Still not really the point. If by to "move away from nuclear" you mean closing existing plants early, you might have a point. However if you just mean not building new ones that it really seems like you do not. New renewables go up fast, and they are operational essentially immediately. A nuclear plant produces no power until after "first light" when it is 100% complete. A 10% complete wind or solar farm produces 10% of the power. If you only complete 70% of it then have to stop for a decade, the farm produces 70% for that decade.

Synthetic jet fuels would be a parallel goal of course. Ideally as much of aviation as possible would be swapped with electric. Using swappable metal-air primary batteries (for example aluminum-air) and and efficient flying V plane designs (which have the added advantage that they naturally have enough volume relative to weight capacity that the airlines simply can't stuff people in like sardines) has the potential to make 80% of plane routes all electric (and still just as fast as current commercial airliners). The remaining 20% would be routes that require higher altitude flights to avoid turbulence over certain mountain ranges or certain storm patterns.

I am pretty sure pretty much everyone in this discussion is aware of it though. In any case, it is a serious indictment of fossil coal (not a problem for the synthetic stuff I mentioned though, since the only elements in it would be carbon and any radioactive carbon in it would have come from the atmosphere to start with anyway), but coal wasn't really a consideration in this discussion in the first place. I will certainly concede that "it's not as bad as coal" is actually a good argument when we already have coal under consideration. So, coal being a bad idea seems like something we can all agree on.

Regardless of Hollywood context though, it's pretty much undeniable that what the original poster said about the catastrophic nature of something going wrong is correct. There is, in fact 880 tons of what they are calling corium barely kept cool by constant pumping of water underground in Fukushima right now. The place needs something like 50 megaWatts to pump and filter the water, ventilate and maintain negative internal air pressures, oh and maintain a massive zone of frozen ground! They have only just now started removing the spent fuel rods that weren't even involved in the meltdown. They can't even realistically start on the actual cleanup until what they now say will be 2037 (that is likely to be pushed back) and that job is not expected to be completed for a century.

Given that sort of thing, I think it is reasonable for someone to point out that, when a wind turbine goes wrong, the consequences aren't quite so massive or require so much trouble to clean up.

Now, some of the new designs do indeed deal with some of those problems. Like the whole thing with needing constant power to avoid a catastrophic failure, or the pooling of spent fuel into a critical mass. That's definitely a good thing if any get built, but it doesn't remove the concerns for people who have been told repeatedly that this sort of thing literally can't happen again before it happens again.

Personally, at this point, any such concerns are on the back burner for me. I think the safety questions and the waste disposal problems that have lingered for nearly a century at this point are frustrating, but they are simply not showstoppers for me. My problems with nuclear power focus primarily on speed and agility and nuclear power is not fast or agile. Renewables quite simply seem to be faster and more versatile, not to mention, until someone proves otherwise, cheaper.

As for SMRs specifically, my concerns boil down to economies of scale and essentially the square cube law. Everything suggests that SMRs produce less power per unit of pretty much everything involved. The reactor cores don't produce as much thermal energy for their size relative to larger cores in the first place. Then, while some things in the rest of the plant may scale down linearly with the size of the core, many things do not, so there needs to be more overall plant for the actual rate of power produced. Plus refueling schedules, etc., etc. Ultimately, they seem to mostly exist at this point to draw in investment. Most nuclear scientists whose careers aren't riding on this will tell you that SMRs aren't really practical except for niche applications.

That is a pretty loaded statement.. Let's not forget that the anti-nuclear stance of Greenpeace was mostly about nuclear weapons and nuclear weapons testing. Even the single guy, who isn't generally considered a "founder" (let alone multiple founders) by anyone other than himself (or all the people who quote him as the founder or multiple founders to promote nuclear power). Basically, there are 7 founders from the original committee and then 2 more who were involved in the Green Peace name and in directing the committee. Patrick Moore, the "founder" you're talking about wasn't on the committee, wasn't originally a director, didn't name the organization, and, even if he counted as a founder, would only be 10% of the founders. He was an early member and was on the first boat trip, and was an early leader and was there as the organization grew and renamed to Greenpeace. There is another claimant to being a founder, Paul Watson who formed a breakaway organization who never went pro-nuclear power. Ultimately, there are dozens of early members with similar bona fides to Moore who could make a roughly equal claim to him to be a founder. ) Moore was a guy who left Greenpeace after a dispute over chlorine policy (as a tipping point anyway, he was apparently pretty autocratic and didn't get along with people), then failed in his business and realized he could make a career out of selling himself to lobbying firms as a "Greenpeace founder". He started with promoting the clear cutting of old growth forests for logging companies. He expanded from there, eventually to nuclear power. He also moved on to climate change denial, including claims that it's actually good for the planet.

Basically he's a sellout who went into PR and "crisis management" who helps companies green wash. This is the guy who had an interview where he said you could drink a whole quart of glyphosate and "it wouldn't hurt you." to which the interviewer replied "We have some here. Do you want to drink it?" to which he replied "I'm not an idiot!" and stormed out. So, in other words, someone who literally can't swallow his own story.

Basically at present, nuclear is pretty much doomed to be relegated mostly to niches for the foreseeable future because there seem to be better alternatives.

"We should be moving away from coal" is a good argument. Absolutely we should be moving away from coal. But that argument is orthogonal to what we should be building for new power generation aside from that we shouldn't be building coal power (not fossil coal anyway, though there is an interesting argument for capturing CO2 from the ocean to make what would essentially be pure carbon synthetic coal to be used as carbon-neutral to slightly carbon-negative third or fourth tier power storage and burned for power with iron-oxides to avoid burning any atmosphere nitrogen and producing only pure CO2 as exhaust). Since the actual context was safety standards and how they needed to be tighter for nuclear because of how catastrophic things could be if things go wrong, then contrasting with coal power wasn't really appropriate.

Well, certainly you can't trust what he says or does. I was just pointing out that the claim that allies lined up behind the US and Israel against Iran was a bit odd because they didn't and Trump has been attacking them for it. He seems truly confused about the purpose of NATO and the obligations of its members.

None of which requires bypassing downloading the actual, current page in favor of whatever tokenized version the AI model has.

I explicitly said that it almost certainly isn't happening because of the lack of selection pressure.

Once again, they don't kill remotely enough birds, so there is indeed no filter. We do not disagree on that. If, however, somehow it were an issue then there are numerous existing features, behavioral or otherwise, that would be selected for. I named a bunch of them. They already exist, natural selection would just make them more prevalent. None of them are magic, they mostly fall under existing avoidance instincts.

Sure, although there is some possibility of some birds thinking they can roost on them.

I think you may have gotten it into your head that I'm disagreeing with more of what you're saying than I actually am. The only real disagreement here is about existing instincts and other genetically coded factors that would be concentrated by selection pressure if any real, significant selection pressure existed from wind turbines.

Not actually correct. License plate laws in various jurisdictions go back to at least the late 1700's.

Yes, it's crazy to believe that many police are not trained in the art of pretexting. If they use the right magic words, they can justify their actions.

As for videos, as an aside, the ones where they are yelling orders at a deaf person who isn't facing them are usually pretty heartbreaking. Just in general people apply some pretty impossible standards to people in police interactions. Quite aside from conflicting orders, basic human psychology tells you that in incredibly stressful situations like having a gun pointed at you, many people will lose the ability to comply. While it's not a pointed gun, watching videos of people walking across glass bridges over canyons shows this pretty clearly. When faced with the prospect of imminent death, even with a supposed safeguard such as "1000's have people have walked across this without falling off", or "if you just comply no one will shoot you" some people can handle it, but some people can not, they collapse, become incapable of responding to their surroundings, even freak out and violently react to people touching them sometimes. For some people, they're even fine one minute, they something breaks. Ultimately, the expectation of perfect compliance in a police action, especially with guns drawn is actually an unrealistic standard to apply across the board.

The rarity runs into a sampling problem though. There were five officers directly involved, and all took part. Now, obviously in that case there was a systemic problem, so that anecdote doesn't mean that 100% of officers everywhere would take part in those actions. It is notable though that, in virtually all of these incidents, it's not just one single random officer acting alone, but rather a group acting in concert. There are definite reasons for this aside from concluding that 100% of all officers would participate, but that means that you have to isolate the reasons why the officers in these cases don't act like randomized individuals. When people complain about these things, it's those systemic issues they are looking to address.

Also, I think you are making a mistake saying that it's "extremely rarely the fault of the police for a bad outcome". Many of the cases of bad outcomes, when carefully examined often show numerous mistakes by the police. Examining those mistakes and trying to correct them is a basic part of quality assurance.

It's weird that you read that statistic and appear to think: "Yikes, that's a lot of people attacking the police" while I look at it and say "what the hell were the other 60% doing that they were shot for?"

If it hasn't happened already, it seems like it's bound to. Of course, when it does, no matter the actual situation, someone, or many someones will explain how it's entirely the fault of the completely innocent person because they didn't comply and never wonder why a completely innocent person suddenly apparently turned into a dangerous desperado who had to be shot entirely through their own fault.

I think it's pretty clear that this system is not random and it's not just using the pure URL as a cue. It is actually browsing for the website, just not on the actual servers, rather the compressed copy that exists in the AIs model. It regurgitates that and fills in and reinterprets the missing detail. So, this is more like you dial a number, then it looks up whose number it is and all the people who could be answering the phone, then simulates that person using whatever information it has in its model about that person.

The fact of the matter is that it sounds a lot like it is actually loading the website, just not directly from the server. This is just another form of caching. AI models are mostly just a lossy way of compressing the input data, which includes basically the whole web. It's highly unlikely this is creating a web site from scratch, it's just coughing the compressed data about that site up from the model and filling in and/or re-interpreting. Yeah, whoever thinks this is useful is an idiot.

Of course they have it. Every animal has a whole set of built in behavioral biases that are concentrated over time by natural selection. Flying and running are complex activities, but birds can (mostly) fly automatically at maturity (and if they can't the parents provide the reinforcing selection pressure), and animals like antelopes can run with the herd almost instantly after birth. Flying is a very unforgiving and competitive activity and modern birds would not be able to navigate the skies, trees, competing birds, etc. without a lot of built in instincts. Birds have a whole repertoire of built in behavioral instincts that help them avoid obstacles. So much so that certain unfortunate mating combinations will lead to birds that directly fly into the ground in some species/phenotypes. So that means that there absolutely will be behavioral building blocks that would end up in preferred combinations for avoiding wind turbines... if they were such a problem that they really created population pressure. Which they don't, so it's pretty much a moot point.

You're not wrong though that learning from previous generations and communication are also ways that birds could learn to avoid dangers or be warned away from them in the moment. Still though, flocks of birds, for example, are not really directly lead by experienced leaders. There is some navigation bias from experienced birds in a migratory flock, for example, but most flock movements are highly reactive and instinct driven with the individual birds acting as cellular automata.

You are though, almost certainly wrong with "that is not the case". I mean, just for a start, to be right you would have to prove a negative. I think you're partially conflating natural selection at the level of existing phenotypic features with full on evolution and the emergence of completely novel traits. Completely novel traits certainly can and do emerge, but there's also a lot of re-use in natural selection. There's a big, pre-existing toolkit of tools that mostly don't go away but just stay dormant if they aren't a metabolic burden to hold on to. For example, a common example of natural selection is moths that rapidly became darker for camouflage on soot stained trees in the industrial revolution. It wasn't due to full on mutation, just selection for phenotypic variations.

So, in birds, you would probably see adaptions of existing traits for avoidance of certain patterns. Also possibly a sharpening of avoidance instincts for the wind turbine blades that would just be a variation on the same instincts for avoiding, for example, hawks swooping down from above. It would vary from bird to bird. For example a lot of raptors don't watch ahead during flight, they watch down, looking for prey, but some look up and ahead more during flight. That behavior would be selected for. Some also have faster visual processing for motion than others, so that blades on a wind turbine are less blurred and that would be selected for. For all birds, there is a simple instinct to be afraid of anything new or unfamiliar. Birds with that fear would simply be more afraid of wind turbines when they first see them, so they would approach them less. Then there are a whole set of instincts related to understanding turbulence and wind patterns. Those change around wind turbines, so birds whose instincts make them more cautious about such turbulence would be selected for. Birds detect infrasound and use it to avoid storms, etc. The same instinct would also divert them away from wind turbines and would be selected for. Ground nesting birds already instinctively avoid power poles as an adaptation of their instinct to avoid places predators are perceived to perch. Nesting further from very tall poles would be selected for. Not to mention that there's clearly an instinct there for generally avoiding poles of a certain size that would be selected for when it specifically avoids extremely large ones. Those are just some of the obvious ones. Obviously there are a lot more less obvious ones that would contribute. Obviously though, for selection pressure to work, it has to provide a real survival advantage over not strengthening those attributes and wind turbines don't provide that, which is something I think we definitely all agree on.

Well, I would have used Modus Operandi, but some people get fussy when you use Latin prhases, no matter how well known they are. I suppose I could have just said M.O. In any case, rather than waste the energy on that, you could have just answered the question, which I note you didn't. I suppose of course that it's only fair to directly answer your questions, though I know you'll never even make an attempt to do anything for my questions other than deflect.

In fact, very many people in fact do hate this President so much. Now, not everyone hates him, there are plenty of people who simply object to the things he does without emotion, but for many, hate does in fact come into it. The point though is that it is not irrational hatred. They don't object to the things he does because they hate him, they hate him because of the things he does. It feels silly to provide examples because there are so, so many reasons, but if we just look in the news right now, there's him having people prosecuted for supposedly vandalizing the reflecting pool to deflect from the fact that he hired a vendor without a proper vetting process that utterly screwed up the job. So, to return the question there to your court, do you consider having people arrested and prosecuted to protect your ego and public image to be problematic, and is it not a valid reason to potentially hate someone? As another example, as leader of the executive branch, he ran both sides of a lawsuit and tried to award himself nearly two billion dollars of our money and a permanent exemption on tax audits for himself, his businesses, and his family through a rapid settlement on a case that was being dismissed. Is that not problematic? Is trying to steal from us for personal gain not a reason to hate someone?

Make no mistake, this is not in any way a claim that previous or future Presidents are perfect. They all do things that are objectionable and problematic and require some degree of weighing up the good and the bad. To some degree you also have to consider whether they should be considered personally culpable rather than just a functionary carry out a job. For example, I can't think of a President in recent memory who hasn't had people killed. Some in war, but also, effectively anyone on federal death row, where the President has the ability to commute their sentence, or people who have been killed extra-judicially, or people who died less directly as a result of their policies. Determining culpability there is tricky because the President is an administrator of a huge system that does a lot of things and that really runs largely independently of the President. Sometimes though, their behavior is so egregious and direct that it simply isn't reasonable to say that various outcomes are not their fault or their direct intention or excusable as just the day to day operations of a system that they technically control, but aren't really omniscient about. Trump is quite unique among modern Presidents for the sheer volume and scale of such offenses.

So, I'll ask you again, can you try to think about this objectively and honestly name three things Trump has done that might cause the original poster to not like Trump. You can defend or excuse those things. Point out how you think they are wrong about disliking Trump for those things or how they're actually mistaken, etc. if you like. I am not demanding that you agree, I am simply demanding that, if you're just playing a game that you can't think of anything that some people might not like about Trump that you stop playing the game or, alternately, if you really, truly don't know, you educate yourself a little.

So, you are not completely ignorant about electricity. How on Earth did you ever end up with such confusion about whether 7GW was "annually or daily"? Was it just a moment of extreme mental confusion?

What fusion reactor are we talking about here? Tokamak (which design, torus or spherical), stellerator, FRC, inertial confinement, heavy ion, magnetized target, z-pinch, other existing, as-yet undesigned? You're saying that all of these have parts that are "pretty much the same" with interchangeable, replaceable "liners"? I mean, you haven't even specified if it's tritium-deuterium, deuterium-deuterium, deuterium-helium-3, or proton-boron. Are you breeding fuel using the fusion reaction? Heck, how big is the reactor? Is it the size of a shipping container, or thirty meters by thirty meters by thirty meters? Are people going in to change these liners or robots? Are they solid, liquid metal, other? You must recognize that you've made an extraordinary claim.

Sooo..... the parts for the completely hypothetical power-generating fusion reactor that doesn't exist are standardized and interchangeable, but the parts for existing wind turbines are a huge problem. I mean, even without the stuff about fusion reactors, this is a truly ridiculous complaint. This is not a new problem for large pieces of industrial machinery from multiple vendors. Clearly interchangeable parts and standardized designs produced by multiple vendors are desirable and I never claimed otherwise, but at the same time, it is not a unique criticism of wind turbines, nor is it some sort of showstopping problem for wind power. Obviously you completely ignored what I wrote about it in the previous post, especially where you picked up this obviously planted "on message" talking point. Suffice it to say that if that's your latest attack against renewables, you're really, really scraping the bottom of the barrel.

Yes dear, I suppose you won't be able to watch TV right now because the wind isn't blowing. I wasn't calling 7 GW a big deal or not a big deal. I will point out that you seem to have lost the context here. The original poster pointed out 7 GW in the context of two countries, one with a population 4X bigger than the US, and another with a population and another with a population 32X smaller. So, what they were trying to show that China is out-installing the US by about 4 to 1, and Sweden by 9 to 1. In other words, they were trying to say that the amount the US is installing is relatively small. Somehow you seem to have reversed that and seem to think that the original poster was saying that was a big deal. Put in perspective, if the US was installing as much as china, then that would be about 2.8% of US electrical production becoming wind power per year and, if it were installing as much as Sweden per capita, that would be 6% as much per year. So if the US were installing that much, then, just from renewables, the US grid would be 100% renewables in 12.5 years. Or, if other renewables were scaling at the same rate, 5 years. So, basically your take on this seems to have gotten the point completely backwards. That is why I went into 'teacher" mode. You seemed to have completely failed to understand basically that entire original post.