FirmWeird
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User ID: 757
FirmWeird
Randomly Generated Reddit Username
10hr ago
Don't forget the cost of aid to Egypt, the cost of the failed military operation in Yemen, the bombing of Iran and the conflict in Syria!
FirmWeird
Randomly Generated Reddit Username
13hr ago
"I read things like how cigarettes cause cancer and remain grounded by my family's good health. None of the smokers in my family have gotten lung cancer. Even my grandfather, who smoked a pack a day, didn't die of any smoking related causes."
FirmWeird
Randomly Generated Reddit Username
16hr ago
I'd like to write a more substantive response to your post, but I have a question first.
Once you understand HBD, liberals become obviously wrong on most every social issue,
Are you sure about this? I am not entirely sure your understanding of HBD is the same as mine. While I don't mean to attack you, your post doesn't really seem to show any understanding of HBD beyond the idea that IQ exists and has measurable differences on outcomes. What, exactly, does HBD mean to you?
FirmWeird
Randomly Generated Reddit Username
1d ago
You're not seeing what I'm saying. What I'm saying is that the essence of modern man is a commitment to moving forward, to striving for improvement, such that we can solve problems in the future we can't solve now.
I disagree - but this is a really complicated topic that would best deserve a thread to itself and goes very far afield from the original topic of conversation. If you really want to talk about what defines the essence of humanity, that would make for a great philosophical debate, but I will have to simply agree to disagree in the context of this discussion.
We agree on this. I'm not happy about it at all.
At least we can be happy about finding a point of agreement.
I'm not a paleoclimatology expert, but my understanding is that it will never, ever be green, because the limiting factor isn't temperature, it's that it's a high desert where mountains on both sides intercept any humid air.
I think that the world on the other side of climate change is going to be incredibly different - changes in climate and rising sea levels will produce an incredibly difficult to predict set of changes to the environment, especially when potential human interventions are taken into account. Of course, a thousand years is chump change when compared to the actual scale of the problem - some of the products of nuclear waste remain dangerous for hundreds of thousands of years, substantially longer than the entirety of recorded human civilisation and potentially for longer than the existence of anatomically modern humans. I am not certain that we can actually predict exactly how the Nevada desert ends up by the time these byproducts cease being dangerous.
The sense I get is that you are just motivated to believe every negative thing you can find about nuclear power at once, and don't really care whether or not they fit together, and so you're not able to make a strong and focused case against it.
The main focus of my arguments on this topic is simply Energy Returned on Energy Invested. Financial viability is a fairly good proxy for whether or not a given source of energy provides enough of a return to make its exploitation viable, and the other arguments are simply pre-emptive attacks on the common means of breaking the link between energetic viability and financial viability. Point number 2? The price of uranium being rendered comically low by colonial exploitation is a way of masking the true input costs. That is only relevant in the case of France, but their nuclear power system was the most prominent example of a financially viable nuclear power system (that has since gone into restructuring - c'est la vie). Point number 3? The costs of storage and maintenance being ignored or offloaded onto the rest of society obscures the true expenses of nuclear power generation and can create a temporary illusion of profitability. Avoiding paying those costs simply shifts the burden onto others, and in many cases magnifies them.
Point number 4 does have the least substantial link to my main point, but the relevance of renewables is that they make the opportunity cost of pursuing nuclear power even starker. If we already have power systems which give us a better deal than nuclear, nuclear becomes an even worse idea.
FirmWeird
Randomly Generated Reddit Username
1d ago
The demand for 'ZOG' exceeds the supply. People want an explanations such as dual citizens with divided loyalties composing a significant portion of Congress. That's not true in a factual sense, but it feels right to them.
Only the most unsophisticated of ...zog-demanders? would actually claim that the reason for Congress' divided loyalties is due solely to a large proportion of dual citizens. The actual claim on the part of people who believe in ZOG is that Congress is thoroughly corrupt and gridlocked, which grants AIPAC incredible undue influence over American politics. One of the primary examples these people point to is Ted Cruz, who openly stated that he went into office for the sole purpose of serving Israel - despite not being an Israeli citizen himself. These people are very obviously correct, which is why you have to twist their argument into something like "it is solely the Israeli dual citizens that are the problem" before you can actually defeat it.
FirmWeird
Randomly Generated Reddit Username
4d ago
I'd like to point out that this is the exact same argument feminists use when they say that any advice like "Don't get drunk in a skimpy outfit and hang around lots of desperate horny men" is actually blaming the victim and morally wrong. That said, my personal position (not that I can speak for the people you're referring to) isn't so much "more health insurance ceos need to be gunned down in the streets" as it is "these health insurance ceos need to be reigned in so they aren't causing so much damage to society". If a fentanyl dealer gets killed because he sold a bad batch of drugs that killed a bunch of his clients, I'm not going to pretend that I'm terribly upset when someone gets revenge on him. Play stupid games, win stupid prizes - and when your industry performs as awfully as the US healthcare insurance industry does, profiting on the back of destroying lives and denying people medically necessary procedures, you're going to be buying a lot of tickets for the Luigi lottery. Sure, most of the victims will just die or suffer in silence, but all it takes is for the right person to get screwed over and something like this will happen again. The right thing to do would be for the government to crack down on these people and implement a much better healthcare system, but seeing as how that isn't happening anytime soon we're just going to get more and more cases like Brian Thompson as the years go on.
FirmWeird
Randomly Generated Reddit Username
4d ago
"This is a canary in the coal mine. People are getting fed up. There's going to be more of this. CEOs better take note." And... I mean, it's not like I'm unsympathetic to critiques about health insurance companies. I get the frustration, absolutely. But the moral frame of it, and the flat certainty of who had culpability and agency, caught me off guard, I have to admit. There was a distinct undercurrent that the communities these people were in had already reached consensus that, legal or not, this kind of assassination was, functionally, licit. Or perhaps something like, there no longer appear to be political ways to address this problem, so extra-political solutions are on the table.
If I say "Hey, it looks pretty stormy out there - there's a very high chance of rain, so you should take an umbrella" I'm not actually saying "Rain is morally good and I support the rain falling on you and getting your clothes wet". People are simply pointing out that when you live in luxury and riches earned via rent-seeking in an industry which can just arbitrarily ruin people's lives due to an accident or illness they weren't at fault for, you're going to create more and more Luigis (or whoever the real killer was, if it turns out he is innocent). They're not endorsing extrapolitical assassinations as a means to effect change, they're identifying that a large underclass of people who have no ability to effect change politically while occasionally losing the lottery and getting their lives completely ruined by people like Brian Thompson (have you looked at what he actually did? That man was no angel!) is going to regularly produce more and more violence.
FirmWeird
Randomly Generated Reddit Username
4d ago
Where are the policy initiatives for deep geological storage of solar panels and solar panel production waste that guarantees no environmental damage for the next X thousand years?
The environmental damage from the creation of solar panels comes from the mining of the components used to create them as well as their manufacture. They are mostly made out of glass and aluminum which doesn't actually cause any serious environmental damage, though there are some trace amounts of nasty chemicals. If every single solar panel in use today was abandoned after humanity got wiped out in a second, the environmental damage would be minimal. The two problems just aren't really that comparable.
Why is nuclear power singled out as the one human activity where we have to spend billions to make sure that no living being in any possible future timeline thousands of years in the future is harmed by some byproduct?
Because nuclear waste remains dangerous for that long. But moreover, it isn't - if we were actually being rational, global warming and the flooding of the atmosphere with the byproducts of fossil fuels would demand even more attention. But we're not going to care until it is too late, because the consequences of global warming will come after the people currently making decisions are long dead - you, me and our descendants will have to deal with those problems but the people in power right now won't.
FirmWeird
Randomly Generated Reddit Username
4d ago
I get that. But, as a modern man, I would have no similarity to descendants a thousand years in the future who haven't figured out some easy way to deal with nuclear waste
How exactly would you have no similarity to people who haven't figured out some easy way to deal with nuclear waste when YOU haven't figured out some easy way to deal with nuclear waste?
To share values with us as modern men is to move forward and overcome problems, not to stagnate and regress.
The USA is currently stagnating and regressing right now. Manufacturing capacity and the real economy has been completely hollowed out and sold to China, and political gridlock means you can't even successfully set up advanced chip fabrication technology - ever read about the troubles TSMC has had getting set up in America? American infrastructure is falling apart, the political system is unable to meaningfully address any real problems (Israel not having enough money doesn't count as a real problem) and levels of societal cohesion are in the toilet compared to 70 years ago. Is there any serious analysis which doesn't identify the US as in decline?
Please, tell me what dreadfully important ecosystems draw on the western Nevada desert for water?
Do you know what the climate of the western Nevada desert is going to look like in a thousand years? At current levels of global warming, there's a decent chance that the desert could actually be green in a thousand years. My paleoclimatology knowledge of America isn't the best because I don't actually live there, but I don't think there's anything implausible about places like that turning into more human-useful environments in the future.
Do you actually believe that the storage of depleted nuclear waste deep underground, leaching through the groundwater to aquifers over the centuries, and then to the ocean, diluted in billions of gallons of water, is going to turn into radioactive rain?
This conversation was, in my mind at least, in the context of a polluted river - if it has already reached the surface and created an irradiated river, absolutely. If you're proposing that we replace fossil fuels with nuclear, the amount of waste created would be far higher than the relatively tiny amounts we have now, especially over hundreds of years.
But if your argument for why France's program is cheaper is because the least economically important input is slightly cheaper than getting it from Australia, I think you need better arguments.
France was paying roughly 2 dollars a kilo - and they still had to go through financial restructuring due to economic problems. If you want to disprove my argument, simply point to the successful nuclear program that is currently generating power at a profit healthy enough that it does not need any government subsidies. That's all you need to completely destroy my position!
FirmWeird
Randomly Generated Reddit Username
6d ago
My descendants in 1000 years will presumably have as little to do with my values, culture, genes, and life as I do to my many ancestors from the year 1025.
I am actually incredibly similar to my ancestors from a thousand years ago - they lived in a different country and spoke a different language, but there are a lot of things we have in common.
one of them might go out into the Nevada desert and drink from a stream that has nuclear waste runoff in it.
Except that nuclear waste runoff won't be limited to that stream. What bodies of water will that stream feed into? What ecosystems will draw upon that river for water? A single stream being rendered unusable would be a perfectly acceptable price to pay for cheap, relatively clean nuclear power - but that's not the price actually being paid, nor is it what we're getting for that price. A single stream feeds into the broader ecosystem and harms there will spread in ways that cause immense damage to the fabric of life in the future. That radioactive water will reach aquifers and groundwater supplies, it will reach the ocean, it will reach the atmosphere as it passes through the water cycle and becomes rain. Nature will adapt, for sure, but humans don't evolve nearly as quickly as wolves or bacteria - and the evolution of radiation resistance via natural selection would involve incredible amounts of human suffering and pain.
You are implying that the person you're responding to doesn't care about the world he bequeaths to his descendants.
I don't think that qualifies as snark - not caring about the fate of the Earth is a fairly common position among a lot of rationalist circles, especially ones who believe we will colonise space or discover AGI in short order.
I am happy to have you here for the debate on cost, because that's the debate that actually matters
Sure, here's the debate: Barring a dramatic increase in EROEI, nuclear power is uncompetitive with solar and other renewables. While it is the appropriate solution for some limited circumstances (nuclear submarines, having a colonial empire that lets you get effectively free uranium, etc), it is no way an actual answer to the energy crisis rapidly approaching the world.
Far from being an irrelevant distraction from the argument, nuclear waste and the proper safekeeping/disposal of it is one of the bigger contributors to the EROEI problems of nuclear power. When the final accounting is done, the costs of that storage could leave nuclear power with a negative EROEI - we would have been better off simply not doing it at all save for the generation of certain medically and scientifically useful isotopes.
FirmWeird
Randomly Generated Reddit Username
6d ago
If my descendants in a thousand years' time haven't figured out some futuristic technological solution to disposing of nuclear waste, then fuck 'em.
I'd feel ashamed if I ever said that about my descendants. I think this might be a case of differing moral frameworks - I really can't relate to this perspective.
hence your need to resort to snark
What snark?
it's much more reasonable to care about giving clean, reliable power (bracketing the cost question)
"Bracketing the cost question" lmao. If you don't care about the cost of the power produced then there's no point even talking about the viability of different energy sources at all. Assuming I misunderstood what you meant here... If nuclear power actually did provide clean, cheap power that was too cheap to meter then there would actually be a real discussion to have here but it doesn't! It has failed to do so for decades, and I see no signs that this will change in the near future. What we actually get is power that is more expensive than fossil fuels or renewables and creates a huge waste problem on top of that. My government's chief scientific body recently produced a report on the relative cost of different energy sources, and nuclear ended up being roughly twice as expensive as solar/wind (https://www.csiro.au/en/news/All/News/2025/July/2024-25-GenCost-Final-Report).
FirmWeird
Randomly Generated Reddit Username
6d ago
Europe can either go down the war path and ban Chinese cars from the European market and risk losing Chinese parts
Are you familiar with the Nexperia affair that is currently taking place?
FirmWeird
Randomly Generated Reddit Username
6d ago
Yes, depleted fuel remains dangerous for a long time, but the implication that we therefore need to also develop containment solutions that last for millennia is completely and utterly bonkers.
I mean sure I'll be dead by the time that problem shows up, but I do actually care about the world that we will bequeath to our descendants.
However, spent fuel is dangerous to the touch for a few decades at best, after that, the health and containment concerns are identical to those of any other chemical waste (basically, making sure it does not come into contact with the food supply and drinking water). Except, there is a universal method to detect radioactive contamination.
Yes, that is the entire problem! And sure, we can detect it - but that doesn't stop the river that could have supplied entire communities with life turning into a source of cancer instead.
Some toxic waste, particularly heavy metals, remains dangerous indefinitely. However, you never see any heated political debate about ways to permanently isolate entire waterways.
I am an environmentalist who does actually care about this issue. You're right, that is a big problem - but I'm not particularly moved by claims of hypocrisy when I have actively protested against this kind of thing in the past.
FirmWeird
Randomly Generated Reddit Username
6d ago
Venezuela's oil is notably low quality and requires extensive processing before it is usable - and they actually are drilling for oil anyway for export to China. The last time I ran the numbers, Venezuela's oil reserves, if totally extracted, would be able to power the current global economy for less than a decade assuming zero economic growth. While there's likely to be significant demand destruction due to the US economy imploding to the degree that the administration won't even publish the numbers anymore, Venezuela's oil just isn't worth the squeeze - and even if it was, it won't last for long.
FirmWeird
Randomly Generated Reddit Username
7d ago
Then nothing is cost-effective except for fossil fuels and hydroelectricity, ultimately.
Correct! Hell, forget about cost - there is no viable replacement for fossil fuels.
But we already knew that; that's why banning their use is such a powerful socioeconomic weapon.
Nature is already going to do that for us - not only are the fossil fuels going to eventually run out, rational human beings prioritised the easiest-to-access and most efficient stores of fossil fuels. The energy return on energy invested of conventional fossil fuels is going down, and the EROEI of shale and fracking is even worse.
This line always frustrates me because this is an isolated demand for rigor.
No, not at all. I believe mining should be heavily regulated, especially when it comes to disposal of hazardous and toxic wastes. Allowing people to pollute and destroy the biosphere imposes immense costs on the rest of society - it is a form of abusing the commons, and is ultimately substantially more expensive than properly disposing of the waste. It's just that the cost is paid by the rest of society as opposed to the mining companies.
Which is why you basically can't do this until you have a military that will deal with that.
How long are you going to be waiting? We've already hit peak conventional oil, and tight oil is significantly less competitive on an EROEI basis (which is the only basis that actually matters). Nuclear power, barring some great new discovery or innovation(which, to their credit, the Chinese may have actually achieved), will remain on the shelves in most cases because it is just not capable of functioning as a viable replacement for fossil fuels due to the poor EROEI.
FirmWeird
Randomly Generated Reddit Username
7d ago
It's worth pointing out that the European countries did actually provide material support for the democrats, as well as implementing censorship regimes that targeted American companies and American political opinions. I'm not saying this to claim that the US has clean hands and the EU is attacking them unprovoked, but you're not really going to convince the republicans not to do something on the basis of a threat which they have actually already followed through on.
FirmWeird
Randomly Generated Reddit Username
7d ago
It might not be the culprit, but have you disabled "Motion smoothing"? If you're noticing a quality difference on the basis of framerate that setting is an extremely common problem that's often turned on by default to impress old people.
FirmWeird
Randomly Generated Reddit Username
7d ago
China actually started up a molten salt 'thorium' (eg, starting with uranium, then moving to thorium) reactor last year,
I actually mentioned this in an earlier post. If they can safely generate power with a good EROEI, great!
There's a revealed preferences sense where, if you can't solve those political problems, you can't produce power at price, and it's not entirely wrong. But it's misleading to treat it as a physics problem.
You're right that there's definitely a political aspect holding nuclear power back - the fact that you can't find enough subsaharan africans with degrees in advanced nuclear physics to meet diversity requirements most definitely imposes an additional cost on American/European nuclear power efforts. But some of those policy restrictions are actually extremely sensible and following them imposes lower costs on society as a whole. Take nuclear waste for example - if you can just throw your highly radioactive waste into the river, fucking the nearby ecosystem and causing a massive spike in cancer for every living thing that is connected to that river (which is more than you'd think if you haven't studied ecology) you've actually created a problem that will be substantially more expensive to fix than simply following the regulation. Building nuclear reactors on earthquake fault lines is in fact a bad idea, as is building them in floodplains or directly next to the sea. Your nuclear reactor should also be built to rigorous construction standards rather than relying on cheap contractors who half-arse everything and replace a bunch of structural cement with styrofoam to reduce construction costs.
Do all of those regulations impose additional costs? Absolutely. But at the same time, they prevent much larger and more expensive consequences from showing up later. I'm not going to deny that some of those regulations are bad - mandating that half of your construction workers are women of colour imposes additional costs for negative benefit. But I don't think many people can accurately determine which regulations fall into the former category and which fall into the latter.
FirmWeird
Randomly Generated Reddit Username
8d ago
It's the only alternative that can work anywhere on the Earth's surface on a calm, cold night.
"Work" is the key sticking point here - does it provide enough energy to pay for itself? To pay for the extraction of the raw material from the ground, refinement into usable fuel pellets, transportation to the plant, the construction of the plant, the lives of the people who run it and then on top of that provide usable power for the rest of the society that sustains it? The answer is, at present, "No."
That's the entire basis of my objection - even if you just handwave away the problem of storing dangerous radioactive waste that lasts for millenia and hope it doesn't leak into the rest of the environment, nuclear just can't pay for itself. Every single existing nuclear program I'm aware of is made viable on the basis of government subsidies or exploitation (i.e. the hilarious prices France paid for Nigerian uranium). Every single proposed nuclear program that doesn't have these problems (fusion, molten salt, thorium, etc) is 20 years in the future, and has been 20 years in the future for the past 60 years.
FirmWeird
Randomly Generated Reddit Username
8d ago
I have, and I have eaten numerous downvotes for it. My point has always been that nuclear energy has too low an EROEI to be a viable answer to the energy needs of a modern industrial society, and I haven't seen any convincing evidence to the contrary. France's nuclear system was only viable because they got their uranium for cents on the franc from Nigeria, and even then it ran out of money and had to be restructured when I was posting about it last. This doesn't necessarily mean that there's no place for nuclear power - having a source of power that isn't reliant on fossil fuels could prove to be particularly useful in a future where fossil fuels are harder to come boy or the Middle East is in a state of war. Similarly, nuclear submarines which don't actually have to make enough money to justify their continued existence but place a huge emphasis on the density of their energy source are another good use for them. If China actually manages to get those molten salt reactors working, that would be fantastic as well. But right now I haven't seen any convincing evidence that nuclear power is a sustainable answer to the depletion of fossil fuels - and a large graveyard of failed attempts.
FirmWeird
Randomly Generated Reddit Username
8d ago
I'd expect something like the redditor response to John McCain's death in that case, where they acknowledged that they disagreed with him entirely, but still really respected him and are sad that he is dead.
The only reason "redditors" liked John McCain was that he was anti-Trump - I don't believe redditors are real people (in many cases they aren't, especially the ones posting from Eglin AFB). John McCain was a terrible human being and lent his support to pointless wars that lead to disastrous consequences while sticking his snout in the trough and slurping up a bunch of the profits made as a result. He served in a pointless, failed war of aggression as part of a military that committed truly awful and evil deeds (evil might be a bit hyperbolic, but when I look at the children of Agent Orange I find it hard to find other words). He was substantially worse than Charlie Kirk who, to the best of my knowledge, didn't actively support or fight any wars as odious as the Vietnam war and wasn't a beneficiary of corporate corruption.
The feeling does not go both ways.
I think that you're looking at different sections of the populace. There are absolutely figures on the right that I can respect - Ron Paul and Thomas Massie are two that come to mind for me. But I'm not really representative of the circles on the left that are calling for total republican death, in the same way you aren't representative of the parts of the right that talk about the day of the rope with bated breath. I don't think there's really anything to gain from comparing the worst segments of either side of politics - we can compare the power levels of Patrick Crusius and Tyler Robinson until the cows come home, but I don't think there's much useful information to be gained from doing so.
I don't believe that this endorsement of violence is a partisan phenomenon - there are increasing levels of radicalisation on both sides of politics because the normal, traditional methods of deciding these disputes is hopelessly gridlocked and dysfunctional. Politics as usual are simply unable to address the increasingly intractable problems faced by the average person, and political violence is on the rise because desperate people see no other way to actually get their problems addressed. Political violence of every flavour is going to be a growth industry for as long as the mechanisms of regular politics remain as worthless and nonfunctional as they are today.
FirmWeird
Randomly Generated Reddit Username
11d ago
I do think a problem that the GOP hasn't solved yet is how to get their voters motivated to show up when Trump isn't on the ballot.
I'm not an American so you can take my analysis with a few flakes of artisanal sea salt, but as one of the people who fall into the category of "Would have voted for Trump but not for republicans" I can tell you that the problem is actually extremely easy to solve.
What drew people to Trump was his repudiation of politics-as-usual and the beltway consensus. In order for Republicans to get this demographic to show up to the polls, they can't rely on the same tired culture war distractions - they need to deliver on actual change that improves the material conditions of the people they want to vote for them. Contrary to the opinions of a lot of shrill left wing commentators, these people are not interested in deportations for the purposes of pointless cruelty towards brown people (I mean sure, some of them are) but because they have been legitimately harmed by the importation of a vast illegal labour force who are not under the protection of existing workplace relations law and drive wages down below the floor. The outsourcing of productive manufacturing and the growing financialisation of the economy, vast amounts of H1B visa abuse, illiterate Indians mowing down families while driving trucks they aren't qualified for, the entrenchment of corruption and rent-seeking - all of these policies have immense costs which have been borne by the people who showed up to push Trump over the finish line in 2016 and 2024.
Trump himself, despite seeming to understand these policies and why people hate them, has completely ignored these people and their priorities since being elected. Calling affordability a democrat scam is the latest in a line of recent moments where Trump is fucking over the people who supported him, coming hot on the heels of his newfound support for illegal immigrant labor and the mass importation of Chinese students in order to preserve the elite universities which hate him. Cost of living relief? No, 50 year mortgages! Trump's new priorities seem to be selling pardons to fraudsters and drug traffickers, sending more money to Israel, making criticism of Israel verboten (my position on Israel isn't widely shared on here, but the actual valence doesn't matter for this point - I don't think even the Israel supporters will deny that it has been a huge focus of the current administration) and getting ready for war with Venezuela, the exact kind of stupid war that Trump got into office by opposing. This is to say nothing of the incredibly sloppy handling of the Epstein files - if Trump wasn't going to release them, stirring up his base and making them believe he would is an incredibly short-sighted move given the gravity of what they contain.
While Trump is torching his own base and movement, it isn't like the democrats are going to do anything to stop him or even mount any kind of effective opposition. The last democrat politician to actually inspire people and even win an election was Zohran Mamdani, and the DNC went out of their way to try and make sure he lost. The reasons why are extremely obvious as well - they're taking donations and benefiting from the same corruption that Trump claimed to oppose and promised to fight, and a left wing that actually fought for the people would be a death sentence for a left wing that exists to enrich Nancy Pelosi's stock portfolio.
Ultimately the election is still the republican's to lose - the DNC is currently blowing itself up and destroying their own relevance. All it would take is for the republicans to actually deliver on the agenda they promised... but at the moment that seems like a very tall order.
FirmWeird
Randomly Generated Reddit Username
20d ago
I feel like it is worth pointing out that this would absolutely be better for the businesses in question. Microsoft have embraced H1-B visas and Infinity Indians with open arms... and look at what's happened to their products. These policies aren't actually good for businesses at all in the long run, but they are good for executives who get quarterly performance bonuses and are incentivised to jump ship with a golden parachute before the consequences of eating the seed corn actually show up. I don't think these people are just morons who don't know how to run businesses, I think they're responding rationally to the incentive structures around them, incentive structures which are ultimately bad for the businesses in question.
I think you're making the same kind of mistake a lot of people on the left made when they assumed that having people banned from society for publicly admitting to being racists meant that there weren't anymore racists in society. Something like 80-90% of republican congressional staffers are groypers or deep-cover groypers, and their numbers are heavily concentrated amongst right wing youth (there aren't many 50 year olds watching Nick Fuentes).
When people get evicted from polite society for revealing that they're groypers, you don't actually create a society free of groypers - you create a society where you can no longer trust that any given individual is or isn't a groyper, which is very different (and in my opinion worse).
EDIT: I was spreading misinformation with this post - the actual number is only 30% or so. I'd misinterpreted a poll - birb_Cromble below was correct.
You're right, I don't actually go and prove that it is a good proxy. But the reason why I believe that is simple - that's the only real way we have to determine if a given power source can function viably in a modern western society, and the points where that connection breaks are fairly easy to identify and take precautions around. Actually measuring KWh is definitely worthwhile and there are analyses you can make with regards to it, but it gets exceedingly complicated in a way that finances avoid. How much energy went into constructing the vehicles which mined and transported that uranium? How reliably was that power generated? Was it limited to specific times (power that can only be generated in off-peak hours and can't be stored isn't as useful)? For the purposes of determining whether or not a given power source can feasibly supply power to a first world economy, finances are one of the best tools we have. But that said, to the best of my knowledge nuclear EROEI as measured in KWh still isn't very good. Mining, transporting and enriching uranium tends to consume enough energy that the return isn't terribly worthwhile.
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