leftist themed nujob conspiracy mill

The Republican party is ripe for conspiracy theory targets.

Epstein had close ties with Trump and his attorney general Bill Barr (whose father hired Epstein to teach at a prestigious private high school without a college degree, where he was known for ogling the high school girls and showing up to parties where underage drinking was happening). The waitresses and hostesses at Trump’s Mar a Lago were also regularly recruited to work at Epstein’s island. Alex Acosta, the federal prosecutor who agreed to a secret plea deal where Epstein served a slap on the wrist in a local jail instead of real prison was later elevated to Trump’s cabinet, as Labor Secretary.

Now, Trump has named another child sex trafficker as his nominee for Attorney General.

There are suspicious ties between the Saudi royal family and key members in Trump’s orbit, including his son in law Jared Kushner. Elon Musk has been doing sketchy shit with the Saudis and the Russians, as well. Basically everyone in Trump’s circle, including his nominee to be the director of national intelligence, has shady ties with foreign adversaries.

There’s lots of other little things about financial profiteering by the Trump folks: an SBA COVID bailout that went to huge businesses, a move to privatize or sabotage the public postal service and the weather service to help the private competition, arbitrary or politically motivated regulations to help certain businesses while hurting others, etc.

I mean, it really wouldn’t be hard.

Yeah, the IRA and Infrastructure Bill steer about $67 billion to railways, $80 billion to transit systems. And even though a lot of the other spending goes towards the status quo of car-based passenger transportation, electrifying that will go a long way towards reducing carbon emissions.

And there are some more ambitious ideas baked in, too: redesigning cities to require less car infrastructure and overall energy use, etc.

I thought it was a big deal when passed and honestly can’t understand why people who care about climate don’t acknowledge just how big of a deal it was (and how devastating that so much of the money authorized will now be in control of a Trump administration).

The Inflation Reduction Act included $65 million in research grants for low emission aviation and $245 million in development of biofuel based Sustainable Aviation Fuel (aka SAF). And the $3 billion in loan guarantees for manufacturing advanced vehicle technologies included certain aircraft.

There were also $5 billion in loan guarantees for shutting down our heaviest polluting power plants or retooling them to greener generation methods.

There was $3 billion in buying zero emissions vehicles and charging infrastructure for the postal service.

The Inflation Reduction Act, which inherited a lot of the stuff from the Green New Deal, was a lot of things, and I don’t think I’ve ever heard it called deeply unserious before today.

I haven’t combed through the data in a minute, but I want to also say that they’re also leading in fossil fuel deployment too.

Yup, China is also leading the planet on new coal plant construction. As of 2 months ago, it seemed to be on track to add 80GW of coal generation capacity in 2024 alone, and accounts for more than 90% of new coal construction.

By way of comparison, the US peaked in total coal plant capacity in 2011 at 318GW, and has since closed about 134GW of capacity, with more to come.

In context, what we’re seeing is massive, massive expansion of electricity generation and transmission capacity, both clean and dirty, in China. We can expect China to increase its total carbon emissions each year to be closer to the West, while the United States reduces its own from a much higher starting point. Maybe the two countries will cross in per capita emissions around 2030 if current trends continue, but there’s no guarantee that current trends will continue: will the United States continue to shift from coal to gas? Where does grid scale storage, electrification of passenger vehicles, demand shifting, or dispatchable carbon free power go from here, in a future Trump administration? What’s going to happen with the Chinese economy over the next 5 years? What technology will be invented to change things?

There’s been some reporting that Musk’s Super PAC has been paying its workers so well that it’s poached a bunch of the volunteers from the official campaign, and is so poorly run/audited that a lot of the workers are entering false data into the canvassing reports to qualify for bonuses. If that turns out to be true, then it will have been the case that Musk is burning his own money while hurting the Trump campaign.

I’m not ready to call the race, but stories like this at least reassure me that for Republicans, they’re not sending their best.

I made my own “cell phone service” but it only works within 10m of my home.

Upfront costs are expensive. But operational and fuel costs are very low, per MWh.

So take the upfront costs at the beginning and the decommissioning costs at the end, and amortize them over the expected lifespan of the plant, and add that to the per MWh cost. When you do that, the nuclear plants built this century are nowhere near competitive. Vogtle cost $35 billion to add 2 gigawatts of capacity, and obviously any plant isn’t going to run at full capacity all the time. As a result, Georgia’s ratepayers have been eating the cost with a series of price hikes ($700+ million per year in rate increases) as the new Vogtle reactors went online. Plus the plant owners had to absorb some of the costs, as did Westinghouse in bankruptcy. And that’s all with $12 billion in federal taxpayer guarantees.

NuScale just canceled their SMR project in Idaho because their customers in Utah refused to fund the cost overruns there.

Maybe Kairos will do better. But the track record of nuclear hasn’t been great.

And all the while, wind and solar are much, much cheaper, so there’s less buffer for nuclear to find that sweet spot that actually works economically.

That was true in the 70’s, too. You always needed a way to show that people would pay the long term prices necessary to cover the cost of construction.

The big changes since the 70’s has been that competing sources of power are much cheaper and that the construction costs of large projects (not just nuclear reactors, but even highways and bridges and tall buildings) have skyrocketed.

There’s less room to make money because nuclear is expensive, and cheaper stuff has come along.

One of the great sins of nuclear energy programs implemented during the 50s, 60s, and 70s was that it was too cost effective.

I don’t see how any of this has any bearing on financial feasibility of power plants.

For what it’s worth, before the late 90’s there was no such thing as market pricing for electricity, as prices were set by tariff, approved by the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission. FERC opened the door to market pricing with its Order 888 (hugely controversial, heavily litigated). And there were growing pains there: California experienced rolling blackouts, Enron was able to hide immense accounting fraud, etc. By the end of the 2000’s decade, pretty much every major generator and distributor in the market managed to offload the risk of price volatility on willing speculators, by negotiating long term power purchase agreements that actually stabilize long term prices regardless of short term fluctuations on the spot markets.

So now nuclear needs to survive in an environment that actually isn’t functionally all that different from the 1960’s: they need to project costs to see if they can turn a profit on the electricity market, even while paying interest on loans for their immense up front costs, through guaranteed pricing. It’s just that they have to persuade buyers to pay those guaranteed prices, rather than persuading FERC to approve the tariff.

As a matter of business model, it’s the same result, just through a different path. A nuclear plant can’t get financing without a path to profit, and that path to profit needs to come from long term commitments.

It can take over a decade to break even on operation, assuming you’re operating at market rates.

Shit, it can take over a decade to start operations, and several decades after that to break even. Vogtle reactors 3 and 4 in Georgia took something like 20 years between planning and actual operational status.

Now maybe small modular reactors will be faster and cheaper to build. But in this particular case, this is cutting edge technology that will probably have some hurdles to clear, both anticipated and unanticipated. Molten fluoride salt cooling and pebble bed design are exciting because of the novelty, but that swings both ways.

I still think it’s too expensive, and this contract doesn’t change my position. Google is committing to buying power from reactors, at certain prices, as those reactors are built.

Great, having a customer lined up makes it a lot easier to secure financing for a project. This is basically where NuScale failed last year in Idaho, being unable to line up customers who could agree to pay a sufficiently high price to be worth the development risk (even with government subsidies from the Department of Energy).

But now Google has committed and said “if you get it working, we’ll buy power from you.” That isn’t itself a strong endorsement that the project itself will be successful, or come in under budget. The risk/uncertainty is still there.

20 years ago it was the people who worshipped Jack Welch, not realizing (or not caring) that he was running GE into the ground.

You could put Wendy’s, Walmart, Northrup Grumman, Tyson, Bank of America, whatever, into this, and just change the last line a little bit, and I still would not be able to determine if its satire or not.

I read this as an oblique reference to the “you’re not you when you’re hungry” campaign. It’s a bit of a reach, but it works.

Corporate Advertisement in general is almost completely stylistically played out

It’s like any other thing with fashion or styles. Trends come and go, different eras have distinct markers, later eras may intentionally evoke references or tributes to earlier eras, or other contemporary trends in other fields.

The sign of a successful ad campaign is when the campaign itself gets satirized to continue to build on brand awareness.

Enshittification isn’t always driven by a conscious person or organization with an agenda, much less one with an agenda of short term financial gain. Sometimes the aggregation of a bunch of individual decisions causes something to get shittier. Or better. Or just different. 4chan is not at all like it was 20 years ago, but it wasn’t because of corporate influence. The culture just changes.

So if the question is whether the fediverse might someday suck, I think the answer is probably yes. It remains to be seen how it will suck, who will have caused it to be that way, and whether there will be other nice things about it.

one that eats sulfur and excretes iron, and one that eats iron and excretes sulfur

Thermodynamically, how could these two cycles sustain metabolism? Were there other processes/species in the mix to introduce chemical compounds that had more energy contained within?

The ifunny watermark really tips this over the edge, comedically.

Enshittification of services is real, but the linked greentext complains about something cultural: that internet humor isn’t as funny as it was in 2011.

Which I’d say is a matter of taste, and probably wrong. There are still new greentexts being written that make me laugh. Plenty of tweets/toots/other microblog posts still make me laugh out loud. There are video memes that are pretty funny, and that format wasn’t really feasible until Vine in 2012, and more recently has been made more accessible through simpler editing apps for splicing videos.

For mainstream culture, there’s still great standup comedy out there, good TV comedies, podcasts, etc.

Yes, I love the old stuff. But I like the new stuff, too.

Hobosexual

But some who has earned a penny in interest has spent time as both worker and owner.

I’m not talking about people who only make a small amount of interest or investment return over the course of their lifetimes. I’m talking about people who are already unambiguously middle class (between 25th and 75th percentile incomes), who end up relying on investment income to provide most of their retirement expenses.

I’m talking about people with half million dollar 401(k)s that return hundreds of thousands over the course of a retirement. Some of it is principal but most of it is gains/return/interest.

Basically if you’re able to retire in America, you’re an “owner” for those decades. Yes, there are people in America who can’t afford to retire, but most people in the middle class can.

Also, its not the conventional way. You 100% made that up and what you’re describing is petite bougouise.

Defining the middle class as middle incomes is pretty conventional. I think you’ve misunderstood my description of the middle class (people who fit the definition generally have income from both work and from investment) as a definition.

So let me be perfectly clear:

1. The American middle class, defined as those with middle incomes, earns significant amounts of money from both wages/salaries for their work and on return on their investments, especially in their primary home (with a 60+% homeownership rate) and retirement accounts (401(k)s, IRAs, 403(b)s, even multi employer or government pension funds that are paid for through investment in publicly traded securities).
2. The worker versus owner definition you proposed near the top of this thread is insufficient to describe class, because of the large, large number of people who rely on both and could not support their existing lifestyles without both.

And hey, I was gonna let it go but it’s clear your autocorrect has now adopted it as a new word it will happily let you spell wrong repeatedly: it’s spelled petit bourgeois, or petit bourgeoisie for plural.

There’s also really tight coordination between sight and proprioception, as our visual processing seamlessly stitches together visual information into a three dimensional model of reality, even if we’re moving while taking in that visual information, through stereoscopic signals from two eyes.