I have solar panels and drive an EV. I don't really care what happens to the price of oil. When winter comes I'll care about the price of natural gas (haven't replaced the gas furnace with a heat pump; I'll definitely do that when the furnace reaches EOL), but that that hasn't gone up much.

I highly recommend this strategy.

While that's true, a responsible generation aims to boost the next generation to a *higher* level than the education they received. The world has become more complex and faster-paced, and even if that weren't true, the consequenes of aiming high and falling short are better than the consequences of aiming for the status quo and falling short.

So while I'm 100% onboard with skepticism that technology will magically make education better, I think the argument that "the education I got worked for me should be good for them" isn't a strong argument. What we need is a better ecducation that would have been a better education fifty years ago: stronger math, science, and language skills, general knowledge, and, I think critical thinking and media literacy. Possibly emotional intelligence -- it's kind of pointless to teach people critcial thinking skills if they are carried away by emotions.

There are no economic or security reasons to blockade Cuba, so that leaves *political*.

It used to be believed that bullies were low status individuals who are lashing out out of frustration. But research has shown that bullying is an effective strategy for achieving and maintaining social status. In other words it's a political winner. So the focus of research has shifted from the bully to the people around him who enable the bullying. The inner circle are the henchmen -- people without the charisma and daring to initiate the bullying, but join in when the bully gets things started. Around them are the audience, the people who wouldn't risk participating but enjoy the bullying vicariously. And around them are the much larger group of bystanders, who don't approve but are waiting for someone else to stop the bullying. Then off to the side are the defenders, who stand up to the bully.

Perhaps the least appreciated supporting factor in the phenomenon of the high-status bully is the silence of the bystanders, which is dependent upon the perception of widespread approval. Since you can't visibly see the the line between the approving audience and the apalled bystanders, the silence of the bytstanders is absolutely essential in sustaining the bullying.

Lot's of Americans are apalled at the idea of using military force to inflict suffering on the Cuban people. But that's only politically advantageous *because* of *them*. Tney are indistinguishable from the relatively small number of people who are thrilled when Trump announced he can do anything he wants wtih Cuba. The gap between actual approval and *perceived* approval is absolutely critical in establishign and maintaining any kind of authoritarianism. This is why would be authoritarian leaders are so focused on punishing and marginalizing any kind of expression of disapproval.

"Corporations are people, and money is speech" comes rather forcefully to mind.

If it were just "gambling-addicted basement folk" that would indeed be crazy. But the idea -- and the reality -- is that it attracts interest from serious and well-informed people who know stuff and do their research. And prediction markets do have a pretty good track record; they tend to outperform experts a lot of the time. They did much better than pundits or pollsters at predicting Trump's wins, just to name one example.

Bitcoin, yes, stocks, no. The difference with stocks is that you're buying something with actual, real-world value, a piece of a functioning company that makes real products and sells them to real customers. Yes, you're hoping that the company will be successful enough to pay you a nice stream of dividends from its profits or, equivalently, to go up in share price, but this is no different from buying any other potentially revenue-generating asset.

When you put money into bitcoin or into a prediction market (same thing, really, except that with bitcoin you're betting on the existence of greater suckers, rather than the outcome of some specific event), there's no such equivalent exchange of value.

Energy is very, very cheap compared to my time.

I find I do a lot of refactors that I would have previously written off as good ideas, but too much work to be worth the effort. I still do think about the effort and weigh it against the benefit, but the effort I'm weighing is my time to review what the LLM did, and the time of whoever has to review my PR. On balance, though, I end up doing a lot of code cleanup that I previously wouldn't have done.

I do also have the LLM actually write most of my code, but first I discuss what I want with the LLM and ask it to write a detailed design doc, then I review and adjust the design doc, then have the LLM write the code from the design doc, then review and adjust the code. So I'm still doing quite a bit of work, but the overall process is still a lot faster than writing the code myself -- and I'm pretty fast. The overall quality of the result is on par with what I'd produce by myself, maybe a bit higher because of the greater willingness to refactor.

I actually do "vibe code" lots of stuff. Not production code but throwaway scripts used during development to automate things that I'd otherwise have done by hand because although it's faster once automated, the time to write a script by hand isn't justified. But with an LLM able to output a several hundred-line shell script in seconds, there's no reason not to automate everything I can. Option A is to tell the LLM to do it for me, but if I have to do it frequently and it's sufficiently mechanical to be scriptable the best solution is to tell the LLM to write a script for me. I don't really review those scripts, either, beyond a quick skim to make sure it's not doing anything insane. Beyond that, I figure out if it works by running it. If it doesn't, I tell the LLM to fix it. This is extremely efficient.

For more complex tasks that require judgment I tell the LLM to do it, then see what the LLM screwed up, tell the LLM to fix it, rinse, repeat until the result is good... then I tell the LLM to write a skill to capture what I just learned about how to get the LLM to do that task well. So then I can also automate tasks that aren't purely mechanical.

All in all, AI at least doubles my productivity. And probably a lot more than that.

That's how mine works. But to make it possible you need another piece of equipment, an automatic disconnect or what SolarEdge (the manufacturer of my equipment) calls a "backup interface", plus inverters that are capable of generating their own waveform if none is available to sync to, and will only do this when the backup interface tells them to.

So, the way it works is that when there's an outage, the grid-tied inverters instantly shut down because there's no grid for them to sync to. Then, after a second or two, the backup interface disconnects the house from the grid and sends a signal to the inverters to come back up in "backup mode". I have two inverters in a leader/follower configuration, so the leader generates the waveform and the follower syncs to it.

When grid power comes back, the backup interface tells the inverters to shut down and re-connects the grid. Then the inverters spend a little while watching the grid (takes about five minutes with my system; I think regulations require this) and then come back up in grid-tied mode again.

This means that the house loses power for 1-2 seconds when there's an outage (I also have batteries, so the house can run without grid power even when the sun isn't shining). Just long enough to be annoying. So I still have UPSes on my desktop machine, my network equipment, etc., but I size them for power capacity, not storage capacity, since they barely need any storage at all.

When the power comes back on, the reconnection process occurs without any noticeable flicker. Obviously the AC waveform shifts from whatever the inverters were generating to whatever the grid provides, so I suppose that some equipment (motors, mostly) might have a tiny stutter, but I've never been able to detect it

Fair, though the Middle Eastern oil is high in sulfur, so losing it isn't directly driving the reduction in low-sulfur fuels. But it's a global market.

All absolutely correct, though the refinery output is almost entirely fungible. So, lopping off the production of one category of crude will heavily impact the refineries that process that sort, but unless we end up balkanizing the world's oil trade the net effect on the supply of the outputs is roughly the same as if crude oil were all the same.

In 1790, the US population was 94.9% rural. There is no country. in the world today that rural -- Burundi, which looks like blanks spot in the world at night satellite picturs, is 88% rural.

The largest city at the time was New York, with a population of 33,000. Northern Manhattan was near-wilderness, mid-town was farms and country houses.

In 1790 the US was. country you could "police" with sheriffs and volunteer posses, largely to keep the peace. If you got robbed, you hired a private thief catcher. This works in a 95% rural country with just 3.4 million inhabitants. It would be chaos in a country 87x larger.

No... 20% of the world oil is a lot. Oil consumption has some components that are elastic in the short term, but not that much. Mostly of the consumption is pretty fixed in the short and medium term. The supply side has more elasticity, but it can't adjust quickly and much of the elasticity is very price-dependent -- only when the price rises above a certain point do some sources become profitable to extract, and then it takes between weeks and years to get them into production.

If you're thinking that the price adjustments shouldn't start taking effect until the well -> tanker -> refinery -> end consumer pipeline is actually exhausted, you're wrong because that would make the shocks dramatically worse. The futures are doing their job. By predicting the coming shortages and beginning to push the prices up now, we start pushing on what demand-side and supply-side elasticity exists. The higher price serves both to reduce demand and to motivate suppliers who aren't affected by the war to boost supply.

And keep in mind that part of the price adjustment is due to factors that would remain even if the war ended today. Because they have nowhere to put the oil, the Hormuz-dependent oil producers are shutting down production, and those wells will take weeks to restart.

You describe this whole futures concept as a "FinTech game" but it's very real, and very important. Futures act to smooth out pricing information across a whole raft of commodities, enabling both demand and supply sides to adapt early when it's cheaper, reducing shocks. Of course, it requires the markets to predict the future accurately, and predictions of the future will always be wrong, but historically they're quite good; better than pretty much any other prediction system.

Can't you just plugin any USB keyboard?

8GB is plenty of RAM for what most users use their laptops for, if the OS doesn't gobble it up with background tasks. Probably be a good idea to steer clear of Chrome as a browser on these things.