You have no idea what you’re talking about. shut the fuck up, you pretentious cunt.

This is just fucking misogyny. If the best insult you can think of against Elon Musk is to call him a woman, then you just hate women. Anyone who thinks this is actually good, you are part of the problem, just go vote for fucking Trump

Notice how pro-nuclear people always point towards a bunch of fictional technology as the solution? Oh, we just need fusion, or breeder reactors, or a bunch of other shit that doesn’t exist. No, bro, we just need to build renewables and proper energy grids. It’s really not that complicated. If it’s not sunny where you live, then you just get electricity from where it is sunny. It’s really really simple

Nuclear energy is a solution looking for a problem. Total tech bro bullshit. Like crypto.

Are you fucking serious? Nuclear power plants cost way fucking more than some cables. You people are fundamentally so unserious. Pull your head out of a reactor for ten seconds and take reality as it exists

and breeder reactors are more expensive than faerie magic, I prefer to use technologies that are actually real rather than things I wish were real

I can’t, sorry - I blocked him for being a pro-nuclear shill. Rather than link to a specific study, because there are dozens at this point, I’ll instead just link you to a Wikipedia article that has plenty of references for you to explore - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/100%25_renewable_energy

If you want to find studies, you can find them - there are actually quite a lot of 100% renewable energy feasibility studies that all seem to come to the conclusion that 100% renewable energy economy is completely achievable and viable with current technology. Many of them consider nuclear power to be a fossil fuel.

Ask a pro-nuclear guy to provide any source that doesn’t come from somewhere funded by the nuclear lobby and watch as they flail around ineffectually and then link you to some pro-nuclear lobby group anyways. It’s quite funny

yes

if 15% of the land used for parking spaces in the USA was instead used for renewables, that would generate enough electricity to power the whole country.

a report from the IEA showed that renewables CAN, and I mean CAN fully power the entire world. So take that one up with the experts. thanks!

nice brainwashing though!

There is a huge lobby of pro-nuclear think tanks who try to astroturf pro-nuclear shit onto social media. We, scientifically literate, rational people, need to counteract these harmful narratives with some facts.

FACT: Renewable sources of energy are as cheap or cheaper per kwh than nuclear.

FACT: Renewables are faster to provision than nuclear.

FACT: Renewables are as clean, or cleaner, than nuclear.

FACT: Renewables are much more flexible and responsive to energy fluctuations than nuclear.

FACT: Renewables will only get cheaper. Nuclear will only get more expensive, because uranium mining will get harder and harder as we deplete easily accessible sources.

“oh it won’t run out, it’ll just be ridiculously expensive, despite the fact it’s already more expensive than renewables!”

Yeah great fucking argument dude, 10/10.

Nuclear isn’t in competition with fossil fuels, it’s in competition with renewables. Renewables are better than nuclear by pretty much every conceivable metric. So fuck nuclear power, it’s a waste of money and time.

When energy storage and transmission methods are also not up to the task, nuclear becomes the best answer.

Obviously, the best answer is to improve energy storage and transmission infrastructure. Why would we waste hundreds of millions on a stupid toy power plant when we could spend 10% of that money on just running decent underground cables.

and we can have 100% clean, renewable energy in 2024, we just don’t need the nuclear reactor

Nuclear may have been good 10 years ago, but it isn’t really good anymore. This is like saying “if I had bought a PS2 in 2002 then I would have had fun playing Final Fantasy XI Online. Therefore, I should buy a PS2 and FFXI Online so I can have fun in 2024”. That ship has sailed

I feel the same way, but it’s good to be aware of our own biases - there’s a bit of an aphorism that goes around about advertising and propaganda, that it works best on people who think it doesn’t work on them. If we think we’re immune to something, we let our guard down a bit. I used to think of myself as a very rational, intelligent, realistic guy, but in recent years I came to realise that I was kind of using that to protect my ego - I was wrong about a lot of things, and I could always find excuses to justify my beliefs as rational.

Maybe I still make the same flaw, I don’t know. Nowadays, I try to stay more focused on being nice than being right. That way, even if I’m wrong, I’m not making people’s day worse.

I’m not always successful with that.

That’s perfect, drag, I don’t think anyone could have put it better. The trolley problem is a philosophical thought experiment, yet so many people approach it like it’s some sort of engineering problem that has right and wrong answers, I think it’s probably a consequence of our sort of “tech bro” culture that everything needs to fit into this rational, quantitative framework - we have this drive to put numbers on things that just can’t be rationalised in that way.

People are funny, complicated things, and I love them all!

Thank you so much for being honest about making that choice - almost everyone would choose their friends, but lots of people wouldn’t admit to that. Being honest myself, I’d make the same call - and if it came down to me picking between my friends and drag’s friends, I’d choose my friends. The whole “calculus” we run (comparing how good our friends are to average people) is a way we justify making our decisions, a way to deal with the cognitive dissonance of our values (save as many lives as possible) being in conflict with what we actually do (saving our friends rather than as many lives as possible). In reality you would have no way of knowing who those other 11 people would be - for example, if I said that one of them is a researcher on the brink of curing cancer, how would that change your decision? These are really tough questions to deal with, and that’s the point of the trolley problem - that people make different choices because they have different perspectives, and different values. There’s no objectively right and objectively wrong answer to any of the scenarios. Just different interpretations and ways to think about it.

I think the thing that people often don’t seem to understand about the trolley problem is that it doesn’t have a “single version”, it’s a framework for exploring human decision making. And the correct answer, it’s all a matter of perspective. For example, if all of drag’s friends were on one side of the track, and on the other side of the track, were a number of people who drag does not know, equal to the number of drag’s friends plus one, would drag kill their friends, or the innocent people?

Don’t bother trying to explain philosophy directly to people online. We’re so convinced of our own intelligence that we refuse to consider that our knee-jerk reaction to anything might be worth exploring.

If you want people to learn anything, you have to first of all tell them that they’re right, then add whatever you’re trying to teach them as if it’s some nuance of whatever they’re right about. Even if it makes their original opinion completely wrong. It works surprisingly often.

Our egos have an outer layer of armor that prevents us from easily absorbing ideas unless they have a starting point of agreeing with whatever we already believe.

I was playing with your idea of getting put through torture to get money to pay the bills - if you interpret that as encouraging us to get a job under capitalism, it’s basically what that amounts to!