Ivanpah Solar Plant To Be Shut Down

https://www.eit.edu.au/a-solar-tower-at-ivanpah-solar-power-facility-caught-on-fire/

 

The multi-billion dollar Ivanpah Solar Power Facility in the Mojave Desert of California will be closed and demolished soon.The combination of bird deaths, threats to the endangered desert tortoises, unpredictable sunlight and failed economics have made the installation a disaster in every way.

Fortunately, the remaining recipient of this purchased free power, Southern California Edison, has appointed to its board of directors an effective and well known expert on energy issues, former Secretary of Energy  Jennifer Granholm.

 

bridgemi.com

According to Politico on April 14: 

GRANHOLM’S NEW HOME: Former Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm is headed downtown after her time in the Biden administration, to join global consultancy DGA Group as a senior counselor.

— Granholm, who served two terms as governor of Michigan prior to her four years leading the Energy Department, will advise multinational companies, investors and energy and infrastructure firms on a variety of issues, she said in an interview, including on cross-border strategy and policy, reshoring manufacturing and how to navigate “difficult geopolitical and regulatory environments” as well as the clean energy transition.

— But one of the key pieces of Granholm’s legacy on the latter issue is under threat, with Republicans across Washington pushing to repeal or roll back clean energy incentives that were created under the Inflation Reduction Act and implemented by Granholm’s DOE.

— Granholm told PI she was encouraged by congressional Republicans speaking out in support of those provisions, which she argued are in alignment with President Donald Trump’s energy priorities and noted have overwhelmingly supported projects in red states. “This transcends administrations, transcends political parties,” she said. “It’s really good for America to have the full suite of technologies built in the U.S.”

— Beyond that, Granholm told PI she hopes to put her leadership roles at DOE and in Lansing, Michigan, to good use for her clients. Her experience in both positions will be useful for international clients, for example, “to understand, what do states deal with when it comes to siting projects or connecting to the grid?” she said.

— Though Granholm won’t register to lobby and will not represent any clients before the Energy Department, she noted that she can “certainly say what the Department of Energy has been doing, and certainly I keep my eye on the ball about what the strategy is going forward.

 

 

The Rules-Based World Order

 "Donald Trump has waged an often unpredictable campaign that has upended parts of the rules-based world order that Washington helped build from the ashes of World War II."

Point 1. Rueters, AOL, The Economic Times, RTE, Times Live, Asia One, Dawn.com, The Kathmandu Post, The Straits Times, US News, MSN, News 24, Yahoo News and who knows how many others have used the identical verbiage in the same order to describe the havoc wreaked by the second time POTUS. Does this mean that all of their work is written by the same individual or that lesser typists are given detailed instructions or that the copy is a product of AI? 

Point 2. The "rules-based world order".  Is there a book somewhere that spells out the rules? Does everyone believe and follow the rules?. Amazon will sell you a world rules book,  

"Singapore’s State-Led Capitalism in a Rules-Based World Order", but that's probably not exactly what's needed. No doubt the Orange Man chatted with his underlings in an effort to  find out what their thoughts might be on the subject. Making Canada a 51st state, changing the name of a large area of ocean to the Gulf of America, incorporating Greenland as a province, occupying the Philippines, taking over an independent state, The Republic of Hawaii, forking over $7 million for Alaska. All, no doubt, perfectly legitimate according to the rules-based world order.   

Bullying Trans Kids

Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison is taking the federal government to court over executive orders that forbid male athletes pretending to be girls to compete in women's sports. 

 

huffingtonpost.com

By denying access to women's sports teams Ellison says that the would-be girls are being "bullyed". Kind of the same thing with getting a driver's license before age 16, smoking cigarettes, buying and drinking liquor, etc., all examples of bullying. but are in fact illegal.

"The orders attempt to ban trans children from school sports and define two sexes — male and female — that are “not changeable and are grounded in fundamental and incontrovertible reality.”

Ellison called the Trump administration’s actions “bullying tactics — plain and simple." His position is that he is enforcing the law as it applies in Minnesota

Federal legislation dating back to 1972, Title IX, was meant to gain a measure of equality in men's and women's sports. Schools were required to offer similar sports opportunities to both sexes, in terms of both numbers of participants and financial commitment. It didn't mention boys participating as girls.

 

Rachel Hardeman

Rachel Hardeman, until recently the  the director of the Center for Antiracism Research for Health Equity at the University of Minnesota, is a member of Time magazine's 100 most influential people of 2024. Unfortunately, in what's become a frequent development in academia world, she plagierized the work of a fellow researcher, Bridgette Davis, in a submittal for a grant from  the NIH. While Davis's article was written in 2019 she didn't realize until recently that the Hardeman work was almost a verbatim copy of her own. Hardeman has since resigned.  

 

Basquiat Masterpiece To Be Auctioned

wikiart.org

Christies estimates that the 1982 example of finger painting known as "Baby Boom" could sell for as much as $30 million at their May auction.   That sum would be small in that other examples of Basquiat's work have been gavelled down for over $110 million.

What does this say about the modern art world? Are those with the funds to purchase this kind of art merely taking advantage of the possibility of owning a near priceless work, leaders in the appreciation of immense talent or followers of a trend initiated by others?

We'll need to wait until the response is measured to a Basquiat being stolen off the wall or splashed with tomato soup. It will be harder to determine if its value is related to what appears to be a steady decline in what is called culture and civilization.

Reward Modelling

"Reward modelling" is the term used to describe a process that guides a Large Language Model toward human preferences in generative artificial intelligence. The Deep Seek development team and others at Tsinghua University in Beijing, China are preparing to release version 2 of their economical  GAI in the near future. 

Human preferences? Human preferences are dependent on the combination of particular cultural factors and individual idiosyncrasies, the number of which could easily be infinite. Like every aspect of GAI in whatever form, its development is structured by those doing the developing. No large language model will be able to incorporate something as yet undiscovered. 

An authoritarian regime could easily use directed GAI to explain and justify its policies to its population, just as genuine humans have in the past. It's unlikely that if the human preference is found to be greater personal freedom policies will reflect that. 

The Deep Seek phenomenon is already having repercussions in the US data center growth picture. If smaller scale or more efficient GAI installations become part of the US data center complex, electrical demand will be a fraction of what is currently projected. More Deep Seek publicity will put the brakes on funding needed for what could be called "conventional" data center development. It will also be necessary for reliable customers to buy in to the concept and make GAI profitable. Nobody knows yet if that will be the case but some are willing to accept the risk rather than being left on the sidelines.    

An MIT Analysis Of The Tariff Fiasco

First of all, in a society that values freedom, there are no tariffs. A free citizen is free to purchase whatever legal item he or she wishes from anyone who cares to sell it to them. Both sides agree on the terms of the transaction without government interference. This was the ultimate message of Adam Smith's seminal book from 1776, The Wealth of Nations, free trade, accepted as gospel even today.

According to an MIT Technology Review article: "  Trump administration cuts to the Department of Energy and other federal programs could also take away money from demonstration projects that help cleantech companies test and scale up their technologies. And if Congress does eliminate certain subsidies in the Inflation Reduction Act, it could halt billion-dollar projects that are being planned or perhaps even some that are already under construction."

Perfect logic. Keep spending taxpayer funds that will be used for planned or commenced projects in spite of their lack of viability.

“The biggest challenge for companies that are making hundred-million- or billion-dollar capital investments is dealing with the uncertainty,” Turner says. “Uncertainty is a real deterrent to making big bets.”

 Yes, as Ben Franklin is credited with saying, "There's nothing certain but death and taxes." Other wise it wouldn't be a bet at all. The Neo-Whigs that wish to get in on the clean tech gravy train want to do it with taxpayer funding. They want a sure thing, not a good bet.

Former Biden Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen said that tariffs on Chinese solar panels and other "clean" products are needed if the move to non-hydrocarbon energy is to proceed. Ergo the existential threat to life on earth is economically dependent on making some products more expensive. If an exploring space ship from another galaxy appeared and gave away solar panels for free it would be a disaster, according to the academic economist.