2,681 karma · joined December 21, 2014
And that’s just capex - even if a nuclear plant could be built for free, the cost of operation (huge head count, fuel and waste handling), means it cannot compete with newer technologies. Indian Point shutdown years before end-of-life because it was too expensive to operate.
Nuclear plants are large and complex and expensive to build and run. I’m not sure why it should be surprising that electricity generation technology has advanced sine the development of the PWR - it’s been more than half a century. The world has moved on from electricity generation using a huge steam engine attached to an alternator with a fiddly and complex firebox.
It’s economics and newer technologies that have made nuclear power obsolete - not public opinion.
Oil and gas production is relatively in elastic taking years to expand.
The extra installed solar and wind generation - as a reaction to increased fossil fuel costs and supply disruption - permanently displaces fossil fuel consumption. No matter what fossil fuel prices do subsequently. Like the massive growth in nuclear generation immediately after the 1970s oil crisis.
Championing the continuing extraction of fossil fuels to be sold for combustion given what we know they do to the planet is not balanced in terms of morality by you driving an EV sorry. We have to abandon fossil fuels for energy asap and we practically can - the tech is available and affordable. The current reliance on fossil fuels - outside of some niches - is a political choice backed by inertia and established and powerful financial interests.
We have government agents frequenting this website to sew anti-US sentiment? Really?
Could you identify some of them? Or at least one or two of the obvious ones?
The US and Canada combined are responsible for 28% and 31% of the global oil and natural gas extraction respectively. If this share were eliminated, then it would force global demand down via the supply/demand price curve especially as there are competitive clean alternatives to burning fossil fuels for energy these days.
We're approaching a global crisis point - and every country needs to reign in fossil fuel extraction and consumption. It's morally indefensible to continue profiting from the sale of products that are f*cking up the planet. Just because there are others that are immoral, doesn't give you an excuse to act without morals. Or claim it's better that you act immorally than someone else.
I don’t agree. After my last bike was stolen I decided to buy the cheapest Decathlon had to offer - 240 - for getting around town and there’s nothing unsafe about it. It’s heavy and has cheap components but everything works fine for light city cycling.
The fact that these actions barely seem to register with the US public at large truly blows my mind. That over 35% of the population are completely fine with this stuff is frightening. The fact that none of the constitutional checks and balances are effective in preventing this abuse of office is alarming.
I do not. When you say, “what I mean is economic capacity is constrained by demand and raw materials” - that’s a significant deviation from your claim that economic capacity is infinite which is why I asked you about it. I’m not a mind reader.
But even this claim makes no sense with your toy factory example. Building such a factory consumes no land, no construction workers or engineers’ time, requires no energy to construct or operate, requires no human effort at all to operate and all this can be done for zero cost?
Can you point to any example of such a factory anywhere in the world? I mean if this were possible, why would places like sub-Saharan not be full of such factories?
This is a bizarre claim?
The total ability of an economy to produce goods and services is most certainly finite. For it to be infinite, we'd need infinite workers, infinite factories, infinite raw materials, infinite land, infinite infrastructure, infinite energy, etc.
Could you be more specific about the knock on effects of not making cheap plastic toys, etc. domestically? The US is still the clear global leader in technical innovation in nearly all sectors (and I'm not an American).
And if you’re worried that the US is about to be out competed by China in the IP sphere, surely the US would be in a much weaker position if say 50% of its economy was focused on the production of cheap generic goods?
Given the dominance of state level actors in fossil fuel extraction (a role they did not have in horse based transport), to deny states have a role in decarbonizing energy seems naive. I don’t see what’s unreasonable to suggest that the current massive resources states put into supporting fossil fuel consumption and spending on wars to protect its production and distribution be redirected towards accelerating the adoption of modern clean energy production and use.
Both UTF-8 or UTF-16 are supported, yes, but that doesn't solve the problem because XML parsers have to deal with other encodings. A document that initially looks like UTF-8 could be almost any of literally hundreds of encodings including all the common ISO 8859 encodings. Which is why XML processing/parsing code has to go through multiple phases: a "try to determine the encoding" phase (using heuristics like those described in https://www.w3.org/TR/REC-xml/#sec-guessing) and then switch to a "parsing" phase after rewinding to the start of the document.
I did some work for a bank once which were in the process of moving to using XML as the universal messaging format (message bus architecture) and this wasn't some theoretical issue - it was a genuine pain as the message sources and sinks included a bunch of machines with different native encodings including a bunch of IBM machines (EBCDIC), old Windows machines, proprietary Unices like HPUX, along with Linux, etc.
This is a well known problem with XML.
And wind turbine power scales with the square of the blade length. Which is why turbine blade designs have completely displaced this sort of "wind catching surface" device which scales linearly at best in terms of materials. Solar PV scales linearly which is what makes small and domestic PV practical.
The advances in wind power over the last decade or so have come from engineering bigger and bigger blades.
I don't see domestic wind power ever being practical at all but especially given the competition of solar PV even far from the equator.
Probably I am getting overly sensitive about what seems to be creeping casual xenophobia even in mainstream media. The way the story is presented, the sketchy “foreign” aspect of the money is apparently central to it having this undesirable outcome.
I am not.
Benn claims that the papers say one thing when in fact, if you read them (even the abstracts), they mostly say the exact opposite. It's that simple.
I thought it was a joke of some kind and eventually he would give the "reveal" but no, he finished the video without ever considered that USB is a host/device connection - and although USB-C confusingly introduced a symmetric cable, you cannot connect two devices back-to-back (one end has to be a host) and expect anything useful to happen. And that's why Apple sells a "camera" kit to allow an iPad to act as the host to USB devices.
Seeing him use an oscilloscope to diagnose an Ethernet issue in an earlier video had given me the expectation that he was technically knowledgeable and interesting. So it was shocking that he could present conclusions with such a confident and knowledgeable air, having missed such a basic and fundamental fact about USB.
And there was no push back in the comments that I could see at the time - so seemingly half a million viewers would have finished the video feeling they had learnt something.