Em Adespoton

  • 1 Post
  • 335 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 4th, 2023

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  • I don’t get it. Current nuclear power solutions take longer to set up, have an effectively permanently harmful byproduct, have the (relatively small) potential to catastrophically fail, almost always depend on an abundant supply of fresh water, and are really expensive to build, maintain and decommission.

    If someone ever comes up with a functional fusion reactor, I could see the allure; in all other cases, a mix of wind, wave, geothermal, hydro and solar, alongside energy storage solutions, will continually outperform fission.

    I suspect that the reason some countries like nuclear energy is that it also puts them in a position of nuclear power on the political stage.







  • While true to a point, don’t paint Russia as being any better. They chose the war of aggression against Ukraine and are choosing not to stop it.

    They were also in Afghanistan before the US, and destroyed it even more than the US has, between the two of them leaving the Taliban as the best local option remaining.

    I sure don’t know what the solution is, as everything the world has tried so far has eventually failed, concentrating power in the hands of a few to abuse it.

    BRICS could have a potential to control Russia while redistributing power, except that it includes Russia and China and India, all of which have a strong track record of concentrating power into the hands of the few, rejecting the voice of the people while putting on a western facade of being for the people.

    Throw into this mix the upcoming results of global warming and neither bloc is going to make things better for the majority of humanity.



  • The problem is, once the middlemen gain power, they’re never gonna give you up. Music producers are a great example of this, as are telecoms companies.

    All the current SaaS stuff is similar; the offerings LOOK similar, but they’re explicitly designed not to be a 1:1 match, so you can’t just take your business elsewhere, just like the mattress companies of old.

    We’re even seeing this play out in the streaming video market, where each player has its own differentiator, moreso than we ever saw with traditional cable TV.

    Standards are great, but middlemen have no incentives to not subvert them.