It’s actually harder (requires more advanced technology) to refine heavy and sour crude. The US refining industry process this type of oil mainly because it’s more profitable not because of some limitation.
American oil on the other hand (As in extracted out of the ground) is actually too high quality for domestic consumption therefore gets shipped overseas and sold at a premium. The weird economics of this are made possible by globalization. While it’s not fungible on a dime it’s easy to solve and the US really does hold all the cards when it comes to the petroleum industry.
I'm certain the number of children suffering illness or even dying due to air pollution from Texas refineries is more than zero. Not very high, I imagine, but not zero. There is a very real human cost to these things which we really like to ignore.
Southwest has 30B in assets and makes $441M in profit. Like most airlines it’s a miracle of modern economics and should practically be considered a charity or a nonprofit. You would make more in treasuries or corporate bonds.
Their last earnings report says about 17B in non-cash assets with about 848M in profit based on those assets (assuming that the quarterly profit x 4 is a reasonable assumption). So where are your numbers from?
They have to operate in California though, so I don't blame them.
This is a state that made me a criminal for putting the wrong air filter on my car (Clearly my bad for putting on the 49 State legal version that makes the tailpipe emissions cleaner).
Price controls will screw over the most vulnerable consumers. Small businesses will offer lower prices to price sensitive or low-income consumers or repeat customers. Because despite what you will read about on Reddit, the owners are not cartoon characters, live in the community and care about their neighbors.
> Because despite what you will read about on Reddit, the owners are not cartoon characters, live in the community and care about their neighbors.
What? To the best of my knowledge, not a single grocery store chain in my area is owned by someone local to the community. The two biggest chains (that aren't Walmart) are owned by Kroger and by an international retail conglomerate. Both are publicly traded, so there's no single owner to give a shit about the local community.
Kroger and the others operate razor thin margins. They offer programs for low income consumers, support local and national charities, do second chance hiring and specifically create unique roles for people with disabilities. They aren’t required to do ANY of those things in most places that they operate.
> That includes gay people like me, who could hardly have admitted under our names to how we lived our lives for most of America’s history, as well as many other groups with minoritarian lifestyles
While the points made are completely valid I want to point out that the statement of "Hey, by the way, first let me talk about my sexuality" lowers the quality of dialog a significant degree.
31 million people in America are gay. 71% of Americans support Gay Rights (more than any other political issue polled). It also quietly insinuates that only people with a certain minority lifestyle would care about privacy or that their privacy is somehow more important than others. It's not. Privacy is a universal right that's important to everyone.
Isn't the super dramatic shift in public opinion on this topic the exact thing that makes it such a good example? Isn't the point that anonymity is not considered a universal right yet it is obviously a good thing once considering this example and others? This is a super weird and wrong way to read it.
>It also quietly insinuates that only people with a certain minority lifestyle would care about privacy or that their privacy is somehow more important than others. It's not.
How exactly does their post insinuate that? this comment is the "I don't even see color" as applied to internet privacy (with a touch of "just don't rub it in our faces")
The author is saying that it's worth noting that their privacy is more important because they personally identify as a group with the same mainstream popularity as Coca Cola and Football.
Nothing is being rubbed in anyone's face. The writer is just arrogant and self-centered.
"That includes gay people like me, who could hardly have admitted under our names to how we lived our lives for most of America’s history, as well as many other groups with minoritarian lifestyles and beliefs. It includes lots of people whose ideas were badly wrong for every one whose ideas were right — and I’m glad of it for all of them."
>The author is saying that it's worth noting that their privacy is more important because
The reason this is relevant is because the statistics you quote represent a HUGE swing in public opinion. Only when comparing to things like slavery can you find such a swing in public opinion compared to 20 years prior, and that one had a war fought over the state's rights to do it.
Actually it's done the opposite of what you suggest. It improved the quality of discourse by giving a simple concrete example all of us can understand and most of us would agree with (that vulnerable people are safer because of anonymity). It didn't imply what you're saying it does, and it's kinda weird that you think that.
I don't know why you added statistics (you didn't really make a point with them?), but assuming you meant "gay people don't really need to worry", you actually bolstered the opposite argument. If only 71% of Americans support gay rights, that means 59 million people think the state should criminalize him. Try to put yourself in that position. 59 million people - you don't know who, but you know they probably live in your community - that don't want you to be able to get married, have a significant other, or have any PDA in media because it would "corrupt" kids. In 2016, 49 people were murdered in the Pulse Nightclub because they were gay. In 2020, a transgender woman was murdered because the murderer was afraid someone would think he was gay. Every year there are acts of violence against gay and trans people because of their sexuality. But nobody has ever been killed for being straight.
Because 71% is practically a supermajority. That's the opposite of persecution.
"I'm super special and worried about my privacy because I have a lifestyle that's as completely mainstream as Coca Cola and Football" isn't really a talking point. It just makes you an arrogant person.
Compare the state of transgender rights 10 years ago to the situation now, where a trans person can be literally arrested for going to the bathroom in the wrong state. Or abortion, which was legal everywhere five years ago but now has laws on the books in multiple states encouraging vigilantes to report violations for a cash reward. Supercharged AI making it easy to identify minorities at an industrial scale in the near future is a totally legitimate thing to fear, especially for people in those groups who would likely be the first to be targeted.
I have no idea how you read a statement about how nazis and flame baiters should be able to speak their mind and then concluded that the author only cares about some minorities.
Given that the author didn't say any of the things you claimed, and indeed said the opposite, it leads one to conclude you have a problem with the example used.
On the contrary, I find it a highly effective way to convey something that should be obvious but is often not. As you said, privacy is a universal right, but many don't consider it important until viscerally presented with examples of why it is. Kelsey's writing is immediately effective at doing so.
That phrase is a dehumanizing, Nazi-style talking point: it frames a group of people as a “lifestyle” problem instead of as human beings, which is a common setup for stigma and persecution. Nazi ideology repeatedly used this kind of language to normalize hatred and make targeted groups seem unnatural or dangerous.
Calling people a “minority lifestyle” is not neutral wording; it reduces identity to something frivolous or deviant. Extremist movements have historically used similar framing to make prejudice sound reasonable and to recruit others into it.
> 71% of Americans support Gay Rights (more than any other political issue polled)... Privacy is a universal right that's important to everyone.
Per you, it surely must be important to fewer than 71% of Americans, no?
The state of infringement on privacy seems to evidence that it's not so important to a lot of people such that they continue to be perfectly willing to elect and re-elect the politicians who enact the changes allowing infringing on it/fail to legislate in favor of privacy.
Connecting it to an issue more people care about seems an attempt to argue for its important to those who otherwise are willing to look the other way.
FWIW, I fed my reply above into Claude and asked it to guess who wrote it. It refused (for safety) while also calling me out: "The style here (tight logical structure, the "per you" construction, the move of turning someone's own framing back on them) is common across a lot of contrarian-leaning commenters on HN"
> Benchmarks are toys, real world use is vastly different, and that's where they seriously lag.
I'm not disagreeing per-se but if you think the benchmarks are flawed and "my real world usage" is more reflective of model capabilities, why not write some benchmarks of your own?
You stand to make a lot of money and gain a lot of clout in the industry if you've figured out a better way to measure model capability, maybe the frontier labs would hire you.
> And the fusion with a one-party state government that doesn’t tolerate huge swathes of thoughtspace being freely discussed
That would be a great argument if the American models weren’t so heavily censored.
The Chinese model might dodge a question if I ask it about 1-2 specific Chinese cultural issues but then it also doesn’t moralize me at every turn because I asked it to use a piece of security software.
There are a lot of companies who would gladly drop half a million on a GPU to have private inference that Anthropic or OpenAI can’t use to steal their data.
And that GPU wouldn’t run one instance, the models are highly parallelizable. It would likely support 10-15 users at once, if a company oversubscribed 10:1 that GPU supports ~100 seats. Amortized over a couple years the costs are competitive.
> There are a lot of companies who would gladly drop half a million on a GPU to have private inference that Anthropic or OpenAI can’t use to steal their data.
Obviously, and certainly companies do run their own models because they place some value on data sovereignty for regulatory or compliance or other reasons. (Although the framing that Anthropic or OpenAI might "steal their data" is a bit alarmist - plenty of companies, including some with _highly_ sensitive data, have contracts with Anthropic or OpenAI that say they can't train future models on the data they send them and are perfectly happy to send data to Claude. You may think they're stupid to do that, but that's just your opinion.)
> the models are highly parallelizable. It would likely support 10-15 users at once.
Yes, I know that; I understand LLM internals pretty well. One instance of the model in the sense of one set of weights loaded across X number of GPUs; of course you can then run batch inference on those weights, up to the limits of GPU bandwidth and compute.
But are those 100 users you have on your own GPUs usings the GPUs evenly across the 24 hours of the day, or are they only using them during 9-5 in some timezone? If so, you're leaving your expensive hardware idle for 2/3 of the day and the third party providers hosting open weight models will still beat you on costs, even without getting into other factors like they bought their GPUs cheaper than you did. Do the math if you don't believe me.
There's stuff like SOC controls and enterprise contracts with enforceable penalties if clauses are breached. ZDR is a thing.
The most significant value of open source models come from being able to fine-tune; with a good dataset and limited scope; a finetune can be crazily worth it.
American oil on the other hand (As in extracted out of the ground) is actually too high quality for domestic consumption therefore gets shipped overseas and sold at a premium. The weird economics of this are made possible by globalization. While it’s not fungible on a dime it’s easy to solve and the US really does hold all the cards when it comes to the petroleum industry.
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