Ironically "Surely You're Joking, Mr Feynman" is a great example of what the article talks about: compelling and repeatable stories whose basis in fact is often extremely dubious.
102 karma · joined July 25, 2023
You can't realistically bring nuclear up and down in line with a daily demand curve. Hydro provides the peaking. Pumped hydro is better for this, since it provides both positive and negative balancing, but any hydro will do if there is sufficient storage.
If you have a good balance of nuclear and hydro, the nuclear will run close to full capacity and the hydro at less than half capacity, averaged over a day or longer. This is by design.
Installed capacity of 1 part hydro and 2-3 parts nuclear is a viable energy source at any scale, nuclear on its own is not.
The problem is that building both hydro and nuclear is even slower and more difficult than just building nuclear.
That's not quite true. Nuclear generation is more flexible than wind and solar but much less flexible than thermal fuels, particularly gas. Although you can choose when you turn a nuclear power station on and off, you can't do so quickly, and your choices are somewhat constrained (regular downtime is required).
Nuclear worked well in the energy mix when it supplied base load (ie generate roughly the minimum daily load at all times) while coal supplied predictable peak load and gas could supply unexpected peaking. As this mix changes, availability patterns of nuclear start to be more of a burden. In a system without fossil fuels, you would have to have (some) energy storage, regardless of the split between nuclear, solar and wind.
The exact number for how much storage, how much overcapacity, or how much natural gas generation you would need vary with the proportions of solar, wind and nuclear of course, but it's an oversimplification to suggest that they are trivial if you use mainly nuclear.
Suppose you have a 7-bag system and you draw 35 pieces from it. Each subsequence 0-6, 7-13, 14-20, etc must contain exactly one of each piece. On the other hand, 35 pieces from a 35-bag system have to contain 5 of each piece, but they can be jumbled up. So the sequence could start SSSSSZZZZZ, whereas with the 7-bag system you would have to get at least one I and one T before you could have a second S or Z. In Tetris, as in other games, this totally affects your chances of winning - if it takes longer for the pieces counts to 'average' out, you might have died waiting for an I before they do.
This is a little like the situation with card-counting in blackjack. Going from 1 deck to 6 decks shuffled together doesn't affect the odds for a player who isn't paying attention to the cards. But it makes the job of a card counter way, way harder, and increases the chance that she will run out of money during a long spell of unfavorable cards, before the inevitable regression to the mean eventually happens.
How does it work exactly? Does the use pluck the strings while the machine turns the knobs?
Not having those people in the discussion isn't an 'echo chamber', any more than asking a belligerent drunk gatecrasher to leave your birthday party creates an echo chamber.
Note that it doesn't matter whether or not these people are factually correct or not about the etymology of 'dig' for this to be the right conclusion for Julia to draw.
What country does Ritter Sport come from? Is it considered luxury chocolate in that country?
The huge differences between husbandry and meatpacking standards in the United States and Western Europe are extremely well known. Most US meat products are not allowed to be imported to the EU because of this. I'm surprised you need a 'source' for this widely known fact pattern (which in fact, you yourself mentioned in your comment above - pork in the US can not be eaten rare). What US meat is exported is generally a completely different standard than what's sold domestically.
The ready availability and aggressive marketing of opiate painkillers in the US continued for around twenty years, many of it based in 'pain clinics' whose only service was writing scripts for pills. Such clinics do not exist in Western Europe. The govt cracked down on these at a point where addiction was endemic in some regions. The problem was demonstrably not 'tiny in relative terms'.
It is very, very easy to check that this isn't true.
Capitalism was described and critiqued as such since the mid-1800s. The Communist Manifesto, published in 1848, is certainly no older than "the idea that there could even exist something other than capitalism".
Very few public libraries in the US are older than this, and the era of 'robber barons' took place after this (1860 or 1870 to 1900 or 1910).