pfdietz

19 ms·

541.
by pfdietz 4mo ago
> What do you call it when you turn off a nuclear power plant and then turn on a coal power plant? This isn’t rocket surgery. Still waiting for examples of countries that did that. Also, that's not replacing nuclear with coal. Plan
542.
by pfdietz 4mo ago
Well if that was what it was about, it's what you should have said, instead of lying about nuclear plants being replaced by coal plants.
543.
by pfdietz 4mo ago
No, it's not a good thing, but it's also not an example of the claim that countries replaced nuclear with coal. Still waiting on those countries from the previous poster.
544.
by pfdietz 4mo ago
You can't look at the early plants built in the US that were "turnkey" plants. These were bid at prices not reflecting what they would cost to build, but what was necessary to compete with coal. The vendors took a bath on t
545.
by pfdietz 4mo ago
Which nuclear plants were replaced with coal plants? If you say "German plants", I'll point out coal consumption for power generation in Germany has gone down since the decision to phase out nuclear. Coal consumption would li
546.
by pfdietz 4mo ago
Yes, we know nuclear is actually super great, because of all the merchant nuclear plants that have been built around the world. Here is a complete list of those plants:
547.
by pfdietz 4mo ago
Do you have poor balance? If your vestibular system is not reporting properly then a disconnect between eyes and its output could cause problems when you are looking around.
548.
by pfdietz 4mo ago
Observation is not advocacy.
549.
by pfdietz 4mo ago
Yes, yes, totally dismiss the agency of people who inconveniently don't like what you want them to like. Their preferences mean nothing, their actions must be dictated. I'd be more angry with you if I wasn't amused at the fr
550.
by pfdietz 4mo ago
This was the Suez Crisis for the US. It's all downhill from here. I'm expected the next Democrat president to cashier a bunch of high rank officers who went along with this. They weren't brave enough to risk their careers t
551.
by pfdietz 4mo ago
It's implausible if life tends to spread out. Your scenario there has to assume a universal rule that it never does that, anytime in the past billions of years. That's simply not plausible, especially in fictional universes wher
552.
by pfdietz 4mo ago
The problem with that mindset is that testing, like verification, becomes extremely powerful as it becomes more automated and you throw more compute at it. And it's arguably easier to automate testing than it is to automate formal ve
553.
by pfdietz 4mo ago
And yet, watch all these consumers deciding they want something different from what you're proclaiming is better for them.
554.
by pfdietz 4mo ago
It actually does rule out those scenarios. If intelligent life were that common, and interstellar travel that easy, colonization of the galaxy would have gone to completion billions of years ago. We would never have evolved; Earth and the
555.
by pfdietz 4mo ago
It rules out various superficially attractive scenarios, particularly ones in popular science fiction, like Star Trek or Star Wars.
556.
by pfdietz 4mo ago
As a humorous illustration of the point (of the presence of what is now low relevance content in the constitution.) Let's try to figure out where the 3rd amendment might actually have significance in the future. Maybe in space habita
557.
by pfdietz 4mo ago
> long spooling wires Long spooling optical fibers.
558.
by pfdietz 5mo ago
And also in a positive way. I mean, it's not personal teleportation, but it sometimes feels like it.
559.
by pfdietz 5mo ago
https://theonion.com/third-amendment-rights-group-celebrates...
560.
by pfdietz 5mo ago
Having said that, this therapy could be improving clearing of all sorts of things, not just amyloid-beta. If amyloid is just a misleading side effect, clearing it could also be misleading.
561.
by pfdietz 5mo ago
That's how you get something like Ariane 6 -- engineered to satisfy political constraints rather that to be competitive. Granted, NASA or to some extent the US military have the same problem.
562.
by pfdietz 5mo ago
Well-meaning restrictions that threaten Europe's ability to compete sound like something that would eventually encourage far right extremism by impeaching the validity of the restrictions' philosophical underpinnings.
563.
by pfdietz 5mo ago
It's that the marginal benefit of individual action accrues mostly to other people, or (on a national scale) to other nations. The fraction of benefit that accrues locally isn't enough to justify the cost (unlike, say, the ban on
564.
by pfdietz 5mo ago
That depends on the structure and scale of the sale. Our local library sells most of the books at the biannual sales. Granted, many of those sell for very little; prices decline over several weeks so the things discarded wouldn't sell
565.
by pfdietz 5mo ago
Or, we can judge what they say by the merits rather than hypocritically applying ad hominem arguments to them and not to others.
566.
by pfdietz 5mo ago
In the town where I live, surplus books from the library, and donated books, are sold twice a year over several weekends. As time goes on at these events the price drops, until on the last day it's $1 for a paper grocery bag full. Th
567.
by pfdietz 5mo ago
It's proper to suspect arguments that are motivated by self-interest. The stronger that self-interest, the more one should suspect the argument. This is what you're saying? In that case, the anti-AI Luddite arguments are maximal
568.
by pfdietz 5mo ago
Character assassination is not a replacement for a good argument. But hey, I'm sure you get a rush from that sense of righteousness.
569.
by pfdietz 5mo ago
One of Standard Thermal's use cases is excess DC power from existing solar farms that would otherwise be curtailed because of inverter/interconnect limits.
570.
by pfdietz 5mo ago
Energy is 10% of global GDP, about $10 T a year. I remember this when anyone complains large scale use of solar and wind would be expensive. So is large scale use of any energy source.

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