I guess you could go semi off-grid... i.e. turn the master breaker off at the meter most of the time. My installer says that if you haven't used any power from the grid in 30 days, the power company will contact you to find out what's up, and if you haven't used any in 60 days they will definitely contact you. Of course, you'll still have to pay the basic connection fees even if you avoid actually using a non-trivial amount of their power.

My power company already reduced the credit from $0.09/kWh to $0.04/kWh, and changed so they net out the credits and debits each billing period, where before they'd allow credits to carry over for up to 12 months. My ROI estimate is based on the current deal, which of course could change. Probably will, somewhat. I do expect the price to go up over time. Right now I'm paying $0.07/kWh off-peak -- and of course with the battery I should never pay on-peak prices.

I just installed solar + battery on my house (full commission is this afternoon, meaning I'll be able to net meter against the grid). As things stand now, the ROI is there, but the payback period is a bit long (~10 years), but that's only because my electricity is pretty cheap ($0.12/kWh is the average price here; I'm on a TOU plan where I pay $0.28 on-peak (6-10pm weekdays) and $0.06/kWh off-peak). Given the grid challenges I think it's reasonable to expect prices to go up and knock a couple of years off that ROI.

Of course, having the government pay for 30% of the system definitely helped, and that's not available after December 31. Unless/until it gets reinstated by a future administration.

Kind of, yes, and clearly we should stop, but this isn't the same thing. We're supporting an ally that has gone off the reservation, not doing the bad thing ourselves, and that distinction does matter.

Indeed. The US actions toward Venezuela are worse than China's against Taiwan.

That's true, and bad, but also completely different. China has much more intrusive spying of its own citizens plus actively and deliberately suppresses any kind of dissenting press (meaning shuts them down and throws them in jail or disappears them, not just ceases inviting them to press conferences) and openly and energetically works to block citizen access to any source of information not under the party's control.

Your post was largely a list of false equivalencies between pairs of vaguely-similar things, but this one has to take the cake.

I'm not prepared to agree that credit scores are actually a bad thing, but even if I were, those scores just rate how good people are at managing money (and whether they manage their money the way the banks like), not anything like a Chinese social score.

Indeed.

All true, and I don't think any of this is particularly "bad". Trading partners leverage their advantages, that's how it works. We let ourselves get into a bad situation on rare earths. That's hardly China's fault.

No, it's really not the "same shit". You're pointing out a bunch of bad things that we're doing, things that are objectively not equivalent to the worse things China is doing, and calling them equivalent. If you're willing to play that game, every country is terrible, because all of them are imperfect. The degree of badness matters, and the system's interest in and options for correcting the badness also matter.

Well, there's some reason to hope that American voters may realize that what our government is doing is not what we want, and vote to change it. That option doesn't really exist in China. OTOH, there's no guarantee that American voters will wise up, so...

His claim that we're as far away as ever implies that he has some ability to discern how far from AGI we are. My point is that he does not, no one does.

There's another objection that I did not raise, but it's worth mentioning: His contention that we have made no progress implies that the observable progress we've made over the last decades, and especially the last five years, is actually not progress at all. That implies that it must actually be motion in a different direction, orthogonal to the direction required to achieve AGI, because clearly he cannot be claiming that there has been no movement. If that's the claim, well, he's just delusional.

It is, of course, possible that all of our progress has been in the wrong direction entirely and that therefore we've made no progress. I think that's unlikely, because it certainly looks like we're moving in the right direction, but we can't fundamentally know what constituted progress and what didn't until we arrive, which brings me back to my point about the unknowability of our position.

Do you think you'll still feel that the presidency is above the law, allowed to override or ignore Congress, when a Democrat is in the office? I think the theory of the all-powerful executive that Trump is pushing is clearly unconstitutional, but let's suppose it becomes the law of the land. Do you actually think you'll like that outcome?

This really isn't accurate. Yes, SCOTUS has stayed a lot of injunctions, but I think most of the rulings on the merits -- where they actually do have to give some plausible reasoning -- will go the other way. I think the Roberts court wants to give Trump his way on basically everything, and I think they'll employ a lot of very twisty logic to justify what they can, issuing a lot of bad ruling along the way, but most of his actions are so wrong that they'll ultimately have to shut them down.

Nonsense.

No one knows how far we are from AGI, and anyone who tells you they do is either deluded or lying. It's impossible to know until either (a) we achieve it or (b) we have a sufficiently well-developed theory of intelligence that we can explain it. And, actually, even knowing whether we've built AGI is difficult without the explanatory theory, because without the theory we can't even define what AGI is.

We might be decades away, or we might have already done it and just not noticed yet.

About the only thing you can say for certain is that there is no logical reason to believe that we won't build AGI eventually. Unguided evolution, which is just random variation and competitive selection, achieved it. Our own knowledge creation processes are also variation and selection, but because they operate at an abstract level without the need to modify a physical genotype and wait for phenotypic expression and outcome, they run many orders of magnitude faster. So we will succeed at creating AGI unless we collectively decide not to, and collectively decide to be very serious about enforcing a ban on AI research.

There similarly is no reason to believe that AI won't become superintelligent. Silicon-based intelligence has obvious advantages over the much less-capable substrate that evolution cobbled together. And even if that weren't the case, we would just devise better options. So, the only logical argument against superintelligence is that there is some law of physics that dictates an upper bound to intelligence, and that the peak levels of human intelligence have already achieved it. And even if there is an upper limit on intelligence, and we're it, we should absolutely expect our AIs to reach the same level BUT be orders of magnitude faster than we are, thanks to better miniaturization and faster signal propagation. Imagine the smartest people in the world, but make them able to think and communicate 1000 times faster. Could we even distinguish that from superhuman intelligence? And it seems far more likely that there is no upper bound on intelligence.

The author of TFA may be right that some people are using discussion of AGI and ASI as a way to amass political power now, but that doesn't change the underlying reality that AGI and ASI are almost certainly coming, even if we have absolutely no idea when. Personally, I think it's more likely that the author is uncomfortable thinking about the implications of the arrival of AGI and ASI and prefers to retreat into political theories that keep humans in the pre-eminent position, maintaining the comfortable view that we only have to be concerned about what humans do to each other.

FTFY.

That's what's driving the recent increase in asthma: a more aseptic environment.

I ate dirt as a child, and I almost never get sick. My wife lived in a pristine environment and gets sick at the drop of a hat. These anecdotes are examples that are backed up by reams of rigorous science, some of which was done by a friend of mine, looking at the rate of respiratory illness in Papua New Guinea populations pre- and post-westernization. Their conclusion: we would be healthier if we lived with dirt floors.

So I guess that we are not talking about the POTUS.

would result in news organisations, big platforms (== social media) censoring opinions that they believe that Trump does not like as they fear being sued for displaying them. There is no doubt that the opinions would be attacked in a partisan way -- this is already happening, Trump has sued media for saying things that he does not like.

This would result in suppression of anti Trump opinion - this is what he wants to try to bolster his waning popularity and destroy USA democracy.

That's unusually bad, even for a year ago, but FSD has improved enormously since then. There were some huge updates around ~August that made it go from "Workable, but you have to watch it like a hawk" to "Really quite good, though still needs light supervision". I use FSD all the time and almost never have to intervene. It even passes the wife test now, meaning she uses it nearly all of the time, too, and I'd have said that would never happen.

OTOH, I used Waymo all last week for commuting around the bay area, and it was nearly flawless. There was one time it seemed to get confused because there was an emergency and there were sirens coming from multiple directions but none of the emergency vehicles could be seen. Apparently Waymo uses external microphones to listen for sirens. Anyway, it kind of stopped partway through a left turn through an intersection. It wasn't dangerous; all the human drivers were also slowing/stopping while trying to figure out where the emergency vehicles were, but it would have been better to continue through the intersection, then pull over. After about five seconds of hesitation, the Waymo did exactly that, but I'd have done it without the hesitation.

Neither does an EV. After 8 years an EV's battery pack will have degraded a little; perhaps it'll only have 85-90% of the range that it had when new (the 8-year warranty generally guarantees 80%). But the degradation curve is actually front-loaded; you lose the largest amount of range in the first year, less in the second, and so on. By the time it's 20 years old it will probably only have 75% of the range it had new. At 30 years, 70%, and so on.

Barring some manufacturing problem or catastrophic event, an EV battery should continue functioning long after an ICEV will need an engine replacement. The ICEV will maintain roughly its original range until it fails while the EV will lose a little range, but the EV will last longer.

As a driver of an EV, I disagree. I'd appreciate it if the PHEV (and EV!) drivers moved their vehicles when they are full, but as long as they're actively charging I don't see a problem with it. I suppose if the chargers are oversubscribed I'd appreciate PHEV drivers leaving them for the EVs, but that just means more chargers should be installed.