• 0 Posts
  • 18 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
cake
Cake day: July 5th, 2024

help-circle

  • Bro it isn’t worth it. I respect what you are trying to do, but Lemmy is an echo chamber on these things. You are completely right in what you are saying, but you’re wasting your time commenting here.

    Clearly, if Kamala had won she would have personally resurrected every dead Palestinian and single-handedly repaired all the infrastructure. Let’s conveniently ignore that she was Vice President in an administration that circumvented Congress multiple times to deliver arms with less oversight, that (almost) every US elected official has vocally supported Israel’s actions for 70+ years, and that Kamala herself committed to nothing of substance on the topic.





  • It is impossible to argue against conspiratorial thinking.

    Let’s say Kamala had narrowly won the election, would 2028 be the right time to hold the Democrats accountable for real, useful, policy changes? Or would there be another Republican Boogeyman (maybe Ted Cruz again? Or Desantis?) that would absolutely need to be defeated before it would be proper - in your opinion - to ask these public servants to actually serve me?

    According to many commenters here, and I assume many of the downvoters whenever a comment questions the utility of unconditional loyalty to the blue party, the US has been hovering just above an irreversible descent into a fascist dictatorship.

    So let me ask you, which of the leaders you voted for reversed that decline? Because the ‘vote blue no matter who’ dogma has given over a decade of historically unpopular candidates who consistently lose to - again according to you - naked fascists.


  • The only way a political party changes is when they stop winning.

    If Democrats think they will win by being Republicans who hate the gays a little bit less, then that is what they’ll do. They were just shown that that isn’t a winning strategy, so we’ll see if the party changes tack or doubles down.

    “You monster, it is your fault you gave us Trump”

    I make my voting preferences known in every primary, state, and federal election. I actively volunteer for candidates I like. The party knows what will earn my vote, if they wanted it. If they make the strategic bet that getting my vote will cost them more from somewhere else, then that is on them.

    “That is so entitled, how could you”

    Have you ever considered that the reason both parties seem so out of touch with mainstream thought is because they have 10s of millions of people who will vote regardless of policy, thereby preventing the parties from understanding what is actually effective in getting them votes?

    Elections are an information gathering mechanism.



  • You clearly didn’t comprehend what I wrote. Educate yourself on this topic - not from forum arguments, but from TEA and policy papers.

    For one, I said ‘base load’ generation isn’t needed. Your thinking that is is means your thinking on the matter is 10 years out of date. If you insist base load is needed, then gas plants and carbon capture systems are far cheaper and faster to build.

    You don’t care, though, as you aren’t seriously involved in the policy and just want to live in a world where you are right 🤷.


  • Base load is an outdated concept. It is cheaper, by an order of magnitude, to install surplus generation capacity using renewables and build storage to cover periods of reduced production.

    Nuclear reactors actually make terrible ‘base load’ generation anyway, as large swings in output induce thermal cycling stress in their metal components AND the economics of these multi-billion dollar investments depend on running near max output at all times - otherwise the payback time from selling power will extend beyond the useful life of the plant.

    The policy wonks shilling for nuclear are not being honest. The economics for these plants are terrible, they are especially terrible if The Plan ™ is to use nuclear as a transition fuel to be replaced by renewables - as then they won’t even reach break even. To say nothing of the fact that a solar installation in the US takes 6 months, while there have been two reactors under construction in Georgia for a decade…

    50 years ago, nuclear was a great option. Today, it is too expensive, too slow to build, and simply unnecessary with existing storage technologies.

    If y’all were really worried about base load power, you’d be shilling for natural gas peaker plants + carbon capture which has much better economics.


  • It depends on the type of fusion.

    The easiest fusion reaction is deuterium/tritium - two isotopes of hydrogen. The vast majority of the energy of that reaction is released as neutrons, which are very difficult to contain and will irradiate the reactor’s containment vessel. The walls of the reactor will degrade, and will eventually need to be replaced and the originals treated as radioactive waste.

    Lithium/deuterium fusion releases most of its energy in the form of alpha particles - making it much more practical to harness the energy for electrical generation - and releases something like 80% fewer high energy neutrons – much less radioactive waste. As a trade-off, the conditions required to sustain the reaction are even more extreme and difficult to maintain.

    There are many many possible fusion reactions and multiple containment methods - some produce significant radioactive waste and some do not. In terms of energy output, the energy released per reaction event is much higher than in fission, but it is much harder to concentrate reaction events, so overall energy output is much lower until some significant advancement is made on the engineering challenges that have plagued fusion for 70+ years.




  • I see the point you are trying to make, but inflation doesn’t quite when that way.

    Comparing the prices of the same commodities at two different points in time is literally how inflation is calculated, the increase from $1.50 to $4 is real.

    Now, what the inflation-adjusted dollars are telling you is that if eggs had only increased in price commensurate with general inflation, they would have gone from $1.50 to $2. The extra $2 increase is above what a consumer would expect given the general increase in the prices of everything else. If someone (magically) had a salary that increases with inflation, they would find eggs today to be a larger fraction of their spending if they kept the same level of consumption.

    Eggs are more expensive both in absolute and relative to other products. The reasons for this are complex, but due in no small part to people continuing to buy large quantities of eggs even when they were heinously expensive in the early days of the pandemic. The market absorbed that information and came to the conclusion that eggs were previously undervalued.



  • There is always a tension between security, privacy, and convenience. With how the Internet works, there isn’t really a way - with current technology - of reliably catching content like that without violating everyone’s privacy.

    Of course, there is also a lack of trust here (and there should be given the leaks about mass surveillance) that the ‘stop child porn powers’ would only be used for that and not simply used for whatever the powers that be wish to do with them.


  • The world bank isn’t involved so much in printing money - that’s central banks like the US Federal Reserve or European Central Bank.

    They do love to force developing nations to adopt US-style capitalism by withholding loans for needed development projects. They also focus far too much on increasing GDP at all costs and do not give really any weight to increasing living standards or reducing inequality. Basically, think loans to institute Reaganomics and you won’t be too far off.

    The loans pay for large capital projects (power plants, large-scale irrigation, etc) that are built by the state and then mandated to he handed over to private entities that then charge rents and extract wealth. Not every loan and program is bad, but there’s plenty to give pause when they are involved in a project.