Emma_Goldman

If you read the literature analysing historic nuclear costs around the world, this just isn't true. Nuclear reactors are complex 'mega-projects' requiring coordination across a vast number of actors, specialist work under the constraints of a construction sites, and which - because of lower numbers of reactors, changing and adapted design, diffuse consortia - have failed to push down costs through learning-by-doing. A study just over a decade ago found that ~98% of nuclear projects involve schedule overruns. Because nuclear projects involve extreme capital costs, this means: (i) vast sums have to be paid in interest over the build time; (ii) states/taxpayers/consumers usually bear some of the risk.

Compare a nuclear project to a solar panel. Solar is cheap, simple, commoditised, flexible, and is riding on almost miraculous learning curves. If dispatchable energy can be solved, beyond just gas/coal plants, ideally with long-duration storage based on the conversion of electricity, then this is going to be an infinitely better option. It's also just not clear what role nuclear plants have given that renewables need highly dispatchable power to ramp up and down according to their variable output, not baseload nuclear power.

Interesting, the question for me is why eat ultra-processed meat simulacra, that don't taste particularly nice, like impossible and beyond burgers? It is possible to home cook far healthier and more delicious veggie burgers with seitan, mushrooms, lentils, etcetera. Ultimately, this whole meat substitute market is targeting a niche that doesn't exist at anything like the scale envisioned, because it competes with low cost meat on the one hand and low cost plant-based burgers on the other, and is worse than both on all relevant metrics.

It's not. This whole discussion is confused because it's based on a misunderstanding of how electricity markets work. When states charge a captive customer base whatever nuclear project costs turn out to be, profitability is not a meaningful measure of economic attractiveness. Levelised cost of energy, or system cost of energy, under different regulatory and market regimes, is the relevant benchmark.

Australia and Canada are top producers of uranium ore, and uranium ore is a small fraction of total lifecycle costs. Given a ~2 year refuelling cycle and the possibility of stockpiling uranium, this is very far from an interruption to oil and gas flows - which you need a continuous supply of. Security isn't just a function of autarkic raw material supplies.

OK, fair enough, Brexit generated a lot of political noise and was a bureaucratic headache. Not really the same thing as Trump's America though.

You write as if you have confabulated yourself into being Europe's official spokesperson. This is all a bit high-handed.

I'm not really sure how you are comparing Trump's US - responsible for pulling out of the Paris climate agreement, tearing up the Iranian nuclear deal and then starting a war to reimpose it that has created a global energy crisis, kidnapping Maduro and threatening to invade Greenland, beginning a global trade war, giving up on climate mitigation, nuclear treaties and AI safety - with the UK over the same period.

Liz Truss is not really Trump's equivalent. She achieved exactly nothing in the UK, let alone the world, in her few weeks in office. It's also worth pointing out she didn't win a general election: she became PM via the Conservative Party's internal selection process.

There's plenty of data on the clustering of high-functioning autistic workers in engineering and computer science, and the massively disproportionate share of autistic children with fathers and grandfathers in those fields. I work across technical and non-technical academic fields and the difference is quite obvious. It also follows naturally from some of the common presentations of autism, e.g., the high co-occurrence of dyslexia.

The strong affinity between autism and intelligence seems strongest in technical fields, and engineering and computer science in particular. Autism does not seem to be over-represented to anywhere near the same degree in many other domains that are full of intelligent people.

It's true that all else being equal new power demand lowers the fixed cost per unit of marginal energy generated. But if the data centre requires new grid and storage capacity to handle its load and those fixed costs are charged to the entire electricity consumer base, there is a trade-off.

Also, all else is not equal because the UK is already grasping towards a stretch target of a >95% low-carbon power system by 2030 which has over-loaded supply chains, sacrificed generation cost to speed, and created a queue to connect to the grid that outpaces the annual rate of connections by over an order of magnitude. Adding huge blocks of new incremental demand to the system is quite a challenge, in this context.

Why? Books are to be read, annotated, lived with and lent out, not treated as precious objects in a way that is completely orthogonal to their use-value.

Is cacao production unsustainable? It seems the problem is the oligopolistic and exploitative price setting architecture for cacao. Pay farmers more, and supply will increase.

One of the alt-chocolate alternatives mentioned here involve palm oil, one of the most environmentally destructive ingredients on the planet.

I don't think beyond meat is an example to follow. It is ultra-processed fake food ruinous of health, and rightly - at least in the UK - now has an aura of ill-health surrounding it. Better to just make yourself a burger with healthy whole foods, like lentils, mushrooms, chickpeas.

Lead and cadmium can stay in the body for decades, so it is a cumulative rather than an acute problem, I think.

This is the main reason I don't frequently eat chocolate anymore. Dark chocolate is both the tastiest and lowest-sugar chocolate, but its cacao-intensity increases your intake of metals.

If I recall correctly, however, the origin of the cacao makes some difference. Cacao from West Africa and Asia has a lot less lead and cadmium than from South America. Still, I think little chocolate, wherever it's from, is metal-free.

I use the app screenzen. It rations distracting apps and retrains you to use your phone as a functional device again. I now only use my phone for messaging, emails, maps and spotify, but can still access Chrome when I need. A perfect balance.