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Comment Re:The hidden subsidies to the nuclear industry (Score 4, Interesting) 137

The real costs are not being addressed

The costs of nuclear are addressed all the time.

The problem is the nuke fanbois either ignore the costs or hand-wave them away: "Nuclear is only expensive because of protests and regulations. Next time will be different. Blah, blah, blah."

Even without considering the costs of waste and accidents, nuclear costs four times as much as wind or solar and has a 20-year lead time.

Comment Re:Not just there (Score 2) 137

Tens of thousands of barrels of toxic waste were dumped near Catalina Island, but the vast majority are non-radioactive chemical waste.

DDT leaking from the barrels is a much bigger problem than nuclear waste and shows up in the local sea lion population.

Anyway, there's nothing realistic that we can do about it since any attempt to retrieve the barrels will likely make things worse.

Comment Re:Which is it? (Score 0) 123

A few days ago there was a story about how an AI store was failing horribly. It can't do that, but at the same time will destroy us?

Not "at the same time". You're conflating what AI can do now with what it will likely be able to do in a year or five, or 20.

Amodei and others are worried about what AI that doesn't yet exist may do, not about what current-generation AI can do. AI is getting better, very quickly, and unless there's some blocking obstacle that no one has been able to identify will at some point become far, far smarter than humans, individually or collectively. So before that happens, we need to figure out how to make sure that superintelligent AI wants to help us, and wants to do it in the right way.

Comment Re:TFA has no supporting data (Score 1) 198

The rebates on the batteries you earn over time, and to do so you must export some of your stored battery power back to the grid during peak hours.

Is this actually a substantial amount of energy? I'm in Utah (Rocky Mountain Power) and RMP also pays me to use my batteries... but the amount of energy they draw is tiny. 8-10 times per week they draw on my batteries, but it's like 4 kW peak draw (my batteries can sustain 20 kW), and generally for less than 30 seconds, so in any given week I'm only contributing like 0.2 kWh. As I understand it, this is because RMP uses my batteries not really to "serve loads", per se, but just as grid stabilization; brief backfill to keep the voltage from sagging.

Obviously my batteries do serve *my* loads, which reduces the load on the grid, but that's not what RMP pays me for.

Does CA make heavier use of residential batteries to feed the grid?

Comment Re:What a moron. (Score 1) 73

Most of his donations were to Democrats, so he has no chance for that. https://time.com/6241262/sam-b...

And JD Vance called him Hitler. Trump accepts changes of heart as long as they include sufficient groveling and self-humiliation. SBF's problem is he doesn't currently have any money, and doesn't have a lot of friends to put up cash for him either. If SCOTUS will overturn his fine on a technicality and he can get some or all of that money back, then he'll have the cash to buy a pardon. Obviously he needs to get it done in the next 2 years, four months.

Comment Re:So what (Score -1, Troll) 16

Some place between sometimes and often - I'm not here to argue that - researchers are the first to discover.

But it's also almost meaningless to just go, "I'm such an amazing realist, the worst case happens every time."

That's not really being realist. That's just you not knowing actual things, and having an emotion.

Comment Re:Flock is building 1984 (Score 4, Insightful) 253

That's a pretty shallow(thought admittedly depressingly popular) analysis of the situation.

Being in public does leave you with no particular defensible expectations of not being observed, and possibly even remembered for a time, by assorted passers by; and typically also permits more direct tailing of people for observation purposes(subject to some, often slightly vague, threshold at which having PIs or paparazzi hunting someone remains a problem even in public; as we saw here where the police took the notion seriously enough to show up but not to do anything in particular).

What it has historically never meant, for technical reasons, was pervasive coverage and longterm retention. Which is certainly increasingly feasible with only moderate levels of investment; but is absolutely a novel development for what 'public' and 'no expectation of privacy' meant.

It's like defending the installation of a massive network of sprinklers because "you have no expectation of staying dry when you go outside; haven't you heard of rain?" Sure, nobody the weather to be sunny all the time, any more than they expect everyone to avert their eyes in public; but they would correctly consider the installation of irrigation equipment on every lamppost to be an intrusion on their ability to stay dry despite the fact that the sky has never extended them a constitutionally protected right to no rain.

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