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Cake day: August 14th, 2023

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  • was in charge of the prison where he died

    Technically the president delegates that to his Attorney General, who in this case was the son of the guy who first hired a totally unqualified Epstein (21 years old, no college degree) to be around high school age kids, where he was known for ogling girls and somehow showing up to student parties where there was underage drinking.

    And some blame lays with the prosecutor back in 2008 when Epstein was first charged for sex trafficking and sexual assault, who decided to let Epstein agree to a secret plea deal for only 13 months in county jail (which is really weird for a federal prosecutor to let happen), who, oh wait, was then rewarded by becoming a cabinet official for Trump.





  • Yeah, evolving lungs ended up clearing the way to make use of the much more plentiful oxygen in the air compared to what is dissolved in water. Amphibians and reptiles have pretty low metabolisms, but birds and mammals basically evolved endothermy (aka warm bloodedness), probably in support of much higher muscular power output. Ectotherms (aka cold blooded animals) have metabolisms that are correlated to temperature, which means they can’t exert themselves as well when it’s cold. Endothermy allowed animals to be warm all the time, and therefore use higher muscular power output in any environment, especially sustained.

    That means mammals and birds were able to cover more distance, and survive in places where reptiles and amphibians can’t, and all the advantages that carries.




  • One is something you choose to pay, the other you get shot if you don’t pay.

    Contract claims and property claims are ultimately enforceable by government force, as well. A “no trespassing” or “no loitering” sign, or a “Copyrighted work, all rights reserved” notice is enforceable by men with guns, too.

    If taxation is theft, the same reasoning would extend to property being theft, too.



  • So even with those ultra unrealistic assumptions (100kg people, 1 step per second, 100% efficient energy capture), 9.8 watts just isn’t enough.

    Lighting needs about 0.6 watts per square foot (6.46 watts per square meter) in an office. That means you need someone like that generating 9.8 watts every 16.3 square feet or 1.5 square meters.

    There’s an inherent tension there, where sufficient density to make that work would require people to take fewer, shorter steps.

    A basketball court is 4700 sq feet (436.6 sq meters). That means you’d need 288 big people stepping that fast, jammed into a single basketball court sized space, just to keep the lights on in that space. If any of the people stop moving even for a second, the system fails to keep up.


  • The numbers don’t make any sense.

    A 100kg (220 lb) person whose steps compress the tiles by 1cm (0.01m) per step would be transferring 100 kg x 9.8 m/s^2 x 0.01m = 9.8 joules, or 0.00272 watt hours. That assumes 100% perfect efficiency in capturing that energy.

    A watt is a joule per second, so someone who steps 1 step per second is generating 9.8 watts. That’s not enough to light the station, much less run the computers and signs and the fare gates and escalators and elevators.

    And of course it wouldn’t come anywhere close to running the trains. After all, if it were easy to take people’s biomechanical power to run trains, that would mean that humans could push the trains effectively.


  • So they’re trying to put 2GW of dispatchable (can be dialed up and down on demand), carbon-free electricity by 2028. If you include the last year and a half of the exploratory drilling work they’ve done on site, that’s about 5 and a half years.

    They’re also saying that each well is about $5 million, have about 30 wells planned for the 400MW project. Not sure how much going up to 2 GW would increase the cost, but that’s $0.33 per watt for the 400 MW plan.

    In comparison, Vogtle added 2 nuclear reactors for 2 GW of capacity in Georgia, and it cost $35 billion and took 16 years. That’s $17.50 per watt.

    Solar is somewhere between $1 to $1.20 per watt, but isn’t dispatchable.

    Ongoing operational costs might be different between all of the different types of generation, but the up front costs are important enough to where they should be a significant part of the discussion.

    So if they can pull this off in a few places, this will go a long way towards actually going to zero carbon on the grid.


  • Upfront costs are expensive. But operational and fuel costs are very low, per MWh.

    So take the upfront costs at the beginning and the decommissioning costs at the end, and amortize them over the expected lifespan of the plant, and add that to the per MWh cost. When you do that, the nuclear plants built this century are nowhere near competitive. Vogtle cost $35 billion to add 2 gigawatts of capacity, and obviously any plant isn’t going to run at full capacity all the time. As a result, Georgia’s ratepayers have been eating the cost with a series of price hikes ($700+ million per year in rate increases) as the new Vogtle reactors went online. Plus the plant owners had to absorb some of the costs, as did Westinghouse in bankruptcy. And that’s all with $12 billion in federal taxpayer guarantees.

    NuScale just canceled their SMR project in Idaho because their customers in Utah refused to fund the cost overruns there.

    Maybe Kairos will do better. But the track record of nuclear hasn’t been great.

    And all the while, wind and solar are much, much cheaper, so there’s less buffer for nuclear to find that sweet spot that actually works economically.



  • One of the great sins of nuclear energy programs implemented during the 50s, 60s, and 70s was that it was too cost effective.

    I don’t see how any of this has any bearing on financial feasibility of power plants.

    For what it’s worth, before the late 90’s there was no such thing as market pricing for electricity, as prices were set by tariff, approved by the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission. FERC opened the door to market pricing with its Order 888 (hugely controversial, heavily litigated). And there were growing pains there: California experienced rolling blackouts, Enron was able to hide immense accounting fraud, etc. By the end of the 2000’s decade, pretty much every major generator and distributor in the market managed to offload the risk of price volatility on willing speculators, by negotiating long term power purchase agreements that actually stabilize long term prices regardless of short term fluctuations on the spot markets.

    So now nuclear needs to survive in an environment that actually isn’t functionally all that different from the 1960’s: they need to project costs to see if they can turn a profit on the electricity market, even while paying interest on loans for their immense up front costs, through guaranteed pricing. It’s just that they have to persuade buyers to pay those guaranteed prices, rather than persuading FERC to approve the tariff.

    As a matter of business model, it’s the same result, just through a different path. A nuclear plant can’t get financing without a path to profit, and that path to profit needs to come from long term commitments.

    It can take over a decade to break even on operation, assuming you’re operating at market rates.

    Shit, it can take over a decade to start operations, and several decades after that to break even. Vogtle reactors 3 and 4 in Georgia took something like 20 years between planning and actual operational status.

    Now maybe small modular reactors will be faster and cheaper to build. But in this particular case, this is cutting edge technology that will probably have some hurdles to clear, both anticipated and unanticipated. Molten fluoride salt cooling and pebble bed design are exciting because of the novelty, but that swings both ways.


  • I still think it’s too expensive, and this contract doesn’t change my position. Google is committing to buying power from reactors, at certain prices, as those reactors are built.

    Great, having a customer lined up makes it a lot easier to secure financing for a project. This is basically where NuScale failed last year in Idaho, being unable to line up customers who could agree to pay a sufficiently high price to be worth the development risk (even with government subsidies from the Department of Energy).

    But now Google has committed and said “if you get it working, we’ll buy power from you.” That isn’t itself a strong endorsement that the project itself will be successful, or come in under budget. The risk/uncertainty is still there.


  • Bottom line: There’s no data right now that suggests a significant shift in the electoral college advantage for 2024.

    There’s a ton of uncertainty in the data now.

    2016 and 2020 polls missed Trump popularity, and about 2/3 of pollsters have decided to use recall vote weighting (that is, making sure that their sample is representative of the vote ratios in the actual 2020 results). Historically, that method has overstated the previous losing party’s support (people are more likely to remember voting for the winner, so reweighing the results the other way ends up favoring the loser), but 2 presidential elections in a row have caused some pollsters to try to make up for past mistakes. Then again, does Trump himself being on the ballot change things?

    Throw in the significant migration patterns of the pandemic era where many voters might not be voting in the same state that they were in 2020, and increasing difficulty at actually getting statistically representative poll respondents through spam filters, and there are real concerns about poll quality this year, perhaps more than previous years. Plus ballot access being uneven also might translate to actual voting biases that aren’t captured in the polling methods, either.

    I just wouldn’t trust the polls to be accurate. Volunteer and vote.


  • I agree with your general view that it’s not actually time to relax.

    But I will point out that you can’t just assume the electoral college advantage stays the same from election to election.

    Biden won with 4.5% more of the national vote. Harris currently is polling at about half that. In the EC, Biden won by only 78,000 votes despite his large +4.5% popular vote lead.

    In 2020, Biden won by 4.5% in the popular vote, but he won the tipping point state of Wisconsin by 0.6%. In other words, the electoral college was worth roughly a R+3.8% advantage in 2020 (yes, 4.5% minus 0.6% is 3.9% but when you use unrounded numbers it’s closer to 3.8%).

    Is 2024 going to be the same? Probably not. The New York Times ran an article about this last month, and the tipping point state in the polling was Wisconsin, where Harris was polling at +1.8%, only 0.7% lower than the national average at the time of 2.6%. The article noted that national polling has Trump shrinking Harris’s lead in non-competitive blue states like California and New York, or expanding his lead in places like the deep south, while not gaining in actual swing states compared to 2020.

    Note, however, that as of today, Harris’s lead in Wisconsin has shrunk to just under 1%, so we are seeing a shift towards Trump in the actual electoral college.

    Right now, Harris is showing a lead in the national polling averages, by aggregator:

    • 538: Harris up by 2.4%
    • NYT: Harris up by 3%
    • 270towin: Harris up 2.5%
    • Nate Silver: Harris up 2.9%

    It’s a close race, according to the polls. But whether the polls are actually accurate remains a huge unknown. So everyone should vote, and those with the means should volunteer.



  • I know you’re making a joke, but it’s not funny specifically because of what a piece of shit his dad actually was.

    In Jonny Kim’s senior year in high school, his dad died in a shootout with the police after the pistol whipping his mom and repeatedly threatening to kill her (in front of their high school age son). This dude joined the Navy a few months later, in large part to get away from an traumatic home life.


  • I do volunteer office work for a non-profit childcare center, and have looked at their budget and their books. It’s basically impossible to efficiently do at the scale of a single center in a high cost of living city.

    If you’re paying teachers an average of $30/hour and maintaining a ratio of 4 kids to 1 teacher at all times, and covering 50 hours per week of operational time (for example, operational hours between 8am and 6pm 5 days per week), and you actually have enough staff to not pay overtime, that’s $1500/week in wages per teacher, or $375/week per student. Throw in taxes, healthcare, paid vacation, and staffing in redundancy so that you can handle illness and the unexpected, and each kid might be at $400-450/week in labor costs of the direct work of watching and teaching the kids.

    But in reality, childcare is in crisis now because a qualified worker could probably get a higher paying nanny job for 1 or 2 kids at a time, so there’s a severe shortage of workers even at that $30/hour average wage. And so there needs to be overtime, and that creeps up to $450-500/week for workers.

    And then you have the ongoing overhead: rent, utilities, furniture/equipment, toys, books, other supplies, etc. Most centers provide food, and have to contract out for that, too.

    And then there’s the cost of management. Someone needs to run the place, there might need to be something like a receptionist, and these centers often have to contract out their bookkeeping, electronic records, or even basics like running a website. Most have extra features like electronic reports and maybe even pictures/video for parents, and that costs money, too.

    So even on the non-profit side, without a profit motive or distributions to shareholders, the industry as a whole has a mismatch between the prices parents are able to pay versus the bare minimum acceptable cost of providing that service. (In fact, the nonprofit I’m thinking of has donations coming in to cover things like tuition assistance for parents who need it, or a lot of the supplies, and volunteers like me who can provide specialized labor for no cost to the center.)

    Childcare should be subsidized by the government, and there’s basically no way this industry can continue to exist based purely on revenues from parents alone. Otherwise the industry will enter a death spiral and the number of people simply unable to afford kids will grow out of control.