The costs used for wind/solar energy never included the cost of the required buffer storage, and even the rare few people who include that never factor in frequency stability which to this day is maintained by the giant steam turbines everyone wants to get rid of. It will not be trivial to solve the frequency stability problem; it will likely require massive investment in pumped water storage, flywheel storage, or nuclear energy, and these costs once finally included in the real cost of wind/solar will hurt its value prospect considerably.

As for nuclear waste: the overwhelming majority of nuclear waste generated over the lifetime of a reactor is stored onsite. Only the smallest amount of material is what will actually remain dangerous for a long time, and many countries have already solved this problem. It’s a seriously overstated problem repeated by renewable-purists who usually haven’t even considered how much frequency stability and grid-level storage have and will add to the cost of renewables, meaning they have not given a full accounting of the situation.

The curse of Private-Public Partnerships (P3s) means middle-men sapping all the value out of long-term government projects. We simply cannot trust these organizations with our energy infrastructure.

Oh man Transmetropolitan, Judge Dredd, and some other deeply satirical stories like Harrison Bergeron have ended up being closer to reality than even the best attempts at dystopia: Brave New World, Fahrenheit 451 (though its critique of what is essentially social media is on point), Minority Report (let’s see how AI in law enforcement goes…), Handmaid’s Tale…

I save a special spot for 1984 because our technology is spying on us, our governments and billionaires are using the media to manufacture consent, and the lies and danger around us make us not trust each other. 1984 did get pretty close, but 1984 was made with the assumption that our elites are competent and willing to work together and that does not seem to be the case actually. That’s our one saving grace and we need to act on it as soon as possible.

Book or movie? Because if you mean the book we’re going to have words.

Interesting, I remember years of libs ruthlessly mocking right-wing users (and the lefties who agreed) for thinking Twitter and other social media was dangerous. Now all of a sudden we all agree social media is dangerous because the guy who owns one of the services is openly a shill rather than quietly like Dorsey was?

I’m a lefty with a working memory who knows authoritarians are not to be trusted no matter what side they claim to be on. It seems like the most obvious position a person can hold but people are struggling with even this…

I mean at that point just call it Bleed lol

Paper without some sort of code to hide what’s happening isn’t much better, considering if something ever happens you could get searched.

Interesting take, considering the extreme power women have. Women make up the majority of household spending, women in younger generations are making more money than men, and women are now less vulnerable to job loss.

If you’re wondering where the sudden rightward drift is coming from, it’s younger men feeling hopeless and powerless to change it, for the above reasons and much more. The idea that the split is exclusively cishet male/political is wild and borderline irresponsible. While true in some states and circles, it’s wealthy white women/political in others, and cishet men don’t get included at all.

Demanding moderation means demanding an authority makes decisions. Who is that authority? American (neo)liberals? French nationalists? Saudi government? Maybe the owners are beholden to outside authorities like banks and advertisers?

Twitch, X, and Reddit becoming shitholes is an inevitable feature of capitalism and cancel culture. This thought process you have will always result in the oppression of minorities and minority opinions, and a push to the lowest common denominator; in other words, the least offensive, milquetoast, worthless experience people will suffer through but still come back to.

I get that sometimes people don’t know exactly how something works and they get confused, like ethernet splitters not allowing you to split the output of one cable to two PCs. Fair enough, people used to cable TV and phone lines might not expect that behaviour.

What could possibly make you think monitors can be daisy chained? Nothing else in that space works that way either… Though now you’ve got me wondering about USB-C monitors and what kind of unholy hell of client confusion we might be bringing to our doorstep with those.

When I went to install a suite of emulators on the Steam Deck, it was one installer and some light configuration. Installing ROMs involved using an app that automatically digs up the box art and adds console collections to the Steam interface.

All of this largely just worked.

As a millenial that was wild. I’ve never trusted things to just work before but a bunch of open-source devs made it happen. That’s what made me realize we live in different times (and why newer generations have no idea how to actually use computers).

They don’t understand a lot, but when you say things like “browser to the D: drive and attach the document called ‘not porn.jpg’ to an email, and send it to me”, you will likely get that email.

You can’t say the same about other generations because they don’t interact with the technology in the same way, if at all.

Among other things I am responsible for setting up our users with software, and the young folk are not really any more capable than average boomers with PCs. They don’t understand the file system, basic cables, or even the most basic Windows settings.

There’s a great book called “The People’s Republic of Walmart” that suggests a lot of the underlying computational problems of economics have been resolved within these mega-corps, using the same theories and policies once practiced by Soviet-Era states.

Sounds interesting. Chicago school being wrong yet again would hardly be surprising but it still sounds like an interesting read.

Non-economist: the economy must be shit because I can barely afford bread.
Economist: UR WRONG, GDP GO UP

That’s more or less the state of discourse right now and it’s embarrassing.

Baudrillard strikes again.

Like many things, people hate it because of its associations with other things. They will happily throw it out even if it has good uses. Here have some spicy examples:

Some people experience gender dysphoria and may benefit from medical intervention? Nah it got abused by ideological idiots so it must always be bad. Karl Marx says workers must arm themselves? Nah guns are bad, I know this because rightoids like them.

mansplaining is a made-up idea lol

Us men are taught that our opinion is always valuable.

As a man I’ve been told no one wants my opinion since the 2000s so I’m not sure where you’re getting this from.

Here in Canada I’ve seen much the same behaviour for both Liberal and Conservative voters. “I vote Liberal because I’ve always voted Liberal” is a surprisingly common statement especially among the older generations, and to a small extent even the Green party has a few loyalists in BC.

Always voting the same way no matter what happens is just giving your vote away for free.