You're forgetting the heavy dependence on rare earth element mining used in wind and solar (and batteries), 95% of the world's supply comes from China, which requires manufacturing in China and is highly subsidized by the Chinese government. China strip mines the elements and dumps the radioactive waste that comes with rare earth elements into landfills, which the US is required to sort and cask, so China can vastly undercut prices.

The absolute irony here is the largest Rare Earth Element deposit and mine is... in California. The US only uses it for the military because it is cheaper to buy the Chinese subsidized parts, but the military rightly doesn't trust them so uses US manufacturing. The US geological survey has identified 7 more major deposits (last I checked) and potentially 2 more that may be major deposits in the Unites States. Trump's push to secure more REE deposits for the United States is hilarious. The US already has them - subsidize them in the same way China does and people will build roads to those remote deposits and mine them.

In any case, my point is Wind and Solar are not exactly free of problems including waste issues, and they do wear out over time and need to be replaced. You also often need a means of storing the energy. Not in every case, of course - my grandpa's hand built windmill and generator was pumping water before he even got electricity to the house (out in farm country, that was 1950s) and was still running in the late 1980s when he retired.

Some SMRs generating more waste from the parent is nice cherry picking, of course some will be less efficient than conventional reactors, especially any built on conventional designs. The example used is X-Energy, which uses a pebble bed fast reactor cycle that promotes what we call nuclear waste to fissile plutonium and then burns that, so in theory it will have much less waste and be able to operate much longer without refueling (X-Energy thinks 60 years). Like all Gen IV designs, it is required to be passively safe, and yes, the only non-skeptical words from OP that are true is it will require more expensive and higher enriched starter fuel - all fast reactors require this, and Russia and China are the only countries with them right now, which is why they dominate the supply. The US canceled developing one in 1994 on a bunch of false pretenses (really, the only true one was potential proliferation risk).

I'm not entirely sold that SMRs are the right direction, but I do believe fast reactors are, which is the majority of Gen IV designs, if not all of them.

If they'd developed the right type of nuclear, that is not necessarily true. During the MSRE, they actually shut the plant down every night, so yes, you can balance the grid with nuclear power. Germany chose to abandon nuclear based on really bad environmentalist input, though. IMO, it was like asking a fruit farmer for input on how to build a skyscraper.

I was a victim of studio misbehavior during the runup to GOD games changing this behavior. Publishers would force an NDA and no attribution, no credit clause. When you wanted to say I did this, I worked on this, you couldn't. Switched to business software because I was sick of being f***ed up the ass by the game and music industries. Basically, had to go into a job with zero experience with 5 years of experience. Yeah, f*you game industry. On that note, anyone need GLIDE 3D, lol. 3dfx joke, nVidia won that war.

Taiwan is effectively the rebels (Republican Forces) that defied Mao and the cultural revolution and where they fled when defeated. I'm not judging, but I didn't kill the most people ever by starvation of any regime because I hated sparrows. Thanks Mao, you win.

On the one hand, coal is thousands of jobs and voters, on the other, the worst polluting, poorest energy producing and biggest dumping of radioactive waste on consumers of any power. GO BIG COAL GO BIG COAL. MAGA, MAGA. Yeah, f*** that, I skipped pep rallies in high school by hiding in the physics lab for this very reason.

What they're capturing here is that instant coffee can capture the ideal roast-to-brew timing, then dry it out. Drip coffee has so many factors - when the beans were roasted and ground, what type of grinder was used (burr is usually best), water temperature (200F/93C for brewing, give or take), how long it was sitting on a burner after being brewed, etc. Whole beans are usually best within 3 weeks of roasting, ground beans about 3 days from breaking a flavor seal (vacuum packing helps). Try drip coffee like that vs, say, Folger's Crystals a week after opening the can. There should be no natural sourness to it, and when my mom brews ground, canned coffee, it tastes like someone added a lemon.

General AI. The AI I've programmed all had a specific task it was supposed to optimize. It wasn't very good at it, but you know, 1990s tech, lol.

AI would do great following Happy Path for IT. Non-Happy Path with no workaround documentation, ouch, fail. Going by real world experience, We had an engineer figure out a workaround and the AI failed hard. Probably 3-6 months of downtime and $500 million+ dollars of fail, so yeah... There is now a documented fix and bugfixed installer, after we reported it, but it took 6 months.

I've worked with Ford, and I totally know where they want to cut IT workers to save money, but AI will totally fail them in a couple of areas. How do I know that? I worked with Ford and GM and now work with Boeing and I know where AI totally fails in the "upgrade" (really data migration) process. Yeah, teachable, still fails to understand the bad programmer lingo in the instructions (I know what "blah" means, AI would hard fail). That said, we are automating the hell out of the process, people will probably eliminate white collar jobs before AI does. On that note, LONG way to go.

I'm more on the fence - I think AMD has a far superior CPU these days, but I still vastly prefer nVidia graphics hardware, even though I try and go back to AMD every few years. There always seems to be something just hideously broken with new features on the AMD side. Keep in mind I don't use DirectX, I use Vulkan and used to use OpenGL because I need to cross-compile. Sure it gets fixed when I file a bug report, but I shouldn't be their product tester, lol. I think AMD tests exclusively on Windows, then uses mac QA for macs, then lets Linux users be guinea pigs for the Linux driver.

America actually jumped the gun and killed its new nuclear development in 1994, for all the wrong reasons (well, ok, proliferation was a valid concern, but everything else was wrong). The IFR was pretty much no chance of meltdown, almost no waste, nearly all fuel used, on-demand power.... yeah.

Developing new nuclear technology would've been a better choice than kneejerk exiting the business, but Siemens chose to exit nuclear, probably because the government wanted to exit it, so it died there. Exiting nuclear was a horrible plan, Germany restarted multiple lignite coal plants, which are the worst polluting coal there is. Guess what spews more nuclear radiation into the environment, nuclear or lignite coal... yeah, the latter. The smoke is full of heavy metals, including radioactive ones.

They made some bets on realtime ray tracing maybe a little bit too soon. RTRT is indeed CPU bound, to some extent. It depends on the entire scene to be in memory. Pseudo ray tracing does not require that, so they approximate rays and draw not really ray traced objects. Sorry RTX, you're fake ray tracing, but it still looks good. Real time Radiosity... drools.

6'1 and 350 lbs. Oh, wait, are we just counting pounds of fat? 350 lbs. Oh shit, the CIA is at my door - 6'3, 150lbs, .00025% BMI and 500% muscle, sorry master, I strayed.

They literally are the world's biggest music conglomerate and own roughly 1/3 of the global music recording copyrights. Sony and Warner own huge chunks, as well, but Universal goes after content creators trying to bully them into signing over their content rights, even though it is fair use (and they've ALWAYS lost in the courts). What's interesting to me is, they've also gone after the original artist singing the song, which is totally not their right as all. Lyrics are published via BMI or ASCAP or some similar agency and anyone can interpret them, as long as done in a place with a license to perform them.

So my point is, the creators would have to give up at least 1/3 of their global content, and it is probably closer to 50-60% of US content. Break this bitch up, Congress.