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Comment Re:It is low CO2 (Score 5, Insightful) 113

You can get a lot more renewable energy for the money. Colorado tax payers are going to get fleeced by this.

The other issue not mentioned is speed. It takes so long to build nuclear that it can't be part of any realistic plan to address climate change, and it also makes it very prone to corruption because nothing gets delivered for decades.

These are all issues directly related to regulation and unnecessary red tape created out of NIMBYism and irrational fear around radiation. India, Canada, and China aren't stupid. They're building and/or modernizing nuclear power plants like crazy because they're so effective at reliable baseline power, which renewables simply are not. In the US, we force years - sometimes decades - of reviews and permits and defending court cases and other bullshit unrelated to the construction and operation of clean, safe nuclear power.

The other issue going to cost is that the US - again, stupidly - bars reuse of high energy spent fuel. If you simply separate the low energy (relatively safe, but useless for generating power) waste from the high energy fuel remaining and feed the high energy stuff back in, you can extract nearly all the energy, save a ton of fuel costs, mine less fuel, and have vastly less volume of waste and vastly less energetic waste.

Let's assume some sort of absolute mandate were passed to build 5 CANDU-6 (known, proven, safe, reliable design) reactors. No reviews, no permits, no red tape, no lawsuits. Just build the damn things now. You can get one operational in ~3.5 years, all of them in about 4ish years. South Korea and China have built PWRs in 5. Assuming we also lifted the ban on fuel reprocessing, CANDU-6 plants will produce power at a cost of 5-6 cents per kWh, yielding a retail price of 13-17 cents per kWh. US average is about 16.2 cents, California has rates pushing 50 cents. But we're too stupid to get out of our own way and just do it, so we'll keep strangling the poor and middle class economically.

Comment Re:Not just Americans, immigrant Americans (Score 2) 104

He/his admiration/financial backing apparatus sure is working hard to ensure that private and public institutions alike institutions are not permitted to determine what constitutes merit, and I'll give you exactly zero guesses as to why that is. It sure isn't his/his administration/his financial backing apparatus favorable views to people from other places - citizens, legal immigrants or otherwise. If you don't think these are deliberate actions to adjust the color balance on their reality TV sets, I dunno what to tell you.

Comment Buried Lede (Score 2) 104

This second dataset needed some repairing. Around a third of the institutional affiliations were missing, so I used Claude 3.7 Sonnet to fill in the blanks. When checking Claude’s work, I was surprised at how accurate it was. Of the roughly 275 entries Claude filled in, there were errors in fewer than 10 of them, and the errors that it did make were often borderline (i.e: a publication coming out in a given year and an author moving institutions that same year, or an author having multiple affiliations).

In fact, Claude’s answers proved to be more accurate than the original dataset, at least for institutional affiliation. Spot-checking the original dataset revealed numerous errors, so I also ended up using Claude to make corrections to the original dataset. Altogether Claude (with me checking) fixed probably ~100 errors in categories like institutional affiliation and publication date.

Comment Re:Computers are better friends (Score 2) 78

"why doesn't internet provide me with a group of likeminded to philosophize"

Because properties on the internet subsist via advertising, which is driven by engagement, which benefits more from adversarial (or instinctive) interaction than from non adversarial measured interaction. If platforms were not supported primarily by advertising, we'd have a fairly different kind of internet, much in the way if some towns' municipal budgets were not funded by traffic tickets, they'd have a very different kind of police force.

Comment Re:You know how (Score 1) 304

Sure, but the ability to do that can depend on what kind of terms you have - and "don't go into debt if you don't have to" is a vast oversimplification of the dynamics involved. If you have access to credit - even super shitty credit - you will probably use that to say, pay for medical stuff, or food, or you know .. stuff that directly implicates survival.

The idea that there is always a simple choice is a fallacy for those who are not faced with those types of decisions. And people can be extremely inconsistent, because it's an emotional topic. Plenty of people who *used* to not have that choice, but have escaped poverty though hard work, luck, or any other reason, are capable of the mental gymnastics required to deny this.

Comment Re:Musk'll Fix It! (Score 1) 246

Successful companies are more diverse because successful companies are big and can afford to hire globally.

This is a common misconception. That diversity comes from just *being* places. But what companies recognized was .. they were hiring the same people in their own markets that didn't (and still doesn't) have the diversity of those markets. It hurts them financially.

Now look, I get that people think companies operate on a quota system. I've worked for multiple companies that are *extremely* dedicated to DEI initiatives, and none of them have anything remotely like that. They do have initiatives that study how their workforce aligns with the actual diversity of the population in the market, but it has nothing to do with hiring. It's just an initiative in why the workforce doesn't represent their consumers. "We'd like to get here, we're not here yet. We can prove it from a financial perspective because we make decisions that are not informed by our customers." The people hiring are entirely independent of that analysis. What that kind of analysis does is improve the company's ability to foster moving towards having employees that can better serve their market. Success does not lead to diversity, but hiring *for* diversity is stupid. The thing dumbasses like you don't get is that companies don't actually do that. (I absolutely expect you've got a hundred examples where this happens, based on your junk food news.)

I got modded down for saying below and I'm happy to get modded down again: you're a simpleton and I really doubt you have any actual financial skin in the game. It's all just feelings.

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