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.

JPEGXL really does everything webp does and so much more, and it's well thought out.

WebP isn't terrible; they are smaller than I would have guessed given that they have the container overhead, but there's no stunning argument for it. "Better than PNG for what we used PNG for." OK, true, but.

Google should just let AV1 be AV1 and focus on pushing HEVC out of the market with it. The real opponents of progress have left the image space and are mucking around with video and VR now. Google has the capability to do something about this and foster innovation.

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.

But the cost of building this installation sounds like it would be prohibitive unless you're using slave labor and letting a lot of those slaves die.

Even then I don't know if you could pull something like this off. This sounds like a scam.

Keep in mind if you are in North America then nuclear is basically a scam right now anyway unless you're restarting an old reactor. That's because the investment cost for wind and solar even with the current administration interfering with your deployment is substantially cheaper than any nuclear reactor you could possibly build, again even with the administration looking the other way on safety.

Japan might have a reason to fire up their nuclear reactors because they have so little viable land. But the one thing America has a fuckload of is land. So it just doesn't make economic sense to build a nuclear reactor in America.

I'm not quite sure why so many people over 50 though are so hung up on nuclear. I guess it was the future when you were a kid and it's a future that never happened so I think a lot of old farts are obsessed with it. Libertarian types seem to be really really into nuclear too and I don't understand why. Maybe the small footprint size of the reactors seems more individualistic? I don't know but it's all kind of pointless when we can just build out solar or wind installations.

Because there is no way car companies and airlines would ever allow it.

California tried and Elon Musk came in with a bucket of money and discredited transportation ideas and shut it all down. In fairness he also had help from airline CEO.

Like most things transportation problems are social problems in disguise.

> The failure of successive COPs to agree to get rid of fossil fuels means that this is going to become necessary

Nobody believes this anymore.

Global temperatures are cyclical and the current trend is very close to the normal periodic cycle. All the "models" have failed. Sure, 95% of "Climate Scientists" believe their funding should continue but the jig is up.

If they actually attempt to blot out the sun there is no limit to what normal thinking people will do to stop them.

Fortunately they are very unlikely to get any real support for this harebrained scheme.

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.

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...

Why is it more cost effective to build a new Capitol than to build a water pipeline?

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.

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...