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.

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.

With all this rushing to improve AI engines and whatnot? It's the uptime/reliability that's concerning me as much as anything else.
I've seen ChatGPT Work have multiple outages just in the short time our office started using it. And even when they claim systems are running normally? You can easily get timeouts trying to complete relatively simple requests in systems like Co-Pilot, at least using the free edition.

If I ask my co-worker to complete a task, I have a pretty reasonable assumption he's going to do that. If he fails to complete requests several times in a short time-frame? Then it's likely he'll get in trouble for that, even potentially resulting in his termination. AI should be held to an even higher standard since it's a machine.

What happens when everyone is counting on AI to do necessary parts of daily workflows and then it has an extended outage? That's like your whole workforce going on strike.

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? It's pretty clear that no one has any actual answers or little interest in being honest about the exact capabilities of AI when their bottom line depends on hype or their job position relies on prognosticating doom.

You're discounting the ability of the actor to bring something to the role that the director couldn't envision themselves. The whole point of having casting auditions is so the director can find an actor that either fits their own idea of the part or blows them away with something transformative that they could not have envisioned before seeing it. Not every actor is capable of that and not every part calls for it, but when it does happen it creates something best described as the magic of cinema. If this weren't the case, the phrase "Hello, Clarice" would be completely meaningless to everyone who reads this post, and yet there are some for whom it is not merely memorable, but evokes an entire range of emotions and even causes them to read it in a different voice. Tell me that Anthony Hopkins was just a middle man with a straight face.

...and I know from years of experience in I.T. that any time you give people the ability to do a database search, you'll get people putting nonsense in fields for testing purposes. So at least SOME of the "button mashing" and entries like "dickhead" sound to me like officers trying out the system for the first time, or experimenting because they weren't trying to conduct a REAL license plate search.

That doesn't disturb me as much as the overall problem of allowing these searches without a warrant or at least a judicial review. Even if it's decided that a license plate search doesn't rise to the level of requiring a warrant to conduct it? There should absolutely be someone reviewing the searches being done. (EG. The officer who is too lazy to properly document why he/she is doing them and consistently leaving fields empty needs to be punished.)

Eh, I think it's been well known that renewables without batteries would have troubles. That's one of the things which always bothered me about early green energy proponents: they touted the cost of solar/wind deployments but didn't include the storage necessary to make it more than a complement to traditional generation.

Up until the last few years, no one was deploying utility scale batteries, first because the technology didn't exist and more recently because it was really expensive. California is known for having really expensive electricity (and everything else) so I'm not convinced the cost issue has been completely solved.

Absolutely true for SF proper and anything to the west of the coastal range or right on the bay.

Not sure where you are, friend, but in San Jose and anything not actually on the water, 90+ in the summer is quite common. Most summers have at least a handful of 100+ days (especially places like Gilroy or Livermore).

FWIW, I've worked in Mountain View, Sunnyvale, and Santa Clara, generally between 101 and the bay, and live in south San Jose.

That ship has already sailed for Blizzard. Their present success rests entirely on par performance, but I can't think of anything they've done recently that's excited me. The only genre where someone else hasn't come along and done better is RTS, but Blizzard themselves haven't made a new game of that type since StarCraft 2. Perhaps the same could be said for MMOs as nothing ever "killed" WoW, but the player base for that has diminished significantly since its heyday even if they can keep milking what they do have.

Eventually the remaining fab goodwill will run out and they'll have nothing left. I can see why they would want a union right now with Microsoft looking for anything they can cut, but if they aren't selling enough copies a union won't save them.

Perhaps /. is using AIs to generate the summaries now and they're not much better at that than they are at running stores.

Thanks for clarifying what TFA did not. The article did seem to indicate the union could start negotiating a contract now. Does that come after being certified?

I get it. That's been the argument for over 100 years. I'm just pointing out that people are inconsistent. Progressives hate monopolies when they are a company using market power to raise prices for consumers (which is actually quite rare) but love unions when they do the exact same thing. The union is sticking it to The Man, woot!

Personally, I dislike any form of monopoly and would prefer the government stopped protecting them, be they businesses or unions. If a union can make a case that it can deliver more and better drivers than randomly hiring drivers off the street, that would be one thing. But it's not, unions don't do anything other than restrict supply.

I think you're right, it's really all about power, not monopolies per se. People feel powerless when up against a large company. In theory, they can vote with their feet or wallet but that just isn't a satisfying answer.

Could be. I read through the article and it wasn't clear to me whether there was going to be another vote to actually join the union. The impression I got was the union is now authorized to negotiate a contract. It would find it odd to negotiate a contract if the union couldn't guarantee to deliver the drivers.

But maybe that's how it works. The union and companies negotiate a contract, then the union goes to the drivers with a proposition "if enough of you join the union and accept this contract, then it goes into effect."

Ride sharing also covered far wider service areas than taxis. The canonical example was it was really easy to get a taxi in Manhattan but quite difficult in the Bronx or Queens. Ride sharing covered the non-Manhattan boroughs much better.

Financially speaking, the big innovation of the sharing economy was changing the capital structure. Taxis, limos, and rental cars were owned by the taxi/limo/car rental company, which meant they need to come up with the capital to buy them. Ride sharing used capital assets which were already available but idle. That made it much easier to launch a ride sharing company. It converted capital expenses to operational expenses.

I don't know about that. I have no doubt the union will negotiate higher wages and/or benefits. For the drivers who keep their jobs and like the union rules, this will be a win. Good for them.

This is less good a deal for people who would like to drive but can't get assigned any rides and an even worse deal for riders. Concentrated benefits, distributed costs.

They're no necessarily exclusive. However, union rules and contracts tend to come with inflexible work hour rules. I highly doubt being in a union will make scheduling more flexible.