Zane Selvans

At some point I guess everything becomes the Winter Olympics and we just alternate holding them at high and low latitudes.

Oh no, it's a veiled argument against allowing capex-light tech platform monopolies to offer VCs outsized extractive returns, not regulated utilities.

To me it seems like calling into question the long-term stability of returns from the clean sector / project bankability to scare off future capital flows is a big part of their strategy.

Do you think it's paranoid to wonder if the admin wants the price high? Like they don't care about the impact on the public, and in the meantime they have friends (everywhere) that are happy to get a windfall? Well okay maybe not everywhere.

Maybe this is this what the crypto bros meant by permissionless systems.

The availability of monopolistic platform rents and meme stocks (uh, Tesla) makes capital unwilling to invest in real world things with real long term returns. Because none of that real stuff can make 20-30% a year.

"In this area, however, the interests of oligarchs are fully unified and as a result, their combined material power will almost always enable them to get their way, no matter what political system happens to be in place."

"In other policy areas, the interests of different elites may come into conflict, enabling other actors and groups to make gains by playing those elites off of one another.

Snippets from "The Dispersion of Power" #BookSky

"Winters is concerned with a smaller class of genuine oligarchs and a narrower set of policies -- those governing the accumulation and defense of wealth.

We have the data. My longest columns have more readers, who read longer, and who share them the most.

How is there not a movie about her?

Obviously not trying to capture the #Boulder market.

Absolute hero.

I do feel like the "Trump works for the carbon lobby and Russia, which is also part of the carbon lobby." continues to be pretty good heuristic for predicting behavior.

NOW ENTERING. AGAIN.

Excited to see what this graph looks like in 2050.

The Solar + Storage part of the electricity ratchet at work. From @akshatrathi.bsky.social

www.bloomberg.com/news/article...

The Future of Open Data, Online Conference – Open Knowledge Foundation We are bringing together the open data community for a celebration of two decades of CKAN, and to discuss the role of open data and data infrastructures today, vis-à-vis the current technical and poli...

I'm interested to go to this (despite the UTC timezone) to hear what other open data folks are doing with LLMs for analysis, and if any of it works.

We embed rich table + column level metadata in our Parquet outputs, and I could imagine an LLM reading that as a guide. But.

okfn.org/en/events/th...

How Fossil Fuel Disruptions Lead to Booms in Solar and Batteries Past oil crises forced countries to cut fuel use and pay high prices, but now falling prices of clean tech offer another solution.

Past fossil-fuel price spikes left import-dependent countries with two options: pay up or cut fuel use. Now there is an alternative in solar and batteries.

I looked at recent examples in Europe, Pakistan, Cuba to glean what might happen with the war on Iran.

🎁🔗 www.bloomberg.com/news/article...

Which is a variation on the theme of utilities providing their economic & reliability modeling results to a PUC that's incapable of understanding all of the inputs and assumptions. Which aren't being explicitly shared anyway.

Like what if instead of just the boring descriptive metadata, we also include instructions to the LLM to bias the analysis? Tell it to always give renewables (or gas) the advantage? If someone is going over the code in detail and reproducing the analysis they'll find it. But what if they aren't?

...in a proprietary data context, where you're providing a conversational LLM interface to a large structured collection of data, if the analysis gets too estranged from the underlying data, what kind kind of weird prompt injection attacks will we see?

The Future of Open Data, Online Conference – Open Knowledge Foundation We are bringing together the open data community for a celebration of two decades of CKAN, and to discuss the role of open data and data infrastructures today, vis-à-vis the current technical and poli...

I'm interested to go to this (despite the UTC timezone) to hear what other open data folks are doing with LLMs for analysis, and if any of it works.

We embed rich table + column level metadata in our Parquet outputs, and I could imagine an LLM reading that as a guide. But.

okfn.org/en/events/th...

Paternal: Grapes of Wrath era citrus & almond farmer in California's San Joaquin Valley + 7th Day Adventist missionary in the Amazon + seaman on a medical frigate in the S. Pacific during WWII.

Maternal: Family doctor in a different but indistinguishable small town in the San Joaquin Valley.

How beauteous mankind is!

For some more depressing reads I’ve also done some academic work on the unique challenge of innovation away from high carbon industry (with a glimmer of hope in there too):

www.policyschool.ca/wp-content/u...

#EnergySky #OpenData

Got my driver's license renewed in Minnesota this week. Did an online application that took less than 10 minutes, walked into the government center at 10:15 AM, left at 10:30 AM. The public DMV certainly kicks ass compared to dealing with my private health insurer.

So imma get a little less sober and work on my 2025 taxes.

The Dispersion of Power: A Critical Realist Theory of D… The Dispersion of Power is an urgent call to rethink ce…

The combo of mid-transition work from @gruberte.bsky.social @jlappen1.bsky.social & @shastingssimon.bsky.social, a broad reading of Existential Politics, Samuel Bagg's Dispersion of Power & @amywestervelt.bsky.social's history of fossil fuel propaganda is sobering.

www.goodreads.com/book/show/20...