That’s roughly the opposite of the development of electric utilities in the US. The IOUs owned dense urban areas and refused to electrify further out. It was only the rise of public municipal utilities that got them to go to the states, implement the regulatory compact, be granted rate of return, etc., and then they began building out more.
That is the historic situation yes. However it doesn't change how things are today. the municipal utilities that remain have lower costs because they don't have the more expensive structures.
I looked up onions, lettuce and tomatoes (because burgers), and the volatility actually looks very similar. Am I missing something or looking at the wrong things?
Lettuce and Tomatoes don't keep well, which adds more seasonal variability and reduces the ability of a futures market to smooth prices.
Compare with potatoes, which keep about as well an onions, and are farmed in the same areas. Look at onions and potatoes over a 5-year time span (because the default all-data time span is silly for this). It doesn't give enough control of the Y axis to make the comparison easy - for potatoes it shows me Y=40-320, for a range of 280; for onions it shows me Y=120-440, for a range of 320. This means that potatoes are more "zoomed in" and it's graph will exaggerate volatility relative to onions, but qualitatively, I'd say the potato graph looks smother just the same. This is exactly what economic theory says a futures market should do to the price.
> Lettuce and Tomatoes don't keep well, which adds more seasonal variability
The more durable a produce is, the easier it is to transport over a large area, which will always smoothen price fluctuations. This alone could explain why lettuce and tomatoes have higher volatility than onions, which have higher volatility than potatoes, which have higher volatility than corn and weat.
At least that's the null hypothesis that the hypothetical effect of futures should be compared to.
I know nothing about logistics of the food supply chain and how they preserve food at scale, but at least at home I'd say that potatoes are close to twice as durable as onions.
Or to bring it back to the original context... Reducing volatility would be reducing the impact of bad weather on your harvest, absorbing volatility is finding someone to cover your losses. (presumably by giving up some profits on the good years. It's like a financial low pass filter)
Volatility is a natural consequence of weather, blight, etc., etc.
To reduce volatility you would need to actually stabilize the supply of onions.
What futures do is allow traders to shift risk from the future to the present. By pricing that risk, it's possible for people who depend on onions to pay a little more now in exchange for a guarantee about the future.
It's not magically going to make onions less volatile (although high risk prices can spur investment which might) but it can reduce disruptions caused by volatility.
The classic example of this is futures on jet fuel which allow airlines to weather random wars in the middle east, OPEC shenanigans, etc. Ticket prices are higher this way, but the existential threat of being forced to cancel a bunch of flights is gone.
For speculators yes. But for a farmer and the consumer of the goods they would rather lock in a margin for their goods and run their business than risk guessing what the price will be at harvest time or consumption time. It’s called hedging.
How many farmers do you imagine are in this thread?
And consumers neither lock in margins nor run a business because consumers buy at retail…
Ok charitably, maybe you use “consumer” in a special sense of businesses that consume raw materials such as owners of onion ring factories. In those cases, future prices (as opposed futures prices) are typically negotiated directly into contracts with producers of those commodities…and how many of those are in this thread?
In the vast majority of cases, futures are traded speculatively and physical delivery of goods and chattles is an extreme exception.
People are willing to lose a small but predictable amount of money to avoid occasionally and unpredictably losing a massive amount of money. The former is a loss they can plan for and absorb. The latter might kill their business.
Traders are often happy to take the other side of that trade because they can trade against many counterparties, collect a small premium from each one, and try to ensure their counterparties won’t all fail in a correlated way.
You may have liabilities or income that exist outside of financial markets e.g. if I have 500t of wheat due to be harvested I might want to hedge enough to guarantee I can pay my staff - ive locked in the price of wheat, I might make less money as a result but my risk is lower.
Interesting. This would be more sensible if it was time-bound. Since the intention was clearly "stop a bad thing someone is doing right now" and not "make this field illegal forever"
I wonder if anyone read the copy on this page or if it mostly came out of an LLM.
The "Restoring the shoreline" and Rebuilding the marshlands" paragraphs below the images are almost exactly the same. The first sentence is exactly the same.
Maybe, but there's some very specific legal language that cpra and the state requires everyone use in referring to some of these issues, and at least part of the land SpaceX is acquiring is involved in coastal restoration lawsuits or deep water horizon settlements or both.
As an engineer working on cpra projects in the past, I've wanted to reword a variety things but was forced to use their legal language.
It's mostly a good thing as it keeps things properly defined in a political context that are meant to have specific technical meanings (like marsh, beach, rebuild vs restore).
For me that makes it more likely to be human-generated. Seems like a "rushing person juggling revs and copy-pasting" mistake.
FWIW, the writing style and tone match pre-LLM SpaceX writing. Of course you can prompt an LLM to mimic style, but somehow the regression-to-average blandness shines through. That can be hard to distinguish from bog standard corporate speak though.
I saw the first article on thick art. This was linked within that article.
I enjoyed reading both, then popped over to see if this one had ever been submitted to HN. It hadn't, so I did. Figured that if people liked the first one, they might like this one as well.
The map is ok, but mostly I'm interested in the number of map apps people are cranking out with AI. The design elements pretty clearly mark them as such (and it's even more obvious once you poke around a bit). I love maps, so I get it, they tend to hook people, and the relative density of information can be very high.
I work in the electricity space (and of course we have a map[0]), and it has been wild to see the number of "I was a PM at a B2B SaaS/AI company and now I'm here to solve the grid with this vibe-coded tool", which inevitably involves a map. Seems like an inflection point was hit sometime late last year where first SMEs could make little apps they couldn't before, and then it expanded further into people who truly don't know a space but the AI can make it look like they do to other people who also don't, and the cycle continues.
Utility scale, solar installs, and will be total solar by end of year.
Texas accounts for 40% of new solar capacity installed per year at this point.
It does lag behind an inefficient and expensive rooftop solar, and has no State mandate for homeowners to build it.
That said, I think this is enough to show that Texas doesn't hate solar, so there's probably a different reason for selecting gas to support the data center. If I were to Hazard I guess, it would be stability and demand curve
The solution to pollution is dilution was a philosophy prior to modern environmental protection laws, which were a reaction to the fact that we were absolutely destroying all kinds of ecosystems, even when we thought we were just diluting toxins down to nothing.
This stuff is barely pollution. Everything there is a natural part of the environment and biological processes. Literally the only issue here is the concentration of it. Dumping it in the ocean is an ideal course of action. Failing that it should be dumped out in the wilderness, not in bags, but just on the ground. It may have a short-term change in the local environment, but long term it's fertilizer.
The risk of dumping it in the ocean is that some asshole will see that happening and think "gosh, i should slip my barrels of hazardous toxic waste in with that dumping activity."
> ”It may have a short-term change in the local environment, but long term it's fertilizer.”
The fish would make for great fertilizer, but the salt would not. High salt concentrations will kill many plants and probably would stick around in the soil for a long time.
Absolutely. So the ideal solution would be to return it to whence it came, but presumably that’s easier said than done if they’re going to all this trouble to bury it in a plastic sarcophagus instead.
There's not enough salt to sterilize the land where dumped. The salt in fish sauce preparation may be as high as 20% initially but by the time it's done, after having been drained and refilled multiple times, it's 2-4%. To sterilize land requires 5-10kg/m^2 of salt applied repeatedly.
I’m not talking about sterilizing land. Just that salt is not a desirable ingredient in fertilizer. Most plants will not thrive in salty soil, even if it doesn’t kill them.
The scientists who have been testing it since 2016 have looked at the evidence and they disagree with you. CBC had to do an access to information request for the results - it took four years. Here is their coverage:
That just sounds like it's a knee jerk reaction from regulators. For decades their reaction to pollution was "yeah just dump it in the ocean", then we figured out it was bad. So now the pendulum swung the other way where we can't dump anything in the ocean, even if it's probably benign, because if it turns out to be not benign, it'll super bad on you. "You did what? Approved dumping pollutants in the ocean? Haven't you learned anything from us dumping radioactive super-mustard gas in the oceans decades ago?" Better to play it safe. After all, you're not picking up the tab.
This sludge was actually tested and analyzed- it’s not compatible with marine life and would in fact cause an ecological disaster. It’s why they’re mixing it with peat moss and also why they’re doing the work now - the factory itself has been battered by waves and the vats are in danger of being washed into the sea.
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