Funnily enough, I’m one of the few Americans that gets socialized healthcare because I served in the Navy.

I’ve been pushing for everyone to get it over here

“It’s because you are fat”

“That will be $5900”.

Best of luck, you are gonna need it.

I guess we are just going to have to fight about it then

My digital life has gotten noticeably better since switching to Linux and other FOSS

Its a matter of abundance and where the government decides that abundance can go. Desal is expensive, but you have all the energy you need to power it flowing out of the ground, the cost is somewhat defrayed.

The Gulf states chose to hoard the wealth at the top and build major hubs without reliable public transit. Which is reflective of a policy decision. Its also a matter of what refineries are where and what grade of oil they will process.

That is a policy decision. In places like Saudi Arabia, gas is cheaper than water.

Norway, correctly, invested more into public transit and EVs, and high gas prices encourage that.

Because the US is the largest exporter of petroleum products in the world.

Oh so the FBI DOES investigate and prosecute sex crimes.

I imagine the Ukrainian government has more pressing issues than copyright law at the moment.

He looks like an old version of markiplier from that angle

Wait are you the one post about the husband being creepy to the au pair?

There is no “AI wave”. Machine learning can he incredibly powerful when used properly, and is being used to process scientific and medical data in pursuit of improving humanity’s understanding of reality around us.

But that is not what Microslop is pushing. LLMs that exist to chew up RAM, water, and electricity to shit out slop and generate suicidal tendencies in children.

They aren’t trying to make copilot useful, they are trying and failing to make it profitable, just like every other LLM.

“Your story does nothing to convince me that the industry is regulated to “strangle” it. You don’t say what the pipe did”

The point of that story is to illustrate the gross inefficiency and bureaucracy of engineering design changes in the nuclear regulatory cycle. What the pipe did doesn’t matter as much as how regulators chose to approach the problem. They effectively wasted months of manpower and materials for nothing.

That to me is strangulation of an industry. Another is how the Obama administration handled Yucca mountain and how the federal government, by law, owns all the uranium and is thus legally responsible for its disposal.

No real movement has been made on this front by the NRC and is the main cause of why we have all our spent fuel sitting on concrete outside of the plant instead of a long term geological repository.

It came out of the ground, so just dig under the water table into the bed rock and leave it there.

“Completely different scale of responsibility”

And completely different scale of power generation. Nuclear plants are far more power dense, and that is the ultimate factor in “potential danger”. Solar is great for places that we have already developed but are underutilized, like roof tops or farms, but they aren’t going to power an arc furnace or a manufacturing facility or a data center. The power simply isn’t there vs. The land cost that would be required for it would be astronomical.

Nuclear and " renewables " are two different tools for the same toolbox. One shouldn’t be excluded over the other because both are extremely beneficial. The “green” infighting only serves the fossil fuel lobby.

I didn’t realize we put a dollar price on fixing the climate.

That’s a bad faith argument. As someone who spent years in the nuclear industry, a lot of the regulation exists to strangle the industry.

An example was at Vogtle in Georgia, where a section of pipe was determined by the NRC inspectors to be too small and ordered it redesigned.

When that happens, that’s where huge delays come in. The design has to go back to home office and be redesigned and bench tested. While that happens, worm is stalled on that section of the plant. That costs money because all the workers still need to be paid.

They redesigned the pipe and installed it just for the NRC to go back and say that the original pipe was correct and to put it back.

The cost of nuclear also comes from the way we manage energy utilities. When a solar farm is built, the builders can just sell it to the utility and walk away, no consideration for decommissioning or waste disposal or environmental considerations.

A nuclear plant requires a whole plan and money on how it will be decommissioned by the builders themselves. Nuclear is the only power type held to this standard.

Nuclear power is a good thing, and its time the greens and people left of center get on board. Its scientifically sound and immensely powerful with no greenhouse gasses released.

You are correct, technically Prohibition worked, but its one of those “at what cost” scenarios. The absolute explosion in organized crime that came with it along with the associated cost of enforcement for fighting alcohol consumption makes the argument for a different approach.

I won’t downvote you because what you said is true, its just that the negative association of the explosion of crime and government overreach into peoples’ lives gives people a kneejerk reaction to the statement.

People often don’t think of WHY the prohibition movement was so popular that it could get an amendment passed, but alcoholism at that time was so much more severe than we can even fathom today. Their approach was wrong, but they had legitimate grievance.

“For all the hardest projects”

The funny part of all of this is that EVs don’t exist to save the environment, they exist to save car companies. Between the falling birth rates and the necessity to fix the car based infrastructure of cities, this “EV revolution” is a flash in the pan.

The amount of money and infrastructure that China dedicated to POVs will soon be an anchor around their neck as they come to reckon with the fallout of the “One Child” policy. They saw the US model as the method to reach global dominance, and went all in on a model that had alreasy reached the end of its relevance.

They really do just worship rich people don’t they, and not even the person themselves, just the fact that they are wealthy. Imagine making another person into your identity this much. Not even Trump, just anyone. Then take this orange waste of resources with no redeeming qualities whatsoever and making him out to be the gravitational center of your universe.