I was just adding up how far back GOP hostility goes. The Colbert quote is TWENTY YEARS OLD THIS YEAR.
It followed his previous sally "Truthiness", which was the word of the year for 2004.
Newt Gingrich killed off the Office of Technology Assessment back in 1995, it produced too much science for Congress.

Not to forget that in 1992, GHW Bush believed in Global Warming and wanted America off oil. I suspect the serious anti-science, anti-truth fight, against the Inconvenient Truth, dates to about 1993.

It's clear nobody clicked through to the MIT study. It actually is about running renewables 95% of the time, not 100%.
I should have not used the word "batteries", when I meant "storage".

Battery has always been a somewhat generic term for "storage", but is kind of triggering around slashdot. Still, it will be interesting to see what % of service can be provided in the global south is Form Energy's iron-air batteries work as advertised...with 120 hours of reaction time. That's as long as the longest dunkelflaute in Alberta so far. In southern Mexico, with solar on the west side and high Gulf wind on the east joined up, I'm not sure you would need more.

As Nancy Pelosi said, "we're capitalists"...we all still gravitate to the cheapest solution that meets standards, and were long-willing to put up with the health effects of coal, ignore the whole climate-thing, to get it cheaper.
David Roberts in Vox, in 2019, covered the MIT study that worked out just how very cheap batteries must get to make intermittent a baseload-replacement:
https://www.vox.com/energy-and... ...turned out to be $20/kWh for CAPEX, back in 2019. So that's $25/kWh in 2026.

Sodium-ion batteries are widely predicted to reach down to that price in a few years, less time than it takes to build a reactor. That's if Form Energy, now selling in test batches, doesn't get there first with their with "iron air" batteries.

If the batteries can be produced, and work in the field (they are so far, batteries are the hot new grid purchase for 2026), then both fossil and nuclear projects will fail to find investors. That's capitalism for you.

The only dodge around it is to appeal for government subsidy on some ideological grounds. That's what renewable champions had to do until their solution became cheaper; and it was a hard sell, let me tell you.

Bingo.
I asked a friend who started enthusiastically using AI for coding, used it happily for various business bits of writing, summaries, etc.

So I asked him if he had to give up one tool: "AI" (all of them) or "The spreadsheet", he thought for about 10 seconds and said, "AI" for sure: you're in and out of Excel all day long.

That was me, too. Excel was absolutely essential to my productivity as a data-slinger, managing real-word data into and back out of largish SQL databases. The ability to just refresh a pivot table from SQL was an automatic one-click updated report, with no code.

I could do a whole bunch of massaging of data from plain text files, notes, cut-and-paste from other applications - or I could do several Excel formulas and maybe a short macro, and process tens of thousands of records into the big database.

It was about far more than "modelling" it was a swiss army knife of data massaging, reformatting, and above all, data-cleaning.

And, yeah, I've tried to get the same work done in Libre Calc, and it's not even half-way there. It would be great if somebody could pour some real millions into Libre and take away Excel's lunch, but nobody is even talking about it.

$100/MWh isn't remotely competitive any more, mostly, but because of the "base-load" need, you might get that much. If it can't produce power cheaper than that, though, it won't fly.

Nuclear dreams are now in a race with batteries, basically - if batteries get down to $20/kWh as the CAPEX, keeping around enough batteries for a dunkelflaute every few years, starts to compete with $100/MWh of baseload.

And then there's geothermal, just a big question mark right now, but the chancers doing pilot plants are definitely aiming for less than $100/MWh - and for power that may not just be base-load, but have some storage capability so it can flex up more power at night, hold it back during the day. If they make that happen, nuclear has to beat them or die.

When I retired (10y) I was a whiz with Perl, had learned enough Python to know I could switch over easily, and was being told by Paul Graham that if people were too dumb to see that LISP was the ultimate language that had made his fortune, that Ruby had the same deep structure allowing the ultimate trick of self-modifying code and true compactness and elegance and all that stuff the Great Programming Languages all had to have for the most-elite work.

Of course, I didn't have to work any more, and I hate writing toy programs, and didn't have a problem that really required it, so at 10y, the O'Reilly Ruby book is dusty, and when I have something too hard for a bash script, it's still perl. Which still works.

But I was feeling guilty about it, and now I can put the Ruby book away with satisfaction that the moment passed. (Giving up on FORTH was the hard one; loved that language.)

"Against oil" (meaning, development, business, jobs, etc) has been the big conservative complaint against the Liberals, that they sacrifice prosperity and jobs for their (wrong anyway) environmental tenderness.
They're now giving away precisely nothing: the commitment to get all the approvals through, the environment compromised, for a pipeline that's never going to happen.

The money simply isn't there for such a mammoth multi-project. Money is definitely there for tweaks and tricks to squeeze and extra million barrels/day out of the tar sands, and to get that extra million down various improved pipelines, for "just a few billion" in upgrades:
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada... ... the 80/20 rule, as it were.

But to fill a whole new million bbl/day pipeline, you'd need a major new oil sands mine, like the Kearl Lake Projects back in 2013, which added 880,000/day for a grand total of $20B. (Not just a new mine, you see, but facilities to dilute the bitumen, a pipeline from Edmonton to send diluent, another to send diluted bitumen back, at a billion each...15 years ago.)

So, even if there are new efficiencies, $25B for the sands expansion is conservative, and so is $25B for the next pipeline, even without the pandemic and giant '21 flood that put the last one up to $34B. After recent inflation for construction costs, $50B is really a rock-bottom estimate.

So, if they deliver a million barrels a day, each barrel has to pay the interest on $50,000, and then make a profit. They need over $40/bbl for operating costs, so they really must have over $50/bbl global oil prices...from 2030 through the early 2040s before they get into the gravy. Nobody not paid to be delusional thinks that prices will not go lower and lower as the market starts to decline. The Saudis will probably crash the price (as they did in 2014) just to drive competitors broke.

Nobody's going to risk that. That's the conclusion of the retired Imperial Oil economic/market analyst, Ross Belot, in Canada's Macleans:
https://macleans.ca/economy/wh...

So Mr. Carney can promise to shoot whales personally if they'll just build a pipeline, in the serene knowledge that it isn't going to happen. The only thing he has to do to stop a pipeline is not promise a penny of public money to back it. Since the government already had to pay for the last pipeline, he's got a popular excuse.

I could not tell you one line of PHP in 2025, though I learned enough in 2004 to write a ticket-sales application with a database. It was for one event, so I picked the famously awful, kludgy, just-for-duct-tape language to get 'er done fast, never need to be maintained.

I have to admit, those calumnies against PHP have faded over the years, and here we are, >20 years later. Some 20 years earlier, I had learned PL/1 at University, the language of our MULTICS mainframe. It was predicted to take over all programming in coming years, unless ADA beat it out. The wisdom of 1983.

Selected because it's the information page available? Which

I don't spend much time on slashdot, rather in economics reading. Paul Krugman is probably the most-famous detractor of average, proponent of median, income reporting. I believe his best-known point was that when Bill Gates walks into a 20,000 seat football stadium, the "average attendee" just became a multi-millionaire.
He repeated his 1992 point in a longish 2014 article:
https://prospect.org/2014/06/0...

But my whole post was off-topic for this slashdot article, and we're now moving further afield, and should take this up when income inequality, or relative income of different states, is the actual topic.

But I gotta say - that St Louis Fed page says it rose from 27K to 45K in 45 years. That's 1.1% gain per year. Krugman's own essay above is about how that number is smaller than the percentage gains of the top 10%, much less the top 1%, much much less the top 0.1%...which is what the inequality debate is all about.

But my stronger point was the use of "wealth" rather than "income". Wealth is the integral of (income - living.costs) over time, modified by preference for saving over spending. (Japanese are great savers, so are Canadians). If your income keeps going up, but your inescapable living costs like housing and higher education also skyrocket, your wealth will do poorly, as with Gen Z not having housing.

Canada has THIRTY PERCENT higher median wealth than America. That's the sum of savings, despite lower income, because we have far lower medical insurance costs and precarity.

Don't discourage! Conservatives HATE looking at median numbers instead of averages, normally. This is my discovery-of-the-week, the "Median Wealth" by country:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... (click on the "MEDIAN" column and sort so that Iceland is at top)

If you think of 'wealth' as "the integral over time of (income - living expenses)", then it's a much better measure of whether your society maximizes the number of people with minimal stress...and on THAT metric of national success, the USA is way below Canada and nine European nations. But economists like Noah Smith still refer to Europe "catching up" with the USA, or "falling behind" based on *average* income changes...when most increases go to just a few percent.

Let's hear it for median economic stats.

If you read around a few more articles on this, the new "scenario" assuming no changed regulations or programs anywhere, was added under "pressure". The IEA has some independence, and came up with the peak-before-2030 scenarios a few years ago.

OPEC+ reacted in horror and condemnation, of course, - how dare they effectively call it a sunset industry that will shrink through the 2030s - and set up their own predictions group that came up with a scenario like this one. IEA, (which isn't entirely independent, it's funded by governments, some of them petrostates, and takes funding straight from oil companies themselves) has been under pressure to add the OPEC+ "happy days" scenario to their own suite of scenarios.

The scenarios all have assumptions, and differ because of the assumptions. You can believe these are reasonable assumptions, and the earlier ones wildly optimistic. But a fifth of the cars sold last year were electric, and a quarter of the cars sold this year. The cars are getting better, the underlying battery technologies are improving visibly every year.

Bottom line, this new scenario is heavily influenced by those who would profit from it, and not likely.

http://brander.ca/cordcutcuug

My presentation to the Calgary Unix Users Group on getting the local TV stations Over-the-Air, onto a shared Unix directory as .MPG files that I can save, edit, compress. Just sayin'. It's not even hard. $35/year for the subscription to the index/schedule/search service that gives me the same schedule grid as cable always did.

OTA...well...and of course, the fact that I hate Amazon, Apple, and Disney as monopolist swine and care little for their "IP rights"...

I think he died in great sorrow and sadness, because the GOP he took to great heights is now in the hands of a guy who will probably have Cheney's daughter killed if he can get away with it. No family in the GOP is as utterly disempowered and cancelled as the Cheney family; Liz couldn't get elected dogcatcher in Wyoming now or in 20 years.

Yes, it was likely Karl Rove, and not Dick Cheney, who was the source of the 'anonymous' quote that "every so often you have to throw one of these crappy little countries up against a wall to intimidate all the others", but I'm sure that stated Cheney's thoughts as well.

I agree with all your comments, but would stress that the REALLY bad thing about the Iraq war was not the strategy, but the open, transparent, obvious lies. I mean, when the WHOLE WORLD rolls its eyes at your story, at the UN, when nobody is convinced, and you go forward ANYWAY, you're basing your whole national stance on lies.

"We can lie and get away with it because we are too powerful to hold to account", was the underlying power of Cheney. That same conversation with the "crappy little nations" comment had the even more quoted line: "We're an empire now, and we create our own reality".

To perhaps belabour the obvious, I'm talking about Trump, and how Cheney and Bush showed the way for Trump to just really go for it, and blatantly make America an Empire based on any lies he feels like, the more-preposterous the better, to rub our noses in it.