thinkcontext

> A few nuclear plants could be a good solution. (I’m not an energy expert)

You should look at the track record of recent nuclear projects in Europe. Olkiluoto and Flamanville both 3x+ over budget in time and money. Sizewell C isn't doing too well either, its very far from cheap.

Fossil fuels have a host of nasty externalities aside from climate change that are greatly lessened by cleaner sources of energy. For example, cutting down on the 10s of millions of lives that are shortened and made worse by fossil fuel pollution could be part of a better world.

In many places wind and solar are now cheaper than fossil fuels. This can particularly be seen in the past year countries like Pakistan, India, South Africa, etc greatly expanding their use of solar in particular.

Not sure what immigration has to do with energy policy.

I took it as a reference to the assassination of UnitedHealthcare's CEO.

Well its clear you didn't read the article, it explains how this particular type of geothermal is a technological advance. Current geothermal electrical generation is limited to very specific geology, enhanced geothermal is able to be used in many more places.

> I do 100mi/day

You are an extreme outlier, you should wait until the technology develops further. To use your parlance, no need to screech about people clutching their pearls at you.

Where are you getting that number? Germany produced 488 twh of electricity from all sources over the entire course of 2024. That's a bit over 1 twh per day.

The land argument is terrible. 40% of US corn acreage is already used for a form of solar energy, ethanol. Its over 20x less efficient than PV, so it's a huge waste of land.

Wind power on farmland only results in a tiny drop in acreage. And a hot area of study is mixing solar PV with various ag uses. In some cases yield is improved.

Finally, farmland that is used for solar is almost always not the best yielding land. Maybe the farmer is facing a water shortage or is just not that competitive. Solar could be a lifeline in situations like that.

> It’s so sad that the only way innovation can happen is if it’s funded by the government.

Governments fund a massive percentage of the foundational work that is necessary for productizable innovations, that precedes it by decades. Private companies rarely fund this type of work.

Take AI. All of the current models are descendants of the work of Geoff Hinton. He labored for decades in academic obscurity, when AI was a punchline. It was only after these decades of government support did he get a result interesting enough for Google to hire him.

There are countless other examples like this, lithium batteries, GPS, the Internet. GLP-1 drugs came from the study of gila monsters.

Would you prefer that your children breathe lead in their air?

> but we've never cared anyways

Rural areas in the US have enjoyed disproportionate communications (and infrastructure in general) subsidies since the founding of the USPS. More recently, the Universal Service Fund has spent around $5-8B per year since the 90s, first on phone service then adding broadband. And there are more recent broadband efforts for broadband in the tens of $Bs.

What are the downsides in this case?

Speed limits are necessary but not sufficient. Good design is also essential, as are the right incentives.

From their Wikipedia page

> Energy is captured by direct energy conversion that uses the expansion of the plasma to induce a current in the magnetic compression- and acceleration – coils. Separately it translates high-energy fusion products, such as alpha particles directly into a voltage. 3He produced by D–D fusion carries 0.82 MeV of energy. Tritium byproducts carry 1.01 MeV, while the proton produces 3.02 MeV.

> This approach eliminates the need for steam turbines, cooling towers, and their associated energy losses. According to the company, this process also allows the recovery of a significant part of the input energy at a round-trip efficiency of over 95%.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helion_Energy

That fusion reactions are so difficult to get started makes the reactors very safe because failure makes them stop. So, if you lose magnetic confinement the reaction stops. The reactor may be damaged but that's it.

This is unlike fission reactors, where a failure causes reactivity to increase. That causes meltdown and the possibility of explosion and all the nasty radioactive contamination.

> Heavy redistribution of wealth is already in place and it's not making things better.

Really? Universal education and healthcare don't make things better?

If they wanted to disrupt China's oil wouldn't they have hit the main export terminal on Kharg Island? More generally, you don't think its likely that, regardless of what you think of Israel, their main motivation is they don't want Iran to have a nuclear weapon?

Wanted to give a plug for joining your country's marrow donor registry. As mentioned in the article one of the last ditch treatment options is a marrow stem cell transplant from a donor. Finding a compatible donor can be difficult. On average the odds of finding a match in the general population is 1:10,000, and it can be much worse for some sub-populations. National registries have greatly increased the odds of finding a matching donor but there are people that die while looking for one.

Getting in the registry is easy in the US. You fill out a form on NMDP.org's website, they mail you a free kit, you swab your cheek and mail it back. Something like 1:800 people in the registry ever get contacted about being a donor, so its a pretty rare event. As far as being a donor, I believe around 90% of donations can be done by filtering the blood of the donor, the rest are done surgically.

I was a donor a few years ago after matching through the registry. It was a pretty rewarding experience. Like many people I've had relatives and friends impacted in various ways by cancer. Usually, you get a very powerless feeling as you wait for the process to play out, being a donor felt good because there was something that I could do. Happy to answer questions about the process.

https://www.nmdp.org/get-involved/join-the-registry

Plastic production produces several times as much co2 as is it contains.

> American astronauts regularly fly in paid Soyuz seats

It's a seat swap arrangement, no money is exchanged.

https://spacenews.com/nasa-extends-seat-barter-agreement-wit...

Because the really rich and international do pay full cost which means they can lower it for lower income students.

I took it to mean whoever succeeds him could be just as bad.

> it continues long enough might even result in lower prices for domestic students

International students pay full price so they wind up subsidizing domestic students. Many universities were already predicting strained budgets from fewer international students.

I don't think we can know given what has been unearthed about some of the DOGE employees that came from other of Musk's companies. Not that it's unlikely that it's him.

Manually. Its an old group, it predates widespread use of email. Nowadays it uses Google Sheets to coordinate.

I'm in a food buying club with a few dozen others. We mostly buy staples in bulk from distributors and divide things up. We'll get things like 50 pound bags of rice, 5 gallons of oil, etc. A side benefit is less plastic waste since everyone bring their own containers. An even better side benefit is that acquaintances become friends.

40% of US corn acreage is used for something like 10% of gasoline. This is an unfathomable amount of land. Solar yields 20x the amount of energy per acre. On top of that many are finding efficiencies of colocating solar with agricultural activities (agrivoltaics). And there's also replacing agricultural activities on marginal or water stressed land.

Conclusion, land isn't really a constraint in the US.

J6 made me wonder how many Michael Flynns would it take to get some part of the military to take part in a coup.

> I think the likely reason is they have signed a non disparagement agreement and have no avenue to publicly criticize

That was litigated during Trump's first term and held to be not enforceable. That was the case brought by one of his reality show contestants that he appointed to something (the exact details are too trivial to care about).

How do you square that theory with the strong correlation with deaths and unvaccinated rate, even after controlling for age and income?