For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong.

The problem is that distribution networks are highly regulated monopolies, many of them operating in the red because of fire-related lawsuits or government-mandated rate limits that don't respect the costs. They have no real incentive, and in some cases no funding, to expand to meet the ever-increasing demand.

There's a long backlog of electricity producers waiting to be connected to the distribution network, but that network is expanding very slowly.

Meanwhile, supply meet demand. Consumer demand is increasing, AI demand is increasing, all uses of electric power are seeing increasing demand. The supply is choked by the distribution network. Increasing demand, limited supply -> increased price.

I dunno. China is a "market socialist" system -- which is a contradiction in terms. If China is socialist, then for practical purposes Norway and Sweden have to be even *more* socialist because they have a comprehensive public welfare system which China lacks. And those Nordic countries are rated quite high on global measures of political and personal freedom, and very low on corruption. In general they outperform the US on most of those measures, although the US is better on measures of business deregulation.

It makes no sense to claim Chinese courts have a lot of power, although it may seem that way â" itâ(TM)s supposed to seem that way. One of the foundational principles of Chinese jurisprudence is party supremacy. Every judge is supervised by a PLC â" party legal committee â" which oversees budgets, discipline and assignments in the judiciary. They consult with the judges in sensitive trials to ensure a politically acceptable outcome.

So it would be more accurate to characterize the courts as an instrument of party power rather than an independent power center.

From time to time Chinese court decisions become politically inconvenient, either through the supervisors in the PLC missing something or through changing circumstances. In those cases there is no formal process for the party to make the courts revisit the decision. Instead the normal procedure is for the inconvenient decision to quietly disappear from the legal databases, as if it never happened. When there is party supremacy, the party can simply rewrite judicial history to its current needs.

An independent judiciary seems like such a minor point; and frankly it is often an impediment to common sense. But without an independent judiciary you canâ(TM)t have rule of law, just rule by law.

Hereâ(TM)s the problem with that scenario: court rulings donâ(TM)t mean much in a state ruled by one party. China has plenty of progressive looking laws that donâ(TM)t get enforced if it is inconvenient to the party. There are emission standards for trucks and cars that should help with their pollution problems, but there are no enforcement mechanisms and officials have no interest in creating any if it would interfere with their economic targets or their private interests.

China is a country of strict rules and lax enforcement, which suits authoritarian rulers very well. It means laws are flouted routinely by virtually everyone, which gives the party leverage. Displease the party, and they have plenty of material to punish you, under color of enforcing laws. It sounds so benign, at least theyâ(TM)re enforcing the law part of the time, right? Wrong. Laws selectively enforced donâ(TM)t serve any public purpose; theyâ(TM)re just instruments of personal power.

Americans often donâ(TM)t seem to understand the difference between rule of law and rule *by* law. Itâ(TM)s ironic because the American Revolution and constitution were historically important in establishing the practicality of rule of law, in which political leaders were not only expected to obey the laws themselves, but had a duty to enforce the law impartially regardless of their personal opinions or interests.

Rule *by* law isnâ(TM)t a Chinese innovation, it was the operating principle for every government before 1789. A government that rules *by* law is only as good as the men wielding power, and since power corrupts, itâ(TM)s never very good for long.

Class 1 and 2 e-bikes limit assist to 20 mph, not 15. You can ride them faster than that, but you have to provide the power. 20 mph is well above what most recreational cyclists can maintain on a flat course, so if these classes arenâ(TM)t fast enough to be safe, neither is a regular bike. The performance is well within what is possible for a fit cyclist for short times , so their performance envelope is suitable for sharing bike and mixed use infrastructure like rail trails.

Class 3 bikes can assist riders to 28 mph. This is elite rider territory. There is no regulatory requirement ti equip the bike to handle those speeds safely, eg hydraulic brakes with adequate size rotors. E-bikes in this class are far more likely to pose injury risks to others. I think it makes a lot of sense to treat them as mopeds, requiring a drivers license for example.

Would treating them as mopeds be so bad?

What weâ(TM)re looking at is exactly what happened when gasoline cars started to become popular and created problems with deaths, injuries, and property damage. The answer to managing those problems and providing accountability was to make the vehicles display registration plates, require licensing of drivers, and enforcing minimum safety standards on cars. Iâ(TM)m not necessarily suggesting all these things should be done to e-bikes, but I donâ(TM)t see why they shouldnâ(TM)t be on the table.

I am a lifelong cyclist , over fifty years now, and in general I welcome e-bikes getting more people into light two wheel vehicles. But I see serious danger to both e-bike riders and the people around them. There are regulatory classes which limit the performance envelope of the vehicle, but class 3, allowing assist up to 28 mph, is far too powerful for a novice cyclist. Only the most athletic cyclists, like professional tour racers, can sustain speeds like that, but they have advanced bike handling skills and theyâ(TM)re doing it on bikes that weigh 1/5 of what complete novice novice e-bike riders are on. Plus the pros are on the best bikes money can buy. If you pay $1500 for an e-bike, youâ(TM)re getting about $1200 of battery and motor bolted onto $300 of bike.

Whatâ(TM)s worse, many e-bikes which have e-bike class stickers can be configured to ignore class performance restrictions, and you can have someone with no bike handling skills riding what in effect is an electric motorcycle with terrible brakes.

E-bike classification notwithstanding, thereâ(TM)s a continuum from electrified bicycles with performance roughly what is achievable by a casi recreational rider on one end, running all the way up to electric motorcycles. If there were only such a thing as a class 1 e-bike thereâ(TM)d be little need to build a regulatory system with registration and operator licensing. But you canâ(TM)t tell by glancing at a two wheel electric vehicle exactly where on the bike to motorcycle spectrum it falls; that depends on the motor specification and software settings. So as these things become more popular, I donâ(TM)t see any alternative to having a registration and inspection system for all of them, with regulatory categories and restrictions based on the weight and hardware performance limitations of the vehicle. Otherwise youâ(TM)ll have more of the worst case weâ(TM)re already seeing: preteen kids riding what are essentially electric motorcycles that weigh as much as they do because the parents think those things are âoebikesâ and therefore appropriate toys.

I can't remember the last time I pirated something from HBO MAX, let alone paid for it. What shows do they even have?

For clarity:

Possession is zero tenths of the law.

That's the press doing its usual lousy job of communicating science.

The predictions aren't absolute, they are sets of scenarios for which probabilities are calculated. The longer we drag our feet, the more the set of plausible outcomes narrows. Take Syria -- Syria was a wheat exporter in 1990, but since 2008 or so has been unable to grow enough wheat to feed itself because of climate change when it had become dependent upon imports from Russia and Ukraine. This was early enough that likely we could not have prevented it even if we heeded early warnings in the 1990s when the current scientific picture solidified. We're not going to lose the entire planet in one go, it's going to be one vulnerable population after another.

It may seem like the climate crisis has completely fizzled to you, living in a large, wealthy, and heretofore politically stable country, but it is catastrophic for the people who have got caught. That's how the climate crisis is going to unfold: the rich and comfortable will be able to adapt to the continually changing status quo by moving their financial assets and supply chains out of the way, although you may be paying more for coffee.

At this point it's a matter of degree; we can't avoid problems now like countries being destabilized by climate change and generating millions of refugees. The question is how fast and how big a problem we'll have.

It seems pretty plausible that sub-recreational doses of psychedelics could reduce anxiety, but we have to be mindful that anxiety evolved in our species for a reason. Like inflammation, it’s a natural and critically important protective process that gets out of control in modern lifestyles. It’s unpleasant but pharmaceutically banishing it could leave patients vulnerable.

One of the biggest risks psychedelic therapy will expose patients to are the therapists overseeing their treatment. Psychedelic therapy has an appalling track record of abuse by therapists, including both sexual and economic exploitation. Advocates for psychedelic therapy claim it will “open you up” and I think they’re absolutely correct. But there are other ways to say “open you up” that mean the same thing but set off alarm bells: becoming more suggestible and compliant for example. If the therapist uses psychedelics himself he may have “opened himself up” to some bad ideas about therapist-patient boundaries.

Likewise people microdosing to enhance creativity should exercise caution. Psychedelics absolutely can in some instances unlock creativity by turning down excessive self criticism, but those criitical facilities play an essential role in the parts of the creative process that come after coming up with out of the box ideas. Self reports of microdosing effectiveness should be taken cautiously, due to their potential negative impact on metacognition. Those might be like the drunk who feels more confident driving after a few drinks.

No doubt these drugs have tremendous potential to treat extreme crippling anxiety. They probably even have nootropic potential. But their beneficial effect s come by suppressing natural mental processes that serve important purposes, and the promising results we have come from self reports or clinical reports from advocate researchers. I’ve been following this because I’ve been interested in experimenting with psychedelics for years, but what I have learned has convinced me to hold off until there is evidence and protocols for safe use that would persuade a skeptic.

When I worked at the DNC, our practices for composing the email list left a lot to be desired. They were notionally opt-in, we didn't intentionally buy spam lists, but if "someone" dropped your email address into a form on our web page, we didn't ask twice. And I know for sure that a couple of my own email addresses that should not have found their way onto the list did so, seemingly by collection from downstream politicians' lists who had been even more careless about their list collection. I doubt that has changed for the better.

As near as I could tell, the RNC's practices were worse.

Really, if that's the way you want to live, I say have at it. Other people having the option to live differently isn't going to stop you. It'll be decades before it starts getting hard to find gas stations, and by then EVs will have more range than you can handle.

It is pretty hard not to respond to the pure BS that anti-EV types spout. I know it rubs you the wrong way, but the alternative is to let people who don't know what they're talking about dominate public perceptions.

I wouldn't claim EVs are for everyone, but for many of us they are extremely convenient and economical to run. The corner cases where ICE is clearly more convenient are not a concern for everyone, and not a concern for a multi-car household considering making one of their cars an EV. We have an EV and a plug-in hybrid that runs as an EV probably 80% of the time. We hit the gas station with the plug-in about once every six weeks.

I heard an economist pose this question once. Why do companies have employees at all? Why not use contractors? Then you could hire just as much labor as you need, when you need it, then not pay for labor when you didn't need it.

His reason was the costs involved with finding contractors then negotiating agreements with them. I think there are other reasons, but for sure that's part of it.

But I think technology is pushing us into an intermediate position between the semi-permanent, often lifelong employment of a generation ago, and a world of contracting for everything. I think this is evidenced by a pattern I have seen where companies who are currently successful lay people off. It's not just in the tech world, this is happening in the service industry too.

When technology allows you to monitor the financial performance and cost of every department in an enterprise down to a fare-thee-well, it's easy to identify people you don't need so much in the upcoming quarters and let them go. Then with Internet hiring and automated application screening it's easy to hire those positions back in a year.

Now there's a lot of holes in this rosy (for management) scenario. Automated application screening is dog shit, for example. But you can do it, and you will find people; probably not the *best* people, but then you'll never know, in fact *nobody* will ever know. People will never get to know their jobs well, but again you won't ever know what you're missing. Most of all you will never have anything resembling loyalty from the people you hire; young people these days look at every job as transient. But you can't *measure* loyalty and in most cases, job competence with any precision. But you can track costs down to the penny.

In this case this wasn't about AI underperforming what was promised, but AI performance being exaggerated to cover the company's tracks as it offshored jobs to India. The intent was to use AI as an excuse to let Australian workers go, then to quietly replace them with Indian ones.

I don't think AI promises are "empty", but there is a lot of irrational enthusiasm out there getting ahead of the technology. I think for sure there are plenty of technical failures arising from technlogical hubris and naivite. And I think more instances where the technology is blamed for company failures or unpopular policies -- that practice goes back to the very early era of "computerizing" things like invoicing, so I don't see why this round of technological change would be any different.

But for sure, AI is coming for a lot of jobs. Past forms of automation haven't ended employment; they were just ways of increasing worker productivity. Companies still hired workers until the next marginal dollar spent wouldn't bring in a marginal dollar of revenue. But this time may be different. AI is replacing human thinking. It may be mediocre at thinking, but so are most humans. It may be an opportunity for companies to leverage a small number of humans with advanced cognitive skills, but I think for many companies the siren call of mediocre but really cheap will be too hard to resist.