Then why has Georgia Power been collecting a "nuclear surcharge" from their customers for years?

GP owns about half the new reactors. The rest is owned by several other utilities.

Solar was too expensive when the reactors were approved in 2009. In the mean time, the reactor cost doubled, and solar fell like a rock. So now nuclear is too expensive.

The US southeast has basically no wind power, because trees and hills slow down low-level winds. That's why most wind is in the flat middle part of the country, and soon to be offshore.

> It will be incredibly dystopian if a few at the top accrue all the benefits and the rest are thrown to the wolves (as seems to be the current plan).

I call collectively call automation, robotics, software, and AI "Smart Tools". These require less human attention to operate than "dumb tools". The components in smart tools, like motors and computer chips, are cheap enough for average people to have multiple units. I count several dozen in my house, not including vehicles.

Modern life is complicated, but my power company and bank are both non-profit cooperatives. They abstract the complexity by hiring a few specialists for the rest of us. In principle a cooperative that uses smart tools to supply the basics of life (shelter,food, utilities, transportation) should be affordable. Members can supply part of the needed operations, in areas they know or can learn about. The rest would be hired specialists.

This would at least supply a basic quality of life, which people can improve on by working more or finding outside jobs.

Plasma torch and mass spectrometer. Everything recycles when it is reduced to basic elements.

Hollow core fibers are fixed the same way as solid core fibers, with fusion splices. Hot glass sticks to itself. The the splicing machine aligns the ends, heats them, then pushes them together. Takes about 10-15 seconds.

HCF is used when ping time is critical, since light travels 1/3 faster in air than glass. I don't think that matters to a typical medical office. Higher bandwidth is more for big data customers backing up to the cloud.

Will make the Internet a series of tubes. Senator Ted Stevens (R-Alaska) will be avenged:

"They want to deliver vast amounts of information over the Internet. And again, the Internet is not something that you just dump something on. It's not a big truck. It's a series of tubes. And if you don't understand, those tubes can be filled and if they are filled, when you put your message in, it gets in line and it's going to be delayed by anyone that puts into that tube enormous amounts of material, " -- Stevens, in 2006.

This is a compact-size tractor (40 HP). They commonly get used for landscape work. A downtown municipal park might well blocked by buildings, but even mowing around office parks might have problems. Midwest field crop tractors run larger, up to 600 HP.

The spec sheet says run time of 10-12 hours. So it sounds like "run it all day, charge it all night" would be the duty cycle.

The price ($68,000) is double that of a John Deere compact tractor with the same rating (40HP). At $2,600 savings per year, it would take 13 years to make up the difference. Sounds like you want to work the heck out of it to get a payback in a reasonable time.

Going back to the Mt GOX hack in 2014, there have been too many "hacks" for them all to have been poor programming/security. On the other hand, the regularity of hackers breaking into other databases makes me believe at least some are legitimate hacks, including those by insiders but not the exchange as a whole. So this is one of those "why not both?" situations.

Shouldn't the laws against computer hacking apply to members of the FBI as much as to everyone else?

They stocked everything, literally millions of books and magazine articles.

There are still other mirror sites: https://libgen.rs/book/index.p...

Whp pays Lady Gaga for billions of YouTube views? Google does, and ultimately advertisers. She makes most of her money, though, from live shows and merchandise. The YouTube videos are more like ads for her other products, which actually take work to produce.

I have about 3,000 physical books. I paid for those, because a physical book has significant cost to produce. Digital copies cost effectively nothing to make, and the overhead is covered by users with their own computers and internet connections.

If content providers want continuing income, do something of value - live readings, movie theaters with better sound and picture than home setups, etc. I used to go to media conventions a lot. I got to see the authors and actors in person. I was happy to pay the ticket price to attend.

I was active in Second Life for a number of years, and then a second virtual world (Blue Mars) that was based on the CryEngine 2 graphics engine. That one never made it out of beta.

Meta's avatars are about up to Second Life in 2005 or so. Current SL avatars are way way better, and more customizable:

https://marketplace.secondlife...

It is, except for the fact that the high geothermal potential area in the NW corner of the state is Yellowstone National Park, and you can't build there.

There are plenty of other good geothermal areas in the western US, and some of them already have such plants built.