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Comment Re: Tablets in restaurants safe or not? (Score 4, Funny) 58

The union rules say 6 hours per day, and if everybody stuck with it that it'll be fine. Unfortunately some parents don't stick with the plan and spoil it for everyone childless people are often left alone dining in a silent restaurant with no screaming children for company. That means that some of us parents have to spend ten hours a day just moving from restaurant to restaurant and looking for people trying to read quietly. No rest for the wicked, as they say.

Comment Re:Doctor Evil 2.0 (Score 1) 270

But seriously, nuclear power is the way to go

That position is at least grounded in reality.

It really isn't. Firstly the simple fact is that all nuclear reactors take too long to set up, whilst wind or solar could be got running at decent rates this year. Secondly, you missed the bit about "modular" (small) reactors, which is basically talking about future technologies which they hypothetically hope in future will reduce the cost of nuclear, but where all tests so far have failed and every technology tried turned out to be worse than the bigger older, scaled for maximum engineering gain reactors.

Now is the point to simply keep building out renewables towards the scale that is possible and then later, as some of the nuclear reactors planned now come online, battery costs can begin to be optimized using them. Concentrating on very distributed wind and well connected grids is a part that cannot lose.

Comment Re:So since you got kicked out of the non-profit - (Score 3, Interesting) 77

And it turned into a for-profit against your wishes, the next AI company you started, xAI, is a non-profit, right?

So, if you tried to do it one way and it didn't work out that way, you'd do exactly the same thing again? Right?

There is a serious interest for all of us. rug-pull-ware, where the developer starts off completely open, gets the community to test and validate their software everwhere and then close up once they begin to see commercial success is bad for everyone. It takes away from the community what it created. It slows down the creation of alternatives. It makes people less likely to contribute to other software. It encourages more rug-pulling.

Musk, has uh, his problems, but this is one we want him to win.

Comment Re:Ideologically fueled insanity. (Score 3, Insightful) 270

The "free market" is only allowed to work if (for example) small bakery shops run by grandma and grandpa compete with each other, until one files bankruptcy - so it can be bought up by the big chain who owns already 43% of the bakeries in town ... or by the other chain that owns 41% ... or best case: by the guy who owns 7 shops and now is lucky enough to buy shop number 8.

No worries: that little business will be soon out of business, too.

Comment Re:Ideologically fueled insanity. (Score 1) 270

Do you have examples where offshore wind produces cheap energy?

"cheap" is slightly the wrong question. The thing which produces the cheapest electricity is South facing solar panels. The problem with them is that they produce it at the time when all the other south facing solar panels are also producing lots of cheap electricity. If you face your Solar panels East and West, they produce a bit less electricity, but it comes at a time when it's more vauable so it helps more people and, if you have a variable input tariff which takes demand into account, you will actually get more money for that smaller output.

Offshore wind in Scotland produces enough electricity at times when other sources are not so easily available that it is helping to reduce prices on the grid. Likely some of the new large American farms would be able to do the same.

Comment Re:Doctor Evil 2.0 (Score 5, Insightful) 270

Absolute NONSENSE! .. We in the UK have some of the most expensive electricity on earth! Our Green endeavour has been a disaster for paying customers! Most of us can't even afford to heat our homes.

That's because we're paying the cost of nuclear and gas, not because of Wind. Hinkley point C, delivering just 3 GW just went up to £35 billion.

If that same money had been invested into a new super capacity transmission line from Scotland to England and increasing offshore Wind in Scotland, not only would prices fall vastly, but it would also already have been delivered.

Comment Re: Ideologically fueled insanity. (Score 2) 270

The question you are really asking is "does wind energy create cheap electricity". The overall final answer, taking into account materials and land rental and everything is that wind energy has been one of the things vastly reducing the cost of energy in most of the places where it's been taken into heavy use. Yes, wind is cheaper than the alternatives, has been falling in price and continues to do so.

Comment Re:Ideologically fueled insanity. (Score 2) 270

Wow....I thought our African politicians were corrupt, but they are rank amateurs compared to yours. Shithole country indeed....

I think that's not just an Africa phenomenom. Having seen some former Eastern block countries, I realized that their corrupt politicians were so totally amateur that they do their corruption illegally and sometimes even get caught and arrested. That almost never happens in the West.

In the West, on the other hand, they do corruption by getting directorships and so on after the event. Even if there are totally obvious links between the purchases they made when they were ministers and the companies that they then go and work for there is nothing that anybody can do about it and they will even boast about it. This happens not just in the US, but also in the UK ("revolving door"). There are some good reasons such as getting company experience into government and getting government knowledge to help companies develop, but those are allowed to totally override any ideas of propriety.

In fact, Trump is a great case. Everybody knows that in his first term world leaders used to stay in Trump hotels or Mar-a-Lago in order to get access. The thing is, the law (as currently interpreted) doesn't cover that case and so he gets away with it fine. Insider trading appears to go on with stocks from people on all sides of the US house. When, in his second term, people complain that Trump's cryptocurrency is obviously a way to give him bribes, it seems all they are actually doing is providing him with advertising.

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