Do you think your points are applicable to the specific examples he gives? e.g.:

>As one example, one state agency has asked Revoy to do certified engine testing to prove that the Revoy doesn’t increase emissions of semi trucks. And that Revoy must do this certification across every single truck engine family. It costs $100,000 per certification and there are more than 270 engine families for the 9 engines that our initial partners use. That’s $27,000,000 for this one regulatory item. And keep in mind that this is to certify that a device—whose sole reason for existence is to cut pollution by >90%, and which has demonstrably done so across nearly 100,000 miles of testing and operations—is not increasing the emissions of the truck. It’s a complete waste of money for everyone.

And that $27M dollar cost doesn’t include the cost to society. This over-regulation will delay deployment of EV trucks by years, increasing NOₓ and PM 2.5 air pollution exposure for many of society’s least well-off who live near freeways

It’s quite possible that the pollution controls on some of those engines wig out and turn the truck into a coal roller. Even with 10-100x fuel efficiency improvements, it could increase particulates, etc due to a bad fuel mix.

The real question is why they’re paying $100K per truck for a mobile smog test rig.

The test equipment can’t possibly cost more than $100K. That leaves $26.9M of “you’re doing something obviously wrong”.

My guess is that the regulations aren’t actually forcing the idiocy, or they are designed to subsidize emissions testers in some way. I’d guess it is the latter, which is just bad regulation.

Smog checks in California have been pretty poorly administered for years. For one of my cars, the lowered the nox standard until it would have failed fresh from the factory, then made me spend more than the car was worth on a special cat that reduced emissions by < 10%.

These days, cars continuously smog check themselves, so there could be a mandatory “send smog check report to the state” button on the dash, but that’d stop the gravy train for the smog test operators. At least they don’t make you smog test EVs, I guess.

With all the money that’s wasted on having stations that check dashboard error lights, they could install air and noise pollution monitoring sensors, and seize cars that have been modified to be non-street-legal. This would be stronger and better regulation than we currently have (less disruption to people obeying it, more bad cars taken off the road, minimal privacy implications for anyone in compliance with the law, and lower cost to enforce).

Also, it’d eliminate the need for the startup to test their truck retrofit, since the trucks would just light the stations up like a Christmas tree if there was an actual problem.

> The real question is why they’re paying $100K per truck

> The test equipment can’t possibly cost more than $100K. That leaves $26.9M of “you’re doing something obviously wrong”.

It seems clear from the original text ("It costs $100,000 per certification") that it's the certification FEE that is $100k. For example, https://ww2.arb.ca.gov/sites/default/files/2024-08/mac202403... includes an individual base fee of $126,358.

>This over-regulation will delay deployment of EV trucks by years

And we only need to look at Tesla to see what under-regulation could bring.

I don't know if 27 million is a lot for a business at this scale. It sounds like a lot, but I see 62 "contacts" at the company. 62 workers making 100k a year means a year of compensation is already pushing on half this amount after other benefits (and that's just this companies employees, who are mostly management. So I'm probably underselling compensation and other companies they work with).

In the interests of constructive feedback:

Are those absolute numbers or per capita numbers? If the former, are there population trends which would affect the graph?

What happened between 2018 and 2023? Why is the Biden story missing?

Were there methodology changes anywhere in here? Are the methodologies the same between states? If they are the same, is it possible that funding issues affect how accurate the numbers are?

The graph honestly doesn’t tell me that much.

Trump voting states don't offer services for homeless, so they leave for places that do. Is that so surprising?

Not to mention the morality of cutting soup kitchens and shelters just so your state's homeless become someone else's problem.

I think there are 2 separate issues here:

1. The silent majority of homeless people that are suffering and with the proper services could get back on their feet, but they are not actually having a day to day impact on the general population. Cutting helpful services for these people is terrible, and the longer someone goes homeless the more issue they may have getting out later. Housing prices also have more impact in creating this type of homelessness.

2. The loud minority of homeless people, often in need of serious mental help that they very well may refuse, who have a negative impact on the community - disruption in the libraries, needles on the street, etc. There are places where the prevailing sentiment is refusing to remove these people when they are disturbing important community spaces or to arrest them for crimes like openly using hard drugs and peeing in the public fountain. This sort of tolerance shouldn't be conflated with robust access to resources, but unfortunately it does seem to be by policy makers.

So yeah, many homeless people go to cities where they will have access to services, and that is more relevant to statistics. Some homeless people go to cities where they know they will more easily be able to obtain and use drugs, steal, etc. Those people are a tiny fraction of the total population, but it doesn't take many of them to start to have a noticeable impact on a local area. This is where we see the more visceral negative reaction to homelessness in west coast cities coming from.

Though I'm sure there are people from other areas of the country amplifying this problem for their own political agenda rather than care for the community or the homeless, it's definitely a real feeling amongst residents in certain areas of SF too, and it doesn't come out of nowhere.

Video of a similar story:

https://youtu.be/3ctLEGrOmf4

There is a history of it in the institution:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Santer_Commission

Do you think the Hollywood blacklist was wrong?

Yes, absolutely. But it is not constitutionally resolvable.

Mucking with the Constitution, such as extending the 1st Amendment beyond restriction of government, such as suspending habeas corpus, such as fulfilling 5th Amendment requirements with secret trials, such as adding an interpretation of self-defense to the 2nd Amendment that the Founders debated and intentionally left out, is all really very dangerous because these alterations are effectively diluting our freedoms until they become unrecognizable, and it begins to look like conservative agenda to dismantle government to allow those with money and rich corporations to exploit masses of individuals without limitations.

Considering Justice Scalia's unnecessary and unsupportable and overreaching (without 2/3rds majority of Congress or the state legislatures) reinterpretation of the 2nd to include self-defense fundamentally changes the Founders intent from a selfless right to stand against tyranny to a selfish and redundant right to protect your flatscreen TV. This was nothing less than vandalism, and we are all less safe for it. It is the same with Guantanamo and the suspension of habeas. This did us no favors and reduced the rights of every citizen. It is the same thing with killing Anwar al-Awlaki (let's be clear tho, he was evil), a US citizen, without a public indictment by a Grand Jury nor a public trial, really screws everyone and is a step towards changing our world into Kafka's nightmare, and worse, because we're teetering in the edge of widespread ecosystem collapse due to the activities of big business. Once we change so much of the framework, our government will collapse, and along with it, our individual freedoms, and the slow murder of Earth will be put into overdrive. Then we'll all be dead.

So let's work out problems like the Hollywood Blacklist without mucking with the Bill of Rights.

Also Cadillac Desert:

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/56140.Cadillac_Desert

"Was he speaking from experience? Dostoevsky had been arrested in 1849 for his participation in an underground salon whose members read banned works and discussed French Utopian socialism. He had spent the next four years in prison, where he had undergone a political conversion, abandoning the radicalism of his youth to become, on many issues, a conservative. Yet, what incensed Dostoevsky above all about Chernyshevsky was his blind faith in scientific explanations for human behavior. Chernyshevsky became known for a theory he called rational egoism. Inspired by Jeremy Bentham and English Utilitarianism, Chernyshevsky claimed that human behavior was rational in that it was guided by self-interest. If poverty were to be eliminated, he conjectured, crime would all but cease to exist.

Dostoevsky had served side by side with murderers in prison, “sharing tables and latrines with them, hauling bricks with them, sipping water from the same ladles,” writes Birmingham, and could not abide this simplistic view of crime—and by extension of human nature. People were unpredictable, irrational, and often did things that worked against their own interests—this was ugly, but also beautiful, because it was the essence of freedom. Indeed, this is why Crime and Punishment became a crime novel in which the whodunit is answered straight away, leaving the rest of the novel for questions of motive or—more accurately in the case of Dostoevsky—the muddled mess that is human motivation in the first place."

Seems relevant to a lot of the discussions over LA rail thefts, increased crime, and progressive DAs relationship to these trends. There is nothing new under the sun.

Interesting passages, but why think the poverty-crime issue is a simple binary at all? There's ample evidence that imporverishment does lead to increased criminal activity. No reason to think solving poverty would eliminate crimes of theft either. Specifically on the LA rail thefts, as with the retail theft panic, there is likely far more to the story.

> However, one major development that may be directly correlated with the rise in theft has continuously been left out: In September of 2020, due to pandemic-related budget cuts, Union Pacific laid off an unspecified number of employees across the railroad system. Including members of its railroad-only police force.

> The Union Pacific Police department has jurisdiction over the 32,000 miles of track Union Pacific owns. Many of these “special agents” used to patrol this now infamous stretch of track. According to the source, the number of patrolling officers has been cut from 50 to 60 agents to eight, which the worker thinks has led to an increase in train robberies.

https://www.lataco.com/union-pacific-theft-police-laid-off/

I'd rather just leave any commentary on the incident (mine or yours) out of the discussion of this article, though.

What do you think of these quotes?:

"“Some kind of threshold has been crossed,” said Alina Chan, a Boston-based scientist and co-author of the upcoming book “Viral: The Search for the Origin of Covid-19.” Chan has been vocal about the need to thoroughly investigate the possibility that SARS-CoV-2 emerged from a lab while remaining open to both possible theories of its development. For Chan, the revelation from the proposal was the description of the insertion of a novel furin cleavage site into bat coronaviruses — something people previously speculated, but had no evidence, may have happened.

Richard Ebright, a molecular biologist at Rutgers University who has espoused the possibility that SARS-CoV-2 may have originated in a lab, agreed. “The relevance of this is that SARS Cov-2, the pandemic virus, is the only virus in its entire genus of SARS-related coronaviruses that contains a fully functional cleavage site at the S1, S2 junction,” said Ebright, referring to the place where two subunits of the spike protein meet. “And here is a proposal from the beginning of 2018, proposing explicitly to engineer that sequence at that position in chimeric lab-generated coronaviruses.”

Martin Wikelski, a director at the Max Planck Institute of Animal Behavior in Germany, whose work tracking bats and other animals was referenced in the grant application without his knowledge, also said it made him more open to the idea that the pandemic may have its roots in a lab. “The information in the proposal certainly changes my thoughts about a possible origin of SARS-CoV-2,” Wikelski told The Intercept. “In fact, a possible transmission chain is now logically consistent — which it was not before I read the proposal.”

But others insisted that the research posed little or no threat and pointed out that the proposal called for most of the genetic engineering work to be done in North Carolina rather than China. “Given that the work wasn’t funded and wasn’t proposed to take place in Wuhan anyway it’s hard to assess any bearing on the origin of SARS-CoV-2,” Stephen Goldstein, a scientist who studies the evolution of viral genes at the University of Utah, and an author of the recent Cell article, wrote in an email to The Intercept."

When someone is hawking a book and playing up the subject of that book, take it with a grain of salt.

Are you a scientist?

I was. I can tell you that all of those quotes require a great deal of inspection and you cannot take them at face value.

At the very least, most scientists speak ultra-confidently about this beliefs (beyond their own internal level of confidence) because they've learned to use narrative techniques to make their beliefs sound true.

Any scientist who is actively speculating that this funding is "strong evidence" rather than saying "it's logically consistent and seems more than coincidental" is just wrong. That's a big mistake a lot of the early folks who claiimed it was human engineered made. The evidence is not strong, but not strong enough to convince a rational person.