I think he died in great sorrow and sadness, because the GOP he took to great heights is now in the hands of a guy who will probably have Cheney's daughter killed if he can get away with it. No family in the GOP is as utterly disempowered and cancelled as the Cheney family; Liz couldn't get elected dogcatcher in Wyoming now or in 20 years.

Yes, it was likely Karl Rove, and not Dick Cheney, who was the source of the 'anonymous' quote that "every so often you have to throw one of these crappy little countries up against a wall to intimidate all the others", but I'm sure that stated Cheney's thoughts as well.

I agree with all your comments, but would stress that the REALLY bad thing about the Iraq war was not the strategy, but the open, transparent, obvious lies. I mean, when the WHOLE WORLD rolls its eyes at your story, at the UN, when nobody is convinced, and you go forward ANYWAY, you're basing your whole national stance on lies.

"We can lie and get away with it because we are too powerful to hold to account", was the underlying power of Cheney. That same conversation with the "crappy little nations" comment had the even more quoted line: "We're an empire now, and we create our own reality".

To perhaps belabour the obvious, I'm talking about Trump, and how Cheney and Bush showed the way for Trump to just really go for it, and blatantly make America an Empire based on any lies he feels like, the more-preposterous the better, to rub our noses in it.

I know /. Is full of hard core Atheist and leftists, but go study NDEs.
There is enough evidence to show the real us is a spiritual being interfacing with a human body.
AI might emulate this spiritual essence, but it will never be one.

EdgeRouter which I use has a web interface for control. Their Unifi range uses proprietary controller, which is most of the switch and wireless stuff. We have about 40 unifi products on our work network, and their control plane is awesome.

I run Ubiquiti Edge router at home and pfSense at work. Both are rock solid.

Turn the question around: how much renewables and storage can you build for the kind of money people are spending on nukes?

The link the previous replier gave to the Ontario project notes that they expect to pay out $20B in capital costs for the construction and startup of the four SMRs and their supply chain. For 1.2GW, that's about $17/watt. Let's round down a bit to allow for future cost improvements and say renewables must beat $15/watt.

Both solar arrays and windfarms are now clocking in at something just over $1/watt, installed. That's nameplate max capacity of course, and solar is maybe 20% capacity in Canada, wind 30%. So you need either 5x1.2=6GW of solar, or 3.33X1.2= 4GW of wind, or some combination of the two.

Then you need storage. Sodium-ion is expected to hit $40/kWh next year. That $40M/GWh, or $50M per "plant hour" of a 1.2GW plant.

Let's overbuild the generation, with 4GW of solar (x20% = 66% of 1.2GW) plus 2 GW of wind (x 33% = 55% of 1.2 GW). But we'll need a lot of storage, let's get over 4 days of it: 100 hours.

So, that's $5B in storage, $4B in solar, and $2B in wind, we're up to $11B project cost. Round up to $12B, for exactly $10/watt as a planning figure.

I don't believe the fraction of women wanting 0,1,2 babies has changed. The number wanting 3 has declined a bit.
But it's easy to figure out that if 10% of women either don't want or cannot have children, or ("never find the right time"), and another 10% have just one child, then 3X that many have to have 3 or more kids to balance them out.

Balance always came from the several percent that had 4+ kids. That number has collapsed from several down to under 1%. In America, Mormons used to contribute a lot of 4+ child families, this vanished a generation ago:
https://religionnews.com/2019/...

So, you can't beat on women for "not having kids". Most have not changed from the number their mom and grandmom produced.

The rest have looked at a kid costs $300K over 20 years, sort of like your housing costs. And decided to raise 3 kids in a $900K house rather than 4 kids in a $600K house. That's the tradeoff.

I was watching I think diary of a CEO who has a guy on studying this stuff for a long time.
He said the cause is primarily women delaying having their first child or marriage.
He said we need to promote family first then career.
If a woman builds a career in her 20s, She actually becomes much more selective about men by 30, but a small pool of available men so may never partner thus much less likely to have kids.
He said statistically, the chance of a 30yr woman having any children is 50%, regardless of country.

My copy of Petr Beckmann's "The Health Hazards of NOT Going Nuclear" is at least that old, and dog-eared. For decades, I arm-waved about the possibilities of nuclear, the incredible costs of coal and carbon. That goes back before CO2 was a villain. Ash and particulates were bad enough.

But. I just don't see the money, any more. For a long time, I thought "If only they'd build them right, stamp them out like cookies, only a few designs" or "The next generation will be completely walk-away safe, that'll do it", were going to make it work.

But, I'm an engineer. My job was always to get 'er done, cheaply as possible with every quality and standard met, and now I see that coming with just renewables and storage...cheaper.

If I'm wrong, China is going to prove it before Bill Gates does. They apparently have something like 20 nuke projects a-building, with just about every magic solution being tried. Pebble beds, thorium salts, the works. And China will be the one that can measure them up against renewables costs, too.

In 5 years, we'll know. But I am not hopeful that nuclear has a prayer, not since the sodium batteries cut the price of storage yet again.

...sounds like the Exercise #1 in the first tutorial of my Operating Systems class in 1982.

I think I still have the notes in a 3-ring if Amazon needs them.

All the replies are making the assumption that the AI-independent person NEVER uses AI at work or wherever, that "using AI" is a binary choice. But my comparison is to "screen time" - it's like saying screentime-restricted kids won't know how to use computer. You can use AI all you want, as long as you skip it often enough to keep up your mental skills.

Secondly, the replies miss the point that if you don't keep up your critical thinking and analysis skills, then you won't know how to use the AI as well as somebody who does.

Drugs challenged society with addiction. Those who could avoid, or fight off, addiction continued, many were lost. Societal rules changed, as societies, not just species, evolve to resist challenge and continue to succeed.

Those who do NOT use AI heavily and keep up their own ability to solve problems will succeed over those who do not, in the long run. Parents will learn to restrict AI they way they fight "screen time" now, as they've always had to teach kids not to be lazy - a very default human choice, laziness!

Societal rules can change. It isn't "winning" a race to use a motorcycle. "Winning" at academics by using a writing motorcycle will have to acquire the same meaninglessness.

I have no fears for the species or even the society. Just for those who don't see the challenge and respond to it.

Police enforce the law without respect to the morality of that enforcement.
Look at England where there are jailings for 'hurty words'.
Limiting of state power, while often aiding criminal behaviour, is actually to stop to evil people in government abusing their power.

Yeah.
Most Australians would have never seen a drip coffee machine, and rarely instant coffee.
Everything here is high pressure expresso machines, or pod machines if you don’t care so much.
Nobody uses sugar either, because our coffee quality is usually excellent with no bitterness.

Sound similar to Royal Rifes claim he could resonate cancer cells to death using modulated RF.