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Cake day: June 15th, 2023

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  • The Polymarket prediction markets gives odds for who will win the presidential election and who will win the democratic nominee. We can compare the odds of each candidate and use Bayes Theorem to determine their chances of winning the presidency if they secure the DNC nomination.

    Here’s the results as of posting this comment:

    Joe Biden: 27% Kamala Harris: 50% Michelle Obama: 100% Gavin Newsom: 66% Other: 50%

    Obviously this doesn’t work perfectly (the Michelle Obama example especially is bizarre), but there is over $300M behind these numbers so people seem to think they’re at least somewhat accurate.

    TLDR: there is a lot of money that thinks Joe Biden is one of the worst options







  • This isn’t a good situation, but I also don’t like the idea that people should be banned from using energy how they want to. One could also make the case that video games or vibrators are not “valuable” uses of energy, but if the user paid for it, they should be allowed to use it.

    Instead of moralizing we should enact a tax on carbon (like we have in Canada) equal to the amount of money it would take to remove that carbon. AI and crypto (& xboxes, vibrators, etc) would still exist, but only at levels where they are profitable in this environment.








  • I would love if this were an option, but it’s not. The current battery technologies don’t have the scale for grid level storage capacity. The only grid scale storage solution that is really being done is to build very expensive infrastructure that moves water between two dams of different heights, and building more of those doesn’t seem politically likely at the moment

    The reality is that there is much a whole bunch of excess energy supply that is produced because power plants can’t cycle up and down with demand. So they have to keep producing at peak demand 24/7 (there is some nuances based on the type of power plant, NatGas is faster to turn on/off, but this is broadly true)

    I have my qualms with Bitcoin. As a currency it has significant transaction speed problems, and potential security ones after a couple more halvenings. But I don’t see a problem if Bitcoin miners want to pay energy producers to use energy that would be produced anyway and earn the producers nothing.