scratchee

If it was a matter of half the price then nuclear would be the clear winner. Paying double to get stable power rather than variable power is currently a clear win.

Nuclear has a lot of baggage on top of being more costly (eg public fears, taking a lot longer to get running, building up big debts before producing anything, and having a higher cost risk due to such limited recent production), if it was just a simple “pay twice the price and you never need to worry about the grid scale storage” then nuclear would be everywhere.

Well that sucks. My favourite moment in a hidden role game was when a player won by misreading their card and convincing both of us that we were allies at the start. They ended up the only evil player for most of the game and then in the last round after we’d worked together to systematically kill everyone else (all weirdly innocents, we were both feeling guilty by this point), when they finally realised they knew there was no evil player they checked and… killed me. Total madness and a glorious victory for them. How can you be mad at that?!

The EFF is probably competitive there. But clearly they’re both on the same side of most issues, so not really a competition.

Ok, apart from human rights, workers rights, rebalancing funds to poorer regions, free trade, free movement, a voice at the table, straight bananas, peace in Europe, and endless examples of consumer rights, what has the EU done for us?!

That priest just might. CoE has always had a fun mix of voices, they’re not good at following a party line (which imo is the best thing about them).

Otoh, if they tell him to keep quiet and he doesn’t (is he even capable of shutting up? His own lawyers have never stopped him flapping his jaw so far), that makes things much easier: contempt of court is a simple matter to resolve.

Yeah, the switch has an entire core locked off and everything is downclocked to improve battery life and control temperatures. No doubt this emulation gives everything more clock cycles (and perhaps an extra core?). Probably very short on battery and possibly very hot too.

Don’t loan what they can’t afford to repay. Easy. Not everyone was stupid enough to offer debt up to people’s eyeballs, and many weren’t “fortunate” enough to even try.

Stupid games cause stupid prizes, for everyone involved. Bankruptcy exists for a reason and it was foolish to ever allow any debt to bypass it. Humans always have and always will act in their immediate best interests with a hopeful view of the future, and the best way to accommodate normal behaviour is to balance discouraging it (by encouraging the specialists in debt to refuse bad debt by punishing them with unrepaid loans) and ensuring the people caught in the system can still be functional in society since that is better for them, society, and everyone except the idiots who loaned them money they were never paying back.

If they can predict earthquakes and eruptions more accurately, as suggested in the article, then yes for all the people who don’t die.

I’m certainly not arguing nuclear is a panacea that everyone in all the governments have somehow missed (even ignoring the risks mentioned its only a potential fit for a small subset of the grid these days, there’s no way building a 100% nuclear grid would make sense today).

The point I’m making is that currently there are energy production needs we effectively can’t fulfil with renewables because the costs would be impractical (eg the last 10% of usage on dark windless nights at the wrong time of year). Some cases do fit nuclear better currently (not all, nuclear usually wants constant usage, can’t help with surges).

Nobody really cares about that though for 2 reasons: 1. There’s plenty of opportunities that renewables still can fill and 2. The cost of storage is projected to drop a lot over time, which should fill in the gaps and squeeze out many of the last opportunities for nuclear.

Quite possibly by the end the remaining slice where nuclear could fit will be so thin it can’t actually sustain an industry (and given the industry has been half dead for decades, it’d take a big win to justify reviving it), so yeah, at the moment it looks like lots of risks and questionable rewards. Nonetheless the current prices aren’t really the problem, it’s just that things are risky, and projected to get worse over time, so why invest?

Ironically it’s not that different to the fossil fuel industry, just with a lot less existing infrastructure.

It is a real sign though, I visited as a child. It wasn’t as secret as I was lead to believe, which I really should have foreseen, given I was lead to believe it existed at all. children are dumb.

Trying to control the lives of millions of people because they were too stupid with their finances is a very inefficient solution to the problem (also unpalatable). I think the far simpler option is to simply stop protecting anyone giving bad debt. The government has less work to do, people learn to be smart in what debt they offer, because if they start offering people the moon for punishing but distant costs, they’ll get nothing.

Your solution relies on every human being smart. Mine doesn’t care how smart people are, it ensures the problem is self correcting. Much neater, much less societal harm. Who actually cares about “punishing stupid debtors” when you can instead just not have any stupid debtors.

Tldr: in this “revolution” we get to play the part of the horses from the Industrial Revolution.

The last revolution made more and better jobs for horses at the start. Then it made less and zero jobs for horses. This one could be the same for humans.

As dumb as this comment is, you’ve just guaranteed that I’ll never forget the name of this problem, so thanks for that

Is there a difference between the 2? If cancer is the main side effect of this level of radiation exposure, then being more resistant to cancer is also being more adapted to radiation.

If it’s a hit maybe they’ll come out with a very slightly fancier model with oled later, just like the current switch

Ah, a nuanced opinion. That’s just too much for some people to process. I’m sorry you went through that. Bad enough that they couldn’t accept the difference of opinion, but finding the most painful way to claw at your soul stinks of cruelty to me, perhaps you’re lucky they showed their true colours on day one.

You’re certainly right that their handling of nuclear was inefficient for reducing carbon output.

I’m pretty pro nuclear, but I don’t think that really takes away from their success in pushing renewables forward, they were a very early adopter of solar thanks to their very generous subsidies and probably helped fuel its growth at a faster rate, so regardless of their unfortunate paranoia around nuclear, they do deserve some praise. Perfect is the enemy of good, and given the speed the world has responded to climate change, Germanys mixed and painful transition was certainly not the worst.

The answer is dependent on context I think.

In a universe where the whole future of the world is laid out before you and you can choose 1 death or many deaths, then sure, pick the greater good.

The weakness of simplistic “greater good” automatic arguments is that in a real universe it opens you up to manipulation.

In the end, there’s no avoiding thinking through the incentives from all perspectives. And that indeed suggests not giving in to the rioters, to protect the integrity of the entire legal system and reduce the risk that every trial becomes a show trial dictated by whoever has the biggest mob.

I don’t disagree with your views on Boeing, but this incident is quite likely not related to Boeings problems, (other than their hard-earned public perception problem). Plane engines shouldn’t catch fire, but they do, whether that is rare bad luck or somebody screwed up is yet to be decided, but it sounds like this is not a newly minted plane, Boeing probably hasn’t touched it in years.

Not that Boeing hasn’t earned their public perception problem, but accidents happened before Boeing lost their mojo, and will continue to happen even if Boeing regain it. This incident may well turn out to have lessons once the investigation is done, and some might be directed at Boeing, but that’s not where I’d put my money this time around, it sounds unlikely that they caused this particular incident.

Militaries are typically tasked with protecting more than themselves. If someone invaded Britain then the military wouldn’t have to wait until the invaders had shot a soldier to start defending the country.

A better question is whether they are attacking US and UK citizens/ equipment.

Yeah, one justification I’d heard was that it was a cheap and low risk way to revive the industry enough for bigger projects, but I’m not sure that’s particularly compelling.

Yes, especially right now. To be fair that’s mostly because solar is doing great as far as scale goes right now. Nuclear has near zero scale and lost all experience, so it’s more expensive than ever.

You typed that into social media and posted it, just fyi.

Yup, it’s hard to predict what the mix will look like, but 100% solar would be a very costly solution for sure.

I used to be very pro nuclear, and I still think it could have been a big piece of the puzzle, but I do worry we’ve missed the boat, it could’ve been the first wave of decarbonisation 20 (or more) years ago, I’m not sure how well it can compete growing from almost nothing now with the renewables eating all the easy money. nuclear plants need to run 100% to be successful, and renewables have dropped a bomb on the concept of baseline demand. Maybe as we kill gas we’ll have to start giving massive bonuses to on demand power that isn’t pumping co2, but the absolute lid on that market is the price of storage, which is high enough now, but will drop, it’s unclear how long the gap for nuclear will exist there.

Certainly willing to be wrong though, there’s lots of unknowns with nuclear, quite possibly it could be multiple times cheaper if only we’d invest into it properly.

Yes, but also literally every industry starts that way. Start small and scale up. Nuclear’s special because we did it once and then almost completely stopped building them globally for so long that the capability faded away.

The tech shifted in the meantime, so even the knowledge that was preserved is for designs we wouldn’t want to build today.

It’s a weird situation.

Neither am I, but yes, probably it would be spun that way.

Possibly I was voicing my wish for a karmic result, rather than a politically pragmatic decision.

I agree with you and Alexa, but you can always say “five past six” to avoid the [zer]o if it’s bothering you.

I remember on a German exchange at school the German student could not handle “oh” sounds in phone numbers at all. So it might be tricky for non native speakers (though I think they made more of a fuss from anger at how stupid English is than out of genuine confusion…)

It’s a fair cop

I assure you we’re not, and we seem to disagree pretty fundamentally, possibly you’re confused by the fact I replied to my own comment, but I assure you that was just because I was a bit drunk and couldn’t find the edit button

Just to add, I think the reason bankruptcy needs to exist is to ensure there is no burden on the government enforcing inefficient debt collection. It’s not about fairness or second chances, those are just happy side effects. But if someone’s business model relies on government enforced punishment to function it’s a wasteful model from the governments perspective. Allowing people to go bankrupt means nobody will benefit from this model of debt collection, and thus saves the courts and government to focus on more beneficial contract law involving large amounts of wealth, rather than millions of pittances that cost the government more than they earn the loan sharks.