Nuclear (hopefully fusion at some point) is the only plausible way to meet energy needs in the future (that we currently know of). Fear of nuclear waste isn't irrational, but highly overblown because catastrophic events are more emotionally compelling than the slow degradation of either living standards and/or environment caused by competing technology.
30 years ago, I would have said the same thing. But right now solar is seeing technological advances at an exponential rate, such that by the time we build a nuclear power plant, get it approved, and get it running, solar will be both cheaper and safer while using less space.
So you claim that and that one "paper" from 2019 calculating worst case and with 2019 battery prices. Bad thing is battery prices are falling through the floor and 6 years make all the difference.
> Nuclear (hopefully fusion at some point) is the only plausible way to meet energy needs in the future (that we currently know of).
This is simply false. At this point, its falsity has been sufficiently well demonstrated and communicated that you should have known it was false. If you are not deliberately lying, it's only because you steered yourself away from learning the truth.
I think you probably just disagree with OP about the levels of our energy needs in the future.
If we just sustain human life and pleasure then yeah renewables are probably fine. If we want to pursue highly energy intensive applications and then further if we want to pursue those applications with mobility then we need nuclear.
We can pursue high energy intensive activities with renewables, higher than if we use fusion.
On Earth, solar allows high energy use before we run into limits from direct thermal pollution, since it uses energy already hitting the planet rather than introducing new energy.
In space, the energy available from sunlight vastly exceeds any available from fusion, and the feasibility difference tilts even more toward solar.
For mobility in space, beamed power will be best, and solar works with that just fine, even out to interstellar distances.
I think there are a lot of in-depth trades that can be done to show specifically when nuclear is appropriate vs solar, and I'm sure solar will win a lot of those, but I'm just going to reach for the easy ones here.
Radio telescope on the dark side of the moon, using solar would require long transmission lines. Autonomous vehicles on Mars (already use nuclear energy via RTGs). Any deep space mission where building a nuclear reactor and launching it is lower effort than complex energy beaming.
I don't think a radio telescope uses much power at all. And beamed power should work fine on the night side of the moon, beaming power via laser from collectors in space. The apertures on either end would just be a few meters.
I have to question the moon as a location for such telescopes vs. positioning them in space. We've built (small) space radio telescopes already, but none have been placed on the moon.
Solar and wind aren’t reliable energy sources. They’re not dispatchable 24x7 and fluctuate along various timescales. Storing renewable energy for 24 hours doubles the cost. Storing it seasonally increases the cost 150x. Show me any place, anywhere, which is using renewable for baseline energy production 24x7.
At this point, that’s sufficiently well known that you should have known it. If you’re not deliberately lying, it’s only because you steered yourself away from learning the truth.
Life spans of reactors can cause instability. Nuclear requires unstable mines for unstable materials which are unstably finite. Controlled by unstable governments and where by a nuclear explosion causes a very unstable aftermath. I see nothing stable about nuclear.
Unless, you mean renewable being "unstable" in the sense of no wind, no sun equates to no power. Then yes, but only until the fuel is spent.
However, renewables are stable when resources are available, stable in providing consistent clean fuel and stable in cost on upkeep than say one of a nuclear reactor.
Which is why you combine all three.
> Show me any place, anywhere, which is using renewable for baseline energy production 24x7.
El Hierro, the smallest of the Canary Islands, holds a unique distinction as the only island to operate solely on wind and waterpower for 28 consecutive days.
The facility ingeniously combines wind generation with pumped storage hydroelectric generation. Now that's cool.
I do know it. And I know that the intermittency can be dealt with at finite and tolerable cost, and the resulting solutions are likely to be cheaper than those using nuclear power.
Those seemingly stuck on advocating nuclear power do not seem to understand the advances made both in storage technology and in system design to deal with intermittency.
To be fair, Chernobyl was an older and unsafe reactor design in comparison to the newer ones we have today.
Anecdotally, I live near the Palo Verde nuclear powerplant in Arizona, we receive all of our electricity through a combination of solar (clouds are very rare here) and nuclear. These 2 factors mean energy is abundant in the state, and necessary in the summer for survival; air conditioning is a necessity due to the extreme temperatures in the summer.
The Palo Verde plant was commissioned in the 1980, and provides more power than any other reactor in the US. Since its not located near a body of water, it uses treated wastewater for cooling. It is a Pressurized water reactor design similar to the ones used on Naval vessels, a much safer design than the one used in Chernobyl, and none of which have ever experienced a meltdown or critical failure. Overall, I've never experienced any anxiety regarding the reactor not too far from where I live, it is the least of my concerns.
I believe the future will need to be a combination of renewables, to put all our eggs in one basket in foolish. Smaller and safer self contained nuclear reactors (like the ones used on Submarines) seem very promising for data centers. AI is on the rise, for better or worse, and it's power demands are constantly growing.
On the other hand, assuming the industry doesn't completely stagnate, "X was an older and unsafe reactor design in comparison to the newer ones we have today" will always be true.
I'm not worried about another Chernobyl. We've had one already, all reactor designs have been tested over and over again to avoid a repeat. The real risk is in all the small and seemingly insignificant things working together in unexpected ways. There will always be a nonzero chance of an incident, and due to the nature of nuclear reactors the impact of an incident is essentially unlimited.
Think of it like commercial airliners. Are they safe? Yes, absolutely. They are the safest method of travel available. I have zero worry about my safety when stepping on an airplane. But despite the tiny odds airplanes do crash from time to time, simply because there are so many of them.
An airplane crash has a smouldering crater and a few hundred dead as its result. Not great, but not terrible either: as a society we build a monument and move on. Would we still be flying airplanes if - no matter how unlikely - a crash meant that an entire city would become uninhabitable?
Good hypothesis, I would like to believe the general census would be no. Just because the impact of thought of it occurring is more devastating than the pro of flying to destination in one. I wouldn't want to fly even if there was a .1% of failure whereby it could catastrophically destroy many lives.
I don't refute that we couldn't move on. as we can take the result, analyse and not repeat. Learn from it and move on. Next plane crash causes less crater.
However a nuclear implosion you can't move on and nor is it over once it's occurred. How do you move on from a nuclear imposition? Japan and Hiroshima? They're still fighting the aftermath today and that was a nuclear bomb the same significant difference.
But if the reactor is a protected to 99.9% efficiency and that 1% could cause a aftermath that lasts forever, sure you can take the data like the plane crash and ensure it doesn't make the same sized crater but the results of the first are still devastating. Unlike the plane which is now old news.
If nuclear was a requirement and that other sources of energy were a scarcity then it would be different. But where by we have acres of desert we are not researching enough in to how to harness the energy, have oceans where winds blow, water is nearly endless, do we research that on a large scale for data centres?
It doesn't make sense for nuclear. Technically yes, you are making clean energy but at what expense and on a very dirty political basis.
Nuclear reactors do not surprise explode. The Chinese designs are passively safe: cut off all power and they'll simply sit there. They do not require active cooling.
The Gen 4 designs, which they also have, are physics safe: literally drop bombs on them and they still won't fail (bombing a nuclear plant in general is an over stated risk for other reasons too). They're building those now too.
> Nuclear reactors do not surprise explode. The Chinese designs are passively safe: cut off all power and they'll simply sit there. They do not require active cooling.
The same was said of Fukushima. And it was - until a tsunami fried all the backup local power keeping the control systems alive. Turns out the "passive cooling" still requires some valves to be controllable...
Somehow, fallible humans create robust systems. Look to "AI' to do the same, at a far higher speed. The "AI" doesn't need to recite the Fibonacci sequence; it can write (and test) a program that does so. Speed is power.
I suspect that any advanced species would abandon life as soon as possible. E.g. become non-biological and immortal. Then interstellar travel is trivial.
That makes sense, but machines and culture(s) still undergo evolution, unless replication and changes (mutations) are prevented. (Again, the ones that are good at spreading are more prevalent.) What do you think?
The "social contract" is not a contract, but the word "contract" is used to infer some kind of responsibility or "norm". In reality it refers to what ever equilibrium has been reach in a certain market context between business owners and everybody else. It is a fiction.
Trickle down doesn't "work", because "work" has been defined a certain way. Define "work" another way, and it does "work". It also presumes that the government somehow has first dibs on what people earn, which is absurd.
That's what you were told it's supposed to do. If it's not in fact doing that, then you have to ask yourself: who told you otherwise and why hasn't anyone fixed it? Also, who is incentivized not to fix it? You should be especially wary if the people who are incentivized not to fix it also have the power to fix it, and continually choose not to exercise it.
Unfortunately in our system, the wealthiest people have the most power, and they are incentivized to maintain a system that makes them wealthier. The wealthier they get, the more power they have over the system. We only have to look back as far as the 2017 TCJA to see how this dynamic plays out in real time.
Also stated as "The purpose of the system is what it does".
If the system as designed is concentrating wealth in the hands of a few individuals (who themselves helped set up the system), how can we say it's not working as intended? It seems to be working out very well for them.
Businesses create wealth, and then capture the vast majority of it in the process. Rising inequality should be proof enough for you that wealth concentration is happening.
No, the greater society is actually enjoying the vast majority of value created by a business. You know, the people happily giving their money to the business in exchange for goods and services.
It’s essential that the people who built those businesses receive a corresponding amount of wealth in exchange: it is their main motivator to create the business in the first place.
Businesses which, remember, add a tremendous amount of value to the society - value which is much greater than the wealth their founders receive.
No billionaires implies no founders. No founders implies no businesses. No businesses implies a poor, stagnant society where every body suffers. Kind of like all the communist experiments of the last century.
99.999% of business owners are not and never will be billionaires. There's plenty of upside and profit for business founders without the promise of them becoming so obscenely rich.
> No businesses implies a poor, stagnant society where every body suffers. Kind of like all the communist experiments of the last century.
This is just not a fair characterization; for example the Soviet Union was hardly stagnant -- in the span of 30 years they went from an agrarian society to being the first nation on Earth to launch a satellite and the first man into space.
Big business are the engines that drive the economy. For that you need billionaires.
A nation of small businesses sounds attractive to many people, and it's been tried more than once, but it just doesn't work. You're never going to have chip fabs, automaking, steel smelting, oil refining, ship building, turbine making, etc., without big business.
The Soviet Union has been described as a third world economy with a first world military. The US is a first world economy and a first world military. Thanks to the free market.
BTW, you can buy Soviet built cars. The only people who buy them are collectors who take a perverse pride in their awfulness.
Again, it's entirely possible to have big businesses without having billionaires. I just don't see why you are set on tying the two concepts together. You seem to think there would be no industry if there were no potential at having more money than you could spend in 1000 lifetimes.
I'm sorry, but we're going to have to agree to disagree there, because I'm just not buying that.
> The US is a first world economy and a first world military.
Depends on who you ask. There's a meme going around right now of a split screen "billionaire space race" with a chyron reading "Millions of Americans facing eviction". Tie that to the story today "Full-time minimum wage workers can't afford rent anywhere in the US" and I really have to wonder what "first world economy" really means. I mean, just today the US government started issuing checks to families with children in order to reduce child poverty... how is that even a thing in a first world economy where billionaires are racing to space? Seems broken to me.
I've asked people who lived in the former Soviet Bloc. I also know that the USSR build a wall to keep people in, and the US builds a wall to keep people out. People are also trying to swim away from Cuba.
I don't think you can wish that away.
> it's entirely possible to have big businesses without having billionaires
> the US builds a wall to keep people out. People are also trying to swim away from Cuba.
I mean, as you say the US is the #1 economic and military power in the world, and they have been imposing crippling economic sanctions on Cuba for 60 years. You really can't evaluate the situation fairly without including that relevant bit of information.
> The two have always gone together.
Under capitalism, yes, because that's how capitalism works. But one is not a necessary condition of the other. I've already given an example to disprove your assertion.
Cuba was also propped up economically by the USSR (until the USSR collapsed due to its inability to function economically). The USSR ran a huge deficit in supporting Cuba, and did it for political reasons. Economically it didn't work.
Cuba can also trade with other countries.
I do enjoy your assertion that Cuban communism can only succeed if they have free trade with free market countries.
An economics teacher, when aggressively asked to prove why capitalism is the better system by his left-leaning students tells them:
"At the end of this year I will grade each student individual performance in private but officially you will all receive the same grade, the average of the entire class grades instead, so it is fair for everybody."
They loved it. At the end of the year some work got A grades, some B and some F. But on the average they all received a very honorable B+.
However, next year, with the exact same algorithm, all students received the same grade: Fail.
A society where people are not rewarded each according to his merit is a society where people are not trying their hardest to improve. If you prevent billionaires you also prevent your best performers, your middle class, your millionaires, your small businesses and such. The end result is a uniformly poor society where the most vulnerable hurt the most. Just like communism.
That's a nice little joke, but it bears little resemblance to capitalism vs. communism. This whole thread isn't even really about capitalism vs. communism, but it went that way because that's the way it seems to go anytime the economic order is challenged. "Billionaires are bad" -> "Well communism is worse!" Okay... but that doesn't change anything I said about billionaires and the USA.
Anyway, you seem to be under the impression that capitalism is a system that rewards merit, and communism is a system that doesn't. That's just not true. Capitalism is a system that rewards ownership, not merit. You're essentially saying that everyone who is rich deserves what they have, and as I look around at the pantheon of the wealthiest individuals in the world, I'm not seeing a lot of merit. Where are all the Nobel prize winners? Where are all the billionaire scientists?
Rewards based on ownership are the opposite of rewards based on merit -- you are required to show zero merit under a capitalist society to reap rewards, just a piece of paper declaring your ownership in an asset, ownership which is enforced by the state through violence. How does this lead to a meritorious society? To me it seems it would lead to a society where people don't strive for merit but for ownership of assets.
Look, all I'm arguing for is proportionality. No one is ever going to convince me that the 1% have so much merit that they deserve more wealth than billions of people.
> The end result is a uniformly poor society where the most vulnerable hurt the most. Just like communism.
The end result of capitalism is a society where 1% of the population own 95% of the wealth. Not uniformly poor, I'll give you that. It's quite lopsided and tilted. But one thing's for sure, the most vulnerable are still hurt the most under our capitalist society. Like I said in another post, the USA is sending out child tax credits to reduce childhood poverty this week. Poor children are some of the most vulnerable people in our society, and they are hurting so bad the government has to step in. Capitalism is doing nothing for them. And anyway, It's not like there aren't plenty of uniformly poor capitalist countries around today. Just look at Haiti for an example how of how bad it can get.
You really haven't though. If you feel you have, cite it, but I'm not seeing it. All that's been asserted is that communism is terrible. I don't see how that proves that if billionaires don't exist then value can't be created. I'm not even arguing for communism. In fact you were the first one to bring communism into the discussion.
You haven't shown that one leads to the other. You're trying to use the USSR as an existence proof for your claim but the conclusion doesn't follow the premise. You have to make the connection if you want to make that claim.
You've asserted that if there are no billionaires, it follows there will be no businesses. That's a very strong claim that demands very strong proof.
How? What's the mechanism? The key component of capitalism is that ownership dictates who gets rewards. It doesn't matter how meritorious you are -- if you don't have ownership you get nothing. That's how the whole thing works.
> That hasn't happened yet in 250 years of free markets. But the communist countries all achieved that in short order.
The whole point of communism is that ownership is communal, so it doesn't make sense to compare ownership between the two and say one is better at ownership. But just look at the trendlines in our system and tell me how things are going to get better under capitalist dynamics. The rich are going to get richer and the poor are going to get poorer. The end stage of capitalism is inevitable unless anti-free market dynamics are introduced.
> And yet people with nothing march literally thousands of miles to try to get into the US. Why aren't they marching to communist countries?
And what happens when they get here? Are they suddenly wealthy and prosperous in our capitalist utopia? Or are they some of the poorest and most marginalized people in our country? America's #1 export is propaganda. That people fall for the propaganda is not an endorsement of capitalism.
> It doesn't matter how meritorious you are -- if you don't have ownership you get nothing.
Tell that to the recent graduate getting multi hundred of thousand offers (with stock!) from FAANG companies.
Tell that to the entrepreneur owning 100% of his brand new company after filling a few forms and paying a small fee. Because that new company is worth exactly 0.
Ownership by itself gets you nothing. Making that property worth something is everything. And that’s why self made billionaires deserve their rewards.
> That people fall for the propaganda
It is funny to pretend to care about a category of people but then refuse them the right to think for themselves. Classical leftist: "We need to save the poor! From themselves…"
> Tell that to the recent graduate getting multi hundred of thousand offers (with stock!) from FAANG companies.
Compensation for labor is not exclusive to a capitalist system. You can receive compensation for labor irrespective of the ownership structure of a corporation. But since you've brought stock into it, that would prove my point -- it doesn't matter how meritorious the individual employee is, their total reward is based on their ownership. It may be that the corporation decides to give the employee more stock if they demonstrate merit, but that just reinforces the point that ownership is the fundamental determiner of compensation.
> Tell that to the entrepreneur owning 100% of his brand new company after filling a few forms and paying a small fee. Because that new company is worth exactly 0.
Okay, but under a capitalist system if that company grows the owner gets 100% of the gains. If someone else (employees) help the owner grow the company, they don't share in that at all (beyond the compensation they received for their labor).
> Making that property worth something is everything. And that’s why self made billionaires deserve their rewards.
I've yet to see an example of a self-made billionaire, sorry. Behind every billionaire is a legion of employees doing the actual value creation. And that's why no one deserves a billion dollars.
> It is funny to pretend to care about a category of people but then refuse them the right to think for themselves. Classical leftist: "We need to save the poor! From themselves…"
You don't know anything about me. Kindly keep your personal jabs to yourself.
> In capitalism ownership also extremely easy to acquire and readily offered as a great motivator.
The 1% own 80% of all stocks, so I disagree ownership is extremely easy to acquire. Acquiring ownership of valuable assets requires capital, and capitalists own most of that.
> In a newly created company? With what money?!
I said behind every billionaire, not a newly created company. i.e. there's no such thing as a self-made billionaire. I'd love to see an example, but so far no one has been able to show me one.
This is the crux of our differing point of view I think. You seem to think a billionaire built their business by themselves (self made) and therefore deserve to be billionaires due to their extraordinary merit. I believe that no one has so much merit, and the success of large businesses is more due to the value created by employees.
I can understand for entrepreneurs, that the first narrative is more appealing. But even if I were to agree with you that capitalism is a system that awards compensation proportional to merit of businesses (which I don't), it still doesn't follow that a founders are reaping rewards proportional to their merit; when a business grows in value, that value is allocated to shareholders according to their ownership stake, not their individual merit.
> the success of large businesses is more due to the value created by employees.
The obvious example is Steve Jobs. He turned around two floundering companies - Apple and Pixar - into immensely valuable companies, without changing the employees. You might argue that one was luck, but two? One right after the other? and the two were totally different businesses? You've got a lot of 'splaining to do about that.
> then capture the vast majority of it in the process
No they don't. I buy things when I get more than my money is worth. So does everyone else. It's how trade works. Businesses are not extracting wealth from me or you.
Like I replied to the other poster, you are confusing value and wealth.
Let's say a company makes food. It costs them $2 to make and they sell it for $5. You buy it and eat it. Are you now wealthier? No. Your wealth actually decreased $5. Why would you enter this transaction if it made you less wealthy? Well because the food has some utility for you. You buy things when you get more "utility" than your money is "valued". But at the end of the transaction, you are not worth more.
On the other hand, the company's wealth increased $3. We call this increase in wealth "profit". It's the whole point of a business, and they extracted it from you. An exchange of goods and money occurred. Your wealth decreased, while their wealth increased. Is that not extracting wealth from you?
> I think you'll find it impossible to define the difference
It's not that hard...
Value is the dollar value you assign a thing. In large part this is subjective except when it comes to money, which only works because we all agree it has the same value.
Wealth is the sum total value of all your assets, minus all your debts. If all your wealth is not in dollars, this can be subjective too depending on who is assessing the value of the assets.
Let's say we both have $10 in cash. The total wealth in our economy is $20. I exhaust $2 to make the taco, you give me $5 for the taco. My wealth is now $13, we can all agree. Your wealth depends on the value. Since it is a taco, it has no intrinsic dollar value attached to it. The amount of value you assign the taco will depend on how hungry the buyer is. But if you eat that taco the taco is gone. Forever. Your wealth is now $5, and mine is $13. $2 is now missing from the economy, but like the second law of thermodynamics it all depends on how you define the bounds of the economy, as it's likely circulating elsewhere now and potentially creating assets rather than consumable goods. But you can see in this case I didn't actually create any wealth. I created value, and it was destroyed by you, but I ended up wealthier.
If you resold the food in your restaurant for $10 all that means is someone else valued the taco more than you. The analysis is the same though.
Government, at least in nation-states that are sovereign currency producers, does indeed have first dibs on what people earn. Income taxes are usually withdrawn from salaries before employees are paid, and in the case of independent contractors, business owners, and capital gains taxes, individuals are on the hook retroactively for taxes.
The only perspective from which your statement makes sense is from the libertarian fantasy of government-as-parasite and individual-as-independent-producer.
