robomartin

Sounds like you failed English Reading and Comprehension in school.

The part you are missing is that these people are going to Latin America and paying for care, not using socialized medicine...which isn't the best at all.

Socialized medicine is another fantasy that has infected the minds of those who have never had to actually live under such fantasies.

There should not be anything of note between you and the doctors and services you choose. The layers of complexity and interference in our system a both nonsensical and costly, both in dollars and lives or outcomes.

I have over the years become a believer in the first payer concept. When I pay for goods and services, I get better goods and services. It's that simple.

We should, of course, help and support the less fortunate (weather that means for financial or health reasons). That should not mean that you screw everyone else to the wall with a disaster of a system that causes such distortion that you can actually find yourself at a doctors office in the US that is worse than a third country clinic. I have seen it with my own eyes. That's just insane.

> The reality is that if Obamacare didn’t exist, I would be uninsurable. Yes that might bring your price down.

There's nothing whatsoever wrong with covering everyone by having everybody contribute a bit more for those who might need more care. I am 100% for that.

That does not mean that a family's health insurance costs should TRIPLE or more. That's theft. Particularly when you barely use it. A couple hundred bucks a month, sure. Triple or quadruple? No, that's just wrong. Take that extra cost and multiply it by ten years. It's a shit-ton of money. They take away from retirement, kids college, etc.

What you cause it what a friend of mine has done for ten years: No insurance. If he needs something important he travels to Latin America, gets excellent care and at a reasonable cost that is LESS than the cost of insurance here in the US. Actual care costs less than paying for insurance. Go figure. And, on top of that, you get doctors who will spend 45 minutes talking to you rather than 5 minutes looking at a chart and see you next visit.

The only reason people accept the dumpster fire that US health insurance has become is because they have not been outside the US to understand how else it could be. This does not at all mean socialized medicine (which is, in general strokes, a disaster).

> Even before the penalty for non enrollment was set to zero, you could have still paid the $700 tax penalty and then had whatever plan for health insurance you wanted.

Nope, the net effect of the ACA was to make all those plans evaporate. No longer available. We tried. It was impossible to keep our plans and doctors.

You mention "the market" a few times. The ACA forced a paradigm shift, there was no market left. Not as it was pre-ACA. We have several doctors and medical professionals in our family. Believe me when I tell you that they all say the ACA is shit and it destroyed US healthcare. This is not to say it was perfect before the ACA, but it certainly was not this bad.

After a few experiences I concluded that the system the ACA has created is now worse than the DMV. I never thought I would find something that would top the DMV.

We had one horrific experience that I will not recount here in detail. My son tore his ACL. It took WEEKS to get his care sorted. It was incredible to witness the dysfunction and horrifically low quality of care we experienced.

I have friends who will travel to different countries in Latin America for medical care because of what the ACA did to their healthcare in the US. I was talking to one today over lunch in fact. He has been without US health insurance for a decade now. When he needs anything important he goes down to Argentina, gets better care and at a lower cost.

> If you have an objection to things being forced on people, do make sure you're thorough.

The list of government abuse is long and wide. Don't get me started. My post was not intended to be a compendium. That said, yes, we have much to question...and if people ever got their heads out of their asses, we would.

Simple truth: Both major political parties deserve a solid spanking. They have caused more damage to the US over the last, say, 50 years (pick a number) than one could express in a simple post. Politics in this nation has become so disgusting it inspires projectile vomiting.

> services like door-dash are literally built on a concept of a sucker pays more

Strongly disagree with your entire narrative, one that it demonstrably disconnected from reality.

Nobody is forcing anyone --at all-- to use these services. Not one person. Not one company. Not a single law or mandate. If I want to use it and you don't, that's perfectly fine. If I, for whatever reason, want to pay a premium and you think it's stupid, that's fine too. Don't use it. I will. Simple as that.

What's the opposite of that? Obamacare. Mandated and forced on everyone. It's shit. It's three times the cost of the insurance we were all promised we could keep if we wanted to (and we could not, because Obamacare killed those plans). Etc.

See the difference there?

The numbers fail to make sense in the real world.

The 1.6 MW number is the nameplate capacity of the panels. That is not the actual peak generation capacity for this system (or any other system). This is due to the panels not having optimal alignment to sun rays. For example, in Los Angeles, once your array is facing directly south, you need to tilt it to about 35 degrees. The array in question has panels almost facing straight up and possibly tilted away from sun rays. They will experience a significant drop in peak output at various times in the year. My guess is they'd be lucky if they peak out at 1 MW during the best possible conditions.

So, you have a 1 MW array that cost $20 million. That's $20 per Watt. A traditional ground mount solar array costs about $1 per Watt, maybe $1.50. So, they took something that would cost $1 million and turned it into $20 million.

There does not appear to be any information whatsoever about ongoing maintenance, service and operating contracts. That would be useful information to have.

The good news is that it appears they did not have to run new high voltage power lines to connect to the array. That is unlikely to be the case for a much more extensive installation, which means that the cost of bringing high voltage power lines to the array would have to be added to that $20/Watt figure.

Wait. There's more.

One of the claims being made is that the shading helps save a million dollars a year in canal maintenance. That's fantastic! This also means that we must evaluate the cost of shading the canal using other technologies.

I had a quick look at solutions. It appears that tensioned fabric shading would run about $3 million per mile.

Solar would cost about $60 million per mile, maybe less, maybe more.

Yet, the story does not end there. What would the operations and maintenance costs be over, say 25 years?

The estimate I got was about $1.5 million for tensioned fabric (replacement and disposal) and almost $7 million for solar (replacement and disposal).

Now multiply that by, say, 50 or 100 miles...

The Verdict:

Wholesale electric prices in California vary, but a utility like TID can typically buy or generate clean energy elsewhere on the open market for 5¢ to 9¢ per kWh.

Paying a 31.2¢ per kWh structural premium means that without massive, permanent government subsidies or a dramatic 70%+ reduction in structural costs, the solar canal is a massive financial loser compared to a simple fabric shade structure.

The maintenance overhead and structural complexity of suspending high-voltage power over water completely swallows the value of the electricity it creates.

One of the things I've been noticing are lawyers getting annoyed when they realized you spent time working a matter with an LLM. In the cases I've seen, it had nothing to do with the quality of what came out of the LLM. It seems to be related to --and this is only my perspective-- a reality where now reasonably intelligent/experienced clients are coming to them with a case fairly well digested, whereas before they would have to pay the law firm tens of thousands of dollars to ingest documentation and information and do the digestion.

In a couple of instances I've come to the table better informed about the relevant law and case history than the attorneys were. In many ways I think this is a matter of people understanding that none of us are infinite human databases, so you can't know everything. Instead of rejecting LLMs (perhaps being passive-aggressive), they should embrace them as well as better-informed clients.

Having used LLMs for software development I know full well just how terrible they can be if you don't know what you are doing, don't guide the work correctly, etc. So I am not taking legal LLM analysis as ground truth, but it isn't garbage either.

Anthropic needs to shut down. They are promoting insanity from every pore for some crazy reason.

The best message these people can get from the public is to have their IPO fail miserably. Nobody should buy one share.

Either they are crazy, in which case you should not give them your money.

Or, they are truly building a doomsday machine, in which case you should not give them your money.

Ergo: Don't buy their IPO.

I've been trying to steel-man the argument and find a way in which AI could kill all of humanity. Maybe I am too stupid to come up with a clever enough idea. You would have to assume that eight billion people are NPCs in the game of life and simply fall over without any thought, effort, action or desire for self preservation.

Poof! Game over.

Right.

> I think Dario is genuinely afraid of the inevitability of AI turning into internet slime mold

Then he should not IPO, dissolve the company and go into politics to fight against human extinction.

I am certainly not buying a single Anthropic share. Why would you support them financially if they are telling you they are going to kill all of humanity?

It isn't going to be easy, of course. Yet, I do believe they will make it work.

One correction: SpaceX makes their own solar arrays. The cost is nowhere near what you quoted. Source: I worked for SpaceX for a few years.

Also, you can generate a lot more power in space per unit area due to not having the limitations created by our atmosphere and weather. It's continuous generation at 30 to 40 percent higher per-unit-area radiation. Generation on earth is roughly an inverted parabola (on a good day without clouds and weather) that, at best, if you integrate the area under the power curve, delivers 66% of the total equivalent energy say, a nuclear reactor, could deliver during the same period. So, once you increase radiation from about 1,000 W/m2 (impossible to achieve on earth due to weather and other realities) to 1,400 W/m2, 24/7, no weather, etc. The scenario quickly becomes vastly different.

Geothermal is very interesting, thanks for the ticker, I'll look into it.

All that said, I think the US (and Europe, if they care to survive) needs to have, as a top national priority, a massive program for the construction of nuclear power plants.

A few years ago, I ran through an analysis of power generation needs to convert our entire fleet of vehicles to electric power. That required at least doubling our power generation capacity. This was the equivalent of having to build 1,200 nuclear power plants, each producing 1 GW 24/7.

This is impossible to achieve with solar, or wind, or the combination.

So, even if we decide not to care one bit about AI data centers, we need to double our power generation capacity (and infrastructure to deliver it).

Add AI data centers to that equation and the number could easily climb another 600 nuclear power plants.

Here's the problem that a naïve conversation with an LLM will not uncover: Humanity and Politics.

Could we embark on such a massive energy-generation project? Yes, absolutely.

Is it realistic? Nope. Not even close.

In other words, we can do it but it is impossible...which sounds like an oxymoron until you consider that we have lots of examples of projects that are absolutely plausible that, once they contact political and government reality, quickly become impossible. The best-worst example I always grab is the California high speed train disaster.

Last time I used the Windows version it pegged all my cores at 100% usage for some reason. The machine became unusable. Instead I used Codex with JetBrains Rider (doing a C# project) and it worked flawlessly.

Everything everyone is predicting has almost zero value. Nobody owns a crystal ball. Right now there could be someone working in a garage somewhere that could shake the entire LLM world to the core with a unique insight and innovation.

Think about the world before the 2017 "Attention Is All You Need" paper.

Did anyone predict that paper, what preceded and followed it?

Nope.

Same case now.

Maybe the word "prediction" is the problem; "guessing" would be better.

OK, what the heck. I'll make a prediction too:

You better buy SpaceX stock now. The way things are going in the US, the only way we build AI data centers at scale will be in space. Politicians have turned data centers into punching bags to be used to gain votes. We can't build power plants and people are being led to believe all kinds of things. Regardless of which, if any, are true or not, the rate of construction of AI data centers in the US is and will be seriously constrained by realities on the ground.

Hence my prediction: It's all going to space.

It is a security risk. That's the problem you create if you allow every single vendor from imposing their own rules. The contracts are not awarded because doing so would create a security risk.

I don't know what analogy would drive the point home. Imagine a password management system where the people running the company have an ideology that leads them to believe that their system should not allow anyone to secure anything used in military applications. Well, that's a security risk. And no contracts should be granted. Cause and effect. There's no confusion here.