Notices by Daniel Lakeland (dlakelan@mastodon.sdf.org)

You don't see this kind of spicy very often... Fortunately.

From Reddit r/electricians

https://www.reddit.com/r/electricians/comments/1fpo26t/not_something_you_see_everyday_evidently_this/

According to comments, it's real, and the cause was a downed power line onto a gas main.

What a great weekend. I stayed out late with my wife dancing Hustle in Atwater Village, and then slept in this morning, cooked a fancy brunch, and then my son made everyone amazing bbq chicken sandwiches and we went to Pasadena park for a Jazz concert with the Marcelo Bucater quartet. Then while we're there I swear I recognize the guitarist. After the show we found him and walked up to him and he sees us and turns to his wife and says "Oh hey, these are the guys from the Gelato place!"

I feel like you've got it made when you live in a place where you can take your son to a birthday dinner and gelato and get practically a private concert from a world-class jazz guitarist, who will then recognize you when you randomly show up to his next gig.

So, if you're in the Pasadena area and you want to hear great jazz guitar, check this guy out.

https://benthomasmusic.com/home

That they have to actually WASTE electricity in the middle of the day. This graph shows the total electric demand minus renewable generation capacity (dark purple), that amount went negative today around 10am, so they have to waste electricity.

In around 1979 my father together with a small number of electrical power engineers and activists sued the California Public Utility Commission to try to force them to allow solar and combined-heat-and-power cogeneration. He was naive about how much entrenched power there was. The CPUC was captured by Pacific Gas and Electric, and argued successfully that it was incredibly unsafe and impossible to allow people to generate electricity in their homes. 50 years later there's so much solar cogen

My father died 15 years ago or so without ever seeing this come about, but if a larger group of people with more power had forced this issue through the courts in the late 1970's we could have had fairly widespread solar and combined-heat-and-power generation in CA by 1989, dramatically reducing greenhouse emissions from CA over the last 30 years.

I'm against student loan forgiveness, not because I'm against giving the money out... but because I'm against giving it out *only* to student loan debtors. Here's the idea... give everyone equally a #UBI and let the people with student loans repay it from there. I'm ok with limiting interest rates too, and rolling back capitalization of back interest... totally fine with that. But if we're creating money out of thin air and giving it to anyone, it should 100% be equally distributed.

When you create money and give it to rich people, rich people buy up capital assets with it, consolidating businesses, stuff like "private equity firms". These seek out short term financial gains rather than long term *real asset* gains.

Here's mortgage asset level per capita CPI adjusted... To get mortgage loans you have to be wealthy... So again wealthy people buy up houses, which we aren't constructing much anymore either.

A huge huge huge part of why we have such a non-functional economy with wealth inequality so high is because *banks create money* but they give it almost exclusively to rich people. In this graph you can see commercial debt, CPI adjusted, per capita, through time. Repeatedly we give brand newly created money (aka Loans) to business owners, they fuck shit up, then we bail them out again, it's an amplifying oscillation. https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=1lz5V

Here's housing starts per capita: They are half as high as they were in 1960's.

@ZachWeinersmith
It's possible the "and hybrids" is doing a lot of the heavy lifting there?

I know Chevy decided to cancel the Bolt, then maybe reversed? I'm not sure the current status. Tesla has all sorts of major design flaws. The Kia vehicles seem really good. My guess is people are less likely to pay up front premiums for EV when having issues with inflation sucking down their wealth.

@JessTheUnstill @SymTrkl

I'm happy to say that many people in the "investor class" are leeches. They get laws passed that favor them, they have access to facilities and services others don't merely by being related to someone rich or etc... But the idea that all forms of investors are inherently leeches goes way too far, yet it's the logical consequence of your "they add no value to the process beyond having had capital".

Deciding where to put resources is a job.

@freemo
Right, a paradox is usually a misunderstanding. A situation where a heuristic analysis fails but a systematic one reveals the correct answer. A lot of statistics is using formalism to find the consequences of what we know. At least, a lot of Bayesian statistics is that.
@mjambon

@resuna
Software is properly understood as an economic "public good". The whole system of copyright etc is just rent seeking through threat of gun. Making money off public goods is inherently difficult, you need in essence to get paid first because once the product exists it's non-rivalrous. Copyright destroys all that by threatening to shoot you if you do the obvious thing of using a public good without paying the feudal lord
@hipsterelectron