throwaway1105q

Yeah but does anybody buy it? In my store the peripherals are covered in dust... And it's some cheap Chinese knockoff, nothing like the old high quality ones.

That would make sense in a world where the surrounding location is completely static, but generally as a town/city grows it's much more desirable - more work for better wages, more business opportunities, economies of scale, better education... A world that doesn't respond to that with increasing price doesn't seem sane. Imagine that you start with a house in the middle of nothing. 20 years later there is a major city around you - and the house should be cheaper than it was when there was nothing? What about new housing around your house, should it have the same nearly zero price too? What even is depreciation in case of housing - my grandmother lives in a 120 year old house and I'm pretty sure my grandchildren will live there too.

I haven't used USB-A single time since 2018... My USB-C display has it on its hub, but who cares...

This begs the more important question... Why does it take only one more person to end the world than to change some numbers in excel?

BTW one more point... Publicly traded companies in Europe are not as usual as in the US. It's mostly private equity here. You can't just buy stocks or bonds, it's either very high risk or very low yield.

With conventional methods price and size of the spaceship portion dedicated to propulsion scale with the mass it's carrying. If we could build a massive spaceship that costs a lot to build but runs cheaply, doesn't need refueling with scarce fuels available at only few refueling facilities, carries incredible amounts of goods and is reusable for many decades or even centuries without significant service/retrofitting, it'd make sense.

Lead time is a barrier of business. If I can get my goods to any customer anywhere in the belt in less than 30 days instead of many months, it's very valuable.

You're thinking about "[no] one", I am thinking about deliveries for millions of customers per trip. We're talking about a literal warp engine, this is not near future. There will be hundreds of millions of humans in space when this engine is production ready.

Most probably for the workers and AIs mining the asteroid belt. It's too far away to control remotely from Earth.

"I can't have everything software-wise so let me torture myself hardware-wise so I can forget about it"

Does any other manufacturer produce their own? I think the major issue is that other companies are integrators of cheapest bids for components, not computer companies.

Looks very corelated to the growth of renewable generation capacity...

It is if you're carrying megatons of medical supplies, computer chips, or other high value goods.

Your mistake is assuming France is socialist just because of its relatively generous welfare. It's actually neoliberal capitalism with strong preference for large corporations. And that's why this would lead to a protest or at least voting preference shift - it'd be taking one of the last remaining assets in the hands of the middle class.

Yeah, sure. As I said, I don't agree nor disagree. As far as I know, rental income is taxed everywhere in EU. I just answered why the people would revolt or vote against it - because they're probably still right there in that same city or nearby, and you're touching their personal assets, not some faceless corporation/fund.

Again, that might be true in Australia, but there are zero fossil fuel suppliers where I live. Coal mines were closed a decade ago because there was no more blank coal left and we have zero gas.

I am not French but I live a country or two over. Here it's mostly people who own 1-5 apartments in the city they live in, they definitely pay taxes there. And short term rentals are definitely not as simple as "profiting from land value".

Anyways I don't have an opinion about this, just wanted to answer why would people protest - because it's not some faceless corporation but them directly you're taxing.

You have academic theories, I'm getting practical information from my electricity invoice. The energy regulation office informed me about the necessary power grid operation budget increase through it when they doubled the distribution fee at the end of 2023. The budget (and fee) was stable for decades before this after accounting for inflation.

What grid impacts? The grid here has worked well for decades, there is no comparable grid impact from replacing coal and gas with nuclear. I guess it's different in Australia but this is a very densely populated small country, replacing 3 thermal power plants with 1 nuclear has zero impact on the grid and you can reuse parts of the thermal plant and infrastructure around it.

The politicians are busy talking about migrants and the Russian war, so I can't read anything about this from them even if I wanted to.

Because it's the locals who own it, even if they live elsewhere in the city. It's probably their pension income. Flats are usually owned personally by small scale owners in Europe, it's not like the huge funds and corporations in US. They are not poor but also not rich, it's work even if it's rented long term, and a lot of work if short term.

I have lived in an apartment my entire life. I'm in a building with 15 floors and 5 flats on each right now. My direct neighbors have a newborn baby. I don't hear a thing, literally - I wouldn't know there are other people if I wasn't 20 meters above the ground. Don't compromise on build quality like the Spanish do, build it like the Germans, Poles, Czechs and Slovaks do - and you won't have any issues.

We're talking about France, fix the law too much and heads will roll, or at least cars burn.

There was no blackout in my country past 30 years. The last one was before the revolution, that was before we had enough nuclear.

It's a shock that they have been investing incredible amounts of money into it for decades and still couldn't match the few nuclear reactors they turned off, indeed. At least they have the social/political argument - they turned the nukes off because they didn't like it. It's dumb but respectable. Lying about it being cheaper than nuclear is not respectable.

Won't make an useful engine? Maybe for some Star Trek fanboys. It'd be the most useful engine ever to anyone grounded in reality if it doesn't need reaction mass

Cheaper compared to what?

In my country people recently installed a significant amount of small-scale solar (over 50k households in 2023 compared to 1000 in 2020), in addition to large scale solar and wind generators. Did our electricity get cheaper? No. It's more expensive than the worst year of the crisis after Russian invasion of Ukraine. Why? Because the national power grid operator had to increase their investment to stabilize the grid by 2 orders of magnitude, which means they will spend over 60% of the entire national budget during next 3 years - and somebody has to pay for that. That's a crazy amount and every single person here is unhappy about that.

Nuclear might be more expensive per MWh pure electricity cost-wise, but the full system with storage, balancing and distribution costs is much more complicated=expensive now because of the renewables. It's funny that the same people who always talk about "hidden costs" and "unpriced externalities" of nuclear and fossil fuels never consider this.

My country is backtracking its support for renewables and will build more nuclear instead. Unfortunately a lot of the damage is done and we can't stop all support as it's mandated by EU regulation.

BTW why is Germany importing 2 GW of French nuclear electricity right now if it's so expensive and bad overall? And why is Germany burning so much coal it produces 9 GW right now, if renewables are so great? Let's not forget about the environment too - at this moment France is producing 16g of CO2/kWh, while Germany is at 375 average, and that coal burning causes 1000g/kWh. I hope they do pay for that, it seems kinda unfair that the French invested into clean energy but still have to breathe what the Germans are putting into the air...