• 2 Posts
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Joined 8 months ago
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Cake day: September 24th, 2023

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  • You are on a nuke loving platform and people are going to downvote anything that isn’t hard pro nuke. But you are correct. I have had this exact same discussion before. The numbers you are looking for are called the LCOE, or the ‘levelized cost of electricity’ where the lifetime of the technology cost if factored in. Offshore wind is currently the lowest followed by solar. Nuke is clost to 10x the cost. There is even an international nuke consortium that has several reports agreeing with exactly what you are saying and basically sum it up as: if you invested in nuke early, then it is cost efficient to just keep upgrading. If you didn’t invest in it early, then the cost to implement it so high that you are better off going wind/solar. Even if you add in the cost of battery systems, it is still cheaper than building a new nuke plant. And more than that, with these new nuke plants you have to upgrade all your infrastructure because your old wires can’t handle the output loads. If you look at the 30+ billion Georgia spent on this plant, they could have simply given out a micro generation grant to everyone to add solar to their roofs, not needed to upgrade the lines, and been far better off. But hey, just like reddit, if you are commenting on lemmy you better be pro nuke only and ignore the other numbers.





  • As much as I say fuck the billionaires, they have actually already had methods of doing this for about 50 years. Only the dumb billionaires who registered the planes in their name were annoyed about the rules. They could have always registered it under a trust, like almost every other rich person private jet out there. People can still figure out the plane tail registration and track you through that, and that will never change. So the billionaires that are happy about this regulation change still have their tail numbers known by the public to be associated with them and can still be tracked. Now they just have to change their tail numbers (giant pain) and wait for people to do slightly more difficult digging to figure out what plane is theirs.





  • For those who don’t know: when milk is milked out of the cow it goes through some processing, like pasteurization and separation. When milk separates the fat floates to the top and it is “skimmed” off. You can have ‘whole’ fat in your milk, as in they only take off the very top part of cream on top. Then you can have your ‘skim’ milk with no fat. Then you can add back in a percentage of the fat. This is where the most common 1% and 2% come in. In theory you can make whatever percentage milk you want. This is also where something like half and half comes in, half cream added back to half milk for a 50% ish mix.



  • A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.

    What regulated American militia do you belong to? We have been so quick to jump to defend the later part of the amendment that we have completely dismissed the first part.

    I am a gun owner. I love my ar-15. I was in the Army. I did 2 tours to Afghanistan. I am also very liberal. If a law was passed that expanded on the actual enforcement of the well regulated militia text, I would support it. Instead, we have no regulated militias in America at all, and a bunch of gun nuts that keep screaming “shall not be infringed!!” While ignoring all the rest of the text.



  • I have an honors minor in medical humanities and took several medical policy courses. We looked at this exact graph from previous years as well as several other huge sets of data/graphs/studies and anything else related to insurance you can imagine. Insurance is not a standard market commodity and does not follow the same trend or logic. The only way you can lower premiums in insurance is by reducing the risk in the pool, or increasing the pool size to dilute the risk. This is either increasing the total pool size by increasing premiums, getting more people, or being selective about who joins the risk pool. The third one was what was called “preexisting conditions” and kept high cost people from entering the risk pool and draining the funds. This got banned and increased premiums. By increasing competition you end up splitting up the pools, making everyone’s premiums go up. This happened multiple times post ACA after the GOP started stripping out the funding and safeguards to prevent this. More and more competition opened up with artificially low premiums being subsidized by federal dollars, but then when the subsidies ended the premiums started jumping. Then when the premiums were jumping, new companies opened up to make more competition advertising lower rates, but then further fractured to pool sizes, leading to premiums skyrocketing. If you look back just 10 years ago there was a 3-5 year stretch of premiums increasing almost 30% year after year. It was due to all the competition opening up every year. This is why single payer systems have the lowest rates. If you have even one private company monopoly with a regulated cap on profits you would still end up with lower premiums. Then, if this single paying company was nationalized to take out the profit making middle man, the premiums are that much lower because your risk is spread across a massive pool. More competition in insurance makes the problem worse. I would agree with your stronger regulation though. There is a lot that can be done there.


  • No one in real-estate is doubting it being a bubble. The issue is how it will resolve. Not all bubbles burst. The question is if this one is going to simply “cool down” until the market rate catches up (lol, pipedream) or if the propping up will simply plateau it and it will level off for some years for the market rate the then catch up (almost the same thing, still a fucking joke when they try to justify this). Or there is the option of the bubble popping, it then it is the question of how deep the market cut will go, how fast it will rebound, how far up it will rebound, and if it is still worth it to buy now (what some are saying is that it is still worth doing the current fuckery and still profitable even with a bubble burst).



  • Second on the ladybugs. You have a grow house to contain them and makes them that much more effective. They cost about 15-20$ for a container of them and live for about 2 weeks, sometimes more.

    I used neem oil on other plants and it leaves a residue that I didn’t like. It also raises the leaf Temps and blocks leaf pours/stoma. There are also home made remedies with water/soap/alcohol that are better for the plants.



  • So true. I am from Houston and loved it. I know what you mean about people bitching about taxes no matter what. The oil and gas guys are the worst. They have million dollar town homes, jobs that bring in 250k or more, and then bitch about the sales tax being on their bar tabs that are over a thousand dollars. They will bitch about their city taxes going to nothing, but then when I bring up the port of Houston, all the amazing museums, Herman/memorial park, miller outdoor theater, any of the amazing parks really, or any of the other things Houston pays for- that doesn’t count because they don’t use it and they just want a city paid for frat house with free booze and prostitutes. Ahhhh, classic Houston O&G…


  • I am homesteaders and you are correct in your numbers. And to be transparent here, I am actually a disabled veteran and receive an even larger exemption than most people. The value can grow more than the capped 10% in a few ways. The first was from the first assessment after I bought it. I bought for 170k and yet it was immediately assessed for 210k. Now I am up to about 250k. No improvements. I will be happy to sell for 200k.

    The second thing they can do that I discovered was this last time they tried to say it was worth more than that (before I got it down to the 250k it is now), and did even note that the capped “taxable” increase- essentially saying that they have pre-locked in +10% increases for the next so many rounds of assessments until the taxable value is even with the assessed value. I argued it down. The value is still inflated.

    Now, my personal opinion? I’m actually not mad about paying for taxes. I enjoy the idea of everyone pitching in what they can afford and together we can build a better community, nation, and world. I just hate that my city is playing in the real-estate speculation game as a way to pump their budget and the taxes I pay are going to a bunch of bullshit. Fuck dallas.


  • I think there is a miscommunication between both comments here on ‘fair’. Here is what I interpreted-

    Taxes are never fair in the sense that one poor person will put in a penny, one middle person will put in a dollar, and one rich person will put in 1.99 and they will each receive 1 dollar back in services. This was only fair to one person of the 3, beneficially unfair to one, and penalizing unfair to another. But by paying what each was ably to pay society as a whole has been invested in 3 more dollars and no person was asked to pay outside their means.

    I am not taking sides in this, just conveying the thought that ‘fair’ taxes can have multiple meanings and not just automatically jump to flat taxes.