That does not appear to be true. The BWRX-300 (the SMRs that we're building a bunch of) produces 300 MW of electricity from 870 MW of thermal power, which is about 35%, while a traditional reactor like the AP1000 produces 1,117 MW of electricity from 3,415 MW of thermal power, which is about 33%. So the SMRs we're building are more efficient than the most recent full-sized nuclear reactors that the US built.

The hope is that SMR will drive costs down farther in the future, these are the costs for the first one. The reason why Darlington's unit 1 (well, it's an existing nuclear plant, so the first of the SMR) is a bunch more expensive than units 2-4 is *because* it's the first, and then they've got a bunch of orders for elsewhere in Canada, and quite a few orders internationally. The hope is that serial production will drive the costs down a bunch, which will make them more attractive to buyers, which will help the cost more, and so on.

Solar's great, when it's viable, like in the southern US. It's not as viable here in Canada, not when day gets so much shorter in the winter, and the solar irradiance at solar noon is a lot less even in the summer. But even then, solar isn't ideal for base load. In order to account for really bad conditions over an extended period of time (many days of bad weather), you need a lot of extra storage. So you ultimately want a mix. Hydro. Nuclear. Wind. Solar. The more diversity the better. Here in Quebec, we're around 94% hydro and 5% wind. Ontario's about 55% nuclear, 25% hydro, and the rest a mix of gas/wind/solar.

Anyway, nuclear and hydro are really the only clean options that can provide reliable and consistent base load, and hydro is highly geography dependent, so that leaves nuclear.

The latest one is Vogtle's units 3 and 4, which are Westinghouse AP1000 units, which cost $36.8 billion USD for around 2.2 gigawatts of capacity.

However, recent and upcoming Canadian plants are relevant, because the US and Canada operate a shared electrical grid (excepting Quebec and Texas, and Quebec still has connections to the US and Canada). OPG is currently building GE Vernova Hitachi Nuclear Canada (what a mouthfull) BWRX-300 SMR reactors, with four of them expected to provide 1.2 gigawatts of capacity for $20.9 billion CAD (or $14.8 billion USD), and if we were to predict future costs by assuming future reactors cost the same as reactors 2-4 (as serial production) rather than reactor 1 (the first ever of its type), a similar project, four reactors plus shared infrastructure, would cost $19.2 billion CAD (or $13.6 billion USD). That is roughly two thirds the cost of the latest US reactor, per gigawatt.

Of course, the Darlington project is still fairly early on, and it's possible that costs will be over budget. However OPG does have a good track record in this regard, they recently completed a $12.8 billion nuclear refurbishment project that completed $150 million under budget and four months ahead of schedule.

They spent so long pushing hydrogen and pretending like battery electric wasn't going to happen. Now that they've finally given up on hydrogen, there's nowhere to go but up.

They boost the ISS every few months. It would come back by itself in a year or two if they stopped.

The reason to stop is that it is wearing out. Corrosion and cracks keep cropping up.

..Because MS Office has been designed from the ground up to be challenging to be compatible with. It started with a file format that was in essence the internal memory state of the program written out to disk. When they went to XML, all they really did was record that internal memory state in XML

Anyone wanting to be compatible with Office 'properly' need to implement pretty much all of the office program to render the document, and then convert the resulting render to their format.

What we need to do is to somehow make this Microsoft's problem. Make the cleanest open source office renderer the standard, define that rendering as the correct one, and if Word or Excel renders it differently, then that's a bug in Word or Excel. Or even better, make ODF the standard, and judge Office on its rendering and creating ODF formats.

I agree with you but there are different types of travelers. I'm still trying to figure out where I want to retire, so local stays make sense. But not everyone wants to experience a location as a local does, some people just want everything taken care of with 0 effort on their part.

The Howard Hughes Corp is still around. Eccentric billionaire, hands into several different sectors, unachievable promises, suspicious government contracts, all the similarities. Howard Hughes Corp does different things now compared to back in the day, but large corporations with physical presence rarely disappear completely.

Microsoft is selling business onto their software stack in the name of security. Making it so in order to access emails you have to use the outlook app, and making that app block copy/paste, and refuse to open links in anything but Edge.

Of course, people will instead access their mail through a secure browser, because no one wants Edge, so MS is trying to push businesses to lock other browsers out of outlook.com.

Surely the media would never exaggerate and sensationalize?!?!?

Sales are down. Yes, I'm sure the higher console prices aren't helping. Or the fact that we're so late in the generation. But sales aren't down by *that* much, and the game comes out in a month, and they've already sold 95 million PS5s. Selling a few hundred thousand less consoles, not all of whom would have bought the game anyway, isn't going to make that big of a difference in the game's sales. It's a small percentage difference in the number of total consoles sold. But a pirated copy of the PS5 game that runs on PC, when there isn't a native PC port? That would make a big difference.

Except console sales haven't nosedived. PS5 sales in August 2026 are around 72% what they were two years ago (so before the RAM crisis), which can just as easily be accounted for by the fact that the console launched six years ago, and they've already sold 95 million of them: we're very late in the generation. Even if sales were the same as two years ago, that wouldn't represent a very large percentage difference in the size of the install base by the time the game launches in November.

I wonder if they planned to do the PC port this soon, or if this is an urgent reaction to the rapid progress of PS5 emulators like AnyPS5. If they had released the PC port a year or two later like usual, there's a very real chance that PC players would be playing pirated copies of GTA6 on PC before the official release, hurting sales.

Who stands to gain from this outcome?
Always follow the money!

Trump is the nastiest of vengeful dirty old men. I don't think there's conclusive evidence of pedophilia however, and harping on that takes away from all the shitty and horrible things he has undisputably done.

We went through the immigration process under K-1, then adjusted status to a permanent resident. No lawyer. Many people have done this and there is information out there how to do it, but it can be outdated, especially in the current era. There wasn't a great "here's the overall workflow" back when we did it, and their probably isn't now either.

The forms have instructions, and if you read carefully (together with all reference documents) it isn't too difficult. But I'm a contract guy, most people likely will have difficulty. It would be nice for them to have an official place to ask questions and have all the relevant forms and instructions considered together.

For a more "routine" example, the forms to apply for or renew a passport for a minor are a huge pain. Not all the required documents needed to be brought to an appointment (minor passports must be applied for in person) are listed in one list as of late last year. You have to go deeper into the state department website than you probably should have to. They should just fix all forms which are confusing or have incomplete instructions, but having generative AI assist the user is probably a lot faster to implement.