The reason PGE is so expensive is because it's a privately owned monopoly with a fiduciary duty to maximize shareholder returns. Additionally, the urban areas of California are subsidizing the fire prone rural areas of the state.
The "fake costs" are not primarily from regulation as much as it is from the need to squeeze profit. For comparison, look at Silicon Valley Power which is owned and operated by the city of Santa Clara. SVP charges $0.175/kwh vs PGE $0.425/kwh. [1]
>the urban areas of California are subsidizing the fire prone rural areas of the state
Meanwhile Rural California is where the electricity is actually generated[1]; they're "subsidizing" urban use.
>SVP vs PG&E
This has nothing to do with the ownership model and everything to do with not being obligated to serve rural areas. They get to serve only lower cost dense areas
True that SVP benefits from not serving a rural area, but we also need to consider again that PGE is a for-profit organization that in 2024 posted $2.5B in profits, which were distributed to shareholders[1]. If PGE were owned by the state with no such fiduciary duty, this money could instead be used to lower rates and/or invest in infrastructure.
Great idea to napkin math it, but I think you're off by a very large margin. CA energy commission shows PG&E's energy consumption to be over 70,000 GWh.
$2,500,000,000 profit/70,000,000,000 kWh consumed is ~$0.035 per kWh.
So not exactly the smoking gun that CA ratepayers are looking for.
What you're describing is an Orwellian dystopia, where a boot forces you to think a certain way. We live in a Huxleyan dystopia where there is so much so much to distract you that you become submissive.
The demographic collapse will likely lead to artificial wombs and llm powered vulcan style teaching pits crossed with diamond age primers. Huxley was more prescient than I thought when teading brave new world. I think the nation that has its primers teach the vat-made labor force rhetoric, logic and critical thinking will have lower gdp, but higher stability.
Yes, this, precisely. Our increasingly dystopian present features a fair amount of Big Brother, but Brave New World's soma is what drives and enables it, along w/ aspects of Gilliam's "Brazil"....
There is also so much that's womderful and amazing and positive. No light w/out darkness, "no mud, no lotus", etc. -- which IMHO it's increasingly important to focus on, deliberately.
It's on langchain's official page, a framework that looks like it was hacked over the weekend by a fresh grad that brought a lot of pain to the agentic development, and this just feels like piling up more pain on it.
Tried a public repo but it asked for a personal access token? No thanks. Otherwise great idea, but why should I give a personal access token for something that's publicly available, it really does not inspire confidence.
never pay for something yourself when you can have someone else pay for it. it's a useful concept that can be used in many many cases. the 1%ers love this concept
Personally I have checked 3/4 boxes here, and actively working on a job board currently for fun...
At least for a job board, it feels like it is useful, and also ultimately not that complex a piece of software. Which is nice for doing some light coding as opposed to things I usually deal with at work.
+1 to this! I have tons of fun while building this job board and having to refactor my code multiple times to generalize a pattern that can pull jobs from various sites. It is so fun to dig into some readings on the trimodal nature of tech compensation and pay transparency laws in the US. Plus it is a helpful site for folks like you said.
What type of job board are you building btw? Does it focus on a niche?
The conference coordinators said they would be released in about a month, so I will update the post once they are released! I am really excited to watch them again. Amazingly informative stuff.
The "fake costs" are not primarily from regulation as much as it is from the need to squeeze profit. For comparison, look at Silicon Valley Power which is owned and operated by the city of Santa Clara. SVP charges $0.175/kwh vs PGE $0.425/kwh. [1]
[1] - https://www.siliconvalleypower.com/residents/rates-and-fees