Meme - Crémieux @cremieuxrecueil: "Daily reminder: Nixon wanted to be the American Messmer, constructing a fleet of 1,000 nuclear plants, making American a clean country from then all the way through to today."
"In 1973, President Nixon seized on the nuclear frenzy with a new program he dubbed "Project Independence". Calling to mind the Manhattan Project, Nixon wanted 1,000 nuclear plants to be built by 2000. Those 1,000 plants would have provided 200% of the U.S's power needs... in 2022. No coal, no wind, no solar, no natural gas, no hydro. No carbon emissions. Just 100-percent- clean, made-in-America nuclear power."
Thread by @cremieuxrecueil on Thread Reader App – Thread Reader App - "The American nuclear industry illustrates negative learning: the costs of plants have increased over time. But this is not nuclear's fault. Almost everywhere else, the learning rate is positive: costs decline as the industry gains experience building! 🧵 Consider France. The U.S. has really only been experiencing cost overruns since the Three Mile Island incident, and the reason has to do with the industry becoming overregulated as a result of the public outcry that ensued. In general, nuclear cost overruns are driven by indirect costs, like having to hire more safety professionals due to added regulatory burdens. Those explain 72% of the price hike in the U.S., 1976-87. In a more recent OECD report on nuclear from 2020, it was noted that "indirect cost[s] are the main driver of these cost overruns" and 80% of those indirect costs are attributable to largely unnecessary labor. The regulatory costs levied against nuclear are so extreme that they can make components cost 50 times what they should, like in the case of 75 mm stainless steel gate valves. The main factor differentiating nuclear and industrial grade? Unnecessary quality certification. The question is less "Why is nuclear expensive?" and more "Why is nuclear overregulated?" And the reason isn't clear-cut. It's obvious it's not so simple as saying "ALARA!", since many countries manage positive learning despite sticking to the same philosophy. It's more likely a combination of factors involving activism. Thanks to activism, the U.S. nuclear fleet won't achieve French emission levels because, under the Carter administration, activists managed to get reprocessing banned, tarring nuclear's reputation via the 'waste' issue. In any case, nuclear remains a viable option for cleanly powering the future, and continued research into it is necessary for taking us into the stars. Moreover, for consumers, it remains beneficial ($!) so long as intermittent forms of generation are, well, intermittent."
In other words, "green" activists complain nuclear is unfeasible because it's too expensive, but they're the ones who made it unnecessarily expensive, and without their nonsense, it'd be cheap
Oliver Milman on X - "The 2021 closure of Indian Point nuclear plant in New York was hailed as a huge win by environmentalists. But there's been a sting in the tail - NY's emissions have since gone up. “This has been a cautionary tale," an expert told me about the clean energy transition"
Meme - "I'm speechless... *long message (speech)*"
How Jurong's S$100 million 12-hectare ancient China theme park fell into ruin in under 10 years - "According to The Straits Times, the opening day saw 5,000 people stream into the ancient city, which eclipsed even the Haw Par Villa Dragon World opening, which saw 4,000 attendees. The upcoming Chinese New Year was also thematically relevant, leading to another boost for Tang Dynasty City (it was changed from Village to City on Jan. 25, 1992). The five to 10 years projection to recoup the money even seemed kind of feasible. Unfortunately, in just seven years, the park, riddled with debt, closed down."
Babble hypothesis shows key factor to becoming a leader - "If you want to become a leader, start yammering. It doesn’t even necessarily matter what you say. New research shows that groups without a leader can find one if somebody starts talking a lot. This phenomenon, described by the “babble hypothesis” of leadership, depends neither on group member intelligence nor personality. Leaders emerge based on the quantity of speaking, not quality."
Meme - "funny how we know who all these people are, simply by their hair style" *Rick Astley, Eminem, Vanilla Ice, Sydney Sweeney's breasts*
Meme - The Meme Policeman: "Snopes has gotten so pathetic it's now mostly "debunking' satire, these are just from the past week! As I've pointed out in the past, fact checkers shouldn't concern themselves with satire. There's nothing to fact check, they're jokes, made funnier by the simpletons who fall for it."
I remember when the left mocked the right for falling for satire
Meme - Princess Dionysus @madisommelier: "Trying to eat out less this year so now I pretend my apartment is a tiny restaurant
MAISON MADISON
Breakfast
Cinnamon & brown sugar oatmeal
Biscuits with fruit preserves
Blueberry heart waffles
GF pumpkin pancakes
Multigrain buttered toast
Mushroom & spinach quiche
Poached eggs with mini maple sausages
Cereal: frosted mini wheats, captain crunch, lucky charms
Protein shake : strawberry, banana, peanut butter, and chocolate
Lunch
PB & J
Acai bowl
Beef pho
Pigs in a blanket
Latkes with applesauce
'Coney Island' hotdogs
Mini pizzas: cheese, pepperoni
Dinner
Saffron rice with black beans
Argentinian shrimp with shell pasta
Lemon pepper chicken with bowtie pasta
Chicken alfredo with penne pasta
Spaghetti with tomato basil sauce
Kung Pao chicken
Pesto chicken with tri colored rotini
Tikka masala & garlic naan
Butter chicken & garlic naan
Dessert
Brownies with walnuts
Chocolate covered strawberries
Everything but the kitchen sink cookies
Black raspberry chocolate gelato
Strawberries in sweet milk
Chocolate chip dunkers
Apple Tarte
Drinks
Dulce de leche latte
Dirty chai tea latte
Iced green zing tea
Hot tea: earl gray, black, jasmine, etc...
Hot chocolate
Strawberry milk
French pressed fresh coffee"
Meme - "This is the future atheists want *woman kissing another woman while squeezing her breast*"
Meme - "Age 6- I want to be a pilot
Age 12- I want to be a soldier
Age 18- I will try engineering
Age 24- Hey guys, welcome back to my youtube channel."
Meme - Fruit of the Loom @FruitOfThe L...: "Did it hurt? When you realized our logo never had a cornucopia."
Kurz @Kurz_Prime: "Sure.... *photo of Fruit of the Loom T-shirt with cornucopia*"
Meme - Woman: "So, what do you like in a woman?"
Man: "My cock !"
Analysis: China is one of the costliest places to raise a child, and it’s not all about the money - "The report late last month by a Chinese think tank stated that the cost of raising a child in China till the age of 18 is “almost the highest in the world” relative to its GDP per capita... The report by YuWa Population Research Institute stated that the national average to raise a child in China till the age of 18 is about 538,000 yuan (US$74,600). This includes nanny and childcare fees, money spent on school and educational materials as well as extracurricular activity fees. That’s around 6.3 times the country’s per capita GDP and “almost the highest in the world”, the report said. Also highlighted - how China’s rate exceeds other countries such as neighbouring Japan (4.26 times), the United States (4.11 times), France (2.24 times) and Australia (2.08 times). South Korea claimed the top spot, with the cost coming in at 7.79 times the country’s GDP per capita... As schools vary widely in quality, rural families try to enrol their children in schools in the counties rather than the “lower-quality” village and township schools. At the same time, urban families try to buy expensive apartments near the best schools or pay “school choice fees” to get in, he added. Professor Stuart Gietel-Basten from the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (HKUST) echoed similar points, categorising “expensive schools” and music lessons under “extra costs”. “You don’t need to put your kid into an expensive school to have clarinet and oboe lessons, and you don’t need to be in the best childcare or kindergarten... But raising a child goes beyond the financial burden - there’s also a hefty price paid in time and opportunity cost for parents, particularly mothers, according to the Yuwa institute report as well as analysts. Dr Zhao cited a government survey done in 2017 that listed the lack of a family caregiver as one of the top three reasons that Chinese women of childbearing age do not want to have another child."
Teaching English to a Frenchman - YouTube
Sabine Hossenfelder: Backreaction: Free will is dead, let’s bury it. - "There are only two types of fundamental laws that appear in contemporary theories. One type is deterministic, which means that the past entirely predicts the future. There is no free will in such a fundamental law because there is no freedom. The other type of law we know appears in quantum mechanics and has an indeterministic component which is random. This randomness cannot be influenced by anything, and in particular it cannot be influenced by you, whatever you think “you” are. There is no free will in such a fundamental law because there is no “will” – there is just some randomness sprinkled over the determinism. In neither case do you have free will in any meaningful way. These are the only two options, and all other elaborations on the matter are just verbose distractions. It doesn’t matter if you start talking about chaos (which is deterministic), top-down causation (which doesn’t exist), or insist that we don’t know how consciousness really works (true but irrelevant). It doesn’t change a thing about this very basic observation: there isn’t any known law of nature that lets you meaningfully speak of “free will”. If you don’t want to believe that, I challenge you to write down any equation for any system that allows for something one could reasonably call free will. You will almost certainly fail. The only thing really you can do to hold on to free will is to wave hands, yell “magic”, and insist that there are systems which are exempt from the laws of nature. And these systems somehow have something to do with human brains. If you don’t want to believe that, I challenge you to write down any equation for any system that allows for something one could reasonably call free will. You will almost certainly fail. The only thing really you can do to hold on to free will is to wave hands, yell “magic”, and insist that there are systems which are exempt from the laws of nature. And these systems somehow have something to do with human brains. The only known example for a law that is neither deterministic nor random comes from myself. But it’s a baroque construct meant as proof in principle, not a realistic model that I would know how to combine with the four fundamental interactions. As an aside: The paper was rejected by several journals. Not because anyone found anything wrong with it. No, the philosophy journals complained that it was too much physics, and the physics journals complained that it was too much philosophy. And you wonder why there isn’t much interaction between the two fields. After plain denial, the somewhat more enlightened way to insist on free will is to redefine what it means... “indeterminism” doesn’t mean “free will”. Indeterminism just means there’s some element of randomness, either because that’s fundamental or because you have willfully ignored information on short distances. But there is still either no “freedom” or no “will”. Just try it... This conclusion that free will doesn’t exist is so obvious that I can’t help but wonder why it isn’t widely accepted. The reason, I am afraid, is not scientific but political. Denying free will is considered politically incorrect because of a wide-spread myth that free will skepticism erodes the foundation of human civilization... These psychology studies always work the same. The study participants are engaged in some activity in which they receive information, either verbally or in writing, that free will doesn’t exist or is at least limited. After this, their likeliness to conduct “wrongdoing” is tested and compared to a control group. But the information the participants receive is highly misleading. It does not prime them to think they don’t have free will, it instead primes them to think that they are not responsible for their actions. Which is an entirely different thing. Even if you don’t have free will, you are of course responsible for your actions because “you” – that mass of neurons – are making, possibly bad, decisions. If the outcome of your thinking is socially undesirable because it puts other people at risk, those other people will try to prevent you from more wrongdoing. They will either try to fix you or lock you up. In other words, you will be held responsible. Nothing of this has anything to do with free will. It’s merely a matter of finding a solution to a problem. The only thing I conclude from these studies is that neither the scientists who conducted the research nor the study participants spent much time thinking about what the absence of free will really means. Yes, I’ve spent far too much time thinking about this. The reason I am hitting on the free will issue is not that I want to collapse civilization, but that I am afraid the politically correct belief in free will hinders progress on the foundations of physics. Free will of the experimentalist is a relevant ingredient in the interpretation of quantum mechanics. Without free will, Bell’s theorem doesn’t hold, and all we have learned from it goes out the window... Who cares, you might think, buying into the collapse of the wave-function seems a small price to pay compared to the collapse of civilization. On that matter though, I side with Socrates “The unexamined life is not worth living.”"
After canceling booze, Canada is now coming for your coffee - "After the country’s health officials released new guidance that having over two drinks a week can be a health detriment, new research from the University of Toronto says heavy coffee consumption is cause for concern as well. “These findings suggest that heavy coffee intake is associated with increases in the risk of kidney dysfunction among slow metabolizers of caffeine, who genetically comprise approximately half of the population,” an excerpt from the data read, adding that illnesses like hypertension could emerge... “Slow metabolizers are less able to get rid of caffeine efficiently from the body, so, it’s more likely to have adverse effects in the people who can’t get rid of it,” he added. Fortunately, the other half have the genetic makeup to break down coffee’s biggest perk without worry... researchers from a province at the University of Quebec said that lowering coffee intake could combat climate change due to the reduction in pollution from making a pot"
How Public Health Took Part in Its Own Downfall - The Atlantic - "Many practitioners no longer felt compelled to deal with sticky, sweeping problems such as poverty, inequity, and racial segregation (or to consider their own role in maintaining the status quo). “They didn’t have to think of themselves as activists,” Rosner said. “It was so much easier to identify individual victims of disease and cure them than it was to rebuild a city.”... Public health is now trapped in an unenviable bind. “If it conceives of itself too narrowly, it will be accused of lacking vision … If it conceives of itself too expansively, it will be accused of overreaching,” wrote Lawrence Gostin, of Georgetown University, in 2008. “Public health gains credibility from its adherence to science, and if it strays too far into political advocacy, it may lose the appearance of objectivity,” he argued. But others assert that public health’s attempts at being apolitical push it further toward irrelevance. In truth, public health is inescapably political, not least because it “has to make decisions in the face of rapidly evolving and contested evidence,” Fairchild told me. That evidence almost never speaks for itself, which means the decisions that arise from it must be grounded in values. Those values, Fairchild said, should include equity and the prevention of harm to others, “but in our history, we lost the ability to claim these ethical principles.”"
Apparently openly pushing a left wing agenda will lead to better results, even if you selectively interpret the data to fit your political biases. But ironically, grievance mongering is one reason for vaccine hesitancy
Meme - "The Internet after fat shaming Lizzo into quitting *Kens from Barbie hand in hand singing*"
FA defends multicoloured cross on England shirt as tribute to 1966 team - "The Football Association has defended the multicoloured St George’s Cross on the back of England’s new shirts, saying it was part of a tribute to the team that won the World Cup in 1966."
Adam Grant on X - "Too many people spend their lives being dutiful descendants instead of good ancestors. The responsibility of each generation is not to please their predecessors. It's to improve things for their offspring. It's more important to make your children proud than your parents proud."
The problem is it is much easier to predict what would make your parents proud than your children. 20 years ago, I doubt anyone predicted trans mania
$86 Billion Eco-Friendly 'Forest City' is Already a Ghost Town - "In a tale that might make you think twice about the phrase “If you build it, they will come,” Malaysia’s Forest City stands as a stark $100 billion testament to ambitions that have, so far, fallen a bit short of reality. Envisioned as an eco-friendly utopia, this coastal city in southern Malaysia was designed to be a bustling metropolis for up to a million people, boasting amenities like a golf course, water park, and an array of dining options. But instead of throngs of residents and tourists, its streets are eerily silent, with only about 1% occupancy in the completed sections. Launched with great fanfare in 2016 by Chinese property developer Country Garden, the project aimed to transform a chunk of Johor into a futuristic urban haven. Fast forward to the present, and only about 15% of this ambitious city has materialized out of the master plan. So, what gives? Why has this would-be paradise turned into more of a ghost town? Well, for starters, Forest City’s target market was Chinese buyers looking for a second home in Malaysia. However, despite the allure of living in a brand-new eco-city, the target demographic found the price tag a bit too steep, and local Malaysians weren’t exactly lining up either, finding the cost way out of reach."
Pastor Tells Telethon That Viewers Can 'Speed Up' Jesus' Return Through Donations - "Louisiana Televangelist Jesse Duplantis stirred up criticism after comments made on Victorython, a four-day, live TV event that the pastor hosted... During the recent televised event, Duplantis said that he believes Jesus has not returned yet because people are not donating enough money. "I honestly believe this—the reason why Jesus hasn't come is because people are not giving the way God told them to give," he said in a video clip of the event that has since been circulating online, "when you understand, you can speed up the time." Duplantis, who owns a private jet, makes note of his multi-millionaire status in the clip as well. In 2018, The Christian Post reported that Duplantis received backlash for seeking donations to go toward the purchase of the $54 million jet. He responded to the criticism by clarifying that he was not asking for monetary donations but rather asking people to join him in believing that God would provide him with the plane. At the time, it was reported by Money that his net worth was estimated at $50 million. The purchase of the jet would not be Duplantis' first, and years prior he and Copeland both said that their private jets went beyond convenience. They allowed the pastors the ability to talk freely about God in flight—something they might be unable to do on a commercial plane... "I really believe this, if people would call this number and put this victory all over the world—every available voice, every available outlet—the Father would say 'Jesus go get em,'" he said during Victorython. "What is hindering all these things is because people are not doing in the financial realm —because we live in an economic world — what God's called them to do," he continued."
South African woman guilty of abducting baby she raised for 17 years - "A South African woman has been found guilty of kidnapping a newborn baby, raising her for 17 years until her real identity emerged through a remarkable twist of fate last year. Zephany Nurse was abducted from a hospital in Cape Town in 1997, three days after her birth. Her parents, Morné and Celeste Nurse, never gave up hope of seeing their first-born again and celebrated her birthdays without her. For those years, Zephany grew up just a couple of miles away with a different name and a different family, never suspecting she was not their real daughter. But in January 2015, her biological sister, Cassidy Nurse, began at the same school. Soon fellow pupils noticed a startling resemblance between them. Morné Nurse then saw Cassidy and Zephany eating burgers together in McDonald’s, and, struck by the physical similarities, contacted the police. DNA tests confirmed that she was the Nurses’ long-lost daughter and Zephany was placed in the care of social services, while the woman was arrested."
Meme - Raytheon Technologies: "Few people realize the RIM-7 Sea Sparrow is the most environmentally friendly anti-aircraft missile produced anywhere. We're proud of our commitment to a better future for all the children of the world. Do good things. Be greener. With Raytheon"
Meme - "He: French movie or French kiss?
She: ... French fries"
Michael Shermer on X - "Jesus died for our sins. But he was only dead for 3 days. So what did he sacrifice? His weekend. Jesus gave up his weekend for our sins."
Meme - "His hands look like this so that mine can look like this. *Crucifixion* *hand holding Easter Eggs*"
Finland Population (2024) - "The population density in Finland is 18 per Km2"
United States Population (2024) - "The population density in the United States is 37 per Km2"
Many Americans keep claiming that what works in European countries would never work in the US because the population is larger, because clearly economies of scale aren't a thing. Population density is a better argument, but looks like that's not it either
Maine Population 2024 (Demographics, Maps, Graphs) - "Maine Population 2024 1,402,106... According to the most recent ACS, the racial composition of Maine was: White: 92.93%""
Demographics of Finland - Wikipedia - "Finland has a population of over 5.6 million people... As of 2022, Statistics Finland produces statistics... 8.9%, have a first language other than Finnish, Swedish or Sámi."
Many Americans keep claiming that what works in European countries would never work in the US because European countries are small, homogenous ethno states. Misunderstanding of what an ethnostate is aside, many US states are also "small, homogenous ethno states" but don't copy those models.