alexk307

Of the top 10 states in solar generation in July 2026, 7/10 of them voted for Trump in 2024 [1].

The U.S. solar industry installed 43 gigawatts (GW) of new capacity in 2025, remaining the dominant source of new capacity added to the grid for the fifth consecutive year. Solar and energy storage represent 79% of new capacity installed in the first year of the Trump Administration [2].

[1] https://www.chooseenergy.com/solar-energy/solar-energy-produ...

[2] https://tedmag.com/report-u-s-added-43-gw-of-new-solar-capac...

If you fell down and broke your legs and they healed to be 20% longer and stronger than before, yes.

I encourage you to take your own advice and actually read the links to get a full picture of the available science and data. Climate change is real and a serious problem, but not every single thing you are fed by your algorithms is the ground truth. Nitpicking one example and ignoring the entire body of science is just as dishonest as folks who deny climate change.

Here's a paper you can read and not just dismiss as something that I didn't read [1]. Some islands will vanish, some will grow, it's not as simple as everything is doomed everywhere. Have fun reading :)

> This record comprises 568 islands from 42 atolls spanning the western to the central Pacific Ocean from the Federated States of Micronesia, Marshall Islands, Kiribati and Tuvalu, and is one of the first robust attempts to statistically attribute the drivers of observed island changes within the past half-century. Our analyses demonstrate that island change and a range of its potential controls, including oceanographic, climatic and local-scale morphometric characteristics of reefs and islands, are not correlated, underscoring that no single variable could predict a uniform response across the study islands. The lack of association between sea-level rise and shoreline change on this large sample of islands addresses the common notion of a linear relationship between rising sea levels and magnitude of erosion in reef island systems.

> Analysis of 568 islands across the Pacific indicates that most islands have exhibited significant morphological changes over the timescale of analysis (1944–2018). Accretion was observed on 39% of transects, while 27% of transects showed erosion. Aggregated at the island scale, the balance of erosional and accretionary changes indicates a predominance of accretion on islands, with an average shoreline change of 0.51 m/decade resulting in a net expansion of 444.63 ha (~ 2.25%) of land area.

[1] https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10113-023-02103-5

> Apparently it had its most devastating coral bleaching event just 2 years ago

And it's largely recovered [1]

> With current heat levels we're projected to lose upwards of 1/5th the corn harvest by 2030.

Who is projecting that? Globally we're producing 8% more corn YoY [2]. Do you expect all of the sudden in the next 5 years for 20% of that to vanish?

> I mean some of them did, like a decade ago

Which ones specifically? The Maldives, Tuvalu, Kiribati and the Marshall Islands all still exist, and some have experienced growth [3]

> That is the group most likely to die to cold.

I think you're arguing against yourself here. Fewer people died from extreme cold because of climate change and higher average temperatures.

[1] https://www.aims.gov.au/monitoring-great-barrier-reef/gbr-co... [2] https://www.fas.usda.gov/data/production/0440000 [3] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-018-02954-1

That usually doesn't go super well [1]. Are you good with delaying your retirement 24 months for the greater good? If so, do you think that your fellow citizens would be?

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2023_French_pension_reform_str...

> Sure, during that decline there's going to be issues, but once you hit a new stable population those would go away.

I think you're compressing a lot of hardship into "issues"... It's not about total number of people, it's about demographic distribution. If half of your population is at retirement age, who is going to take care of them? Who will be working to generate tax revenue to provide the social services that you expect?

Also populations don't just stabilize, they feed back off of themselves. If half of your population isn't procreating, you get fewer and fewer babies which is a vicious cycle. There aren't many policy levers to pull during demographic free fall.

> The wind, solar and ess manufacturers got down the learning curve largely because of industrial energy + market transformation policy.

Which manufacturers in the US are you referring to? Almost all of the work to get these technologies at their current costs were done by non-US companies. I do broadly agree with your point, but the in the case of the US, policy has done very little in decarbonizing the economy.

Show me where any politician on either side has made a real impact on any of these charts: https://ember-energy.org/countries-and-regions/united-states...

The US is switching to cleaner (coal -> gas) energy, renewables (solar and wind), and BESS almost entirely because it's cost effective and cheaper than the alternative.

This is cool and definitely interesting, but the title is really overselling what the authors are trying to demonstrate. Astra can "drive" a car at ~.42 m/s within a set of boundaries that are 2-3 times the width of a normal lane, on a closed course, with 0 unexpected obstacles, in dry conditions, in daylight for $7.74. And unless you start and then stop every few seconds while driving, this is barely considered driving. Still very cool and an interesting benchmark!

I'm not sure how this relates to "building a product in the age of AI" or being wrong at all, this is just a list of steps that an elementary school student would be taught when learning how to approach any reasonably complex problem.

> leading American soldiers to die in a futile war

There have literally been 0 American soldier casualties in Israel as a result of this war.

> events in Sudan that are horrible but largely irrelevant to American politics

If you only care about human suffering if it relates to American politics, then sure I guess. Hundreds of thousands of people are dead with millions displaced. The US has been directly carrying out strikes in Yemen for 2 decades now (hundreds of strikes with likely thousands of casualties) and no one talks about it or cares.

It was sarcasm to the post above.

> When we talk about wealth, we mainly talk about billionaires. But what if that’s not the most important truth about wealth in America? What if there were another group that, without drawing much attention, had grown collectively thirteen times richer than the Forbes 400? And that was even more effective at using its financial-political clout?

Yes, collectively the 5 million wealthiest households in America are equivalent to the richest 400 people. Somehow the people who build businesses for themselves in regulated industries are the the real villains, not the billionaires who "donate" their way into political positions... sure.

> they can continuously use it for a long time with out participating in the economy

Yeah, low-cost, low-maintenance, clean energy from the Sun is great and all, but I can't shake the feeling that I'm just not participating the economy enough. Heating and cooling my home with renewable energy is great for my Family and my community but I really should think of the energy sector and their shareholders first.

Ring cameras don't record and index every single license plate that it sees and hand that data over directly to law enforcement. There's a huge difference between surveilling your own private property, and a massive network of ALPRs feeding data directly into government systems.

> An 1GW data center is can fit in a size of a mid size apartment.

Not even close, you're off by a few orders of magnitude. You can also easily find this info online https://www.electricchoice.com/datacenters/

I was curious and tried to come up with a crude estimate - all of the golf courses in the US use approximately the same amount of energy (mowing, fertilizer, etc) as one 1GW DC does.

Worth noting Texas is having one of its quietest tornado years in the ~20 years of comparable data, at the same time. Which is the problem: the reliable detection era is about 30 years, and the preliminary dataset behind these headlines starts in 2004. The IPCC has low confidence in observed trends in severe convective storms for exactly this reason. And your El Niño point argues against you, since El Niño is associated with suppressed spring tornado activity in the southern Plains, which is what we're seeing in Texas.

Humans have been working on this for centuries and we've never harvested more food than the present moment.

https://hannahritchie.substack.com/p/food-projections-2025

Not to say that climate change isn't affecting this in some way, but the Pacific Ocean is known to oscillate between Sardine and Anchovy regimes [0][1].

[0] https://www.mbari.org/news/from-sardines-to-anchovies-and-ba...

[1] https://fishbio.com/collapse-pacific-sardine/

> I’d like to get it to 1750

You want to bring humanity back into the little ice age?

What is Climate repair? What is your company doing to repair the climate?

> Before that [Holocene], for hundreds of thousands of years in the Pleistocene era, humans (and our hominid ancestors) spent most of their time running from drought, fires, floods, extreme cold and heat, predators, and each other. The population was likely no more than a few million people spread across the whole planet. At one point we may have almost gone extinct, with just 10,000 Homo sapiens clinging to life. But after the advent of the Holocene and its remarkably stable climate, in only 100 centuries the world population has risen to 8 billion.

This is extremely misleading. The "remarkably stable" climate didn't bring the world's population up to 8 billion, it was abundant energy from fossil fuels (7 out of 8 of all of the humans that have ever lived have done so in the industrial era). The Holocene isn't some serene stable climate period - there are still natural disasters at about the same rate they have been occurring throughout the past 11k years - but the difference is that we're much less likely to be killed by them due to abundant energy and technology. The transition from the Pleistocene into the Holocene definitely made life easier, mostly because of the natural warming.

Not to mention that if we limited access to fossil fuels today, billions of people would be dead within months. If we turned off the spigot, billions would starve and civilization would collapse quicker than you could say climate change

OP's shining example of Mexico is essentially as obese[0], and far less educated[1] than Americans on average. It's embarrassing to be this blind to the state of things when you have the resources to check your opinions for accuracy.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_obesity_r... [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Education_Index

Right - and that data does not suggest anything close to what OP was saying.

[1] https://cdnsciencepub.com/doi/10.1139/cjfr-2024-0216 [2] https://esajournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/ecs2...

> In the past thousand years, we have never seen a single season where 4% of Canada's entire forest area burned down

You cannot possibly know this, you do not have accurate records of forrest fires that occurred 800+ years before Canada was even founded. Wildfires abide by power law distributions [1][2] meaning that enormous outliers like the one in 2023 (and maybe even this year) are not unexpected with a long fat tail distribution. Wildfires in Canada have been trending down in terms of number of fires, but the fires are burning more area [3].

> When you normalize the data and isolate forests

Here's the past two decades of forrest fires globally [4], very hard to spot a significant trend. I'm not arguing that there isn't a problem here and that climate change isn't playing at least some role in it, but to attribute this entirely to climate change is misguided and not supported by literature.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Power_law [2] https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.0500880102 [3] https://cwfis.cfs.nrcan.gc.ca/en/fire-history [4] https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/area-burned-wildfires-by-...

Sad but you unfortunately need to make a profit as a public company at some point. In 8 years since going public, they've had essentially one marginally profitable year surrounded by lots of losses while growing to 4000 employees. Easy to blame AI when the fault is really poor leadership.

While I'm empathetic to the overall theme of the post, the strawberries are a terrible example and takes away from the message. Strawberries are delicate little fruits that until a handful of decades ago, were seasonal expensive treats. It's not necessarily a bad thing that we've made a synthetic analog that allows less fortunate people to experience the taste of a perfect strawberry. Real strawberries aren't disappearing because of this, if anything this would have the opposite effect because strawberry consumption in the US have ~quadrupled in the past few decades [1]. No one replaced "500 individual human experiences", strawberries are not "extinct", there's no data to suggest that people "prefer the synthetic version".

[1] https://www.ers.usda.gov/data-products/charts-of-note/77884

This seems like a no-brainer. Tax 10-15k ultra wealthy people who park their cash in second homes in exchange for ~$500M/year in revenue.

There's a bit of a difference between "enforcing social norms" and telling a user to ingest prescription drugs to combat nausea from the other drugs that it told the user to take.

Yes, you should be able to write a book with this same information. No, you should not be able to release software that instructs its users to harm themselves. LLMs aren't people, and you shouldn't anthropomorphize human rights onto them.