That "just" is really doing a lot of heavy lifting.
Economics is what makes this country work. If converting to renewables makes more money, that's what will happen and the people making the money will find a way to justify it politically.
Economics only make the country work when societal costs are not externalised by those that cause them. Which they have been, always, by fossil fuel companies.
Because cheap fossil fuels's benefits will dissipate in two decades if we can move to green energy while the downsides project into whatever time remains of organized human civilization.
The benefits of fossil fuels will also be felt for centuries as well. It's what moved us into the comfortable lives we all enjoy today and lifted billions out of poverty.
The point isn't that they're wonderful, it's that they're treated as this thing that only a few have benefited from, when it's exactly the opposite.
This can't be denied but the reality is that the fossil fuel industry has done everything in its power to delay the transition to other forms of energy for the past 50 years with great success and to their benefit. What could have been a successful transition to nuclear and solar would have implied maybe up to 30% of the emissions we have created thus far, which would have drastically changed the panorama of climate change where we wouldn't be in the position where we are today.
It's literally just a couple of decades of effort what separates the scenarios between mild climate change and the accelerated extinction of most of humanity and biomes. All so that Saudi Aramco and Chevron could get a bit more profit.
From the perspective of our evolutionary fitness function the most critical thing is to eliminate existential risk, and from the dawn of the industrial revolution to now all we've done is create them. Fossil Fuels allow us to keep 8 billion people alive at the same time temporarily, which is a reckless and irresponsible thing to do. If it isn't sustainable it's a joke.
Which makes it all the more remarkable given the century+ headstart fossil fuels had in entrenching itself in our political process and power structures.
Texas is doing something right, that’s for sure. But it’s not so clear what that thing is that the topic can be considered settled without debate.
You are ignoring the fact that the Trump administration has taken proactive steps to interfere with economics and prevent people and companies from building cheaper clean energy. They have tried to ban offshore windfarms and when that didn’t work they straight up paid Total $1billion to build fossil fuel plants instead. They spend millions to tear out already installed chargers from federal property. They illegally clawed back funding states and companies were already spending on clean energy. They eliminated tax benefits for electric cars, causing car companies to spend several billion dollars to completely reverse their production strategies.
In an ideal world where the market is perfect, maybe.
But in reality entrenched market players have access to political influence that lets them stay entrenched. They’ve spent a lot of money since the Industrial Revolution to make sure we need them.
It’s not a perfect free market. There’s no such thing. Politics has a huge influence in economics and vis versa. They’re intertwined.
It’s not a hypothesis. It’s an observation of reality. The current administration canceled massive renewable projects and has incentivized reopening coal plants, subsidized fossil fuels, and opened government land to oil drilling.
China is doing it the right way : use fossils but pouring that money into renewables. Use economic forces to cut the dependency . Everything else is just pipe dream building never happened utopian communism 2.0 .
In practice, it doesn't seem to make much difference:
> Propensity score matching and regression analyses of the National Inmate Survey are used to examine individuals’ experiences and perceptions of environmental quality in public versus private prisons across key domains of prison life, with an emphasis on needs, behaviors, victimization, and attitudes. No differences are identified for women. Males in private prisons are more likely than men in public prisons to perceive there to be inadequate staffing and are less likely to report maintaining ties with people outside of prison. Men in private prisons are also less likely to report crowding to be an issue.
Public unions are fine as long as there is a counterweight.
What do I mean by a counterweight? For example, the MLB owners hold a monopsony over hiring pro baseball athletes, but the athletes have their own monopoly via the MLBPA. The result of this bilateral monopoly is that MLB players get better compensated than most other pro athletes. Of course the MLB is private, but I’m illustrating one type of counterweight.
You can have a similar system for public prisons requiring public unions, and Norway found a creative counterweight. Norway unionizes the prison correctional officers, but they also allow incarcerated people the right to organize; this allows them to negotiate wages, safety, and education programs. This provides a nice counterweight as prisoners have an incentive to advocate against correctional officer bloat/waste so those resources go to inmates, while correctional officers have a symmetric interest to keep prisoner bloat at bay. This is because they are ultimately competing for the same (finite) state budget.
Accordingly, giving prisoners more rights to advocate for themselves solves many problems of having a public union, while ensuring that budgets stay capped and tight. Conversely, the private sector tends to lobby aggressively to suppress prisoners' rights to maximize shareholder value, which permanently destroys this counterweight mechanism.
Premised on this counterweight system working, public prisons may not be sufficient to keep prisons humane, but they are likely necessary part of the solution.
For-profit is the delivery system, which should save taxpayer money. Systems where the institutions are directly administered by taxpayer funds and their attendant public employee unions also have political/financial incentives.
Either way - publicly-run or private contractor, if the government is a good steward of public funds, they'll monitor well to avoid waste and remove people who are trying to unjustly enrich themselves. And if the officials are incompetent or corrupt themselves, they'll fail to recognize when those things are happen, or participate themselves. I don't see a big difference in public vs. private unless I imagine a fantasy government run only by officials who are smart and highly ethical.
Because the state prisons are trying to cut costs and/or profit the same way the private ones are. They just tend to invest in waste and expansion rather than pay $$ to owners/investors.
The whole thing is rotten. Changing the ownership of the mess doesn't make it not rotten.
Taking it to a logical extreme is good practice for thinking from first principles, but always pair it up with going to the logical extreme in the other direction. That might look something like: "would you really eat at a restaurant owned by a habitual jaywalker?".
It seems to me that LLM's could massively improve reproducibility issues if journals would require that the papers be reproducible by model X using a standardized prompt in < N minutes, etc...
Yes, that is a economic & public health policy problem that really needs to be solved. We can look to Japan as example of what's possible, they have invested in nearly twice the number of scanners per capita of Canada, and they can get same-day MRIs for $50, roughly speaking.
From what I know, seems like a mix of medical price fixing by the gov't, adoption of lower cost hardware, and universal healthcare. There's apparently less bureaucracy, perhaps because there is no need for negotiation at every step of the process?
There are big costs. The hardware, the facility (RF cage and chillers), power, water, staff, RIS/PACS etc etc.
I can’t see how you can do it for $50. Does the ‘universal healthcare’ bit mean that the government is paying most the bill and it’s $50 out of pocket?
Yes, $50 was a rough out-of-pocket estimate, the amortized cost per scan for operation alone is probably on the order of hundreds of dollars per scan, assuming high utilization.
One funny thing about MRIs is the magnet is always on, so there could be some clever ways to reduce costs running them after hours.
> there could be some clever ways to reduce costs running them after hours.
It seems like a dedicated round the clock facility housing at least dozens of MRI machines ought to offer significant economies of scale. I wonder if I'm wrong about that or if there's some other reason we don't see this approach taken by governments.
The staffing costs then skyrocket. 1.5x or double time. However, the main obstacle is a lack of staff. Good staff are hard to find and worth what they cost. And they usually don't want to work out of hours.
The economies of scale are interesting. Eg PACS/RIS cost very little more when you increase scans done, and rent is a fixed cost. The best thing that happens are you increase scanners at a the management of no-shows. Patients fail to turn up regularly (a 'did not arrive', DNA). With more imaging going on, you just grab the next available patient, the gap ends up later on, then you make a new booking. The record at my site is 6 DNAs and no slots missed.
I run a small MRI service.
Is the premium really that large for the night shift at (for example) a hospital? But even if you can't do 24/7 presumably there are physicians and technicians who would be willing to do either early morning or late evening without demanding much of a premium.
A massive daytime only facility should at least enjoy reduced capex and maintenance burdens if they have enough machines in one place. Less duplicated infrastructure and everything closer at hand.
Although if as you say even a small service can paper over 6 DNAs without missing a slot then maybe there isn't all that much to be gained here.
I’ve just checked the contract for the largest employer of techs (in New Zealand) and they only get 1.25X for night shifts. This is the rate at public hospitals. Private employers pay more and the penal rates are more aggressive - due in part to none of us wanting nights or weekends worked.
However that’s a bit meaningless as night shifts don’t exist. MRI is run as an oncall service and only acute scans are done at night - good luck getting a consultant to come in for anything less.
There are staff who like early starts (6am) and a smaller number who like to finish a bit later 6-9pm).
Techs are lucky enough to be in demand and if an employer pushes too hard, they’ll go somewhere that’s a better fit.
We only site 2 MRs next to each other, so savings are going to be minimal but we do see staffing advantages and less downtime. Coils scan swap between machines, one chiller can supply both MR scanners (just… be careful).
Depends for what reason. I trained in Canada. Studies are triaged priority 1 through 4 in most provinces. Nowhere in Canada is a high priority MRI waiting 2 months.
Arbitrary enforcement of a regulations is against the principles of administrative law and gives rise to a cause of action that can set aside the governments action. So all regulation has that as an explicit assumption.
There is also a case that it violates due process because anthropic wasn’t provided adequate notice before enforcement or an opportunity to challenge, respond, or take steps to comply.
There is latitude for compelling state interests and national security is one with the widest latitude and potentially one that counts can’t review. But the court of public opinion may draw the inference that this is direct retaliation for refusing to make the models available for autonomous weapons and spying.
A country that is a thousand years old is obviously going to have to change its constitution.
European countries have gone from massive societal changes to massive societal changes (for example from monarchies to republics).
The USA is a new country, and its constitutional rigidity causes a lot of social and political problems that most likely will lead to big changes in the future.
Yes, some countries in Europe remained monarchies for 1500 years or longer. They didn't really have a constituion back then because they were not republics.
They really did have constitutions back then. Substantial constitutions. With many many many documents over hundreds of years.
A constitution, or supreme law, is the aggregate of fundamental principles or established precedents that constitute the legal basis of a polity, organization or other type of entity, and commonly determines how that entity is to be governed. [0]
Their entire history of implementing and applying principles of Roman Law and other creeds was their ever growing constitution.
> The USA is a new country, and its constitutional rigidity
and general loudness on the matter of "what is a constitution and why ours is the first and the greatest" has caused much confusion given they have such a short and barely evolved one.
Furthermore, even if the trade deficit was something to worry about, why should the food and drug safety bureaucracies be the ones to determine that kind of economic policy?
I've been working through Nand2Tetris with my 13-year-old son, but the official hardware simulator was pretty overwhelming. That's why I built a browser version that tests the first 2 chapters, is simpler, and has a tighter feedback loop with more helpful hints.
