Pranav retweeted
We are going to be dealing for years with a thousand dark consequences of a huge chunk of the population deciding it's okay to have robots think for them.
Pranav retweeted
For anyone who hasn't heard about this yet: ICE showed up at the front door of Dr. Ann Lawani in Lodi, California, while she was still in her pajamas, shackled her at the wrists, waist, and ankles, and shipped her all the way to a detention center in Louisiana.
She’s a frontline nurse who worked through the worst of COVID, directs the master's nursing program at the University of San Francisco (overseeing 230+ nursing students), and takes care of her 83-year-old dad.
When her family and lawyer tried to find out where she was taken, ICE’s online locator came back with "0 results." It turns out ICE quietly changed its policy the day before her arrest to stop listing thousands of detainees in the public database, so her family had no idea where she was for days while she was bounced from Stockton to Bakersfield to El Paso to Louisiana.
DHS put out a statement claiming she had a 2013 removal order, but they conveniently left out that on the *exact same day* in 2013, an immigration judge granted her Withholding of Removal blocking her deportation to Nigeria because she faced persecution there.
She has zero criminal record, has checked in with ICE for 13 years, and has a valid federal work permit through 2029. Because they legally can't send her to Nigeria, Rep. Josh Harder says ICE has been trying to quietly deport her to an undisclosed third country behind her lawyer's back.
Full write-up and breakdown of what happened here:
eyesonice.net/p/covid-hero-d…
Support independent coverage & frontline updates:
ko-fi.com/eyesonice
Pranav retweeted
I’m a broken record on this, but Dems don’t realize how much their party punches above its weight
If GOP held all the Senate seats in states Trump won in 2024, they have 62 seats. If Dems had all the Senate seats in states Biden won in 2020, they’d only have 50.
And yet…
A fascinating stat @NateSilver538 alluded to the other day: following Dems' wins in KS/MS/SC/TX, 44 of 50 states have elected at least one Democratic senator since 2006.
Only 35 of 50 states have elected at least one Republican senator during that time span.
Pranav retweeted
The @nytimes editorial board agrees: BAAJA is a state capacity bill.
BAAJA isn't just an energy bill. It's about making government work.
Any member of Congress who wants the government to be more effective should vote to pass this bill.
Read @apmechan in @pahlkadot's Eating Policy Substack! eatingpolicy.com/p/the-permi…
Pranav retweeted
Very glad to see the NYT editorial board endorse BAAJA, the bipartisan permitting reform bill.
Key points from the article:
1. "Democrats who call climate change an emergency should not defend a permitting system too slow to build the clean energy that would address it."
2. "[BAAJA] would make it easier to build solar energy farms, battery storage, power lines and more. As a result, it would reduce energy prices. The status quo is expensive, dirty and unstable. The country needs to build a lot of big, new things to make its future cheaper and cleaner."
3. "The bill’s Democratic skeptics are making a mistake. President Trump would almost certainly veto a follow-up bill next year. And time matters, especially for the climate. Congress should pass this bill now. It can then return next year and pass other bills that would do even more good."
4. "Today, it typically takes between 5 and 13 years to build a long-distance power line, like the one that transports clean hydropower from Quebec to New England. That line took about a decade to finish, and opened in January. It has enough capacity to meet about one-fifth of Massachusetts’s electricity demand, and it’s projected to save consumers $50 million a year."
5. "A more robust, cleaner grid would make American energy more reliable and less dependent on hostile foreign nations. No country can embargo the wind."
6. "[BAAJA] would force data center operators to pay the full costs of the electricity they use, protecting the average electricity consumer."
7. "On net, the bill would cut greenhouse gas emissions from power plants by as much as 18 percent by 2040. It would do so in part by nearly tripling the construction of high-voltage transmission lines."
8. "Anyone who cares about climate change should cheer this bill. And a party that just won an election on affordability should not pass up a chance to start delivering immediately."
Pranav retweeted
Jesse Jenkins was a lead thinker behind the IRA, the high water mark of US climate policy
He says BAAJA is necessary for decarbonization
I've spent my entire career advancing clean energy policy and studying pathways to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.
Making it possible to build energy infrastructure at speed and scale is a fundamental prerequisite for deep decarbonization of the U.S. economy. That is indisputable.
Passing permitting reform is a necessary — but not sufficient — step on the path to net-zero emissions in America.
It is time to pass BAAJA.
Pranav retweeted
I've spent my entire career advancing clean energy policy and studying pathways to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.
Making it possible to build energy infrastructure at speed and scale is a fundamental prerequisite for deep decarbonization of the U.S. economy. That is indisputable.
Passing permitting reform is a necessary — but not sufficient — step on the path to net-zero emissions in America.
It is time to pass BAAJA.
Pranav retweeted
Stopping climate change requires massive increases in clean energy by the 2040s.
That will take electrical transmission lines connecting places with the best sun, wind, and geothermal to population centers.
But under our status quo laws, a transmission line that started permitting in 2006 to connect wind power in New Mexico to customers in California was finally completed *in 2026.*
17 years of permitting and lawsuits, 3 more years to build. And that was under the federal government's "fast-track" process.
If we don't pass BAAJA, the clean power infrastructure we start today won't get done until it's too late. If we pass BAAJA now, it'll be done during the next administration.
If we can't stop climate change because we have to preserve every lawsuit, paperwork and procedure, we've lost the plot.
Pranav retweeted
It genuinely saddens me to see other countries make common sense engineering decisions that would be non-starters in the US. We go to such extreme lengths to avoid disruption and we pay for it with extreme construction costs.
Pranav retweeted
new york’s congestion charge, a policy whose whole purpose is fewer cars, had to produce a 4,000 page federal environmental assessment. meanwhile nearly every major highway widening clears the same law unchanged. NEPA is a speed bump that only works on trains
Pranav retweeted
"a certain kind of environmentalist will tell you we have ten years to decarbonize and then defend a review process that uses seven of them."
Pranav retweeted
a certain kind of environmentalist will tell you we have ten years to decarbonize and then defend a review process that uses seven of them. the planet is on fire, please submit written comments before the close of the 90 day window
Pranav retweeted
This is the best reason to pass BAAJA: we can’t possibly decarbonize by the 2040s years if building a single electric transmission line takes 20 years
Pranav retweeted
James Talarico received a larger share of the vote as a Democrat in Texas than Chuck Gray did as a Republican in Wyoming.
Pranav retweeted
The alternative to passing BAAJA and reducing emissions by 4% is doing nothing for another two years, which would reduce emissions by… 0%.
Anyone who tells you there is a more climate-friendly bill on the table is lying to you.
Some of us believe there is a climate emergency. I have to wonder if BAAJA proponents really do. Best case modeling, BAAJA drives down emissions 4% by 2040. If that's what we actually end up doing, we're cooked. This is not a climate bill.
billmckibben.substack.com/p/…
Pranav retweeted
“Most people assume famous research has been checked many times. Often the first person to really check it is someone with nothing to lose and an assignment due.”
A 28-year-old UMass graduate student got a homework assignment to reproduce a famous economics paper, couldn't make the numbers match, and found a spreadsheet mistake in a study that politicians had used to argue for budget cuts.
His name is Thomas Herndon.
In 2010, two Harvard economists, Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff, published a short paper called Growth in a Time of Debt. Its headline finding: once a country's public debt goes above 90% of its economy, growth falls off a cliff. In their numbers, average growth for that group was minus 0.1%.
It came out right after the 2008 financial crisis, and it spread fast. In the US, the Paul Ryan budget cited it as its only evidence on what high debt does to growth.
In Europe, an EU commissioner pointed to the research in a speech. In Britain, George Osborne cited the authors by name.
Herndon was a PhD student at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, taking a class called Econ 753: Applied Econometrics. The big assignment was to pick a well-known paper and replicate it.
He picked this one. He couldn't get the same results.
He asked the authors for their spreadsheet, and they sent it. When he spotted the problem, he called his girlfriend over to make sure he wasn't seeing things.
He wasn't.
> One formula stopped five rows short
> That quietly left out five countries: Australia, Austria, Belgium, Canada and Denmark
> Some available years of data for other countries weren't included
> The way the averages were weighted let a single bad year in one country count as much as decades in another
Herndon and his professors, Michael Ash and Robert Pollin, published the critique in April 2013. Fixing the problems, average growth for the high-debt countries came out to 2.2%, not minus 0.1%.
Reinhart and Rogoff publicly admitted the spreadsheet error. They disputed the other criticisms and defended their broader view. Economists still argue about debt and growth today.
But the formula was wrong, and for about three years nobody had publicly caught it.
A student doing homework did.
Most people assume famous research has been checked many times. Often the first person to really check it is someone with nothing to lose and an assignment due.
Have you ever found a mistake in your boss's spreadsheet and kept quiet?
Pranav retweeted
First big test for Jeffries and the affordability agenda we ran and won on
Letting old conservative do nothings kill this bill would be a terrible sign
