> There are now mountains of exceptionally good research showing a solid causal link between social media use and negative mental health impacts
Given that essentially every young person uses social media, I don't see how there can be research showing a causal link - how can you establish causality when there's no control group?
If you'd read this [0], which was the first result for "young people
social media use" then you'd know that in Germany, for example only
52% use social media, Poland (58%), Czech Republic (56%), France
(70%), Netherlands (65%), India (31%).
At least one third of the global population under 16 yo do not use
social media. There's your control group.
I dunno, I think billionaires are doing a pretty good job changing the world (thinking of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and OpenPhil as the best examples).
> Slowing down aging is like going to space: it’s a fun complicated problem for nerds to think about but it is utterly meaningless to the quality of 99% of lives on earth.
Except that aging is the causative factor behind Alzheimer's, Parkinson's, cancer, AMD, and a battery of other illnesses
They're illnesses for which age is the biggest contributing factor of whether you'll get sick, and how sick you'll get. Nearly every disease affects you more severely the older you are.
> It is the version of Effective Altruism that has gone beyond that to "we need to focus on AI safety" and "we need to fly to mars" that people are calling bananas.
There's been more of a move towards longtermism (and existential risk) in the last couple of years, but this is still not the majority of what the Effective Altruism community is about. I also don't think flying to Mars has ever been on their radar.
> The single thing missing from 99% of philanthropy conversations after all these years is STILL the voices of the people we’re all trying to help
Not so! Popular EA charity GiveDirectly does exactly what you're suggesting - giving money directly to people in extreme poverty through direct cash transfers.
I love GiveDirectly. If all of EA was simply advocating for unconditional cash transfers, I’d be a fan. But on the whole, it’s far from that. Cash is no longer cool, now it’s AI and existential risk, tomorrow it’ll be something else.
If they've invented utilitarianism, why do they use that exact term so often?
Seems like EAs are actually pretty familiar with the history of utilitarian thought. Much EA discourse focuses on moral philosophy and meta-ethics. Will MacAskill, well-known EA, is a professor of moral philosophy.
It's worth to look at the track record of utilitarianism:
Jeremy Bentham, often regarded as the founder of classical utilitarianism, almost 300 years ago, was arguing in favor of women's rights, decriminalization of homosexuality, abolition of slavery, animal welfare, prison reform.
Energy companies are subsidied all the time. About year ago to date a 10 billion subsidy program (in the form of gov backed dirt cheap loans) was started in Finland.
In the meantime people struggling with inflation are getting huge cuts to benefits, pay and public services.
> Energy companies are subsidied all the time. About year ago to date a 10 billion subsidy program (in the form of gov backed dirt cheap loans) was started in Finland.
Uh no. Government gave above market rate short term loans (literally mostly 1 day) so the electricity producers could sell their electricity to the market due to the price being high and the market rules requiring you to put money into escrow as insurance.
Basically if you had 200 million worth of electricity to sell and had to put 1 billion into escrow as insurance but did not have that money it meant you could not sell that electricity and it would have driven the price up further forcing every producer to not sell their electricity crashing the whole system.
No I am not talking about Uniper. I am talking about the exact thing you linked.
> Valtiovarainministeriön tukiohjelmasta voidaan myöntää lainoja, joilla tilapäisesti turvattaisiin yhteiskunnan toiminnan kannalta kriittisten sähkön johdannaismarkkinoilla toimivien yhtiöiden likviditeettitarve.
Basically says the loans are given to cover electricity derivatives market liquidity needs for companies that are important for society in general (basically all large electricity producers)
> Lainoja voi käyttää vain sähkön johdannaispörssikaupan vakuusvaatimusten kattamiseksi.
"The loans can only be used for covering electricity derivative market collateral/deposit needs"
As I said when someone sells electricity they have to put money into escrow that can be used to cover that electricity production from the spot market in case they fail to produce that electricity for whatever reason (wind did not blow a much as the forecast said, nuclear plant had to be shutdown due to faulty sensor, etc)
So if you had a customer on a 5c/kWh 2 year long contract and the spot price for an hour is 2e/kWh you would have to put 2e into the escrow account for every kWh of electricity you sold for 5c/kWh during that hour (meaning you would need 40x your revenue for that day in cash just sitting around)
The system makes sense/works well when prices are somewhat normal but needs massive amounts of cash when the prices spike and this is what the government had to help with. Without this loan program there would have been many players on the market with hundreds or thousands of MW of production capacity who would have had to turn OFF their power stations at the moment when the country was almost running out of electricity because they could not have covered the deposits.
There is also the municipal owned electricity company version of that with slightly different conditions.
> The Finnish government said its loans to power companies under the guarantee scheme would initially come at an interest rate of 10% plus the six months Euribor daily reference rate.
For the fossil fuel plants, fuel costs money so you spend most of your revenue on buying fuel. Less power usage => Less fuel used => Lowers costs. That doesn't mean the pandemic wasn't painful for them, but they were likely a long way down the list.
For a solar or wind plant, construction costs are almost the entire cost, there's no fuel and low maintenance, but almost nowhere has saturation, so outside of freak situations you're always selling into a willing market anyway.
Then for power companies we wouldn't expect them to make high profits during periods of high energy prices (they're just passing on the higher cost of fuel to the consume) - sort of defeating the OP's point.
My understanding was that solar and wind are just necessarily the low bids so that's why they always sell into basically any market until they saturate all demand.
They're the low bids because if your power plant needs fuel, you must bid high enough to pay for the fuel, at least on average and at least most of the time, or else you go bankrupt when you can't pay your fuel bills. But wind and solar don't need fuel. While you're not going to make a profit selling wind electricity for $5 per MWh because of your enormous capital costs - you make more money doing that than if you bid $50 per MWh and lost the auction to a gas plant.
These auctions actually pay everybody the same price, so even though your bid was $5, if some $45 per MWh gas plants were needed to hit the target capacity, you're getting $45 per MWh for your wind power. But because your bid was low, you always sell at whatever the price is.
Good challenge! This is how I understand the UK government's CfD[0] regarding renewable energy strike prices. As long as you don't go above the max, you can always sell.
Ah, I see, you've misunderstood what the strike price is.
The electricity market isn't paying that strike price, it's just paying the market rate.
The government (via the "Low Carbon Contracts Company" which it owns for this purpose) settles the difference (hence "Contracts for Difference") between the strike price† and the market price of electricity when you sell it.
There are three prices to think about here:
A. The price you are willing to sell your electricity to the market for. This is probably very low, let's say it's £1 per MWh.
B: The settled price for a period, paid by the market. The market pays everybody a price determined by finding the minimum price for which it could buy enough electricity (with some margin). This will usually be higher than A, if it was lower you just won't sell electricity, for a coal or gas plant this means you needn't burn fuel to make electricity. Maybe B is £48 per MWh.
C: The strike price from your government auction. This will often be higher than prevailing market prices (B) but not always. LCCC settles the difference with you, if C is higher than B (the usual case) you get enough money to make that up, if B is higher than C, you pay them the difference. C might be £67 per MWh.
So in our worked example we bid A = £10, the market settled at B = £48, but our net reward is C = £67.
If other people's prices were way higher maybe a major gas pipeline exploded, maybe A = £10, but B = £200, however our net reward is still C = £67.
Why would anybody want a CfD? Because all the cost is in building the wind farm, whereas all the profit comes from long term energy supplying, and it's hard to predict what that'll pay. Knowing, a decade in advance, that you're getting £67 per MWh, no matter what, makes it much easier to find investors for your wind farm project.
Given that essentially every young person uses social media, I don't see how there can be research showing a causal link - how can you establish causality when there's no control group?