While your points are good, this looks like negligence to me. So, yeah, our "justice" system needs reform, but that facility should be made to change it's practices. (Not that I'm sure this decision will cause them to do that.)

Remember kids, when you want to understand at a very basic level what an act does, take the name and turn it to its opposite. The Clarity Act is -- without knowing anything else -- much more likely to be about leagalizing obfuscation than any else.

The problem is that TMI was NOT a really bad disaster. It was frightening, and could have been bad. Actually, though, it was quite contained. But the more reactors you have, the greater the chance of a really bad disaster. If one of these is small enough to be thrown around by a tornado, you have new possibilities of a really bad disaster. (I didn't check. I assume it's too heavy. But perhaps it could be broken open.)

OTOH, smaller reactors have a smaller "worst possible case". I'm not really convinced that they're a good idea, but I could be. (If it's intended for use in space, what happens if there's a catastrophic launch explosion? That might be a good use, if they can handle the heat, but I'd prefer that the fuel be mined on the moon.) Low probability accidents that are possible WILL eventually happen. (Or at least one should plan that way.)

It's a new model, so the only way to really know whether it's safe or not is to try. But modelling gives VERY useful indications.

WHY is it wonderful news? The reports I've seen say that small reactors are less efficient than larger reactors and have increased chance of dangerous results (though the size of the danger is smaller).

Just asserting that it *is* wonderful gives me no reason to believe you.

I "sort of" agree. But my estimate of this is low enough (cost-including-pollution vs benefits) that I don't think it should be subsidized including being granted favorable legal treatment. In fact I'd be in favor of eliminating bankruptcy protections for any damage it causes.

Distributed power means having 2-3 orders of magnitude more power sources than with centralized systems. That increases the likelihood of an accident by the same factor.

In the US, we have already had near-disaster level nuclear accidents with about 100 total plants. Let's be generous and say that only one was really bad, TMI. That's a 1% failure rate where "failure" means the potential for disaster-level accident. If you want to remind yourself of what disaster-level accidents look like, recall what happened in Ukraine at the Chernobyl power plant, which was caused by human error. And recall that TMI was also caused by human error.

With 2-3 orders of magnitude more nuclear plants at 1% failure rate, that means 100-1000 nuclear disasters in the US, unless, somehow, we are able to engineer plants that are 2-3 orders of magnitude safer, and can find operators that make 2-3 orders of magnitude fewer bone-headed mistakes. As an engineer, albeit a non-nuclear one, I find that a daunting challenge. Yes, we as a society are capable of manufacturing at six and seven nines, but that's when we have lots and lots and lots of practice making things. Right now, nuclear plants only have two nines, with most of the relevant design and construction experience aged out. There aren't enough power plants to be made to develop that expertise, and we'll have plenty of disasters along the way as we learn, where disasters have centuries-long consequences.

So distributed nuclear power? No. Frelling. Thank. You.

I didn't mean to claim that I though trade secrets in code were a good thing, merely that they were a reason a company might not want to open their source code. Patents are not such a reason. (Also, I don't believe software patents should be valid. Copyright, yes. Trademarks, yes. Trade secrets, yes. But software should not be patentable. [And copyrights should have a much more limited duration.])

You left out "trade secrets". That would be plausible if the software were sufficiently innovative.

That's "tool using", not "tool making", but I wouldn't be surprised if dogs could to simple tool making. A cow was recently documented making a backscratcher.

If rolling a styrofoam ball is using a tool, adapting a towel to a flyswatter is making a tool. I'll admit that I've never met someone who was that limited. Everybody used to be able to whittle something, if not something fancy, but I think that knives are now generally not used that way. I don't even know if rubber bands are still used to launch folded paper (which is multiple instances of tool making).

I've never met a human who couldn't make a tool. Not a complex tool, but just a tool. Complex tools are a lot more difficult, but anyone who can adapt a towel to a flyswatter can make a tool.

To a constitutional literalist, much of what the federal government does is illegal. Unfortunately, the Constitution, if literally interpreted, would not work in a large society with fast transportation and fast communication. It was written for a country that was 90% rural, and where it could take weeks to travel to Washington, DC. It was also written for a country where most of the decisions affecting citizens were LOCAL. Town or county level.

And, yes, the government has clearly drastically altered to interpretations put on many sections, and ignored others. This was necessary because the Constitution is too difficult to amend. (Perhaps they would have done it anyway, but that's a separate argument.) E,g, there is no valid basis in the Constitution for any law either enabling or regulating a corporation. The founders generally didn't trust corporations, and to the extent that they were permitted, thought that they should be regulated a the state level or lower. Some of them thought that corporate charters should be for limited periods of time...but just imagine trying to build a transcontinental railroad without standardized legal corporate laws. (It's been done in other areas, but it sure wasn't easy.)

Exactly. Just because a design is new with shiny gadgets does not mean it is automatically better than what has been previously on sale.

The sooner the newer generations understand this idea is nothing more than pure marketing hype, the sooner we can break away from and reject the enshittification.

While true, that's like saying dirt can't exist without gravity.

Capitalism existed long before markets existed, and markets existed before people did. Fish cleaners staking out a site for their business in the ocean is a market. An amoeba storing resources for later use is capitalism in action. (I.e. it's getting stuff now for later use, accumulating capital.)

Most of the things that people attribute to capitalism are only the property of one "dialect" of capitalism. And corporate capitalism is itself a cluster of dialects, that exist under specific legal constraints, which vary with time and place.

So, yes, markets cannot exist without capitalism, as markets are about exchanging stuff, and capitalism is, basically, "the way one handles stuff". I suppose one could rephrase that as "the belief in the way one handles stuff", which would eliminate amoebas, etc., because they don't practice belief, but the way it's commonly used doesn't seem to imply belief.