booly

joined 2 years ago
[–] booly@sh.itjust.works 6 points 2 days ago

I think it's more accurate to say "You will die for Epstein so that the oil class stays wealthy."

[–] booly@sh.itjust.works 2 points 2 days ago

There have been examples of postponements of elections for emergencies (most notably, the mayoral primaries in New York scheduled on September 11, 2001 had to be postponed for 14 days later), I'm not aware of any instance of an actual changing of swear-in dates being postponed.

Fuckery can still happen, but I'm more worried about threats and governmental terrorism that suppresses votes on the election day that moves forward as scheduled rather than actually moving the election schedule itself.

[–] booly@sh.itjust.works 2 points 2 days ago

Still interesting to see how it is implemented in neighborhoods and buildings that are over 150 years old. I think the Smithsonian museums in our capital are actually the most interesting examples, because many are old buildings whose historical character were preserved, but where wheelchair ramps, railings, and elevators were tastefully and functionally installed many decades or more than a century after the building was originally constructed.

And perhaps the best thing about the ADA is the sidewalk requirements. It doesn't much matter why a sidewalk developed a raised crack when the ADA requires that it be fixed.

I'm not even disabled, but I've pushed baby strollers in different cities (including outside the US) enough to realize how nice it is to be in a city where all the sidewalks and public buildings are ADA compliant.

[–] booly@sh.itjust.works 2 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

Are you talking about battery storage itself being about $126/MWhr? Yeah, that incorporated into the solar+battery LCOE, because solar itself is $31, battery is $126, and the weighted average of how much energy is expected to come directly out of the solar panels onto the grid (at $31) and how much is expected to be stored for later ($31 plus $126) averages out to $53, presumably because most demand matches the daytime solar curve and doesn't need to be stored for later.

[–] booly@sh.itjust.works 1 points 1 week ago (2 children)

Which graph? I linked to a PDF with a ton of graphs.

[–] booly@sh.itjust.works 2 points 1 week ago

It's because fuel is such an insignificant percentage of the overall cost of building, operating, and maintaining nuclear power. Increasing the complexity of the reactor in order to make the fuel use more efficient is basically a nonstarter, economically.

[–] booly@sh.itjust.works 3 points 1 week ago

Oh, I agree.

I was a big, big nuclear proponent 20 years ago. But seeing how Vogtle and VC Summer played out, and how that "cheaper" and more "scalable" AP1000 design put Westinghouse into bankruptcy, basically turned me off from the economics of nuclear power.

Oh, and because of how utility generation is paid for, ratepayers in Georgia will be paying for the Vogtle construction and cost overruns in their electric bills for the next 75 years, as the nuclear plant is shielded from competition by price regulators (state Public Utilities Commissions and the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission), so even if newer and better technology comes online, customers in 2080 will still be paying for 2020 technology.

The technology is still neat but I don't believe there's an economic future for civilian nuclear power generation. Not anymore.

[–] booly@sh.itjust.works 62 points 1 week ago (12 children)

Last week, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission just approved a new construction of a reactor for the first time in 10 years, to the Bill Gates backed Terra Power. Cool, except it's projected to cost $4 billion and the government is expected to cover half the cost, to build a reactor with 345 MW of capacity.

In contrast, solar panels cost about $1 million per MW, so an equivalent amount of peak capacity from solar would cost about $345 million, or about 1/12 the price. Solar won't run all day, but the nuclear plants will also continue to cost money to run after construction is complete.

Looking at the different LCOE estimates of each type of power generation shows that advanced nuclear is around $80/MWhr and solar+battery for all day demand tracking is about $53/MWhr.

Basically nuclear is only economically viable with government support at this point, and we should be asking whether we'd rather have the government support towards other forms of energy.

[–] booly@sh.itjust.works 10 points 1 week ago

Lots of non-American banks don't want to deal with the rules, so it's easier for them to just say that they won't open accounts for Americans.

[–] booly@sh.itjust.works 36 points 1 week ago (1 children)

It’s not discriminatory.

I mean it quite literally is discriminatory, but it's legal and justified discrimination.

[–] booly@sh.itjust.works 5 points 2 weeks ago

Yes, but the economies of scale of cargo transport generally mean that the percentage of the total cost attributable to fuel cost is usually pretty small.

Take bananas, for example. If they cost $0.70 per pound at the store, how much fuel could have been used getting a pound of bananas from the plantation to the port, shipped from that port to a port in the United States, then from that port to a distribution center, then to the store? So what would doubling the price of fuel do for the price of bananas?

With more expensive items, shipping (and therefore fuel) is an even lower percentage of the total input costs.

The price of goods will go up with the price of fuel, but not as much as a lot of people seem to assume.

[–] booly@sh.itjust.works 1 points 3 weeks ago

I wonder how those specific buyers' household incomes are. Part of the "k shaped recovery" from COVID is that some people genuinely are richer than ever.

If 10% of US households make more than $250k/year, and richer households are more likely to buy new cars (and buy them more frequently), it might very well be that the $1000/month payments are being paid by those who can easily afford them, while the $300/month payments are the ones actually causing financial strain on average households.

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