This is harder to do well than you think as someone that's done drywall thankfully in a part of the house you can't readily see. Keep in mind, you have to move or extend electrical outlets and any other fixtures.

I too know the pain in the arse that is cinder block housing from the 50s albeit my house was built in 1960. Most times you can get away with drilling a couple of holes and putting spray foam into the hollow part of the block. It won't get you all the way but it will at least get you to the point where the AZ sun doesn't make the block on the inside uncomfortable to the touch.

As someone that does like to do stuff myself I hear you though. When pros took care of the 30 foot long crack in the sewer pipe, (Insert PUN here) they had to cut into the brick on the outside leaving me although 15 feet where I had to put new brick in. Once it is covered in paint didn't look half bad, you can tell its not original though.

Insulation is hard though, there are lots of things inside walls that can cause problems. Even spray foam can be troublesome as it will go wherever the path of least resistance is and that point is not always obvious.

There is also the operating personnel issue. More units will need more people to operate, maintain, and update them, and the nuclear power industry is already having problems finding enough 20-somethings willing to work in their plants much less devote themselves to a 30 year career

I was going to add probability of failure also, since the airline maintenance and aircraft design worlds long ago observed that with more engines there is a higher probability of failure and reducing the number of engines from four (B707, A340) to two (B767, A330) increases the reliability of the airplane and reduces the number of incidents. The situations aren't exactly the same since in aircraft two engines on the same side have higher chances of common mode and interactive failures, while in theory the small modular reactors would be independent. But inevitably someone would build a site with eight modular reactors, and share some facilities to save costs - at which point common mode and interactive failures would reappear.

You are a bit confused. Monopolies most often are not the result of government enforcement, that is mostly unique to internet providers where it is a natural monopoly. Most Monopolies are created through acquisition. Big company A buys smaller company B competitor. Now the market has one less competitor, Company A repeats this procedure over and over and becomes Sinclair broadcasting or Microsoft or Google or all the meat packing companies who's names I can't remember off the top of my head.

Bell was broken up because it was abusing its monopoly and it is the last example of trust busting in this country. Since then, all the baby bells that were created in its wake have largely been consolidated into ATT which if you work in IT Operations you'll groan immediately as they are terrible to work with because they simply do not care about you or your business. The same goes with FiServ in banking, and literally dozens to hundreds of other markets.

Monopoly is the natural conclusion of capitalism however. Success allows you expand and buy out your competition until you no longer have competition and then you set your prices. American industry is littered with examples of this.

The very game of Monopoly teaches this lesson quite well at the expense of everyone who's playing with you.

There is a giant gap between laissez-faire capitalism and complete socialism. A big example is that we used to do a fair amount of trust busting. When you regulates parts of industry that have gotten out of control you can ensure the market remains mostly fair. This has not been done for 50 years at this point. The closest we got was Microsoft antitrust case and look how little resulted from that in the late 90s?

Capitalism is animalistic and you can't really blame animals for acting like animals. It is natural for a business owner whether publicly traded or not to seek higher and better profits. On its face there is nothing wrong with that unless you are cutting costs by dumping your garbage in my yard and expecting me to clean it up. If you succeed by actually being better than your competition then you are the definition of actually deserving your success.

There used to be at least somewhat of a social contract and it died with the American dream somewhere in the 80s.

I'm so old I had to increase my browser zoom to 250% to confirm that the poster's userid was indeed in the 7 million range. To be posting on Slashdot and not get the Netcraft reference...

My thought exactly: IBM shed all its entry-level business architectures, the networking business, and finally the PC business to stay focused on high performance workstation chips and mainframes, only to see its hardware side shrink to... .the size of the mainframe market (workstation architectures having evaporated along with entry-level and midrange business architectures other than the PC). Profits are probably high per unit sold, but they aren't growing and aren't a significant force in the future of computing any more.

Much of the hard right anti-trans folks have no actual interaction with trans people and forget, that they are in fact, people.

How many times have you seen a Republican change their hard right stance when it suddenly impacts their own personal lives. It's unfortunately impacting my niece who is in a loving relationship with another woman. A lot of people in their town have such a distaste for two people that wouldn't hurt a fly. It's amazing to me that they care so much about something that has zero impact on their own life.

I think most people have a tendency to view trans folks through the lens of drag shows which are obviously not representative of the group, if you can even call it that, as a whole. Although I contend most of them haven't been to an actual drag show or they wouldn't be so concerned about them.

The capitalist system we use is the ultimate ponzi-scheme. It requires that economies grow infinitely. An economy can only grow by adding more people unless you actually want to pay existing people more. Since Elon in particular certainly doesn't want to pay them more, he has opted for population growth to ensure the can keeps heading down the road.

If the economy shrinks because population declines, you can look at Italy and Greece and see what happened on a small scale. That doesn't mean you're necessarily wrong about the overall outcome, it will be very bumpy and terrible for a lot of people but it will also continue on and likely as you say, become a lot more efficient.

Incumbent US-focused auto makers/sellers, whether HQ'd in the US or elsewhere, should be worried about their own collective abandonment of the market for entry-level cars and small cars in general. The idea that young person can jump directly from a bicycle or driving the family junker to buying a $60,000 SUV with no entry point in between is clearly not sustainable, but that's where the current crop of automakers is headed. So yes, if they continue down that path they should be concerned about new competitors who have figured out how to make affordable and regulatory-compliant small cars.

An irregularly shaped chunk of solid Inconel? Sure to tumble as it passes through the atmosphere? I don't think anyone who worked in high temperature industrial process was surprised by this; not sure what NASA was thinking.

And yet the SmartCar (the original one, not the SmartForTwo) was certified in the EU and uncertifiable in the US. We can argue all day as to whose safety and registration regulations are stronger or in some sense better (neither of which was part of my OP), but the fact is they are different. And the PRC EV manufactures have so far not see a positive return in meeting the US/Canada standards and entering the market.

So far the EV autos designed in the PRC have not attempted to meet US/Canada safety and regulatory certification standards. BYD has an engineering and manufacturing center in the US for their EV municipal vehicles so they could certify a car if they thought they had a market for it, but so far that doesn't seem to be the case. Perhaps the US EV makers could concentrate on making their products more price competitive and improving sales and service so they don't have to resort to a trade war to win the market?

That's a symptom, not a cause. EVs are all newer and built with current technology; there are still many ICE vehicles in production based on 2005 designs, technology, and parts. As those age out of the production system - as they are doing now - they are being replaced by new designs (whether ICE, hybrid, or EV) that use extremely expensive and non-repairable modern technology and parts. Have a fender-bender in one of those, EV or ICE, and you will be hit with a $5000 repair bill. The days of "beat to fit; paint to match" are over.

Why are the only options shutting down "Big Agriculture" or letting bad practices persist?

We've spent the better part of 40 years deregulating in this country to very predictable results. When profit is the incentive it is natural that businesses will do whatever they can to increase said profits. If a company is publicly traded and profits don't increase year over year the stock tanks rather than being seen a stable company.

You need to face it, corporations with the same legal standing as people is indeed the cause of the majority of issues that face modern society. Does that mean we need to go full communist? Of course not, but we can certainly regulate industry and corporate America better than we do. There is so much money in politics today because corporations are allowed to use their money to fund PACs while CEOs also fund their brand of choice. Greed used to be considered one of the seven deadly sins. It is now considered as a virtue but our country is founded on this idea. The wealth and power Elon Musk enjoys today dwarfs that of the robber barons of history.