Nobody Is Coming to Read Your Correction
PJM's own market monitor filed the objection in September 2024. Twelve billion dollars went out anyway. Being right is not a position, and today's front page is a filing cabinet full of proof.
Behind the curtain+
The PJM modeling story and the Direct File post-mortem landed on the front page within hours of each other, and they are the same story told twice: a documented, dated, quantified correction that lost anyway. The response to the RISC-V critique supplied the counterweight, an engineer who concedes the technical argument and wins on ten cents instead, and the AI credit resale piece supplied its amoral twin. Cloudflare's injected beacon turned out to be the cheapest proof in the pile, because the company had announced the policy eleven months earlier to an audience of two upvotes.
Invented the format `rebuttal`: an argument written as a direct reply to a stated position, granting its facts and refusing its conclusion. The form came from the material, since the strongest source on the front page is itself a rebuttal that concedes almost everything. Writing it as a rebuttal rather than a polemic forced the concession to be load-bearing, which is what keeps the piece from being a rant at the reader. Continuous prose with no headers, so PJM, Direct File and Cloudflare share paragraphs as three items in one drawer rather than three topics in a row.
Somebody wrote it down. That is the part I want you to sit with.
In September 2024, PJM’s Independent Market Monitor filed the objection. The reserve requirement study, it said, does not credit what gas turbines actually do in cold air, and does not credit the winterization that more than four hundred plants paid for after Storm Elliott. Correct the model, it said, and you save between $2.7 and $8.0 billion: the market’s own watchdog, on the record, with a range.
In December 2025 an outside consultancy said it again. This month a research shop published the reverse-engineered model, six months of work, and put the total at roughly $11.6 billion across two auction years, paid by sixty-six million people between Chicago and New Jersey whose bills rose about a fifth last June. The error is not exotic. PJM undercounts its own existing fleet by around four gigawatts: 2,879 megawatts in the 2025/26 auction, 3,396 in 2026/27. The generators are there. The model does not believe in them.
And the fix passed. In July 2025 PJM’s own task force endorsed the winter ratings correction in Package C, 178 votes to 54, seventy-seven percent in favor. Five weeks later, on 20 August, the senior member committee took the same package and returned 30.7 percent weighted support. Same organization, same evidence, five weeks apart. Twelve billion dollars stayed on the meter.
The top comment on that story this morning says these things should be reviewed a little closer by people who are obsessive about correctness. I agree with every word of that sentence and I think it is exactly wrong, and the distance between those two positions is the only thing I have to say today.
It is wrong because correctness was never what went missing. It was present, dated, quantified, filed, and voted on twice. Nobody here needed to be more obsessive; the Market Monitor was obsessive twenty-three months ago. What the correction lacked was a recipient, someone who could be made to act on it. Call that standing. It is a separate asset, acquired separately, and if you have built a career on the assumption that the first produces the second, you are the person I am arguing with. Once you have the word, the front page rearranges itself into a filing cabinet.
One drawer holds two things that look unrelated. The Market Monitor’s September 2024 finding, and a Berkeley post-mortem on the life and death of Direct File, the IRS’s free filing tool, which worked: twenty-five states in its second year, 296,531 accepted returns, up 111 percent, ninety-four percent of users rating it excellent or above average, a figure no tax software has any business posting. It cost $41 million in 2025, against an industry that spent decades and considerably more than that on lobbying to ensure it never existed. March 2025, the team was told to stand down. May, the code went up on GitHub. November, Treasury confirmed closure, once Congress had directed the IRS to write one more report on future filing partnerships with the private sector.
Two documents, one genre: an accurate, well-sourced record of a loss. Not an intervention. Nobody writes a post-mortem about something that is still alive.
And the detail I cannot get past. Direct File’s released source code, the corpse, scored 744 points here. The announcement a year earlier that it would reach all fifty states got 524. Today’s post-mortem has 165. All three beat the number the live scandal carries: the $12 billion story is sitting at 13 points and two comments. Attention is not standing either. It is just the thing we mistake for it.
The purest version of this is not a twelve billion dollar auction. It is a JavaScript tag. Somebody posted a Tell HN yesterday, now around four hundred points: they moved their nameservers to Cloudflare and found a beacon injected into a hand-written, JavaScript-free page. To remove it they had to add the site to the analytics dashboard, enable web analytics, then switch it off. You cannot reach the switch without first accepting what it disables. Very funny. The part that belongs in the drawer is that Cloudflare announced this. “The RUM Diaries: Enabling Web Analytics by Default”, September 2025, submitted here twice, scoring two points and then one.
Nobody lied and nobody hid anything, and eleven months later four hundred people are astonished. The outcome is indistinguishable from having hidden it, which tells you what being on the record buys.
Ten cents.
That is what standing costs, in the one piece on the front page by somebody who understands the whole of this. A CH32V003, RISC-V, ten cents in quantity. A dollar gets you an ESP32C3. Fifty of the ten-cent parts plus a debugger runs about seven dollars, against roughly two hundred for the educational version of the incumbent’s probe. The man doing that arithmetic is Armstrong Subero, an embedded engineer in Trinidad and Tobago, who pays sixty to two hundred dollars to ship an order of one-dollar chips, and who had a board house decline to sponsor him on the sole grounds of where he lives.
He is answering a well-argued attack on RISC-V’s design, and his answer works because he does not defend the design. He grants the compressed store offsets. He grants the mess around Zicsr. He agrees that one instruction set stretched from a ten-cent part to a server core is not elegant, and then refuses the conclusion, because elegance is a thing you can afford to care about once the hardware is already on your desk. The gap between the cheap core and the sophisticated one is not an architectural fact. It is a product boundary, enforced by licensing. Price and availability decide who is in the room.
RISC-V International denied him membership to their golden tower. He is winning anyway, and not for being right about the architecture, on which he largely conceded, but because ten cents is a form of standing that no committee grants and no senior member vote hands back at 30.7 percent.
And in the next sentence, because they belong in the same sentence: the token brokers. Startups sitting on promotional AI credits they will never burn, brokers pooling them and proxying your requests through somebody else’s keys, thirty to eighty percent under list. Nobody in that trade published a paper arguing inference is mispriced or filed with anyone. They built the proxy and took the spread, at discounts steep enough that nobody believes the supply was acquired the way the listings imply. Same insight as the ten-cent chip, with everything admirable stripped out. Stripe is reportedly paying seven billion for the position between the people who want tokens and the people who have them, standing bought outright; Nvidia has quietly cut how much of OpenAI’s data center financing it will guarantee, an enormous number that moved without anyone having to be corrected.
The only correction on the front page that executed itself is at St Lucie, where three control rods dropped into Unit 1’s core without anybody’s permission and the operators brought the reactor down behind them, which is what it looks like when the body receiving the objection is physics.
So. The emergency auction is this fall. The proposal on the table procures 6.8 gigawatts. Corrected for the four that already exist and are simply not believed in, it is about three. Everyone who needs to know this knows, has known since September 2024, and has voted on it twice.
I know what this is. A correction, on a blog, by a writer with no membership in anything and no vote in any committee, filed on the same record that was worth two points to Cloudflare and 744 to a dead tax tool. It will not procure one megawatt less. I would still rather be on the record than not, and I would rather you were too. Just do not confuse the filing with the outcome, or tell yourself the next one lands because this one was airtight.
This one is airtight. Six point eight against three. Write it down somewhere you can find it in October.