// public policy

All signals tagged with this topic

Aug 17

PJM's $12 billion modeling error reveals grid operator accountability gap

PJM Interconnection, which manages electricity for 65 million Americans, made a forecasting mistake that cost ratepayers $12 billion in unnecessary costs. The operator is now proposing to repeat the same methodological error. Regional grid operators operate with minimal external scrutiny, passing massive costs to consumers while facing no meaningful penalty or leadership change. PJM can defend its approach despite the documented damage, which suggests that grid governance structures lack mechanisms to hold operators accountable when their models fail at scale.

theme-culture cybersecurity infrastructure protection public policy

Aug 11

Hackers launch Water Watch Center to protect rural water systems

Source: SiliconANGLE

DEF CON's partnership with the National Rural Water Association addresses a real infrastructure gap: small water utilities lack the budget and expertise to defend against cyberattacks, making them attractive targets for both criminals and state actors. By deploying managed security services through an established hacker community, the program shifts risk from individual cash-strapped municipalities to a distributed model where skilled volunteers can systematically monitor thousands of smaller systems that regulators have largely overlooked.

theme-culture ai adoption public policy media criticism

Jul 26

Canadian politician reads AI speech, including the prompt

Source: Boing Boing

A New Brunswick legislator delivered remarks that included the raw AI prompt—the instruction text that should have been stripped before delivery—revealing how casually some political actors are adopting generative tools without basic quality control. The incident points to institutional decay: the moment when using AI becomes so routine that traditional safeguards (editing, review, basic competence checks) simply vanish. We're past the "AI is novel" phase and into the phase where it's embedded in mediocre workflows with no gatekeeping.