Lynne Kiesling-Knowledge Problem @knowledgeprob

"The tragedy of our present moment is not merely that Americans disagree passionately. Democracies are supposed to contain passionate disagreement. The tragedy is that many citizens increasingly struggle to imagine political opponents as participants in a shared constitutional project, which is precisely why Tocqueville matters today." @knowledgeprob with a terrific #reading project for #America250... Reading Tocqueville. open.substack.com/pub/knowledgep…

Fun model and very much in line with my priors. Problems arrive stochastically. Some orgs choose new processes to solve them. Costly to know when the problem is no longer active, hence costly to prune. Rule: be firm to not institutionalize solutions to temporary problems.

Vicky C Yang @VickyCYang

2 days ago

Between 1985--2023, MIT's faculty grew 9%. Administrative staff grew 189%. 📈 Why? In new @PNASNews paper, we use dynamical system model to show administrative bloat can emerge without empire-building--just from well-intentioned problem-solving gone awry pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pn…

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ERCOT low key sitting with the highest reserve margin of the major North American grids this summer according to NERC: Given an Anticipated Reserve Margin of 67.9% and Reference Reserve Margin of 13.75%, ERCOT expects to have sufficient operating reserves... nerc.com/globalassets/o…

knowledgeproblem.substack.com/p/reading-tocq…

I'm celebrating the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence by rereading Tocqueville's Democracy in America. Please join me. Few thinkers have understood as deeply the relationship between liberty, civil society, local institutions, and democratic self-government.

@mungowitz Thank you, sir!

I've read a bunch of dumb commentaries on data centers. Interesting to read a smart one. From @knowledgeprob substack.com/home/post/p-19…

🧵 Agree 💯 this is a great innovative direction.

Arushi Sharma Frank @ArushiSF

3 days ago

Flex consumption over capped low pwr consumption means:, AI can use ⚡ headroom + curtail to a floor in response to locational congestion. Three weeks ago, I introduced @ERCOT_ISO & @SantaClaraPower (Silicon Valley PWR) colleagues to one another. Pushing grid-aware load ops is

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Beautifully done. Evolution of women’s fashions.

Good coverage and clear to anyone paying attention to these markets over the last 18 months. PJM came within 2GW of forcing data centers onto backup power last week. Summer heat drove peak load past 135GW with reserves at 4%, and 40GW of generation sat in maintenance. DOE only cleared a voluntary switchover this time. Writing is on the wall: When the grid hits peak conditions, data centers lose service first. Texas already wrote that into law with SB6. Half the US pipeline sits in PJM and Texas. Takeaway: Interruptible service is becoming the price of a fast interconnect.

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🧵

Michael Giberson @MichaelGiberso3

a week ago

At a recent Cato Institute event @ENERGY Sec Chris Wright spoke warmly of his friendship and respect for Milton Friedman. It’s likely that Professor Friedman would not be a fan of DOE’s use of emergency authority to block the retirement of old power plants across the country.🧵

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@SlBrandin Well said!

🧵, although I would de-emphasize the "perfect" in the competition concept.

Sam @SlBrandin

a week ago

When people say they want “abundance” what they really mean is they want robust and competitive free markets which can readily respond to price signals incentivizing new supply and technological innovation when demand calls for it. This concept gets simplified into the notion

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Welcome to my power bill 😬.

Travis Kavulla @TKavulla

a week ago

ComEd customers seeing the PJM "uplift" costs (out-of-market payments for gas plants during Winter Storm Fern early this year) on their bill this month. The cost of the surcharge (the "purchased electricity adjustmnet") is literally > than the cost of electricity this month

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I've written a @claudeai skill that is useful when you’re starting a new project and want to absorb fifty papers before writing a word yourself. /tyler converts a folder of academic PDFs into a token-efficient markdown wiki for literature review. Point it at a directory of papers and it produces one lightweight .md file per paper, plus an index, so Claude Code can load an entire literature into context without burning tokens on raw PDF parsing. Named in honour of @tylercowen, the economist behind @MargRev and a famously voracious reader. Available from --> johanfourie.com/econtools.html

.@Microsoft has proposed to the PUC of Nevada what it's calling Ratepayer Protection Tariff and it's...really good actually. It would have @NVEnergy undertake a 'but for' test identifying particular assets needing to be built to serve a new large customer. The costs of those assets would be separately accounted for. The data center would either prepay for them, or convert those costs into a separate facilities charge, subject to credit requirements. But don't some of these assets have spillover benefits? Yes, as they always do. The utility contemporaneously runs at least 3 scenarios that evaluate the usefulness of these investments to other customers. That provides an evidentiary record that -- if the utility/data center want to try to make that showing -- could lead certain joint costs being assigned to the rate base everyone pays for through a full Commission proceeding. But the "speed to power" option is for the data center simply to accept full cost responsibility, thereby avoiding regulatory litigation. If, later, a scenario actually materializes where other consumers are realizing benefits of the infrastructure build, the utility can go back to the well to urge a reallocation of costs -- but at that point there will be both forecasted data from the time of the grid expansion + actual facts-on-the-ground to justify that...or not. It also allows, should the large customer no longer use the capacity, a pathway to clearly remarket the capacity at net cost (while the prepayment/collateralized facilities charge is a clear protection against stranded costs). Finally, the large customer additionally pays the same embedded cost rate other customers pay -- an acknowledgment that in addition to causing incremental costs, that they are using the legacy grid as well. Hard to disagree with Microsoft's characterizations below. This seems like a tariff where cost-shifting concerns are mitigated, and it achieves that while getting "speed to power".

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Look at all the 🇺🇸 trade that's now happening without the Jones Act in effect. And the Jones Act fleet is still fully booked. This is all extra shipping, from Americans to Americans, that's happening just because government got out of the way.

This is an excellent piece by @jasminewsun responding to the rebuttals to her NYT piece. She writes about my essay on What Will Be Scarce, so I thought I'd clarify a few things since they may have been lost in the online discussion. substack.com/@jasmine/p-197… The main arguments of the piece is that 1) broad automation will potentially be at an unprecedented scale with AI, 2) the economics of structural change predict that value will reallocate to what remains scarce, 3) supply of products is endogenous to demand--so if people have preferences for relational goods/services, and humans have a comparative advantage providing those goods and services, then there may be substantial employment and economic value there because firms will cater to those preferences. A few clarifications here. 1) The above process is a medium/long run phenomenon. There is a large amount of uncertainty in the short run even in this scenario. The *speed* of transformation is incredibly important and a huge unknown. If it's fast, this can mean substantial disruption and job market impacts, etc as the transition takes place. As Jasmine correctly points out, the short run can be quite a while in economic models. I've tried to emphasize this whenever I could: x.com/alexolegimas/s… and aleximas.substack.com/p/will-advance… 2) What I term relational has a specific definition: conditional on output being held constant, there is a significant preference for humans being in the loop. This means that relational does not apply to just any good/service which is currently done by humans (e.g., Waymos vs. taxi is not a relational service). The data is currently being collected on this, but for goods/services that are relational, we find the premium to be quite large. This includes many jobs that we think of as white collar work. What this means according to the logic above, that these sectors will expand while others will shrink. 3) The distributional consequences are not clear, both in short/medium/long run. As James Meade (h/t @ben_moll) pointed out, you can have high human employment after nearly complete automation, but also a high degree of inequality. 4) The What Will Be Scarce scenario is a potential scenario, but it is not the only potential scenario. This is why I've been pushing people to also read @pawtrammell's essay exploring the same topic: philiptrammell.substack.com/p/is-labor-a-l… I'll stop here, but one thing that I want to emphasize is the amount of uncertainty we are entering is in many ways unprecedented. Social media is not the best place to convey it, but I certainly have wide confidence bands.

@MichaelGiberso3 I hadn't even read Swett's remarks until after I published this!