> So it's just a lot of hot air, simply because it is not the government that is restricting our right to compute. But the device makers, and software developers.
No, it is only the government which can restrict these rights through violence and the threat of violence. Sony cannot restrict you from buying an Xbox or Nintendo.
But sony, microsoft and nintendo all heavily restrict what you can use their computer for, and what software you can run on it.
This is not a free-market issue. Yes, I am still free to buy another device. But if all device makers heavily restrict access, then this is a bunch of feel-good nonsense.
It is a free market issue, because when an oligopsony controls what can be bought and sold you don’t have a free market. These hardware vendors are controlling the market for software for their devices, and buyers are not free to make their own decisions about hardware they purportedly own.
> They had no problem carving out an exception to the filibuster rule when pushing through district court judges and later Supreme Court justices without Democrat support
Democrats removed the filibuster on district and appellate court judges.
I used to be a true believe in nuclear (in the 80s, 90s). Recently, I thought (with good justification) that it's a folly to build out nuclear if renewables' economics continue on the current path.
Recently, I wonder if a nuclear winter (I mean this in the cold war context) is likely enough to make renewables massively less efficient. If the current administration were more competent, I'd assume that they are pushing non-renewables for that reason.
But then again, after a nuclear winter, our energy consumption will probably drop to near zero (the population being near zero), so it probably wouldn't matter either way.
I was pretty into nuclear as well but it's pretty obvious that solar/wind with battery storage is the future. For the price of a single reactor you can build out like 5x the capacity with other renewables. That's also accounting for the down periods.
It's kinda fitting that NOW trump jumps on board with nuclear, once the data says it isn't really necessary anymore. It's possible we can maybe build some useful small reactors for some stuff, but yeah.
Nuclear doesn’t work in a market based electricity market. The capital costs are high and it’s difficult to make money if you aren’t paying down those expenses.
IMO, the old style regulated public utilities were cheaper and more reliable.
Nuclear is a renewable, and of course it still makes sense to build it out. In what world do you think our energy needs plateau? I'm always so surprised to see this 1970s hippie attitude making a comeback, especially since it makes less sense today than ever before.
BTW: Is this some kind of new alchemy I don't know about ? How exactly do you renew fissile or fusion-able material ?
We can probably agree that renewable is a misnomer, sine yesterday's sunlight isn't magically showing up again - it's new light from the same sun. Once the sun dims, we are in big doo-doo.
But for fission: fission end products are either useless for future energy production, or require fairly messy breeder reactors that, as I understand it, do not lend themselves to nice modularization and reconditioning that stuff isn't particularly easy (Sellafield may be a good example of how horrifyingly costly all this is). And the end fission products are never the same as the input, so I would like to understand better how you see fission as a "renewable" source.
Also, just to understand the logic in:
"Nuclear is a renewable, and of course it still makes sense to build it out."
Why? A lot of "renewables", like underwater tide plants, should probably not be built out, at least right now, because the economics are just not supporting it. Just because something is "renewable" does not automatically mean we should "of course" building it. that would be the real 70s hippie attitude we so eschew on hacker news.
I think it makes a lot of sense to build out if the construction and remediation costs are born by a persistent entity that can amortize all those expenses appropriately. It makes almost no sense to build out if your entire energy market is privatized into small entities and you lack the regulatory willpower to ensure proper cleanup funds are reserved and thus open up a loophole for companies to run with minimal costs after construction and disburse funds internally freely. Such was the case with Vermont Yankee and it is very possible (likely even) that it'd be repeated.
If you have a strong central governance authority that can ensure proper maintenance and remediation then they're wonderful... France and China have these advantages - Japan was often held up as a paragon of this approach until massive internal mismanagement was revealed with Fukushima.
I am excited to see my country (Canada) investing more into Nuclear energy as we have a track record (ignore our uranium mining please) of doing this responsibly. I don't think America could safely manage this especially with the destabilization the current administration and lack of legislative backbone has demonstrated is possible.
There was still a perfectly nice window of opportunity even scratching nuclear from the list.
My other glib thing about nuclear is that France, a much denser nation than the US (though of course density is a local property...), has a bunch of nuclear, but even with "full" buy-in it's hard to make the whole thing profitable, and a lot of the nuclear reactors are running at like 80% capacity.
Electricity is pretty fungible at smaller scales but when you start building reactors you need water and you need consumers of a lot of electricity to be close by, and that does cause its own sets of constraints.
Would still be better if the US had built a bunch more nuclear reactors, but my assumption has often been that there are limits to how much it could be expanded in the US given those constraints.
> a lot of the nuclear reactors are running at like 80% capacity.
This is presumably intentional. Beyond longevity, being able to shift one plant to 0 and take up the load across other plants allows for continued uptime even with a plant down (or just below capacity).
> it's hard to make the whole thing profitable
Considering France had the second-cheapest electicity for industrial use in the EU (in 2015, the most recent date from Wikipedia), this feels more regulatory-bassed than a properly fair shot at "Look how expensive nuclear is"
It's intentional in that people are making decisions to do things, but the people running the power plants really would rather run at much higher capacity
I get what you're saying, but the line of comfort for these plants is above where it's at. I think the target is like 90% or something?
> Considering France had the second-cheapest electicity for industrial use in the EU (in 2015, the most recent date from Wikipedia), this feels more regulatory-bassed than a properly fair shot at "Look how expensive nuclear is"
Well... the State is present to make the whole thing work. This isn't a bad thing per se, though I think it goes against some US narratives of "well if the state didn't put in a bunch of regulations then nuclear would just be everywhere".
It's more I guess a point about how there's unlikely to be magical economies of scale that make this whole thing work out.
And the industrial use electricity point goes hand in hand with the reactor usage levels: there's a lot of electricity that EDF would like to sell but have few buyers for! It's a buyer's market!
I like nuclear stuff in general, just think it's worth being clear eyed that nuclear power generation has Real Problems that even full state and societal buy in didn't solve in France's case. Though they did get cheap power for trains etc from the deal, so not like France's situation is bad by any stretch of the imagination.
That will be one of many things they will not forgive us for. Alas most of us in developed countries have treated the world as a dumping ground for our excess.
This is the worst part. Wind and solar don't come within a thousand miles of being sufficient unless we massively improve our generation density, invent new magical batteries that aren't even on the horizon yet, and build out hundreds of thousands of square miles of solar panels and windmills.
Warrant canaries depend on action, the removal or altering of the canary document. It’s too clever but no more clever than what Israel is requiring here.
Yes, the equivalent of a warning canary would be that Google pays the Israeli government a set of payment every month such as 3100 shekels (for +31, NL) and then suddenly November 2025 they stop issuing it. That would mean there's a legal investigation targeting Google by the Dutch prosecutor (OM) involving Israeli data.
I suspect they didn't go for this route as it is too slow.
I would think to stopping doing something is equally an action as to do something, in regards to warrant canaries and gag orders. You had to take make some change to your process, or if automated take an actual action to disable. In either case, there was a cognizant choice that was made
The legal theory is that in the US the first amendment prevents the government from forcing you to make a false update. I don’t know if it’s ever been tested.
As I understand, this theory wouldn’t even hold up in other countries where you could be compelled to make such a false update.
What if I, sometimes, annually paint a canvas with an artistic interpretation of a canary bird? Can a government compel me to make an artistic expression with specific content, at my own expense? What if I'm just not in the right kind of creative mood to make it a good painting?
Or maybe I can bill the government for the compelled artwork -- I'm afraid I'm tremendously expensive as an artist.
More specifically, the theory is that cannot compel you to lie, there are all kinds of cases where businesses are compelled to share specific messages.
As far as I've seen, the examples of that have always been things like health warnings and ingredients lists, where showing that message is a condition of being in that (licensed) business, and applies equally to any company.
For employee things, I can understand being required to notify parties in agreements the company has entered into. As far as I understand, consent degrees are settlements and as such a mutually-agreed mechanism for ending a lawsuit early; their terms are whatever the parties negotiate and do not come from the government.
To be more precise, the law requires employees to publish the nlrb notice in well trafficked or otherwise conspicuous locations.
I think there are other places where "government mandated corporation inform people of their rights" is a thing, especially with things like data use and sharing.
In terms of consent decrees, that was the wrong example. But lots of judgements do involve various notification requirements.
Car manufacturer warranty recall letters are probably a good example.
I get them even though I've never done business with the car manufacturer -- I bought the vehicle from a private party.
But that still sort of connects (at least in my mind) to health warnings etc.
Right - the whole premise is that the government cannot compel speech (in the US). So if you publish something every week that says, “we’ve never been subpoenaed as of this week” and then receive a subpoena, the government can’t force you to lie and publish the same note afterwards. The lack of it being published is the canary here.
Whether you can be compelled to lie under these circumstances or not is not a resolved question of law. Although it seems fairly likely that compelling speech in this way is unconstitutional, if it has been tested in court, the proceedings are not public.
Isn’t the problem that Trump is now doing what he promised? He campaigned on tariffs and deportations (and a decade ago, building a White House ballroom).
What if the second- and third-order effects of this modern activism have resulted in the Trump presidency? Is that better or worse than what Theil has built?
There is an infinite regress of blame you could play for the Trump presidency. Where you choose to stop is more revealing of your intentions than the truth.
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