I think it plausible that 99% of new energy this year come from renewable sources because many of those sources come from renewable types with relatively short construction times.

Up until recently, the US adds about 50 GW of capaicty per year. There's a huge uptick in generation capacity because of energy demands from data centers, so recently it's more like 65 GW/year. The challenge is you can't exploit *this year's* high market prices by starting a nuclear power plant that won't come on line for a decade. Even a combined cycle natural gas plant is going to take five years. But you can have a wind farm up and running in months.

It's not the renewability *per se* that's driving this; it's profiting from the high prices before the AI bubble bursts. Nobody is rushing to bring new hydropower or geothermal plants online, and they're just as renewable as wind or solar.

This move to renewables is not about changing the world. it's about short term financial optimization. But these short term, local optimizations *will* change the world, and planning to handle the transformations driven by short-term market forces is going to take coordinated, long term national action. At present there are regional mandates that will stabilize the local grid against variations in electricity supply. But carving up the nation into small regional markets means higher prices and economic inefficiencies where electricity is transfered from high price areas to stabilize low price areas. Market economics don't work if there are non-market forces (stability) that trump profitability.

Strictly speaking, Gates' name appearing in the files as a "note to self" isn't dispositive of anything. Epstein was a sociopath, and while he was profoundly and disturbingly weird, not a dummy. He'd already been publicly exposed and convicted of child procurement. So he knew he was radioactive. He might well choose to salt his own records with poison pills.

But that's the context we shouldn't miss: Epstein was publicly known to be a child trafficker years before Bill Gates initiated his contact with him. And Bill Gates has people to look out for him and extensive contacts with Epstein's clientele. He must have known. So the parsimonious explanation is that he was seeking out what Epstein uniquely could provide.

As for Gates, he's really smart in a certain way; he's probably usually the smartest guy in the room. But not one-in-a-million smart. I bet a lot of us know people who are smarter than he is. What his history shows is a willingness to act ruthlessly and transgress legal or ethical rules for personal gain, while being aware of reputational risk. I'm not reducing him to a cartoon villain — he may genuinely care about issues like malaria. But he understands the value of curating his reputation. Epstein is a perfect match for him: high school math teacher smart, sociopathic, but obsessed with amassing social capital through connections with academics with tech-bro appeal that opened doors.

It is indisputable that Gates had a relationship with Epstein — Gates himself doesn't deny it. Gates is contesting the veracity of what Epstein wrote in his files, and you know what? I think ithose things are likely false. If Gates needed to score some antibiotics on the DL, he wouldn't need to beg is pedophile buddy. But if Occam's razor serves here, the STD story is just a distraction. Getting or not getting and STD would just be a matter of luck. It wouldn't change the fact Gates sought association with a known child sex trafficker.

And here’s the other big piece of context we shouldn’t miss: while appearance in the Epstein files isn’t strictly dispositive of anything, the unprecedented structure of Epstein’s plea agreement and the resulting absence of federal prosecution constitute a smoking gun for deliberate non-enforcement by law enforcement. From this, we can reasonably infer that powerful individuals were being shielded from scrutiny. Epstein received an extraordinarily lenient deal that explicitly immunized unnamed co-conspirators — an inversion of standard prosecutorial practice, where defendants are typically flipped to expose broader conspiracies. It is reasonable to infer, in the absence of any credible explanation, that prosecutors were motivated to protect those co-conspirators for some reason.

at first, but only for 12 parsecs or so . . .

Possibly. And after all this, I neglected the most obvious modern example of rent-seeking; John Deere's repair lock-in. Farmers have begged for right-to-repair legislation. This problem isn't limited John Deere, and in that the other examples are also instructive.

A less obvious use is to add charge to your house batteries, extending their capacity for those long nights.

How well this works in the frozen North remains to be understood.

It's been an increasingly &($ experience since about 1998. Doubleclick.com...

No, they are trying to equate intrusive software notifications with some sort of automobile safety hazard.

Not much software covers the speedometer in your car. In fact, annoyance isn't much of a vehicle safety issue, or we would not have on-ramps on the highway without traffic lights in the right-hand lane (in America, that is...).

I think we may agree that artists in any medium deserve to be paid for their work when they make it available for pay. And they are very right to keep it themselves if they wish to it, or set whatever limitations, restrictions, or requirements they have in mind. The GPL is a good example of this, copyright. The more remarkable one or more common. My complaint with copyright is that it extends beyond the life of the artist, and that doesn't strike me as Fair, unless the artist arranged for those rights to be held by someone else. Else. And then we get into the whole corporate copyright argument whether or not corporations should be allowed to hold copyright in. Definitely. Probably the thing to remember about that argument is that if the original artist, and if the cooperation employed the artist then the corporation as owner holds it for their life. Life. Well natural lifework corporation as infinite in concept. A mess

To me, while this is a union issue, there, of course seeking to protect their membership. I think this reaches into they a situation where they want their membership to be compensated for work they either lost, or were denied access to? I'm not sure I like that idea. But it doesn't really matter what I like, is it fair?

And we keep coming back to modern lease agreements where a commercial landlord makes us part of the lease payment. A share of revenue of the lessee. Or me. This is another business negotiation. In most cases that I'm familiar with, the commercial landlords would negotiate a lease without a share of revenue, it would just be a higher payment. Ultimately, they're looking for some value in return for providing the property. They're setting the value. Their Les c has to decide if it's tolerable or not. That's a business decision

On the other hand, I was not aware of this feature and enabled it IMMEDIATELY.

We're supposed to just take them at their word that this is unrelated to the white collar job cuts.

Their argument boils down to "well if it's a synthetic actor, we represent them too, so we are entitled to $".

No, no you aren't.

By that logic, if I draw a stick figure, I "owe" someone some $. If I sell it, I owe them some of that.
To be fair, congress has already laid the ground for this, with the idea that if I draw a big stick figure sexing a little stick figure, that (to some in Congress) is borderline kiddy porn.

A late comment, but I think this seems to be rent-seeking, masquerading as some form of protection or 'necessary' regulation.

I am a very lame producer, but I make really good money at it. It started as a hobby back in 2015.

I use Ai now with all our customers. We will NEVER hire anyone who has EVER used the word "SAG" in their resume or social media profile.

SAG => monopoly => control who can act => if you don't agree with SAG's politics, you can't act.

It's well past time to remove SAG from the market through market forces. Ai is absolutely AMAZING for my client base, they love being able to change the race, gender, location of a commercial with a few clicks.

I absolutely can't wait to send these SAG clowns packing.

A massive gamer who hasn't heard of Asus?

We continually see this - politicians saying Universal when it's not. By definition, if applies to a specific sector then it's not universal. Using the phrase muddies the waters between normal benefits system as usual, and the new (as in never implemented) concept of Universal Basic Income.

This post isn't a commentary on whether UBI is or is not a good idea, or whether benefits should or should not be introduced in this case. It's to stop people diluting concepts - UBI and the current benefits system (I'm in the UK) are separate concepts.