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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 1st, 2023

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  • You seem to be misunderstanding friend.

    I’m all for building as much wind, hydro, and solar power as possible. It is the cheapest option.

    I’m not arguing against that.

    People here seem to think that money spent on nuclear is money NOT spent on Wind/Solar/Hydro/Storage/etc as if there’s a fixed budget for all energy transition projects. That’s not the situation.

    Insurance and financial institutions are losing big money on climate change disasters, and they are getting data from their actuaries and climate scientist, saying it’s going to get massively worse. There is rapidly growing interest from “big money” private sector investors, In any technology that might solve the climate crisis.

    There’s more money investors wanting invest in wind, solar, or hydroelectric projects, than there are projects to invest it. The limiting factor isn’t money.

    Believe me, no one would be happier than me to be proven wrong that we can build enough wind, solar, and hydroelectric to get off a fossil fuels by 2050.

    But if you extrapolate the current data and the current trend lines, they don’t come anywhere close.

    If we also invest in nuclear, we come closer.



  • From an investor perspective, solar farm projects are a slam dunk once they reach the point of being ready to purchase panels.

    There are a lot of things to line up to build a grid-scale solar farm before you get to that point. You need to acquire (the rights to) the land, get permits to connect to the grid, which usually includes construction of the new transmission line to the grid. You need to line up panels from a manufacturer (who in turn has supply chains to manage), and labor to install it. And 100 other things. It typically takes a few years of planning, but get all that in order and it’s a small percentage of the total expense of the project.

    At the point you need to do the larger capital raise needed to buy the panels and hire the labour it’s a slam dunk. The project can be completed typically within 12-24 months so there’s a quick process to get to generating revenue for investors, and because solar has gotten so cheap it doesn’t take long to see positive ROI. It’s not like electricity demand is going away either. It’s a very safe bet, once all the pieces are lined up, and not difficult to raise funds once you get to the point of needing the big money.

    People on Lemmy/Reddit have this mental model that there’s a fixed budget for investment in the energy transition. If that was the case, then yes it would make sense to go all in on the cheapest technology option.

    But that’s how it works. Energy projects are competing with the global market for investment capital with non-energy related investments and there’s no shortage of wealth wanting to throw money at a solar project because they’re low risk/high ROI.

    Nuclear projects are a different story, long timelines from construction to revenue generation and high upfront capital costs make them unfavourable investments, they generally need government support to derisk the investment before investors jump on board. Which the governments are reluctant to do because they lack a mandate to do so from the populace. In part because of this mindset that nuclear investment impedes solar or wind investments.


  • Solar has been growing exponentially for the past decade or so, wind has not. Wind has run into supply chain limitations on rare earth metals such as neodymium and isn’t growing exponentially anymore.

    It’s doubtful that solar will continue growing exponentially for the next 20 years but even if it does, that only gets us to the point of enough capacity to displace the ~17.9 PWh of electricity generated by fossil fuels in 2023.

    To get off of fossil fuels we need to change everything else that’s burning fossil fuels too. That means every vehicle replaced with an EV, every gas furnace replaced with a heat pump. As we do that it’s going to 2-3x electricity demand.

    The world burned 140 PWh worth of fossil fuels in 2023, and we only generated 1.6 PWh from solar power. That 1.6 is up from 1.3 PWh in 2022. A lot of that 140 PWh was wasted heat energy so we don’t need to get that high, but we still need to generate something in the area of 60-90 PWh of electricity annually to eliminate fossil fuels.

    ~4/5th of our energy still comes from fossil fuel, we have a long f’ing way to go. Even with the current exponential growth of solar we don’t get off of fossil fuels within 20 years, and that’s assuming global energy demand doesn’t increase.

    Don’t take my word for it. Extrapolate the data yourself. Your rose coloured glasses aren’t helping.



  • I’m no expert, but I think you’re mixing up jail and prison. Prison would require a judge, jury and trial. But a cop can unilaterally throw someone in jail temporarily until their first court appearance.

    From the article:

    They [the sherif and a deputy] told Patterson to turn around and put her hands behind her back. As three of her kids watched, Patterson was handcuffed. The sheriff took her purse and phone, put her in the cruiser, and hauled her off to jail.


  • This is what 24/7 news does to the brain. It completely fucks up people’s sense of how risky things are.

    As humans we tend to assume that the probability of something happening is proportional to the number of times we can remember hearing of it happening.

    Many people think children walking or playing alone are at high risk of getting abducted because they hear about it “all the time” on the news. Yet they don’t think twice about sticking their kids in the car and driving somewhere.

    Statistically though you’re orders of magnitude more likely to kill your child in a car accident, than have them abducted by a random stranger while allowing them to play or walk somewhere unattended. Car accidents are common so they rarely make the news, Child Abductions are extremely rare And frequently make the news. The mom in the story could have literally driven the child to the town and put the child at a greater risk in doing so then letting the child walk there alone.

    Both the cop in the story, and the Karen that called him, Have a completely distorted sense of how much risk this child was in, And it’s all because the news media makes us think the extremely rare is relatively common.

    In recent years, the media has told stories in fear mongering ways in order to drive more ratings, Which is only the amplifying this effect.


  • Most of them are hurting in one way or another. This particular round it’s mostly the financial, mental and emotional aftershocks of the pandemic amplified by greedy people coming up with new and inventive ways to take money from the poor and give it to the rich.

    But you need to first hear and understand their pain to have any hope of getting through to them.

    They’ve been told over and over through misinformation that immigrants, people with disabilities, loose/secular/independent women, people of different religious beliefs, skin colour, whatever else are the reason for their suffering, and that they should be afraid of them. That initial pain is channeled from fear to anger to hate to dehumanization to… “final solutions”.

    They want Trump in because they’ve been convinced that he’s powerful and “Trump will fix it.” ‘It’ being whatever the pain is.

    The reality is of course a much different story of basically just greedy people distracting them while they steal their lunch money, and narcissists that will do anything to gain ever more power.

    But if you want to unprogram someone from that you need to hear their pain. What was that thing that was used by the greedy and narcissistic to channel into hate.

    It’s mostly hurt/hurting people who are voting for Trump. To turn them around you need to hear their pain.




  • My mental image of the bicycle changed as each detail was added, but sometimes the detail changed the image (the handlebars were straight until you said they were dropped) and sometimes the detail didn’t exist; the dropped handlebars were wrapped in handlebar tape, but that tape didn’t have a colour (not sure how to explain that better) until you mentioned it was black. Most of the details “added” something to the scene rather than “changing” an assumed detail.

    The “front forks on the ground” question was particularly interesting to me.

    The bicycle started with two wheels, and front wheel just sorta disappeared from my image when you mentioned it was stolen, but the front fork remained floating in the air as if there was a wheel still supporting it. But asking the question about the forks on the ground made gravity exist, and then there had to be a reason it was floating, which became it was being held up by the U-Lock.

    I seem to imagine scenes with few superfluous details that mostly includes only what is mentioned or implied by the narrative. But it’s super interesting to me what details we’re in fact implied.

    The ball on the table was similar. The table was at waist height to the person, and the ball had a specific size of roughly the size of a racket ball because it had to be something that could be easily pushed. But the person pushing it was just a silhouette of a person, it had no gender, the only thing I pictured clearly was the hand that pushed the ball. It was pushed in an intentional way that made the ball roll across the table away from the “person” (as opposed to bouncing, or pushed sideways)

    The table was just an elevated plane it had no texture, or even legs supporting it, (probably because there was no ground for those legs to be on,) it didn’t go on forever, you could see the end of the table, but it also didn’t have a size.



  • Yes. Nuclear waste is tiny. That’s the point.

    Nuclear isn’t the only hazardous waste we dispose of burying it.

    We’re disposing of tonnes of hazardous waste daily. Only a tiny percentage of that is nuclear waste.

    Yet for some reason everyone loses their mind about the comparatively tiny amount of hazardous waste from nuclear and no one cares about the significantly larger about of hazardous waste from the eventual disposal of solar panels and 100s of other sources of hazardous waste.