One weakness of capitalism is that it's not going to build "an energy abundance electro-state" when the demand isn't there. Especially when coal or gas is the shortest putt.
I know what you mean, but right now we're seeing everywhere around the world that capitalism can also do stuff just from the supply side. Solar and batteries are getting so cheap (especially in grids that are still below 50% renewable), they are displacing almost all new generation capacity. Once that capacity is online and starting to get amortized, electricity prices should drop, which will bring up demand. It's the slow way, but it should work. Historically, cheaper energy has always resulted in people ending up spending MORE money on energy - because it gets used for so much more things.
My point is that we've made Nuclear far more expensive than it needs to be, despite our relatively hungry first-world energy demands.
This is certainly true, but I'm not convinced nuclear ever had a chance against the fossil capacity of the past and the renewable capacity of the future. Reactors are large and complex, and such projects often resist scaling laws (see also: housing, hospitals, dams, bridges). I'm curious to see what the Chinese manage to do with their modular reactors. I'm skeptical: nuclear reactors work better if they are large. But making them in a factory might unlock some extreme efficiency gains. We'll see.
pbmonster
13hr ago
I blame the Germans - for trying that again. They should have gone to the French and told them "you do the jet, we do the tank. We only meet again when both are done, until then we trust each other not to fuck it up to badly - because we usually don't".
The French are pretty well known to value their independence highly, sometimes to their own detriment or at least that of their close friends.
There are countless examples for this:
- military procurement: the French have always pretty much exclusively fielded their own military hardware. If you can even get them to consider cooperating with their alleys, they will usually nuke the entire project and then do it alone anyway. Never, ever, would they consider buying US aircraft or missiles. Annoyingly, this results in... decent hardware. Seriously, they spent comparatively little money - all of it domestically - and got a full nuclear triad (historically, today "only" sea and air), a blue water navy with expeditionary capabilities and carrier air wings, and an effective air force and army. This means not only do they not need a global Big Brother, they don't get bullied all that much.
- the french decided that energy independence is important, and then just built 60 reactors. They have uranium only in their... colonies, so of course they just built a giant fuel rod reprocessing industry as a backup, invented at least half the relevant processes and then where done with energy for the next several decades.
- less relevant now, but before SpaceX kicked everybody's teeth in, Ariane was an impressive system. Still is, in some niches. It's pretty much the embodiment of French refusal to fly on American or Russian rockets.
- The French have slowly accepted that they're not quite a global superpower anymore, and I think this was a painful process. Still, they are notoriously bad at following their hegemon, i.e. the strong opposition to the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq and countless UN security council veto situations. They are also notoriously bad at keeping their finger out of Africa, and so far nobody important seems all that interested in stopping them.
pbmonster
14hr ago
Europe isn't a country and we've been enemies with most of Europe one time or another. We're friendly now because none of them have an economy or a military that supports their self-image as "first world nations". Their choices for international big brother are Russia and us, so they side with us, but they hate us for it. The US' ability to influence international politics and project military power is a thumb in the eye for nations who used to be able to do similar things.
For what it's worth, this is all laughably incorrect in the case of France. Say what you will about the Frenchies (some of your second paragraph hits), but them pathologically always doing their own thing leaves them in a much better spot than the rest of the Euros.
pbmonster
18hr ago
Over five percent of China's power comes from fission plants
This is... not all that much? Slightly more than necessary to keep the tech stack alive enough for a weapons program?
China's political classes had very obvious mixed feelings about dependence on foreign-produced infrastructure for a long time
I've talked about that in another reply, they had multiple decades of close friendship with the soviets during which getting a licence and tech support for the VVER reactor would have been trivial. They had decades of messing with a home grown design. It never got all that cheap, which is extremely concerning, because the Chinese have world class expertise in optimizing the last cent of slack out of industrial processes.
But they've put >3 GW of fission power online just in the last year.
This is impressive - for nuclear. And that summarized our sad story about the entire technology. Because they increased their coal capacity by 42 GW (they probably took old coal plants offline, which means they installed even more new coal plants than those 42 GW) and they seriously plan to make it to 600 GW (peak) of new solar and wind capacity in 2025.
pbmonster
19hr ago
We've always had a bit of a head start on the technology for high-quality fission plants. Expecting mind-bogglingly corrupt communist regimes to do it well seems counterintuitive.
Come on, this is cope. The Soviets had the first nuclear power plant in the world online, and by the 60s they had a unified civil design ready (the VVER), regularly putting up new 400 MW reactors. By the early 70s, the VVER had iterated to a standard gigawatt design, and they built quite a few of those in the early 70s (most of them are online today) and then just... never stopped. There will be new gigawatt VVERs connecting to the grid in the next 2-3 years. The Soviets, of course, also got a ton of naval reactors online quite quickly, which is a far more impressive feat. We'll ignore the slight... reactor design detour they took with the RBMK, and focus on the fact that they didn't even let that shit show stop them for one second. They decommissioned some of them, kept others running, and went straight back to building more VVERs.
The Chinese had several decades where they could have bought reactors from the Soviets, licenced the Soviet design and/or straight copied that reactor. They did all of that for many other vital technology stacks.
What I'm trying to say is: even high state capacity corrupt communist regimes with access to uranium and a well-developed homegrown nuclear industry didn't build an energy abundance electro-state. No matter how thin you cut your security margins, and no matter how hard you subsidy the industry, no matter how many dozens of reactors you have your commie slaves build: it never actually gets all that cheap. If you have coal or gas, you might as well just burn that. And if you made it into the 2020s and now have terawatt solar capacity... well, you probably know how that's is going: you can just try to have your commie slaves install a nice round 600 GW (yeah, yeah, I know: peak) of new generation capacity. Per year.
The coolest 'monumental' works human have recently achieved are the aforementioned Burj Khalifa, SpaceX's Starship (still in progress) and, no shit, the Las Vegas Sphere.
We haven't yet stopped building. It's pretty easy to fill out that list a little, even if you look just at the anemic Euros: The Sagrada Familia made impressive progress over the last couple of years, the Millau Viaduct is pretty monumental, and - while harder to just look at, on account of being underground - the the Gotthard Base Tunnel and the Large Hadron Collider are gigantic feats of engineering. I can recommend visiting the latter when they do upgrade next time, even just the detector halls are monuments (and you can only enter them when they shut everything down during construction).
I think most of those will stand all throughout the fall of the West. People will live in their shadows after centuries of decline.
pbmonster
1d ago
Then why doesn't China have more fission? Hell, since the US is so rich in fossil resources: why didn't RUSSIA ever get more fission?
pbmonster
1d ago
I might go further and say that insurance in general is just totally broken in the West.
Firstly, the stuff that people want to insure against (big, unpredictable disasters that result in ongoing costs) aren’t what insurance companies want to cover.
Do you have examples? I have zero problems getting cover for those. The insurance companies all try to tag on useless crap I don't want, and they call to up-sell this stuff if I un-select it, but they all end up selling me insurance in the end.
pbmonster
8d ago
In my undergrad (MIT), and my PhD, basically none of my male friends read at all.
My bubble is split roughly 50/50: some don't read at all, the others are probably top 1% readers. But even those guys practically never read anything written in the last 20 years. The backlog of classics is just to long.
pbmonster
19d ago
We consider building a house soon-ish, since there is a very attractive Erbbaurecht project currently.
That's too funny. Did the most incompetent offspring of the head of the city council read Wikipedia under "rent seeking", and decided to do a 100% speedrun?
- They rent the land to you (the thing that always appreciates in value), but you buy the house (the thing that depreciates in value).
- They rent the heat pump to you, and then sell you the district heat and the electricity for it, while buying your (overbuilt) solar power from you. Then they make you pay connection fees
- You build the house, but they make all the decisions, down to wiring and parking
That has to be a scam, like Blackrock buying up trailer parks to get a captive customer base. I bet the electrical mains are to small for a heat pump without district heat, and I bet the price of the land explodes after you've been paying their interest rates for them for 15 years...
pbmonster
19d ago
But yeah, a lot of young women just treat the workplace as another playground for being cute ("aww here's me being cuuttte") and doing cute, fun things
I'm still convinced the women surviving lay-offs after making those videos were hired exactly to make those videos. She's a product manager, but the product she's managing is the public perception of Meta's work culture and status as an employer. Which doesn't mean she treating this as a playground -it means she's fantastic at her job. 3.4M views in 24 hours is respectable, even if most of those were rage-baited into watching.
pbmonster
19d ago
I dont remember hearing any claims of sexual orientation manifesting pre-puberty.
Anecdotally, I have clear childhood memories of being fascinated by boobs/curves/legs way, way before puberty. Finding a stack of Playboy magazines was a treasure by first grade. The male form never got anywhere close to being that visually appealing.
pbmonster
20d ago
That's just insurance socialism with extra fewer steps, right? The American public would never accept it. "Why should I, with my beautiful fast clotting blood and strong infection resistance, pay more for a procedure that will barely keep me in a bed for one night?"
Agreed on all points, maybe my original answer should have included the remark that both mirrors and sunshades are pretty dumb - but fun to think about.
I'm pretty sure that indiscriminate general shading of the planet would substantially disrupt crop production as well as wild flora.
To be pedantic, the sunshade-at-Lagrange-Point-1 idea would really just dim the sun by 2%. No matter if you use thousands of independent sunshades or one big one, when viewed from Earth it will only occlude a tiny part of the suns disk. Every spot on earth would receive 98% of normal sunlight. This wouldn't "substantially" disrupt crop production, it would just diminish it by around 2% (naively - except in cases where the limiting factor is available water or soil nitrogen/phosphorus or pests/weeds or ...). Making a sunshade that's larger but transmits the red and blue wavelegths relevant for photosynthesis would be smart, but probably even more ludicrously expensive than just having a thin film of aluminum on a polymere membrane which indiscriminately reflects all sun light.
Ultimately, if it matters you could also pretty easily "turn off" a sunshade by flipping it 90° (you probably need this capability anyway, because you have some degree of maneuverability in space using radiation pressure). If you really need a boost to the global growing season a little, you could always just turn it off.
pbmonster
22d ago
Wouldn't actually extending the day with a giant space mirror significantly mess up the climate, plants, and animal behavior?
If you're sending up space mirrors to orbit in order to light your cities, you can just as easily send up space sunshades to the Lagrange point in order to fine-tune global temperature - blocking only 2% of sun light from reaching the earth would cancel global warming. You'd also need less sunshades than space mirrors, since the sunshade always deflects sun light, while the space mirror supposedly only puts light onto the planet for a few hours per day in winter.
But yes, it would mess with plants and animals - though probably less than current light pollution does.
pbmonster
22d ago
seem to be resting on their laurels with Windows
How I wish they would have just rested on their laurels. Windows 7 was fine. Windows 10 was fine. They could have just kept shipping security patches indefinitely, and people would have kept buying their real cash cows. If you absolutely need to have an entire pyramid of managers scrambling for bonuses, they could have shipped incremental updates for Windows 7, unified the UI a bit more and slowly brought in new security features - optionally, as user hardware allows. It never was going to be good anyway, so they might as well have kept it cheap and consistent.
But no. They needed to fuck with it heavily. Managers needed to leave their mark, and so we got Windows 8 and 11...
pbmonster
29d ago
Republicans could have, at any time, used their Senate majority to end the shutdown by over-ruling the parliamentarian and invoking cloture with less than 60 votes.
But that's the nuclear option, right?
Changing/re-interpreting the Senate rules by majority vote, effectively lowering the cloture threshold permanently for ordinary legislation, would change the entire game. And it would certainly come back to bite the Republicans the very next time the Democrats gain power.
pbmonster
1mo ago
It seems more likely that it was not a lack of money that caused the hesitancy to spend more on military equipment, but rather that they did not want to divert money from social services, schools, hospitals, and other government expenditures.
They also - just like the US - really don't want to be seen as escalating. The Germans debated endlessly about giving Ukraine a couple of long range Taurus missiles. But they are afraid of what the Ukrainians are going to do with them, and the Russians told them they would consider a Taurus hitting deep infrastructure as Germany having entered the war.
So, no Taurus. They got Iris-T air defense systems and another $2B in military aid instead.
pbmonster
1mo ago
Cadence is a bit of a preference, some people just like to pedal slower with more force. Jan Ulrich was famous back then for running huge chain rings and paddling at like half the speed of Lance Armstrong. But yeah, if you keep dropping way below 90 because you can't sustain power on climbs, you just gotta downshift, accept the drop in speed and keep at it. Speed will go up with time. And like everybody in cycling loves to repeat endlessly: "It never gets any easier, you just go faster".
pbmonster
1mo ago
I want to be holding around 15mph at least, and to do that I feel like I need to be able to hold 18mph for a few miles, which I really can't seem to do right now. My problem seems to be with cadence, I can't manage to move my legs fast enough for very long to sustain higher speeds.
Is it actually cadence or is sustained power the problem? Because if you just prefer to pedal slower, you could get into a higher gear. If your highest gear is to fast at 18 mph (improbable, but not impossible) this means switching bikes (or switching cassettes/chain ring if you like the bike).
pbmonster
1mo ago
Then upgrade your cheese game! There's practically no limit on nobility variety, tastes and prices. Goes extremely well with potatoes, doesn't increase the complexity of preparation towards anything resembling "cooking", still nutritionally complete. And unless you actually dislike potatoes and/or cheese, it should be far more tasty than a can of Delicious Soylent Green (or it's modern successors).
pbmonster
1mo ago
If we allow simple meals (inspired my the biryani benchmark) as meal-replacements, you could always peasant-maxx and just microwave potatoes.
Potatoes are very close to nutritionally complete when eaten with any kind of cheese or milk. Depending on how refined your taste in cheese is, it will knock restaurant/delivery biryani out of the water in terms of price per calorie. You can easily deal in total calories by adding butter.
pbmonster
1mo ago
Western economies are built on services now, they're definitely productive.
I'm not convinced.
What percentage of the labor force feels their job are bullshit (creating PowerPoint slides nobody looks at, writing code for projects that get canceled, ect.)? What percentage of the labor force does redundant work (picking a 10 year old meme to avoid AI complications: how many startups selling monthly subscriptions to Kanban boards does an economy really need? Or on a larger scales: How on earth are Nissan, Landrover and Mini still selling even a single car?)
The West has an established culture on how to operate businesses, and many of those businesses make money. But this could be a local maximum in productivity under current conditions, not a global maximum. That's why I'm so fascinated by the rise of China. I'm curious to see what kind of maximum they'll find.
Oh wow, you are correct! They also fly the E-3, because apparently Airbus historically didn't have any AWACS in their portfolio? Maybe the western market is so small that it doesn't support two manufacturers (the French have 2 E-2s and 4 E-3s)? That must have been humiliating for them.
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