Most people in California don’t have PG&E. Most of the land area in the northern 2/3 of the State or so is covered by PG&E, but people and land area aren't the same thing. Southern California Edison alone serves almost as many people as PG&E, and other smaller utilities, including public utilities like LADWP, SMUD, Silicon Valley Power, etc., serve another big chunk of the population.
SCE will screw you nearly as hard. We are on a tiered usage which is the cheapest they offer and it's $0.32/kWh and even at that rate the EV isn't much cheaper than the non-hybrid I replaced. I'd need to switch to a ToU plan which would increase my other electricity costs.
Also for depreciation:
2020 Mazda 3 - sold $18k at dealer, originally $28k, 64% retained
2022 Kia EV6 - bought $25k, originally $55k-$7.5k federal, 53% retained
I'm also gonna be that guy - hand wringing is a stereotype of an expression of distress, not coercion. You're thinking of the idiom "twisting someone's arm".
Weapons can come in all forms and sizes. When wielded with the blend of censorship and propaganda, (social) media is absolutely a weapon. Is there a reason why it won’t be?
Well it’s time to rethink that then. Necessity is the mother of all invention, and at one point it’ll be a necessity to downsize if you want an affordable home.
How much space do you really need to raise a child? I’m genuinely curious because Americans act like you need a mansion to raise kids.
A 3 bed with 1K sq ft still gives you like a 10x10 room - more than enough space for a crib and a queen bed. And you have two other bedrooms to spare. As they get older and need space to run around and stuff, there’s no shortage of parks / trails / fields.
> How much space do you really need to raise a child?
It definitely depends on climate. I live in Ireland (in a relatively small house in the suburbs) and in the summer, there's absolutely no problem as we can take the kids out pretty regularly. However, in the winter when it's dark at 5pm and wet and windy, I definitely feel like we don't have enough space.
I do think the US houses seem absurdly large to me, but then lots of the more recent houses built in ireland are of a similar size.
Yeah, the cold would bother me less than the rain and darkness, tbh.
> for short stints.
This is the issue though, we have a 2.5 year old who's just super active, and it's much easier to tire him out when the weather is better and there's more light. Like, right now in Ireland it's still completely dark by 5.30 which means it's hard to tire him out in the winter.
> and we still have 3rd Places nearby, like community centers
That's cool, we have those too but they're mostly kid friendly in the mornings and afternoons and used for adult stuff in the evenings.
I’m a little shocked to see the quality of some comments here - I would expect a more grounded discussion. This is like Reddit / YouTube comment history. Someone please tell me this is a Wendy’s.
Sure the Fed isn’t perfect. But we don’t really have a better solution as of now because our financial systems are extremely powerful and anyone in office would love to abuse it if they can.
Sure, the renovations are ridiculous. But it’s not like this administration is austere in the slightest, so that’s a bit rich. Not to mention the cronyism prevalent across the cabinet.
There's also little genuine conversation to be had. The situation is bad, has been bad, and seems to only be getting worse. That's the only interpretation any rational person can hold. And, when everyone has the same opinion and that opinion is drastic, that creates a circle jerk.
Not the renovations themselves but the cost is supposedly at 2.5B. Personally I don’t really mind but I also don’t think government buildings need to be all that fancy with marble flooring.
It was budgeted at 1.9B (in 2019). Most of the cost overruns are from unexpected site issues like asbestos (more than thought) and water table problems. The buildings are historic, they already had marble. The marble was taken down and saved, this marble will be re-used. Some pieces are damaged, those will be new marble. These buildings are near 100 years old. I also don't think they have marble floors, but facades and other stonework.
I don't understand the cost either, apparently it only costs around a billion dollars to build a skyscraper? The Burj Khalifa only cost one and a half billion dollars when completed in 2010. I don't know that there's criminal activity here, but the cost of this is rather surprising to me. I knew the Federal Reserve was being renovated, but I thought it was something closer to a hundred million dollars.
Do you know anything about how data science works? The algorithm is to be tuned over historical data to optimize for an unchanging reward function. The problem isn't that complicated if you think about it.
> The algorithm is to be tuned over historical data
So you’re saying that historical data can’t have biases? Data cannot be collected and shared (or not collected a la jobs report) to manipulate the output? Seems a bit of a naïve take if you ask me.
If data is not collected, it is missing. A decent algorithm will be robust to missing data.
How on earth do you think the Fed sets the rate? Each board member probably has a simple spreadsheet, although they use their gut feeling in the end. It's markedly less objective and completely un-transparent.
People here are funny in that when I preach for transparency and objectivity, they preach for obscurity and individual board member bias. Their skepticism of data science shows how uneducated they are about defining and optimizing an objective function.
I’m not saying I’m against an algorithm. I’m saying that I’m against _only_ an algorithm. And we do want transparency and objectivity - nobody is denying this. I’ve worked with enough data to know that there are implicit biases, and just because data exists doesn’t mean it’s good. Let’s just say I’m skeptical that an algorithm alone can replace the Fed.
> although they use their gut feeling in the end.
That gut feeling check is pretty crucial, I think. Why not just work to make the Fed a more transparent org? And let’s say it is by an algorithm - will it be open sourced so it can be vetted?
Edit: also more crucially, who’s responsible when the algorithm fucks up?
That's just something they say to scare the children.
In any event, the point of a decent algorithm is that if the result isn't complying with the action, upcoming updates to the weights will fix it. Moreover, changes to the weight would be such that they optimize for maximum learning.
It is so weird seeing people preach for an obscure entity to do something so basic, and being shut down when asking for transparency. Today's AIs could write good model-development algorithms for tasks that are a hundred times more complicated.
Oops, the unaccountable algorithm eased when it should have tightened and Volcker Shocked when it should have eased. No prob, the weights will get tweaked and all will be well. Once the economic crisis blows over, anyway . . .
> That's just something they say to scare the children.
Is that really your response to “past results aren’t indicative of future performance”? Honestly at that point why not just let ChatGPT run loose and set guidance? Please, I implore you to think about the issue a bit deeper.
Bold claims like this need citations.
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