Nuff said

Captialism is necessary, though not sufficient, for a free society.

And this is utter nonsense. A free society can coexist just fine with a simple barter system or even when everything belongs to the commons, which was one of the ways the tribal societies worked. Economic systems are completely orthogonal to the societies. It takes a completely brain washed person to insist otherwise.

From the train station to home, not from my parents. It is about 10 km away. I think 30 km at once is about my limit when walking - I am unfortunately not as fit as I used to be.

Same for me. But there was a situation when I was visiting my parents who live about 250 km away. I took the train. On my way back it was already so late that the last bus from the station to my home was gone. A rental bicycle would have been perfect for this situation. I had to walk instead, not a problem but it took me almost two hours. Would have been more like half an hour on a bike.

Russia had famines every 10 years or so, the last one was in 1947, though.

Ukraine was not a country before 1991. Just saying ;-)
The USSR started sinking because eastern European countries and most of the union republics were a bottomless drain on the economy, not other way around.

ORLY? Just in January two workers died at the Fukushima power plant.

Except that you don't mine pure uranium, you have to mine uranium ore (pitchblende) from what is mostly useless rock and then refine it while coal is basically ready to use and comes in seams. Coal dust is not good for your lungs, but uranium ore dust also gets you radioactive poisoning, and so does radon exposure, with the additional benefit of lung cancer. It is no coincidence that uranium mining used to be a prison-camp job.

This is how an uranium mine looks like. So much for orders of magnitude.

So you count coal mining deaths, but not uranium mining deaths?

They are in the similar ballpark, but without the horrendous dismantling costs. And renewable costs actually go down with time, not up. Also Germany still doesn't have a place for long term storage of nuclear waste. So I'd say long live Maoist Energy Sources.

I am also fine with natural gas, to be honest. Russia has been a reliable supplier even during the worst cold war days.

In case of the new British power plant there are not only upfront investments, there is also a guarantee for the power price that is twice the going rate and this guarantee is extended for the whole lifetime of the power plant and will be adjusted for inflation over that time.

I used to type much faster with a stylus on a resistive touch screen than I ever can type with my fingers on a multitouch display and using a stylus I did not need a finger-friendly user interface so actually I can only second everything Frobnicator wrote about WM and iPhone. Well, except for WM5 being any good. It sucked both in comparison to WM2003 and to WM6. I liked my WM phones a lot, and damn, copy&paste is sooooo laborious on an Android phone in comparison. Same goes for the need for special gloves. I honestly miss resistive screens and the stylus.

Could this be coloring your perspective, AC? Just a little?

What was it again about "a speck that is in your brother's eye"? Libertarians are just as delusional as communists are, the difference is that libertarians also lack both empathy and the will for cooperation - both are traits that made humans out of apes. Human children are still like that - very competitive and lacking empathy, so I guess libertarians just never really matured. This, by the way, explains, why books that are normally read by teenagers can push people into this kind of social darwinism crap.

What is especially funny is thinking that Heinlein was a libertarian. He was a military first and foremost, and there is no place for personal liberties in military.

Heinlein not simply hated communists, he was pissing-his-pants scared of them which coloured his perception.

which I, an escapee from the evil empire especially appreciate.

I have read your posts and I can only see your ridiculous hate for anything slightly left of fascism. This has nothing to do with being "an escapee from the evil empire". There were millions born in GDR, the USSR, any other socialist country, but this kind of hate is not that common, even though you might feel different, being in an echo chamber and never accepting a converse opinion. Here in Germany mostly the "heil hitler" kind of baldies from the former GDR are like that - something what makes me ashamed for my fellow citizens. The others, like me, who don't shave their heads, are often much more relaxed about the past, even though they didn't like the mandatory Russian lessons (I, for one, am in love with Slavic languages, but this is a personal preference, I didn't like the mandatory French lessons later on).

Personally, I also think that Heinlein is way, way overrated. There were much better SF authors back then, like Robert Sheckley or Stanislaw Lem. Their books stood the test of time much better than anything Heinlein has ever written. His stuff reads like eternal fifties, and I am not just talking about the technology. The only books even worse in that regard were the Lensman series.

where he extolled virtues of the Individual while dissing the Collective

The ones who speak loudest about the virtues of the individual are usually the ones who profit from a collective the most, but in their eyes they earned it all by them selves. You boasted once that you can speak Russian. Let this example of virtues of the individual speak for itself.

This is the theory. But the facts are that all currently built nuclear power plants suffer from massive (in the range of 3x the originally projected price) cost overruns and nuclear power is more expensive than even solar or wind.
The reactors you mention that are "supposed to be" exist only on paper. The past experience shows that all nuclear power plant designs were overly optimistic about cost, security and performance.
Klaus Traube, one of the most prominent German anti nuclear activist used to design nuclear power plants for a living and was later a CEO of Interatom and responsible for the development and building of a breeder reactor. He thinks that we don't need nuclear power because it is too complicated and too expensive - not worth it. This is appeal to authority, sure. But this particular authority knows much more about nuclear reactors than a standard issue slashdot atomic playboy.

Nuclear can't compete with anything.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

The UK wholesale electricity price in 2013 is about £48 per megawatt-hour (MWh). EDF has negotiated a guaranteed fixed price â" a "strike price" â" for electricity from Hinkley Point C of £92.50 per megawatt-hour (in 2012 prices),[2][3][31] which will be adjusted (linked to inflation) during the construction period and over the subsequent 35 years tariff period. The price could fall to £89.50/MWh if a new plant at Sizewell is also approved.[2][3] Research carried out by the Energy Policy Research Group at the University of Cambridge argues that no new nuclear power plants would be built in the UK without government intervention.[32] The construction cost are estimated to be £24.5 billion.