateaued and dropped, even as new coal capacity comes online.
We are (or were) doing something similar in the US, just using natural gas as the fuel rather than coal.
DoorDash not being able to continue operating doesn’t bother me one bit. They aren’t curing cancer, and a society with fewer food delivery options based on extorting poor people to turn their vehicle’s equity into less cash than it’s worth will still be a fine society. But I would be perfectly fine if they continued to exist and simply provided some basic guarantees like subsidized healthcare for their employees.
DoorDash lobbies heavily against laws that would regulate labor, or classify its workers as “employees” and thus require they be covered by the minimal protections our country offers.
I only checked the abstracts, and they seem consistent. Good LLMs (Claude Opus, ChatGPT Pro) still get things wrong regularly, but lately I've noticed these are mainly the deep details, not easy things like "there is a result that claims X."
I don't want to take anything away from Bennett and Brassard, but I'd like someone to spare a word for poor Stephen Wiesner, who invented the earliest quantum information-distribution protocols as far back as the 1960s and published them before Bennett and Brassard. He also invented Oblivious Transfer (OT) which is required for multi-party computation -- although his was a quantum protocol that demonstrated some of the ideas behind QKD, not the classical protocol we call OT today [1].* Weisner was an inspiration for Bennett and Brassard, who then realized more useful systems.
While obviously this takes nothing away from BB's many later contributions (and they have extensively credited him), it's just a reminder of the randomness that goes with scientific credit. Since my PhD thesis was on OT, I like to remind people of Wiesner. He deserves a lot more credit than he gets!
* I suppose if you're a real theoretician, since OT implies MPC and MPC implies all cryptography, then perhaps Wiesner's OT implies everything that BB did subsequently. I'm not sure any of that is true (and I've since checked with an LLM and there are some no-go theorems from the 1990s that block it, so that's super interesting.)
If you're designing a car, then the CEO/Founder might want the ability to add falcon wings to it at any point, and that's pretty reasonable. If you're designing a trustworthy encyclopedia, knowing that the CEO/Founder might wish to alter arbitrary facts to his whim is really not very reasonable. Is it his company? Sure. Do you want to make low-quality information artifacts? That's a judgement call.
So much of the last four years was watching fools and dishonest people pretend that the government was coming to take away your free speech and you'd better elect [people who routinely lied about everything and clearly had no principles] to protect you.
These are not subtle effects. You either have an energy weapon that does visible damage to people and things, or it doesn't. Yes, incompetence is possible. You should not jump to "I mistake a candle for a burning skyscraper" levels of incompetence as your main model for a project that lasts a year and is extremely high-priority.
According to those reports, the US military tested it for more than a year on animals, and found that they suffered similar patterns of brain damage. They didn't just get a device and say "wow, this looks like a bunch of very suspicious electronics, too bad we can't turn it on!"
Naturally the testing claims from insiders could be specious. But once you go down the road of distrusting stories told by spooks, so could the purchase of a weapon in the first place. The CIA might not even be a real thing.
The purpose of scientific publication used to be to deliver useful scientific results to one's peers. This meant that everyone ran their own personal filter of which peers were working on interesting things, and which collections (journals) were reproducing the most interesting ones. This system still works relatively well for most conscientious researchers. The idea that we should also use publication metrics to rank researchers was never part of this system, and it obviously leads to all sorts of spam (that most scientists just work around) but that seems to really upset non-scientists.
This is naive. For larger firms, targeted product and industry-specific tariffs can be a game-changer. For example, Trump created a set of exemptions related to smartphones built in China that weren't officially aimed at Apple, but since Apple sells approximately 50% of US smartphones (for a much larger slice of profit) and 80% are made in China, this disproportionately affected a single company. But there are other areas where the administration can also use Federal power: see, for example, Trump's use of Federal approval to block the Netflix/WB merger as one example.
If two companies come to you with an offer to sell the refunds, and one has strong ties to a central figure in the administration — which can, in the future, subject or exempt you from new tariffs and otherwise use the Federal government’s powers to mess with you - are you truly free to choose either offer? Or is there a risk and a benefit to taking the one that’s tied to the administration? (And frankly, can you even be certain either way?) This kind of conflict (even the appearance of this kind of conflict) is why we generally don’t want government officials or their families to be profiting directly off the policies they oversee. It is at best unseemly, and that’s being kind.
The problem with these "yes/no" systems is that they also involve the websites you visit calling up a centralized party and asking if you're old enough. This is fine if the websites aren't interested (or if you really trust your government with your web browsing history), but gets unfortunate if you don't want to share that information.
Getting rid of the filibuster is a good thing in general. The GOP-led states have already moved into mid-cycle gerrymanders and routine gerrymandering of the state legislatures to eliminate fair elections there: I'm sure eventually someone will have the idea of adding new GOP states. Adding two actual territories/districts that are full of actual unrepresented Americans happens to be a good idea on the merits, since those people are being screwed by the Federal government.
As a child, there was nothing worse than getting out of school at 3pm and then having the sun set at 4:21pm. I barely got home before it got dark, forget about playing outside. Morning time was useless, since school prep ate that up.
I don’t think either of these things requires more than a vote of Congress and the President’s signature. DC might, because of its unique Constitutional status and the current partisan Court, but there’s no argument for PR. You would have to abolish the filibuster, but Congress can do that once per session by majority vote — it’s just a legislative rule and not a Constitutional mechanism.
We could add new states. For example, Washington DC has 702,000 people with zero Congressional representation, and they're currently occupied by Federal troops without any voting recourse. If they were made a state, they'd be bigger than Wyoming and Vermont. Puerto Rico is also a US territory with 3.2 million people and zero Congressional representation. As a state it would be larger than 20 existing states. This doesn't "fix" the problem but it does ensure that more U.S. citizens gain access to representation in Congress, while also shifting power to more densely-populated areas.
Solar is just one technology. Decarbonizing successfully requires still further huge investments in batteries, modular nuclear reactors, CO2 removal, zero-carbon steel production, aviation e-fuels, non-fossil plastics, etc. But yes, hopefully we've unlocked enough economic advantage with just that one technology to get us 90% of the way there just on the basis of economics. (If the current administration doesn't find some way to sabotage it.)
It was a socially-driven movement, but economics made it feasible for social concerns to win. The lesson is that you need both, and this is especially true when time is short.