Oh no, I think shareholders deserve to be responsible for the actions of the corporations they invest in. I'm giving you parts of the story you're asking for and then you're making assumptions about what I believe based on things you didn't ask about, and only imagined. I'm not responsible for shit you made up.

As the one proposing nuclear as the solution, it's very much on you to provide the solutions. Saying we can develop them in 10, 20, 30 years... We need to be addressing climate change now.

If the solutions don't exist today then they are already too late.

As for standardized designs, that's what was tried in France, among other places. It wasn't significantly cheaper.

70% of all middle class jobs have been eliminated by automation

We're running out of work, and there's nothing on the horizon to replace what we're automating. That was supposed to be a good thing, but we're not socially or emotionally prepared to deal with it.

And most of them did it to themselves. Many of them had no business creating their own streaming entity in the first place - they didn't have the existing content library to support it, nor did they have a reasonable chance of creating enough good-enough new material to maintain it. But they saw how popular Netflix was and thought "some of that is our own content already... how hard can it be?"

? It's not a fusion rocket.

It's a fission rocket - bloody close enough.

additionally, have you factored the weight and storage space lost on the fusion rocket, to make room for 2x the fuel,

It's an ISP of 5000, it doesn't matter.

If you want to get there quickly, you're always loading it fully with fuel. The only difference is in the transfer time. All of them are "very fast", just varying degrees of "very fast".

It's like trying to say we should only fly airplanes on the couple days per year when the jet stream is strongest. It's such an immensely stupid idea.

1) the 'now 2 months' is down from the 'best time of 6 months', caused by mars being literally closer to the earth.

That's not how Hohmann transfers work. Just stop. And a minimum energy transfer to Mars is 9 months anyway, not 6.

In order to achieve the 2 month travel time, it must launch WITHIN THE LAUNCH WINDOW.

Get this through your head: There Are No 'Launch Windows' With Nuclear Propulsion. You don't leave a craft that can travel to Mars a matter of months sitting idle rusting away rather than repeatedly ferrying back and forth, just because some times the trajectory is somewhat longer and others it's somewhat shorter.

There are launch windows with minimum energy Hohmann transfers because that's what you need to have Mars be at the right place when you intersect its orbit. It takes roughly the same amount of energy to intersect Mars's orbit regardless of when you launch a Hohmann transfer, but unless you time it right, Mars won't be there. Launching at any other time requires more dV to dogleg it - and dV is dearly bought when it comes to chemical rockets. It isn't dearly bought with nuclear rockets. So launch windows simply don't apply to them. You launch on an elliptic which doesn't terminate at Mars' orbit, aka you applied more delta-V than was necessary to get out that far, but that's happening by definition if you want to get there faster. A minimum energy elliptic can only intersect Mars orbit opposite its starting position, but the higher the energy of the transfer, the more rotated the interception point is.

I will repeat: your capital cost is in your rocket. You're not going to leave it sitting around waiting for 2 1/2 years when you could do 10-ish trips during that timeperiod, just because some are longer than others and some somewhat shorter, and thus raise your capital cost per kg tenfold. They're all varying degrees of "short", and you have flexibility; you're launching on all of them. Unless you're an utter moron who likes throwing away 10x more capital at a project. You do not have to intersect the planet at a specific location on its orbit in opposition to your starting point when you apply more than the minimum dV.

since the ships ARE NOT THOUSANDS OF KM APART, due to ALL LAUNCHING IN THE SAME WINDOW

Launching just days apart in the same window (which again, THERE ARE NO WINDOWS), they're MILLIONS of kilometers apart. Do you not even know how far Mars and Earth are apart, or can you not divide a travel distance by the number of days of the trip?

And for the last goddamn time, the exhaust doesn't even remotely resemble a collimated beam, even if it did it would still be orders of magnitude weaker than ambient radiation, and even if it wasn't all you had to do was microscopically off-angle it. This is such a stupid line of discussion.

That might not be true. There are still a lot of ancient algorithms in AI that might be improved with large datasets. In particular I think combining a knowledge base (like Cyc) with an LLM might be particularly fruitful.

They don't lower efficiency all that much and they work fine.

This is the trouble with conservatives. If the first and most obvious solution to a problem doesn't work you declare it unsolvable, even when it's been solved for ages. You guys did the same thing with windmills in the cold. Denmark had a good laugh at you lot for saying their windmills didn't work in winter.

Good job listing out the terminal velocity of some hail. Adding a little factoid like that makes your entire post sound more convincing. It's a neat trick. Did you know they're teaching kids in California Media Literacy now? Makes me wonder how much longer neat tricks like that will be around...

I know you're trolling, but anyway, libertarians are those who want money to provide police protection from slaves, and are sure that they belong in the slave owning class.

What I am is in favor of profit being attached to responsibility, rather than being predicated upon being permitted to ignore externalities.

If they connect to the national grid they've got to bring their grid up to the higher standards of safety and reliability the rest of the nation has. That way they're not just taking power they're giving it too when the other side has an issue.

The privately run power companies don't want to do that of course, because they want that money for themselves and they don't care that the grid goes down periodically. The way they run them they target marginalized communities that don't have the political capital to demand better. During the rolling blackouts they literally kept the power on in the finance districts while shutting it off to some hospitals. Had lots of excuses why and they were all bunk.

Same here, one letter from the ISP and I signed up a VPN right there, never a peep since (and ironically all the streaming providers lock things down when they see you logged in over the VPN)

All those ad's for VPN's are just cover for their 90% use case, hiding your traffic from your ISP and thus the media companies.

This is magical thinking. Do you have a practical way to build them faster, without compromising safety? If China can't do it, I can't see how anyone can, but I'm always open to suggestions.

It's something we need to deal with immediately. Are there any solutions to these problems today? Because renewables are here and they work, and the only barrier to deployment is political.

People have tried, none of them have succeeded. Show us it working. I can show you serial production of wind turbines and solar panels.

I don't think such a thing is possible, at least not on a commercial scale. Again, people keep trying, and keep failing. And even if someone did figure it out, it's going to take a very long time to get that from an idea to a working commercial scale demonstration.

The build time and cost for current nuclear is bad enough, without adding on extensive R&D for new designs as well.

Those two things are not the same, and conflating them is the height of crony capitalism cuckery.

Yes, businesses exist to make a profit. That is absolutely reasonable and understandable.

The way trading happens in stock markets has turned business into a game, where the only goal is to get ever higher numbers in order to please shareholders. There is no reward for steady, reliable businesses which make a reasonable profit year after year. They have to make more money every year or they are considered failures and the stock market punishes them for not doing anything and everything to achieve that goal, no matter how antisocial or indeed self-destructive.

The problem is that once you have plenty of renewables, those times when there is not enough renewable energy become too small for a nuclear plant to be economically viable. It will end up as single digit days a year, if that. It's highly desirable to get there because it means cheap and plentiful energy, so the suggestion that we don't do it just to make nuclear viable isn't going to gain much support from consumers.

It's more likely we will use storage for that, or possibly even some fossil fuel with carbon capture/offsetting.

Nobody is terminated without notice anywhere. Giving notice is how you terminate someone.

What do you think that says?

The people you're hiring disagree with the first part; the second is irrelevant.

I've had plenty of employers with no common decency. Most of them, in fact.