I think what you are hearing is that there are lots risks to investments that could turn out to be worthless. "Capitalism" relies on those losses being widely shared through insurance and government bailouts. Insurance companies are faced with far greater risks in the future and higher costs in the short run. They aren't going to be able to make good on all their promises and its unlikely governments will be able to bail them out or the people they insured. I doubt that is the end of capitalism, but it may be the end of some capitalists' individual wealth.

To be clear, the $12,000 repair was not on the car with the loan and the value of the vehicle it was on is far greater than $12,000.

No ti wasn't. 50 years ago every department store offered their own credit cards and almost every home owner had a mortgage. And almost every farmer borrowed money to pay for feed, fertilizer and machinery to plant their crops. Virtually every one of the founding fathers of the country had debts. Credit is nothing new.

The problem with teaching people they shouldn't use it is that it means we don't teach people how to use it wisely. Its a little like our sex education. We tell kids to abstain and don't teach them how to have sex safely or use contraceptives. The result is lots of venereal disease, unwanted pregnancies, single parenting and abortions.

That is because you are an ideologue who ignores real world results. Why is it a "bad financial decision" to save money by using credit?

The Price Anderson act was designed somewhat differently.

Exactly. It wasn't as if Three Mile Island customers who picked up the tab in proportion to the amount of power they had received. Amazon,Google et. al are not going to pay the tab if the nuclear power plant they are buying power from melts down or even just shuts down without the resources to decommission it. Much less pay the costs of permanent secure storage of the resulting waste.

There is no disaster that can't be explained. The problem isn't explaining them, its anticipating all the possible ways they can happen. And every disaster is a "black swan" if it wasn't anticipated.

The idea that American's aren't capable of the same incompetence as the Soviet engineers has been amply proved untrue on numerous occasions. But its a time tested industry propaganda talking point that uses emotional appeals to patriotism to silence criticism.The problem with Chernobyl was it was designed by human engineers who not only didn't but couldn't anticipate an unlikely series of events and didn't accurately evaluate the risks.

Categories that are almost totally meaningless. Of course people have learned from experience. But there is no magic to "category three", its just a talking point for separating new plants from the failures of the old.There are a lot more similarities between those plants than there are differences. Not one of them has solved the problem of securely storing the extremely lethal waste they produce.

If production (GDP?) grows at 4% per year it will double in 18 years. At that point, you have twice as many "apples" produced and the same total amount of money available to buy them. Everything has to cost half of what it did.

The real problem is that production won't grow that fast, if at all, with a constant money supply. Because the expectation is that if you invest in a factory that will produce a 100 widgets every year the widgets it produces would be worth half as much 18 years from now under the 4% growth in GDP scenario.

The house you buy today will be worth half as much and your loan payment will buy twice as much. Do you buy a house under those conditions?

We are talking about an extremely dangerous and toxic substance. CO2 isn't. If it leaks, its no big deal. If there is an accident in transportation, its no big deal. If someone digs it up, its no big deal. If the wrong person/people get their hands on that waste they can do a lot of damage. So you not only need to store it, you need to secure it for thousands of years.

And if something goes wrong, the company that owns the plant will go bankrupt and the public will pick up the tab. The tech companies that used the power will walk away with no liability. If you made the customers liable for those costs there wouldn't be any customers. This is the standard process where the corporation makes the money and the public gets the risk.

You are blaming credit cards for bad financial decisions. You are absolutely right that lenders of all kinds benefit from trapping people in debt and credit cards are no different. Because they are widely used they are the most common debt trap. The key isn't to avoid credit, its to avoid debt traps. Payday loans and pawn shops are certainly no better than a credit card.

We pay our credit card off each month largely by putting the cost on our credit card. By the time we pay the bill we have already added almost a months worth of expenses on the credit card that will be on the next statement and won't have to be paid for another month. Its essentially a permanent loan.

Could it be a trap? Yes. If for some reason we couldn't pay the bill we would have two months worth of debt on the credit card and we would be paying interest on that and all of our new daily expenses. This often happens when people lose their job and can't pay the bill. But the alternative is that they can't pay rent or buy food. The alternative to using a credit card is less money in the bank in an emergency, not more.

We just put a $12000 car repair on our credit card. The alternative would have been to sell stock in our retirement accounts and pay taxes on the disbursement. Putting it on the credit card allowed us to have the time to arrange a home equity line of credit. We will still have to pay that off, but we can do it without the loss of income in our retirement accounts and the extra taxes. In short, the credit card gives us an immediate solution and the time to arrange a more optimal one.

The real problem with credit cards is the revolving debt. Putting new debt on the card even as you are making payments on past debt means you are still paying interest on everything you ever charged. Those old purchases are still in the balance you are paying on. If you hadn't paid for it on your card, the balance would be lower by the same amount as you paid. That means that lunch you put on your credit card several years ago is still getting paid for if you never paid off the balance in the meantime. Its that revolving nature of credit card debt that is the biggest trap.

Paying interest isn't any different than any other expense. Its part of the cost of whatever you buy on credit. We have a loan on our car that we pay 2% interest on. We have certainly made more than that from our savings. But we paid off the mortgage on our house that was going to be 8%. But we certainly wouldn't have paid if off if it meant leaving a balance on a credit card at 30%.

Credit card one should be used for everyday purchases and provide you with useful rewards. This credit card balance gets paid off every month and its limit, whether self imposed or by the card company, should be the amount you know you will be able to pay off. If you have two paychecks each month, limit the balance to the amount of one check. That guarantees you will have the money available to pay the balance when it comes due.

Credit card two should have the lowest interest rate you can find and the largest credit limit you can get. This is the credit card you use to borrow money. If you have an emergency you use this card while keeping card one's balance manageable. That way you still aren't paying interest on your daily expenses while you pay off your emergency loan.

The idea you should never use credit is stupid and short-sighted. Credit card interest rates are generally high, so if you qualify for some other form of credit you should use that instead of a credit card. But for lots of people credit cards are the only personal debt available. And it makes no sense to delay a purchase that you will use or need now just to avoid the interest cost. The question is whether it is worth the extra financial cost, because the alternative is the opportunity cost of not having it.

1) This is a new generation, remember. They have no safety record at all.

2) Chernobyl. Yes, it was a one off. Lots of different problems converged to create it. But it shows you one thing that is certainly possible. Almost as certainly, it was not the worst possible.

3) There were literally thousands of other safety problems at plants that never came together to create a disaster.

4) There is no need for nuclear power. We can easily replace fossil fuel electricity far faster, cheaper, more reliably and with little risk.

This is not about reducing emissions by replacing current energy use. This is about building industrial scale electrical plants to feed an enormous growth in the use of energy. For crypto and AI for instance. But also for industries whose overall operation and products will produce huge amounts of additional emissions.

So resources for immediate reductions in climate emissions will get hijacked for another round of new experimental nuclear reactors. Likely with all the hidden (and not so hidden) public subsidies, cost overruns, delays and lack of reliability that has come to be associated with commercial nuclear power. But it will put money in investors pockets. Gates and the other tech bros can't wait for their investment in the nuclear PR campaign to produce fruit in the form of profitable investment opportunities.

Bitcoin is deflationary because a fixed amount of currency is inherently deflationary. Deflation is caused by there being a decrease in currency relative to economic activity. So if economic activity increases and the supply of currency remains the same, you have deflation.

A simple (and grossly simplified) example. There are 10 people with 10 dollars each and 10 apple sellers with 10 pounds of apples. If the apple sellers set their price at $1 per pound the buyers can buy all the apples at $1 per pound. The next year the amount of currency hasn't increased. There are 10 people with 10 dollars each. But the apple producers all doubled their production so they each have 20 pounds of apples to sell. To sell all of them, they need to set the price at $.50 per pound. That is deflation even though the supply of currency has remained static.

Economists fear deflation more than inflation because the inevitable result of that deflationary condition is a downward spiral in economic activity. There is less advantage in investing since future prices will be lower and there is an advantage to waiting since the cost of investment will decline in the future. There is an advantage in not buying things now because they will be cheaper in the future.(The apple buyers decide to wait a year since the ten dollars they save now will buy twice as many apples next year.)

The issue with government borrowing, like the issue with any borrowing, is how was the money spent. Virtually every successful company in the world is in debt. The folks who talk about the debt are almost always making an argument against spending they don't approve of. Its tough to find one that wants to raise taxes to deal with it and none that think we should cut government services that they find useful.

We seem to be talking about different things. He claims that we can produce the same amount of energy at less cost. Theoretically that would reduce the GDP because the energy is worth less than the energy it replaces.

But the larger issue is the electric car problem. If you trade in your ICE car for an electric car you have not reduced emissions at all. The car you traded in will just burn gas for someone else with no change in emissions. You need to junk the ICE car to reduce emissions. But then the cost of making that change is a LOT higher and not many people will make it. The same is true of the larger emissions picture. Solar is cheaper than burning coal, but often not enough cheaper to account for the cost of junking an existing coal plant. So when you set the standard that reducing emissions has to have an economic benefit whether its corporate bottom lines or GDP, you have set us up for failure.