As dumb as this comment is, you’ve just guaranteed that I’ll never forget the name of this problem, so thanks for that

I assure you we’re not, and we seem to disagree pretty fundamentally, possibly you’re confused by the fact I replied to my own comment, but I assure you that was just because I was a bit drunk and couldn’t find the edit button

Just to add, I think the reason bankruptcy needs to exist is to ensure there is no burden on the government enforcing inefficient debt collection. It’s not about fairness or second chances, those are just happy side effects. But if someone’s business model relies on government enforced punishment to function it’s a wasteful model from the governments perspective. Allowing people to go bankrupt means nobody will benefit from this model of debt collection, and thus saves the courts and government to focus on more beneficial contract law involving large amounts of wealth, rather than millions of pittances that cost the government more than they earn the loan sharks.

Trying to control the lives of millions of people because they were too stupid with their finances is a very inefficient solution to the problem (also unpalatable). I think the far simpler option is to simply stop protecting anyone giving bad debt. The government has less work to do, people learn to be smart in what debt they offer, because if they start offering people the moon for punishing but distant costs, they’ll get nothing.

Your solution relies on every human being smart. Mine doesn’t care how smart people are, it ensures the problem is self correcting. Much neater, much less societal harm. Who actually cares about “punishing stupid debtors” when you can instead just not have any stupid debtors.

Don’t loan what they can’t afford to repay. Easy. Not everyone was stupid enough to offer debt up to people’s eyeballs, and many weren’t “fortunate” enough to even try.

Stupid games cause stupid prizes, for everyone involved. Bankruptcy exists for a reason and it was foolish to ever allow any debt to bypass it. Humans always have and always will act in their immediate best interests with a hopeful view of the future, and the best way to accommodate normal behaviour is to balance discouraging it (by encouraging the specialists in debt to refuse bad debt by punishing them with unrepaid loans) and ensuring the people caught in the system can still be functional in society since that is better for them, society, and everyone except the idiots who loaned them money they were never paying back.

I agree with you and Alexa, but you can always say “five past six” to avoid the [zer]o if it’s bothering you.

I remember on a German exchange at school the German student could not handle “oh” sounds in phone numbers at all. So it might be tricky for non native speakers (though I think they made more of a fuss from anger at how stupid English is than out of genuine confusion…)

Yes, especially right now. To be fair that’s mostly because solar is doing great as far as scale goes right now. Nuclear has near zero scale and lost all experience, so it’s more expensive than ever.

Yes, but also literally every industry starts that way. Start small and scale up. Nuclear’s special because we did it once and then almost completely stopped building them globally for so long that the capability faded away.

The tech shifted in the meantime, so even the knowledge that was preserved is for designs we wouldn’t want to build today.

It’s a weird situation.

Yup, it’s hard to predict what the mix will look like, but 100% solar would be a very costly solution for sure.

I used to be very pro nuclear, and I still think it could have been a big piece of the puzzle, but I do worry we’ve missed the boat, it could’ve been the first wave of decarbonisation 20 (or more) years ago, I’m not sure how well it can compete growing from almost nothing now with the renewables eating all the easy money. nuclear plants need to run 100% to be successful, and renewables have dropped a bomb on the concept of baseline demand. Maybe as we kill gas we’ll have to start giving massive bonuses to on demand power that isn’t pumping co2, but the absolute lid on that market is the price of storage, which is high enough now, but will drop, it’s unclear how long the gap for nuclear will exist there.

Certainly willing to be wrong though, there’s lots of unknowns with nuclear, quite possibly it could be multiple times cheaper if only we’d invest into it properly.

Yeah, one justification I’d heard was that it was a cheap and low risk way to revive the industry enough for bigger projects, but I’m not sure that’s particularly compelling.

I’m certainly not arguing nuclear is a panacea that everyone in all the governments have somehow missed (even ignoring the risks mentioned its only a potential fit for a small subset of the grid these days, there’s no way building a 100% nuclear grid would make sense today).

The point I’m making is that currently there are energy production needs we effectively can’t fulfil with renewables because the costs would be impractical (eg the last 10% of usage on dark windless nights at the wrong time of year). Some cases do fit nuclear better currently (not all, nuclear usually wants constant usage, can’t help with surges).

Nobody really cares about that though for 2 reasons: 1. There’s plenty of opportunities that renewables still can fill and 2. The cost of storage is projected to drop a lot over time, which should fill in the gaps and squeeze out many of the last opportunities for nuclear.

Quite possibly by the end the remaining slice where nuclear could fit will be so thin it can’t actually sustain an industry (and given the industry has been half dead for decades, it’d take a big win to justify reviving it), so yeah, at the moment it looks like lots of risks and questionable rewards. Nonetheless the current prices aren’t really the problem, it’s just that things are risky, and projected to get worse over time, so why invest?

Ironically it’s not that different to the fossil fuel industry, just with a lot less existing infrastructure.

If it was a matter of half the price then nuclear would be the clear winner. Paying double to get stable power rather than variable power is currently a clear win.

Nuclear has a lot of baggage on top of being more costly (eg public fears, taking a lot longer to get running, building up big debts before producing anything, and having a higher cost risk due to such limited recent production), if it was just a simple “pay twice the price and you never need to worry about the grid scale storage” then nuclear would be everywhere.

It’s a fair cop

You typed that into social media and posted it, just fyi.

Neither am I, but yes, probably it would be spun that way.

Possibly I was voicing my wish for a karmic result, rather than a politically pragmatic decision.

Otoh, if they tell him to keep quiet and he doesn’t (is he even capable of shutting up? His own lawyers have never stopped him flapping his jaw so far), that makes things much easier: contempt of court is a simple matter to resolve.

If they can predict earthquakes and eruptions more accurately, as suggested in the article, then yes for all the people who don’t die.

Watch the music video “Let’s go” by stuck in the sound for another take on exactly this scenario.

https://youtu.be/52Gg9CqhbP8?si=fKzjWGeAXE1S7D2f

Disagree, they were pointlessly rude to a confused patient. The patient may have been in the wrong place, and they started strong with trying to guide them, but the later comments were just lashing out and trying to hurt.

Stating falsehoods is not a requirement for being “problematic”. Indeed, it’s ridiculously easy to reach any offensive ideology you want without having to stray from factual statements.

That’s not to say it’s all his fault, it sounds like a messy case where everyone involved screwed up.

Actual actual answer: WFH