Solar is a market for (financial) lemons
There are only four more days left in my Kickstarter for the audiobook of The Bezzle, the sequel to Red Team Blues, narrated by @wilwheaton! You can pre-order the audiobook and ebook, DRM free, as well as the hardcover, signed or unsigned. There's also bundles with Red Team Blues in ebook, audio or paperback.
Rooftop solar is the future, but it's also a scam. It didn't have to be, but America decided that the best way to roll out distributed, resilient, clean and renewable energy was to let Wall Street run the show. They turned it into a scam, and now it's in terrible trouble. which means we are in terrible trouble.
There's a (superficial) good case for turning markets loose on the problem of financing the rollout of an entirely new kind of energy provision across a large and heterogeneous nation. As capitalism's champions (and apologists) have observed since the days of Adam Smith and David Ricardo, markets harness together the work of thousands or even millions of strangers in pursuit of a common goal, without all those people having to agree on a single approach or plan of action. Merely dangle the incentive of profit before the market's teeming participants and they will align themselves towards it, like iron filings all snapping into formation towards a magnet.
But markets have a problem: they are prone to "reward hacking." This is a term from AI research: tell your AI that you want it to do something, and it will find the fastest and most efficient way of doing it, even if that method is one that actually destroys the reason you were pursuing the goal in the first place.
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/security/engineering/failure-modes-in-machine-learning
For example: if you use an AI to come up with a Roomba that doesn't bang into furniture, you might tell that Roomba to avoid collisions. However, the Roomba is only designed to register collisions with its front-facing sensor. Turn the Roomba loose and it will quickly hit on the tactic of racing around the room in reverse, banging into all your furniture repeatedly, while never registering a single collision:
https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2021/04/when-ais-start-hacking.html
This is sometimes called the "alignment problem." High-speed, probabilistic systems that can't be fully predicted in advance can very quickly run off the rails. It's an idea that pre-dates AI, of course – think of the Sorcerer's Apprentice. But AI produces these perverse outcomes at scale…and so does capitalism.
Many sf writers have observed the odd phenomenon of corporate AI executives spinning bad sci-fi scenarios about their AIs inadvertently destroying the human race by spinning off in some kind of paperclip-maximizing reward-hack that reduces the whole planet to grey goo in order to make more paperclips. This idea is very implausible (to say the least), but the fact that so many corporate leaders are obsessed with autonomous systems reward-hacking their way into catastrophe tells us something about corporate executives, even if it has no predictive value for understanding the future of technology.
Both Ted Chiang and Charlie Stross have theorized that the source of these anxieties isn't AI – it's corporations. Corporations are these equilibrium-seeking complex machines that can't be programmed, only prompted. CEOs know that they don't actually run their companies, and it haunts them, because while they can decompose a company into all its constituent elements – capital, labor, procedures – they can't get this model-train set to go around the loop:
https://pluralistic.net/2023/03/09/autocomplete-worshippers/#the-real-ai-was-the-corporations-that-we-fought-along-the-way
Stross calls corporations "Slow AI," a pernicious artificial life-form that acts like a pedantic genie, always on the hunt for ways to destroy you while still strictly following your directions. Markets are an extremely reliable way to find the most awful alignment problems – but by the time they've surfaced them, they've also destroyed the thing you were hoping to improve with your market mechanism.
Which brings me back to solar, as practiced in America. In a long Time feature, Alana Semuels describes the waves of bankruptcies, revealed frauds, and even confiscation of homeowners' houses arising from a decade of financialized solar:
https://time.com/6565415/rooftop-solar-industry-collapse/
The problem starts with a pretty common finance puzzle: solar pays off big over its lifespan, saving the homeowner money and insulating them from price-shocks, emergency power outages, and other horrors. But solar requires a large upfront investment, which many homeowners can't afford to make. To resolve this, the finance industry extends credit to homeowners (lets them borrow money) and gets paid back out of the savings the homeowner realizes over the years to come.
But of course, this requires a lot of capital, and homeowners still might not see the wisdom of paying even some of the price of solar and taking on debt for a benefit they won't even realize until the whole debt is paid off. So the government moved in to tinker with the markets, injecting prompts into the slow AIs to see if it could coax the system into producing a faster solar rollout – say, one that didn't have to rely on waves of deadly power-outages during storms, heatwaves, fires, etc, to convince homeowners to get on board because they'd have experienced the pain of sitting through those disasters in the dark.
The government created subsidies – tax credits, direct cash, and mixes thereof – in the expectation that Wall Street would see all these credits and subsidies that everyday people were entitled to and go on the hunt for them. And they did! Armies of fast-talking sales-reps fanned out across America, ringing dooorbells and sticking fliers in mailboxes, and lying like hell about how your new solar roof was gonna work out for you.
These hustlers tricked old and vulnerable people into signing up for arrangements that saw them saddled with ballooning debt payments (after a honeymoon period at a super-low teaser rate), backstopped by liens on their houses, which meant that missing a payment could mean losing your home. They underprovisioned the solar that they installed, leaving homeowners with sky-high electrical bills on top of those debt payments.
If this sounds familiar, it's because it shares a lot of DNA with the subprime housing bubble, where fast-talking salesmen conned vulnerable people into taking out predatory mortgages with sky-high rates that kicked in after a honeymoon period, promising buyers that the rising value of housing would offset any losses from that high rate.
These fraudsters knew they were acquiring toxic assets, but it didn't matter, because they were bundling up those assets into "collateralized debt obligations" – exotic black-box "derivatives" that could be sold onto pension funds, retail investors, and other suckers.
This is likewise true of solar, where the tax-credits, subsidies and other income streams that these new solar installations offgassed were captured and turned into bonds that were sold into the financial markets, producing an insatiable demand for more rooftop solar installations, and that meant lots more fraud.
Which brings us to today, where homeowners across America are waking up to discover that their power bills have gone up thanks to their solar arrays, even as the giant, financialized solar firms that supplied them are teetering on the edge of bankruptcy, thanks to waves of defaults. Meanwhile, all those bonds that were created from solar installations are ticking timebombs, sitting on institutions' balance-sheets, waiting to go blooie once the defaults cross some unpredictable threshold.
Markets are very efficient at mobilizing capital for growth opportunities. America has a lot of rooftop solar. But 70% of that solar isn't owned by the homeowner – it's owned by a solar company, which is to say, "a finance company that happens to sell solar":
https://www.utilitydive.com/news/solarcity-maintains-34-residential-solar-market-share-in-1h-2015/406552/
And markets are very efficient at reward hacking. The point of any market is to multiply capital. If the only way to multiply the capital is through building solar, then you get solar. But the finance sector specializes in making the capital multiply as much as possible while doing as little as possible on the solar front. Huge chunks of those federal subsidies were gobbled up by junk-fees and other financial tricks – sometimes more than 100%.
The solar companies would be in even worse trouble, but they also tricked all their victims into signing binding arbitration waivers that deny them the power to sue and force them to have their grievances heard by fake judges who are paid by the solar companies to decide whether the solar companies have done anything wrong. You will not be surprised to learn that the arbitrators are reluctant to find against their paymasters.
I had a sense that all this was going on even before I read Semuels' excellent article. We bought a solar installation from Treeium, a highly rated, giant Southern California solar installer. We got an incredibly hard sell from them to get our solar "for free" – that is, through these financial arrangements – but I'd just sold a book and I had cash on hand and I was adamant that we were just going to pay upfront. As soon as that was clear, Treeium's ardor palpably cooled. We ended up with a grossly defective, unsafe and underpowered solar installation that has cost more than $10,000 to bring into a functional state (using another vendor). I briefly considered suing Treeium (I had insisted on striking the binding arbitration waiver from the contract) but in the end, I decided life was too short.
The thing is, solar is amazing. We love running our house on sunshine. But markets have proven – again and again – to be an unreliable and even dangerous way to improve Americans' homes and make them more resilient. After all, Americans' homes are the largest asset they are apt to own, which makes them irresistible targets for scammers:
https://pluralistic.net/2021/06/06/the-rents-too-damned-high/
That's why the subprime scammers targets Americans' homes in the 2000s, and it's why the house-stealing fraudsters who blanket the country in "We Buy Ugly Homes" are targeting them now. Same reason Willie Sutton robbed banks: "That's where the money is":
https://pluralistic.net/2023/05/11/ugly-houses-ugly-truth/
America can and should electrify and solarize. There are serious logistical challenges related to sourcing the underlying materials and deploying the labor, but those challenges are grossly overrated by people who assume the only way we can approach them is though markets, those monkey's paw curses that always find a way to snatch profitable defeat from the jaws of useful victory.
To get a sense of how the engineering challenges of electrification could be met, read McArthur fellow Saul Griffith's excellent popular engineering text Electrify:
https://pluralistic.net/2021/12/09/practical-visionary/#popular-engineering
And to really understand the transformative power of solar, don't miss Deb Chachra's How Infrastructure Works, where you'll learn that we could give every person on Earth the energy budget of a Canadian (like an American, but colder) by capturing just 0.4% of the solar rays that reach Earth's surface:
https://pluralistic.net/2023/10/17/care-work/#charismatic-megaprojects
But we won't get there with markets. All markets will do is create incentives to cheat. Think of the market for "carbon offsets," which were supposed to substitute markets for direct regulation, and which produced a fraud-riddled market for lemons that sells indulgences to our worst polluters, who go on destroying our planet and our future:
https://pluralistic.net/2021/04/14/for-sale-green-indulgences/#killer-analogy
We can address the climate emergency, but not by prompting the slow AI and hoping it doesn't figure out a way to reward-hack its way to giant profits while doing nothing. Founder and chairman of Goodleap, Hayes Barnard, is one of the 400 richest people in the world – a fortune built on scammers who tricked old people into signing away their homes for nonfunctional solar):
https://www.forbes.com/profile/hayes-barnard/?sh=40d596362b28
If governments are willing to spend billions incentivizing rooftop solar, they can simply spend billions installing rooftop solar – no Slow AI required.
Berliners: Otherland has added a second date (Jan 28 - TOMORROW!) for my book-talk after the first one sold out - book now!
If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
https://pluralistic.net/2024/01/27/here-comes-the-sun-king/#sign-here
Back the Kickstarter for the audiobook of The Bezzle here!
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Future Atlas/www.futureatlas.com/blog (modified)
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https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/
J Doll (modified)
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my insane c!stageduo headcanon list (incomplete) (aka: communication skills, just NOT these guys' forte, jesus christ)
c!dream never tells c!punz about scrapped lore. if he was really betrayed, after all, it would be more optimal to keep his potential betrayer from knowing what really happened, wouldn't it? if that happened. he's safe, no matter what, really. he has an impenetrable fortress and he's the only one with the keys. let them buy his mercenary, let them pound on his walls. sapnap has been howling outside for months and even with the greenery that's begun to grow in the cracks, nobody has ever managed to step a foot inside. quackity's fake cell had none of the defenses of the real one, he has nothing, just a pale shade of the glory that had resulted from countless hours of building and brainstorming and carving the glory that is pandora's fucking vault out from the sea. the next time they meet, it's almost a month later, and nothing further happens. he's not ambushed. there's no traps, no cells (he would be able to escape anything anyway, with pearls and totems and gapples in his inventory) (he only surrendered on that stage because it was the part to play, not because he couldn't literally make his way out with the gear he had) (he was in total control then. he still is now.) (when wilbur and tommy show up in the prison lobby just a few weeks later, for a second, he still wonders.)
c!dream never tells c!punz how long he was tortured. c!punz's job was to watch and wait. he did. he didn't make a scene of it, of course, and neither did he spend much time on spying on the prison, specifically (there was work to be done, after all. knowledge to gather. time, he found, is a delicate thing, and it would be remiss to not take advantage of the lack of scrutiny that comes with being seen as the server's hero) but part of keeping an eye on the server means keeping an eye on the prison (if anything is compromised, he'll have to take their research and run as soon as possible. they have a hidden base somewhere far out, where he can revive dream if necessary.) he has to watch a little bit closer after ranboo gets locked out, but he knows better than to try and visit--he sees quackity getting in an out, and well, a visitor means there must still be a prisoner to see, doesn't it? the first time he catches quackity visiting is march. the last time he does, it's september, and quackity looks harried as he runs to las nevadas. punz passes dried blood on the prime path a few times. dream tells him things went south, and mentions plans to attack quackity a few months after his escape with a keycard now dangling between his fingers, and so when he tells purpled over half a year later, it's just math, isn't it.
c!punz meeting with c!purpled to tell him about the revenge plan against quackity was behind c!dream's back. the question we get repeatedly in this scene is why punz is the one carrying the message at all, and there's a difference between dream bringing up his torture and how punz was emphasizing how fucked up he got from it. further, while c!dream emphasized how important it was that no one put together that he and c!punz were on the same side after staged finale repeatedly in the finale streams, c!punz was the one to break their cover by reviving c!dream in front of clingyduo when he could've done so in secret after the two of them left, meaning we have a precedent for c!punz being willing to break their cover for revenge-related purposes.
c!punz sees the inside of the prison exactly once before the finale streams. c!dream shows it off a little while after daedalus, before the lobby gets overgrown with stalagtites and vines, before he's scrawled over the walls in ink. he shows off the keycard, the security mechanisms, the lava-filled antechamber, the main cell. punz makes a comment about the blocks of netherite, only a little awkwardly. there's still blood soaked into the chest, permanently. dream mentions that there was a dog that sat there once, before sam killed it.
before the prison, in the experiments that they run once they've ensured the book works, punz dies--actually dies--exactly once as well. he has a better familiarty with magic and runes than dream, who knows enough to muddle his way through enchants and little more than that, and part of the reason why he was chosen in their little trio to be the one with the revive book was his aptitude in more magical things. (dream was a survivalist, not a mage, and punz had a whole secret potion room before pretty much anyone on the server.) limbo has schlatt, and had wilbur, (and schlatt saw dream with his book of moon runes, and ghostbur knew about the revive book on doomsday) and dream was the one, after all, to make his agreements with both--it just made sense for him to be the one to communicate. made sense not to let punz's presence become too obvious, even to the dead--ghosts are real, after all, and not all of them are known for keeping secrets. dream was the one that needed to have lives to lose in their little show, and dream was the one that might need to be revived remotely, if there were any unforeseen issues, and dream was the one that needed to die in front of the server and be carried off into the heart of the prison--where his endurance would be key to their survival. where it certainly wouldn't hurt to be prepared, to know exactly what he may have to survive (i thought i would be fine with raw potatoes) (do you know what that does to a person?, and the warmth of dream's blood on his palms.) limbos change based on the way that you die, and tommy saw darkness, and then happiness that didn't belong to him, and dream--well it wasn't his first time--and punz said, you know, my limbo sucks, (singular). it's simply more efficient to keep one person clear-minded enough to do what needs to be done, and limbo puts you through the wringer. that's alright. punz and dream like efficiency.
dream never stops paying punz.
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73 Yards
I have slightly mixed feelings on this one, but what it did well it did brilliantly. The episode was beautifully shot with a fantastically creepy atmosphere throughout. The Welsh landscape, the close shots, the out of focus semper distans, the mystery of what was being said. Millie Gibson's performance throughout was stellar and this is the most invested I've felt in her character so far. I did miss Ncuti's presence somewhat, but it says a lot that she was able to carry the episode on her own and I do love when the format gets shaken up occasionally and we get a Doctor-lite episode.
I loved Kate's brief appearance and the way it sold the fact that this was a very serious situation. You think UNIT might be able to help here, but Ruby is once again left alone. The themes of abandonment in this one were incredibly potent and really tie into the themes of the series. Unsurprisingly, one of the most effective and upsetting parts of the episode was Ruby's mum also being affected by the mysterious woman. Her anguished screams for her mum were really quite harrowing, as was that awful comment about her birth mother not wanting her.
It also got far darker than I would expect in a Doctor Who episode. The far-right politician and the threat of nuclear war was plenty, but what was done to Marti was absolutely chilling, as was Ruby's apology for not doing anything. It gets away with it because it's all through implication, but that almost makes it more hard hitting. You don't always need to see the monster in action to know what it's doing. It also reminds me of my much younger self not picking up on the Master beating Lucy Saxon until I was a teenager.
The way time began to speed along was actually quite shocking to begin with - I actually gasped when we saw the 25th birthday cards - and it kept bringing to mind various other episodes where companions have been abandoned either in the real world or another timeline/reality, especially things like The Girl Who Waited, Turn Left, Forest of the Dead, The Lie of the Land, World Enough and Time etc. That things get undone at the end was again a little reminiscent of a few of them, but this is also where we come to my criticisms of the episode, because - while I loved the experience of watching it - the ending feels tacked on in a way that is very unsatisfying.
There were a number of things that just never get explained. For a minor example, why did the Doctor disappear? Disturbing the fairy circle released Mad Jack (I'll come onto him) and also made the Doctor disappear? And also made the TARDIS lock in a way that couldn't be opened with Ruby's key? I'm not as bothered by this as the below, but it feels messy and like an attempt to do a Turn Left without an actual reason for the Doctor to be gone.
A bigger gripe is Ruby being the following lady. That on its own would have been fine, but that combined with other elements just frustrates me. Mainly, if the following lady was Ruby, what is it she says to get people to run away? I don't mind things being left to the imagination - for instance, I quite like that we don't get an explanation for why she has to be 73 yards away; I can infer that that's got something to do with the fairy circle - but it appears that whatever she says specifically makes people think there's something horrifying about Ruby.
What could Old Ruby possibly say to that end and why would she? And why would the same thing make a Prime Minister resign? If we had never found out who she was, I would have been perfectly happy to infer that she was a force of some kind that drives people mad, but it's Ruby! Knowing who she is but not what she does or how or why she does it is the worst way round. I want to know neither or both, or possibly the latter but not the former, but this way round just frustrates me.
On that note, the friend I was watching with pointed out that, as she was dying, elderly Ruby had very short hair and suddenly has long hair when she becomes the semper distans lady. A small detail, perhaps, but one that further muddles the conclusion. Why did her hair change? Where did the coat come from? It's a different actress as well and, even at that distance, you can kind of tell. Did Old Ruby just end up embodying an existing spirit to do with the fairy circle? If so, I would have liked that to be a lot clearer. If not, why does she look so different?
Okay, so, Mad Jack. Who or what is Mad Jack? Is he a spirit of some kind that possesses Roger ap Gwilliam? Was he always Roger ap Gwilliam? Does Roger ap Gwilliam exist without him? If Roger ap Gwilliam does not exist without Mad Jack, how come the Doctor still mentions him? If Roger ap Gwilliam does exist without Mad Jack, what is changed by the Doctor stepping on the fairy circle?
In the version of the timeline we end up on (where the Doctor doesn't step in the fairy circle but Roger ap Gwilliam is still mentioned by him as a dangerous Prime Minister), here are a few possibilities and why they don't work for me:
Does he still become Prime Minister and get taken down another way? Perhaps, but it's not like Turn Left where we know the problems would have been stopped by the Doctor (who's not here). Without Ruby's infiltration and semper distans lady, what stops him? And why was that not able to stop him in the timeline we witnessed?
Is he less dangerous? The second time around of the opening conversation we don't get the line about the brink of nuclear war, though only because Ruby interrupts him to point out the woman, but maybe we can infer that this time he's a dangerous Prime Minister but not that dangerous? That seems quite weak and unclear, though, and seems to disregard the horror of the Marti stuff.
Does the timeline only change after the Doctor's comments about him being a dangerous Prime Minister? He does say that before stepping (or not stepping) in the fairy circle both times. I might be happy to assume that Roger ap Gwilliam never comes to power after that diverging moment has passed, except that things have already changed before the Doctor mentions him because Ruby says she's been to Wales three times. Maybe they've changed a bit but not enough until the moment she stops him from stepping on it, but that is not at all clear.
If it's any of these (or none of them), that's really confusing! It's just so messy and unclear. It would have been a simple fix, too! Keep everything the same and just add in a line as they're walking away at the end along the lines of "thank goodness he never got into power; people never found him that convincing". That would have clarified a) things have changed since a few seconds ago b) that Mad Jack is what allowed him to get to power and c) in this timeline, that won't happen and Ruby won't need to stop him.
Despite all my complaints, I did really love watching this episode. It's just so carelessly wrapped up, as if they didn't think about the implications of the otherwise very well told story. I'll be interested to rewatch it and see if my complaints bother me more or less on second viewing. I really want to love this episode because there were so many fantastic elements, but it just makes all the inconsistencies and loose threads and muddled logic particularly frustrating because they were only another draft or two away from being solved.
Misc small things
No theme tune! I feel robbed! Maybe it was meant to be part of the vibe that we're not in the usual timeline, but come on. It could easily have been slotted in when she left the TARDIS the first time or before she got to the pub!
Other episodes I thought of: Extremis with warning other versions of yourself; The Hungry Earth/Cold Blood with waving at future versions of yourself that disappear when things change; Journey to the Centre of the TARDIS with weird timelines and future selves and things being undone; Last Christmas with the companion becoming elderly; Turn Left for the vibes of "there's something on your back"; Under the Lake/Before the Flood with a silent message, since it looked like the woman was trying to sign things to Ruby; and The Sound of Drums/Last of the Timelords with the triple whammy of the companion having to 1) set off on their own to 2) take down a prime minister and 3) have time reverse.
It's also got a good old bootsrap paradox in it, which doesn't bother me in the way of the above complaints, but for the sake of completionism: How was Ruby warned about the future when that future hasn't happened? Would have loved Twelve to briefly pop his head in and explain it for us.
It's interesting that the snow stopped throughout this version of her life. It also seemed to snow while she was on her way to the pub.
Kate's comment about how "this timeline might be suspended along your event" was interesting and I wonder if it connects with the snow stopping.
For the first time I actually recognised Susan Twist when she appeared, but I'm not sure I would have done without Ruby realising she recognised her. I liked that! It felt very Boom Town and recognising Bad Wolf coming up again.
There was a little cameo from Mrs Flood.
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