abraxas

joined 2 years ago
[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 year ago (1 children)

How many leftists do you have to execute to earn your colors?

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 year ago (6 children)

What word would you prefer to someone who tells you to your face that they intend to "put you up against the wall" and then asks if you "know what that means, you fucking lib"?

I mean, I'm a demsoc, and of the last 20 death threats I have received in my life, 15 came from people who identify as Communist-Leninist. PLEASE give me a better word for them.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Well, by their teenage years, why not all the reasons adults need smartphones fully accessible? Looking up information from authoritative sources? Emergency contact? Coordinating schedules for office hours?

Schools often simultaneously demand more from children than workplaces do adults, and give them less opportunity to excel.

I'm not saying work-inappropriate phone use should be accepted, but taking them away entirely is downright irresponsible. Just like schools who still demand students write on a notebook instead of using a laptop. Raise your hand if you had RSI-related issues for a decade or more after high school? We old people tend to forget how bad school used to be (and can be) for physical and mental health AND for learning.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I'm not sure I agree with how you'd be able to execute on that level or organized construction safely, but I think we're also reaching the "impossible-to-be-sure hypothetical" territory, so I'll concede the point for now.

I think my problems of cost and time still stand. It looks like adding rooftop solar with batteries to every building is still cheaper (on startup, and likely per MW) than nuclear plants. Regions that cannot support solar, onland wind, geo, or hydro can justify nuclear (at least unless shipping batteries or hydrogen conversion becomes cheap enough to compete), but I don't think they amount to nearly 15% of the power needs in the world since they represent fairly distinctive regions with low energy demand.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 year ago (3 children)

Just did a bunch of my own math before realizing those numbers were already out there. We would need to add 3960 nuclear plants to match current energy demand for the world (440 power 10% of the world).

That would require at least 5 years of construction per plant. It takes about 7000 workers to produce a nuclear plant. To produce them concurrently would require about 27.7 million construction workers dedicated to this project for at least 5 years. So on one hand, perhaps you're right, since there are 100M construction workers in the world. I can't, however, find numbers about how much heavy equipment exists to facilitate a product requiring 1/4 the world's construction workers concurrently. You might be right that if all other construction were ground to a halt, we might be able to manage a 5-year plan of nuclear at the cost of about $20T (I had done the math before realizing this reply were about workers, not cost stupidity). I concede it seems "10x increase world construction capacity" was wrong, and the real number is somewhere around 1.5-2x, so long as we stay conservative with nuclear figures and ignore extra costs of building or transporting nuclear energy to countries incapable of building their own plants.

Interestingly, at those construction numbers, you could provide small-project rooftop solar to the world. I can't find construction numbers for power farm solar, except that it's dramatically more efficient than rooftop solar. Unlike nuclear, it appears we could easily squeeze full-world solar with our current world construction capacity.

I won't bore you with the cost math, but since I calculated them I'm still going to summarize them. Going full nuclear would cost us about a $20T down payment. Going full solar (with storage) down payment is about $4T (only about $1T without storage costs factored). And while nuclear would be cheaper than solar per year after that $20T down, solar power and storage would STILL be cheaper in a 100 year outlook, but would also benefit from rolling efficiency increases as we add new solar plants/capacitors and tear down older ones..

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago (5 children)

As others pointed out, to build that many nuclear power plants that quickly would require 10x-ing the world's construction capacity.

My counterpoint is that if we had "just got on with it" for solar, wind, and battery, we would have the capacity by now and the cost per kwh of that capacity would be approximately half as much as the same in nuclear. And we would have amortized the costs.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago

Except that nuclear isn't the only, or even the cheapest, alternative to fossil fuels.

[–] [email protected] -1 points 1 year ago

That’s why there are lots of regulations for things impacting life safety

Regulations that a lot of pro-nuclear people try to get relaxed because they "artificially inflate the price to more than solar so that we'll use solar". I'm not saying all pro-nuclear folks are tin-foilers, but the only argument that puts nuclear cheaper than solar+battery anymore is an argument that uses deregulated facilities.

If solar+wind+battery is cheaper per MWH, faster to build, with less front-loaded costs, then it's a no-brainer. It only stops being a no-brainer when you stop regulating the nuclear plant. Therein lies the paradox of the argument.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

I know this is the wrong server to say it, but there were some things I liked about Hillary. I am still convinced that her gender played far more of a role in people's hatred of her than they will ever be able to accept.

Yes, she's still a neo-liberal, but she's further left than most of the Democrats, and we consistently see that the supermajority of non-Republican voters are simply not as progressive as most of us are. Hillary had a well-conceived labor plan and respected unions. She liked the idea of single-payer, if not enough to spend too much political capital on it. She was left of Obama and of Biden, if still to the right of her "progressive" so-called roots.

Here's my non-opinionated counterpoint. Trump bested Hillary on Labor when his plan was "kick out immigrants and deregulate coal so you get your dangerous job back", and she had a 100 page labor plan that involved things like subsidized retraining of coal workers. The Democrats have learned that you will not win Labor by favoring them. A bad lesson.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 year ago (1 children)

That's what the campaign to quash the bill did. That, and tried to convince people that they might have a single multi-million-dollar transaction in their life (like selling a large successful business) and have to pay an extra 4% on it.

Always a push to get the "temporarily embarassed millionaire" to support the reach. "Yeah, yanno. My little lawmowing operation that makes me $20,000 coild sell for over a million and then I'm fucked"

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

That's a symptom of too much caffeine...

I know, I have it.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (3 children)
 

I've noticed this one seems to be chilling (lobby emptyish), so I would love to pipe it up to people who might not know about it.

I've been obsessed with Spy Party recently. It's this casual-not-casual 1v1 strategy game where one person plays a spy trying to complete innocuous missions at a crowdy cocktail party while the other player is a sniper trying to catch them in the act and shoot them. And the whole game runs just 3-4 minutes. The spy wins if they finish their missions or the sniper kills an innocent, and the sniper wins if the spy fails or they catch them redhanded and fire their ONE bullet.

Dev has basically stopped, but the game is pretty much complete. What a blast. You probably want to make sure you have a friend to play with in case the lobby is sleepy (there's usually one or two people inviting me to a game immediately when I join, but mostly because they're chilling alone waiting for a join). A buddy of mine and I keep going back to it over a bunch of other games because it's so damn addictive.

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