I looked up onions, lettuce and tomatoes (because burgers), and the volatility actually looks very similar. Am I missing something or looking at the wrong things?
Lettuce and Tomatoes don't keep well, which adds more seasonal variability and reduces the ability of a futures market to smooth prices.
Compare with potatoes, which keep about as well an onions, and are farmed in the same areas. Look at onions and potatoes over a 5-year time span (because the default all-data time span is silly for this). It doesn't give enough control of the Y axis to make the comparison easy - for potatoes it shows me Y=40-320, for a range of 280; for onions it shows me Y=120-440, for a range of 320. This means that potatoes are more "zoomed in" and it's graph will exaggerate volatility relative to onions, but qualitatively, I'd say the potato graph looks smother just the same. This is exactly what economic theory says a futures market should do to the price.
> Lettuce and Tomatoes don't keep well, which adds more seasonal variability
The more durable a produce is, the easier it is to transport over a large area, which will always smoothen price fluctuations. This alone could explain why lettuce and tomatoes have higher volatility than onions, which have higher volatility than potatoes, which have higher volatility than corn and weat.
At least that's the null hypothesis that the hypothetical effect of futures should be compared to.
I know nothing about logistics of the food supply chain and how they preserve food at scale, but at least at home I'd say that potatoes are close to twice as durable as onions.
Or to bring it back to the original context... Reducing volatility would be reducing the impact of bad weather on your harvest, absorbing volatility is finding someone to cover your losses. (presumably by giving up some profits on the good years. It's like a financial low pass filter)
Volatility is a natural consequence of weather, blight, etc., etc.
To reduce volatility you would need to actually stabilize the supply of onions.
What futures do is allow traders to shift risk from the future to the present. By pricing that risk, it's possible for people who depend on onions to pay a little more now in exchange for a guarantee about the future.
It's not magically going to make onions less volatile (although high risk prices can spur investment which might) but it can reduce disruptions caused by volatility.
The classic example of this is futures on jet fuel which allow airlines to weather random wars in the middle east, OPEC shenanigans, etc. Ticket prices are higher this way, but the existential threat of being forced to cancel a bunch of flights is gone.
For speculators yes. But for a farmer and the consumer of the goods they would rather lock in a margin for their goods and run their business than risk guessing what the price will be at harvest time or consumption time. It’s called hedging.
How many farmers do you imagine are in this thread?
And consumers neither lock in margins nor run a business because consumers buy at retail…
Ok charitably, maybe you use “consumer” in a special sense of businesses that consume raw materials such as owners of onion ring factories. In those cases, future prices (as opposed futures prices) are typically negotiated directly into contracts with producers of those commodities…and how many of those are in this thread?
In the vast majority of cases, futures are traded speculatively and physical delivery of goods and chattles is an extreme exception.
People are willing to lose a small but predictable amount of money to avoid occasionally and unpredictably losing a massive amount of money. The former is a loss they can plan for and absorb. The latter might kill their business.
Traders are often happy to take the other side of that trade because they can trade against many counterparties, collect a small premium from each one, and try to ensure their counterparties won’t all fail in a correlated way.
You may have liabilities or income that exist outside of financial markets e.g. if I have 500t of wheat due to be harvested I might want to hedge enough to guarantee I can pay my staff - ive locked in the price of wheat, I might make less money as a result but my risk is lower.
Interesting. This would be more sensible if it was time-bound. Since the intention was clearly "stop a bad thing someone is doing right now" and not "make this field illegal forever"
I wonder if anyone read the copy on this page or if it mostly came out of an LLM.
The "Restoring the shoreline" and Rebuilding the marshlands" paragraphs below the images are almost exactly the same. The first sentence is exactly the same.
Maybe, but there's some very specific legal language that cpra and the state requires everyone use in referring to some of these issues, and at least part of the land SpaceX is acquiring is involved in coastal restoration lawsuits or deep water horizon settlements or both.
As an engineer working on cpra projects in the past, I've wanted to reword a variety things but was forced to use their legal language.
It's mostly a good thing as it keeps things properly defined in a political context that are meant to have specific technical meanings (like marsh, beach, rebuild vs restore).
For me that makes it more likely to be human-generated. Seems like a "rushing person juggling revs and copy-pasting" mistake.
FWIW, the writing style and tone match pre-LLM SpaceX writing. Of course you can prompt an LLM to mimic style, but somehow the regression-to-average blandness shines through. That can be hard to distinguish from bog standard corporate speak though.
I saw the first article on thick art. This was linked within that article.
I enjoyed reading both, then popped over to see if this one had ever been submitted to HN. It hadn't, so I did. Figured that if people liked the first one, they might like this one as well.
The map is ok, but mostly I'm interested in the number of map apps people are cranking out with AI. The design elements pretty clearly mark them as such (and it's even more obvious once you poke around a bit). I love maps, so I get it, they tend to hook people, and the relative density of information can be very high.
I work in the electricity space (and of course we have a map[0]), and it has been wild to see the number of "I was a PM at a B2B SaaS/AI company and now I'm here to solve the grid with this vibe-coded tool", which inevitably involves a map. Seems like an inflection point was hit sometime late last year where first SMEs could make little apps they couldn't before, and then it expanded further into people who truly don't know a space but the AI can make it look like they do to other people who also don't, and the cycle continues.
Utility scale, solar installs, and will be total solar by end of year.
Texas accounts for 40% of new solar capacity installed per year at this point.
It does lag behind an inefficient and expensive rooftop solar, and has no State mandate for homeowners to build it.
That said, I think this is enough to show that Texas doesn't hate solar, so there's probably a different reason for selecting gas to support the data center. If I were to Hazard I guess, it would be stability and demand curve
The solution to pollution is dilution was a philosophy prior to modern environmental protection laws, which were a reaction to the fact that we were absolutely destroying all kinds of ecosystems, even when we thought we were just diluting toxins down to nothing.
This stuff is barely pollution. Everything there is a natural part of the environment and biological processes. Literally the only issue here is the concentration of it. Dumping it in the ocean is an ideal course of action. Failing that it should be dumped out in the wilderness, not in bags, but just on the ground. It may have a short-term change in the local environment, but long term it's fertilizer.
The risk of dumping it in the ocean is that some asshole will see that happening and think "gosh, i should slip my barrels of hazardous toxic waste in with that dumping activity."
> ”It may have a short-term change in the local environment, but long term it's fertilizer.”
The fish would make for great fertilizer, but the salt would not. High salt concentrations will kill many plants and probably would stick around in the soil for a long time.
Absolutely. So the ideal solution would be to return it to whence it came, but presumably that’s easier said than done if they’re going to all this trouble to bury it in a plastic sarcophagus instead.
There's not enough salt to sterilize the land where dumped. The salt in fish sauce preparation may be as high as 20% initially but by the time it's done, after having been drained and refilled multiple times, it's 2-4%. To sterilize land requires 5-10kg/m^2 of salt applied repeatedly.
I’m not talking about sterilizing land. Just that salt is not a desirable ingredient in fertilizer. Most plants will not thrive in salty soil, even if it doesn’t kill them.
The scientists who have been testing it since 2016 have looked at the evidence and they disagree with you. CBC had to do an access to information request for the results - it took four years. Here is their coverage:
That just sounds like it's a knee jerk reaction from regulators. For decades their reaction to pollution was "yeah just dump it in the ocean", then we figured out it was bad. So now the pendulum swung the other way where we can't dump anything in the ocean, even if it's probably benign, because if it turns out to be not benign, it'll super bad on you. "You did what? Approved dumping pollutants in the ocean? Haven't you learned anything from us dumping radioactive super-mustard gas in the oceans decades ago?" Better to play it safe. After all, you're not picking up the tab.
This sludge was actually tested and analyzed- it’s not compatible with marine life and would in fact cause an ecological disaster. It’s why they’re mixing it with peat moss and also why they’re doing the work now - the factory itself has been battered by waves and the vats are in danger of being washed into the sea.
Not mentioned, but later on a gas turbine was built on site with some of the existing transmission infrastructure, and there’s also the Cross Sound Cable there, coming over from New Haven and connecting NYISO and ISO-NE.
Possibly not mentioned because some of the adjacent site is still very much used due to those facilities, making it even easier to be caught trespassing.
The dosage makes the poison - but if it sticks around in the body dilution may slightly alleviate effects but at the cost of more widespread buildup. This is out of my field so I'm not certain if that's a concern here.
In some cases it still is, but we need to emphasize the exceptions, which can be rather serious.
For example, we can hardly "dilute" CFCs or CO2 any more than we did, by putting them into a whopping 5.15×10^18 kg of the entire atmosphere of the Earth. Yet both still cause bad things, because there's no (sufficient) process to break them down or move them to a safe state.
What did Republican appointees on the Supreme Court have to say about student loan forgiveness?
Who not only fights tooth and nail against healthcare improvements but actively took money from existing programs to fund a national police and detainment apparatus?
Which party produced the most meaningful (albeit not far enough) healthcare reform of the 21st century in the US?
Those examples in particular are quite rough to try and both sides.
No, you're playing a rhetorical game, trying to con readers with a switcheroo between pairs of "viewpoints" that aren't actually the same thing at all. For example:
1. "The liberals are everywhere trying to teach our children something wrong! They're telling them men can become pregnant!"
2. "Men--by which I implicitly mean people without the parts for it--cannot become pregnant."
Only the second one common and banal, unless you ask someone with a weird fetish, or perhaps a fan of Schwarzenegger and Danny Devito eager to talk about the film Junior.
In contrast, the first one is not solely a medical belief, but also a claim about what others advocate, and the average American--or average HN commenter--may quite rightly judge you a weirdo for internalizing and repeating it.
Uhm, did we read the same comment? There were many things listed that only a demented fox news watcher would go off about in one comment. What specific thing does "80% of America" support?
Holy projection, batman. I'm simply calling you out on your bullshit and you decided to spaz out about castration or whatever the nutter talking point is of the day, further proving my point LOL
I had Claude dig through the orders to pick out substantive examples where the courts ultimately allowed the order to go through USAID's dismantlement is the top instance which has an affirmative legal ruling. However unilateral grant freezes, tariffs, and other issues are still progressing in the courts.
While I'd certainly like to return to the world where congress handled the democratic duties of law making, budget, and war declarations. I must acknowledge that we no longer appear to have separation of powers.
Where I live (California) there are basically no republicans in power. For a long time now. And we have more money and a better economic base than just about anywhere on the planet Earth.
So to all the partisans out there who are sure things would be better if "their side" had total control, I ask: what the hell is going on with California then?? We should be modeling the best governance in the country and even the world, but yet, our government is basically dysfunctional and our state is great despite it.
California has structural obstacles that don’t fit into partisan politics. Proposition 13 limits property tax collection, which warps housing development and many other factors. Also, California has high incomes, which means Californians pay more federal income tax, and the state receives less back in federal benefits, to the tune of almost $100 billion a year. Those are significant headwinds that the state would still have to deal with even if it was governed well.
Prop 13 is brought up a lot but it never made any sense to me that it also applies to commercial real estate used for businesses. I can see an argument for single family homes (primary dwellings) but property that large corporations own ? It makes no sense.
It was created by and for homeowners, but businesses aren't going to pass up a gift like that. It's actually worse for commercial property - building are owned by separate single purpose corporations, and if you want to sell the building, you sell fractions of the ownership in the corporation over time so there's never a big enough change to trigger a tax reassessment.
You really think california localities have a revenue problem? Prop 13 dos not limit property tax collection: it changes the distribution of it. It means I pay 40x more than my neighbor and that is very dumb, but whenver the city needs more revenue they just raise the rates.
The problem with Prop 13 is not about its effect on tax revenue.
Prop 13 is no different from rent control. It distorts the market and limits supply.
If a property owner can't afford the tax on their land, it means the land is under-utilized. SFHs should be replaced by townhomes which should be replaced by multi-family buildings and so on. That doesn't happen because people who bought a house 50 years ago for a few beads and pieces of gum don't have this market signal in the form of a higher property tax bill.
Where was it suggested that it caused a budget crisis? This started from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47938121 which said "Proposition 13 limits property tax collection, which warps housing development and many other factors."
Low turnover, political and financial opposition to building, and structurally higher costs. It's a tangled mess.
1. People are disincentivized to move - the longer you've lived in a home, the larger the effective subsidy (vs average property tax payer) becomes.
2. New homes are on the other end of that - you pay much more in taxes than the average. So the cost of new homes is higher.
3. The average home pays less than it costs the local government. This is largely true everywhere because of the cost of public schools, but Prop 13 makes it more pronounced in CA. So local governments have a huge disincentive to approve any housing, especially larger apartments or condos where school aged children could live.
4. Govs make up for the lower tax per home by charging very high development fees for new construction, which raises prices and lowers rates.
Bwuh yeah imagine living in a meteorological paradise that happens to be the world’s strongest economy with the nation’s best state school system with a diversity of culture bringing tangible everyday benefits like delicious food. Sounds horrible.
Sure, our streets are shit, our legislators are actively trying to ruin the tech industry, we spent $130B on 300 yards of train, policing in large cities is a disaster, and the "best state school system" translates into an education level at 29th/37th country-wide, building housing is impossible due to the world's worst permitting process, but otherwise...
Look, I don't mind paying a lot of taxes. If there's service you get for it. And I'm deeply in the blue camp. But CA leadership (state/county/city) is still an utter disaster and needs to be tossed out on its ear.
Yeah I don’t mind Californians shitting on California, by all means, strive for perfection. But… have you been to eastern Kentucky? There’s levels to this.
Also, low key, visit eastern Kentucky. Gorgeous countryside, Red River Gorge. Genuine people, I once stayed in someone’s cabin over Thanksgiving and they insisted on bringing me a fresh Thanksgiving meal, a gesture I’ll never forget.
> what the hell is going on with California then??
Only being the 4th or 5th largest economy in the world.
California's own voters did the housing crisis to themselves by passing Prop 13. You can't pin that on any political party.
I don't know who's responsible for the clusterfuck that is PG&E.
Water supply and farmer water rights are another contentious issue. The seeds for that were sown in the late 19th and early 20th century. It's got nothing to do with Democratic domination of state politics today.
Other than expensive housing and electricity, and a sometimes precarious water supply, the state is basically fine. What's this political dysfunction you speak of?
> And we have more money and a better economic base than just about anywhere on the planet Earth.
Because of the massive historical defense, tech and entertainment industries all under one roof for decades, bringing in crazy money. The blue politicians that built California as the defense, tech and movie powerhowse decades ago, have nothing in common with those running California today, so California staid successful despite it's current blue leadership not because of it.
It would be amazing for things to be as simple as "vote blue and become rich like California", but that's not how it works. It's more like rich people tend to vote blue, rather than voting blue makes you rich.
When the private sector brings trillions in revenue and local taxes, then the current political competence decline, corruption and mismanagement, inflicts a much smaller splash damage than in places that have less money so there's no one size fits all magic solution.
Define "For a long time now". The Republican party controlled California for 75% of the 1900s with the Democrats coming in power in the last quarter of the century. This is well after California established itself as an economic powerhouse which was greatly aided by the wild West attitude and things like Santa Clara being the location of 20 superfund sites due to all of the ground pollution caused by the semiconductor industry. California is also home to the greatest environmental disaster known as the Salton Sea. You are either going to have to concede that either the economic base of California was established by Republican and exploitative pro-business practices or that Democrats manufactured some of the worst environmental catastrophes.
> Define "For a long time now". The Republican party controlled California for 75% of the 1900s with the Democrats coming in power in the last quarter of the century.
50 years seems like plenty to justify "a long time now"
That's easily answered. They think California is a hellhole that everyone with means is fleeing. "Vote for Democrats to turn your state into California" is a great way to get people on both sides to vote for their own preferred side.
California has an identical problem to Texas: Local big money industry responsible for a large part of the state's GDP, and ample money to take total control of the local Single Party machine. New York was like this once, possibly still is.
I don't think "What the hell is going on with California?" is a great example. I've lived in many states throughout my life, from deep red to navy blue, and now I live in California. It's definitely the best place I've ever lived, and neither me nor anyone in my family wants to leave any time soon. Is California a flaw-free utopia? No. Does it have its shit together in more ways than most other states? I'd say yes. Also, being a few hours drive from the ocean, a few hours from a city that's a major cultural center, a few hours from the beautiful Sierras and winter sports, and a few hours from many other pristine and interesting outdoor amenities is and added bonus. Extra bonus, year round decent weather, relatively clean air, clean water, a great university system. Extra extra bonus, nobody in my house has to worry about being hunted down because of the color of their skin or their national origin or their sexual preferences, or because they had a miscarriage.
Not exactly the hell hole red staters make it out to be.
Totally, like I said right there, it is a great state!
But the governance is not great. That was actually the whole point I was making. And getting back to that: The getting things done is abysmal. Taxes are high. Spending is loose. No progress is made on things the state takes on as priorities (housing costs, high speed rail, homelessness). It's just not well managed. But from the "one side good, other side bad" POV it should be great, no pesky republicans to get in the way. I don't know if there's a lesson there but it's an intersting question to ask.
Is there any example of good State governance to point to, though? Every State is on the spectrum of dysfunction. I'd argue (and I am aware that it is a blatantly partisan point of view) that every additional republican you add to the mix will increase dysfunction. The party's entire M.O. currently is to increase chaos wherever possible, grief the other side, and generally troll everyone not like them; and I say this as someone who voted (R) decades ago. The (R) of today have no governance principle besides sowing chaos and ending effective governance, and CA would be even worse if Sacramento had to deal with having a significant number of them around gumming everything up.
I thought Larry Hogan did pretty well in Maryland. Debate about the surplus he left being a sleight-of-hand or not, I didn't feel that Maryland was dysfunctional.
Baltimore however, yes. Hoping this latest mayor can finish his term without getting arrested for corruption, as is tradition. The city council is worse.
You clearly have a low opinion of republicans. I do too! Where we differ is that I have a low opinion of democrats too. I see many dem partisans say how much better they are than republicans and overall I’m not seeing good governance.
Yea, I definitely wasn't clear: With (D)'s we see a spectrum from incompetence to uselessness, and bad outcomes from good intentions. With (R)'s, the spectrum instead includes malice, griefing, cruelty, and deliberate sabotage of governance. Neither are good for governance, but I know which one I'd rather have.
Yeah there are a lot of pathologies on both sides.
Democrats, for example, have loved to stoke the class war for the last 10+ years. Every week you hear a new take on how billionaires could solve homelessness or cancer or something if only they were taxed more. The left wing radicals are just as bad for America. Partisans hate it but the only true path out of this mess is centrism.
Maybe a good start if you're a specific flavor of person, but it would be pretty amazing to claim it's an objective observer of "freedom" when the Freedom Index is a John Birch Society project, which is an ultraconservative advocacy group.
Just because it's called the freedom index, doesn't mean it's concerned with the freedom of all man, look to the civil rights movement for easy examples of how JBS' "freedom" is only for certain people.
Hell, click over to the JBS website and you'll see Alex Jones and Steve Bannon front and center on their home page. It's crazy to refer to one of their projects as some neutral arbiter.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onion_Futures_Act
(which also banned box office receipt futures)
A fun thing is to go on FRED and make a graph with prices from onions and, say, corn to see the differences in volatility.
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