The majority of the Swiss population lives within 50km of a nuke. It's good enough for world leaders to routinely visit and also to leave their progeny on the premises long-term. Ask yourself why they do that. If you'll excuse my rudeness, I think you fell for some propaganda aimed at psychotic soccer moms.

I think that the tablet thing is a good example for one of those feedback loops:

A: The likelihood of major contamination is vanishingly small, but we have a ton of money to spend on safety so lets give tablets out.
B: They are giving out iodine tablets! This confirms that we could get irradiated at any time. We have to increase the safety measures!

A: Living near the reactor impacts your radiation exposure less than living in a concrete building or eating a banana daily.
B: Doesn't matter! You still have money, spend all of it getting emissions even lower, as low as possible.
C: Wow, these reactors are bottomless money pits of maintenance problems! They must be really unsafe! We have to shut them down.

A: The reactor emits a couple kilograms of waste per year. People are concerned about this, so instead of a normal toxic chemical dump, lets go completely overkill, entomb it in solid concrete, hire linguists so a primitive tribe 3000 years into the future will not get the idea to open it etc.
B: Wow, these guys are already planning for the post-nuclear apocalypse! SHUT IT DOWN!

To some people, spending $1MM to deal with 5kg of nuclear waste only proves that they were right all along and you should've spent $10MM instead (recursively)

Nuclear is the most expensive if you don't account for the storage costs of renewable, and if you treat disruption by protestors, ALARA and political whimsy as inevitable costs. I guess it will forever remain a mystery why data centers want nuclear (until the thugs with the guns start shutting down construction). Must be cultural!

I live close enough to a reactor to be issued iodine tablets. I even pay a lot of money in rent for the privilege. Now what?

You are also free to donate to the German government. They fought nuclear well and hard, and could use your support dealing with the astronomical electricity prices.

Only 45%? Journlolists are obsolete then

> If they are promoted... then they are a distraction because to some people they will be a solution to the climate crisis that doesn't require decarbonising

Is there a term for this socialist mainstay? The one where they have a shit solution that doesn't work, and work to stop any alternatives from emerging lest their victims escape?

> they get money thrown at them when they go public, then they don't want to be held to the standards

We have the opposite problem. Companies are NOT going public. The regulations are harming retail investors by restricting access to large/new/profitable enterprise.

Regulation that claims to protect investors should pass a cost-benefits test. If private equity is achieving outsize returns by investing in SpaceX, Anthropic, Instagram or smaller less well-known private companies, while retail investors underperform and only invest in legacy companies like KO and OXY, this is a concrete harm that regulation is inflicting on the people it claims to "protect".

Companies are founded, reach profitability, exist for some years while returning capital, and then sooner or later die. It is an objective and well-known fact that companies are staying private for longer and longer, shutting out retail from participating. Is is up to the courts and regulators to do some soul-searching and identify which of their mandates are the most burdensome and most harmful and repeal only those. But the widespread sentiment here of "just dont go public if you dont want retail's money lol" reveals a striking ignorance about the last decade of well-known and successful companies refusing to go public, of third parties inventing various ways to give retail access to said companies and getting bid up to ridiculous premiums due to overwhelming demand.

"I think [privately traded company X that retail wants to invest into] is a scam"

Maybe, but generally the market has been more about allowing investors to allocate their own capital, not Gary Gensler allocating it for the good of the people and the economy.

I am still amazed that Visa and Mastercard have not been broken up. I guess Lina Khan was too busy hallucinating big tech monopolies to go after the obvious duopoly dictating terms to entire industries. Think of the MindGeek affair - you and your monopolist buddy work publicly, in lockstep, to shut down a website that every other American uses. And no politician dares go after you. Now that is raw, unadulterated power.

Incel has never meant "involuntary celibate". It has always meant "someone I disagree with". The rest is smoke

Right, if the elite doesn't believe that the median voter can be trusted to use the Internet without a babysitter, why would they believe that voting is a good thing? You don't allow morons neither knives and you also don't allow them near voting booths. If the moronous populace cannot be denied access to the voting booth, the results are inherently illegitimate and ignoring them in favor of doing whatever the elite wants is the only way to save democracy :^)

Far worse than a lack of guardrails is the ubiquitous attitude in media and politics that the average voter is no better than a child. "Think of the sheeple, what if they hear about the cum soup!"

It's very fashionable to outwardly care about democracy while also believing that the average prole can't be trusted with access to kitchen knives, unsanitized chatbots, unapproved thought etc. Something is deeply rotten in how journalists and policy people are taught; the "liberal" in "liberal arts" is gone.

In a society where people actually believe in democracy, the dominant response to "we must control the how the populace uses chatbots" would not be "but China will win the AI race!", but rather "who made you king?".

There is nothing odd about it. It is difficult to both study until 30 and also have multiple kids. Pre-40 education trades off against fertility. PhD = no income stability until 30s = no kids until 30s = likely zero kids or "one and done". Delayed fertility is fertility foregone.

Folks, let me tell you, we have the greatest AI regulations—really, just incredible. Some say the best in the world, and you know what? They’re right. Artists, creators, they come up to me, they say, ‘Sir, we love what you’re doing, we love the protections, but can you make them even bigger?’ And I say, ‘Absolutely, we can always do more, much more.’ Because we’re not just regulating—we’re leading. The Americans, the Chinese, they look at us, they say, ‘Wow, how do they do it?’ And I’ll tell you how: because we understand fairness, we understand safety, and we understand protecting jobs. No one else does it like us, folks. No one.

In Switzerland there's a system called eBill where you can authorize bill providers, manually greenlight individual bills or set arbitrary caps under which bills are automatically authorized. It works very well. The first time I paid my electricity bill, my banking app offered to add that provider to my eBill account (without that I had to scan a physical QR code that came in the mail to pay the bill).

The first big Skype exodus I saw was to Facebook. In elementary we all had Skype, in hs everyone was on Facebook and coordination happened in Facebook groups. Meanwhile MS changed Skype to only hold the last 6 months of chat history (imagine FB Groups working like that).

The ability to keep accurate lists in triplicate is one of very few things that are non-negotiable for a bank. Yes other banks will help undo it but I think it's a near miss in the sense that "Citi can't keep lists" -> "Citi should not have access to interbank payments"