Look at Japan's new maglev line. It's 90% tunnels through mountains. Goes through densely populated cities to reach the stations. More than twice as fast as TFA is speculating about, at 600 KPH / 370 MPH.

Cities were competing to get mid-way stations added. In the last couple of decades they also built the Tsukuba Express line, and a number of new towns along it, for commuters to live in and access central Tokyo. Joined up planning, and creating new opportunities.

They don't need multi-track either, their trains are reliable, even with the earthquakes and extreme weather.

They are aiming so low anyway. Very small reactors, low output power, and they appear to have a lifetime of a few years because they don't have a plan to bring them up and refuel them. SMRs go through fuel faster than larger reactors, one of the reasons why they produce more waste.

In summary they are planning to use an untested new technology that nobody has managed to make a working prototype of, and bury it in a harsh environment where they can't fix any issues that arise, all to power an AI datacentre whose existence depends on a bubble that is already showing signs of bursting.

It was mostly down to the available implementations of JPEG XL being crap. The reference C library had an unstable API, and performance was mediocre. They were still addressing some pretty severe security related bugs with every release. It was immature and not suitable for shipping with a web browser.

Now there are better options, Google can integrate it safely.

It turns out they aren't quite as bad at the Boomers and their Facebook.

Looking at the top sites, it's

Cat videos
Russian propaganda
Soft porn
5 second attention span

I like how Twitter has falling so far down the rankings now.

The capacity of the government of a large jurisdiction like California, or more particularly the US, could bankrupt someone like Musk, so I say, bring it on. Within a decade Musk would have abandoned all efforts, or, even better, be stone cold broke (frankly billionaires shouldn't exist at all, and we should tax the living fuck out of them down to their last $200 million).

We're too afraid of these modern day Bond villains when we should be aiming every financial, and probably every real, cannon straight at them and putting them in a sense of mortal danger every minute of their waking lives, so that they literally piss themselves in terror at the though that "we the people" might decide to wipe them out for good.

That's just what human beings do. It's not really even that's going over budget it's that whenever these things are pitched they are under budgeted.

If we got upset every time anything went over budget we wouldn't have a country. We never would have made it out of the Northeast.

You need to build in extra lines and stops because there's a lot of in California people want to go. We aren't at the point yet where we are going to be building expressways. That kind of infrastructure comes later after you have a larger amount of rail installed. It isn't anything we can't or wouldn't do though in the absence of large car companies and airlines screwing everything up for the sake of their own profit.

There is absolutely nothing stupider than having an entire transportation system built around 3,000 lb+ personal vehicles that we all have to be personally responsible for both on and off the road. How many extra hours do we work to pay for these damn things? And if you're okay with that fine but fuck you for dragging me into it so that I have to pay for it too. I'm fucking sick and tired of paying for gearhead's fucking hobby.

It doesn't. What it means is cutting through a lot of big parcels whose owners have big money, so they can be big impediments. There has to be a happier medium than this between respect for individual private property ownership and the needs of the many, but we are clearly uninterested in finding it in this country.

Are you unready or ill equipped for the conversation about making them not stab-happy in the first place? Because you leapt rapidly to throwing away the key.

Oh look, a one-issue sock puppet has shown up to Charlie Kirk the discussion.

So then the hard part is creating the reactors which don't exist, as usual. It's a weakness shared by literally every proposed SMR project.

That's not what "native" means.

Who invented pluggable file formats anyway? The first place I experienced it was AmigaOS 2.0. NeXTStep had reusable controls but AFAIK it didn't provide formats to all installed applications.

I really wish them luck, but there have been so many false dawn's on fusion...

It had nothing to do with renewables they had a voltage surge and the hadn't prepared for it. They could have been running their entire grade off nuclear and they still would have had the outage.

It's a classic case of not spending the money to keep infrastructure of to date in order to prevent disasters. The basic problem is that nobody ever gets a pat on the back for stopping a disaster they get it for the cleanup afterwards...

Put another way nobody likes spending money on preventative maintenance.

Again though you have to compare it to alternatives. And the fact is wind and solar installations with batteries to make up for the gaps are infinitely cheaper than even well understood nuclear plant designs.

For something like 15 years now. There are plenty of dirt cheap battery solutions like those crazy sand batteries. You don't have to use rare Earth minerals to store energy there's plenty of other ways.

There really is no economic case to be made for nuclear power in America. The only reason we may see any new nuclear energy come online is people bringing up old plants that got shut down because AI has so much money right now.

Which isn't a good thing. I mean we're combining a weak regulatory environment with an old plant that was shut down because the cost of keeping it open was too high with a bubble economy heavily incentivized for low costs.

But even ignoring all that you're not going to see any new nuclear power come online.

I would be curious to get an honest answer from people why they are so obsessed with it. I really do think it's just that it was the cool thing when we were kids. Honestly solar punk isn't really all that cool.