mercutio2

Thermal power cycle infrastructure has a pretty high lower bound on price even if you’re ignoring the cost of containing a fission reaction.

It’s not that there wouldn’t be learning curves, it’s that we’ve already seen the learning curve for the easiest part of the stack, and it’s not competitive.

I’m all in favor of continuing to throw VC money at small nuclear, to be clear. The regulatory situation everywhere outside of Texas is so bad that there will be niches where “power plant arrives on a semi, no external interconnect required” is a great business proposition.

But if we had a sane regulatory environment for building transmission and interconnect, nuclear wouldn’t get enough custom to ever climb the learning curve.

You’re either using nominal, not real, returns, or assuming that passive fund is taking on a lot of risk/recency bias.

If you had said $2 million, I’d say that’s closer to accurate, although there’s still a conversation to be had about risk vs return.

I thought they changed the rules around this ~6 years ago, and it’s now allowed (at least in the US)?

Are you sure Europe has less credit card fraud? When is your data from?

The US has a much less secure system specifically because there was much less credit card fraud in the US than in Europe.

Chip and PIN was an attempt to combat the rampant fraud in Europe.

It may be true at this point, I haven’t been tracking recently, but it wasn’t in the past.

People assert all sorts of nonsense in response to questions like this, usually not at all backed up by the data. The drivers of high US healthcare costs are:

  1. Doctors, nurses, and hospital admins make dramatically, *dramatically* more money in the US than anywhere except Switzerland. Every time a discussion of healthcare costs comes up, everyone tries to point their fingers at middlemen, but the middlemen extract tiny fractions of the revenue stream. Most of it goes to actual humans that are high status, and no one wants to imply they’re lobbying to lower the pay of these folks

  2. The US pays for drug development for the entire world. You can call this the US “overpaying”, or the rest of the world “free-loading”, but the US is a very rich country that has decided to incentivize drug development by allowing drug companies to profit from their massive investments by setting high prices

  3. Americans are fatter than the rest of the rich world (although the rest of the rich world is rapidly catching up) and chronic metabolic-disease is very expensive to treat (everywhere)

All the other factors are noise. Insurance companies extract a few percent, bureaucratic overhead extracts a few more percent. But to get to 100% more, these just don’t matter.

Junior developers love writing code.

Senior developers love removing code.

Code review is probably my favorite part of the job, when there isn’t a deadline bearing down on me for my own tasks.

So I don’t really agree with your framing. Code reviews are very fun.

There are 3 different components of PG&E electricity bills, which makes the bill difficult to read. I am also in PG&E East Bay community generation, and when I look at all components, it’s:

Minimum Delivery Charge (what’s paid monthly, which is largely irrelevant, before annual true-up of NEM charges): $11.69/month

Actual charges, billed annually, per kWh:

  Peak NEM charge: $.62277
  Off-Peak NEM charges: $.31026

Plus 3-20% extra (depending on the month) in “non-bypassable charges” (I haven’t figured out where these numbers come from), then a 7.5% local utility tax.

Those rates do get a little lower in the winter (.30 to .48), and of course the very high rates benefit me when I generate more energy than I consume (which only happens when I’m on vacation). But the marginal all-in costs are just very high.

That’s NEM2 + TOU-EV2A, specifically.

Huh? My maxed out Mac Studio gets 60-100 tokens per second on 120B models, with latency on the order of 2 seconds.

It was expensive, but slow it is not for small queries.

Now, if I want to bump the context window to something huge, it does take 10-20 seconds to respond for agent tasks, but it’s only 2-3x slower than paid cloud models, in my experience.

Still a little annoying, and the models aren’t as good, but the gap isn’t nearly as big as you imply, at least for me.

Your googling gave results that were likely accurate for California 4-5 years ago. My average cost per kWh is about 60 cents.

Rates have gone up enormously because the cost of wildfires is falling on ratepayers, not the utility owners.

Regulated monopolies are pretty great, aren’t they? Heads I win, tales you lose.

Not OP, but my California TOU rates are between a 40 and 70 cents per kWh.

Still only $50/month, not $150, but I very much care about 100W loads doing no work.

Monopolies are not illegal or ipso facto anti-competitive.

I am so fascinated by the different worlds everyone lives in.

I haven’t watched a video hosted on YouTube in years. But I hate amateur video. I never watch anything that I can possibly get through reading.

So in my tiny corner of user space, it’s really as if YouTube doesn’t exist except as an annoying thing Google puts at the top of searches I have to scroll past, reminding me to configure this device to use a different search engine.

I’ve never heard anyone say freshman physics is the hardest class in high school!

Memorize 6 equations, 15 terms of art, and be competent at super simple algebraic expressions and you’re done. Physics in US high schools is taught long before calculus and usually before trig, which is dumb, but they compensate by making the calculation requirements something 6th graders routinely do.

AP Calculus is even easier assuming you’ve taken trig and calculus, but I realize many Americans don’t. But freshman physics is… I generally say a waste of time it’s so easy.

What did your daughter find challenging?

Can you point to these studies?

Anyone who gives a 3% discount for cash will get cash from me, but I already have all my money in index funds. The effort to maximize points is “use this credit card, get the cash back”.

It’s really not that much effort, for rich people with excellent credit. It is of course a hugely regressive system, but that wasn’t the argument you made.

There are many arguments I've heard about price discrimination being annoying, but deadweight loss is not one of them. Quite the opposite, fixed prices in the presence of undeserved pricing power results in a less than socially optimal amount of production, and price discrimination tends to reduce that.

To say nothing of the implicit argument that software service providers have undeserved pricing power; I think that's begging the question, but it's not really relevant to my quibble here.

You just described an agency problem.

Investors in a corporation don't want individual teams to spend money "just because it was budgeted, even if we didn't have a good thing to spend it on".

I, as a manager of a team at a corporation, of course have a partially adversarial relationship with investor goals; I want my team to be happy, in part because happier teams often are more productive, but in large part also because it's just nice to spend my work life working side by side with people who are enjoying their perks.

If my entertainment budget directly (or even partially) reduced my team's bonus pool, that would be crappy for team cohesion, but it would probably make me think more carefully about taking everyone out to lunch.

Do you realize how extensively companies have to document their buybacks? Who is deceived?

There is zero fraud implied or even suggested by stock buybacks. They are heavily-publicized-in-advance returns of capital to shareholders. That's it. The sales are often offset by the creation of new stock via RSUs, and in that case just reduce the dilution intrinsic to RSUs.

Shareholders want executives to be incentive-aligned to reduce agency problems. Stock based compensation furthers that goal. If a manager doesn't think they have a better use of spare capital than returning it to shareholders, returning the capital is exactly what shareholders want. There's nothing nefarious here.

Intel did not do a good job with its (sizable) investments for the last decade. There's little reason (at least for me, a casual observer of their failure to deliver good chips) to think they would have done a better job by just throwing (more) money at the problems they were trying to solve.

The existence of markets Intel didn't dominate does not, to me, imply that it would have been a good use of resources to throw (more) money at the markets they didn't dominate. Not every company is good at every business, even if they dominate some seemingly related market.

No. Generally speaking, I want corporations to return capital in excess of operating needs to shareholders unless they have actual high-expected-return, ready-to-be-executed plans for what to do with their money.

When corporations just invest because they have money, there is a gigantic agency problem, and executives have a tendency to burn shareholder value on vanity projects and fancier headquarters.

Stock buybacks are exactly what I want wealthy companies to be doing with money they don't have a high expected ROI for.

I ate Edwardo’s several times a month on the south side in the 80’s and 90’s, as did a sizable number of my friends. This is back before it became a chain (I guess technically the south side location was the second location, so it was already a chain) and they decided to take the best pizza on earth and make it mediocre-to-poor for a mass audience, which I guess happened in the early aughts?

So there is at least an existence proof for deep dish very much a thing for south side kids when he was in the vicinity.

WebDAV is pretty darn simple.

It just builds on actual HTTP, i.e. you have to actually think about the transport layer in a way that’s out of fashion now.

And some people don’t like XML.

It’s certainly true that CalDAV specifically is complicated, but… multi user calendaring is intrinsically very complicated.

Other systems are not less complicated, they just tend to be more vendor specific.

Dominating finance + Brexit.

Brexit worked out fairly badly for rich folks. I'm not sure how well it worked for the folks who were voting for it, but it's possible "take the rich folks down a few notches" even if it lowers the median income, if you yourself don't earn the median income, is still seen as worth it.

I am normally all in favor of metonymy, it's perfectly fine and well understood style.

In the case of Trump-as-Mad-King tariffs, it sure would be nice if the world didn't conflate America, the historical land of twisting other nation's arms to reduce tariffs, with Trump and his fake-emergency tariffs.

I can understand if you do, and if America has permanently lost a lot of good will by electing this buffoon for you, I can hardly argue with you.

But still. In my mind, these are Trump's tariffs, not America's.

And specifically the idea that Trump's tariffs are reciprocal, that is even more "Trump is just a liar" than something any honest American would argue.

No. They’re not, anywhere in Europe. This is a mystifying talking point based on wishful thinking and vastly overestimating the non-monetary value of a larger social safety net. The median US citizen is much, much richer. The first quintile US citizen is fairly comparable to first quintile Europeans in income and in-kind transfers.

But it is certainly the case Trump is trying to bring US income down to something closer to EU levels, which will hopefully cause Congress to get its spine back.

I was about to say exactly this.

Applying force directly to the center of gravity with one finger is hard.

You end up applying torque plus adjustments in response to that torque. And that is heavily dependent on your moment of inertia, unlike the normal force.

But I do agree that explanations of friction are right up there with “how do airfoils work” where poor instructors are liable to get long past the edge of their knowledge and just make shit up.

iOS hasn’t allowed access to contact notes for several years, and last year added support for providing arbitrary subsets of contacts to all apps.

Geez. I loathe the administration, but I would really prefer it if people on my side quit it on the hyperbole.

In no sense has the current administration expressed that “women” are enemies.

Feminists, like myself, need to quit it on the arguing “anyone who is anti-feminism is anti woman”.

It’s the exact same rhetorical flourish as “anyone who is anti-Zionism is anti-Semitic”.

In this era of Trump’s statements bearing no relationship to truth, we can’t sink to the same lows. Or the bullshitters have already won.

What definition of treaty are you using that the USMCA is not a treaty?

The difference is negligible in international use, but in the US it means “agreement that was ratified by the Senate”.

Are you claiming the USMCA was not, in fact, ratified by the Senate?

Disputing under the terms of a treaty is quite different than unilaterally breaking a treaty.

Telling a sovereign nation, and the US’s closest ally, it should become the 51st US state isn’t making war, but it’s way more than imposing tariffs in contravention of treaties this president signed in his last term.

“Back” is in the mid 1800’s, you mean?

Or “back” as in when we built astonishingly expensive liberty ships for a large fraction of our GDP in WW2?

Because since the move to steel ships, there’s never been a time the US has been good at building ships.

Brian Potter goes into great detail on this [0], it’s a great read.

[0] https://www.construction-physics.com/p/why-cant-the-us-build...