itsmek

Why do so many otherwise seemingly rational people pretend that nuclear is the answer to our energy needs?

I don't think anyone reasonable is saying we should only do nuclear.

I didn't interpret the other post to imply only nuclear. I interpreted to mean "why do so many people think nuclear is better than battery". My understanding is that LCOS+LCOE for batt+solar is quite close to nuclear cost and will only go down further, plus it has the advantage of being safer in the catastrophic case.

Also a dead giveaway: >That's what matters

It's probably Florida or some other gulf state with weather risk. Could be California with wildfire risk but then they wouldn't have tax increases. In both of these states insurance is going crazy without the property value cause you mention. If it's a condo then insurance can single handedly explain HOA rates (since they buy insurance too) as well as HO insurance rates.

I don't know man, I'm just telling you what I see in the conversation:

OP: Complaint about taxation without representation

A: Acktually it's called suffrage not representation

B: This phrase has been in use forever and people use it interchangeably when they mean the other. It's a slogan, chill

A: I've had great representation without suffrage!

C: You're missing their point

A: Taxation without representation isn't an issue

I feel like I'm chatting with an LLM with a broken input box.

If you want to be genuine about investigating this issue you would obviously compare countries of equal wealth and economic power, but we all know that's not your goal. Could actually be a very interesting comparison if your reasoning weren't so motivated.

To be clear, their point is:

The facts show that just like the amount of labor is not fixed, neither is the size of the economy (fixed pie fallacy) and as more work is done, the economy grows

Your reply is a glib thought-terminating cliche strawman that doesn't address their point at all. Interesting!

The person you're replying to knows this. You're missing their point.

The thesis of the person you're replying to seems to be that this is just another in the long line of mechanized crafts, and that it's hypocritical not to be equally anti-loom as anti LLM, for example. At least that's how I interpreted it.

While reading your rebuttal I was able to substitute LLM with loom and arrive at the same conclusions, mourning the loss of the artisan, copying their product for cheaper, etc. So you failed to draw the distinction that is necessary to rebut their point.

The only point you made that seemed on point to me was the first one, "it's not hypocrisy because people do protest looms", which I didn't find convincing.

It's not uncommon for free things to be higher quality than cheap things, especially when we're not talking about physical goods. Think hobbyist vs hack. Selective pro bono vs quantity over quality. The former describes old internet while the latter describes much ad-supported internet. I'm not saying cheap is better than expensive, and I'm not saying everything works this way, but I do think many things do, especially for pure information that doesn't have a major capital cost associated.

The Math Your Finance Team Has Not Done Pull out the napkin. This matters.

Nobody writes like this.

The government should just regulate it, control purity and production and let people access small amounts for recreation/performance. It’s not an evil drug per se

Opioids were/are manufactured by regulated, publicly traded companies with inspectors who controlled purity and production. The result? A shattering drug addiction crisis

They were marketed and sold to consumers as safe, much more effective, and dramatically less addictive than it actually was. An industrial addiction machine ignored regulatory safeguards, built a 'pay for play' rewards structure to incentivize prescriptions, and a zillion other cartoonishly evil things

I mean, states & countries that have completely state-run liquor stores still have alcoholism and serious alcohol problems though?

I tried to draw upon the main central point of each comment to this point. This discussion felt reasonably solid until this point where I feel like you failed to refute their main point. Your counter-example is still apples and oranges. State run liquor stores don't have the strong financial incentives to push alcohol and they don't downplay the addictive potential of their wares using fake science and they don't have authority figures give their patients official recommendations to take alcohol as a treatment with that fake science and financial motivation. Obviously people can and do still get addicted to all kinds of things without that scheme in place but I feel your initial example is pretty uniquely evil and not something we can learn generalizable lessons from, other than "don't do super evil stuff". Surely if your initial point is strong enough you can still make your case using other more generalizable examples.

Don't put too much stock in the ENSO models until the spring unpredictability barrier is over. That said there was a huge kelvin wave a couple weeks ago which tracks with the super el nino pattern. If you look at a map of pacific equatorial ocean temps this year vs past super el ninos at this stage of the progression they do feel like they track. So I'm not saying it's not going to happen, it's just that the models are very inaccurate at predicting the winter until we're into the summer. In the past such predictions like we see now have turned to duds.

Risk free banking past FDIC limits is not explicitly a cornerstone of the US economy, it is a thing that is sometimes done and sometimes not done depending on contagion risk. If it's so essential then we should make it explicit so that everyone pays the fair share for their deposit insurance.

Obviously, but their implicit point is that in your scenario you can win by bluffing as long as you can continue to credibly promise the moon and keep the bet rolling but in their scenario only the final outcome wins. Dude is famous for bluffing so it's a reasonable take.

I don't see how he's risking the future of his company by saying words that end up being false, he does that all the time and lying/exaggerating is probably an essential part of being an effective fundraiser these days. In my eyes an enforceable large bet would be much stronger evidence indeed than words.

If I'm building a warehouse and I say "this warehouse is going to house the worlds supply of x", am I risking the future of the company if that fails and I pivot to housing y instead?

Eh, they were kind of bailed out in that uninsured deposits were made whole. Not saying they shouldn't have done it (fighting contagion is like fighting fire, earlier is prob better and potentially cheaper in the end if your confidence bluff succeeds) but "bail out" is a flexible enough term that electing to cover uninsured deposits at the expense of uninvolved parties feels like it qualifies to me. Plus it has some of the same smells as other bailouts - weighing moral hazard vs systemic risk.

"The reason for the CA blend goes back to the 80s and 90s when smog was a much bigger problem. Better vehicle emissions standards since then as well as improvements in the blends the rest of the country uses have largely made the CA blend obsolete so CA is really paying $1+/gallon more for literally no reason"

California cities still struggle with smog. The valley geography capped by inversion layers are unique factors to LA, central valley cities, and some parts of the bay that really do necessitate unique solutions if we don't want to choke. There's sources that back this claim you're welcome to Google. Lastly, based on the overall tenor of your points, I'd invite you to question whether someone with an agenda is driving the incorrect facts you receive in your media diet.

Is the problem solved by an open database license? Doesn't that make a community migration easier, putting a cap on how enshittified any given database can become?

Source? I've always thought of Tokyo as a rare example of abundant and affordable housing among major world cities. Their rent to income ratio is like 0.3 while most major global cities are 0.35-0.4

Ah. Didn't he threaten to destroy every power plant and bridge in the country? Do you not find this threat credible? I think the US military is capable of it and obviously that's a threat against the lives of civilians. But it's not a war crime if it's "aimed" at the leaders or because Trump generally bloviates something like that? Any explanation I come up with is exactly the kind of legal workaround I'm talking about.

"A whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again. I don't want that to happen, but it probably will,"

"just any act of war, which naturally causes some amount of terror among civilians"

I think we just may be working with totally different perspectives on this since I'm struggling to see this the same way as you.

Cool that's a nice workaround of the Geneva conventions - any threat you make while negotiations are underway is actually a negotiation strategy! The law tends not to be friendly to such workarounds in my experience, especially if it's trivially easy to enact ("be in negotiations"). Or perhaps you can help me understand what distinguishes this situation in the way you suggest.

As has been extensively discussed over the past week, hitting civilian infrastructure with rockets (or otherwise) is a war crime, and we aren't doing it.

I agree, but want to add that the threat of hitting civilian targets is itself a war crime, so there's a pretty solid case that we already did over the last few days:

"Acts or threats of violence the primary purpose of which is to spread terror among the civilian population are prohibited." -Article 51(2) AP1 to Geneva Conventions

You must live in Europe. Not entirely sure but that's the way things are going in North America, as far as I know all the proposed legislation here is zero export. I guess one concern is local grid instability if too much power is generated this way. Also if for example you put a plug in solar on the same circuit as an appliance that uses its power then the breaker doesn't "see" this usage but it still heats up the wire just the same leading to fire risk, but not sure if this has ever been demonstrated or just theoretical. And also there's the old meters still around that don't measure bidirectionally, so those will just roll back or roll forward each way, neither desirable.

You will still export when the grid is up if your solar generates more power than you use at any moment.

Plug in solar must be zero export to bypass utility approval process.

Authoritarianism is a form of government characterized by highly concentrated power, limited political pluralism, and the suppression of dissent, often enforced by a charismatic leader or elite group .

A mandate is an authoritative command, order, or authorization to act, typically given by a higher authority, such as voters, a court, or a governing body .

So in the sense that a mandate is passed by government, and governments are sometimes authoritarian? If your logic is stronger than that you'll need to explain it to me. I'm not saying Asian countries are not authoritarian, I take no stance on that, I just genuinely don't understand how mandates imply authoritarianism.

Syncing them with electricity is easy. The hard part is preventing export to the grid which requires either a compatible smart meter that can communicate with your panels or a transformer clamp installed by an electrician. My understanding is some meters measure both directions equally so if you do end up exporting power you can conceivably increase your utility bill.

I don't interpret your statistic the same way you do and I don't think it backs your point. Some of the difference between that 11% and 33% you quote are due to the fact that gas is baseline cheaper in the US than China, and a mere denominator difference doesn't prove one more reliant than the other on gas when it goes up by a flat rate, which is how oil prices generally impact gas prices. Another factor you're failing to consider is the possibility that economic headwinds due to oil prices or any other factor really (you're trying to model an extremely complex system here and the war can affect these two economies in many other ways) impact Chinese demand for gas (driven by their mfg sector) more than American demand for gas (driven by broader factors) - maybe cargo price, currency, shift of demand from consumer to military, or who knows what are causing the things you see. I don't claim to have the answer, I am just saying your measure is totally insufficient to prove your point. You're correct that it's a global commodity that impacts everyone but most experts agree that it impacts east Asia more than the US.

I just want to point out one disagreement I had:

"Take desalination plants as an example. Yes Iran has those too but Iran also has significant snow melt as a source of water, Mountains, remember? Iran has ski resorts they have that much snow."

Iran is in a dire situation with its water supply. It used to rely on an ancient system of ancient Qanat wells that only provide a fixed amount of water that can't be overdrawn, but in their quest to be self sufficient in terms of food they have gone to groundwater instead. The Qanats haven't been maintained so their output has reduced, probably permanently to some extent, and the ground water table is running dry to the extent that they are considering moving their capital.

Source for the risk going up by 10x? Wild claim