partial_accumen
@partial_accumen@lemmy.world
- Comment on In the US, is this actually the moment past the point of no return? 1 day ago:
USA was still very much on the rise at the advent of the internet. If you define the advent of the internet to be Arpanet, then that was 1969, the same year the USA landed on the moon. If you define the advent of the internet to be the first use of the World Wide Web that would be 1989 the same year the Berlin wall came down and 3 years before the Soviet Union collapsed, which was arguably the most powerful the USA has ever been as it was before China’s rise.
- Comment on In the US, is this actually the moment past the point of no return? 1 day ago:
Did Britain or Rome know the moments when Pax Britannia or Pax Romana had hit their tipping point to decline? I doubt it.
I think the tipping point will only be observable through the lens of history many years from now with a subject heading of: This event was the beginning of the end of Pax Americana.
- Comment on If trump appointments someone that doesn't last as long as Anthony Scaramucci do we measure that in fractional moochies or do we abandon the mooch system because it failed us? 2 days ago:
- Comment on Anon questions our energy sector 2 days ago:
Ask why? don’t just stay with oil companies PR talk points.
I do. I’m not using anyone’s talking points. I couldn’t even tell you what they would be. I have 2 smaller nuclear power plants in my state. I liked the idea of nuclear power, but looked into it myself. It seems like it should be great. Reality shows it isn’t great. I does one thing well (24/7 carbon free electricity), but thats it. Everything else is negatives I found.
Nuclear is expensive because innovation has been artificially stifled.
I read your article. It doesn’t say what you’re saying it does. That article says “nuclear is expensive” because projects are building old designs retrofitting existing plants.
A huge part of this, is the insistence to forbid newer designs and more modern improvements,
See you say that, but facts don’t align with that: “NRC Certifies First U.S. Small Modular Reactor Design” Jan 2023 source
Do ALL new reactor designs get approved? No. Do no new reactor designs get approved? Also no.
Nuclear power is expensive (in the US), because it was made expensive by refusing it all the factors that typically reduce costs of technologies.
I read your article there. Its argument is that the theoretical arguments for pricing nuclear power are faulty. We don’t have to work with theoreticals. The customers of the most recently brought online reactors at Vogle nuclear power plant in Georgia are paying significantly more for their electricity as the result of their new nuclear reactors, and will, for decades to come. I pointed this out and cited sources in my OP on this.
It doesn’t matter though. Nuclear power could’ve help us survive climate change…40 years ago. It’s too late now anyways. Even if we covered the whole planet with solar power and stopped every single combustion engine in existence, we are already on the way to living in a hellscape. We must focus on survival of the species now.
Agreed, so its irrelevant to bring up what could have been done in the past. We have what we have today.
- Comment on Anon questions our energy sector 2 days ago:
The argument I’m replying to is a classic “not perfect, thus not worth it”. Its disingenuous and it calls for disingenuous reply.
I wrote nearly a page of text all of factual and relevant points. If your threshold for bad faith replies is that every facet of every argument must be explored before you’ll allow a genuine reply, you’re in the wrong place.
We are also pursuing renewables in despite of their political and technical flaws.
Agreed! We are seeing their benefits over their shortcomings. Additionally, its not an all-or-nothing decision. A blend of solutions is the best likely path forward. Some nuclear (currently built) should be part of that. However, putting all the efforts into scaling nuclear would be extremely expensive. If we do that, we should understand that cost will be much larger than most people understand.
The point is that all the flaws that OP exposes about nuclear power also applied to renewables (at one point in history solar power was 10x more expensive than nuclear) and also to oil.
Thats a bad argument to support your pro-nuclear position. Other renewables are expensive when they are first developed and get cheaper over time. Nuclear has gone the other direction. Nuclear power is more expensive now than it was when it began, and is only getting more expensive.
They are status quo defending arguments designed to halt thought, paralyze action and scoff change. Just because it isn’t perfect doesn’t mean it isn’t better.
My dollar cost argument against nuclear is not that.
The exceptionally high dollar cost of nuclear was not part of the conversation before I introduced it. It is an important consideration if we’re talking about scaling out any particular solution. If one solution is more expensive than others that produces the same result that is important to consider.
- Comment on Palworld Developer Reveals The Pokémon Patents Nintendo Claims It's Violating 3 days ago:
Nintendo claims Palworld is a knockoff, and people bought it, so you’ve got a bit of a disconnect with reality and your positions.
- Comment on Palworld Developer Reveals The Pokémon Patents Nintendo Claims It's Violating 3 days ago:
So you’re cool if some other developer makes a knockoff of Palworld and sells it, right? Cause that knock off developer has to make a living, right?
- Comment on Palworld Developer Reveals The Pokémon Patents Nintendo Claims It's Violating 3 days ago:
Uhhhh…. You are aware of what topic you are posting in, right?
Are you the Palworld developer then? This is preventing YOU from making a living?
- Comment on Anon questions our energy sector 4 days ago:
A new nuclear unit (4 billion-ish)
In the USA the most recent two reactors (2 added to a plant that already had 2 existing) cost $34 billion just for the two new ones. source
- Comment on What is stopping a scammer from HTTPS certificating a "nonsense.ReputableBank.com" 4 days ago:
I recall that subdomains are their own record inside a DNS
Well, not a record, but a zone. A subdomain is its own zone. There are additional DNS records that support a separate zone though.
which would imply that anyone can claim that their server is a non-existent subdomain of the real domain
False. The person wanting control of the subdomain must be delegated control from the parent domain. Owners of the parent domain don’t just hand that out to anyone. The mechanism is called DNS Delegation.
- Comment on Palworld Developer Reveals The Pokémon Patents Nintendo Claims It's Violating 4 days ago:
I don’t need to come up with any revolutionary ideas, the open source folks are already creating without patenting their creations
The largest contributors to Open Source make their money from patents and other IP. As in, they can afford to give away lots of time and effort because they make their money with IP. If IP were to be eradicated as you’re proposing, all those contributions to Open Source by those largest contributors would evaporate. Here’s the largest Open Source contributors from 2017-2021.
- Comment on Anon questions our energy sector 4 days ago:
Because oil has never depended on outside countries that are openly hostile.
That argument is so weak to me. No one is advocating “oil is the future! We need to build more oil consuming power plants!”. If people were, sure you’d have a great counter. Since that’s not reality though, its a Strawman response at best. Its Whataboutism at its worse.
- Comment on Palworld Developer Reveals The Pokémon Patents Nintendo Claims It's Violating 4 days ago:
yeah now its brutal for anyone trying to make a living
What patent or copyright is preventing you from making a living?
- Comment on Palworld Developer Reveals The Pokémon Patents Nintendo Claims It's Violating 4 days ago:
A shitty solution for a shitty situation is not a good solution
Feel free to share your revolutionary idea that will still incentivize people to create without creating a “shitty situation”.
- Comment on Palworld Developer Reveals The Pokémon Patents Nintendo Claims It's Violating 4 days ago:
Patents shouldn’t exist! Mostly.
We had a history before patents/copyright were enforced. It was pretty brutal for anyone trying to make a living with their creations. Take a look and see if you want to return to that.
- Comment on Anon questions our energy sector 4 days ago:
It’s sad that the coal lobby has convinced so many people that the most reliable clean energy source we’ve ever discovered is somehow bad.
Its bad in the sense that is a crazy expensive way to generate electricity. Its not theoretical. Ask the customers of the most recent nuclear reactors to go online in the USA in Georgia. source
"The report shows average Georgia Power rates are up between $34 and $35 since before the plant’s Unit 3 went online. " (there were bonds and fees on customer electric bills to pay for the nuclear plant construction before it was even delivering power.
…and…
“The month following Unit 4 achieving commercial operation, average retail rates were adjusted by approximately 5%. With the Nuclear Construction Cost Recovery (NCCR) tariff removed from bills, a typical resident customer using 1,000 kWh per month saw an estimated monthly increase of $8.95 per month. This follows the previous rate impact in 2023 following Unit 3 COD of $5.42 (3.2%).”
So another $5.42/month for the first reactor built on top of the $35/month, then another $8.95/month on top of all that for a rough total of $49.37/month more just to buy electricity that is generated from nuclear.
Maybe the power company is greedy? Nope, they’re even eating more costs and not passing them on to customers:
“Georgia Power says they’re losing about $2.6 billion in total projected costs to shield customers from the responsibility of paying it. Unit 4 added about $8.95 to the average customer’s bill, John Kraft, a spokesman for the company said.”
So that $49.37/month premium for electricity from nuclear power would be even higher if the power company passed on all the costs. Nuclear power for electricty is just too inefficient just on the cost basis, this is completely ignoring the problems with waste management.
The next biggest problem with nuclear power is where the fuel comes from:
“Russia also dominates nuclear fuel supply chains. Its state-owned Rosatom controls 36 percent of the global uranium enrichment market and supplies nuclear fuel to 78 reactors in 15 countries. In 2020, Russia owned 40 percent of the total uranium conversion infrastructure worldwide. Russia is also the third-largest supplier of the imported uranium that fuels U.S. power plants, accounting for 16 percent of total imported uranium. The Russian state could weaponize its dominance in the nuclear energy supply chain to advance its geostrategic interests. During the 2014 Russia-Ukraine crisis, Russian Deputy Prime Minister Dmitry Rogozin threatened to embargo nuclear fuel supplies to Ukraine.” source
So relying on nuclear power for electricity means handing the keys of our power supply over to outside countries that are openly hostile to us.
- Comment on Someone Is Trying To Play Concord Right Now 6 days ago:
The player must be in Texas. Even though the game is long since dead, they’re not legally allowed to end it unless it is a threat to their life.
- Comment on I have been told ever since I was a little shit that when you die you go to heaven first wait in line for St Peter to judge you at the pearly gates? Is this in the Bible? I thought god did judging 6 days ago:
Even “the bible” isn’t “the bible”.
“Protestant Bibles have only 39 books in the Old Testament, however, while Catholic Bibles have 46.” source
- Comment on Can you scale down a firearm to make an identical looking firearm that fires a different round? 1 week ago:
There is a whole youtube rabbit hole you can go down showing videos of miniature versions of larger (larger caliber) guns. The smallest I saw was “replica” Civil War Navy revolver that the whole gun was about 6cm long. It was a functional gun that had a powder charge with a projectile.
- Comment on Can you scale down a firearm to make an identical looking firearm that fires a different round? 1 week ago:
If you’re talking about actually scaling, like a CAD drawing, then no.
If you’re talking most of the appearance and function, then yes! There is a scale model of a Browning M2 machine gun (which normally fires 50 cal ammo) that fires 22lr instead. It will set you back about $20,000.
- Comment on On a lighter note: Why do people still buy fast food? 2 weeks ago:
I can go to a cafe where I’m waited on and served decent food for $20.
How much do you tip on you cafe meal on top of that $20?
- Comment on What can I do to help? 2 weeks ago:
I think there is a high likelihood we will see President Vance before the end of this second Trump term. I can’t really tell which is worse.
- Comment on Why doesn't Lemmy have a system like Reddit's Karma? 2 weeks ago:
The purpose is to rate the users.
Individual communities can set up guidelines, that if you have a new account under 6 months, and you have a negative overall karma,
you’re banned from that community until a human can look through your post history to see if you should be unbanned.you’ll have to repost previously highly upvoted content to pump up your karma numbers, until you have a positive overall karma.FTFY, I’d really prefer to leave that mistake of karma at Reddit instead of polluting Lemmy with it.
Lemmy karma-less method also drastically reduces the value of bot accounts to farm karma (for nefarious or advertising use before being banned).
- Comment on [deleted] 2 weeks ago:
Stop. The Vanguard retirement funds all did this if the target is before 2060. And those are invested in index funds by professionals. OP likely had the VTINX
OP’s losses are more exagerated than just the Target Date fund experiencing a dip from bond exposure.
Here’s OP’s same initial investment on the same day but 100% in VTINX:
So instead of a $4k loss that OP showed, it would been a $71 loss. OP went picking individual stocks and got burned (assuming they liquidated their position after seeing their portfolio balance).
- Comment on [deleted] 2 weeks ago:
Or I completely disagree with the idea of individuals investing for their retirement as a base expectation when the options available are not universal nor affordable for half the population.
Then you should have led with that. I wouldn’t have wasted my time trying to explain how to use the system to someone not interested in any part of the system. None of your arguments are about the mechanisms of the system, but instead lack of its universal applicability. You weren’t interested to learning how the system can work, you’d already dismissed it from the get-go.
Your post comes across as dismissive of anyone criticizing the current system.
Your posts come off as trolling because you’re arguing about particular internal steps to the current system when you don’t even care about it.
- Comment on [deleted] 2 weeks ago:
You do understand a significant portion of the population doesn’t have a dollar to spare when they live paycheck to paycheck, right?
Listen friend, its entirely possibly you started off with good intentions in this thread, but somewhere along the line it looks like you got so concerned with “being right” or “getting zingers” that your responses got more and more useless and simply argumentative for arguments sake. I’m human, I’ve been there. Look where you started off this line of conversation with this:
So if the market crashes the year before I want to retire I should just put off retiring for another 30 years.
The way I know you went down the wrong path is that if you were genuine with your argument, you would have started HERE with your comments about people not being able to save anything for retirement. Instead, you attacked a legitimate way to save for retirement for those that can save for retirement. Worse, you did so from a position of ignorance, but then attacked the response that informed you how your stated position was inaccurate.
The other possibility is that you started your whole rant without any thought to having a good faith conversation about the benefits or challenges to Americans saving for retirement. That would make you a straight up Troll. I don’t that thats who you are, so maybe just let this conversation thread die because its not producing anything productive for you and its otherwise a waste of time for everyone.
- Comment on [deleted] 2 weeks ago:
Earns enough money to set some aside for retirement.
Do you literally not even have $1 in your pocket that you earned for yourself? Thats all it takes to open an IRA and start saving for retirement.
- Comment on [deleted] 2 weeks ago:
Only 32% of people have 401k accounts.
45% of 18-29 year olds have a retirement account. That number keeps rising to 77% of people 60+ having a retirement account. source
You don’t need a 401k account to save for retirement. You can do this same savings/investing in an IRA or even an brokerage account (but you wouldn’t get the tax benefits). There are ZERO employer requirements to opening an IRA, you just have to be someone that earns money.
- Comment on [deleted] 2 weeks ago:
I recommend FSKAX over FZROX. There are few minor differences. Yes FZROX has a lower expense ratio, but it BARELY lower when compared to FSKAX. My understanding is the biggest downside to FZROX is that you can’t hold that in any other brokerage. So if one day you decide you don’t like Fidelity you have to sell all your FZROX and then buy something else offered at the other brokerage. In a retirement fund this isn’t so much a big deal, but could mean you miss out on gains between the sale and the purchase of whatever else you replace it with.
If you’re investing in a non-retirement account this is a BIG deal, as any gains would be taxed at the time of sale. This can mean you pay 15%-20% on the gains just to switch brokerages. FSKAX doesn’t have that limitation, and you’d be able to simply do an “in kind” transfer of the securities to your new brokerage without any tax events/consequences. To me, that portability is worth the tiny different in expense ratio.
- Comment on [deleted] 2 weeks ago:
You found the good ones. No need to go looking further.
