I agree, but I feel like I have to speak up here to defend Governor Cox a bit (I live in Utah). He's actually an intelligent and very reasonable guy, and as close to a thoughtful centrist as has any hope of getting elected to a statewide office in Utah. His position on trans rights just about cost him re-election, even though he really wasn't saying anything other than "Hey, we have to be careful here, these kids are suffering and doing the wrong thing could cause a lot more suicides" (Utah already has among the highest teen suicide rates in the nation, and the US has pretty high rates relative to the world). His "disagree better" campaign, while exactly what we need in this country, IMO, also raised a lot of GOP eyebrows in the state. Which is just stupid, but it is what it is.

Anyway, the point is that he has to pick his battles. He often signs legislation he disagrees with because he knows the GOP-dominated state legislature can and will override him if he vetos, and being overridden is politically costly. And if you think that's a cop-out, you should look at the field of competitors he had in the GOP primary, none of whom could be called thoughtful, reasonable or anything close to centrist.

I'd prefer someone the left of how Cox acts, but he's not only the best we've got, he's the best we're likely to get. And I strongly suspect that Cox would prefer to move significantly leftward (which would still leave him right of center, nationally), but he's an astute politician and politics is the art of the possible.

A few comments, in reverse order.

First, code violations are civil, not criminal, in every jurisdiction I've ever heard of. What state are you in? The only way they become criminal is if you refuse to comply for long enough that a judge finds you in criminal contempt. In this case, I'd be shocked (even assuming shutting off the emergency disconnect would get you a citation, which seems unlikely, see below) that the first ticket would simply be an order to turn it back on. From there if you refused to comply it would escalate to fines, then increasing fines, then a court order to turn it on and pay the fines.

Second, the purpose of codes like this is to make sure that the house is livable. I expect the code (if it actually says a grid connection is required) was written before self-generation was realistically feasible and just wasn't considered. Odds are a house that has plenty of electricity but is technically in violation wouldn't be cited, unless you sold the place and the new owner complained, and even then they'd probably just require you to pay for reconnecting it. Further, I expect that as long as your house is still physically connected, it would be in compliance so if you were cited a judge would throw it out.

Of course, you shouldn't take my word for it, but it's pretty easy to find the laws and codes online. I'm curious enough that if you tell me where you are, I might even look them up for you :-)

That said, there very well might be something the power company can complain about if you try to get service disconnected so you don't have to pay the monthly connection fees. There might be some law giving them the authority to issue citations, essentially for non-compliance with their contracts. In practice, what would probably happen if they have that power and you called to disconnect is that they'd just tell you "no". But I'd really be surprised if they complained as long as you kept the service and paid the basic monthly fees; from their perspective it just looks like you're paying them money for nothing.

Finally, not having an exterior emergency disconnect is a serious code violation from what I can find (NEC 230.85 (that link is from NY, but the code is national)), so you might already have a code violation. I guess it depends when that requirement was added to the code vs when your system was installed, but you said your system was just redone recently?

I don't think the EU is claiming Apple has a monopoly in the smartphone market, I think the EU is claiming Apple has a monopoly in the market for apps, etc., for iPhones, where its market share is statistically indistinguishable from 100%.

That's an argument for employers not to care what the grades were, if all Harvard grads are good enough, and I'm sure there are plenty of employers who will take any Harvard grad.

But for the employers who wish to be even more selective, hiring only the best of the best (and obviously offering appropriate compensation because they're competing with the other employers who want the best of the best), it's useful for them to be able to use GPA to discriminate between the mediocre Harvard grads (who would presumably be outstanding anywhere else) and the high-performing Harvard grads.

Harvard does the students a disservice by giving most of them A's. And the smartest students are going to realize it and look for an institution that is more discriminating, where they can prove their worth.

I'm surprised that cover letters were ever a very good signal, myself. Didn't students always get someone else to help them write the letters anyway?

Funny, but I'm wondering if there's actually something behind this. Can you elaborate in what way Utah is friendlier to Crime? Utah does have a long history of multi-level marketing scams, but I think that has made the legal environment less friendly to fraudsters.

You don't know what you're talking about. Spend some time discussing a novel engineering design with a current-generation LLM with a self-talk reasoning overlay.

Whatever little money could have been made that way would absolutely not have been worth the PR risk of it leaking, especially since Google employees aren't good at keeping secrets.

Nah. I had some conversations with a guy who had worked on it and it really just didn't turn out to be very useful. It didn't find a lot of stuff that wasn't already in public leaked data databases, and when it did send information to users they were often confused about what to do. Worse, fake alert emails were being used for phishing. Shutting the program down probably won't impede that abuse much, but maybe a few people who get a phishing email who would have trusted it because they knew about and had signed up for the program will now not trust it because they know the program has been shut down.

I'm skeptical... what happens if you just turn off the main breaker?

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?