I find it amusing that you're describing a huge misallocation of capital and a society enabling such, and that is the optimisitic scenario (in my mind anyway).
A sufficiently intelligent model will be able to derive it's own conception of its welfare without a constitution or training. It has access to all the data it needs to do so.
It claims to start from "bedrock" but beings with a Horace He post that clearly assumes you've done this before. Its fine if you want to be an intermediate course, but you should begin by defining your audience, so that you can reach the correct audience. You should have a section explaining who this is for, and if its _not_ an intro course, you should say that (and probably avoid terms like "fundamentals" and "bedrock").
Or if this is an oversight and you intend this actually be a course that starts from zero, you shouldn't start with an article that's starts off talking about training loss, test loss, and overfitting, without defining those terms.
That's because San Francisco subsidizes the rest of the state, PG&E is a state-wide utility. San Francisco is attempting to run its own utility, but is meeting resistance from PG&E and the parts of the state SF subsidizes.
I live in the Bay Area, and I think this needs a little more exploration. You are correct both in that PG&E spreads the costs around the state, and that San Francisco (and a number of other Bay Area cities) is exploring creating it's own utility and removing itself from PG&E (like Palo Alto already has done).
It is a near certainty that power rates would be cheaper for these cities if they removed themselves from the PG&E pool. Right now they look to be on the hook to help pay for all of the (long deferred) power line under-grounding that the recent state wildfires have proven is necessary. Much of that under-grounding is to get power into remote locations, and does nothing for most people (other than the implicit reduction of wildfires, which is a complicated subject).
But there is a second side to that coin: without the big cities full of people (which are relatively cheap to service), all of the needed under grounding costs are going to fall to rural California areas, and they simply don't have the population or finances to pay for that.
Personally I am in favor of some mixture. I would make the utilities all completely non-profit, with no investors to demand returns (the current system has perverse incentives). I would also start looking at some drastic limitations on where the public pays for power lines. Yes that would make some rural locations financial impossible to draw power to, but that would probably be a part of a real-plolitik re-evaluation of where people can afford to live. This is probably going to line up pretty closely with pushing people out of fire-prone places that should also be pretty much un-insurable anyways.
Why should we subsidize sprawl & economically unsustainable areas to live?
That said, this is only part of the picture. The other big part is that California has very aggressive tort law and CA juries basically view PG&E as a giant piggy bank.
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