𝙲𝚑𝚊𝚒𝚛𝚖𝚊𝚗 𝙼𝚎𝚘𝚠

You really won’t short something, and wooden toothpicks are at risk of splintering and leaving more behind than getting out if you’re not careful.

You generally won’t be touching the contacts much, since most gunk like lint can just be scooped out. Just be a bit gentle and you’ll be fine.

China is investing more in solar. But China is also very power-hungry, so any energy they produce will get sold to the market, so their market looks significantly different. Their economy is different and so is their power usage.

The same could be said of solar. ‘It’s a very expensive capitol investment and as soon as the sun goes down it’s just a stupidly expensive roof costing money’.

Solar is significantly cheaper. Like it’s not even funny how much cheaper it is. This means that other than the sun going down, they’re always going to be producing because it’s by far the cheapest power available. And because they easily earn back what they cost, it’s perfectly fine if they don’t operate at 100% efficiency.

For nuclear to remain economically viable in these market conditions it has to be similarly profitable, and it just isn’t.

You’d have similar problems doing this under communism tbf. It’s expensive under any economic system. Solar at least has the advantage that any Joe Shmoe can put it on their roof and produce their own power, not being dependent on big energy corpos.

Modern nuclear plants with light water reactors are designed to have maneuvering capabilities in the 30-100% range with 5%/minute slope.

In the power grid of today (and even more so in the future), that’s fairly slow. On good days wind and solar already produce more than 100% in several countries, so it needs to be able to drop to 0%. Worse however is that nuclear is already expensive, and shutting it down means it’s just a hunk of a building costing money. It’s why private investors have largely shunned nuclear in the modern days: it’s not econonically viable anymore, or even if it is it’s just not profitable enough. And that picture seems to be getting worse and worse every year.

The costs are just externalized and safety is, comparitively, neglected.

Sure, but the power companies don’t pay for that so to them it’s cheap, which was the point.

The main issue with nuclear is that it just doesn’t make economic sense. It’s far too expensive to build and it takes ages to get running too.

Second problem is that due to the variability in output of other renewable sources, anything that intends to be the “backup power” has to be very variable as well. Nuclear can’t quickly scale up and down, and even if it could it’d make nuclear even less economically viable. It’s why currently gas plants are used as backup: they’re cheap and can scale up/down very quickly.

And then there’s the big advantage that solar has, which is that people can own the power generation themselves, saving a lot of money and in some cases even making money. It’s also decentralized: an accident or attack at a nuclear plant would have huge consequences for electricity availability (not to mention other safety problems). Solar is also dirt-cheap and getting cheaper every year, faster than most scientists predicted it would.

Extra virgine

You might just have the wrong shape of glasses. I thought for years I had the right shape of glasses on my face, but as it turns out a different shape looked way better.

No it’s about the 2014 World Cup.

Yeah Abagnale pretended to be a doctor and conducted 12 “fitness examinations”, supposedly for Pan Am, on young female students. Definitely creepy.

And then there’s the individual women who accused him of all sorts of stuff.

You should probably know the best con that Abagnale pulled is making people believe he actually did all of those things. Journalists have discovered that the vast majority of his claims are completely fabricated.

Maybe admins should be able to easily block crosspost comments from specific communities or instances? So if there’s an instance with a lot of rulebreakers out there, the admin can hide them all in a quick and easy way.

Because for users this seems like a nice feature that prevents some of the at times obscene fragmentation of the discussion, which also seems antithetical to the idea of the Fediverse (a federated whole, rather than hundreds of little islands with little to no interaction between them).

Yes, that’s not in dispute?

If you click through on the source on commerce sanctions (which is what would apply to possible tariffable goods) then you will find that the BIS oversees that. Not the taskforce going after Russian oligarchs, who have a different set of sanctions apply to them.

Again, there’s already a high level of tariffs on Russian trade, and they don’t have a “most favored trade nation” status anymore:

U.S. Trade Representative Jamieson Greer told lawmakers there is “no effort to reinvigorate trade with Russia,” pushing back on Democrats who suspected Mr. Trump was cozying up to Russian President Vladimir Putin amid negotiations to reignite economic relations or end the war in Ukraine.

President Biden signed bills and issued decrees in 2022 that sanctioned Russia and Belarus and increased tariffs on things such as steel and aluminum, minerals and chemicals.

“They already have these high tariffs, they don’t have permanent normal trade relations,” Mr. Greer told the House Ways and Means Committee.

Sanctioned oligarchs have completely different sanctions than trade sanctions that apply to countries. Apples and oranges.

One is a sanction lifting on a fairly unimportant woman, true. Two are about “plans” a month ago (nothing was put in practice). Last one is tangentially related. But none are really about lifting sanctions on the country.

Trump hasn’t lifted any sanctions on Russia yet. He prolonged them for a year in February, and has been trying to offer the perspective of lifting them in exchange for peace negotiations. But since Putin hasn’t started negotiating in earnest yet, no sanctions have been lifted as far as I know.

They’re on a different list that allows limited trade afaik.

Yeah but that’s out of incompetence, not malice. You’re in most cases not allowed to trade with Russia due to sanctions, so what is there to tariff?

Russia is already on its own “special list” of countries that have very heavy trade restrictions. Like North Korea.

I don’t think tariffs would’ve made a difference there.