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.

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.

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.

Don't talk about productivity or innovation, talk about the general, widespread, median prosperity? Can Germany afford good schools, are kids going hungry in France? These are the measures I care about.

You're talking about measures that INVESTORS care about, and I'm not one.

I just read a dissertation by Terry Chu, a doctoral candidate in Toronto; it was about how different the COVID infection rates were in districts that read mainly Chinese media, and our media. Far worse for us. It turns out the Chinese media mainly wrote about COVID as a public health problem, a risk to life. The main Toronto papers mostly wrote about the *economic* problem, the risk to money-making.

This is another case of writing about "risks to money", not "risks to the population".

You can ask Iraq about that. The ultimate UN Treaty is the Charter itself, whose main provision is "no war", i.e. Article II.4, no use of force against fellow members.

This would all be a bit overwrought and off-topic, except Trump has broadened the exception from international law from "if I have a story about a nuclear threat", to "If I feel that we signed a bad trade deal and I want to throw it in the garbage on a whim"...even for trade deals HE signed a few years ago.

"International Law" now means just about nothing. What's Canada going to do with that lawbreaking? Take it to a US court?
Iraq could theoretically have done that over the Iraq War, too ... hah. Americans are just finding out now how that feels, to have no appeal to justice.

Never mind "jet lag"; this is proof positive that moving your body a single time zone is bad for your health.

I remember the fanciful suggestion, months back, where AI was going to scan millions of CCTV images just looking for crime in the real world.

But, very obviously, that's hard, and scanning the cyber world of bank and corporate transactions, and numbered corporations and real-estate flips, is much, much easier: it's just scanning a flow of bits for patterns found to be related to frauds and other white-collar crimes, in the past. Could AI scanning of all bank loans and Credit Default Swaps, and leveraging, have spotted the Global Financial Crash before it happened?

Oddly enough, the Masters of the AI Universe have never suggested watching their own economic class for crime, to my knowledge.

If a Canadian engineering firm designs something to be built in America, nothing crosses the border but information. Specifications one way, blueprints flow the other. The work is taxed in the country of sale, where the customers are. It's always been that way, on both sides.

This is just a computer doing some work in America (and we all know the actual computer may be in Sweden), work that is sold as a service by Americans, to Canadians. It's no different than the specs and blueprints. A query is sent to America, services are performed, results are sent back to the customer in Canada.

And it's a friggin' THREE PERCENT TAX. God, quit whining. You got away with no-tax for years, and never should have.

The best intel I got was from David Roberts "Volts" podcast, where he had on a genuine "China Expert" who has reported full-time on their business news for a long time. That guy pointed out that you can't get anything done in most provinces without appeasing the 'boss' of that province, generally the actual political head.

And a lot of those guys own coal mines, so you can't get your solar project approved without also putting in a coal plant. A lot of the power plants are solar with coal "backup", and a lot of those are barely turned on - just a few months of winter, say.

So, yes, they "build a coal plant every week" but at low capacity factors, so the coal usage can actually go down.

The metallurgical use is expected to decline sharply in the 2030s, even if no better process is found, simply because their building boom is over and a lot of it was for rebar.

I used Excel heavily, with longish macros, do be able to program at all (in Engineering, not IT, not allowed any development tools), and was able to write a lot of what (were not then called) "apps" - specialty programs that did one thing. Custom reports and updates, mostly; A button would refresh a pivot table directly from Oracle database; another would put changes back in to Oracle, after data filtration.

Calc is pretty lame at many things that Excel really had nailed down well, 20 years back. Casually tossing of Macros that do database hits or invert pivot tables is just easier in Excel.

Thing is: IT Dept. HATED ALL THAT.

IT totally hated user programs of any kind, even when they were far more stable and reliable than their solutions. Even small ones that did one thing.

My solutions were always up for being replaced by some more-difficult usage of their Big Solutions, like PeopleSoft or the Formark Document Management system. Only the fact that they were so slow to deliver - by the time they'd started the project in earnest, the business needs would have changed; I'd adapt my Excel macro solution in a few days, and they'd be back to square one on a year-long process - kept my solutions going for years.

So, the bad news is that you won't be able to do some of the cool power-user solutions with Calc that you could with Excel; the good news is that your IT department will be happy about that.