PeterMP

Odd to see you call yourself an old fashioned Democrat because that is some first class, let's ignore facts, data, and what the other person is actually saying, Republican fear mongering there. OMG if we don't subsidize the billionaires companies so they can become trillionaires, they'll take all the jobs, we'll hurt small businesses, and we'll be left with nothing. (And there's nothing we can do about the billionaires becoming trillionaires anyway.) Fundamentally, companies don't strive to be efficient. They strive to make money for stock holders and management (and given the current situation in a lot of cases in the short term). If you supply them with cheap energy, you reduce their incentive to be efficient, and if you are subsidizing energy production you are subsidizing their energy inefficiency. As we have been building them, nuclear power plants don't get off the ground without huge government subsidizes. Which actually hurts the building of other types of energy companies and makes it more likely in the near to mid-term we'll have problems. Those facts are indisputable.

Increasing efficiency doesn't allow one to instantly decrease costs and save money in most cases. Increases in efficiency almost always require some up front costs and money is saved in the long run. And R&D to make new technology to increase efficiency is an even more extreme in that costs are paid up front in hope of saving/making money much later. And then the amount you are paying for something like electricity matters in terms of how long it takes to make back the original investment and so whether it makes sense to do make the initial investment. Completely making up some numbers, let's say I'm buying a million units of power a year (whatever measure you want to use), and I'm pay 0.35 per a unit of power. I can install some new equipment that is going to cost up front $10,000,000 dollars that will cut my energy use in (so 500,000 units). Well the pay out there is going to be 50+ years. No company is making that investment. Now, take the same scenario and say I'm paying $3.5 per a unit of energy. That same piece of equipment now pays out in under 6 years. There is a much better chance that companies will make that investment. And because the time scale matters the focus on long term savings vs. short term profit making for CEOs and stock holders matters. If you're primary focus is short term pay outs, then you aren't going to make the investments needed to be reasonably maximally efficient over the long term. So yes, CEO salaries and stock buy backs do matter. Those are taking money that could be put into equipment and R&D that could increase efficiency but only pay out over the long term. Companies that are interested in short term maximizing CEO profits and stock prices are almost certainly not investing in equipment, infrastructure, and R&D to maximize efficiency and long term saving/profits. And there is a feed forward effect because if companies using things are more aggressive about buying equipment/tools that is more efficient, then companies that are developing things will be more aggressive about doing R&D to make things that are more efficient. It isn't a sin tax. It is here is the true costs of running your business tax. If your data center is going to require building a new nuclear power plant that is going to be tied to billions of dollar of US government subsidies and then more costs to store the waste indefinitely, then you aren't really paying the true costs of running your business. We don't need every good job at any costs. Spending billions of dollars to create a handful of new good jobs doesn't make sense. Even for jobs, there has to be a cost/benefit analysis. How much are we really paying to create that job vs. how many jobs and to what benefit are we as the larger public getting. We will need more energy in the future. That doesn't mean that it makes sense to build (many) more nuclear power plants given the costs and how they will impact the building of other types of energy producing plants. I'm not arguing that we won't need more energy. I'm arguing we should try to ensure that companies that are using energy are doing so efficiently and take into account the company's societal value to try to minimize how much energy we need in the future and so how much we have to pay to build the power plants that we'll need in the future. And not just say, hay let's spend billions and billions of dollars to throw up some nuclear power plants so that people/companies can waste money/energy in the future.

I'm not at all sure the tech industry is already driven towards increases in efficiency. Certainly, their CEO pay doesn't seem to be consistent with that. It seems to me that Reddit could have afforded to pay more in taxes for the electricity to support their servers/data, or put more money into research driving long-term increases in efficiency, and paid their CEO a little less. II'll bet Reddit's budget on R&D on how to make a more efficient server or store data more efficiently last year was 0. (I think essentially every industry today is driven by making sure upper management and stock holders make money.) The article mentioned bit coining mining. The bit coin mining doesn't seem to be driven to increase efficiency. If you think somebody like Sam Bankman was about driving things to be more efficient long term and making the investments and doing the research required, I think you're wrong. In terms of taxing anything into oblivion, that wouldn't be the objective. The objective would be to make sure they are working to be efficient. Let's not be ridiculous and take points to the extreme. Even smoking hasn't been taxed into oblivion. But I'm also not sure of the actual economic advantage to having the computers here in terms of data centers. In some cases, there are advantages to being close to the computers, but those tend to be pretty small and in rare cases. The number of workers directly employed by them I suspect is going to be small. From my perspective, I don't think massive subsidies to the energy industry that can be used to support data centers, especially if there are essentially no controls on how much and how they use energy, make much sense. Money is money. Spending money to subsidize energy inefficiency is money spent.

Yes, it makes sense to plan for the future. But planning for the future rarely means building things that are essentially the last centuries technology, especially when they take decades to build, take decades more to pay off, and you also have a need in the short term that they aren't going to be able to fill. People saying building more nuclear power plants are ignoring that. We also only have so much money to put to energy production. Every dollar you put into a nuclear power plant is a dollar that you aren't putting into something that can be used in 5 years, and thinking about building nuclear power plants makes it harder to get investment for other things. You can't ignore the costs that are making it questionable current nuclear power plants are ever going to actually pay off, and if they do it is going to take 50 years or so. But if you've put the money into build them, they are going to run. People looking at investing in other types of energy are going to see the investment (which is going to take huge amounts of federal money in terms of things like loan guarantees) and that's going to make it less likely they will invest in things that we can use to get more electricity in the nearer future. SMR development appears as if it is close to the point where we could build them and bring them on the grid. But the long term economics of SMR are still very much unclear. Acting like SMR is a real solution is just making things up. At some point, inefficient energy production is as costly as to little energy production. Especially when there are other solutions. For example, tax data centers based on the amount of power they use, and force them to be more efficient in their energy consumption. There's no reason that a greater number of data centers in 50 years or so can't use less power than current ones if we put effort, research, and money into making them more efficient. If we simply let them run and do what they want, they will remain inefficient and will consume all of the power put out by as many nuclear power plants as you can build. Same things with cars. We know how to make cars that are much more efficient than the average car on the road today. People just chose not to buy them. We are never going to out build people's/companies' willingness to be energy inefficient. Putting money into building nuclear power plants so that people/company can be energy inefficient doesn't make sense. (This isn't to say that we shouldn't consider building more nuclear power. But looking at where we are and saying well just build more nuclear doesn't address the short term problem and actually might be making it worse. Nuclear needs to be part of the mix for at least the foreseeable future. And we made a mistake through the 1980s and 1990s of doing no building of nuclear power plants. But that mistake has been made. It isn't at all clear if the correction for that mistake is to now try to make up for it.)

We have to recognize that energy is not like other commodities/resources. Not matter how much we produce, demand will just increase as people will just build bigger/less efficient things. Yes, you have to have incentives to keep supply high, but there is no way to generate a supply that will out compete demand (given our current system) and generate low prices. The key is to price as a function of the amount of demand and not per a unit price and maybe as a matter of function. Energy prices likely should include a societal value judgement.

Nuclear power plants take years and even decades to build, and it isn't just regulation. There is like one company that makes many of the parts, and they're backed up. And unlike other things building more and as the technology has matured the cost of building one has gone up and not down. https://energy.mit.edu/news/building-nuclear-power-plants/ In 2006, there was an application to build a nuclear power plants on site in GA where there already was one. As of 2024 after nearly 2 decades of time and price over runs, the company that was originally building them going bankrupt and despite the US government putting up over $8 billion on loan guarantees back in 2010, one of them became operational in July 2023 and the other just in March of this year. Saying build more nuclear power plants is a fine solution if you are planning on having an energy crisis in 2055 and don't care what the final costs will be. (Unless you have some plan also to change how they are built.)

@Ball Security What VA's primary tells me is that VA is blue, but even in an open primary there isn't enough anti-Trump support out there to turn VA to Haley. If there was widespread anti-Trump vote in the GOP and right leaning Republicans, then I suspect that primary is much closer. And that signals trouble for Trump. That's good news for Trump. (The GE is almost certainly going to be close. And how it goes will depend on this summer/early fall. If the economy stays strong and things are at least reasonably stable in the ME and with Israel and Palestine that benefits Biden and should be good enough to give him a victory. If issues in the ME spread, there are continued issues between Israel and Palestine and nearing the election things still look bad over there, gas prices spike again, or there is a more general economic slow down, that's bad for Biden and likely tips things Trump's way IMO.)

He's going to lose. But he can lose VA and win the GE easily. In fact, if he manages to win VA that pretty much makes him a lock to win the GE. For the Dems to win, VA has to essentially be a no contest state. If the Dems even really have to compete in VA, that alone is a win for the GOP. I'm not claiming that the primary results show that Trump is going to win the VA GE and more than the 2016 primary results showed he was going to win VA in the GE. But by any reasonable measure, it was a strong showing by Trump. And extra voters are going to come out in every district in the GE.

They've been deflated. This year's turnouts aren't anywhere close to 2016s on the Republican side.

But the GOP hasn't had much a race and so that GOP voting is also down isn't surprising. The GOP race isn't and has never been about President. That GOP turnout is down some and so especially in states that are open primaries Dems coming in and voting can distort the % of votes. In 2016, over a 1 million people voted in the VA GOP primary. This year, it was just over 600K. The GOP race isn't a true race for President and voter turnout is corresponding down.

Much of your post is inaccurate. I'm going to deal with this part specifically. A 1/3 of the party hasn't said they wouldn't vote for him. In some states, 1/3 of the people that are voting in the Republican primary have voted against him. Those states have mostly been open primaries where Democrats can vote in a Republican primary. Also, in any primary there are people that vote against a candidate that then vote for that candidate in the GE. Having 1/3 of the voters in a primary like VA vote for the other candidate doesn't mean that a 1/3 of the party won't vote for him in the GE. It means that 1/3 of the people that voted in the Republican primary, which could include Democrats, didn't vote for him. And of those who knows how many will vote for him in a GE when it is just him and Biden. Halley winning a 1/3 of the vote in VA isn't an indication that 1/3 of the GOP voters won't vote for Trump in a GE any more than the fact that he didn't win 50% of the vote the primary in VA in 2016 was an indication that 50% of the GOP in VA wasn't going to vote for him in the GE. Do you understand that?

Trump lost Farifax county in the 2016 primary and GE. Why should he be worried about losing Fairfax county? Especially in an election where Democrats can come vote against him.

"Tonight, pretty much running as an incumbent president and against only one other person still in the race, he's pulling 65 percent of the vote in VA. " You can't have it both ways. Either Trump is essentially equivalent to Biden (essentially an incumbent) in which case comparing vote totals between the two is reasonable. Or he's not, in which case comparing him to 2016 Trump is reasonable. And either way, he's doing really well. If he's essentially Biden, that's good for Trump because it appears he's out competing Biden now. If he's not comparable to Biden (and not essentially an incumbent), then that's still good for Trump because he's still easily out preforming 2016 Trump and he won the GE that year. You're making two different arguments that contradict one another. And again, the national polls look very good for Trump. And the pollsters got the MI primary pretty much right. To me, it seems you are ignoring all of the "good" news for Trump by making contradictory arguments and ignoring the data that is good for Trump w/o any reason really other than you don't like it. The loser talk is also just nonsense. His name is on the ballot in all of these primaries, and he's winning easily. He's won as many Presidential elections as Biden on fewer tries. And if he had wanted to be a Senator or something, he could have absolutely moved to some red state 2 years agon and won. Taking anything from a primary is hard as I said initially. I'd not overly look at these results with any significance and only made my comment because there was the claim that the primary results are bad for Trump and are evidence that the general polls are wrong. I'd really not be comfortable drawing any conclusion from these results, but if anything if I'm running the Trump campaign, I'm pretty happy. You can say Trump is running as an incumbent in which case the results look pretty good (he's out doing Biden in states Biden has to win), or he's not an incumbent (he's easily out performing 2016 Trump in the primary and that was good enough to win the GE). Either way, it is a good look.

Trump got over 100K more votes in VA than Biden in a state that Biden must win in Nov to win the Presidential election. In MI, even if you throw in the ~100K Democrat uncommitted vote Trump still out gained Biden. (It is hard to pull much meaning out of these for the GE because the turnout will be much higher for the GE, but anybody looking at those numbers and thinking Trump is weak or that the general polls are wrong are deluding themselves IMO. I'll note that the polls in MI pretty much nailed the out come of he MI primary. If I'm working for the Trump campaign, I'm feeling pretty good.)

It is hard to look just at precents because there is a lot of cross over from Dems voting in some of these primaries. In 2016, there was also a somewhat competitive Dem primary that kept more Dem voters voting in the Dem primary. To me looking at vote totals makes a lot more sense. And there was hope in 2016 that some of those people that voted for other candidates would in the end not support Trump. We'll have to see how it breaks down, but in what is essentially not a contest that wasn't likely going to result in strong Republican turn out, it looks like Trump is going to win nearly as many votes as the whole GOP field in 2016. That's a strong showing (to me).

Can you explain this logic? In 2016, Trump got 356,840 in the VA primary. Right now, he's already at 349,302, but under 60% of the vote has been counted. He's easily going to surpass his 2016 totals. How is he not doing well? How do you look at that and say the polls are wrong? He's doing better than the year that he won the general election.

The headline of that piece should be the NYT has put out a poll with weightings that I don't like and don't understand because the results are something I disagree. But I'm not going to bother to put together what I think are more reasonable weightings, show the result, and explain why the results are more reasonable. Instead I'm going to write something based on the idea the NYT doesn't know the first thing about polling.

This guy is an idiot that doesn't understand anything about polling. He's so clueless that he doesn't know how clueless he is. They poll, then they weight the poll based on the expected electorate. They don't report that literally report the % of the people in the poll that answered they'd vote for Trump. If you read the poll (and have any clue what you are reading), there is a whole section on "Weighting — registered voters". https://nytimes.com/interactive/2024/03/03/us/elections/times-siena-national-poll-toplines.html (Looking at the comments, he actually seems to understand that. But arguing their weightings are nonsense is different than acting like they've put out a poll without weighting. And if you think their weightings are garbage, great put together your own weightings and put out the results. As noted in the actual poll, NYTs poll have a historical margin of 5%. Maybe their weightings are garbage this time around, but there's no reason to think that's the case and no evidence. And the post given certainly doesn't give evidence of it. All he's done is w/o evidence suggest that the NYT and Sienna don't know the first thing about polling which is garbage. I suspect the issue is people are self-reporting their location. 35% of the people are reporting their rural, but I'm guessing that most people don't know the census definition of rural and their definition is off the census and so you get people over reporting they are rural compared to the census. The census also don't include suburban. You are either rural or urban. The NYT is essentially ignoring people's self-reported location vs. the census because they don't matchup/are garbage.) Why anybody would believe some random dude on the internet over the NYT, I don't know.

Most people didn't know Dukakis at this point in time in 1988. And the vast majority of the country had 24 hour news tv.

That's right. It is now Biden's fault that companies are pricing their product based on what the consumer will pay. How awful is that.

I'm pretty sure Dwight Howard has made the comments about instead of bulking up when he was younger, he should have been working on his flexibility. Wemby should be in a serious stretching regime now. Bulking up is fine if it is done in a manner that competing muscle groups are increasing proportionally and can be done without a loss of flexibility.

You gotta love how the conservative Supreme Court justices are so gung ho states' rights, historical examples, and a literal reading of the Constitution. (If we actually had a conservative judicial movement/group with any logical/philosophical consistency, this country would be more interesting and IMO a better place.)

Events and things like you describe are about helping students build a support network (of friends), which then helps people graduate. I'm sure places would like to see people feel belong, but that's much harder to do. But having friends that are nearby, going through the same process(es), and can offer emotional and physical support when you need it, help people graduate. (At some level, colleges are fighting social media and the general lack of personal social connections that are declining throughout society. It's great that you've stayed connected to your high school friends, but that high school friend doesn't do you any good when you've been in a car accident at 1:00 am, and they live 2 hours away. You need connections nearby. Over the last 20 years, many colleges/departments have ramped out activities to build connections for all students.) Even at the faculty level, I think most people would be surprised about how much time we spend talking about how do we build more/better community among the students in our majors. Because when we have better community, it helps our students do better, and realistically, it helps us because they then lean on each other more for academic support. Considering the average college graduate makes over 50% more than a high school diploma, people that only have a high school diploma are more likely to cost the state in others ways (e.g. end up in prison), etc. I think $50,000 isn't actually that much. Prior to the Supreme Court decision there was good data and studies that show how to increase minority graduation rates. There are non-affirmative action reasons a place like UM is seeing increased rates of minority graduation and a place like Texas A&M isn't. Anybody that wants to argue that eliminating affirmative action increases graduation rates is going to need real data to back that up vs. people are doing the things they were doing before the Supreme Court decision that are well supported in the education literature as increasing minority graduation rates. I know less about hospitals, but college administrations have pretty much grown directly as a result of government, law, accreditation, technology requirements, and understanding of how they make money. The ADA, Title IX, EPA requirements, computer/wireless/ infrastructure, changes in society, generally just creating an environment that is more equitable, and raising money all have created more college non-teaching roles that get counted as increased administration. Accrediting agencies decided, they wanted to see more effort put into assessment. Where I work, we went out and hired somebody to over see assessment. That's an administrative cost, but it was clear that if we didn't there could be an issue with accreditation next cycle. Universities offer mental health/counseling services to students, that go with the increase in mental health problems in young people in society. Similarly, with the number of students that get some sort of accommodation (the ADA) have gone way up. But then you need staff to deal with those increases. That's an administration cost. In my career, support for writing grants is way up. That's because universities have decided it makes sense to offer that support because they can bring more money back from the federal government, help in terms of recruiting students, and alumni donations (students that do research are more likely to donate money back later). Having staff that help get grants shows up as an increase in administration, but there's good reason to think that it actually ends up helping the college financially. College President pay is the one thing where to me things have gone up and maybe they didn't need to. But that mirrors increases in CEO pay across society. If you want a top level executive, it is hard to not then have to pay more. And in some cases there have been issues with what is essentially government corruption at public universities that have caused increase administration costs. But Harvard is as bad as anywhere in terms of increased administration costs, and their private.

I'm not sure a DEI program can make people feel belonged. But where I work a lot of the work of people in DEI is directed at retention/academic support. Things like early academic intervention, extra (free) tutoring, and getting involved in research (which requires money) all can help minority retention and success. And where I work a lot of that comes from work/funds/ from DEI staff/programs. Texas A&M's graduating 72.1% of their African Americans in 2020 and have been pretty flat since 2016 (after 6 years). Over that same time period whites have gone up from 83% to 87.5% and looks like a real increase. So at Texas A&M African Americans are falling further and further behind whites. Meanwhile UM's African American graduate rate has gone from the upper-70s to over 86%. The values for whites were pretty high to start with (91.9%) so it is hard to say if they've gone up (to 93.7%), but African Americans are at least keeping pace if not gaining. I suspect we'll see 2 things happen in FL: 1. There will be fewer African Americans in the state going to college (especially in state). 2. The ones that will stay will have a lower graduation rate. Obviously, spending money on something that people aren't really committed to doesn't make sense, so I guess if you and your colleges aren't committed to DEI, then cutting DEI programs probably makes sense. But I think as a state, you might be hurting yourself. Those two things will hurt the FL economy. Highly qualified African Americans that can get into other schools where there are DEI programs will leave FL and then are less likely to go back than people that stay. Ones that stay will be less likely to finish and so less likely to have college degrees and will be saddled with debt that they can't really pay back creating a drag on the FL economy (compared to somebody that finished college). And from there, the cost of recruiting students is expensive for colleges so not retaining students is actually bad business. Also, people look at graduation rates when they are selecting a school so lower graduation rates make it that much harder to recruit (good) students. And endowments (which mostly come from wealthy/successful alumni) are an important part of many colleges budgets having less grads and less successful grads negatively impacts the colleges ability to raise an endowment. It isn't unreasonable that you might get in a situation that a good DEI program might actually be saving you money (though I don't know of a study that shows that, just seems possible). Certainly at the state level, but even at the university level, it might make sense to spend another $18 million/year to graduate another 14% of your minority students. I suspect as a state long term FL is costing themselves money. (Many people think about college budgets in terms of tuition in vs. money spent. But that isn't really the case. Like any business, money spent can be an investment that makes it easier for you keep a current customer and obtain future customers. And universities have this odd thing where previous customers will sometimes "pay" even when they are no longer customers. Spending money to build long term relationships and put out people that will be successful can actually make you money. It isn't very common for people to donate money to a university that they dropped or were failed out of. And then for state institutions it is even more complex because graduating people that are successful and in state will increase the tax base and can impact your funding in the future. You get into well are we going to keep more of our more successful students in the state if we do X.)

I think this is unlikely. Quantum mechanics tells us the universe is not really deterministic but probabilistic. While the brain function itself seems to be mostly the result of the movement of relatively large things where QM won't matter much, it is clear that in totality a person's mental state is related to the whole body (including the microbiome) and some reactions and processes at the larger scale will be based on the movements of small things (electrons and protons) and QM will matter. The end result will be at best we'll be able to define probabilities for people's actions/thoughts. I suspect in the not to far off future we'll be able to do things to affect people's thoughts and actions by flooding certain parts of the brain with certain molecules/ions and some people will declare that the death of free will. But really if you do X, the person will do Y is not new. If I hit the knee in the right place with the right amount of pressure the person's leg will move and historically has not thought to be a violation of the idea of free will. For what you are saying to be true, I think we'll have to understand what underlies QM and that will have to be deterministic in nature and not probabilistic.