How many concrete, proven cases of Chinese espionage via telecom hardware have been detected? Are the Chinese so skilled AND self-confident that they would deploy spyware in thousands of units to be deployed in adversary countries, who have full and unrestricted access to the actual hardware?
Because this looks a lot like a case of protectionism by fear-mongering. Leaving aside the whole PRISM thing.
most professions that receive tips are quite fond of the system
No one complains about receiving money. I'm pretty sure all professions receiving tips would rather prefer the same money as higher wage with no tip.
No tipping means Soviet-style restaurants where the wait "staff" don't give a shit about you and tell you to go f yourself.
Never been to Europe? No tipping means waiters have a modicum of dignity and do not come along every 5 minutes asking "everything OK?!?" with a smile so fake it could be plastic.
And yes, sometimes we do tip, when there is extraordinary service involved, not when they did just what they were supposed to.
Just like for ICE cars you will need to replace the engine and or the transmission at some point.
I find that unlikely, since EVs have neither of those things. EVs have electric motors (far cheaper and more reliable than high-temperature ICEs with thousands of moving parts) and there is neither gearing nor transmission required (the motor is installed directly on the shaft).
I live in Norway, where EVs were phased in much earlier, and EVs are well-known to be cheaper to maintain and way more reliable than ICEs.
[...] assuming we'll never find another type of material to make a future battery out of.
That's because there isn't. Lithium is irreplaceable for high-density battery storage because it has an extreme electrode potential and extremely low weight. I mean literally extreme since there is no material with higher (well, lower since it has a minus sign) electrode potential for a plain ionisation, and there is no lighter solid material.
You can play with all the other metals and components in batteries like nickel, aluminium, molybdenum, iron, phosphates, but lithium is the one carrying the charge and you can't replace it. If you heard of sodium batteries, those are only for stationary storage as sodium is a lot heavier than lithium.
Then you can think outside the box and go for hydrogen for fuel cells, which is lighter and does not need to be mixed with other metals for storage, but that's another technology entirely.
Did you forget to amortize $30b across 80+ years of operation?
Did you forget to account for capital costs? With a reasonable, non-commercial 4% interest rate, the present value of annuity factor converges to 25 years for an infinitely long depreciation horizon. (It's 23.9 years for 80 years of horizon). So it does not really matter that much whether the plant is going to last 40, 60 or 80 years to calculate the LCOE.
This is because you need to pay interest for those loans you took to build the plant to begin with. No one is going to give you 30 billion dollars interest-free, except for the government, but then we are in subsidised territory and taxpayers will be paying for that.
My employer (in Europe) provides company phones for private use (nice perk), but also requires us to use a work profile (at least on Android) for work apps.
It is a bit clunky (e.g. I cannot copy and paste data between apps in separate profiles, but that's the point) but it works fine for us. Is there an inherent weakness to this approach that makes US employers rather give out an extra phone?
The average mileage of a US car is 1123 miles a month, so the GP's data are perfectly credible.
Also, it's pretty easy to set up some smart charging logic to charge the car in the middle of the night when electricity is cheapest. Tesla has it out of the box.
So, the idea with SMR is to make many small reactors. The problem with current big ones is that they are too expensive, and making something smaller is not the way you usually go to reduce prices; but the argument is that building many identical SMRs will eventually bring the unit price down, with the point of contention being whether this can offset the loss of economies of scale.
However there is not just the reactor that is being scaled down: there are a lot of other things that benefitted from large scale.
I find it a dubious proposition that SMRs can be per-MW cheaper than traditional reactors, and I still have not seen a credible source (i.e. not a company brochure) claiming SMRs are any game changer.
Browsing in Google Scholar, I found papers are quite tepid, from "[modularized] SMRs [...] could possibly compete with large reactor baseline total construction costs" (Lloyd et al.) and "cost effectiveness of SMR [...] is in line and of the same order with LR’s" Boarin & Ricotti. This is not sufficient: nuclear power must come down with a factor of at least 4 before it's even competitive with renewables.
I appreciate any link to more recent or comprehensive TCO analyses of SMRs.
Germany was pressuring Russia contractually to deliver gas (in Nordstream1). Each day the gas wasn't delivered, Russia had to pay a fine
How much was that fine that it trumped having a major bargaining chip to get Germany to back off from the war? Was the fine applied even if Russia claimed they were having "technical problems"?
And why in the world would they then destroy the pipeline at the border of Denmark and Sweden, instead of staging a false-flag "Ukrainian terror attack" at the terminal in Russia, which would have been a lot cheaper, safer, and allowed them to say they had finished repairs at the most convenient moment?
He's a billionaire, and you're not.
He inherited his wealth, I could be a billionaire too if I did not have to work for it. That, and he underperformed index funds (though figures are disputed since it's difficult to quantify his actual wealth).
Your argument is a bit like "Charles III is a king and you're not". Well duh.
Siemens has recently unveiled their Mireo Plus H, which also reaches 160 km/h. Still, very interesting the Chinese added self-driving on top of it, drivers are usually the most expensive item in any vehicle.
The US are not out of the race: Stadler (well, as Swiss company) is going to deploy a H2-powered FLIRT in CA next year.
The non-competes will be replaced with far more consequential NDAs.
This is the situation we have in Europe and it's perfectly reasonable. Workers can pursue their careers, whereas companies are covered in case of industrial espionage.
Of course you are not supposed to talk about confidential information you learned through your previous job. If a company would not hire you unless you spy on your previous employer, you should not consider that company to begin with.
And let's not fool ourselves here, non-competitive clauses are there to keep wages low, not for information security.
Offshore wind turbines near Japan would need to be built to withstand earthquake and tsunami events
No they wouldn't. First, tsunamis far out at sea are long fast waves, and boats often pass them without even noticing them. The worst that can reasonably happen is some anchors coming loose. Second, even if the tsunami were enough to somehow topple the turbines, they are just pieces of metal like any other wreck in the sea - no possibility of further pollution beyond lubrication oil in the gears, and no crew that would need rescue.
Yes, it's a petrostate. Far leftoids on wikipedia certainly will twist themselves into pretzels to deny this.
Happy to oblige. You are looking only at the exports, but if you had looked at the makeup of the GDP you would have seen that more than half of the GDP is in the service sector, and only one third in industry (of which oil & gas is a large part). See also CIA's take on Norway's economical makeup.
"Been through Hell? Whaddya bring back for me?" -- A. Brilliant
