Power Monger

Y'know, I've largely moved on beyond pointing out and lamenting at how openly corrupt the Trump administration is, but holy shit the Trump administration is so unbelievably corrupt.

As in the rest of the literature, we find that the effect of each college characteristic [average SAT score, Barron's Index of selectivity, and net tuition] is sizeable for both cohorts in cross-sectional least squares regression models that control for variables commonly observed by researchers (such as student characteristics and SAT scores). However, when we adjust for a proxy for unobserved student characteristics—namely, by controlling for the average SAT score of the colleges that students applied to—our estimates for the effects of college characteristics fall substantially and are generally indistinguishable from zero for both the 1976 and 1989 cohort of students. Notable exceptions are for racial and ethnic minorities (black and Hispanic students) and for students whose parents have relatively little education; for these subgroups, our estimates remain large, even in models that adjust for unobserved student characteristics. One possible explanation for this pattern of results is that highly selective colleges provide access to networks for minority students and for students from disadvantaged family backgrounds that are otherwise not available to them.

Diversifying Society’s Leaders? The Determinants and Causal Effects of Admission to Highly Selective Private Colleges

Using this design, we find that being admitted from the waitlist to an Ivy-Plus college increases students’ chances of achieving early career upper-tail success on both monetary and non-monetary dimensions. The causal effects of admission to an Ivy-Plus college are much larger for students with weaker fallback options– e.g., whose colleges in their home state channel fewer students to the top 1% after college. Exploiting this heterogeneity in treatment effects, we estimate that the marginal student who is admitted to and attends an Ivy-Plus college instead of the average flagship public is about 50% more likely to reach the top 1% of the income distribution at age 33, nearly twice as likely to attend a highly-ranked graduate school, and 2.5 times as likely to work at a prestigious firm.

for background: Lake Tahoe residents live in California and get their energy from Liberty Utilities, a California energy provider. Liberty Utilities gets 75% of its energy from NV Energy, a Nevada energy provider with the power lines and energy going to Lake Tahoe. NV Energy has a contract to stop supplying energy to Liberty once a new transmission line is built that can serve Tahoe.

based on the headlines you'd never guess that

the energy supplier NV Energy already sold its CA assets to CA-based Liberty Utilities in 2009 and told them to find their own energy provider within five years

Liberty Utilities did not do that (it's hard and costly and they're a small provider!) so NV Energy granted temporary extensions in 2015, 2020, and 2025

Liberty Utilities is struggling and having to raise energy prices because fire insurance has gone through the roof. CA has a Wildfire Fund that helps energy providers with this, but Liberty Utilities isn't covered by it

NV Energy is building new transmission lines that should give Liberty Utilities access to energy from other providers

NV Energy will continue providing energy to Liberty Utilities until the new transmission lines are finished

so the headline is insanely misleading rage bait. a Nevada energy supplier is finally ending their 16 years of temporary energy service to Tahoe residents in California because the infrastructure for letting a different provider serve Tahoe is about to be built. Tahoe residents are kinda screwed but their plight has been 16 years in the making.

Tahoe residents complain that prices have gone up, but it's not because of ai, it's because of fire insurance! Liberty also isn't trying to increase profit to fund ai stuff. they asked for an 11% return on equity (max allowed shareholder profit) and the California Public Utilities Commission (CPUC) instead brought them from 10% to 9.75%. larger energy provider PG&E is also down, from 10.28% at 9.98%, but PG&E is way bigger and benefits from the CA Wildfire Fund! which is to say Liberty is allowed less profit than before they had to raise the prices, and less profit than larger energy providers despite carrying way more risk.

The Chicago Maroon reports:

> At 1:30 p.m. on April 17, a group of undergraduate students identifying themselves as “UChicago For Our Future” gathered on the main quad, handing out onions to protest the 1958 Onion Futures Act.  > The 1958 law prohibits the trading of onion futures contracts, making the bulbs the only type of agricultural product banned from futures markets in the United States.  > To draw attention, the group brought approximately 100 raw onions to the quad in a large cart. They encouraged passersby to participate, saying that any student who ate an entire onion would be featured on their website. About 20 students attended the event, while others took onions as they passed through. The group also collected 131 signatures on a petition to repeal the law. 

I feel like you might see a protest like this at Oberlin as a joke, but at the University of Chicago market distortions are deadly serious and the protest was in earnest. Maybe:

> “It’s always filled me with fury that we accept such odd minuscule policies that really are just odd market distortions,” second-year Adam Ash, a member of the group, said. “Even if one specific issue seems minute or minuscule and trivial, what matters is a combination of all of these. It’s a death by a thousand cuts to our agricultural policy.” … > The group’s Instagram account was later banned, which Ash claimed was the doing of “the corn lobby.”  

Okay maybe a joke?

(via matt levine)

human-caused