Can somebody explain why electricity rates would go negative? That blows my mind.

Edit: also why don’t they just mine some coins?

> Edit: also why don’t they just mine some coins?

Nobody is going to pay for mining rigs that are idle 99% of the time.

If it happened enough you'd have people set up cheap resistor banks to eat all the excess, so that provides a natural cap on how much negative pricing there can be.

While subsidies are one cause, another cause is demand response problems:

Imagine you have a greenhouse factory producing strawberries. The strawberries come out of the factory on a conveyor belt. Now, you can't just turn off this factory easily since it might take a week to get it up running again and you don't have any storage, so what happens when nobody wants your strawberries for a day?

You pay someone to take them.

And yes, it happens to physical products too, e.g. household electronics - you need to pay someone to scrap them.

A better example would be plastic production. In an emergency stop, factories need to change several pipes because the plastic solidified inside. Stopping production properly takes days, and even then, resuming it also takes days.

Because the German government is paying for renewables, via a tax on electricity, even when there is no additional demand.

They can't turn off power plants, because the renewables are ephemeral.

This happens when the electricity supply is higher than the demand. It only affects the wholesale rate, not consumer rates (at least in Uk and US)

Normally supply and demand need to be matched to obtain a balance. If the supply is not enough for demand then the frequency drops below 50Hz, if it drops too low bad things happen.

Actually there's at least one provider (octopus) that occasionally passes the negative rate onto the consumer with their dynamic plan.

The renewable generators get a subsidy for each kWh that they pump on to the grid. The logical thing to do if electricity were oversupplied, i.e. you have to pay people to take it, would be to temporarily shut down some renewable generation, but then the renewable providers would lose out on the subsidy for those kWh.

The electricity rate only for short-term traded electricity goes negative. Much of the volume is on long-term contracts.

You have too much energy and you need to get rid off it.

There are some subtleties. Models like GPT2 are trained using many copyrighted documents whose authors could claim it is derivative of their work.

Why not both?

It'll be interesting to see how they use their preferred shares voting power (which still give them effective control of the company).

There's a difference in not having a profit due to (a) reinvestment; (b) poor unit economics.

(a) is much less worrying for an investor, e.g. Amazon (b) suggests a bad business model, e.g. Uber/Lyft, Tesla

But Tesla is reinvesting a lot. And it's growing the market for electric cars, setting up infrastructure, etc. He might be selling at a loss initially in order to create the volume that will eventually drive down the cost so he can generate a profit. From what I understand, the big reason he keeps losing money on selling cars is that by the time the previous car starts making a profit, he's already already started selling the next one at greater volume, creating new loss that drowns the fresh profit from that previous car.

That was true with model S but not with model 3. The latter is the main product, bread and butter, whose purpose is not funding other future products.

Is it possible that Tesla is driving down the cost curve faster than any other electric vehicle manufacturer, and once they hit a tipping point, they will disrupt the entire automotive industry and be worth 10x their current price? I may not believe Musk’s self driving car vision is attainable in the gritty real world in under 10 years, so I’ll discount that... but driving down battery cost, while making a better electric vehicle than Audi/Mercedes/Porsche.. that’s exciting.

Also vpn typically costs money

If you don't want to use P2P or multiple hops ("Secure Core"), then ProtonVPN offers some free VPNs.

I use ProtonVPN free nested with another free VPN, then I put Tor on top. You just have to know what you are doing.

Most A.I. researchers believe the brain is a computer.

Actually you can still haggle at the tesla store for in stock models. Otherwise you pay MSRP.

If 90% come from 10 rivers, shouldn't we focus on monitoring those?

One takeaway: always put a PIN on your SIM card?

Don't use SMS based 2FA.

NIST recommends against it because it's so easy to hijack.

Is it easy to break a SIM pin?

What about taking control of the phone number itself? Unauthorized porting can probably be accomplished with a bit of social engineering.