jordanb

The logic for a "small" reactor is that it's one that can rely on passive cooling in the event of a shutdown so that it doesn't have to be actively cooled to avoid a meltdown.

The "modular" part is the idea that you then produce more of them lowering unit cost and install many more than is typical at a site.

This also potentially allows you to have more control of plant energy output and respond faster to grid needs.

Recall that the fukushima meltdown was caused after the cooling failed. The reactor building survived the tsunami and the reactors were shutdown. The problem is the diesel backup generators used to run the coolant pumps were flooded.

I started working in the 2000s.

I assumed that the culture changed at some point between the 1960s when it was normal for a corner office to have a full liquor bar in it (according to mad men) and the 2000s.

After the 1980s I guess

Brand USA was hip during the Obama years.

> 10-15 years ago it was expected you would have 1-2 glasses of wine at lunch as a front office guy / banker while talking shop. Now you will get a trip to HR unless meeting a client or in a place that still allows it.

It's been like this in America for decades. Even places with "beer on tap" the expectation is you don't drink until after the work day. If you were pulling the tab at lunch you'd get a talk from your boss and eventually HR

More Americanization of Europe?

Again how many times before intent is clear? This is HN thinking law is software.

At some point it becomes clear that openai should expect this to happen and so when they keep doing it, it is because they intend it to happen.

When the mobster says "it'd be a shame if something happened to this place" the law recognizes that as a threat due to the mob's history of making such statements before burning places out.

How many times does it have to happen before they no longer get to claim that they didn't intend for it to happen?

If it happens 50 times and they keep doing shocked pikachu face at some point they look like the toddler who tosses their sippy cup on the floor and shouts "oopse!"

They could make that argument the first time it happened but the next time or the fifth time I don't see how they can still credibaly claim to not know that the computer they control was going to do that

Apparently corporate structure gave him power over the board. Historically this kind of structure was considered undesirable and illegal in a public company, but beginning in the 2000s there was this idea that "visionary founders" should be able to demand absolute control, ex: Zuckerberg

They could have known they wouldn't succeed but they could have decided their fiduciary duty requires them to either try or resign.

Another good example is how these trade deals strip liability at the border.

I recall an example of when a Mexican worker in an LG plant lost her hands in a poorly-maintained stamping press. Theoretically Mexico has robust worker protection laws, but in reality the courts are corrupt and controlled by the maquiladoras.

So instead lawyers tried to sue LG in US court on her behalf. In fact they sued the actual TVs being imported by LG US that were made in her factory, the same way counterfeit goods are sued and arrested at the border by intellectual property owners.

The US judge dismissed the case arguing that the TVs were owned by LG US, who bought them in Mexico from LG Mexico. Both companies being owned by the same parent company is irrelevant to the law which saw them as completely separate entities and neither LG US nor the TVs it bought have any responsibility for the conditions in the Mexican factory.

Now if the drafters of NAFTA cared at all about worker conditions they could have easily made liability follow the goods across the border the same way they made copyrights and trademarks follow the goods across the border. They did not care about the workers and in fact they saw the mistreatment of workers as an advantage of the free trade deal.

I guess we're going to have a bunch of people innovating on jet turbines in their garages?

I was talking to the turbine engineer at lunch one day and the way he put it is this:

There are about five companies who hire people with his background. They all go through boom and bust cycles together. When he graduated they were in a bust cycle and nobody was hiring new graduates, so he found a job in software. He was glad because the pay and working conditions are better, and at the time (a few years ago) it seemed like software engineering was a safe career with lots of employers, which turbine engineering was not.

In my career I've worked with people with PHDs in Physics. People with advanced degrees in fluid dynamics and turbine engineering, people with chemistry and ChemE degrees, postdocs in Geology.

All were working alongside me, a self-taught programmer making websites.

I've long thought that there's an oversupply of smart people in the world but for the field of software development, which was hiding that fact by soaking all of them up.

If SDE is collapsing as a field, a whole bunch of people who thought their intelligence and credentials guaranteed them a comfortable life are in for a shock.

> Unfortunately, this might be an example of OpenAI the company having vastly more compute time and effort than your average enigma nerd.

It seems like a lot of the recent "breakthroughs" come down to this: spending millions of dollars in compute to solve problems that essentially amount to recreational math problems

Boeing is not a healthy company it's a deeply sick company with a horrible internal culture. I know because I've spoken with people who work there.

The fact that leadership is focused on extracting profits out of the enterprise is also not a show of strength. It's a demonstration that they're trying to drain whatever value is left in it.

This is pretty much true of any of the American "greats:" Boeing, Intel, GE, GM, Corning. They're producing (or have recently been producing) great profits because they're eating their own seed corn. Nobody expects them to still be the businesses they currently are in another few decades.

America has lots of natural resources (even more when we're friendly with Canada) cheap electricity, good transportation infrastructure (historically).

China has to import much of their raw materials. Wood from SEA and Russia, oil from the middle east and Russia, even coal, ore and beef cattle from Australia! They don't have the water supply, forests, mines or oil that exist in North America.

There is no good reason for them to be the manufacturing center of the globe and there were rational reasons why the US was the center of manufacturing in the globe in the 20th century.

The reason they became the global center of manufacturing was policy choices in China and the US at the turn of this century, and the reason why they remain the center of manufacturing is they developed a massive amount of capital and know-how in an era where the USA was actively destroying its own.

Completely agree Jiang Zemin spent the 1990s courting global capital.

The point is that it wasn't technology it was policy, on the Chinese and American side, that drove the China Shock.

This was also what a lot of anti-globalization people were say at the time. The pro-globalization people were saying not only is it good but it's inevitable. There Is No Alternative.

The anti globalization people were saying if it's inevitable why does it need all these policy changes, trade agreements, and bigwig conferences?

They're the mandrins of our modern age. Their role is to make what our rulers want to do sound smart and reasonable

If you go back to WWII America was the China of the world: mass produced products if midrange quality.

Europe owned high end quality, especially Germany.

Most Radar technology was invented in the UK and then sent to the USA where American engineers would redesign it for mass production. You'd have a magnetron that the British machined at great expense and the Americans would redesign it so it could be stamped out by the thousands.

Germans would look at the wrecks of bombers they shot down. Early on they'd look at a B17 and say "this thing is crude" but by 1944 they'd look at a late model bomber and say "we don't even know how they made some of this stuff".

People have it entirely backwards. They think if you can do high end manufacturing the low end is easy. In fact if you can do mass production of low end parts with consistent quality then high end stuff is easy.

Again containerization happened in the 1970s and 1980s. The China Shock was 2000-2010.

What technology was invented in 2000 that allowed everything to go to China? No technology. That was the year the US adopted Permanent Normalized Trade Relations with China. It was a government policy change!

By the way the US already had trade relations with China. All PNTR did was promise not to change the policy in the future. That was the starting gun that signaled to all American companies that they should start investing in production in China.

So would globalization happen on some scale just because of the march of technology? Sure. But the way it happened, the speed at which it happened and the extent to which it happened, were the result of policy choices.

I promise you the people in the towns where the factories were closing were 100% against it. And the corporations never tried to claim that "at least your town will be cleaner" probably because they were mostly leaving behind superfund sites they were trying to avoid cleaning up.

Was the New Yorker crowd clinking glasses together talking about how good it was to get the dirty steel mills out of the country? Sure maybe but this argument never resonated with anyone on the ground.

Were companies actively moving factories offshore so they could be dirtier because they didn't have to comply with American environmental laws? Absolutely.

You're arguing that American manufacturing is healthy because of Boeing?

I think you missed their conclusions. The problem wasn't that China was a lot cheaper. The problem was that substantial subcomponent or process vendors only exist in china. Like, they could find American sheet metal stamping companies but they were all using custom tooling made in China because American tooling doesn't exist anymore.

Tooling is a high-skill trade. America used to be amazing at tooling. What's more, tooling isn't super cost sensitive because one tool can make thousands of parts.

When outsourcing to China began the tools would be made in the USA and shipped to China for the low-skill work. But over time those Chinese manufacturers figured out the tooling. What's more they realized that controlling the tooling would let them control the whole process.

They started doing things like, for instance, including the tooling in the price of the product so you don't even see it, if you use their tools. Just send them the cad file and they'll do the rest. So American tool making went away. But this was a conscious decision on the part of the Chinese manufacturer and an unconscious decision on the part of American importers who didn't really value their in-house expertise.

I remember being a young guy, blue collar background, but in the left-wing anti-globalization movement (think Seattle WTO protester types).

When I was in college or going to parties with New Yorker Reader types I'd try to argue against globalization and they would start smugly dropping their theories on me. I was too young and naive to refute them in any kind of convincing way, but my life experience told me that it was wrong.

But it was pervasive in the zeitgeist. Basically anyone trying to argue against it was backwards and stupid, or shrill if they were lefty.

Clean Air Act was passed in 1963. the Clean Water Act was passed in 1972. The China Shock began in 2000 after PNTR.

Avoiding environmental regulation was one reason to move factories to China, avoiding unions and high wages was another.

But the local communities weren't demanding that their factories be moved overseas so they could have a clean if impoverished towns. Your entire causality is completely backwards.

> I feel like you could take all the handwavy comment that are made today to dismiss this caution, and find equal dismissal back then when companies were actively outsourcing the manufacturing.

Absolutely people were extremely dismissive to anyone saying that we're losing the ability to make things in this country!

There were all these theories like Comparative Advantage that people would trot out to point out that, if you don't like outsourcing, not only are you ignorant and backwards you're also probably racist.

This is exactly right. The gift economy that Open Source is part of is incompatible with the extraction economy AI represents.

Guess this is the logic for SPCX bond trading at junk valuations?

> they brought in management that was more interested in 'doing management. than making money.

Boy it'd be tragic if these guys felt like they were over their heads, decided to "hire some experts" and ended up with MBAs.

Real bummer I have their manual lathe and mill and have made a lot of things it would have been impossible to make without the ability to machine (even at small scale their machines could do).

One reason why I bought sherline is the company was still in business and creating so many accessories.

I guess I'll be trying to buy stuff off of eBay or something like I would have been doing had I bought Chinese stuff.

Speaking of which does anyone know the details of their small 60 degree carbide inserts? I assume that don't make those themselves.