I don’t agree with the implicit assumption that the people who are bullied have to be actual nerds/geeks. People get bullied for being different, whatever that may be, and Elon strikes me as a real weirdo.

And of course that assumes a lack of charisma, which of course describes Elon. Charismatic weirdos can actually set trends to follow, whereas uncharismatic weirdos tend to become social pariahs.

For the most part, you’re probably correct, but Elon Musk would’ve been bullied mercilessly in my high school, and it probably could’ve instilled some sense of self awareness if he had been.

I think the same is probably true of Stephen Miller and J.D. Vance.

To be clear, women’s work before World War II was more than just the dishes. If you look at the guidebooks published for housewives back then, you’ll see that they were expected to have quite a few skills that most households now generally outsourc to external businesses:

• Feeding the family. This was more than just cooking. They were expected to process foods from a much less processed state (much more butchery of meats and cleaning and processing of vegetable products, dairy products, baked goods), and then preserve foods for out-of-season consumption (pickling, preserving in jams/jellies, home canning, drying, and in some cultures smoking). Much of this work is now done by the industrial food processing industry so that we can buy cans or jars or boxes of the stuff that’s already processed or partially processed. Even our fresh foods have been cleaned and sorted and trimmed to mainly just the edible parts.
• Making and maintaining textiles. We see bits of this surviving into knitting and crocheting as hobbies, but back before the rise of cheap apparel it was important to be able to clean and repair clothes that we’d now just take to our local dry cleaner.
• Maintaining the house itself. Home improvement is masculine coded today, but a lot of the stuff that qualifies as home maintenance was traditionally the work of a homemaker. Plus things like heating the house required active involvement of keeping fires burning and fuel on hand.
• Making household consumables. Homemakers were making their own soap, their own candles, and all sorts of little tools.

The economic shifts that come from women leaving the home for the paid workforce are all over, and some of them are pretty pronounced. But it’s important to remember that women worked hard before they ever got paid for it. Life was toil.

Are you talking about battery storage itself being about $126/MWhr? Yeah, that incorporated into the solar+battery LCOE, because solar itself is $31, battery is $126, and the weighted average of how much energy is expected to come directly out of the solar panels onto the grid (at $31) and how much is expected to be stored for later ($31 plus $126) averages out to $53, presumably because most demand matches the daytime solar curve and doesn’t need to be stored for later.

Which graph? I linked to a PDF with a ton of graphs.

It’s because fuel is such an insignificant percentage of the overall cost of building, operating, and maintaining nuclear power. Increasing the complexity of the reactor in order to make the fuel use more efficient is basically a nonstarter, economically.

Oh, I agree.

I was a big, big nuclear proponent 20 years ago. But seeing how Vogtle and VC Summer played out, and how that “cheaper” and more “scalable” AP1000 design put Westinghouse into bankruptcy, basically turned me off from the economics of nuclear power.

Oh, and because of how utility generation is paid for, ratepayers in Georgia will be paying for the Vogtle construction and cost overruns in their electric bills for the next 75 years, as the nuclear plant is shielded from competition by price regulators (state Public Utilities Commissions and the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission), so even if newer and better technology comes online, customers in 2080 will still be paying for 2020 technology.

The technology is still neat but I don’t believe there’s an economic future for civilian nuclear power generation. Not anymore.

Last week, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission just approved a new construction of a reactor for the first time in 10 years, to the Bill Gates backed Terra Power. Cool, except it’s projected to cost $4 billion and the government is expected to cover half the cost, to build a reactor with 345 MW of capacity.

In contrast, solar panels cost about $1 million per MW, so an equivalent amount of peak capacity from solar would cost about $345 million, or about 1/12 the price. Solar won’t run all day, but the nuclear plants will also continue to cost money to run after construction is complete.

Looking at the different LCOE estimates of each type of power generation shows that advanced nuclear is around $80/MWhr and solar+battery for all day demand tracking is about $53/MWhr.

Basically nuclear is only economically viable with government support at this point, and we should be asking whether we’d rather have the government support towards other forms of energy.

Yes, but the economies of scale of cargo transport generally mean that the percentage of the total cost attributable to fuel cost is usually pretty small.

Take bananas, for example. If they cost $0.70 per pound at the store, how much fuel could have been used getting a pound of bananas from the plantation to the port, shipped from that port to a port in the United States, then from that port to a distribution center, then to the store? So what would doubling the price of fuel do for the price of bananas?

With more expensive items, shipping (and therefore fuel) is an even lower percentage of the total input costs.

The price of goods will go up with the price of fuel, but not as much as a lot of people seem to assume.

Yeah, seems like someone could pass the test by only knowing pokemon, which isn’t what we’d want in testing people on their drug knowledge.

I didn’t know until this thread that this character is from Overwatch or that there is apparently a lot of porn of her. I only knew it as a random meme format.