My guess. Total energy consumption in 2024 was x. Total energy consumption in 2025 was x + y. For example, solar PV was installed and led to increased electricity consumption. Or more oil was extracted and used to drive cars around more.
They broke down y into all these different energy sources and made a pie chart. So roughly 25% of y was solar PV.
Isn't it still flawed? If a coal plant gets switched off, that needs to be replaced but this graph excludes it. Unless you do it properly rata, but then the graph is essentially showing all generating capacity that's been added?
People in the year 1500 could pretty reliably tell you that a rock would fall down if you released it from a height. People would also tell you that if you threw it up and away, it would go up in an arc and fall down.
The innovation that Newtown and friends brought about was they made quantitative predictions about the rate at which the rock would fall down, or the arc it would follow - both to pretty high level of accuracy.
The point is that, of course, building more houses has a tendency to reduce rents. The question is whether reduction is -0.1% or -10% or there is an increase of +5% because some other factor was more dominant. It would be very hard for policy makers to argue against building more housing, if there was a quantitative model that predicted exact numbers for how much rent fell down given all relevant factors, and this model had been validated over and over again by prediction (not retrodiction). Rather than "rock fall down if you drop it" model that everyone keeps quoting.
We don't need quantitative models if we want the rock to fall. It might be nice to have them, but one of the great things about market economies is that we don't micromanage according to overly complex estimates, and get better results.
Zoning and homeowners are holding on to the rock with a death grip, all while saying "the rock won't fall if we let go, that's fake science, it's far more nuanced you see" as they lie through their teeth to make big profits and immiserate those who don't own land.
The quantitative model will tell you whether building housing of type A of quantity B results in more of a decrease in rent than building housing of type C of quantity D. Then you choose the policy that results in the desired decrease in rent. Otherwise, you risk wasting time in pursuing a policy that only results in a 0.1% decrease.
You do have a strong point, in that homeowners are eager to approve plans that allow for ADUs but disallow anything slightly larger. Homeowners already have housing, don't often need more of it, and like having complete control so they approve plans that allow ADUS with the knowledge that it won't account for any significant new housing, and new housing is directly against homeowners' financial interests.
But in reality, the political choice of "let's build A, or B, or C" doesn't exist to maximize the effect of housing. People overly focus on highly regulating to a specific type of housing to prevent anything from getting built.
Let people decide for their own what type of housing they want, and all of a sudden we'd have enough of it. That's the biggest fear of landlords and homeowners.
Most rent payers aren't concerned with the exact function that will describe the shape of the curve for decline in cost of rent.
They are mostly interested in "rent go down", or at least "rent not go up".
That said, there are people who have studied this. You don't need Newtonian level math to calculate elasticity. Hell, we can look at how rents rise in a constrained market and make a pretty good guess what would happen if supply increases.
There are dozens of papers that have these numbers when you search the academic databases for "rent elasticity"
Lots of places in the world have legally mandated percentage by which rent can increase for a unit per year. It might be 2% or 3%, but it is a fixed number that is fought over politically before being decided. That is the function that you are claiming rent payers don't care about. But they do, as evidenced by elected officials enforcing the number they think will get them the most votes.
I don't think the predominant factor causing pollies to shy away from increasing housing supply is a lack of understanding that supply decreases prices, it's a lack of political will to decrease prices.
It's harder than you think to argue for a house price decrease when it's the singular asset that most older adults have most of their wealth tied up in.
In a city like San Francisco, relative to the status quo ante easier development is more likely to result in slower growth in home prices, not a reduction in home prices.
But that's not the reason most San Franciscans oppose development. The primary reasons are 1) they're convinced more development will raise prices, 2) they believe affordability must be mandated through price controls or subsidies (e.g. developers dedicating X% of units for below market prices), 3) they insist on bike shedding every development proposal to death, 4) they're convinced private development is inherently inequitable (only "luxury" housing is built).
Pretty much the only group of people in the city worried about housing stock increases reducing prices are developers trying to sell-off new units. But developers are repeat players, and they're generally not the ones lending support to development hurdles. Though, there is (was?) at least one long-time developer who specializes in building "affordable" housing--mostly at public expense, of course--who did aggressively lobby for development hurdles, but carefully crafted so he and only he could easily get around them.
> It's harder than you think to argue for a house price decrease when it's the singular asset that most older adults have most of their wealth tied up in.
The only thing they can exchange it for is another house or an alternate form of housing. Because you have to live somewhere.
But what I have seen is worries about social class and sharing space with new neighbors who act like they're from the next rung down on the ladder. Which isn't all that different from the usual objection to short-term rentals.
Notably, though, a significant fraction of people seem to believe that building more housing will cause rents to increase. So it seems like it is still important to point to data suggesting the opposite.
Housing is a unique market, because every single product in it is unique, and prices and rents can vary quite a bit.
In a city I used to live, the city decided to revitalize a section of downtown by bringing down some old small buildings and replacing them with high rises. The resultant effect was a bloom in shops and restaurants in the area. That meant that 1km^2 area became a lot more attractive, landlords jacked up rents, and existing tenants in the other buildings in the area had to move out for people who were willing to pay 2x the rent. Of course rents probably went down elsewhere in the city to compensate.
You will never get this sort of prediction from simply supply and demand. You need to build quantitative and holistic models that make predictions based on a range of factors. Then use those to make policy.
> It would be very hard for policy makers to argue against building more housing, if there was a quantitative model that predicted exact numbers for how much rent fell down given all relevant factors, and this model had been validated over and over again by prediction (not retrodiction).
Policy makers are experts at completely ignoring objective facts, why would this be different?
The MNT Reform classic discussed here was designed 6 years ago, but there’s nothing preventing an updated motherboard with better port selection from being created.
The MNT Reform Next that’s scheduled to be fulfilled this year has a much more modern port layout:
Why not? It's only an adapter away if you have something thst needs to connect to a usb-c female host port. And if you need more ports, which seems likely, you can get a usb hub which has ports of your preference.
Thunderbird currently runs entirely on donations, even though they have paid products in the pipeline.
I think a piece of software running on donations is not running off "charity". It's just a business model to not charge every user. Similar to how Twitch streamers operate, or my local theater group.
Thanks, that's helpful. This says about ~70% of the money was paid to employees, ~10% infra costs, the other ~20% various other fees and smaller expenses.
It would be interesting to have a breakdown of what part of the Thunderbird team is working on Thunderbird, Thunderbolt, or other forms of thunder.
Economic behavior is inherently game theoretic - agents take various actions and get some positive/negative reward as a result. Whether an agent's reward is positive or negative and of what magnitude, depends on the strategies employed by all agents. If some agents adopt new strategies, the reward calculus for everyone involved can completely change [1].
Over the past few centuries, countless new economic structures and strategies have been discovered and practiced. The rewards for the same action today and in the past can be completely different due to this.
So to me, if someone claimed more than a few decades ago that certain economic strategies and structures are good or bad, its simply not worth listening to them, unless someone reconfirms that the old finding still holds with the latest range of strategies. In that case, the credit and citation goes to that new someone, not the ghosts of the past.
Game theory is just math. As with any math, the calculations can all work out, but that says nothing of how it reflects nature. All you can say is that if the axioms are all true, then this is the necessary outcome. Look for string theory as a cautionary tale here.
Game theory assumes rational systems. But we have over 6 decades of behavior science which contradicts that fundamental assumption. Economic behavior is not necessarily rational, and subsequently it is not inherently game theoretic. You will find plenty of dogmatic, idealistic, superstitious, counter productive, etc. behaviors in an economy. You need psychology, and not just math, to describe the economics which happens in the real world.
Game theory definitely does not require rational agents. Game theory says there are agents with certain specified strategies. Whether a strategy is rational from the underlying theory of value the agent adopts is completely separate matter. For example, its very common to study agents who always do one action no matter what others do or what the reward function is. Hard to call such actors rational, but that does not stop as from studying them.
When I said rational I meant it in this way. That rational agents will perform in a way in which maximizes their utility (or reward function). In psychology we call this theory homo economicus[1]. Regardless of theories of value, perceived rewards, and utilities, human beings have biases, prejudice, superstition, dogma, etc. etc. In real economies these non-strategic behaviors are consistently observed. This is why I say that economics are not just game theories, they are psychology, sociology, religion, as much as they are zero-sum games between actors.
> Hard to call such actors rational, but that does not stop as from studying them.
This is precisely why I object to your first post. “Shut up and do the math” has not done the wonders which string theorists had hoped. Game theory is a perfectly fine way to mathematics, and to study certain strategies, but it tells us nothing about the nature of economies in the real world.
> if someone claimed more than a few decades ago that certain economic strategies and structures are good or bad
As you point out, it is all game theory.
But things that arrange for the game to be more beneficial to everyone, that align our interests more, deserve to be called "good", regardless of their inability to universally do so.
The latter would be an impossible bar for anything.
Where I find things frustrating, is when someone thinks because something is "good", it somehow becomes "enough". (Think, capitalized versions of different economic schools of thought.)
I got 0.0039. Peripheral vision helps a lot. My eyes, at least, are very differently sensitive to different colors. It's really difficult to discriminate with bright and pink like colors. Easier with darker colors.
> Unfortunately, over the years, arXiv has become something like a "venue" in its own right, particularly in ML, with some decently cited papers never formally published and "preprints" being cited left and right.
This has been a common practice in physics, especially the more theoretical branches, since the inception of arXiv. Senior researchers write a paper draft, and then send copies to some of their peers, get and incorporate feedback, and just submit to arxiv.
And this is really how it should be. Honestly the only thing I want arxiv to do is become more like open review. Allow comments by peers and some better linking to data and project pages.
It works for physics because physicists are very rigorous. So papers don't change very much. It also works for ML because everyone is moving very fast that it's closer to doing open research. Sloppier, but as long as the readers are other experts then it's generally fine.
I think research should really just be open. It helps everyone. The AI slop and mass publishing is exploiting our laziness; evaluating people on quantity rather than quality. I'm not sure why people are so resistant to making this change. Yes, it's harder, but it has a lot of benefits. And at the end of the day it doesn't matter if a paper is generated if it's actually a quality paper (not in just how it reads, but the actual research). Slop is slop and we shouldn't want slop regardless. But if we evaluate on quality and everything is open it becomes much easier to figure out who is producing slop, collision rings, plagiarist rings, and all that. A little extra work for a lot of benefits. But we seem to be willing to put in a lot of work to avoid doing more work
You could imagine separating the "publishing" part, which really should just be open with minimal anti-spam etc, from the "this was reviewed by a trusted group of people so you should give it more consideration" part. You could do the second without it being attached to the publishing.
I think your phrasing was good. A lot of people conflate a work being published is equivalent to peer reviewed and that "peer reviewed" means "correct".
I think when you think about publishing as what it actually is, researchers communicating to researchers, what I said makes much more sense. I do think formal review does help reduce slop but I think anyone who has published anything is also very aware of how noisy the system is and how good works get rejected or delayed because they aren't "novel" enough.
Honestly, my ideal system is journals with low bars. We forget this prestige bullshit and silliness of novelty (often it's novel to niche experts but not to others) and basically check if it looks like due diligence was done, there's not things obviously wrong, no obvious plagiarism, and then maybe a little back and forth to help communicate. But I think we've gotten too lost in this idea of needing to punish fast and that it has to be important. Important to who? Tons of stuff is only considered important later, we've got a long track record of not being so great at that. But we have a long track record of at least some people working on what we later find out is important.
There's a lot of stuff with basic errors in peer reviewed journals. Things also can get rejected for anything from formatting to politics.
I like Arxiv better. I get the paper, know it's probably not reviewed (like in many journals), and review it if I want to. I used to ise Citeseerx, too, to get tons of CompSci papers. Even better, OpenReview might have some good observations.
I don't agree actually that is how it should or can work for everyone. Senior researchers produce good quality research, and they have a network of high quality peers built over decades. Both those are necessary for them to reach out and ask for feedback, and get genuine and high quality feedback.
Junior researchers don't have these typically. They also benefit more from anonymous feedback, which enables the reviewers to bluntly identify wrong or close to wrong results. So I think open journals should continue to exist. They fill an essential role in the scientific ecosystem.
Mostly I'm fine with journals and conferences but I think it's the prestige that has fucked everything over.
I want reviews of my papers! But I want reviews by people who care. I don't want reviews by people who don't want to review. I don't want reviews by people who think it's their job to reject or find flaws in the work. I want reviews by people who care. I want reviews by people who want to make my work better. I want reviews by people who understand all works are flawed and we can't tackle every one in every paper (the problem isn't solved, so there's always more!).
So low bars. Forget the prestige, citation count, novelty, and all the bullshit and just focus on the actual work and that the act of publishing is about communicating. Publishing is the main difference between private and public labs. Private labs do fine research, without all the formal review. It's just that nobody learns about it. They don't give back to the community.
So my ideal system still has reviewers, journals, and conferences but I think we'd get along just fine without them. I believe that if we can't recognize that then we can't use these other tools to make things better.
They aren't fundamental tools needed to make the process work, they're tools that can make the process work better. But I'm not convinced they're doing a good job of that right now.
Don't forget about William Wootters, who also did significant work in the 1980s on quantum information. Most notably with Zurek, he proved the quantum no-cloning theorem in 1982. This result is at the same foundational level as energy conservation or constancy of light.
He was also on the Teleportation discovery in 1993.
Asher Peres told me that Bill Wootters should be given 99% of the credit for the teleportation discovery (and this is in the context that most of us around at the time presumed the majority of the credit should go to Peres and Wootters who had already been discussing publicly very similar stuff).
> eg. I've had my parents say the "taste" of food is worse on electric instead of gas stovetops
If you are using the cooking technique of "bhunai" [1], which is quite common in South Asian cooking, there is a large difference in food quality you can make with an electric and with a gas stove. Gas stoves are able to provide higher heat at consistent levels, and you can tilt the pot to concentrate heat in one corner to intensify the cooking. So I don't disagree with your parents.
[1] bhunai is when you cook meat with spices at very high heat while rapidly stirring it. I think the willingness to burn the spices during this process is what sets this apart from similar techniques in other cuisines, but I am no expert.
My mom doesn't cook bhunai - she's pushed for a low oil household since I was a kid and is extremely health conscious verging on "crunchy".
I've also done bhunai with electric stovetops and ceramic cookware like Dutch ovens and green pans and gotten close enough to an authentic taste - the marginal differences that exist are due to differences in ingredients in the US (eg. lower milkfat percentages, onions instead of shallots, different cultivars of vegetables, etc) and some inexperience of non-Westerners with Western cookware.
It's a very solvable problem. For example, the Indian restaurants my parents like and feel taste "authentic" use electric stovetops as well in the back, but discriminate on ingredients and masalas.
Yeah, my induction range will get a carbon steel wok really fucking hot really fucking quick.
Like, I can't really stir-fry on max because my range hood can't keep up and I set the smoke detector off. Outside of crappy rentals, I'm pretty sure electric ranges here are up to whatever, high-heat cooking wise.
Yep! My SO's Vietnamese and we've both been able to cook pretty decent Viet and Korean (Hallyu wave is a thing) food with electric stoves despite her being used to LNG and charcoal in VN.
The marginal difference in taste is literally just due to certain cultivars not being available here. Ofc, a half decent Vietnamese sourced nuoc mam solves everything but those are available at our Costco.
They broke down y into all these different energy sources and made a pie chart. So roughly 25% of y was solar PV.
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