hvb2

> Lowest LCOE by far is "nuclear LTO (Long Term Operation)".

That's some serious cherry picking you're doing there.

It also says: "The LCOE calculations also do not capture other systemic costs or externalities beyond plant-level CO2 emissions such as, for instance, methane leakage during the extraction and transport of natural gas."

So we can just gloss over the nuclear waste problem. Which is especially interesting since the fossil plants will get a heavy hit due to their CO2 footprint.

Because of how hazardous it is, every country treats that as a national issue thus offloading the cost to taxpayers. Besides, I'm only aware of a single country (Finland I believe) who is far along on an actual permanent storage location. The US for example still doesn't have one, until that exists the real cost simply isn't known.

> And the various nuclear startups have cost projections that range from 2-3 cents to below 1 cent / kWh.

Startups have cost projections, sure. That's marketing material until they've actually built something. I'm sure SMRs will soon be reality and we can see how much of it is actually true. Until then, take everything you read with a grain of salt.

> The USPS is also, ahem, rather incompetent, and their own report [1] shows that "mitigation efforts are limited, with no substantive approach to identify counterfeit stamps in the Postal Service network.

They've been underfunded for a long time. Meanwhile they still have the legal requirement to deliver everywhere in the US. So the big guys like Amazon will happily deliver their own packages in densely populated areas where it's easily profitable. The areas where it's not can be done by USPS...

So basically the taxpayer is paying for Amazon to not have to deliver where it would be costly for them.

> The one on a stick in Balboa Park San Diego might have associated boxes of bits-and-bobs.

That's an A-12, not an SR-71

> That’s why the United Nations Security Council works.

Saying the security council works is... A perspective.

During the general assembly there were plenty of comments as to how it's not representative at all. There are 5 members with veto power (us, Russia, uk, France, china), why these? Because they won the WW2? The whole southern hemisphere doesn't hold veto power.

The security council works very well, if you're one of the 5 permanent members.

Your first paragraph "just use a MySQL container" and the second "test against what prod runs on", seem to contradict?

> If not, you are asking for eventual outage in Prod when some slightly different AWS thing bites you.

Exactly...

Having done many road trips in a Tesla, I don't believe this is true. My trips were in the south west though. I'm sure there are areas where it is a problem but it depends.

Make sure you ask it why it wouldn't work too. Because its answer given the same facts will be different depending on the question asked

> Like S3 emulator, you could download one of many and test it but unless your test suite is extensive, the costs against S3 test bucket would probably cost you .03 cents

Not sure if your serious.

You picked the simplest service that isn't expensive at all to run. Have you tried with an RDS cluster for example, how does that work?

Does your integration test create a new cluster to use? That's slow to set up.

Does it use an existing one? Now you might have failures due to noisy neighbors and your cost will not be small.

And that's just RDS, as soon as it's not serverless, costs aren't trivial anymore.

I was referring to normal business operations in the US.

So if someone thinks this is illegal, it's only illegal until a court says so. It can be in clear violation of the law but until a judge says it is they can pretend they 'interpret' things differently

Spoiler, they only follow court orders. You can violate the law as long as you want until there's a judge saying you do. This is just modus operandi for any big corp in America nowadays.

I think everyday astronaut did a video explaining how a refueled starship can make it to Mars.

So you are missing the fuel for the return trajectory, which they plan to make there IIRC. So add in situ resource utilization to your list.

> If the EU countries were leaving NATO to form their own military alliance, then I would agree with you but that hasn't happened and maybe never will.

The whole point is that, in general, global cooperation has worked well in the last 80 years. Europe doesn't want that to change but the US didn't vote for this guy once, but twice. Fool me once, shame on me, fool me twice, shame on you.

So Europe won't leave NATO, but it is pivoting to being more self sufficient. It's another area where the US is quickly spending the political capital it accumulated for decades.

> That is not explained by increased deficit, but by net increase in demand.

A yield going up means you pay more for the same thing. So if the US wants to issue more debt, they can. The fact that more debt was bought but the yield went to means the supply grew faster than the demand. So an absolute increase in demand, but a net decrease, thus a higher price as shown by the yield

I like your post a lot, in that you're describing how this doesn't say anything about anyone's chances really. However...

> but also with poor people abusing their democratic powers to unjustly take from others that which they have not earned

How would they abuse their democratic powers? It's their decision to vote either way. So who says that's unjust? Certainly it's not abusing their democratic powers.

Abusing of power happens on the other end of the spectrum, especially in the US thanks to citizens united.... Surely all those super PAC dollars don't buy any influence... As a result, the voice of a single rich person might be stronger than a whole quintile of the population. So chances are that they are unjustly given things that aren't theirs (i.e. advantageous contracts, laws that help them etcetera).

Counter argument being that this seems to indicate you can do whatever as long as you're innovating?

Some post offices in the US also function as a so called notary public. Basically, they can verify your identity and attest that it's you who sent/did something.

This is used quite often for important things that don't have offices themselves.

And who pays for those miles of fiber? That one customer, because he chose to live there?

I assume you understand that it that's the case, Starlink is a much better option as it won't cost them 5 figures upfront

I obviously didn't invent that term. And in large part you're right that it means deregulation so companies can do whatever

For European governments that have their email and such running with Microsoft, it's quite the signal when individuals lose their email because the US doesn't like them. See international criminal court.

> we have an (ever growing) list of forbidden clauses that even when written and signed by consumer are null and void

I'm pretty sure that's true almost everywhere. Law beats contract. The real question is how strong the laws are. In the US not so much because of small government and stuff, especially in red states.

An out of county police officer, in general, can't conduct a traffic stop? There's a few exceptions but none of those seem to apply?

London is not a financial center?

Uh? By what metric?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_Financial_Centres_Index

Just to be a pedant, 18.5 % in the US and same in Canada so 37%.

I wouldn't call that almost half, it used to be about half before the move (NY at 31.3, 19.7 in Canada).

For Europe the choices are, foreign actor A or foreign actor B.

I don't think the current US administration has shown themselves to be less hostile than China...

> If I pay $5000 for a chair I have reason to expect a lot from it. And more often than not, pricey furniture doesn't actually deliver sufficient quality to be able to defend the price.

That's not the point. A large chunk of the price is the name on it and the marketing/image you associate yourself with. I thin, as engineers, that's hard to relate to. But that is how it works.

The price is not a reflection of quality, it's an outcome of a process to pick a price just enough people are willing to pay.

> I imagine that their issue is reviewer bandwidth.

This feels to me as the real bottleneck in general. Maybe along with thinking through what to code/prompt.

I don't need more tokens or automated generation of PRs, I'm already at capacity for the care and understanding I want to have for code I own.

Not sure what you're referring to but in June they achieved criticality in a demo. While a good milestone that's not at all a functioning reactor connected to the grid. Let alone anything like a repeatable consistent production of said reactor.

Well so far I believe they've been buying us government bonds for example?

Also, haven't they been buying all kinds of stuff in Africa etcetera? Money doesn't have to flow from A to B and back to A. It might very well pass many more hops to complete the circle

> But China wants to make everything

As long as a typical Chinese person is happy with a standard of living that is far below what an American expects, China will be way cheaper on labor.

For most products, labor is a significant cost.

For a lot of consumers, price is more important then where it's made. Maybe not what they say they think is important but when they actually decide. As a result, China will make almost everything, along with the rest of south east Asia.

Basically, the lower price for products comes at the cost of exporting your own jobs. One is easy to reason about when making a purchase decision, the other is indirect and abstract. Which is why the former wins

Selling at a loss to capture market share, isn't that part of every SV startup? What makes it so bad in this case?