I would add that its a travesty that legislators on both sides of the aisle have created the cluster-mess that is taxation in this country. There are thousands of carve outs, big and small. Most for seemingly good intentions, but add up to a absolute nightmare. It is telling that neither party feels moved to fix any of it. Rather both find it just great to add their special interest to the pile. Then bark about issues on the periphery, like is the IRS hassling this group or that group this month. They are hassling all of us all the time(!)

Just set a damn rate to pay the bills. Like 22% for everyone. Regressive, progressive, I stopped caring. Corporations have been determined to be "people" they all pay 22%, no more accounting tricks no more deferrals. If Apple is somehow located in Ireland, Apple pays the US our 22% first and we'll decide how much Ireland gets. Hedge fund manager...22%. Crypto bro 22%/ Phase out mortgage deductions, phase out basically all deductions. A lot of these end up with negative, unintended consequences (see US Health Insurance, see also 401k) . Just stop trying to gear social policy with tax policy. Want a child tax credit...just give people the cash or make it a day care voucher or whatever

And I mean the Mike Judge version. This line

"...whose 10-person staff has been splitting time between Airbnbs in Silicon Valley and home offices in New York"

which I know is meant to sound all cool and stuff. But to me this sounds like a bunch of dudez who want to 'play' start-up, clikety claking bogus code in biz class over flyover country while luring investors farther down the pyramid scheme.

"California's Film Commission announced in a news release Monday that Lucasfilm's upcoming feature film The Mandalorian & Grogu will be produced entirely in the state," reports the Press Democrat, "one of 15 movie productions coming to fruition thanks to California's Film and TV Tax Credit Program."

At this point, doesn't that just mean 7 people and an LED wall? Meanwhile the remaining 120 minutes of the file is composed on a GPU farm in "the cloud" with remote animators and maybe with an IP addressed registered to a CA production corporation. Not complaining, just thinking the days of big, physical studios are coming to an end.

I just ask that when the script is written they phrase it like "ChatGPT: Please write a script for a Star Wars universe sequel, meant for intelligent adults, that does not beat me over the head with morality lessons, and overall that simply doesn't suck"

This is particularly insightful since another /. post mentions 2% of US electricity generation goes to freakin' bitcoin mining. And I'm guessing that power isn't being generated by a tokamak or solar or any other 'nice' method.

First principles. CO2 is generated as a result of human activities. Reduce the rate of human population growth and the problem . No, not talking about James Bond + Moonraker stuff. Just boring ideas like incentive based birth control. China proved it could be done, and aside from some admittedly awful stories to come out of that land of 1 billion people, the one child policy was almost entirely driven government financial incentives / disincentives. We don't even need a 1 child policy, 2 child policy works just fine.

The negative effects of overpopulation are not just on CO2, but on clean/available water, environmental health and resiliency of land, water, (and air). And frankly overall quality of life for humans, Or just keep the laissez faire mode on population and see Malthusian results start to kick in on those countries least able to support burgeoning populations, with misery and fatalities accelerated by GW.

Parasols in space or Nexplanon on earth...?

That's actually a very good point. The whole voter registration process does seem like a weak spot. Just looking at a few state's Voter Registration sites, basically they are asking for your name, address, and drivers license / state id number. So the real vector could be the DMV.

Though I think (hope) with this new Federal 'RealID' there is less opportunity to screw around with the DMV databases.

And the debates about people who don't have official id not being able to vote...I'm ok with that. Same with people who forgot to register, or waited until after midnight to register...lots of things require you to prove your identity and do stuff on time. Voting is one of them.

I confess that way back in the day I was a proponent of electronic voting. In the way that a younger person cringes at any small amount of friction or inconvenience in their life. But maybe sometime after 2000 election but way before all the last 10-12 years of insanity I've done a 180.

Paper ballots, with machine counting is the way to go. It's the correct mix of tamper-resistant and relative expediency. If something looks fishy, or even if it doesn't fire up the hand recount. In the past I would have angrily shaken my fist at having to wait two, three days for a result. Or clutching my pearls at a couple million dollars of extra cost (that argument is the best...no one cares that govt spent a zillion dollars on this or that, but some tiny fraction to an election is shocking). Or can someone please think about the trees (used in paper ballots)

But its worth the wait, the expense, the stupid trees. While political parties are finger pointing at each other about dead people voting, double counting and assorted nonsense, we have to know that other countries would love to eff with our elections. So lets not leave that avenue open for them.

Per capita California doesn't even crack the top 15 in per capita gasoline consumption (citation: https://commodity.com/blog/sta...)

CA's gasoline consumption is down almost 25% since it's peak in 2008. Decline is structural, accelerated by pandemic. (https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2022-09-06/california-loves-evs-but-will-be-stuck-in-hybrid-for-years)

Jet fuel is interesting. It does seem correlated with cities that host the most international travel and in Georgia's case, the major Delta hub and busy airport (Top aviation fuel states: California, Texas, Florida, New York, Illinois, and Georgia ). Bio jet fuel from non-food sources (algae, yeast, etc will be an area of opportunity for someone who can figure out the scaling.

And also not related to climate change, gay drag queen, liberal conspiracies is the same sort of ban in Florida, by everyone's favorite ex-president

"While the previous moratorium on drilling in the Eastern Gulf of Mexico expired [in 2022], former president Trump issued an executive order to protect both coasts of Florida from drilling through June 2032"

It is fun how quick the internet denizens are to jump on any grain of news and twist and turn it to some political end. The short version as described in the parent, above, is CA's oil is expensive, local politicians are opposed to drilling, why bother. And CA's gasoline consumption is way down, nearly 25%, from the 2008 peak. Part of a structural decline accelerated by pandemic.

CA doesn't even make the top 15 states of per-capita gasoline usage: https://commodity.com/blog/sta.... spoiler, MS, ND, AL, WY, DE, SC, etc. Really, Delaware? It takes like 5 minutes to drive across the entire state.

That's pretty much it exactly:

"A planned sale of OpenAI employee shares that would value the startup at about $86 billion on paper hangs in the balance after the sudden firing of CEO Sam Altman and a slew of top executive departures. The tender offer, which Thrive Capital is leading, has not yet closed but has been in its final stages and was expected to be completed as soon as next month, according to a person familiar with the matter." --www.theinformation.com

Much like on the TV series "Succession" on which this OpenAI debacle is based...there are no likable characters.
-Sam Altman is an attention whore, clueless on actual AI, but has good connections and is good at selling. Think Travis Kalanick, Adam Neumann, etc
-Ilya Sutskever probably a pretty smart guy with the mechanics of AI, but clearly completely clues on business politics. Which is ok-ish if you are Director of blah blah at Nowhere Inc. but not if you are on the board of a 90 billion USD company.
-Mira Murati she should be in politics flip flopping positions that quickly is...professional grade duplicity.
-Satya Nadella had the opportunity to display real character and leadership by getting everyone together, quickly and quietly resolving this nonsense. Instead he clumsily applied the MS weight to get his manservant, Altman back in. The OpenAI people might be forgiven for being out of their league, but Nadella is just a jerk.
-OpenAI board members basically same as Ilya...they took some beef (imdb Beef) with Altman and blew it out of proportion, with no idea the blow back.
-Employees at OpenAI Go freakin work at MS or Salesforce or Google for that matter if you just want to be paid. Literally you will be selling your soul. But you can't have it both ways . Also there are like 12 people max that are vital to that company, the other 500 are just riding coat tails

I sort of like the idea of making the occupation of cab driver a white collar profession.

That website doesn't seem super credible. For one, the guy who runs the reformcalifornia dot org is quoting himself (a lot) as the expert:

Experts say Newsom is either woefully ill-informed or being dishonest. “The overwhelming facts prove businesses and residents are fleeing San Francisco due to the crime wave and a spike in homelessness,” says Carl DeMaio, Chairman of Reform California.

And the website states that Salesforce is leaving San Francisco? Who is going to break the news to Marc Benioff ? There's a lot of serious discussion around SF's woes, but this guy from San Diego is just trying to fund his next campaign.

Generally I appreciate the work the EFF does however I am increasingly finding their responses to the evolution of surveillance technology to be lacking. Their website is full of references to community-based workshops and toolkits and the like. They promote 'conversations' on privacy with community leaders, etc etc and have "victories": in 18 'disparate' communities like San Francisco, Oakland, Santa Clara...all with a tilt towards abstinence of video surveillance.

What I think would be useful to society is come up with some practical recommendations on how to balance video surveillance with privacy. Things like
-recordings should be encrypted by default, with the owner maintaining the key and/or issuing keys to others (including government entities)
-recordings should be automatically deleted after some number of days
-cameras should be directed at XX% of your own property (i.e. shouldn't point your camera directly at your neighbor)
-recordings should not be posted to social networking sites

And then maybe stuff around facial recognition, %'s of confidence etc. In short, the 'conversations' are fine, the Community Control of Police Surveillance (CCOPS) framework is ok, but not impactful. I would hope/like to see an EFF or similar take on the actual technology aspects of surveillance tech to guide it in a reasonable manner.

Spot on. What used to be the sole domain of military dictatorships has crept into the politics of democracies across the globe. I would suggest that people who are interested in preventing dictator-like governments need to figure out what it is that makes a third or more of voters truly desire a stongman/dictator type leader. Figure out this psychology and see how that need can be met in some other way. The current 'strategy' of trying to shame folks, lecture them, ban people doesn't seem to be making much headway. We need a better plan. ...also one that doesn't involve just starting a war to distract the populace.

Readers Digest (blast from the past?!) has an article on why we don't even see the Goodyear blimps much anymore.
https://www.rd.com/article/why...

tldr; it's really expensive, like $100k per flight. Maybe Brin's vanity project has improved on helium leakage, etc. But honestly, there really isn't use case for a dirigible that isn't done better, faster, cheaper from existing tech. Pathfinder has a 4 ton cargo capacity...but a Chinook helicopter can transport up to 12 tons a lot faster and more reliably. The focus should be on carbon-neutral aviation fuel

I personally am concerned about humanity exhausting our helium supply on crap like....party balloons and this current project. Helium is not something we can manufacture, and getting helium from Saturn will be really, really expensive

For real. And since you are talking about $250 million, assuming these other guys are working on commission for whatever is recovered, you'd want to put into said contract a clause like "in the event the data is recovered via other means" (like...I finally found the post it note with my passwords) then you pay them time+materials and some amount of money.

Likewise these 'other guys' would probably want some time+materials guarantee payment if the USB drive turns out not to have Bitcoin on it.

But overall this seems either insanely sloppy by the owner...or a publicity stunt and his bluff has been called by this Unciphered outfit