booly

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.

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.

Unions are legal in all occupations.

One caveat: the legal protections of the right to unionize apply to non-supervisors. If you have people who report to you, your power to unionize is pretty limited.

There are also some specialized jobs that aren't allowed to unionize by either federal or state law: actual soldiers in the Army, certain political jobs, etc.

But for the most part, if you are employed, you're probably allowed to unionize (and protected against retaliation even in an unsuccessful union drive).

The kinetic energy in that stardust, and the gravitational potential energy of stardust pulling itself into tighter balls, doesn't necessarily come from fusion. There's all sorts of cosmological forces and energy out there, and I don't think they all trace back to nucleii smushing together.

So is biomass. And wind. And fossil fuels. And hydro.

In fact, I think only geothermal and fission aren't fusion-based.

This is a counter to the Democratic party supporters you see everywhere who always get irrationally upset at third party voters, not about Republicans.

Plenty of us Democrats are very much in support of a ranked choice voting schemes, or similar structural rules like non-partisan blanket primaries (aka jungle primaries). The most solidly Democratic state, California, has implemented top-2 primaries that give independents and third parties a solid shot for anyone who can get close to a plurality of votes as the top choice.

Alaska's top four primary, with RCV deciding between those four on election day, is probably the best system we can realistically achieve in a relatively short amount of time.

Plenty of states have ballot initiatives that bypass elected officials, so people should be putting energy into those campaigns.

But by the time it comes down to a plurality-take-all election between a Republican who won the primary, a Democrat who won the primary, and various third party or independents who have no chance of winning, the responsible thing to make your views represented is to vote for the person who represents the best option among people who can win.

Partisan affiliation is open. If a person really wants to run on their own platform, they can go and try to win a primary for a major party, and change it from within.

TL;DR: I'll fight for structural changes to make it easier for third parties and independents to win. But under the current rules, voting for a spoiler is throwing the election and owning the results.