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booly

@ booly @sh.itjust.works

Posts
1
Comments
201
Joined
3 yr. ago

  • Americans with six-figure incomes are in 'survival mode'

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  • I'm not as pessimistic as you about the future, and I don't think of today's children as people passively experiencing things that happen in the world. They're participants, and they'll have a lot more agency about their futures during our lifetimes.

    Politically, I still think that fascism is brittle. Competence is actively discouraged (independently competent people are minimized to prevent threats to centralized power), so I think any fascist system is bound to fail when the people actively resist.

    Economically, the business cycle ebbs and flows, and whoever's on top today might not be on top tomorrow. I believe the current economic system is dominated by bubbles that have no future, so we're gonna see some future chaos where new bases of power will rise. Good guys can win in those scenarios, and those good guys may very well be my own children.

    Culturally, nothing is permanent. Trying to predict things is a fool's errand. Better to just prepare our children for resilience through flexibility and adaptability, and raise them to be kind, well adjusted, socially plugged in.

    Living a good life is possible even in a bad world. That's happened throughout human history. And so if people want to raise children, let them.

  • Americans with six-figure incomes are in 'survival mode'

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  • Just want people to think a bit further than mid-19th century definions and analysis which I think no longer hold.

    Yeah, one of the things that really shaped my views on fairness in wealth distribution was studying corporate law (and the legal cases that shaped what Delaware corporate law is today). That history adds a lot of complexity to figuring out who is the "owner" class and who is the "labor" class. Highly compensated executives often have their shareholders over a barrel, and the legal system is designed to protect management from shareholders, so long as the corporation makes some minimal token gestures towards shareholder value. In practice, shareholders have very limited means of controlling a corporation (mainly by electing directors, who tend to be officers/managers of other companies and sympathize with managers and give quite a bit of leeway when only part time supervising the officers they often play golf with).

    And we can see this play out in the modern era. We have a bunch of wannabe finance bros, hopeful future millionaires, talking about financial topics and cheerleading their heroes (CEOs and founders), often being willing marks in financial investment scams. They believe that holding capital will help them survive further divergence between the haves and the have nots, but history shows that when push comes to shove, only power matters. No amount of accumulated wealth can protect against power, and those with power can always use that power to enrich themselves.

    So I don't find it particularly useful to draw bright lines on who is or isn't the enemy based on their financial situation. We should recognize the power structures themselves, and how power is exercised (politically, financially, legally, culturally, and the old standby, violently), and work to influence things through those levers (including the power to change the levers themselves).

  • Trump Thinks Canceled Flights, Long TSA Lines, and Chaotic Airports Will End the Shutdown. He’s Wrong.

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  • Budgets are approved every two years, so it just means people will lose their coverage in one year.

    The budget process is an annual process. Not sure where you're getting the idea that it's a 2-year budget.

    There are 2-year appropriations, but that's less common than the default 1-year. There are also other multi year appropriations and no-year appropriations that don't expire at all (agencies can spend the money until it's gone, however long it takes). You can read about those here.

    Either way, though, Congress needs to pass a budget every year (or at least continuing resolutions).

  • 'I've Never Seen Anything Like It': Trump Policies Leave US Farmers in Dire Straits

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  • People like to use the example of Crassus' fire brigade as an analogy for how corporate interests extract value from regular people in society. Crassus and his fire brigade would go around buying burning houses on the cheap, and then put out the fire for the benefit of Crassus, the new owner. There were some who believed that Crassus was setting the fires himself, but the extractive playbook here works whether he was setting them himself or not.

    Are agricultural megacorps buying up farms with depressed values and then fixing them so that the values increase? Probably not. They're in basically the same boat with the price of commodities, in terms of the inputs (water, fertilizer, labor, equipment and machinery, fuel, energy) and the outputs (wheat, corn, soybeans, etc.). It's a problem for them, too.

    Maybe they have deep enough pockets to ride out the current crisis and will have more to show for it in the end, but for now, they're in the same boat.

  • I just spent four months in hospital in the UK. How screwed (financially) would I be in the US?

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  • The average cost of a hospital stay in a U.S. hospital is about $3,000 per day, but it varies significantly by location. So long stays like yours might cost between $250,000 and $500,000.

    If your insurance covers it (and about 92% of Americans have health insurance), you'd be looking at your annual out of pocket max, which the law caps at $18,000 for family plans or $9,000 for individual plans, but which most people on employer sponsored plans (around 60% of Americans) have out of pocket maxes around $4,000 to $5,000. Source

    So for most Americans, your hospital stay would've probably cost the individual patient about $5,000. Insurance would've paid another $350,000.

    But for some Americans, they'd be looking at a $360,000 bill and then would just file bankruptcy, start over with close to a net worth of zero, at least for non-exempt assets (people generally get to keep their homes, cars, and retirement accounts in bankruptcy so it won't actually be starting from zero if you're well into a middle age in the middle class).

    Or worse, the hospital would realize they're not getting paid, and then would find a reason to kick you out as soon as you're stabilized. They have to keep you alive even when you can't pay, but don't have to treat you beyond that for free.

  • Why is it often cheaper to buy new than repair old and how can repairing be encouraged on different levels of society?

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  • Let's take home appliances. Imagine you are a person who knows how to diagnose and repair microwaves. You keep all the most common parts for the most common brands in your warehouse. You bring them with you based on the customer's description of what is wrong, and you're prepared to efficiently apply to correct repair as soon as you're confident in your diagnosis.

    Your typical job looks like this:

    • Get a call, get all the billing information (15 minutes).
    • Drive out to the person's home (30 minutes).
    • Talk to the customer (15 minutes).
    • Unscrew and disassemble the access panels to the appliance itself (15 minutes).
    • Diagnose and test things to make sure your initial hunch is correct (15 minutes).
    • Remove and replace the faulty part (15 minutes).
    • Put everything back where it belongs (15 minutes).
    • Drive back to your office (30 minutes).

    There, that's 2.5 hours of your time to do a 15-minute task of installing a part. At the factory, a much less skilled person (who doesn't need to know how to diagnose different models, or manage a business) could have installed 10 of those in the same amount of time. Maybe more, because they wouldn't have had to remove an old one.

    Most manufacturing is like this. Assembly is easy. Repair is hard. So repair of heavy/bulky/stationary things is always going to be very expensive. It may be more economical to tow the thing to a central place to be repaired, so that the worker doesn't have to waste too much time driving from place to place.

    Throw in the need to keep an inventory of dozens of parts for hundreds of models, and you're also paying for the warehouse space and parts supply chain, and the interest on the money spent up front to stock up, maybe to be recovered later when a job actually needs that part.

    The economics strongly favor assembling new stuff rather than repairing old stuff for anything even remotely simple. It isn't until you're up to the $5,000 range that it becomes pretty normal to prefer an all-day repair job over paying for a replacement.

    For $500 devices, it's gonna be pretty hard to economically repair things.

  • NSFW Deleted

    Permanently Deleted

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  • I'm only generally familiar with the big crime podcast/documentaries that spilled into the mainstream about 10 years ago: first season of Serial, Making a Murderer. And both of those were highly critical of the police work and called convictions into question (and actually got the public attention on the wrongful convictions).

    More recently, I've seen the HBO series on Karen Read, and it painted a picture of severe police misconduct that at worst tried to frame an innocent person, and at best botched the investigation to make a conviction of a guilty person difficult to impossible.

    So yeah, crime documentaries often do show police misconduct and incompetence. At least the ones that hit my radar.

  • Podcast Bro Turns on Trump: ‘I Voted For None of This’

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  • You might enjoy dunking on them (which is fine) just as long as you're not actively pushing them away.

    The easiest way is to enlist their involvement in dunking on the actual politicians, officials, and policymakers. A fascist movement relies heavily on a reluctant populace complying in advance, which is why little pieces of resistance can be effective against fascists. Humor, sarcasm, and outright mockery of the people giving the flimsy orders diminishes their power by persuading the public that there won't be consequences for those who ignore those orders.

    It's not going to be enough by itself, but having the apolitical comedians turn against fascism is still a useful thing to have on our side.

  • Solar + Battery (covering 97% of demand) is now cheaper than coal and nuclear

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  • No, LCOE is an aggregated sum of all the cash flows, with the proper discount rates applied based on when that cash flow happens, complete with the cost of borrowing (that is, interest) and the changes in prices (that is, inflation). The rates charged to the ratepayers (approved by state PUCs) are going to go up over time, with inflation, but the effect of that on the overall economics will also be blunted by the time value of money and the interest paid on the up-front costs in the meantime.

    When you have to pay up front for the construction of a power plant, you have to pay interest on those borrowed funds for the entire life cycle, so that steadily increasing prices over time is part of the overall cost modeling.

  • Solar + Battery (covering 97% of demand) is now cheaper than coal and nuclear

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  • My problem with nuclear is both the high cost and, somewhat counterintuitively, the very long life cycles to spread that high cost. The economics only make sense if the plant runs for 75 years, which represents an opportunity cost of displacing whatever might be available in 25 or 50 years.

    A solar plant planned in 2025 might be online in 2027, and decommissioned in 2047, replaced with whatever technology/economics are available then. But a new nuclear reactor bakes in the costs for 80+ years, to be paid by ratepayers who haven't been born yet.

    So if in 2050 a 2030-constructed nuclear plant is still imposing costs of $66/MWh on ratepayers, to finance the interest and construction costs from 25 years earlier, will that be competitive with the state of solar/wind/batteries/hydrothermal at that time? Given the past trend lines, it seems economically foolish to lock in today's prices for the next 80 years.

  • Solar + Battery (covering 97% of demand) is now cheaper than coal and nuclear

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  • Solar + Battery (covering 97% of demand) is now cheaper than coal and nuclear

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  • Ok, current projections are still for the next two AP1000s at Vogtle to be something like $10 billion. That's just not cost competitive with solar/wind. And it's also not very realistic to assume that there won't be cost overruns on the next one, either. Complex engineering projects tend to run over.

  • Solar + Battery (covering 97% of demand) is now cheaper than coal and nuclear

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  • Also where did you see they did amortization of solar?

    I'm just familiar with Lazard's LCOE methodology. The linked paper talks about LCOE, so that's just how that particular cost analysis works.

  • Solar + Battery (covering 97% of demand) is now cheaper than coal and nuclear

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  • Vogtle added 2 AP1000 reactors for $35 billion. Future deployments might be cheaper, but there's a long way to go before it can compete with pretty much any other type of power generation.

  • Solar + Battery (covering 97% of demand) is now cheaper than coal and nuclear

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  • But the other misleading part is they looked at 20 years which is close to the life cycle for solar/batteries and not even half the life of nuclear

    I think Lazard's LCOE methodology looks at the entire life cycle of the power plant, specific to that power plant. So they amortize solar startup/decommissioning costs across the 20 year life cycle of solar, but when calculating LCOE for nuclear, they spread the costs across the 80 year life cycle of a nuclear plant.

    Nuclear is just really, really expensive. Even if plants required no operating costs, the up front costs are so high that it represents a significant portion of the overall operating costs for any given year.

    The Vogtle debacle in Georgia cost $35 billion to add 2 MW 2GW (edit to fix error) of capacity. They're now projecting that over the entire 75 year lifespan the cost of the electricity will come out to be about $0.17 to $0.18 per kilowatt hour.

  • Judge Rules Training AI on Authors' Books Is Legal But Pirating Them Is Not

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  • Archive.org was distributing the books themselves to users. Anthropic argued (and the authors suing them weren't able to show otherwise) that their software prevents users from actually retrieving books out of the LLM, and that it only will produce snippets of text from copyrighted works. And producing snippets in the context of something else is fair use, like commentary or criticism.

  • Judge Rules Training AI on Authors' Books Is Legal But Pirating Them Is Not

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  • just spitting the information back out, without paying the copyright source

    The court made its ruling under the factual assumption that it isn't possible for a user to retrieve copyrighted text from that LLM, and explained that if a copyright holder does develop evidence that it is possible to get entire significant chunks of their copyrighted text out of that LLM, then they'd be able to sue then under those facts and that evidence.

    It relies heavily on the analogy to Google Books, which scans in entire copyrighted books to build the database, but where users of the service simply cannot retrieve more than a few snippets from any given book. That way, Google cannot be said to be redistributing entire books to its users without the publisher's permission.

  • Judge Rules Training AI on Authors' Books Is Legal But Pirating Them Is Not

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  • What does an LLM application (or training processes associated with an LLM application) have to do with the concept of learning?

    No, you're framing the issue incorrectly.

    The law concerns itself with copying. When humans learn, they inevitably copy things. They may memorize portions of copyrighted material, and then retrieve those memories in doing something new with them, or just by recreating it.

    If the argument is that the mere act of copying for training an LLM is illegal copying, then what would we say about the use of copyrighted text for teaching children? They will memorize portions of what they read. They will later write some of them down. And if there is a person who memorizes an entire poem (or song) and then writes it down for someone else, that's actually a copyright violation. But if they memorize that poem or song and reuse it in creating something new and different, but with links and connections to that previous copyrighted work, then that kind of copying and processing is generally allowed.

    The judge here is analyzing what exact types of copying are permitted under the law, and for that, the copyright holders' argument would sweep too broadly and prohibit all sorts of methods that humans use to learn.

  • Judge Rules Training AI on Authors' Books Is Legal But Pirating Them Is Not

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  • specifically about the training itself.

    It's two issues being ruled on.

    Yes, as you mention, the act of training an LLM was ruled to be fair use, assuming that the digital training data was legally obtained.

    The other part of the ruling, which I think is really, really important for everyone, not just AI/LLM companies or developers, is that it is legal to buy printed books and digitize them into a central library with indexed metadata. Anthropic has to go to trial on the pirated books they just downloaded from the internet, but has fully won the portion of the case about the physical books they bought and digitized.