But even if it didn't, not only grid-scale but also large-residential-scale batteries+PV is cheaper in Germany than industrially priced nuclear, and even "small" batteries+PV are cheaper than residential electricity: https://www.ise.fraunhofer.de/en/press-media/press-releases/...
Yes, Germany has plenty of coal reserves. Germany has about as much subbituminous coal & lignite reserves as U.S.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coal_reserves
(But neither should Germany, U.S., China, India or any other country burn fossil fuels if possible).
The levelized cost of electricity (LCOE) are pure generation costs, you take total cost of generation (building power plant, operating costs, fuel, decommissioning) over expected life time and divide it total produced energy produced over expected life time. You don't take into account electric network as physical and economical system. For example you disregard transmission, demand for electricity, costs of stabilization of the energy grid, costs of backup - dunkelflaute.
I don't care, I was talking about power stations. Look at charts linked in previous comment.
> For example you disregard transmission, demand for electricity, costs of stabilization of the energy grid, costs of backup - dunkelflaute.
I literally said the word "dunkelflaute" on the first line; and I have absolutely accounted for that, that's why I said what I said about batteries, and why even with those renewables are cheaper.
Transmission and demand are approximately identical for all power sources, modulo only where the specific power lines go. Well, that and that in principle one can be off-grid for PV+batteries at a reasonable cost (especially for new builds given how much a grid connection costs in the first place), which is itself rather novel, but IMO will only be worth accounting for when almost all vehicles are EVs and/or literally all new houses come with PV and it's no longer optional (last I checked this was not yet the case).
If you want to go off-grid I would recommend in addition to PV+batteries also a passive house. In the long-term costs nothing beats good thermal insulation.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Passive_house
The grid connection cost are so high because the high electric system costs, which are distributed to the market participants using grid connection cost: the transmission costs (upgrade costs of electric lines - digging earth is surprisingly costly, overhead power lines are cheaper but they are not for free, upgrade costs of transformers), costs of backup - Germany plans to build new gas power plants, which will have a very low utilization.
340,000 adults and 13 years doesn't sound "way too short and glib" to me?
But there is an important missing word: "grape".
Like, what if you only drink non-alcoholic grape juice? Which also has "polyphenols and antioxidants". And of course, such research has in fact been done, and says that yes, grape juice has an effect: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/26633488/
Point on the issue with grape juice, or other sources of such nutrients.
"short and glib" was a description of the Nautilus article.
In the ACC article you linked - notice all the disclaimers in the 5th-to-last paragraph. Plus, if the "lifestyle factors" were self-reported - people who are more health-conscious often assess their own lifestyles by harsher metrics than less health-conscious people. The authors have very good reasons to recommend high-quality randomized trials.
In one sense, all intelligence is a search in a gigantic solution space.
But the difference is:
What Deep Blue did was (if the Wikipedia page is correct) Alpha-beta pruning[0], where some humans came up with the function for what "better" and "worse" board states look like.
And what LLMs do (at least the end models) includes at least some steps where there's an AI trying to learn what human preferences are in the first place, in order to maximise the human evaluation scores. Some of those things are good, like "what's the right answer to the trolley problem?" and "which is the better poem?", but some are bad such as "what answer best flatters the ego of the user without any regard for truth?"
The former is exactly like route-finding, in that you could treat travel time as your score of better-worse and the moves as if they're on a map rather than a chess board.
The latter is like being dumped into a new video game with no UI and all NPCs interact with you only in a language you don't know such as North Sentinelese.
I don't see how ITAR is critical today. Before SpaceX demonstrated any successes, sure, but simply by following SpaceX's example about the existence of low-hanging fruit there's now a lot of other companies around the world who hire equally smart people to solve the same problems. Not only has China demonstrated they're quite capable of putting out clones, Rocket Labs exists and launches stuff and that was originally a New Zealand company. Even here in Europe, last trade fare I went to had a 3D printed rocket engine on even one of the smaller stands.
The other problems of course is Musk himself, both because he's directly aggravating his own employees[0], and the Democrats (who, in the absence of a dictatorship, can be expected to regain government control in the not too distant future), and also a lot of non-US politicians (the list of nations he's aggravated includes all of his 3 citizenships but also far more besides) and phrases like "security risk" are getting thrown around.
But the trick is US market. For everything pertaining to tech, whatever happens outside of US is a rounding error. And ITAR protects US market from foreign competition - while in the US, no one could try beating SpaceX in launch costs.
> For everything pertaining to tech, whatever happens outside of US is a rounding error.
Tech? That's a very broad domain, do you want to be more specific? Like, hardware is mostly China and Taiwan, IT services were a strength of India but IDK what's happening now with AI, etc.
But as a broad brush, "tech" is all over the place in every industrialised nation, so it's going to be more like 25-35% USA.
But even in the USA, I don't accept "no one could try beating SpaceX in launch costs", for the same reason SpaceX got as good as it did as quickly as it did. It's not a unique magic artefact, but rather science and engineering.
And of course, new market + legal prohibitions just means opportunities for every other nation to be the place (say, all the chips are made in Taiwan, though obviously they may have their own opinions about exports to China) to go for everyone who just wants a commercial satellite up in orbit, and when the interesting tech isn't from the US in the first place, no export control by the USA can stop that.
Competing with SpaceX is about as hard as competing with Boeing on passenger planes - except Boeing is also a corrupt, disorganised wreck and SpaceX isn't. And unlike Boeing, SpaceX is also an airline, and it's also a passenger. Build some competitive product and SpaceX will refuse to launch it - and launching it with anyone else will be extremely expensive and also just impossible due to their low capacity and scheduling years in advance. Try building launch competition and SpaceX will easily undercut your prices because they don't even need launch revenue to succeed anymore. Try building both... and you will never get enough qualified engineers, know-how, and funding, just because no one will fund a copy of Boeing(plus a lot of other things), or Intel. And it is already a thing a lot more complex than Boeing or Intel.
> Try building launch competition and SpaceX will easily undercut your prices because they don't even need launch revenue to succeed anymore.
A) not when you're the Chinese government
B) not when the rockets are now 3D-printable
C) even without that, that sounds to me like an obvious monopoly abuse lawsuit, and even if the US doesn't take that seriously any more, it's the fig leaf needed for all other interested nations to use existing tools for trade manipulation to "level the playing field"
> Try building both... and you will never get enough qualified engineers, know-how, and funding, just because no one will fund a copy of Boeing(plus a lot of other things), or Intel.
Clearly not true because competition already exists for each part separately. Even from other US billionaires, let alone internationally from nations who see the USA as a threat.
But also this pertains to previous point about Musk himself being a threat to this position, he's poisoning his own well of talent.
> I am having a hard time thinking of a mode of power that isn’t far more centralized today than it was just 2, 4, 6, 8, … years ago.
Electrical power. That used to be almost entirely centralised, but it's increasingly easy to be off-grid.
Manufacturing power. I don't know the full dynamics, but there's clearly a lot of cheap good tools easily available, so the term "cottage industry" still makes literal sense.
Comms. Twitter becoming X pushed a lot of decentralised alternatives with similar vibes.
That said, if you go back 20 years, you get the pre-Facebook world and the pre-Twitter world for comms, but you lose cheap good home 3D printing and a specific district in China was becoming the obvious heavily centralised place for all modern consumer electronics to get made.
Of course, go back to 1800 and you get something like, IDK, 70% of the world's internationally traded cutlery being made in Sheffield? I may be off by a lot there, that's just a rough guess given its dominance.
The percentage of goods manufactured in the world that come from the set of the top 5 or top 10 or top 100 or top 1000 sources have all increased today relative to before.
I agree on electricity though. Cheap solar panels have made distributed energy possible in a way that was unimaginable even 20 years ago.
In a sibling comment, I point out that increasing long tails are not incompatible with overall mass centralization.
Relevant to your comment, increases in 3D printing capabilities have not translated into a reversal of manufacturing centralization in China’s favor.
That centralization continues as instability (often defended as an attempt to act against centralization) has perversely disrupted and pulled back manufacturing investment elsewhere.
As an individual, you may be able to do more, or choose from more niches. Even as the vast majority of resources and impact flow to fewer entities by volume.
That is a very good point. Long tails exist. And many long tails continue to grow.
But the mass of everything keeps centralizing.
So the two are not contradictory. Together they imply an increasing dearth of middle diversity/distribution of choices and players.
Increased choices (the menu) can happen at the same time as decreased diversity of choice (flocking, herding) or capacity (sourcing).
So I don’t think you are wrong, despite centralization still being overwhelming.
——
Despite 3D printers, manufacturing in particular has been centralizing in China for decades, and this trend has only increased over the last year as politics and economic instability have hampered manufacturing investment outside China.
Being able to print anything, doesn’t turn around economics and structure that hamper creating major supply chains and new manufacturing centers.
Anymore more than being able to write and publish, and an increase in voices, is turning back the general tide of people en masse viewing/reading and self-exposing themselves to fewer uncoordinated voices.
Economic power is centralizing in fewer mega corporations and in the hands of an increasingly dominant economic minority.
Tech business power in capitalization and sources for the best components is centralizing.
Political parties power is centralizing. Very dramatic changes relative to previous decentralization between different party scales, like local vs. Federal. And far more “personal” centralization like has happened at the top in US parties.
Especially in the US, dramatic power centralization across all three branches of government, over the top of the checks and balances, and intended competing roles, that maintain the US Constitution’s relevance as a constraint on autocracy.
Social media over the last two decades has greatly centralized communication and media. And most of all, popular influence.
That power grows despite the emergence of decentralized alternatives. A reversal in favor of decentralization overall would be welcome.
The creation of huge centralized governmental and corporate caches of deeper and richer surveillance information, is a massive submerged centralization of power.
Device lockdowns on outside ecosystem software continues to increase, relative to the typical consumer.
——
Long tails operate at the fringes, and matter to many. But they are not slowing down overall economic, technological, social and political centralization.
> What is cheap is nuclear, what is expensive (and requiring massive subsidies) are intermittent renewables.
This has not been the case for a while now.
Specifically German source to avoid questions about regional variation, from 2024; only "small rooftop" PV (both with and without batteries) even has an overlap with nuclear, and even then at the low end of the cost range for nuclear:
I suspect we're still going to get new nuclear reactors, but for the radioisotopes and not because of any questions about cost or supply diversity or dunkelflaute.
That would still match "[favouring] white Christian people". Or at least that part matches the "Christian" part, the other stuff Musk associates with seems to suggest at least some racial (and not simply cultural) biases in his thinking, e.g. how he regards DEI as being a promotion of undeserving people rather than a way to give equal opportunities to deserving people who are demonstrably under-represented given their qualifications.
It is entirely unimportant how Richard Dawkins is categorised, isn't it? Last I checked, the "pro-natalist" part isn't there for Dawkins, so how other things modify a pro-natalist stance don't connect to anything.
You're the one who chose to combine Musk and Dawkins in the same group here with "cultural christian", that's absolutely a straw man if this is what you're doing.
I mean, your own link up there has a sub-heading of "Everyone has their own definition".
Especially when you're replying to "he seems to clear favor white Christian people and himself especially" rather than "is a Christian". Queen Victoria wasn't a feminist, neither.
You are saying they are Christian in the same sense of being "cultural Christians" rather than actual Christians. if you say one is a Christian it follows that the other is a Christian.
The point is that given Musk is clearly not an actual Christian he cannot favour Christians "himself included".
Basically all of human history can be described in similar terms, and it's not melanin-specific.
If you can name a historical figure, they were probably some flavour of non-standard mental processing and beliefs.
Even just coming up with "marvels that expanded our freedom and made our lives better" is inherently a non-standard position relative to how most people live and think.
What you're saying amounts to: ambitious assholes know they need better PR than people who just get the job done. In principle this is an approach open to anyone, but in modern America, it is just a clique of strange white men.
No, I'm saying oddball philosophies and pseudoscientific beliefs are the default.
Even coming up with the scientific method took millennia, and actually trying to take that seriously is still really unusual in the human species.
It may happen to be a clique of strange mostly white men in the USA, but it would be wrong in both directions to label this under "modern America": the founding fathers of the USA were, by both modern and contemporary standards, more than a bit odd. And that was true at almost every point in US (and indeed world, not just USA) history. And it's not just a uniquely American thing, as anyone who points to, say, the Chinese Great Leap Forward's famine will point out. (And that was just the first example that came to my head, basically everywhere and every-when has something weird to pick up on).
Science is hard. Thinking critically and logically is hard. As Feynman said:
The first principle is that you must not fool yourself – and you are the easiest person to fool.
> How the hell did CEOs get away with telling us that offshore dev teams would be fine because in-person collaboration wasn't necessary while simultaneously saying we all had to be in the office?
Hopefully those particular CEOs are now in line for being replaced with an AI.
At the start of WFH, we were all* rather more worried about the pandemic and what the shops had in stock than childcare.
By the end of the pandemic, it was more of a social battle between those who wanted to maintain the new normal and those who absolutely loathed it, and again nobody* really cared about childcare.
Closest anyone got to caring about childcare at any point was home-schooling and the value of air filters in classrooms.
* I am of course being excessively absolutist with this language, very little is all-or-none.
But even if it didn't, not only grid-scale but also large-residential-scale batteries+PV is cheaper in Germany than industrially priced nuclear, and even "small" batteries+PV are cheaper than residential electricity: https://www.ise.fraunhofer.de/en/press-media/press-releases/...
But electrification of transport and heating is more critical at this point than the inevitable short-term changes to electricity: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/energy-consumption-by-sou...
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