Watch him try to open this truck door. He looks frail and uncoordinated.

There’s been some reporting that Musk’s Super PAC has been paying its workers so well that it’s poached a bunch of the volunteers from the official campaign, and is so poorly run/audited that a lot of the workers are entering false data into the canvassing reports to qualify for bonuses. If that turns out to be true, then it will have been the case that Musk is burning his own money while hurting the Trump campaign.

I’m not ready to call the race, but stories like this at least reassure me that for Republicans, they’re not sending their best.

I made my own “cell phone service” but it only works within 10m of my home.

was in charge of the prison where he died

Technically the president delegates that to his Attorney General, who in this case was the son of the guy who first hired a totally unqualified Epstein (21 years old, no college degree) to be around high school age kids, where he was known for ogling girls and somehow showing up to student parties where there was underage drinking.

And some blame lays with the prosecutor back in 2008 when Epstein was first charged for sex trafficking and sexual assault, who decided to let Epstein agree to a secret plea deal for only 13 months in county jail (which is really weird for a federal prosecutor to let happen), who, oh wait, was then rewarded by becoming a cabinet official for Trump.

40x the kinetic energy. Now consider the chemical energy stored in sufficient fuel for a coast to coast flight of that weight and speed.

Same vibes as Kim Jong Un touring a factory.

Upfront costs are expensive. But operational and fuel costs are very low, per MWh.

So take the upfront costs at the beginning and the decommissioning costs at the end, and amortize them over the expected lifespan of the plant, and add that to the per MWh cost. When you do that, the nuclear plants built this century are nowhere near competitive. Vogtle cost $35 billion to add 2 gigawatts of capacity, and obviously any plant isn’t going to run at full capacity all the time. As a result, Georgia’s ratepayers have been eating the cost with a series of price hikes ($700+ million per year in rate increases) as the new Vogtle reactors went online. Plus the plant owners had to absorb some of the costs, as did Westinghouse in bankruptcy. And that’s all with $12 billion in federal taxpayer guarantees.

NuScale just canceled their SMR project in Idaho because their customers in Utah refused to fund the cost overruns there.

Maybe Kairos will do better. But the track record of nuclear hasn’t been great.

And all the while, wind and solar are much, much cheaper, so there’s less buffer for nuclear to find that sweet spot that actually works economically.

That was true in the 70’s, too. You always needed a way to show that people would pay the long term prices necessary to cover the cost of construction.

The big changes since the 70’s has been that competing sources of power are much cheaper and that the construction costs of large projects (not just nuclear reactors, but even highways and bridges and tall buildings) have skyrocketed.

There’s less room to make money because nuclear is expensive, and cheaper stuff has come along.

One of the great sins of nuclear energy programs implemented during the 50s, 60s, and 70s was that it was too cost effective.

I don’t see how any of this has any bearing on financial feasibility of power plants.

For what it’s worth, before the late 90’s there was no such thing as market pricing for electricity, as prices were set by tariff, approved by the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission. FERC opened the door to market pricing with its Order 888 (hugely controversial, heavily litigated). And there were growing pains there: California experienced rolling blackouts, Enron was able to hide immense accounting fraud, etc. By the end of the 2000’s decade, pretty much every major generator and distributor in the market managed to offload the risk of price volatility on willing speculators, by negotiating long term power purchase agreements that actually stabilize long term prices regardless of short term fluctuations on the spot markets.

So now nuclear needs to survive in an environment that actually isn’t functionally all that different from the 1960’s: they need to project costs to see if they can turn a profit on the electricity market, even while paying interest on loans for their immense up front costs, through guaranteed pricing. It’s just that they have to persuade buyers to pay those guaranteed prices, rather than persuading FERC to approve the tariff.

As a matter of business model, it’s the same result, just through a different path. A nuclear plant can’t get financing without a path to profit, and that path to profit needs to come from long term commitments.

It can take over a decade to break even on operation, assuming you’re operating at market rates.

Shit, it can take over a decade to start operations, and several decades after that to break even. Vogtle reactors 3 and 4 in Georgia took something like 20 years between planning and actual operational status.

Now maybe small modular reactors will be faster and cheaper to build. But in this particular case, this is cutting edge technology that will probably have some hurdles to clear, both anticipated and unanticipated. Molten fluoride salt cooling and pebble bed design are exciting because of the novelty, but that swings both ways.

I still think it’s too expensive, and this contract doesn’t change my position. Google is committing to buying power from reactors, at certain prices, as those reactors are built.

Great, having a customer lined up makes it a lot easier to secure financing for a project. This is basically where NuScale failed last year in Idaho, being unable to line up customers who could agree to pay a sufficiently high price to be worth the development risk (even with government subsidies from the Department of Energy).

But now Google has committed and said “if you get it working, we’ll buy power from you.” That isn’t itself a strong endorsement that the project itself will be successful, or come in under budget. The risk/uncertainty is still there.

Bottom line: There’s no data right now that suggests a significant shift in the electoral college advantage for 2024.

There’s a ton of uncertainty in the data now.

2016 and 2020 polls missed Trump popularity, and about 2/3 of pollsters have decided to use recall vote weighting (that is, making sure that their sample is representative of the vote ratios in the actual 2020 results). Historically, that method has overstated the previous losing party’s support (people are more likely to remember voting for the winner, so reweighing the results the other way ends up favoring the loser), but 2 presidential elections in a row have caused some pollsters to try to make up for past mistakes. Then again, does Trump himself being on the ballot change things?

Throw in the significant migration patterns of the pandemic era where many voters might not be voting in the same state that they were in 2020, and increasing difficulty at actually getting statistically representative poll respondents through spam filters, and there are real concerns about poll quality this year, perhaps more than previous years. Plus ballot access being uneven also might translate to actual voting biases that aren’t captured in the polling methods, either.

I just wouldn’t trust the polls to be accurate. Volunteer and vote.

The explanation is pretty mundane.

The last 2 years have seen really, really fast depreciation, because the car shortage of 2020-2022 drove up cars way beyond their normal prices. Some cars actually appreciated in value in 2021.

So when the shortage untangled eventually, used car prices plummeted. Here’s a chart of the most robust used car price index.

At the same time, several EVs saw huge price drops as Tesla tried to preserve market share against increased competition. When the new car drops in price by $20k, then the used market for that car similarly drops suddenly.

So when the value of vehicles drops unexpectedly across multiple markets, you’ll have a lot more people whose car values failed to keep up with their loan balances.

Most people make a down payment so that their loan balance starts off being significantly lower than the value of the car.

20 years ago it was the people who worshipped Jack Welch, not realizing (or not caring) that he was running GE into the ground.

I agree with your general view that it’s not actually time to relax.

But I will point out that you can’t just assume the electoral college advantage stays the same from election to election.

Biden won with 4.5% more of the national vote. Harris currently is polling at about half that. In the EC, Biden won by only 78,000 votes despite his large +4.5% popular vote lead.

In 2020, Biden won by 4.5% in the popular vote, but he won the tipping point state of Wisconsin by 0.6%. In other words, the electoral college was worth roughly a R+3.8% advantage in 2020 (yes, 4.5% minus 0.6% is 3.9% but when you use unrounded numbers it’s closer to 3.8%).

Is 2024 going to be the same? Probably not. The New York Times ran an article about this last month, and the tipping point state in the polling was Wisconsin, where Harris was polling at +1.8%, only 0.7% lower than the national average at the time of 2.6%. The article noted that national polling has Trump shrinking Harris’s lead in non-competitive blue states like California and New York, or expanding his lead in places like the deep south, while not gaining in actual swing states compared to 2020.

Note, however, that as of today, Harris’s lead in Wisconsin has shrunk to just under 1%, so we are seeing a shift towards Trump in the actual electoral college.

Right now, Harris is showing a lead in the national polling averages, by aggregator:

• 538: Harris up by 2.4%
• NYT: Harris up by 3%
• 270towin: Harris up 2.5%
• Nate Silver: Harris up 2.9%

It’s a close race, according to the polls. But whether the polls are actually accurate remains a huge unknown. So everyone should vote, and those with the means should volunteer.

An Italian guy who opened a restaurant in Mexico catering to Americans because the United States had banned alcohol.

The Holy Roman Empire was not holy, nor was it Roman, nor was it an empire.

What, a ghost choked you in Switzerland?

Enshittification isn’t always driven by a conscious person or organization with an agenda, much less one with an agenda of short term financial gain. Sometimes the aggregation of a bunch of individual decisions causes something to get shittier. Or better. Or just different. 4chan is not at all like it was 20 years ago, but it wasn’t because of corporate influence. The culture just changes.

So if the question is whether the fediverse might someday suck, I think the answer is probably yes. It remains to be seen how it will suck, who will have caused it to be that way, and whether there will be other nice things about it.

one that eats sulfur and excretes iron, and one that eats iron and excretes sulfur

Thermodynamically, how could these two cycles sustain metabolism? Were there other processes/species in the mix to introduce chemical compounds that had more energy contained within?