rwcarlsen

If you use a heat pump in winter you do actually make outside colder. So there is that analog.

It's not the magnitude of demand that affects price - it's the price elasticity - the demand and supply curves matter. Demand for petroleum (e.g. gas, etc.) is very stiff - so small changes in supply can have large impacts on price.

While I'm sure some of that does occur some places in the region, my experience in the Utah/Idaho region is very much the opposite. Friendly and very merit oriented work environments.

Depending on who you talk to and your definitions, nuclear is generally considered dispatchable. The only definitively non-dispatchable sources are e.g. wind and solar where they cannot guarantee power levels and availability during the dispatching window. It is a bit of a spectrum - some sources (i.e. nat gas plants) are considered highly dispatchable because they can be spun up and down and adjust power levels very quickly (i.e. load following).

Global supply chain problems. Inflation problems. China still doing rolling lockdowns. Geopolitical conflicts. Ukraine. China-Taiwan. Off the heels of a not unlikely a lab evolved virus pandemic. Extreme political polarization in the U.S. Increasing anxiety and other mental health problems in youth. I'm going to go with very worried. But maybe I'm just becoming an old cynical curmudgeon.

It's not really overloading. it is associative:

    2*time.Hour+1*time.second == time.Second+time.Hour*2

No they are technically correct. In the reactor world "shut down" explicitly and specifically refers to chain-reaction-running mode. The reactors do still require active cooling for several days+ to avoid plant damage scenarios. Several comments on this page seem to not have a clear understanding of this difference.

Once the chain reaction is shut down - there is basically no way for the reactor to come alive (chain-reaction-wise) again on its own - not even if it's being bombed, shelled, etc. And run-away super(prompt)critical reactions are not even possible with this reactor design. These reactors are water-moderated - which means that water is used to slow down neutrons to increase their reaction probability. As the reactor heats up, the water gets less dense (even if it is still a liquid) making it a less effective moderator - this density decrease is enough to passively/automatically keep the reactor in a shut-down state. Residual decay heat from radioactivity of the fission byproducts post-shutdown is enough to damage the reactor internals for several days - hence the need for active cooling post-shutdown.

I've seen lots of crazy-exaggerated news reporting on how "bad" or "dangerous" this entire situation could be. It's not good, but neither is the war in Ukraine. It's not even remotely possible for this to be anything like Chernobyl, and I think unlikely to be nearly as bad as Fukushima (which in the grand scheme of the Tsunami - wasn't really that bad). In the war context, I don't think this nuclear plant situation is particularly notable beyond it providing a large fraction of Ukraine's power.

I am a nuclear engineer FWIW.

Why is twitter not letting people see and talk about this? What happened to discourse? I'm completely unsurprised that a tweet that shows how extreme our covid discourse/mitigations have become has been removed/deleted.

I agree it's absurd - which is why I wasn't sure why it sounded like you were making it. So since we established natural immunity is superior - why is it being ignored? Apparently it's not part of _the_ science.

But what about people that have already engaged and benefited from that risk? For many of those people, the vaccine risk is not so negligible compared to the additional benefit they gain from any (much smaller) immune boost they might get. Also, how is policy making "following _the_ science" if it doesn't even acknowledge the superiority of natural immunity. The least they could do is own their disregard and say - we're ignoring some science for [reasons] instead of simply demonizing a large fraction of the population as bigoted selfish backward uneducated scum - which is my interpretation of POTUS declaring war on 20% of Americans - a so called "pandemic of the unvaccinated" in his own words (or whoever wrote the speech).

I'm a draw-bored mortise and tenon guy myself.

You mean the shots that provide sterilizing immunity for diseases that have orders of magnitude higher mortality rates for children and healthy people? None of which is true with COVID - and anyone that disagrees can just look up the stats on the CDCs website and read about sterilizing immunity on wikipedia.

Yes - infected+vaccinated is more protected than infected. But infected is way more protected than vaccinated only. If your position is that everyone should meet the highest standard of infected+vaccinated - which is only marginally better than just being infected - then we should be mandating mandatory covid infection. But if your position is that vaccination alone provides acceptable protection, then infection alone already far far surpasses that in both lasting immunity and total efficacy.

[edit] Here is an excerpt from their conclusion:

"This study demonstrated that natural immunity confers longer lasting and stronger protection against infection, symptomatic disease and hospitalization caused by the Delta variant of SARS-CoV-2, compared to the BNT162b2 two-dose vaccine-induced immunity."

From my evaluation and research, nearly all the economic damage is being caused by said mitigations - not the virus or pandemic itself. So... stop doing the things that damage the economy? People want to work. People want to travel. People want to play. Let. Them. Do. It. A few are fearful and want to hide - that's fine too.

This is actually false and contradicts findings from several very reputable and large studies. See e.g. https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.08.24.21262415v...

That's a pretty poor analogy. Nails are often the right and often the wrong tool for different circumstances. And there are different kinds of nails. Lots of carpenters have preferences for what types of hardware they use - based on their own experience and that of experience from others. And even if I disagreed with a carpenter on what tools were right for any given particular circumstance, it would be silly to try to micromanage them doing their job - just let them do their work!

"because it's inconvenient" seems like a pretty poor precedent to set for governments mandating (unnecessary) medical procedures.

Where is the discussion about the fact that a very large fraction of these employees likely already had far superior natural immunity - which is provable. So they were fired for refusing to undergo what amounts to an unnecessary medical procedure. And these vaccines are non-sterilizing - so it's not like other vaccinations that are routinely required in other public health contexts.

You are not alone. The authoritarian threat and government overreach problems are IMO orders of magnitude more important and concerning than the virus. I will almost certainly be taking a stand and be terminated by my employer over this within the next few weeks.

So you're saying the tesla self driving capability is on par with humans driving at near their worst in a panic'd sort of circumstance. Great!

You really want covid to be categorically different than things we engage with every day and have since humans first began to walk the earth - but it really isn't. We make these sort of tradeoffs and engage with this sort of dilemma constantly. Nothing new or earth-shattering.

We allow people to make personal choices all the time that negatively impact others. I am acknowledging the gray area and have been the entire time. I'm saying that on the particular issue of seatbelts (and mask wearing) - I prefer to let people make their own choices being fully aware that it could cause some amount indirect harm to others. Maybe I hate the color yellow - people can still have yellow cars. I hate breathing in second-hand smoke, but I don't think people should be disallowed from smoking everywhere. I pay into entitlement programs that help support medical costs for people that voluntarily engaged in unsafe activities that caused their health problems. I still think those people should be allowed to make those choices.

I argued nothing black and white at all. I said that these things are tradeoffs. In this case - it is something along the lines of a freedom <--> safety tradeoff. And why aren't people allowed to draw their own lines on that spectrum. I was just stating that I draw my line in a different place than some.

Yes - I believe seatbelts should also be a personal choice. Infinite safety was never a goal - and never should be. If it were, our speed limits should be 5 mph everywhere - then nobody would die in car crashes but oops, it causes too many other problems - it would be a bad tradeoff. And lost freedom is a cost that is unacceptable to many people.

Anecdotally, I frequently observe masks causing people to touch their faces more. Masks cause itches, need to be adjusted, must be removed for drinking/eating, etc. I would be very interested in large-scale empirical studies measuring how effective masks are in practice. Sure in theory they can help. But I suspect in practice with the general public in everyday life, they do little to nothing to reduce virus sharing.

To say nothing about the costs of globally increased hunger, unrest, depression, deaths of despair, neglected+abused children, and on and on - that billions of people in the world will continue to pay for years to come in order to try to save at most a couple million lives of people with mostly significant pre-existing conditions and of advanced years that were mostly "on their way out".

Why not forget about the future and younger generation - they don't matter - we need to save the people that are going to die soon anyway at _all costs_! \s

Decreased influenza was influenced by loads of changes - not just masks. Various social distancing measures, schools closing, travel being restricted, etc. I don't think you can conclude anything empirically about influenza and masks without controlling for this dearth of other variables.

After reading your comment I want searching around the nets - and discovered this: https://www.economist.com/big-mac-index . Hilarious yet insightful.

You need to normalize to the dog population at least - rather than the human population.

$40k only gets you permission to hook up. The inspections, excavation, and most of the plumbing work needs to be paid for by the owner independently. So all the work that actually costs resources to do is not part of that $40k fee.