They exist to present to the public as a viable alternative to renewables and transitioning to renewable energy resources in general.

It lets you tell the public that the scientists will figure it all out so they don't need to make any changes to the way we do things today.

It's the exact same scam plastic recycling turned out to be and for the exact same reason.

I dug into the sources a bit. Apparently they were excluding white neighborhoods from checks, then somebody else was removing non-asian names before forwarding it for further investigation.

source.

Looking into the sources and tracing a bit:

source.

If they actually did this, well, that's like how the NRA forced most "may issue" states to be effectively "shall issue" for various weapon permits.

When the police can't come up with a good reason for denying the black woman's permit request when she has letters from a ex-boyfriend stalker threatening to kill her, who is due to be released from prison soon, but the white doctor living in a gated community gets it first thing, there are questions to be asked. Especially when permits for black people have a 99% reject rate while whites get them 90% of the time.

One of the things I've been noticing lately is that the kind of people who didn't use to get hassled by the cops are now getting hassled by the cops...

Crime keeps going down but we keep putting more cops on the street. People expect them to arrest people. So they're looking for guys they can hassle like yourself.

Recently a municipality had lost a fight to prevent a freedom of information request for flock camera data.

They instantly canceled the program and shut down the cameras.

Remember that Steve Jobs would buy a brand new Mercedes every couple of months so that he didn't have to have a permanent license plate.

The rich and powerful are very concerned about having their movements tracked.

What they are talking about is specifically abuses of the technology that people are on aware of.

The concern is that people are going to use the tech to get information and it's going to be bad information.

In politics there is a concept called a low information voter. This is someone who pays very little attention to politics and ends up with a lot of poorly informed opinions and makes poor political choices because of it.

This is Been supplemented by a new phenomenon call the bad information voter. Someone who has actively bad information and is making decisions on it. The decisions they make tend to be catastrophic.

Llms are bringing that same energy to every other aspect of people's lives. Basically people are awash in extremely bad information. Things that are just absolutely objectively false in every way shape and form. And they are likely to make decisions based on that information that are going to be very terrible.

A proper civilization would recognize this issue and work towards education but we have become obsessed with personal responsibility to the point where we can't even consider the effects on ourselves of other people having that much bad information.

We have all forgotten that no man is an island. Probably should be teaching that poem in schools...

There's a concept of determinism because of some of the consequences of how physics work. Basically the idea that every decision is already made because if we're made of molecules you can predict what those molecules have to do moment to moment.

Like how your body has already decided to move by the time you do it.

But quantum mechanics kind of throws all that right out the fucking door. My favorite fact is if we try to create a complete vacuum we still have little particles popping into existence out of nowhere and we can't explain it.

Just to be clear, I believe that part of the problem was that the city government was broke and basically in receivership. Ergo, the politicians in Flint were not actually in control of the water contracts, it was an emergency manager appointed by Governor Rick Snyder(R).

I remembered the broke part and not in control, looked up the specifics.

Basically, to cut costs, the manager stopped the practice of piping water from Detroit and started using the historically very polluted and corrosive Flint River, without adequate testing and treatment (itself actually a violation of federal law).
Because many of the homes still had lead service pipes, going from basic to acidic caused the protective oxidization on the pipes to dissolve, putting excessive lead into the water.

It eventually made national news, but by all measures, this is still a far better situation than what Tehran is facing.

Switching back to the old water source or adding more controls like running the water through a filter of crushed limestone to correct the PH fixes the issues in Flint. No such easy solution is possible for Tehran.

Russia can't really force it if they could then the war would be over and Europe wants to keep it all going so they can wear Russia down some more.

So nothing is really going to change in the war will just continue unless and until we get a democrat in the white house again with a clear majority in Congress.

It is incredibly fucked up that the world is just kind of standing by letting Russia do this so that they can wear Russia down and reduce their ability to function as a global superpower. Then again this shit we are letting happen in Yemen and Sudan is even worse. And Jesus fucking Christ if you read the history of what America did in South America during Ronald Reagan...

Yeah you're not really supposed to think about how expensive the drug war is versus just giving people support and addiction treatment.

America especially is really into punitive and revenge-based Justice. I wonder if it will start to fade if religious extremism continues to fade. It's not hard to draw a line between puritanical bullshit and wanting to do as much harm as possible to people who commit crimes or do drugs.

Yeah you could for example point at the trans panic as the reason why Trump is President not once but twice because without that moral panic he couldn't have won but you'd also have to ignore all the voter suppression cheating and the sabotage the Republicans have done to the economy and the Republicans packing the courts allowing Trump to commit multiple crimes and get away with it and and and...

The Democrats insisting on running a woman when the country has made it crystal clear that they do not want a woman at top of ticket didn't help either.

Basically every single system had to collapse in order to make a has been game show host with 28 credible rape accusations president. Again..

So yeah you have multiple causes for a disaster a lot of times.

But take any one of those causes out and the disaster goes away. So I don't think it's unfair to say those things caused the disaster.

And in this case Iran is a relatively poor country that was trying to do a theocratic dictatorship by America in order to secure influence in the Middle East so it's not like they have a lot of say in reducing climate change. It's mostly a matter of the United states, the wealthier states of Europe and China. And you can hardly blame them for their corruption if you are an American since, well you caused it.

Of course pointing all this out is not going to endear you to Americans. We don't like to think about the consequences of our actions.

Sorry, I didn't get that quite correct, they're Passive Autocatalytic Recombiners. They require no external power.

If we don't have a 30 style crash. In addition to basically completely deregulating Wall Street and investment in general and all the other structural economic problems we are all just kind of pretending aren't there over and over and over again we are seeing crooks let off the hook by the current administration for no discernible reason except the blisteringly obvious one.

We are basically speedrunning a repeat of the lead up to world war II only this time we have nuclear weapons. But I'm sure it'll be fine right? Right?

It's the same stupid fucking pattern over and over again where you have wealthy elites who are well respected by the public and have control of the local media so the journalists will not discuss them critically.

There's nothing magic about being Japanese. Corruption and malfeasance are just things that human beings do everywhere.

The only country I have seen that I have the slightest faith in their ability to safely run nuclear reactors as France and that's because when France's ruling class tried to raise the retirement age to 62 there were riots in the streets.

I know those things don't seem connected but they are. It shows that the public there is not likely to let their betters run roughshod over them like America and Japan and frankly 99% of the rest of the world does.

The problem here is that elites can cause enormous disasters by taking huge risks that they are not personally culpable for and then get away with it because we have a different set of rules for them then we do for everybody else.

That is not by any stretch of the imagination in uncommon setup in the world. Frankly France is the odd man out here.

And marginally less profit for the plant owners...

If the people responsible for the disaster were currently rotting in prison it would be one thing but I keep coming back to the fact that the public blamed the engineers and let the CEOs off without even so much as a trial..