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If these projects ultimately end up canceled they’ll be the largest “mostly done” infrastructure projects to be cancelled. A huge waste. And a monument to US in
by softwaredoug 9mo ago
If these projects ultimately end up canceled they’ll be the largest “mostly done” infrastructure projects to be cancelled. A huge waste. And a monument to US incompetency.
- toomuchtodo 9mo agoWell, judicial checks and balances should protect them until regime change, which is coming.
- Waterluvian 9mo agoI dunno. The Americans stuck their hand in a blender for four years and then four years later needed to try it again. Alas, Stumpy McNubs remains long on limbs but short on memory.
- actionfromafar 9mo agoDon't look into laser with remaining eye! (Unless it's really shiny, and red?)
- Waterluvian 9mo agoScience demands rigour and repeatability.
- toomuchtodo 9mo agoI have similar concerns, but the evidence so far is encouraging. https://old.reddit.com/r/politics/comments/1puwkpj/democrats_overperform_by_double_digits_in_south/nvrz8lo/ https://old.reddit.com/r/politics/comments/1puwkpj/democrats... https://old.reddit.com/r/politics/comments/1qu6vyu/trump_calls_into_dan_bonginos_first_show_and/o381fkj/ https://old.reddit.com/r/politics/comments/1qu6vyu/trump_cal... https://thehill.com/homenews/campaign/5716988-democrats-score-upset-texas/ https://thehill.com/homenews/campaign/5716988-democrats-scor... https://www.npr.org/2026/02/01/nx-s1-5695678/democrat-taylor-rehmet-wins-texas-state-senate-seat https://www.npr.org/2026/02/01/nx-s1-5695678/democrat-taylor...
- AnthonyMouse 9mo ago"The President's party loses seats in the midterms" is a long-term trend and it seems pretty likely to hold this time. The real question is, once the Democrats are back in control of at least one house of Congress, are they going to be sane or are they going to spend two years making such fools of themselves that we end up with another Republican President in 2028?
- bruce511 9mo agoAlas you'll need to define "sane" first. That might be harder than expected. Equally unfortunate is the need for 60 senate votes to actually have a meaningful say over what the president does. And in truth no part has had "control" of congress to this level for a while. When one (or indeed both) sides are politically incapable of being bipartisan (witness the outcomes for those voting against party lines, on both sides) control of one house is meaningless and a majority in the senate (short of 60 votes) mostly meaningless. Expecting any change in behavior after November, regardless of the results, is wishful thinking.
- deleted 9mo ago[deleted]
- AnthonyMouse 9mo agoIt takes 40 votes to prevent the other party from putting something in a bill that you're willing to do a government shutdown to prevent. That's probably a good thing. Consider what would be happening right now, when the Republicans have >50 but not >60, if that meant they could actually do whatever they want. And the difference between 49 and 51 is still pretty damn important because "majority" has a lot of procedural consequences that are not irrelevant.
- tialaramex 9mo agoAs you've seen, over, and over, and over again, this is their own internal rule they've changed it before and they can just change it again with a simple majority, the so-called "nuclear option". None of this has any actual weight, it's all theatre. Which doesn't mean it lacks consequences, but they could at any time just sweep it aside and they choose not to. Ironically, one thing the Senate does constitutionally need a super-majority for and can't just change the rule is Impeaching the President. Which means that so long as Republicans have enough votes and apparently still believe loyalty to one corrupt rotting bag of shit is their purpose in life he can't be impeached.
- tzs 9mo agoThe first time many of Trump's desires to do illegal things were somewhat restrained by non-political government employees who remembered that their oath is to the Constitution, not the President. Based on what I've read a lot of people who voted for him subsequent times thought that would continue.
- behringer 9mo agoThere's no regime change coming when those in power run the elections, have already cheated in the past, and know that they are now untouchable.
- amanaplanacanal 9mo agoStates run the elections.
- prawn 9mo agoThe US president just today said that Republicans should "nationalize the voting" in future elections.
- rootusrootus 9mo agoIt certainly gets us to keep talking about him. Which seems to be his primary skill. It does not have any basis in reality, however.
- XorNot 9mo agoThis is what people keep saying until the administration does something and then dares the courts to stop them.
- watwut 9mo agoReality check is that he has actual track record on delivering or trying to deliver on his anti-democratic impulses. In terms of personal monetary gain, he is the most successful president of history. He is also actually successful at making Project 2025 reality. He is on the way to cause very real harm (economic, physical) to blue cities too.
- rootusrootus 9mo ago> In terms of personal monetary gain, he is the most successful president of history. And in terms of legislative impact he is the least successful president in history. I don't like the corruption one bit, but on balance it is probably the less damaging of the two. > He is also actually successful at making Project 2025 reality Not at all, though, on any kind of permanent basis. He is showing that you can make the executive branch do shitty things with executive orders. What he isn't managing to do is codify any of this in law. There's a reason that the universities and other 'elites' knuckle under and cut deals with him -- they know that these deals are informal and temporary, and go away with the next POTUS. If Trump took this agenda to Congress and got it enacted into law it would persist for many more years.
- softwaredoug 9mo agoIt's going to be dicey whether you can keep all the suppliers engaged with start / stops over 3 years.
- toomuchtodo 9mo agoFrom the piece: > Several of these projects are near completion and are likely to be done before any government appeal can be heard. Just gotta keep grinding towards success.
- int0x29 9mo agoThis will kill most future investment in offshore wind even if those projects are sucessful.
- toomuchtodo 9mo agoIt’ll come back when there is more policy certainty, China isn’t going anywhere and they’re going to keep building. Luckily, there is manufacturing supply chain safely outside the US. China is roughly a third of global manufacturing capacity after all. Don’t think in years, think in half decades and decades. This too shall pass. https://ember-energy.org/data/china-cleantech-exports-data-explorer/ https://ember-energy.org/data/china-cleantech-exports-data-e...
- bgroins 9mo agoWorse than the Superconducting Supercollider?
- xeonmc 9mo agoOr that space telescope?
- Retric 9mo agoYes far worse, the superconducting supercollider produced science which has debatable value. There’s an argument we lost nothing by canceling the project. Wind farms produce electricity which pays for the investment when you finish but pays nothing when a stop early. This makes stopping early extremely economically harmful.
- deleted 9mo ago[deleted]
- watersb 9mo agoEsoteric programming language developed for the superconducting super collider, Glish, was picked up by the National Radio Astronomy Observatory, which used it well into the 2000s. Glish supported networked remote procedure calls, made then almost transparent to the program. Otherwise, Glish was roughly similar to Tcl or Lua. I don't know what other bits and pieces got salvaged from the SSC project.
- shawn_w 9mo agoDocumentation etc: https://www.cv.nrao.edu/glish/papers/index.html https://www.cv.nrao.edu/glish/papers/index.html
- vel0city 9mo agoI've read a lot of the science funded in the early engineering of the project around the magnets eventually rolled into the LHC, so there's that. Otherwise it seems like we spent a lot of money on a 17-mile hole in the ground in North Texas.
- JumpCrisscross 9mo ago> A huge waste. And a monument to US incompetency But a windfall for the litigation financier that buys those claims off the U.S. government. These leases are contracts. Sovereign immunity is curtailed when the U.S. contracts.
- kabdib 9mo ago> incompetency "corruption"
- threethirtytwo 9mo ago[flagged]
- tosapple 9mo agoWait until you live through what Argentina or Brasil have then see how you feel about redress, petition and speech.
- threethirtytwo 9mo agoI'm specifically talking about Chinas' lack of freedoms... which is entirely different then Brasil or Argentina. I don't have the freedom to own a gun in China, but it's safer in China to the point where you don't need a gun. Practically speaking I prefer to have less freedoms simply because you need less freedoms for society to function better AND most of these freedoms that are taken away by China are freedoms most people never exercise.
- tosapple 9mo agoExercise like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1989_Tiananmen_Square_protests_and_massacre https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1989_Tiananmen_Square_protests... Right?
- threethirtytwo 9mo agoYes, the event is Tiananmen Square. And on the moral axis, there is no ambiguity. It was a tragedy. People were killed for demanding political change. History does not need softening there, and I am not interested in doing that. But morality alone does not explain how the world actually unfolds. And using morality as a trump card to end the discussion only works if we pretend the world is clean, fair, and reversible. It is not. The uncomfortable reality is that history does not grade outcomes on intentions. It grades them on stability, continuity, and what comes after. The question is not whether Tiananmen Square was morally wrong. It was. The harder question is whether allowing that movement to succeed would have produced a better long term outcome for China, or whether it would have fractured the country into something far worse. At that moment, China was not a mature liberal democracy waiting to be unlocked. It was a fragile state emerging from famine, revolution, and internal collapse. Power vacuums do not fill themselves with enlightenment. They fill with chaos, factionalism, and often bloodshed on a scale that makes a single atrocity look small in hindsight. The leadership chose order over moral legitimacy. They chose continuity over uncertainty. They decided that dissent, even righteous dissent, was a risk they could not allow. The cost was horrific. The result was a state that remained intact, centralized, and capable of executing long term plans. And execution matters. A lot. Today, you can live in China and experience a society that functions at scale. Infrastructure appears where it is planned. Cities are built. Systems work. The future arrives on schedule. For many ordinary people, daily life feels stable, predictable, and materially improved compared to what came before. Now contrast that with San Francisco. A city that prides itself on moral clarity, individual rights, and moral signaling. A city that debates endlessly and acts reluctantly. A city where compassion has become so fragmented across competing claims that enforcing basic order is treated as cruelty. The result is visible on the streets. Not theoretical. Not symbolic. Real decay, real suffering, real dysfunction. This does not mean repression is good. It means the world forces tradeoffs whether we consent to them or not. There is no system that gets everything. There is no button you press that yields justice, freedom, stability, and progress simultaneously. China accepted moral debt to buy coherence and speed. The West often accepts paralysis to preserve moral self image. Both choices carry costs. One is just easier to condemn from a distance. The other is easier to live with emotionally while things quietly fall apart. If you want to argue morality, you will win the rhetorical point immediately. Tiananmen Square ends the conversation. But if you want to understand how nations actually become what they are, you have to step into the grey zone where history operates, where choices are made under uncertainty, and where the alternative paths are not clean, heroic, or guaranteed to be better. The world is imperfect. Every society is built on compromises it would rather not examine too closely. The honest discussion is not about pretending one side is pure. It is about acknowledging that values shape outcomes, and that no outcome is free.
- dyauspitr 9mo agoGOP cronyism and deep corruption.
- zobzu 9mo agohave you met the california high speed rail or not yet?
- sephamorr 9mo agoWell, that's not 'mostly done'
- epistasis 9mo agoEven bigger than the abandoned AP1000 reactors in South Carolina? That was about $5B of abandoned capital, IIRC. It was also a monument to IS incompetency, but at least those responsible went to prison for it. I doubt we would see the same for cancelling the wind projects.
- nebula8804 9mo agoJust as a side note: Recently it seems as if there is interest in finishing those projects as a result of data center energy needs. Your point still stands but just wanted to put that out there.
- epistasis 9mo agoThere's been talk for a long time about restarting construction on Virgil C Summer again, but it has never happened. I remember an interview with a Santee Cooper exec that was extremely withering on the prospects of it actually happening. I can't find it now, but here's a 2019 video from the then-new CEO about the people who were looking into restarting construction, that's far less withering: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tq0LsX_fCm4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tq0LsX_fCm4 I'll believe it when it happens. Traditional 1GW nuclear like the AP1000 is just such a huge financial bite to make these days that the only orgs big enough to do it are large consortiums of large companies, or nation state. It's a tough position because the AP1000 has a much better chance of reaching affordability than SMRs, but nobody wants to spend the $50B-$100B in capital to produce uneconomic nuclear reactors in order to maybe drive down the cost of construction so that future reactors will be economic. It's a very different situation for funding than solar, because there's small scale use cases where expensive energy makes sense, in places that wires don't reach, etc. etc., on devices, etc., and that's what really drove a lot of the early development of solar manufacturing capacity. That got it to the point that Germany could do subsidies to really scale up the deployment of expensive energy, and since Germany spent that money, it's been smooth sailing for the rest of the world. The path for nuclear is not as clear as it was for solar.
- abcd_f 9mo ago> US incompetency US corruption. Incompetence would've been a good news here.