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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 9th, 2023

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  • It’s also worth expanding on this by noting that 35% of the debt is debt from one government agency to another. Another 34% is held by various financial institutions who use it as a protection against financial risk as even if the market crashes they’ll still have a basically guaranteed (and now very valuable) asset to cash out to keep their customers safe, while only 24% is held by people, institutions, and governments outside the United States.

    Together we’ve just gone over 93% of the national debt.

    Also, they way we paid off this debt last time was that 50% effective corporate tax rate and a 91% top income tax rate during the 40s, 50s, and 60s, which as we all know was a really terrible time for the American economy./s







  • Firstly, the standard lifespan for modern solar panels is typically 25 to 30 years, while nearly all grid scale batteries are rated for 5000 to 8000 0-100% cycles, which is 13 to 20 years of daily cycling. If you are not completely discharging the batteries every day that lifetime can be far longer.

    Secondly, it’s worth remembering that said rated lifespan is not when the pannel or battery stops working, but rather the point at which it hits 80% of the capacity it had when installed. This means that when that happens if you just do nothing for another decade or two, you are still getting well more than half of a brand new power plant’s worth of output for free, as this output is often not calculated in the cost of the plant. This also means you only need to replace panels on the same timeline as nuclear plants need far more expensive complete refurbishments.

    Thirdly, yes, solar outputs less than it does in some parts of the world, which means you need proportionally more space and funding to build it. Still far less than the cost of a nuclear plant of the same output, and as for land use, I was unaware that Canada was such a small dense country, completely devoid of parking lots much less vast grassland parries.

    Finally, you realize that nuclear plants have far higher operational costs than wind and solar, with the Pickering plant for instance requiring over three thousand staff to keep operating, while most solar fields don’t even have a single full time employee?

    Ultimately however, the largest demonstration that nuclear will not clean up Canada’s energy is that in the quarter century that Canada had known without doubt that it must replace its oil and gas plants, it has not tried to do so with nuclear despite building nuclear reactors only getting more and more expensive with each passing year. As such, of the government has so thoroughly demonstrated it is unwilling to replace oil and gas with a more expensive option, maybe we should focus our efforts on getting them replaced with less expensive options instead.


  • Fun fact, the US first developed a hypersonic interceptor in the 1960s with the nuclear armed Sprint missile.

    Moreover, the US demonstrated the ability to successfully identify and shoot down incoming ICBMs launched from the other side of the ocean with the Aegis system in 2012, and said system is now installed on a number of our and our key allies ships and bases.

    The problem is not that it’s impossible to shoot down an ICBM, far from it, the problem is that to provide a reasonable margin of safety in a full scale nuclear extange you would need an absurd number of said missiles, as an opponent an just choose to focus all their missiles at a few key targets, so you would need to have all your cities and bases to each protected by enough missiles to take out the entirety of your adversaries arsenal by themselves.

    So if you actually wanted to actually improve the US’s missile defenses, you would just be ordering more RIM 161 SM 3’s from Raytheon and Mitsubishi, not throwing money at Musk’s cronies for their ‘invaluable insight’ into this new idea.


  • The risk with nuclear isn’t safety, it’s in the cost overruns and ever expanding build timelines. When it at best takes ten years and twice the funding to match what battery backed solar can do in six months, there is significantly more time for things like inflation and fossil fuel funded lawsuits to turn what is already a questionably profitable investment into a significant loss.

    When the primary thing limiting the energy transition is lack of funding, it makes sense to foucus said funding on renewables which can be built cheaply and quickly over more expensive and slower build methods like Nuclear, conventional Hydro, and deep Geothermal.






  • Counterpoint, I grew up in a smallish town in Idaho and was still absolutely surrounded by Democrats. State wide, only sixty percent of the voting age population actually turned out, and of those one out of every three people voted against Trump.

    Hell, Democrats outnumbered Republicans in some countries and again, this is fucking Idaho.

    This means that if you talk to an a Idahoan at random, there is a more than fifty percent chance they either largely already agree with you, or they are largely insulated from and not paying attention to politics and thusly susceptible to being swayed with the right approach and concrete examples of what Trumps doing to fuck them and their friends over specifically.

    Left wing ideas and policy are still far more popular among the general public, which is why Republicans have to lie about them constantly.

    Look for your local anarchist bookstore, look at what your counties Democrats actually organized, especially things like local pride events, show up, and network/make friends.

    As is fun to note, there are more Democrats living in Texas than New York state, so the idea you should just give up on finding any around you because you live in a red state instead of one where the numbers are reversed is honestly rather absurd.





  • If it makes you feel any better, modern climate and economic studies have shown that even a full scale nuclear war involving every nuclear power at the height of the Cold War and when nuclear stockpiles were far larger than today we still wouldn’t have come very close to actually killing off all the humans on earth, with the vast majority of the casualties being owed to famine in regions that were/are heavily dependent on western fertilizer. Indeed entire nations in the southern hemisphere tend to get through such senecios without much of an direct effect from world war three.

    Mostly this change from earlier predictions came from being able rule out the theory of a nuclear winter as climate modeling became more accurate and we could be sure that the secondary fires from such a war could not carry ash into the upper atmosphere in significant quantities, which was practically shown when a climate change fueled wildfire in Australia got so large that it should have been able to carry the ash into the upper atmosphere under nuclear winter theory but none was observed, validating modern climate models.

    Also, dispite what some less scrupulous journalists trying to drum up clicks have posted on the Ukraine War, the Russian government itself hasn’t really made any major signaling moves with regards to bringing nukes into the conflict, and indeed has maintained and repeatedly reiterated Putin’s 2010s no first use policy when asked.

    Don’t get me wrong, this is not the result of some greater Russian morals or whatever, but just a consequence of the inherent risk that such posturing could lead to nuclear escalation and breaking the nuclear taboo or even just other nations actually believing they plan to, and such scenarios end very badly for Russia in general and Putin in particular.