If I am having some problem with the federal government, I can call up my local representative and their office will help me sort it out. If it's a situation where I'm being treated unfairly or not according to the law, a sternly written letter from the representative usually sorts things out. If it is a case of the law being unjust, they might get the law changed, if it's not a politically difficult problem.
You might find it surprising that this actually happens in a country of 330M people and just 435 representatives, but it does. In part because only a small percentage of people need this service, but everyone benefits from having it as a contingency plan. Helping a single constituent can pay big dividends at election time as they tell their friends, family, and social media about your help. Likewise, not helping can cause great harm as you alienate your voter base.
Scaling - you live in a country the size of California with a quarter of that states population ( ~10 million ).
Large countries have different issues in areas that for you would be two or three whole European countries distant, and countries with larger populations have many multiples of your entire population to represent.
Those problems should be solved locally and often have no right to be influential on the national level. The fact that some areas are heavily invested in fossil fuel shouldn't cause the nation to stop a transition to renewables, but that's what seems to be happening a lot in the US.
In stead, at a national level, a transition can be started and budget can be created to support the states that will be negatively affected. The way that budget is handled locally will then depend on local politicians who can be voted on and need to show that they're actually doing the right thing locally.
Right now, national level politicians can get reelected locally because they're just obstructionists that want nothing to ever change. They'll never actually have to do anything except fund raise and pretend to care about their constituents by blocking anything those constituents don't like. It's a great way for a couple of people to make lots of money while killing the country.
Ok, now I have read several of your replies in this thread that are basically all arguing the same thing, so, I'm basically replying to more than just this one post.
When you say "the entire population", you mean the entire population of the country "USA", right? Because as someone from another continent, it seems like there is a very specific set of opinions that you want included.
You use terms like "the other side" of the political discourse, which to me, reduces the set of opinion to two specific sets of opinions, namely the two sets represented by the two major parties in the american two party system.
As someone from "the outside", this seems like a very narrow view of reality, even if you managed to get your "unbiased AI", that represents both major american political parties, it will still seem like a very narrow and biased AI to someone from the outside of that.
Also, what exactly is the goal of a conversational AI? is it just to make a conversation with it seem like a conversation with an average american? If so, why would anyone want that? Wouldn't it be of more value to have an AI that could tell me what people with knowledge of a subject thinks of it, rather than what random people think?
Not op, but I think it means that the cooling system contains a gas that if released (it would normally not be released at all), it would do the same amount of harm to the environment as you would normally do in a year.
(I have no idea if this comparison is accurate, but I do know that coolers commonly contain gasses that you don't want to release)
And in my experience, the "fake friendly" is largely confined to chain restaurants in the US. I haven't encountered it much at Michelin-starred establishments, for example.
I also didn't understand that you were making a joke, and was sitting here wondering how using a different type of database would solve this kind of problem.
I think that the economic argument is that it isn't viable for a private company to start a nuclear power-plant, it would require government involvement, and lots of people don't want the government to get involved in something that they think no-government entities can handle.
You don't nee the government to get involved in the nuclear plant if you don't want them to be - you can have the government make sure that the cost of global warming is paid by the coal plant. Either climate change and global warming are serious issues, and then properly accounting for their cost would significantly disadvantage coal power - or they are not serious issues and we can keep burning coal and oil.
Electricity will never, ever be a free market. The barriers to entry are almost insurmountable, especially capital requirements (production + distribution, especially distribution) but also the myriad safety regulations.
Might as well involve the government and gain some accountability, because with corporations, there is 0 accountability.
One of those definitional things; it'll never be a truly unregulated wild west market, but then what is?
Realistically the grid needs to be nationalised or under an arms-length wholly government owned corporation. You can't have competing grids. The grid is the market. The UK tried privatizing it (and the rail infrastructure, and the broadband infrastructure) and ended up taking electricity and rail national again.
On the back end I think the UK market works reasonably well with a light regulatory touch allowing for microgenerators. The retail side is more of a problem. You can't really expose retail customers to the spot price (that went wrong in Texas), so there has to be an intermediary, who is vulnerable to bankruptcy instead if the spot price shoots up.
> One of those definitional things; it'll never be a truly unregulated wild west market, but then what is?
Well, I didn't say "unregulated". You can have regulation that doesn't create huge barriers to entry.
What would be a free market today? Something with very low barriers to entry (capital, expertise, legal requirements) and with lots of competition.
For example real estate agents in some developing countries. They frequently have only a high school degree (if that), they don't really need a ton of money to get started (just some nice clothes and some time), and the legal aspects are mostly covered by notaries, anyway. In many developing countries the real estate market is not consolidated so you have a million independent real estate agents, who frequently don't even have exclusivity for the property they're selling. So you could literally have 10 agents promoting the same property.
Yeah, distribution is a huge can of worms. But production (and storage, as soon as it makes economical sense) are quite easy to entry. There are many cars that are more expensive than a small sized hydro or solar plant.
Note that managing lots of small generation is much harder than a few big ones that are contractually bound to behave according to certain rules. Distributed generation is extremely exciting, but it's also a big challenge.
