A third of their store is devoted to selling collectible shit or similar products that retail for $20, but cost pennies to manufacture. It's been a while since I was last in one so perhaps they've further increased the amount of floor space for those products. I think almost all of their competitors have gone out of business so they don't have much competition as far as used game stores go outside of any local non-franchise stores. Until the consoles kill off physical media entirely there will be something like them that exists.

Who is suggesting any nation get 100% of their electricity from nuclear? I certainly made no such suggestion.

I've seen similar claims before, I have my doubts on the practicality of running a national electrical grid with that level of renewable energy sources on the grid. The reason I have doubts is those that make a counter claim would show their work while those that argue for all renewable have a more "trust me, bro" attitude on the calculations. Another reason to have doubts is the recent Iberian power outage, an outage that impacted a lot of people with an over reliance on renewable energy as the primary suspect as the cause. Certainly there was a human factor in this, likely people that wanted "bragging rights" on reaching some kind of record on renewable energy on the grid. The human factor could instead be improper training and/or protocols on managing the grid that were lacking in some way.

If it were that simple to run a grid on 90+% renewable energy then I would expect some nation would have made it work by now. Wind and solar power isn't new, it's not like there wasn't time in the last 50 years or so to make that happen. I'm picking 50 years somewhat arbitrarily, this is about the time when concern over pollution and such from energy really got going as well as about when solar PV was something that was low cost enough that it found uses beyond powering satellites in orbit. This is also about the time that Three Mile Island had a meltdown and created opposition to nuclear power among the general public.

50 years have gone by and nobody has made it work. Those that made the most effort on an all renewable grid have seen rising energy costs and blackouts.

It's not just oil and natural gas impacted by blocking off trade bottle necks like Hormuz. Oil and gas can't get out while also nothing can get in. Well, it would appear that there is allowances for food and medicine to get in as the war is with the leadership in Iran than the innocent citizens of Iran. Which gets to the next point...

If China does something stupid that could cause nations in the region to blockage ships carrying solar PV panels and battery-electric vehicles then there could be all kinds of issues getting energy in any form. France decided long ago to build a large fleet of nuclear power plants as they have very little in fossil fuels, not much in hydro, and so on. They needed to reach some level of energy independence or see their national wealth evaporate from having to export cash for energy imports. It's the same motivations driving China to build dozens of nuclear power plants at a time.

There's only so far that buying solar PV, electric cars, and such can go in reaching energy independence. It would be impractical to run a nation on only wind, water, sun, and geothermal. Nuclear power will have to be included as part of the mix of energy sources, it is a need to have technology than a nice to have technology. One hurdle to avoid fossil fuels and nuclear fission is like France where they lack the geography, geology, climate, and so on to rely only on renewable energy sources.

I expect to see large reductions in CO2 emissions as something of a happy accident while nations wake up to the need to reach a point were disruptions in trade won't leave them in the cold and dark. Nuclear fission, onshore wind, hydro, and maybe also geothermal, are all options that have proved to be competitive on price with fossil fuels. I'd expect someone to reply on the costs of nuclear power not being competitive if I didn't point out what should be obvious, as the global trade in fossil fuels are restricted due to blockades the price will keep rising until it reaches whatever cost people believe nuclear power costs. We can plot out the costs of fossil fuels to nuclear fission over time on a graph as blockades impede trade in fossil fuels, when those two lines meet then it would be economic suicide to not build nuclear power plants.

As nations build nuclear power plants to replace electricity from fossil fuels their CO2 emissions will go down. As nations gain experience in building nuclear power plants the costs for nuclear power will go down. Concern on CO2 emissions is a luxury, something that a nation will only look to addressing once more important issues have been dealt with. The same goes for opposition to nuclear power, that's a luxury that can only be maintained so long as energy costs are tolerable.

To those that believe nuclear power plants take "too long" (in scare quotes because that is subjective) I can make two points on that. First is that we've seen nuclear power plants go from planning to putting electricity on the grid in under four years, which is near parity on the build time for large solar and wind projects. Second, if there wasn't the irrational fear of nuclear power then we could have plausibly seen many nations able to be relatively unconcerned about fossil fuel prices, even if we assume a nuclear power plant takes more than a decade before it puts power on the grid. The need for nations to maintain some level of energy independence isn't new, what is new is that the fears of restrictions on the global energy trade has become real.

This sounds nice in theory, but for quite some time now, that hasn't panned out the way it seems like it should.

Let's use a great go-to example - the finance department. Back in the 1970's, it was mostly-manual. You might see a calculator in the back room, but the ledgers were written by hand, the credit card slips all came from a knucklebuster, and lots of people had full-time jobs doing calculations and data entry and inventory management.

*all of that* is automated away now. Scan a barcode, shipping manifest of the whole palette is entered into the inventory system for delivery. When a purchase is made, inventory is decremented, ledger is updated, credit card company updates the statement in real-time, accounting ledgers are updated, bank balances are updated, information is downloaded into Quickbooks, the Quickbooks file is sent to the accountant, tax calculations - ALL OF IT is done automatically. From the farmer's market to the Fortune 500, *nobody* is doing their accounting work by hand anymore. An accounting firm with five accountants can handle the tax returns for ten thousand businesses annually precisely because of how much is automated.

Now...*some* businesses probably repurposed their bookkeeping staff to other tasks...but the bookkeeping industry today employs a tiny fraction of the people it did in the days of our parents. Did some businesses encourage the bookkeepers to help develop their business? Sure, some did...but most simply laid off the staff and "grew" through the reduced payroll.

AI will indeed help with some gruntwork areas, and it will enable the sorts of projects that used to be done with Excel macros and Access databases...but "capacity limits" haven't been a true barrier for a while. It's been readily possible to higher programmers on a "gig economy" basis over at Upwork for decades. More and more off-the-shelf solutions exist for niche applications as SaaS or OSS on Github.

But the real disconnect is here:

You'd be hard-pressed to grab a hundred people at random, have them think of the software they use regularly (be it desktop, mobile, SaaS, or embedded), and point to a time in the past decade where their software got an update and they were HAPPY. Exceptions certainly exist - most DJ software got the ability to separate vocals and instrumentals in real-time, which was huge for the industry...but for *most* people, *most of the time*, software has gotten worse, not better, because "new features" are far more likely to be implemented to benefit the developer, not the user. Try going to a website without an adblocker now; it's a 20MB cacophony of garbage surrounding two text paragraphs for most of the internet. Adobe Acrobat does maybe three useful things more than were present in version 9 from 20 years ago, yet it's five times the size.
I *might* agree that AI can help improve the process of software development by reducing the amount of time spent on gruntwork...but the overall culture of making software user-hostile has been a cancer on the industry that long preceded the availability of Claude and ChatGPT. If AI accelerates that, then I do think there will be a gradual shift in problems - some businesses will try to DIY their own software, which brings support and liability problems back in-house that were half the joy of outsourcing, but the desire for the in-house option comes from that software being too user-hostile over time.

Chocolate making, cheese making, watch making, banking, staying out of wars, and blowing those huge horns to sell cough drops.

In most of Europe individuals are free to choose which union or trade organization they want to join and the availability of alternatives makes those organizations compete with each other. In America they operate as a monopoly with all of the downsides. Of course the existing American unions don't want competition so they would never change to the European model which would actually see overall union membership in the U.S. increase.

Those trucks do not claim to have a 500 mile range on a single charge like the Tesla Semi. If the Volvo examples given could get 500 miles on a charge while retaining a cab-over design then you would have a point. They claim 700 km, or about 435 miles. That might be only a 15% difference but I have a suspicion that it would be enough to force a significant redesign of the truck to get to 500 miles, to the point that it could no longer retain the cab-over format as it is currently understood/defined.

Maybe we could see some new battery chemistry that can allow for all kinds of new capabilities but this will come at a cost, and not necessarily a monetary cost. In the search for batteries with increasing energy density we are seeing batteries that are made in ways that make them increasingly more delicate, and should there be damage then they can burn in ways that are difficult to control. This has lead toward a trend in battery-electric vehicles to use battery chemistry and construction that give up energy density so as to be more durable, use less expensive materials, and address other concerns. It is because of these trends I'm suspicious of battery-electric long haul trucks seeing success in wide adoption.

I recently saw a video on YouTube singing the praises on gains being made in "solar fuel" technology. This is the same fuel synthesis technology that has existed for something like a century now but this time the heat and electricity for producing diesel fuel, jet fuel, or whatever, comes from sunlight. Is the goal to move cargo by battery power? Or move cargo in a manner that doesn't add CO2 to the atmosphere? Solar fuels will allow using the same diesel trucks we have now but with carbon neutral fuel than fossil fuel.

I believe we should be looking at new fuels than new trucks. Solve the fuel problem and we make all existing vehicles carbon neutral than set ourselves up for trying to replace what took us a century to build in logistics and infrastructure. Change the fuel and we could reach carbon neutral in a decade or two. Changing to all battery-electric vehicles will likely take more than a century. If I were to make a bet on which comes first then I know where I'd put my money.

That worked well for the time because routes the trucks took were short so the range requirements were minimal. Then is that with deliveries being in the early mornings, while people were still asleep and wanting milk with their breakfast, being quiet was important. The load needing to be carried was relatively small and light and so no real concern on the battery-electric milk truck being so big that navigating tight corners in residential areas could be a problem, or so heavy that there could be a concern on breaking the pavement.

Does any of this apply for the Tesla Semi? A Class 8 vehicle? These are trucks meant to haul 20+ tons of cargo over hundreds of miles. These trucks are not meant for tight confines seen in residential areas but the wide open highways, no need for the shorter cab-over designs common in Europe. It might be difficult to make a practical cab-over battery electric Class 8 truck given the volume the battery required for the range and power demanded of the vehicle.

Isn't there a rule that allows electric trucks to exceed the normal weight limits for Class 8 trucks? I recall it is about an extra 2000 pounds over the limit for a diesel truck. I expect this was necessary or the Tesla Semi would be dead on arrival. Without that allowance for extra battery weight then the people operating the trucks would have to make up for it by reducing the mass of the cargo carried. Since trucking runs on moving cargo mass over miles that would make a dent in profits that few companies and owner-operators would tolerate.

I have my doubts that any Class 8 battery-electric truck will prove successful. Had this been something like a Ford Transit or GMC Topkick, Class 6 vehicles at most, then I would have higher expectations for success. These are trucks that would do the kind of work that the old milk delivery trucks would do, as in short hauls with "light" loads (at least "light" when compared to Class 8) and long periods of being idle for a recharge. Short haul semi trucks are certainly a thing but these are also the cab-over trucks that tend to be popular in Europe because these are the kinds of trucks that make that "last mile" delivery to grocery stores and such, and so need to be able to navigate in tighter spaces. The size of the battery, as I mentioned before, is certainly incompatible with this shorter cab design.

The United States Postal Service tried to experiment with battery electric delivery trucks. The problem they ran into was getting enough electrical capacity to the overnight parking lots to charge all the trucks. Issues like that could pose problems for wide adoption of the Tesla Semi and similar vehicles.

If it gets rid of all the lawyers would it really be such a bad thing? This is honestly the best proposed use for LLMs that I've heard of yet.

Behold, the power of the protest vote. Hopefully we have two democratically selected candidates to choose from in the next election, assuming there is one.

No. They did not.

The original geofence warrant identified 19 devices.

The police narrowed it down to nine that fit the movement pattern and requested more detailed information on those nine.

The police then requested the identifying information (actual names) of the three most suspicious individuals.

They did a background check and identified Mr. Chatrie as the most likely suspect based on his criminal record and other factors.

Only his home was searched. A few more might have been searched if nothing was found at his house.

The other people are likely not aware that their records were ever given to the police.

It is much easier to move to another state than to another country.

I've lived in seven states, but only four countries.

America spends more per pupil than any other country except Norway and Luxembourg.

Where? I'm guessing here that we'd start with new reactors at existing nuclear power plants. Then we'd likely see old fossil fuel plants get converted to nuclear, these are places with existing wires, rail lines, water, and so on to minimize cost for new nuclear capacity.

Similarly I expect new nuclear reactors built on land owned by hydroelectric operators, there's typically a lot of land around the dams that's been set aside for matters of facility security, future expansion, and so on that could accommodate a nuclear reactor. Also, like with conversion of fossil fuel plants to nuclear, a hydroelectric dam will have things like wires, water (a lot of water), rail, and so on already in place to make new construction almost trivial.

We can build a lot of new nuclear power capacity at existing sites before we need to worry about finding new places to build. Before we run out of existing power plants to use for land we'd likely start looking to existing government land with lots of space and existing security perimeters, such as military bases, airports, national labs, universities, and maybe little bits carved off of nature reserves and national parks. I expect people will protest such ideas but the alternatives would be solar panels and windmills that take up far more land for the same output as a much smaller nuclear reactor. It's not like windmills and solar panels are free from issues. Windmills kill large and rare birds, as well as create issues with radar used for tracking aircraft and weather. Solar panels also kill birds, and create problems for aircraft with the reflections that come off them. Maybe we could see nuclear power plants built on barges and floated to ports near population centers, Russia is experimenting with this idea. Floating power plants can solve a lot of issues surrounding construction and siting.

At what rate? In the USA? Well, slowly at first then likely exceeding the peak rate reached in the 1970s two or four times over. In the 1970s the USA was putting 1 GW on the grid of new nuclear power every month, so I'd expect we could reach 1 GW per week in the USA within a decade or two. Given that we are currently seeing about 60 GW of new electrical generating capacity per year added to the grid it shouldn't be too big of a reach to see a decent sized chunk of that be nuclear if the USA were committed to lowering CO2 emissions while improving reliability of electrical generation. The global build rate is anyone's guess, there's a lot of variables to consider.

I see at least two issues with bringing those up as examples to oppose new nuclear power. The first issue is that they are first-of-a-kind and in any "first" there will be a lot of lessons to be learned. As we gain experience on construction costs should come down. As the technology develops with lessons learned costs should come down. As regulators learn more about what keeps nuclear power safe we should be able to reduce regulatory costs. A related issue to this is that you picked two outliers among dozens of nuclear power plants. Why not look at average costs? Or look for a couple successes to go with the failures to give a range on what to expect?

Second, the reason we are seeing a renewed interest in nuclear power is because costs for all other energy sources are going up. We are currently seeing a number of trade wars driving up energy costs globally, as well as some shooting wars that are driving up demand while driving down production. It's not too much of a leap to believe that we can see current trends in rising energy get extrapolated out to where $50 billion for a new 3-ish GW nuclear power plant look like a bargain.

If you want to argue against nuclear power because of the costs then it might be a wise to do it somewhere other than the comment section on a news article on how nuclear power costs are coming down. We are seeing more people consider nuclear power because cost on nuclear power are coming down and the costs of alternatives are going up. At some point those two lines on the graph will cross and then so much opposition to new nuclear power will fall.

A quick look at Wikipedia tells me that construction started on Chernobyl in 1972, and construction on Fukushima started in 1967. Fukushima is hardly the more modern power plant. We could look deeper into which is "newer", such as which had the engineering plans drawn first or which came into operation first, but we'd still end up with them being contemporary designs for the most part. I'd argue that the failures in engineering were such that they were so rare and random that it simply took longer for the flaws in Fukushima to manifest. Both designs were almost certain to fail before their planned operational life, it's just that we had to see dozens of both designs built and many decades to pass before those failures became obvious.

What bothers me the most is that the meltdowns at Fukushima could have been avoided if the oldest reactors were shutdown as planned in March of 2011 than allowed to be operating in May when the tsunami hit. The reactors were still operating because of delays in construction of new reactors over lawsuits and protests on new nuclear reactors, reactors built to higher standards on quake tolerances and flooding hazards. This could have been avoided if people weren't protesting, or the government had enough of a spine to keep new construction on schedule in spite of the protests.

If nuclear power safety concerns you then get out of the way of new nuclear power construction. If we can't build new nuclear power plants then our other options are energy scarcity, or keeping old and unsafe reactors operating until they blow up in our faces or some other better option comes along. If you believe better options already exist, such as wind and solar power, then we'd have already shutdown these old reactors. Your protests created this problem, and people died from it. Your efforts to "save the planet" has resulted in real and actual people ending up dead.

This is also a problem that is a creation of protests. Stop getting in the way of solutions and we'd have this solved already. One example of this is a proposed design for a pressurized heavy water reactor that can "eat" the waste from current nuclear power reactors. There will still be some waste materials from these reactors but it will be of shorter life isotopes, and isotopes that are known to be useful for industry and medicine and so not exactly "waste" that needs to be disposed of at considerable expense. Those processing the waste could sell off the valued isotopes to pay for the disposal of what they cannot use.

Stop getting in the way of new nuclear power plants and we'd have these problems solved already.

Right, we can't allow new nuclear power plants being built because that could mean people investing in solar power could see their investments tank.

Electricity from nuclear fission is really only a threat to solar power. Fossil fuels don't see nuclear power as a threat because most of their money is in liquid fuels and chemicals, until we figure out how make airplanes fly over oceans on battery power there's going to be demand for fossil fuels. Wind and hydro don't fear nuclear power because there's little reason to expect nuclear power to be lower cost and/or scale as well as they can. Solar power has a very powerful lobby, to the point that they make more money from government subsidy than they do from actual useful energy.

So much of what is holding nuclear power back is FUD. 40 years of rising energy costs is making people reconsider nuclear power as an option. So much of what anti-nuclear people complain about are problems they constructed by regulation and protests. As people learn this the barriers to new nuclear power will fall away. We will get more nuclear power plants, you'll just have to deal with that.