Since others are not saying it, enforcing this will immediately cause havoc as any number of citizens do not have ready access to any document proving citizenship.
(Non-US people note that this is likely a major difference between the US and your country. The US does not compulsorily provide proof of citizenship to its citizens that can be used at places where one is typically asked to prove one's citizenship.)
Bessent notes here that Real ID would not be considered valid ID for this purpose, which sounds like it will have the same problems as the SAVE act. This could mean debanking anyone who has changed their name and does not have a notarized copy of the name change certificate, and most people who do not drive.
(I am not sure how it would handle minors, who generally do not have any photo ID. Would they have to come in to provide ID when they turn 18?)
The underlying idea is fine, but it creates problems when combined with the reluctance to issue any kind of national ID.
I don't even think it's about partisan tilt anymore. This administration's M.O. is raw chaos, havoc, and just this low-level randomized churn that keeps us all conditioned to believe that nothing in government works deterministically anymore.
> If they don't have documentation, are they citizens?
Yes. As OP said, "anyone who has changed their name and does not have a notarized copy of the name change certificate, and most people who do not drive." Note that the first category includes many married women.
> All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside.
This is part of the US constitution. There's no "if they have proper documentation" qualification.
If the US Constitution is to have force as the core document foundational to the governance of the US, it is important for its clear text to have the force of law.
An executive agency creating new requirements for citizenship has the effect of overriding the Constitution, which brings into question what are the controlling documents for the country.
Yeah I don't think people are really fully appreciating the scope of this, because it means people would essentially have to have a passport to open a bank account.
It's very dark. I tend to be libertarian about these things and feel like it's none of the government's business. Get a warrant and do your investigations if you want to prove someone is a foreigner up to no good. There is no real problem unless you're xenophobic or racist.
So I don't agree the "underlying idea is fine" at all. This is a step further though, by putting an administrative and financial burden on people to have a bank account.
The fact this is normal in other places in the world doesn't make it ok to me either — two wrongs don't make a right. And in any event many other places are more socialized than the US, so there isn't the same kind of burden on many places as there would be in the US. It would be one thing if the administration were bending over backwards to provide public healthcare, expand education and public research, but they're doing the opposite.
> I don't agree the "underlying idea is fine" at all
I gave you a shout out! :-P
> the reluctance to issue any kind of national ID
Americans have tended to resist this kind of surveillance (when done by the government). Honestly, because it's not necessary. It doesn't make sense to tax 350 million people when DOJ usually doesn't even go after the known big fish. Or when companies can openly violate e.g. money transfer laws at vast scale until they get rich enough to get the laws changed in their favor.
This feels like the kind of thing that will blow up if they implement it and then have to be kicked down the road forever, like RealID. Old people know that the initial RealID deadline was before Barack Obama's election.
You are required to prove your citizenship to the government (by proxy of your bank or otherwise). The government lacks a unified document of identity which would by law act as a proof of citizenship, and reserves its right to call any other document it is issuing to be “insufficient”.
Generally will leave as an exercise for the reader.
But immediately one can say that most minors will not have the requisite picture ID because they do not drive and we are not required to carry picture ID (this rollout would be touch more people than the requirement that drivers carry ID). So as of right now, most minors in the US cannot prove citizenship under the criteria Bessent is suggesting (yes, the country should be debating this).
Let's call it all the people under 15 so we don't get the "akshully learner's permit" folks objecting. The US has ~60 million people in the 0-14 age bracket, apply whatever ratio you want to that for citizens/noncitizens and you are still going to end up with a lot, likely millions, of people.
Minors aren’t allowed to open bank accounts without their parents being on the account. Unless their parents are also in that age bracket, but that’s biologically unlikely
You asked who doesn't have the required documentation, I am telling you it's minors. Saying parents are also on the account does not change that as of this moment, those documents do not exist and therefore have to be secured.
> Unless their parents are also in that age bracket
This is irrelevant because the point was to identify a broad population that currently does not have the relevant documentation. That's people 0-14.
> Since others are not saying it, enforcing this will immediately cause havoc as any number of citizens do not have ready access to any document proving citizenship.
I didnt have all the documents available for my Real ID which has quite the requirements. In the limit, at least as many as any other citizenship proofing task. We can assume the greatest difficulty would be for the homeless.
It took me ~15 minutes on the social security admin website to get a card ordered to me because mine is lost somewhere in a safe. I had it sent to my house, a PO box, homeless shelter, or any other location would work too. Can be done via a library if you're homeless. Zero excuse.
It took me ~20 minutes to figure out which hospital I was born at and get a copy of my birth certificate shipped to me. See above. Likely marginally more difficult for a homeless person. Not terrible difficult though if you're not so cracked out you don't remember even the state in which you were born. Again, zero excuse.
It took me ~30 seconds to find a document to prove my current residency. Trivial for a homeless person as well. Zero excuse.
Again, in the limit, the government should provide an easier way to do this. But the pearl clutching over the difficulty is to vastly overstated.
This is simply a fantastic excuse to not require citizenship for yet another thing. Something absolutely unheard of in other western countries. I'm beginning to think all of this avoiding proof of citizenship has an ulterior motive.
The point is that there are hundreds of millions of consumer bank accounts in the US, and it's not clear that Treasury appreciates the turmoil they are proposing. The country has not had a debate over this, it sounds like it might just drop out of the sky one day and create unnecessary chaos.
We can use the rollout of Real ID itself as a gauge. Executives of both parties, and several Congresses, landed on 20 years as an appropriate rollout time to do so smoothly. And that's basically only needed for air travel, which most Americans do not do in a given year.
It's not crazy to ask that a more disruptive change be subject to more scrutiny and deliberation about its rollout.
In your case, everything was straightforward, you already have a license, and your bank is local so you can walk in and show your ID, awesome for you. But over hundreds of millions of people, every edge case will present. (Is it okay for banks to freeze assets of people in hospitals who are unable to perform the necessary steps and present themselves at a bank? Inmates? How are joint accounts handled? What counts as bank account? What happens to money currently held legally here by foreign nationals?)
The one that might affect the most people here: if you have to show ID, presumably the bank has to be able to authenticate it against your person. Which means an in-person visit. This would be bad if you are one of the tens of millions of Americans whose primary bank does not have any branches in their state of residence. I bank at my alma mater's credit union, even though I have not lived in that state for decades. Would I need to travel there to show my ID or have my account frozen?
Again, a bipartisan set of Congresses and Presidents landed on 20 years to rollout when the only real penalty would be some people would not be able to board a plane when they wanted to, without extra scrutiny.
A botched rollout of this could lead to unpredictable financial calamities as rents and other bills go unpaid, etc.
There is simply not an emergency here, we don't have to upend our financial system pretending there is. The ulterior motive here is to preserve the stability of our financial system while making changes.
Do people really prefer to see vCPU pricing in per-second increments? Is this useful for any person?
Presumably no information is conveyed by the first 4 significant digits. And can anybody compare this pricing to e.g. AWS or Google Cloud? I have never known my compute cost to second resolution, so I'd need to do calculations to even ballpark this.
Suggestion: Don't obfuscate the price, just remove it. Clearly you don't really want casual browsers to know how much you're charging[1]. Which: fine, this is the current trend in tech. So just remove the pricing and put your calendar link there as a CTA instead. Be classy. Don't play games with your audience.
1 - anybody who plugs this into a calculator will a) understand why you don't show monthly pricing and b) think this is screamingly expensive. Which reinforces my recommendation to just replace the price with a CTA and your calendar link.
There is a useful signal in such a way of indicating pricing: it signals that the billing is done at such a resolution, which, for some workloads, can make a difference compared to say, a minimum increment of an hour or a day. Though I would prefer that you can see the conversion to longer timescales on the page itself.
Not the OP, but there are likely many tens/hundreds of thousands of people using AI daily because their management requires it. Management tracks AI usage by employee and uses it as a KPI. You want to keep your job, you use AI. You want a bonus, you use AI a lot.
This is simultaneously one of the easier management KPIs for employees to hit and one of the least meaningful.
They won’t, because specialization is a key aspect of capitalism.
This is why companies outsource anything. Google, Inc. is big enough to own farms and ranches to grow the food eaten in its cafeterias. They could make trucks to transport that food. They could operate factories to make cutlery, etc. Why do they instead choose to pay layers of margins to layers of middlemen?
Absurd example? How about Apple? They outsource production of their chips, instead of capturing the margin they are currently gifting to their partners. Why?
Delta Airlines doesn’t operate oil fields or even refineries even though a major cost of their operations is jet fuel. Why?
Once you can reason through these very simple examples, you will understand why enterprises are unlikely to walk away from SaaS.
s/Delta/United/ or s/Delta/Southwest/ or s/Delta/Lufthansa/. Or if you prefer, s/refinery/oilfield, or s/refinery/pipeline. Or even s/refinery/farm/ because Delta also buys food in vast quantities (I would not be surprised to find they have interests in ag producers that offset a small % of their food purchases, which does not diminish the argument).
Delta also does not make airplanes, jet engines, seats, radios, GPS, glass, or even wires. They don't distill the spirits they serve on their flights. They don't own and operate a satellite Internet capability. They don't even make movies for in-flight entertainment.
The point is that Delta, like most successful firms, outsources key aspects of core service delivery.
The second article you linked says plainly that the refinery is an offset/hedge. QED Delta still outsources the vast majority of its fuel costs. (They could, for example, own large swathes of the Permian and do E&P as well. They choose to leave that to others.)
Vertical integration has been a common practice in industry for 150 years.
Yes, very few firms fully control their upstream supply chains, but very few conversely produce nothing but their core market offering in-house. Most companies are somewhere in between, doing some things in-house, and obtaining other things from vendors.
Most large firms have in-house software dev teams responsible for at least some portion of their development work. I know software engineers locally working, variously, at banks, pet supply distributors, power companies, soft drink bottlers, and many other non-tech industries. And AI can and will extend these teams' capacity to internally manager larger segments of their companies' tech stacks.
There are many people who do not have ready access to a million dollars to purchase said Mac minis, much less the operating capital to rack & operate them.
Very smart play to build a platform, get scale, and prove out the software. Then either add a small network fee (this could be on money movement on/off platform), add a higher tier of service for money, and/or just use the proof points to go get access to capital and become an operator in your own pool.
If those numbers are true, they could tart with one Mac and can double every few months. But, I guess there are also many people who do not have ready access to whatever a Mac mini costs either...
Today was 31% solar, 16% wind, 16% hydro, 6% geothermal, etc.
Some of the difference to your numbers will be seasonal/weather-related, but the pace of solar and wind installation is such that data that's even a year or two old can be wildly out of date.
No, coal and oil is not. Since we have micro organisms that can consume wood, coal and oil will never be produced again.
> During the Carboniferous period, massive amounts of plant matter accumulated to form coal because microorganisms and fungi had not yet evolved the ability to break down lignin, a tough, aromatic polymer in woody plants.
We can make synthetic oil and I think we can also make synthetic coal, too.
Though it's close to useless because at that point they're too expensive to be worth it for anything else than very niche uses that absolutely require them.
> We can make synthetic oil and I think we can also make synthetic coal, too.
IIRC, that's basically what charcoal is. Except charcoal is cleaner once made, because most of the nasty stuff happens while being made from the source plant material.
Sure, but the problem with coal and oil is not their chemical composition, per se. The problem with specifically fossil coal and oil is that the carbon atoms used to be buried deep underground and end up as part of CO2 molecules in the atmosphere. Making synthetic kerosene for jet engines is one of the top contenders for long-distance air travel in a post-fossil fuel world, IMO.
California is not anywhere near 83% renewable for total electricity generation. [1] Are you just adding up nameplace capacities without capacity factors?
One thing about power generation stats like these is they are incredibly sensitive to examination dates given the rapid growth of (especially) solar.
That EIA site cuts off in August. The same EIA report shows solar grew 17% from 2024-2025. You can plug in your own assumptions to the solar growth curve since then, as well as your assumptions about the natural gas curve given the ride natgas has been on since August.
EIA also produces live status on the daily generation mix[1]. 69% today was wind, solar, geothermal, and hydro. 12% nuclear, so some of this is whether you consider nuclear renewable or not.
CA's power generation may cost more, but the pricing (for raw power at least) should be a lot more predictable than those of us dependent on fossil fuels. Natural gas, for example, has undergone a ~100% price round-trip in the last 12 months.
California is a huge success story at a massive scale. Looking at Casio right now it’s 92% clean energy. For a state of 39 million people! And batteries keep getting deployed faster and faster
Supply costs have surprisingly not that much to do with Californias silly electric rates. They load into the retail rates all kinds of disaster recovery costs, environmental blah blah costs, distribution upgrades, social programs, the list goes on. Plus straight old fashioned corruption in a state sponsored monopoly.
You can get some idea of the BS that gets loaded in by comparing some rates from municipal grids like SMUD vs pg&e. Same supply, fraction of the end user rate.
Anyway, that is to say theres very little useful to draw on here in comparing nuke to renewable cost.
Given the general dysfunction in American politics (and I say this as an outside observer), the current owners would raise a stink about it, possibly playing the "nationalize == communism == USSR == gulags" card as a negative campaign in the next election.
GA resident here. Let's not close the books on Vogtle yet, as our electricity rates are also moving up quite significantly. Let's get to a steady state before we declare a cost win.
IIRC our rates are up ~30% since 2024, and our electricity prices are 5th highest in the nation. I need to underline that this is in one of the lower-wage states in the country, with few state-level labor protections.
Also: the finances on Vogtle were sufficiently bad that they led to a rapid run-up in consumer electricity rates that generated political fallout. First: two members of the Public Service Commission lost their seats to Democrats, who do not generally win statewide races here. Second: the Federal government has had to specifically loan money to the operator to subsidize consumer rates. The Federal government could equally subsidize California rates down to the average or below if it so desired.
That's part of why the shift to renewables. I have a 12kw system on my roof and I pay $220 in December and get $150 back in July.
The economics are getting interesting cause now you can get a 2kw hr battery for like $350 and plugin 400 watts of panel into it and run at least a laptop and basics peripherals forever so the draw on the grid is gonna diffuse over time.
For peace of mind I'd like to be able to run my EV (24kwh battery) and spare fridge / freezer off home solar. Anything more than that is gravy, and I'd rather invest in things like Oregon Community Solar.
Electricity is cheap in Georgia because Georgia is generally not a desirable state for business. Electricity, along with a lot of others things, is expensive in California because it's California. There's a lot of talent in California, a lot of inertia, and a huge economy.
> Electricity is cheap in Georgia because Georgia is generally not a desirable state for business.
Are you insulting the great state of Georgia???
Paraphrasing a quote about North Carolina from American Crime Story, season 1, episode 9:
> [...] may I state first of all what a pleasure it is to be [...] once again in the great state of Georgia. My heart gladdens [...] when I stand in one of the original 13 colonies.
I'm not focused on some random attribute. The cost of this specific plant was a big part of this conversation, so I'm asking what number I'm supposed to use for it.
I did not make the claim that Georgia and California are comparable energy markets. The cost of that one subsidy is between 1 and 4 billion. The Federal government's handling of the two states is entirely different and the states themselves have entirely different priorities so the cost of something government manipulates heavily is not about production costs from when projects started and certainly not about production costs if new projects started today.
There is pushback here against the figures you are quoting.
Here is something real. South Australia electricity production averaged 75% from renewables last year. Wikipedia (for 2023) put it at 70%: "70 per cent of South Australia's electricity is generated from renewable sources. This is projected to be 85 per cent by 2026, with a target of 100 per cent by 2027." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_in_South_Australia They averaged 75% in 2025.
South Australia has no hydro to speak of. They have a some local gas, but no local coal. They do have good wind and solar resources. To me it looks like the transition was driven largely by immediate pragmatism concerns, as renewables are so much cheaper than gas. The politicians make a lot of noise about it of course, but I suspect if they had a local cheap source of coal the outcome would have been different.
Their electricity prices are high by Australian standards - but they have to pay for the gas they import to cover the missing 25%, and gas is by far the most expensive form of generation in Australia. And they are paying for all the new equipment this transition requires.
The Dutch bureau of statistics reports 50%, of which a plurality (one third) is biomass. The Netherlands is also famously gas-dependent. Natural gas isn’t converted to electricity for heating and many industrial applications. Can’t quickly find stats on production here, but renewables are only 17% of total energy usage. Renewables without biomass are ~12% of total energy usage.
It seems to disagree with Dutch statistics because the linked view is for April 2026. While the article cited is talking about all of 2024.
If you change the view to look at the year 2024 [1] it claims 53% carbon free with 2.5% of that coming from nuclear. This seems to line up with the cited statistics of 50% of consumed electricity produced by wind, hydropower, solar, and biomass in 2024.
The Netherlands: 50%, of which one third is biomass.
As someone living in the Netherlands, I would love to live in energy utopia, but stats reported by people who can’t read Dutch government reports are usually wrong.
Are you just drawing from today's figures? Or annual figures?
I just checked for NL and in the past 12 months it's 50/50 for electricity (fossil/renewable), with about 10% of the renewables being biomass which isn't particularly renewable.
For NL for example we import wood pellets from North America and then burn them. Yeah, not great. Essentially it's releasing emissions by burning 30-40 years of American forests, which might be replanted, and will have soaked up the Co2 around 2065. Therefore it gets to count those emissions as zero (renewable), despite having a full effect on climate change in the next half century which is critical. Not to mention there's a 15% roundtrip loss from logging, shipping etc.
Agree there's real momentum but these are misleading figures.
Are you referring to California? IIRC the prices are driven by several factors, including expensive payouts for wildfire damage, but there isn't anything suggesting that renewables is a major factor. And rolling blackouts haven't been a thing since 2020. That might have been arguably related to renewables since they were experiencing abnormally hot climate change related heat waves that were extending into the evening hours and driving high air conditioning load beyond the time solar was prepared to handle it. I believe that in the meantime they've installed quite a number of batteries, which is why it is not a problem now.
Although "Getting rid of cheaper electricity generation would make the electricity cheaper" is genuinely an actual right wing talking point in the UK it doesn't make any sense. The reason it's a talking point is that they're funded by billionaires who'd reap the rewards from new fossil fuel licensing. They know they can't deliver, but what they learned from Brexit is that their supporters aren't too smart and simple messages, even if nonsensical, resonate well with those voters. "Drill baby drill" is simple. Wrong, but simple.
Right now in a dark and not very windy UK w/ 10GW of gas burners running the spot price for electricity here is almost £150 per MWh, but at 10am it was sunny with a brisk wind and sure enough that spot price was about £25 per MWh. Gee, I wonder whether the wind and sun are cheaper...
> Although "Getting rid of cheaper electricity generation would make the electricity cheaper" is genuinely an actual right wing talking point in the UK it doesn't make any sense
Specifically both the Tories and Reform pledge to eliminate the "Green levy" funding for renewables. But that funding doesn't just vanish in a puff of smoke after voters pay it, it's paying for us to have renewable energy generation.
The very stupid part is that we spent a lot of money already and they can't reverse time's arrow, they can't unspend that money, they can only choose (and at least publicly are choosing) not to reap the reward.
Edited: Ah, maybe you want a citation for the specific phrasing, in which case that's fair, I cannot cite a UK politician, on the right or anywhere else, who has said those exact words.
The anti-renewable policies would cost the UK a roughly similar amount to Brexit.
Some random numbers:
Renewables reduced UK energy costs by 100 Billion over the 2010-2023 period (despite just getting started and costs continuing to decline)
The conservative "cut the green crap" changes around 2013 that are milder versions of what Farage would do, add a cost of about 5-15 billion a year (ongoing) in higher bills.
EVs will be 30 to 70 Billion a year savings once you get to 33 million.
He's also against grid batteries that will save about 5 to 15 billions per year once scaled.
Brexit is about 100 billion a year according to Bloomberg.
> SQLite doesn't buy you uptime if you deploy your app to AWS/GCP
This is...not true of many hyperscaler outages? Frequently, outages will leave individual VMs running but affect only higher-order services typically used in more complex architectures. Folks running an SQLite on a EC2 often will not be affected.
And obviously, don't use us-east-1. This One Simple Trick can improve your HA story.
> This is...not true of many hyperscaler outages? Frequently, outages will leave individual VMs running but affect only higher-order services typically used in more complex architectures. Folks running an SQLite on a EC2 often will not be affected.
You're trying too hard to move goalposts. Look at your comment: you're trying to argue that SQLite is immune to outages in AWS even when AWS is out, and your whole logic lies in asserting the hypothetical outage will be surgically designed to somehow not affect your deployment because it may or may not consume a service that was affected.
In the meantime, the last major AWS outage was Iran blowing up a datacenter. They should have just used SQLite to avoid that, is it?
An interesting thing about this era is that things which were bipartisan in the 2000s are now seen as partisan. Some examples of things that I remember as bipartisan in the 2000s which are now seen as left-leaning ideas: NATO membership, suffrage for women, freedom from state religion, the Forestry Service, national parks.
Worth keeping in mind that Twitter/X is something like the 8th largest US-based social media site. Like it's ~1/6 the size of Facebook.
It's in all probability smaller than Pinterest (we cannot get trustworthy numbers from Twitter/X). LinkedIn is 2x its size, and real people across a swath of society use it. Knocking Threads for the Instagram distribution is silly because part of the point of posting is to get distribution. This is a PLUS for Threads, which organically is still close to Twitter/X's size.
Nobody is saying it's urgent for brands to be on Quora, a close size mate.
Of these sites, Twitter/X is the only one that (effectively) requires brands to pay to post.
BlueSky and Mastodon are both open platforms designed around the ideals of digital freedom and control of your own data and feed. It makes perfect sense for the EFF to remain on platforms which are aligned with their goals. This is like criticizing them for dropping Microsoft Word but still using Libre Office.
> It's almost like there's an ulterior motive at play...
If you actually read the article you would see the entire section they dedicated to addressing exactly this complaint. But then you wouldn't be able to whine about it here in good faith, would you?
>If you actually read the article you would see the entire section they dedicated to addressing exactly this complaint.
If you actually understood the section in question you would see it doesn't explain in any coherent manner why they're sticking with Facebook but not Twitter. But if you understood it then you wouldn't be able to whine about it here in good faith, would you?
(Non-US people note that this is likely a major difference between the US and your country. The US does not compulsorily provide proof of citizenship to its citizens that can be used at places where one is typically asked to prove one's citizenship.)
Bessent notes here that Real ID would not be considered valid ID for this purpose, which sounds like it will have the same problems as the SAVE act. This could mean debanking anyone who has changed their name and does not have a notarized copy of the name change certificate, and most people who do not drive.
(I am not sure how it would handle minors, who generally do not have any photo ID. Would they have to come in to provide ID when they turn 18?)
The underlying idea is fine, but it creates problems when combined with the reluctance to issue any kind of national ID.
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