Washington State’s constitution limits a tax like this to no more 1% and requires it to be uniform; this law meets neither requirement.
I am uncomfortable that supporters of the income tax are so unbothered by it being unconstitutional. So few are insisting we amend the constitution to allow or not do it at all, on the grounds that violating the constitution (or flexibility construing it to match our desired ends) is bad.
Until there are severe personal penalties for an elected official violating their oath of office with regard to unconstitutional laws, they will simply ignore it. This is doubly true in formerly purple but now uniparty states like Washington where the Supreme Court is completely beholden to the party elite.
We have the same problem at the federal level in part because SCOTUS will not or cannot provide input or warnings on proposed legislation. How many federal laws would simply not exist if SCOTUS got a veto before it went to the President for signing?
Doesn't it just limit property tax to 1% while saying nothing about income tax?
Is it this?
> the aggregate of all tax levies upon real and personal property by the state and all taxing districts now existing or hereafter created, shall not in any year exceed one percent of the true and fair value of such property in money
Asking an AI (I know, I know) it suggests "Courts have ruled that income is property" which to me sounds like ruling up is down. I mean everywhere that has property tax separate from income tax or only one or the other would object...
There was initiative 2111 which seems it wouldn't even be necessary if income tax was against the constitution to begin with? Also I assume this law basically nullifies initiative 2111?
Washington's constitution says: "The word 'property' as used herein shall mean and include everything, whether tangible or intangible, subject to ownership". That is extremely broad, and there is 90 years of precedent affirming income is include here as something intangible and "subject to ownership."
So if one has income tax and property tax separate (which I guess happens now) then presumably one has also codified that income is _not_ property (which I guess is the more common state of affairs )?
Seems like this would be something for a Supreme Court to try. It was ordinary laws and cases (presumably) that had established the norms of equating income with property.
I think this is right, in part because I've been told exactly this from people who work for Google and their job is to sell me cloud stuff- i.e., they say they have so much internal demand they aren't pushing TPUs for external use. Hence external pricing and support just isn't that great right now. But presumably when capacity catches up they'll start pushing TPUs again.
Feels like a bad point in the curve to try and sell them. “Oh our internal hypecycle is done… we’ll put them in the market now that they’re all worn out.
There are almost always obvious conflicts of interest. In a normal startup, VCs have a legal responsibility to act in the interest of the common shares, but in practice, they overtly act in the interest of the preferred shares that their fund holds.
I once worked somewhere where I found some evidence that the offsets we were considering buying were probably junk. The CEO agreed, bought them anyway, and proudly proclaimed to all staff how we were now a net-zero company. Junk offsets are cheaper.
A hug part of the power of religions, such as christianity or ESG, is that it provides a mechanism to allow normal people to engage in evil but feel forgiven or justified.
"If someone can make you believe absurdities, they can make you commit atrocities."
Getting fossil fuel sourced carbon permanently out of the atmospheric carbon cycle with currently available tech (i.e. planting trees doesn't work because they burn and decompose) is an absurdity.
There's no realistic tech on the horizon that can actually reverse novel carbon emissions. Even if we had that kind of carbon capture tech, we would likely need to devote at least as much energy as we got in aggregate from all our fossil fuel burning human civilization captured over the past century to the project. We're several orders of magnitude in renewable and nuclear generation fleets away from that possibility.
The adults in the room aren't talking about reversing carbon pollution on human timescales anymore. They're talking about planetary heat engineering to adapt to a more densely insulated Earth. That means adapting to a changing environment on the ground, as well as possibly limiting the amount of solar energy entering the system in the first place.
Humanity is entering childhood's end. We can't depend on our mother to do all the work of providing a safe cradle for us anymore. We either grow up and take ownership by proactively managing our environment, or we die. The teenage years are usually painful.
> at least as much energy as we got in aggregate from all our fossil fuel burning human civilization captured over the past century to the project. We're several orders of magnitude in renewable and nuclear generation fleets away from that possibility.
Several orders of magnitude? That's not right at all.
If we more or less stopped emitting carbon, and devoted just 2x our current renewable and nuclear production to capture, paying "as much energy as we got", we'd be removing it 1/3 as fast as we emitted it, which is a pretty good pace.
Even if you include the growth to replace all current energy use, you don't even need a single order of magnitude.
Also it's entirely possible today to do things like make carbon-bearing liquids and stick them in a dead oil well, using local solar power to run the equipment. Something doesn't have to scale to the entire planet to be a real thing that some entities could pay for and legitimately be net negative on carbon. Geoengineering is almost certainly more cost-effective, but that's a different issue. Paying for $5 of cleanup every time you toss a piece of litter isn't cost-effective either, but it does legitimately improve things.
World renewable at around 12% * in 2022 [1], Nuclear is 9%. "2x current renewable and nuclear" for reclamation involves tripling current installations, and then it's another nearly 5x increase on current installations just to "stop emitting carbon".
Agreed with you that 7x isn't "several orders of magnitude" but it's certainly not happening anytime soon either.
Right, so you agree with my math? They were talking about just the energy to capture, so I gave that number first, followed by the number to do both.
> Agreed with you that 7x isn't "several orders of magnitude" but it's certainly not happening anytime soon either.
The hard part of that 7x is switching our current energy uses. It's not the extra power. And a reliable grid with that many renewables should make lots of extra power as a side effect.
> devoted just 2x our current renewable and nuclear production to capture, paying "as much energy as we got", we'd be removing it 1/3 as fast as we emitted it, which is a pretty good pace.
Some quick and dirty back of the envelope math.
According to this source, https://ourworldindata.org/energy-production-consumption, oil, coal, and nat gas, the big culprits, currently account for 137,000 TWh of energy use per year, or 76.5%. Bump that up to 82.5% if you include traditional biomass burning.
So, only 31,000 TWh per year come from renewables and nuclear. One third of that is hydropower, which is largely tapped out and certainly doesn't have exponential growth potential. So, we currently have about 20,000 TWh of renewable and nuclear generation capacity as a civilization, compared to 179,000 total consumption.
So, just to maintain current civilization standards without fossil fuels, we need to grow our renewable nuclear fleet by a little less than a single order of magnitude. Does it make sense to devote any of our renewable fleet to renewing atmospheric carbon if we are still emitting any of it? Seems like the more prudent action would be to use 100% of renewables to decrease emissions in the first place, because emission/extraction is always going to be an inefficient process.
Now, this doesn't account for the fact that most humans in the world are still incredibly energy poor. Your refrigerator uses more energy than the total use of the average person in Nigeria, which is expected to become more populous than China by the end of the century. Let's say that we agree that US levels of energy consumption is too high to target, and we would like a world where everyone has a European standard of living. The average European consumes about 38 MWh per year, US is double at 79 MWh, https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/per-capita-energy-use.
This means by the year 2100, human civilization would need control of about 400,000 TWh of energy to accommodate an expected population of 10.4 billion humans. Therefore, we need a 20x increase in the renewable and nuclear fleet just to serve all humans with a good standard of living without any fossil fuel consumption.
Now that we have people taken care of and we're not adding more carbon, we can start talking about removing carbon.
Back to the first data source, human civilization has currently consumed an aggregate of 5,341,110 TWh of fossil fuels since 1800. Assuming carbon capture can be 100% efficient (preposterous) meaning it takes an equal amount of energy to remove the carbon as we got when we burned it, then we would have to devote an equal amount of renewable energy watt hours to the project. Dedicated our current fleet of renewables, that would take 178 years. Let's assume that by the year 2100, we have 100,000 TWh of excess energy and we somehow have the political will to devote 20% of collective energy to the reversal project. That would take 53 years to remove the carbon added as of 2023 assuming 100% efficiency, and not accounting for the growing rate of carbon emissions until 100% carbon free. Given the fact we've been way overly generous with efficiency assumptions, we're looking at a project that takes multiple centuries.
So to your initial point, I am wrong. Not really several orders of magnitude, but between 1 and 2 orders of magnitude even in the most generous case where we don't make social progress eliminating poverty and just maintain the status quo. And that's assuming the crisis isn't that urgent and we can lazily take on the order of centuries to remove all the carbon we've added.
Assuming carbon capture can be 100% efficient (preposterous) meaning it takes an equal amount of energy to remove the carbon as we got when we burned it, then we would have to devote an equal amount of renewable energy watt hours to the project.
The rest of your analysis is quite correct but this is too pessimistic. You don't have to turn carbon dioxide back into fuel to get it out of the atmosphere. You only have to turn it into a stable non-gaseous compound, like magnesium carbonate. That can be done by crushing silicate rocks rich in alkaline earth metals, like olivine, and spreading them in coastal areas to get exposure to water and wave action. The magnesium silicate exchanges with carbonic acid to form magnesium carbonate and silica. The chemical reaction is thermodynamically spontaneous. The energy input to crush the rocks is just to accelerate the kinetics of weathering by exposing more surface area.
It's an accelerated version of the geological carbon cycle that naturally removes CO2 from the atmosphere:
Accelerated silicate weathering seems like the most affordable carbon capture solution that actually works, but it's still a more expensive way to decarbonize than shutting down coal fired plants or partially displacing gas-generated electricity with non-combustion electricity sources. The vast majority of countries that want to decarbonize still burn coal and gas for energy; incrementally reducing combustion of these fuels is the most cost effective incremental move for the next several years. That's why (IMO) no country is doing large scale carbon capture yet.
As for the research efforts, some privately funded work is trying to get a saleable product out of carbon capture, like turning CO2 into useful polymers or other chemicals. Accelerated silicate weathering is simpler but it also has no hope of producing any valuable outputs. It's purely a mitigation measure for CO2 that has already been emitted. I don't think that these efforts are likely to yield profitable processes, but it would be great if they did because then even countries without government decarbonization mandates could improve via private business efforts.
On the government-funded side, I think that some unproductive R&D work is being funded either due to funding bodies not being savvy enough or due to politics. Kind of like how NASA has to go forward with the Space Launch System even though it's ridiculously expensive for what it does.
As I said in another comment, almost all of the difficulty you're describing is decarbonizing our current use, not about capturing past use.
Also my original comment was about specific people or companies paying for capture. At that scale, paying for the increase in renewable power production isn't very hard. Many people and companies already use carbon-free power sources.
And I will note that over the course of decades scaling an industry up by 20x isn't particularly hard.
Fun analogy, but the link you provided seems to contradict your interpretation:
> An indulgence does not forgive the guilt of sin, nor does it provide release from the eternal punishment associated with unforgiven mortal sins. The Catholic Church teaches that indulgences relieve only the temporal punishment resulting from the effect of sin ... an indulgence is not a permit to commit sin, a pardon of future sin, nor a guarantee of salvation for oneself or for another.
It's not a terrible idea as a way of funding work to scrub atmospheric carbon for companies who don't want to or can't do it themselves. I just wish we were more strict about only including sellers that remove (not reduce) carbon from the atmosphere in a directly measurable way.
I've seen this phrasing frequently in regards to carbon sequestration and it always seems to wildly understate the real problem with removing CO2 from the atmosphere.
CO2 isn't some unnecessary byproduct of creating energy, compared to say soot in wood burning. The CO2 created is an essential part of the carbon cycle by which all living things store and release solar energy. CO2 + H2O + (Solar) Energy => Hydrocarbons + O2. This is how energy is stored on our planet from the energy in a high calorie soda to petroleum (okay technically sugar is not a hydrocarbon, but the idea still holds).
When we extract energy from foods, burning organic material, or fossil fuels we do so by reversing that equation: Hydrocarbons + 02 => CO2 + H2O + Energy
To "scrub" carbon necessarily requires more energy than we got out of the process in the first place. Photosynthesis, for example, is only 4% efficient. Which means it takes about 25x as much solar energy to build the log you burn then the heat and light you experience burning the log.
"Scrubbing" CO2 fundamentally requires tremendous amounts of energy, and more than we got from the energy source in the first place. There are natural processes, like rock weathering, than can do this without energy inputs, but those are hard to replicate and scale.
When I see people talking about processes where the end goal is removing carbon from the atmosphere, it's generally two setups.
The first setup is growing a lot of plants, turning them to charcoal, and burying it. This does require lots of energy, but the plants do it for you. You don't have to input the energy.
The second setup is a process that uses CO2 but doesn't generate fuel, so it needs much less energy than creating hydrocarbons.
> There are natural processes, like rock weathering, than can do this without energy inputs, but those are hard to replicate and scale.
any efforts to combat this issue? or approach it through a different perspective entirely ? seems like a fundamental/ circular problem, where in search for energy,
optimisation for the long term (sustainable conservation of fossil fuels) you need to input more energy or ‘value’ than you get ‘value’ out of it
If only there was a way for the government to incentive folks to stop consuming and companies to stop producing by rewarding folks who don't with some kind of monetary compensation.
Sounds like your CEO is a piece of shit. Luckily not all companies operate this way and being directly involved in my company's net zero initiative I know we investigate every single carbon offset we purchase and its rarely the cheapest option. In some cases it's a little frustrating when you see things like "this offset is we won't cut down a forest in Alaska for the next 10 years" as that is piss poor, but there needs to be better regulations and oversight...and the government doesn't care because they are getting their piece of the pie too.
Making advanced LLMs and releasing them for free like this is wonderful for the world. It saves a huge number of folks (companies, universities & individuals) vast amount of money and engineering time. It will enable many teams to do research and make products that they otherwise wouldn't be able to.
It is interesting to ponder to what extent this is just a strategic move by Meta to make more money in the end, but whatever the answer to that, it doesn't change how much I appreciate them doing it.
When AWS launched, I was similarly appreciative, as it made a lot of work a lot easier and affordable. The fact AWS made Amazon money didn't lower my appreciation of them for making AWS exist.
I think it's a defense against anti-trust attacks. Bell Labs did a TON of this in 60's and 70's when they owned most of the phone lines, service contracts, AND TELEPHONES THEMSELVES in the USA.
I believe companies open source their research efforts as a thing to point to when regulators come so they can say "look at all the good our cash-faucet monopoly provides the economy!!"
Some moves are purely altruistic. Some moves are semi-altruistic - they don't harm the company, but help it increase its reputation or even just allows them to offer people ways to help in order to retain talent. (Which is also kind of strategic, but in a different way.)
Also, some things are just mistakes and miscalculations.
This, in my view it's a (very smart) move in response to OpenAI/Microsoft and Google having their cold war-esque standoff.
Following the analogy : Meta is arming the Open source community with okish (but in comparison to the soviets and Americans shoddy) weapons and push the third position politically.
Amazon meanwhile is basically a neutral arms manufacturer with AWS, and Nvidia owns the patent on "the projectile"
I'm not trying to biting the hand that arms me - so thank you very much Meta and Mister Zuckerberg.
Now someone, somewhere can create this eras version of Linux, hopefully under this eras version of the GPL.
You have to agree to any terms they might think of in the future. Clicking download, they claim you agree to their privacy policy which they claim they can update on a whim
Google's privacy policy, for example, was updated stealthfully to let them claim rights over every piece of IP you post on the internet that their crawlers can get to
You agree to their privacy policy, and they can change the privacy policy. But if you have the model and don’t interact with them, then you don’t need to agree to future revisions because you aren’t interacting with them again (unless you want newer versions)
If I buy a TV, and the store has me sign a receipt that says I agree to their privacy policy by shopping there. Then that’s fine. I don’t need to agree to any future revisions unless I go back to buy more electronics from them.
> Google's privacy policy, for example, lets them claim rights over every piece of IP you post on the internet without protecting it behind a paywall
This is a nonsense. They added a disclaimer basically warning that LLMs might learn some of your personal data from the public web, because that’s part of the training data. A privacy policy is not a contract that you agree to, it’s just a notice of where/when your data is handled.
No there’s no legal basis for any of this that even begins to make sense. It’s nothing but a bad-faith reading. Here’s the phrase in question:
“we use publicly available information to help train Google’s AI models”
That’s it.
The point being that such public information might include personal data about you and that’s fair game, it falls outside of the privacy policy. It’s not a novel claim, just a statement of fact.
We're adult enough to have discussions like this in public. They are healthy to have. People make mistakes. Kudos to the original authors for releasing the source code so people could inspect and replicate their results.
I agree, and just want to add: nowadays it's super common for researchers to widely publicize their new work on social media. The blog post here even mentions "Table 5 from the paper was often included in tweets".
In this context of sharing your results very publicly, it seems only fair that rebuttals would be very public, too. Otherwise researchers would be highly incentivized to very publicly publish weak results because they would get a lot of positive publicity when they share the results, but not much negative publicity when the weaknesses are found and shared.
I think a "down-vote everything" strike could be highly successful. As long as enough users participate, it could cripple subs whose moderators didn't choose to participate. And it is fitting. Reddit is trying to charge its users for content and data created for free by its users, so why shouldn't users make that data junk for awhile to make a statement?
I suspect Reddit already has protections in place against this type of coordinated attack, as it would look exactly like when a whole sub (or 4chan) decides to brigade another sub for some other reason. There’s probably a hidden limit somewhere that when you downvote too many things at once, those vote become shadow-votes that don’t really count anymore.
That is a good point. Are there modifications to the voting strike idea that would make it effective?
For instance, what do you think about an "inverted-voting" strike instead? Everyone on strike does things roughly as normal, but swapping most of their down votes for up votes, and visa-versa? That way, people on strike will continue to vote about the same amount as before, and in the same subeditors as before, so it would be harder to identify them. The hope would be that although Reddit could do work to clean up the voting data, it would be annoying & take time, and presumably still end up as significantly lower quality data than they had before.
I remember reading that downvotes on the posts/comments page of a user's profile don't count for a similar reason, but no idea if that's actually true.
Years ago during the maxwellhill r/technology debacle, many users did that, and we're all banned. My first primary account, which today would have been 13 years old, was banned.
DOCSIS 3.1 has been out for 10 years, and I'd be happy if Xfinity just offered me those speeds. Compared to max speeds of the standard, Xfinity offers up to 12% the download speed and 3.5% upload speed.
I think the issue is that the bandwidth is shared. One of the things Xfinity is working on is moving to mid/high-split DOCSIS 3.1 which increases uplink speeds by allocating a larger frequency range to uploads. Even with mid or high-split DOCSIS 3.1, you're still sharing 450Mbps or 1.5Gbps with everyone on the same node. Without mid/high-split, you're sharing 108Mbps with everyone on your node. Another part of the network upgrade is splitting nodes and bringing fiber closer to the customer. If a node is serving fewer customers, there's less bandwidth that's shared.
The max speeds of the standard aren't really things that they can give you. Theoretically, LTE networks can give you 5Gbps, but the real-world experience is different given a shared link and signal loss/interference.
As I noted, Xfinity is updating their network to mid/high-split DOCSIS 3.1 and they're going to be increasing upload speeds to 75-200Mbps depending on your plan. They're already offering 1.2Gbps download speeds in my market. They're also supposed to start trials of DOCSIS 4 later this year.
I don't say this because Xfinity is a good company or anything, but you can't just look at the max speeds of a standard.
Notably also PON networks, the predominant last-mile fiber tech, is also shared medium with splits afaik going as high as 1:128. So for example classic GPON/EPON with nominal 1Gbps capacity can mean possibly only <10Mbps per-subscriber bandwidth allocation.
You are right, but with DOCSIS, you're generally sharing an order-of-magnitude smaller bandwidth allocation with many more users. Around here, there's 4 upstream channels available (roughly 120 megabits) shared across at least 200 homes.
Downstream is better, but it's still around a gigabit shared (32 DOCSIS channels.) Then you need to consider the RF issues that constantly plague cable networks, like ingress. Based on my personal experience, it can take months to get this fixed, if they'll even believe it's a problem. They'll open ticket for "outside plant" and not fix anything. At one point, I saw my upstream drop below a megabit! (And no, it wasn't my wiring or equipment.)
I recently switched to fiber, and it's night-and-day.
The cable monopolies are the robber barons of our time. Amazon, Google, Apple, Facebook, and, Microsoft all have competition. There is no real alternative to my cable internet provider. Satellite and 5G cellular are not effective competition and the old landline phone companies seem to have given up on expanding residential fiber.
Ireland (and I suspect other European countries) seem to have found a good model.
Right now, we have the following:
- FTTH networks (3 - POTS successor, electric company, government rollout)
- cable TV networks in urban areas (docsis, fiber coming allegedly)
- fixed wireless
- 4g / 5g fixed installs
- 4g / 5g hotspots
- LEO / geostationary satellite
For most technologies (except cable), there is competition through retail companies that rely on wholesale providers for the network. Residents in urban areas typically have access to 1-2 high speed (FTTH / fast docsis) options but coverage is still variable countrywide.
In most urban areas, there are metro networks that businesses can tap into which reduces the cost of landing (diverse) fibers.
The competition is other local companies offering fiber. Around here, the incumbent telco offers fiber (Verizon Fios.)
And some of the problems are technical. To do those mid-split upgrades that provide more bandwidth, they'll need to replace every amplifier between the user and the HFC node. That's a lot of truck rolls. Only to find out there's tons of interference on those frequencies.... more maintenance. It's no wonder it's taken years to deploy DOCSIS 3.1.
Loser pays causes higher legal fees, because on average, one only has to pay half of one's own fees, and also because losing becomes more costly making it worth it to spend more to try to avoid losing.
Hart says "Amazon served me with a lawsuit,"[0] but it was Amazon who was sued by California citing Hart as a witness to support the lawsuit. Hart is having to go through discovery as part of that.[1][2] Amazon is allowed to do this discovery, on the theory it should be able to scrutinize claims being made against it, particularly when billions of dollars are at stake.
Hart's estimate for the fees Amazon charges him seem approximately the same as the fees Amazon estimates it would charge for products like his.[3] Given that, perhaps he shouldn't matter much for the lawsuit. But the law is vague, often saying something is prohibited only when it is bad for competition. So vague claims of what helps vs hurts competition matters, which is why Hart's testimony matters.
Most stores choose not to feature items that one can readily buy cheaper elsewhere. So what exactly is the state's theory about when that is legal or not in such a way it is illegal for Amazon to be doing -- and is the state's theory here supported by the laws?
The problem really is the laws around what is anti-competitive are vague & subjective. As a result, everyone has to spend a ton of money on lawyers (and lobbyists) to figure out an outcome. Instead of this, the legislature should revise the law to be clear. I assume this is not done because the lawyers and lobbyists like the flow of money to them created by vague laws, but it also might be because vague laws are easier for the legislature to write.
I am uncomfortable that supporters of the income tax are so unbothered by it being unconstitutional. So few are insisting we amend the constitution to allow or not do it at all, on the grounds that violating the constitution (or flexibility construing it to match our desired ends) is bad.