Im not aware of anyone that keyed a tesla and got any serious charge. I am aware of people who set fire to teslas getting arson charges. The Trump administration tried to spook people protesting and blocking tesla dealerships by threatening domestic terrorism charges, but of course nothing came of that because its fucking ridiculous and a transparently corrupt abuse of power meant to try and save the buisnesses of a high profile ally.

If we start seeing mass job displacement from AI and robotics come too quickly without other economic avenues opening to take those workers, I have little doubt you'll see mass vandalism of those machines. Probably even attacks on datacenters and AI infrastructure. Probably won't change the outcome, but it'll be an outlet for rage.

Its wildly incorrect. California has about 40 GWh of batteries.

Mark Johnson, for the record, isnt a good source of information. He has made his career advocating shit other experts find laughable: 20 years ago he was claiming the wind technology of the day could power the US affordably without issues, which still isnt true today. His grad students regularly churn our what I'd consider highly misleading papers on reliability. I'd call him part of the new wave of "science advocates" who have a policy position and use their credentials to try and advance it on moral grounds.

Im glad California is blazing this trail, it saves other states the headache. But the batteries they have are really only useful for load shifting under ideal conditions, not for reliability. Displacing peaking gas will help a lot for global warming, but its far from a panacea. And dispatching those batteries is still an area of active R&D, its a legitimately hard problem to solve.

Teacher salaries vary wildly by state and location in a state. There are places where teachers make a perfectly fine living, and places their pay is mediocre. But in virtually every state the average teacher makes cash salary above the median household income for the area. Then theres the benefits (typically a very good pension/healthcare, decent amount of paid leave, extremely high job security), and the summers (mostly) off. It's not a bad gig at all.

Everybody thinks theyre underpaid, always. Im all for teachers making cash money on par with industry, provided they get the rest of what comes with that: year round work expectation, no pension, 3 weeks vacation, and constant job insecurity. You don't get high pay AND keep all the good benefits. And make no mistake, its this way on purpose. Because of the way the benefits are structured it heavily discourages industry people from switching to teaching later in their career. Tear down those barriers and the teacher shortages go away overnight... but a lot of existing teachers would suddenly find themselves competing with some extremely competent professionals for their jobs.

The real issue in my opinion, based on people I've known who left teaching early, is kids and parents suck. They're shit to interact with on average. People get into the profession thinking its one thing, and its a different thing. That happens in a lot of fields. The only super noticable disparity ive seen is if youre a math or physics teacher the starting salary gap is massive. If you get a degree in math and go teach high school, and your buddy gets a degree in math and goes into industry, the industry guy will make twice the cash money easily. And when youre 23 with student loans you notice how you cant afford shit while your buddy just got a new car. Thats a specific issue though, and not true of most other degrees. I've known chemistry majors working as chem technicians that made less than a teacher made when you factor in benefits.

Thats nonsense. Copyright was conceived on a fundamental level to protect and advance creative enterprise. It's not an archaic notion that need updating.

The real question is "should the creators of an LLM be allowed to profit on human creativity to the detriment of the humans doing the creating." Because that's what's happening. No LLM exists without human works. And most of the value comes from recent work. These kinds of things were fraught even when humans read a work and changed a few words to "transform" it, copyright has always been hard to quantify.

But it seems to me the line here is clear: if you use non licensed data the LLM cannot be monitized, and products of the LLM cannot enjoy copyright or be commercialized. Why should someone else profit on the backs of others without permission or compensation? And why should the weeping that "if you dont let us our business wont work!" be any more compelling than the guy selling unlicensed T-shirts outside a sports game?

And to the morons that say "well thats how humans learn why shouldn't an LLM do it" I say great! The LLM now owns it's outputs, no humans can. When you can convince humanity at large that the LLM is sentient and capable of licensing its own creativity you can purchase its output. Until then its a tool. And tools can't incorporate copyrighted material without licenses.

The AP1000 was supposed to be more standardized, but really just the reactor itself. At least when I was still dialed in to Vogtles construction one of the wildest sources of delays was outside of containment none of the building layout had been finalized. At one point when they were trying to figure out how to lay things out some genius had the idea to put the count room (the place you didn't radioassays on reactor samples) directly adjacent to containment. When the Radiation Protection folks found out they flipped, because there's more than enough flux through the containment wall to fuck up detection equipment and make life hell. So everyone got to go back to the drawing board to put the counting facilities on the other side of the building.

Add on top of that all the "learning experiences," like the reactor vessel imported from Japan literally blowing out the railroad bed it was so heavy during transport, and it makes perfect sense why that project ran so long. Vogtle and VC Summer were really prototypes. Unfortunately the knowledge gained will probably never be used. Cheap natural gas basically assured that.

Natural gas, especially in the east and central US, is absurdly cheap much of the time. It is weather dependent due to heating demand and pipeline constraints, but it's not at all uncommon to see gas prices dip below $2 per mmbtu. At those prices natural gas power generation with a combined cycle unit, even with all construction costs, is wildly cheaper than renewables with batteries, and usually cheaper than straight variable renewables with no batteries. Much less efficient peaking units are still in the ballpark of batteries however, partly because often when you need significant peaking capacity you're going to be in a higher gas price environment.

Anyway, for perspective about 10 years ago existing nuclear units attempted a modernization to compete with $3 per mmbtu gas, because at that time that was considered the "normal" price of gas in the US. Thats where the gas producers would like to be: really they're overproducing currently because shutting down production is costly and they're all trying to ride this environment out.

Natural gas power is the cost benchmark in the US. It's so cheap that Ive seen estimates that even if carbon capture was mandated on new CCs they would still be competitive in cost terms. Which is wild given the costs that technology would impose. Coal is currently surviving in the margin, being utilized heavily when gas prices spike (usually during a hard winter) and running close to breakeven most of the rest of the time.

There's actually one step further than this that I enjoy thinking about. All these big tech firms had erected moats of technical complexity around themselves, it was part of the logic behind paying for developers you didn't need just to keep the away from "the other guy." There's two possibilities out of this AI hype: either it's not real, and they're squandering huge amounts of resources, or it is real and they're now entirely exposed. If, for a few hundred dollars, I can hand requirements to an LLM in plain English and have it spit out mostly functional software, why would I bother paying for whatever non-tailored vendor garbage your company is producing? Maybe you can justify it on something that needs a bit of ubiquity like Excel, but shit like what Salesforce produces? Why bother paying them?

In the world these companies seem to be hyping it seems far more likely that any major player will begin to bring staff in-house to protect their (incredibly valuable) data, and develop their own tools since the development will be trivial. It'll just be one more competitive advantage, rather than something ancillary to the core business. I don't know if that means more or less developers overall, but it should scare the living shit out of anyone that makes software that doesn't involve substantial domain knowledge.

One thing to remember is even if the wage paid is $15/hr in the US any full time employment comes with a host of other taxes and obligations that are invisible to the employee but real to the company. When I've been involved in hiring the rule of thumb I was given was take the base salary and assume total cost to the company is 150% to 200% of that.

It's one of the reasons gig work is pushed so hard, you can circumvent a lot of that and push it back on the employee.

I actually suspect someone went back to Trump and was like "seriously, if tarrifs don't go down immediately there will be zero goods at Christmas. Even if you get a deal later, you will forever be blamed for the year that didn't have a Christmas. And since most small retailers live or die based on Christmas sales, you're likely to bankrupt substantial number of small retailers."

A 30% tarrif is (very) bad, but can maybe be absorbed, at least on the medium term. The sellers will lower margins a little, and the rest goes to the consumer. But at a level that can be stomached for smaller, non-essential goods. The real question is if Mark Cuban is right, and the transportation snarls we're about to see will rival what was seen in covid. If so, the inflation impact could be enormous even if tarrifs drop to zero.

While what you said is true, there's actually some loopholes that would vastly speed up the paperwork.

During the last wave of optimism about nuclear power (before the tracking breakthroughs that made natural gas dirt cheap in the US) there were dozens of reactors planned and moving through permitting. Several of those got through land acquisition, local permitting, and most importantly geological and environmental site studies. Several were on the locations of existing energy infrastructure so you didn't have to permit substantial transmission changes either.

People think those projects died, but in reality they didn't. Once those documents were obtained the cost to maintain them was pretty trivial. Many utilities chose to keep them active, as a hedge. So much of the permitting is, for all intents and purposes, done.

Unless they're going to try and revive the AP1000 designs in the US, the real skepticism should be around these SMR designs. Trump could speed those through NRC review potentially (Sure to be contested in court), but they just don't have any runtime yet. There's all kinds of nuclear chemistry related things that could cause those SMR designs to fail in mundane ways (like they clog), and nuclear chemistry is finicky enough I wouldn't bet they thought of all of them. And assuming they do work many of the designs don't actually have fuel fabrication infrastructure in place.

What gets me is how does this even apply in the age of on demand content? Netflix shoots a film in France, and... what? It's ignored? It's delisted in the US? US consumers pay some kind of fee based on streamed hours?

It seems a whole lot like this would just end theatrical release, and push everything to streaming.

Eh, "better" is subjective. The reason gas taxes exist in the first place is ease of administration, it's not like you couldn't theoretically already be measuring odometer readings and scaling by vehicle weight. It's way more invasive and harder to account for though.

While I'm sure the point of this is partly to put a thumb in the eye of EV owners, the reality is the gas tax hasn't gone up in 30 years. I'm shocked people aren't mentioning that. Realistically it's not that the EV fee should be lower, it's that the gas tax should be like 2 to 3 times as high.

For an outage this big hopefully they'll have some idea what happened, the initial rumblings sound like some sort of frequency stabilization event... so I'm guessing that's what the operators saw at least. You're right that they're a little gunshy saying something definitively I'm sure.

Unfortunately there's really three fundamental things working to destabilize Western power grids.

First was the move to wholesale power markets, whose primary "benefit" has been to take slack out of the system by pooling reliability margins over vast areas. The old balkanized system was more redundant, even if marginally less efficient.

Second has been wind and solar energy (and batteries). There are physical characteristics of these power sources that introduce more and varied failure modes (more transmission lines, intermittency, etc.). But there's also the physical complexity of managing them. The old bulk grid could basically be managed by guys calling each other on the phone and a few indicator lights on panels; the new bulk grid increasingly relies on advanced sensors and internet connections and predictive models that position the right resources at the right time to handle issues. If at the end of this we found out some new AI assistant misread sensor data and tricked operators into causing a ghost reliability event I would be only mildly surprised. Grid control isn't fully autonomous, but humans are increasingly in the middle of computer systems like Homer Simpson with the big red button.

Third is the electrification of the economy. Things like electric cars and heat pumps interact with the grid in ways we roughly understand, but we don't have backward performance data for and may not fully have stop gaps ready for. I also wouldn't be surprised entirely if we found out some major electric car or smart appliance manufacturer pushed an OTA update and accidentally caused a massive simultaneous power draw. I don't think there's that kind of penetration of those systems yet but it isn't out of the question.

It's an interesting time to be in the utility industry. This shit isn't going to get easier to manage in the near future, fuckups will happen as we navigate it. Have real disaster preparations on hand if you can afford it. Food you can eat unheated, a week of clean water to drink, and a camping toilet bag can be the difference between an unpleasant time and a scary one.

California has been a tremendous beneficiary of the integration of China into the US supply chain. There are many, many parts of the economy of California that exist largely because they are the US portal to China, including the tech company presence in the state.

We are entering a world where China will increasingly be cut out of US economic policy, for better or ill. There's a fantasy that the trend will reverse, but there is a reason the Biden administration didn't reverse all the Trump policies on China from Trump's first term: it's broadly recognized in US intellectual circles that China has for decades gamed the economic landscape in hopes of leveraging that into political and military power. The prevailing view has become that China represents an existential threat to the US so long as the US cannot manufacture its own critical wares without it. Not just things as trivial as phones, but things like grid scale transformers for delivering power are basically entirely Chinese at this point. That's not good.

Trump is a blunt instrument, and frankly I don't much like him. But I think his China policy in particular is representative of where all the winds are blowing politically in the US. That's extremely bad news for California, whatever other challenges it may face. Best case scenario for California is that trade shifts to other southeast Asian nations, and they stay the portal for trade. But that doesn't appear to be where things are headed. If I had to guess I'd say the future is a mix of more local suppliers with a very strong Indian manufacturing base. Trade from India currently comes predominantly through the East coast of the US, not the West.

My bets wouldn't be strongly on California going forward, and its politics are the least of that calculation. That said, inertia is a powerful thing. I don't think California is going to fall apart tomorrow, but I do think its going to have to reckon with a steadily harsher economic landscape. Maybe it will navigate that well, but historically that transition has been unkind to trade nexus'.

From what I've seen, even department to department in a large org, is the ability to work remotely has a substantial cultural component. There's an entire generation of older workers, many of them in management, that either can't understand how to work remotely or refuse to. And it's sort of understandable, many of those people predate having a significant online social presence... they just aren't used to interacting with people that way.

Managing a remote org well either requires sniping known self-motivated high-performing employees and giving them a great deal of autonomy, or managing normal employees far more intentionally. Things like on-boarding younger employees can be even easier remotely than in person, but it's not as simple for management as the old school method of "new guy, this is frank. Follow frank around like a lost dog for a few months." If you're a lazy manager I can see how in-person would be more attractive.

Whats been interesting to watch is smaller companies really embrace remote work, while larger firms desperately try to figure out how to keep it's benefits while also forcing employees into a physical location. At my workplace it's failing pretty badly, and our older management is just baffled. They've said as much openly. In their heads it seems like if you force everyone into a room they instantly become pals and you'll have no attrition. What's actually happening is the highest performers have been leaving at a steady cadence for smaller firms, and backfilling their roles with anyone competent has been an absolute nightmare. And frankly, it's just entropy. The best employees now have thousands of job opportunities at any given time with remote work, opportunities they didn't have in the past. The roles they're leaving have access to a very limited talent pool that's largely local. It's easier for my companies best employees to leave than it is for them to attract the best employees... gas expands to fill a space and all that.