It's how basically everything else works. Provide the product desired and you make money -- and people get what they want to buy. The core point, though, is that it's silly to worry about who is going to get rich. Just make sure the market is competitive, then see who can compete the best. This particular market is a bit hamstrung by regulations, but diversifying the supplier sources should actually help to ease the effect of that a bit.

How would out of state "pirates" manipulate the CA market? If the pirates want to charge more for electricity than it costs locally, use the local power. If they're offering it for less (which is likely the case, since everywhere around CA has cheaper power than CA does), then buy it.

This seems like nothing but a win for CA residents. The residents of other states in the area might not fare so well, since their own generation companies will prefer to sell to CA for the higher prices available there.

Except in this case the answer is clearly "yes". Connect the grids as far and wide as possible, and let market forces drive production up and costs down. The argument that "but then Californians might sometimes be using dirty power from coal plants in Nevada" is just stupid, because while that might happen sometimes, it also means that people in other states will use more of CA's renewable power.

What matters isn't who uses which, but that we maximize the total use of renewables and minimize the total use of fossil fuels. Given that renewables are dramatically cheaper than fossil energy, this means that just letting the market work will move us in the right direction. Broad interconnection and competitive markets will serve to ensure that the cheapest and greenest energy sources are 100% used and never wasted, not until the whole western US has enough renewables that renewable output sometimes exceeds the consumption of the entire region. It will further encourage deployment of more and more super-cheap renewables, driving fossil energy gradually out of the market.

Note that it's also important that wholesale prices not be tightly regulated, that the market be free to seek proper price equilibrium. Why? Because it's important that it be possible for, say, gas peaker plants to be able to make an absolute killing in the rare cases that available renewables fall short, so that power companies are motivated to operate and maintain those plants -- or to replace them with energy storage systems (battery, pumped hydro, whatever) so that those can make a killing when they're needed.

If at some point we fall into a local minimum where the market isn't incentivizing the shift to renewables + storage, then it will make sense to find some way to intervene with regulation. But, again, the best strategy will be to harness the market. For example, just internalize the carbon emission externality by applying a carbon tax, then let the market work out the power balance -- which could even include fossil fuel plants with carbon capture systems, who knows? At the present, though, costs favor renewables even with the carbon externalities of fossil plants.

Whoever can provide the most power at the lowest price at the times it's needed.

It's usually a little bit more indirect than that. Soldiers get commendations and medals for confirmed high-value targets, and those help them get promoted, which of course results in higher pay. I'm not aware of any western country that has given cash bonuses for taking out specific targets. That includes Ukraine. TFS says their units get more/better equipment, which makes sense.

I've used quite a lot of sophisticated statistics, requiring calculus. It makes sense that it's somewhat context-dependent, I suppose. In any case, I think calc is an important element of mathematical maturity, which is useful regardless of whether or not you actually use the mathematics in question.

It should be mentioned that this was a 2012 trial after a 2009 earthquake, and that all but one of the convictions were overturned on appeal. The one whose sentence was confirmed also had his sentence reduced and suspended. In Italy, convicts don't go to prison until after their first appeal, so none of the scientists served a day of their sentence.

The one that had his sentence confirmed, though not his punishment, had provided information in an interview that was scientifically invalid and discourage evacuation. Specifically, he told them that the many small quakes reduced the likelihood of a big quake by releasing pent-up stress, but the scientific consensus is that this isn't true because the amount of energy released by small quakes isn't enough to affect the energy of a big one, not unless there are tens or hundreds of thousands of small ones, and that a rise in the number of small quakes more often indicates increased probability of a big one.

I don't think he should have been prosecuted for what he said, but he really should have been more precise, and more responsible. A suspended sentence to make the point that scientists need to be careful and precise with their public statements in cases where lives are on the line is excessive, but it's not ludicrous.

It would barely inconvenience them. These guys are well-funded. They'd just set up their own relays outside of China.

Will it actually help his coin and the crypto bros? I'm not so sure.

A lot of crypto bros believe that all that crypto-assets need now is legitimacy and they'll blow up and take over the world. They also think, probably correctly, that regulation will legitimize crypto-assets. In some sense that may be true, but the ability to sidestep regulation is and always has been crypto-assets' killer feature. Take that away and they may be legitimized, but they'll also lose their only actual reason for existence, which I've got to think will ultimately be bad for crypto-coin valuations.

Trump is clearly terrified of it being released. That's why he's taken to insulting anyone who brings up Epstein, attacking the credibility of the file contents (just in case he is ultimately forced to release them) and engaging in delaying tactics like this grand jury testimony order.

More than that, grand jury files are secret and can generally not be released to the public. The president can ask, the AG can ask, but only the court can approve the release, and the court can only do that only as defined in the Federal Rule of Criminal Procedure, Rule 6(e)(3)(E):

The court may authorize disclosure—at a time, in a manner, and subject to any other conditions that it directs—of a grand-jury matter” in a number of situations including:

(1) in connection with a judicial proceeding;

(2) to a defendant who has come forward with evidence that something improper occurred before the grand jury and he may be entitled to have the case dismissed; or

(3) at the request of the federal government, to another jurisdiction that needs it to prosecute a case.

Which of those apply in the current situation? Granted the language says "including", rather than "limited to", but the judge will take guidance from the specified situations and unless there's some similar reason to release the files, the judge will refuse.

No, he's throwing it to a judge to decide, for three reasons (which he probably didn't come up with and probably doesn't understand).

The first is to delay and hope that people demanding the info calm down and forget about it in the meantime. The judge probably won't act quickly (they generally don't), and while the judge is thinking about it the administration can just point to the order and the judicial process and shrug, saying "Trump ordered the release, that's all we can do". That's bullshit of course, because Trump absolutely could just order the DoJ to release the files it has, but because it's mostly Trump's own people who are upset, and most of them know nothing about the Federal Rules of Criminal Procedure, they'll probably buy it. For a while.

The second is so that when the judge ultimately refuses, Trump can throw the court under the bus. "Hey, I tried, but those damned courts and their activist judges", again ignoring the fact that Trump doesn't need the courts to do anything. As you pointed out, Maxwell's pending appeal may help him get this outcome.

The third is that because the grand jury testimony was focused on what Epstein and Maxwell did, so in the unlikely event that the judge does order its release, it probably won't include a lot of damaging information about other people in their circle, like Trump or his associates, that might be in the full files the DoJ has. As you pointed out, Bondi also gets to decide what parts are pertinent, so there's that filter as well.

To be clear, I strongly doubt there's a "smoking gun" in the Epstein files that could convict Trump of sex crimes. If that were there, the DoJ would probably have acted on it after he left office. But there definitely is something in those files that Trump is afraid of. Maybe it's about him, maybe it's about someone near him. But there's something he doesn't want to come out and that's why he's refusing to release the files and trying to pre-emptively discredit them in case they leak or he is somehow forced to release them.

Statistics is highly useful for CS, and calc is a prerequisite for (real) statistics.

Not if coding is all you can do. That's his point. He's not saying you don't need a degree, he's saying you do need it because it teaches more than just how to code. If all you want is to code, you don't need a degree. But if you want to be a computer scientist or a software engineer, you probably do need a degree... and Google hires computer scientists and software engineers, not coders.

Heh. That reminds me of a conversation I had with my academic advisor in the CS department back in college (~35 years ago). I had been working as a programmer for a couple of years while going to school to get my degree, and had been writing code of various sorts for a decade. I was also young and very cocky. While laying out my path to graduation we were looking at scheduling the required software engineering series. I asked if there was a way I could skip it because "I've been writing code for a while, so I'm pretty sure already learned everything on my own". The professor gave me an indulgent smile and said "I think you should take it anyway".

Looking back, I'm embarrassed for and amused by my younger self. So clueless. So arrogant! I assumed I had discovered, on my own, in a few years of solo projects, the software engineering lessons accumulated by the industry over decades of large-scale projects. I took the classes and immediately realized how much I didn't know, and that the classes were only going to scratch the surface. In hindsight, I'm not sure "scratch the surface" is even accurate, but they did at least make clear to me that I had a lot to learn, and show me something of what the shape of that knowledge might be.

As for whether you can get hired by Google without a degree... you actually can. Google cares about capability, not credentials. That said, there aren't many non-degreed SWEs at Google, because auto-didacts smart enough and dedicated enough to give themselves a good grounding in all of the things a decent degree program provides are pretty rare.

It is hard in practice to get hired without a degree because the recruiters generally discard resumes that don't include a degree (or clearly-equivalent experience), but if you happen to know a Google SWE and can convince them to give you a mock interview (most are happy to unless it's clear to them that you're going to fail badly), and you pass, they can jump you past the screening process, straight to the onsite interview.

> However while the total area may be pretty large, the area doesn't have to be as cleared or denied sunlight

Agrivoltaics is a thing; Solar PV and crops sharing the land.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

Meanwhile I still argue that the kite system will need an exclusion zone. On the ground for personnel safety, but also in potentially the air as structures above a certain height (on the order of 100 meters usually) require warning beacons for aircraft... I imagine something that will be airborne above 400 meters and flying around would pose an even bigger hazard. You'd also need to consider anything that's within maybe 500 meters of the base station because if things DO go wrong that kite could hit the ground anywhere in that radius. Buildings, roads, high voltage lines, etc. are all things to worry about.

And if it's so remote that none of this is a concern, it's probably best to install something that doesn't need to be actively managed and maintained by a specialist.
=Smidge=

> The example they give is farms that want to produce power but don't want to dedicate as much space as is required for solar panels in that power output range.

A few problems with that, though; 10kw worth of solar is not that much space. 10kw is barely enough to part a tractor under.

Sure the winch and *folded* airfoil is compact, but so is a stack of solar panels. You can install solar panels on racking - also very compact when knocked down for transport - and do stuff underneath them. You probably need a reasonably large exclusion zone around the winch because you'll have a steel cable under several tons of tension whipping around unpredictably. You'll need to be clear of buildings, overhead utilities, and trees for several hundred feet at least I reckon in case the kite dips low too fast to be reeled in safely.

Okay the airfoil works at night and on cloudy days... is this not for temporary power though? You still need a storage system too, and the system is not self-restarting. They do not mention how they get the kite aloft in the first place but traditionally they've used rockets, small aircraft, or lately drones to carry it up until the wind catches it.
=Smidge=

This kind of system has been commercially available since at least 2010. It's been a "game changer" and "the next big thing" since the 1990s. In fact there have been, in my opinion, better implementations of the concept than this using two reels for more continuous generation.

Forgive my skepticism but the fact that we haven't seen more pilot projects like this, let alone full commercial deployment anywhere, really suggests there's something fundamentally lacking in this tech. I suspect that deployment and re-deployment of the airfoil is a major hurdle that torpedoes the viability.
=Smidge=