Curious how this impact air pollution? My understanding is that the largest contributor of air pollution in cities is vehicles. And if predominantly the vehicles are cars and 2 wheelers and of that the higher percentage is 2 wheelers and if those are changing from petrol to electric then it should make a dent in pollution. As such air pollution could be a proxy of how e-2w benefit the country…
The most talked about air pollution story in India is Delhi. If you live in India you probably know that the major contributor there is not vehicle smoke but smoke from burning stubbles from nearby agricultural fields. It doesnt happen in other countries with similar agricultural output since stubble finds more profitable avenues eg fodder for livestock. In India, the most profitable thing to do with stubble is to burn it and prepare quickly for the next sowing season.
This is to say that the EV transition wont put a major dent in Delhi's annual air pollution story.
For the other cities, it will have the same impact as anywhere else. Eg when Paris banned or limited vehicle traffic, the air quality improves substantially (BBC had a few before / after pics). Given that India is densely packed, an EV transition should improve air quality markedly atleast in major cities. It wont do anything for other sorts of pollution such as water pollution in the Yamuna but that will take time since these days even London can't keep shit out of the Thames.
2 stroke engines on new vehicles were banned in India 20 years ago and there have also been some restrictions on re-registering old 2 stroke vehicles as well
you're not wrong they just solved that part of the problem already
Well let's face it, not on the same level but even four-stroke tend to annoyingly noise, saying this as an owner. A screaming 2 stroke engine is super annoying but the bass of say, a Yamaha T-Max is also super annoying and will transmit accross walls even better. And so many people run noisy aftermarket exhausts.
This is true in the USA where motorcycles are expensive toys. When I visit India, most motorcycles on the road seem to be very quiet in comparison. The constant sound of horns is more annoying than the engine noise.
Yes. This has long being the case. Cities with national monuments used to enforce "only eletrical taxis" rule near the monuments to protect them from pollution and this was successful.
Because that’s what is configured as the “default” page to show when somebody goes straight to archive.ph. When you go to archive.ph/someurl the server then serves you a page that corresponds to that url (someurl in this example). When you go to YouTube.com/somerandomstring it takes you directly to the video. But if you just go to YouTube.com you get a bunch of “random” videos as the home page is configured to show that (grossly simplifying )
1) I am surprised there is no mention of trading it back to apple?
2) I am sure putting a decent “churn” schedule for apple devices is already been done right? Top of my head I can imagine coming up with one where for of the major product line apple offers (mbp, iPad, iPhone) we can look at the typical depreciation curve and find optimal “get in” points and “get out” points right? How hard could it be. I agreed there is a friction and activation energy needed to going down to the Apple Store and trading it in but you could get a new device every 1-2 years and keep largely churning the same out of money plus a slightly more to top up (call it premium to avoid the anger /pain inflicted by not doing it.)
You can only trade it back for (time limited ?) store credits. I assume there's also additional limitations requiring you to move the device under your account for instance.
Selling it secund hand could be an alternative, but then the value is usually ridiculously low for older iPads, so the question is a pretty common one.
Aren’t prisons a business run by corporations? And I could be wrong but I recall reading somewhere a while ago that 1 or 2 companies run most of the prisons in USA. As such they probably have no need / incentives driven by market forces to modernize. It’s not exactly a market to begin with in the first place I would say.
There are some private prisons, but overwhelmingly most are run by the state or federal government. However, that makes what you say even more true; they aren't driven by competitive market forces. Of course, many things aren't, and presumably that's the role of government regulations, to protect the public interests and fulfill the social contract. (Whether it does or doesn't is larger topic, and not something I'm trying to address in this comment)
Most people are not in private prisons (< 10% [0]), even if there shouldn't be any at all. Of course, there are still many "contractors" and "vendors" (phone service providers, food vendors, etc.) in public prisons which grift everyone.
After becoming familiar with the reality of the cost inflation of (in my case local government real estate) development projects vs private I chalked it up to graft, incentives, and mismanagement.
Actually your comment is probably more correct - adds a whole step to move the wallet. Misaligned incentives and mismanagement are probably more equal across public/private than we like to believe
I'm being a little bit facetious. When the government actually owns/operates the labor or equipment they can do a lot more. In the prison example state COs are certainly better than rent-a-cops.
It's just unfortunate that's how most administrators work. The traditional debate about public vs private usually focuses on different tradeoffs and incentives of the public - but if they are just paying market vendors it's greatly diminished.
I agree the officer story is the most significant difference, with state COs being more like police - likely to be well trained, have a long term stake in the career, and having somewhat of a social service culture.
This. To me if you are still unprofitable after 15 years you are not really a business.
However genuinely curious about the thesis applied by the VC’s/Funds that invest in such a late stage round? Is it simply they are taking a chance that they won’t be the last person holding the potato? Like they will get out in series L or M rounds or the company may IPO by then. Either ways they will make a small return? Or is the calculus diff?
The last person in usually gets the best deal, in that they can get preference and push everyone else (previous investors, founders, and employees) down. If things goes south, they get their money out before anyone else.
Why don't early investors put clauses in their investment to protect themselves against being screwed over by later investors? It seems like an obvious thing to ask for if you're giving someone a lot of money, so I'm assuming there must be a very good reason it's not done.
Early investors (the main ones at least) usually get pro-rate rights - which means you can invest in later rounds to maintain your ownership percentage (i.e a later round dilutes your ownership, so you invest a bit until the ownership stays the same).
But the pref stack always favors later investors, partly because that's just the way it's always been, and if you try to change that now no one will take your money, and later investors will not want to invest in a company unless they get the senior liquidity pref.
Isn’t everyone “the last” at the moment they are taking participation in the round? If someone thinks they’re gonna get preferential treatment in Series C or D, and then comes someone in E with preferential treatement, then
> However genuinely curious about the thesis applied by the VC’s/Funds that invest in such a late stage round
1) It's evaluated as any other deal. If you model out a good return quantitatively/qualitatively, then you do the deal. Doesn't really matter how far along it is.
2) Large private funds have far fewer opportunities to deploy because of the scale. If you have a $10B fund, you'd need to fund 2,000 seed companies (at a generous $5m on $25m cap). Obviously that's not scalable and too diversified. With this Databricks round, you can invest a few billion in one go, which solves both problems.
I agree with all that you say. It’s an incredible time indeed. Just one thing I can’t wrap my mind around is privacy. We all seem to be asking sometimes stupid and some times incredibly personal questions to these llms. Questions that we may not even speak out loud from embarrassment or shame or other such emotions to even our closest people. How are these companies using our data ? More importantly what are you all doing to protect yourself from misuse of your information? Or is it if you want to use it you have to give up such privacy and uncomfortableness ?
People often bring up the incredible efficiency improvements of LLMs over the last few years, but I don't think people do a really good job of putting it into perspective just how much more efficient they have gotten. I have a machine in my home with a single RX 7900 XTX in it. On that machine, I am able to run language models that blow GPT-3.5 Turbo out of the water in terms of quality, knowledge, and even speed! That is crazy to think about when you consider how large and capable that model was.
I can often get away with just using models locally in contexts that I care about privacy. Sometimes I will use more capable models through APIs to generate richer prompts than I could write myself to be able to better guide local models too.
Genuine question: If CA is mostly getting its energy from Solar why is my energy bill so high especially during winters? Or does solar energy while clean does not necessarily mean cheap?
Go pick a few PG&E tariffs, look at the unbundled prices, compare them, and then try saying that it’s legitimate transmission and distribution costs again with a straight face…
I find the explanation that they neglected maintenance and upgrades in favor of dividends and stock pumping for years, and now we're paying off the last couple of decades of maintenance and upgrades in a new, more volatile wildfire climate for which PG&E has been assigned legal and financial liability.
I agree that it doesn't necessarily reflect the individual marginal cost of an additional customer, but that makes sense, things rarely do.
Last year they got twice as much electricity from gas as they got from solar.
They're doing well globally, and solar is generally ramping up quickly everywhere but headlines are more often about hitting 100% renewables for an hour or for a day, not over a year.
If you need the hookup at any point during the year, you have to pay for the hookup for the whole year. That's just fair to everyone else that didn't have $20,000 (or didn't own property) and don't want to subsidize your solar upgrade with their own rates.
I'm confused; which one is it? The property owner pays 20k, or the ratepayers are subsidizing it?
Also, my pge statements now have a line item for transmission that's usually larger than my generation total. If I have 2x solar and I'm feeding my neighbor, are they paying the same "transmission" structure for the power I'm providing them?
It's one or the other. Under NEM 2, ratepayers are subsidizing. Under NEM 3, the property owner is paying (more of) their fair share of transmission costs, and are being subsidized less, which people complain "kills" rooftop solar.
NEM 3 makes rooftop solar worse than NEM 2, but it's not common to say it kills it. It's the new flat fees they have been trying to implement that would kill rooftop solar. For example, if 50% of an average bill was a flat fee and then energy was half off, that would kill rooftop solar + batteries on NEM 3.
I don’t think you’ll see the full cost benefits of solar (and wind) until after the transition to 100% renewables (and maybe nuclear) is complete. There’s just too many big investments needed in the transition. That’s expensive.
Repowering a solar or wind power plants is dramatically cheaper than building it from scratch.
reply