If you primarily choose to watch educational videos sure, but YouTube can give you just as much brainrot as TikTok, depending on what the recommendation engine decides you might like.
The answer, IMO, is simply banning all algorithm-driven social media, for everyone and not just kids.
This conveniently sidesteps the identity/privacy arguments, makes it much easier to enforce, and would present an even greater net benefit. There is no benefit to algorithmic social media at all, and everyone would be better off without it.
Plot here is quite thick. SF selling power to PG&E to distribute was found illegal/in violation of the Raker Act by the US Supreme Court in 1940 in United States v. City and County of San Francisco.
SF shifted to "wheeling" instead of selling power to PG&E and is tenuously in compliance now, but the current set up was never intended when the federal government ceded water and power rights from Yosemite to SF.
The other angle that people may not realize is that SF has voted in nine separate elections to not establish a municipal utility. The people of SF demonstrably do not want to take over PG&E, given numerous opportunities.
SMUD has cheap power because 100 years ago the people of Sacramento invested a lot of money to establish that utility. What the vocal minority of SF public power people want is magical: cheaper rates without all that bothersome investment.
100% of its generation and grid stability is provided by PG&E. All it provides is the local distro and local maintenance. Also, in a low generation scenario, you are the first to be cut off to save the rest of the grid.
Please remember that the lines from HH to SF are the same ones that caused wildfires in CA over the last 10 years. So if SF owns the line, they own that liability too. And a single fire's cost is about 3x the yearly budget of SF.
> remember that the lines from HH to SF are the same ones that caused wildfires in CA over the last 10 years. So if SF owns the line, they own that liability too
Crazy thought—dedicate the resources to maintaining them. From what I can tell, this tolerance of power-sparked wildfires is uniquely American (and concentrated, fairly and unfairly, in California).
Also, you don’t have to put it straight on the municipal balance sheet. Stick it in a distribution subsidiary with a little outside capital. (Hell, make it a member-owned co-operative.)
Alternative: sell off that transmission to someone else. Just handle last-mile distribution. Not transmission.
Some generation PG&E owns, some is in a shared vehicle split between PG&E and a group of private investors, some is owned by other utilities (Edison) and some is just privately owned. Remember that generation was built up over 70 years. Different plants at different times with different politics ends up with different ownership arrangements. They all bid into CAISO and independently choose to produce or not based upon prices. The generators sell futures contracts and PG&E (and Edison) buy them either in 1 day cycles or 15 minute cycles (almost always some of both).
> But PG&E has charged significantly more for power the last few years. Most people easily hit 50c/kwh on their bills.
Way more than that! In prime time it's now in the ~80c/kWh these days.
I've been posting this for years and continues to be true: given the price increase trend of PG&E, within 10 years the electricity bill will be larger than the mortgage.
Yikes… that means a Tesla Model S with a 95kWH battery would cost $76 to charge. Most people around the country pay way less than that to fill a combustion SUV at the pump.
I have some doubts about San Francisco’s ability to run a provider well, given the long history of corruption in city service providers and permitting agencies.
... that it produces about 976 GWh per year. A few different sources say that SF uses about 5-6 TWh per year. So that is slightly less than 20% of total power needs. Still, it is a good start.
> The angle of this that people may not realize is that San Francisco already owns the power generation (ie, the Hetch Hetchy dam).
My conclusion might be totally wrong because I'm converting from units that aren't meant to be converted, but...
If you filter down to only San Francisco County on this official-looking thingie [0], you see that it claims the city [1] has 5.126 TWh of consumption.
Your link [2] claims Hetch Hetchy Power System provides something like 395 MW of power generation capacity. I'm going to assume that that's a misprint and they meant to write MWh because that's the only thing that makes sense to me for a measure of power generation. While the last page of this PDF [3] indicates that the hydro generation component is capable of powering a bit more than twice the city's municipal demand, it seems like it's not enough to satisfy even 1/1000th of the demand of the entire city.
Perhaps I've totally fucked up my unit conversions (or relied on garbage data), but it looks like only the tiniest fraction of the city's power demands can be satisfied by the Hetch Hetchy dam. (Though, we could easily electrify way more of the Muni lines with the surplus capacity.)
I would assume 395MW is the nameplate capacity, so you would multiply it by a capacity factor and time to get the energy production in a specific interval. Capacity factor in hydro can vary a lot by season and how much they want to produce vs reservoir levels, but for a back of the envelope 100% capacity factor you have 395 MW × 8,760 hours/year = 3.46TWh/year . Capacity factor could be in the high 90s in good conditions and maximum production but I expect it's a lot lower unless it's a wet year with very few big maintenance jobs needed.
> Capacity factor could be in the high 90s in good conditions and maximum production but I expect it's a lot lower unless it's a wet year with very few big maintenance jobs needed.
Most rivers this far away from the equator don't receive the same inflows each season. For example, the spring will have very high flow due to melting snow in the mountains that feed that reservoir. I guess the winter has the lowest flow because snow melts much less in the winter.
I seriously doubt that any non-nuclear power generation in history has ever gotten to 90% capacity factor. Based on industry averages, HH is probably about 55-65% capacity. Things that effect this are: low demand periods (caused by lots of renewables), maintenance periods and low water levels at times (in winter) behind the dam.
Also, PG&E is HIGHLY regulated. Its prices, its generation and its executive compensation are all set by the state of CA. That SF wants to complain about those numbers is pretty amazing. Remember, they still don't have enough money in the tree trimming budget so that those same lines don't start fires in other parts of the state. Its the same wire that connects HH to SF. And somehow the city is going to manage that wire better?
PS The tree trimming budget is set by the state too. Why is it so low? Renewables cost money and that's one of the budgets they raided to get the funds.
to figure out roughly the maximum possible annual demand that could be served by the system? (For the purposes of this question, I'm just doing the -er- dimensional/unit/whatever analysis and ignoring production-capacity-reducing factors that you'd definitely have to factor in to get the real number.)
If so, what a boneheaded, rookie mistake by me. Thanks for the reply.
Power generation facilities are typically quoted in terms of Watts, not Watt-hours. From an era where these were fossil fuel or nuclear plants or dams that provided a pretty steady level of energy. It indicates what the generation facility/asset can produce at any given moment, although if rivers run dry hydro output can decrease.
I think the numbers you cite in [0] are in terms of total annual consumption.
The (nameplate) capacity is in watts. Its production is in watt hours. Some parties have intentionally confused these two concepts (capacity and production) to make certain power sources seem better than they are and other power sources worse than they are. The media consistently and clearly intentionally confuses these two concepts to prevent most people from learning how bad the numbers really are.
PS Capacity factor is the ratio between capacity and production. Its probably the single most important factor when comparing different generation types. Its intentionally made confusing because NPPs have 90+ cap factor and renewables have about 10ish cap factor. This makes renewables seem competitive when they are not. That's why this is always presented in a confusing manor.
PPS Its also the main reason power is so expensive in CA.
It's not really anything to do with "an era where these [...] provided a pretty steady level of energy", it's just the only way that makes sense to describe it in any case.
Demand is always instantaneous, and transmission lines from a generator need to be sized for the maximum instantaneous generation, so in terms of the size of (any kind of) generator it's the main thing you're interested in. Capacity factor brings in seasonal / daily output variation but that's a whole different thing.
You did this wrong but drew the right conclusion. Hetch Hetchy system exists but it is nowhere near the scale of powering the entire city of San Francisco.
Mmkay, so what were my core mistakes? Unit conversion failures? Order-of-magnitude errors? Sign problems (somehow)?
Both Wolfram Alpha and units(1) indicated that conversion between MW and MWh was totally nonsensical, so I presumed either that that was a typo, or that 1MW of power generation run for one hour will satisfy 1MWh of demand... assuming that either that demand is evenly spread throughout the hour, or that you can smooth over spikes with storage.
Your mistake is ignoring capacity factor. Most power generation has between 40% and 60% capacity factor. NPPs are 90+ and renewables are about 10. This is intentionally made confusing and you aren't helping because you don't understand this. I do get that this is a good faith error caused by the intention conflation of different units by PR statements.
Hydro resources are worse than anything because of their fish-based flow restrictions. They can't flow consistently all the time, the fish hate that. They have to ebb and flow.
> The arrogance of American tourists is truly boundless. How dare Japanese people not speak English! Who do they think they are?
This attitude is so unbelievably prevalent among native English speakers. "Obviously everyone should speak *my* language -- why should I ever have to learn another one?"
One would think "not being able to speak anything but Japanese" would be a problem for anyone not speaking Japanese, not just English speakers specifically, so this framing is more than a bit ironic, don't you think?
Seriously, what is so baffling about expecting an interpreter to be provided? Even if you do "speak" the language, this is not some everyday environment, and evidently not a good-faith one either. If I got into a similar situation in the US or similar, you can be sure as shit I'd ask for one too, even though I do believe I have a reasonable command over the English language in general.
An interpreter is in fact provided for important communications, but it's a given that there's not going to be interpreters on-hand for every foreign prisoner 24/7. I think most people would simply accept that a language barrier is a normal fact of life of being arrested in a foreign country. The expectation of not needing to speak a foreign language in a foreign country seems to be a uniquely English one, and it manifests in other ways. There are many people who come to Japan to teach English without understanding a word of Japanese, and then complain about the difficulty of life, how restaraunt staff won't speak English or provide an English menu for them, how this and that are not provided for in English. They don't attempt to learn Japanese even after teaching for 5+ years, and yet criticise Japan for not catering to their needs. The sense of entitlement gets nauseating after you've witnessed it enough.
You are legally entitled to an interpreter when being questioned by police or while in court. I believe the claims in the article are exaggerated, I would speculate intentionally so as the author is an engagement-farming content creator who has made several videos about the subject garnering hundreds of thousands of views. Of course, it is possible their experience was worse than what they are legally entitled to -- the real world often doesn't live up to ideals and legal rights can be violated -- but they speak in broad generalizations about the system as a whole that are not representative.
100% this -- westerners love to criticize Japan's justice system, while ignoring the fact that much of it actually works.
Drugs? Petty crime? Homelessness? No other country comes close to managing these problems as well as Japan does, and Japan somehow manages to do this without descending into a 1984-esque surveillance state. Wander the streets of Tokyo at night and you will see zero drug-addicted homeless people. How many western cities could one say that about?
The virtues you mention are not a consequence of the tortuous treatment described in the post though. Conditions could rise to Western humane standards and the underlying Japanese culture that allows for such peaceful living would still remain.
You can't take the Japanese criminal justice system out of Japan. It's part of a larger whole.
The Western mentality, especially in the USA, focuses on independent will. The government is not supposed to stop people from making choices that are bad for society or bad for themselves. In Japan, the mentality is that every person has an obligation to work with society and to fit in at all costs. The Japanese criminal justice system exemplifies that spirit, but it touches all areas, such as employment, personal relationships, behavior in public, talking to strangers, etc.
In short, if you want to have the advantages of Japan, you need to take it with the disadvantages as well.
Skid row isn’t abandonment, CA spends $47K per homeless person per year in direct and indirect assistance. It exists as it does due to intentional and well funded policy.
Even granting that (which... no. How is it true? Any evidence?) it's still less inhumane than what Japan is doing here. The conditions amount to torture.
The fact that many people opt to falsely plead guilty and get a reduced punishment in a society that highly values honor and saving face should say a lot about it.
Californian spend on homelessness is public info, you’re free to search it yourself.
There is something about seeing drug addicted zombies impossibly contorted in on themselves and swaying in the wind that appears very inhuman to me. If given the choice, pre zombification, of a false confession or life as a zombie I know which I would chose.
Extreme control of movement and sleep including deprivation of it for arbitrary amounts, constant lighting, no outside time, nothing to do for months at a time, lack of nutritious food, all those things in combination constitue torture under most modern definitions.
> Andrej Karpathy can train a GPT-2 class model for less than $80 now, so at least the environmental cost of training may drop to a point that it's acceptable to LLM vegetarians: https://twitter.com/karpathy/status/2017703360393318587
I suspect that even if you reduced the cost of training or any other real world metric, the goalposts would immediately move. It seems to me that it has never been about those things, but simply about the feeling of superiority one can attain by eschewing something seen as trending.
> built on massive exploitation of human labor and make profligate use of scarce resources
This kind of hyperbole repeated ad infinitum by haters online is not-constructive, IMO. I would be quite certain that the manufacture of whatever computing device the author is accessing the internet on used far more resources and exploited far more human labor than training an ML model ever did.
It's fair to think there will be positive effects and negative effects. The next question should be "for who?"
If the majority of the positive effects of AI are privatized and captured by people who are already wealthy, and the majority of the negative effects are socialized and felt by the poor, then I still think the correct position for most people is to be strongly against AI
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