Sideshow Bob is way too smart to be compared to trump

I agree it’s not the ideal solution, but it’s better than most solutions we have, depending on location.

Rooftop solar doesn’t only need to be on residential buildings, it can also be on industrial and commercial buildings, which take a significant land area.

One last benefit of most renewable energy that is related to its distributed nature: it’s easy to slowly roll out update and replacements. If a new tech emerges you can quickly change your rollout plan to use the new tech, and replace the old tech a little bit at a time, without any energy disruption.
With mega-projects like nuclear reactors, you can’t really change direction mid-construction, and you can’t just replace the reactors as new tech comes online, because each reactor is a huge part of the energy supply and each one costs a fortune.

Also, according to the doc you shared of land-use, in-store wind power is nearly the same as nuclear, since the ecology between the windmills isn’t destroyed.

So while I agree that nuclear absolutely has a place, and that renewables have some undesirable ecological repercussions, they’re still generally an excellent solution.

The elephant in the room, though, is that all the renewable solutions I mentioned will require energy storage, to handle demand variation and production variation. The most reliable and economically feasible energy storage is pumped hydro, which will have a similar land usage to hydro power. On the upside, although it has a significant impact, it does not make the land ecological unviable, it just changes what ecosystem will thrive there - so sites must be chosen with care.

Right, like I’ve said it’s not the best solution everywhere. But where it’s an option (which is many places) it’s a better one. Not solar in the case of grasslands, probably wind. But you get the idea.

Are you displacing whole ecosystems, though?
How much do wind farms affect grasslands and prairies, etc? They’ll have an impact for sure, but it’s not like the whole place gets paved over.
And solar can get placed on roofs of existing structures. Or distributed so it doesn’t affect any one area too much.

I have to admit idk much about sourcing the materials involved in building solar panels and windmills. Idk if they require destructive mining operations.
I imagine that a nuclear reactor would require more concrete, metal, and rate earth magnets that a solar/wind farm, but idk. I likewise don’t know the details about mining and refining the various fissile material and nuclear poisons.

The other advantage of renewables is that it’s distributed so it’s naturally redundant. If it needs to get shut down (repairs, or a problem with the grid) it wont have a big impact.

I like nuclear, and it’s certainly the better choice for some locations, but many locations seems better suited for renewable

I agree it absolutely has problems and I hope we come up with a better solution in the near future.

But it’s currently the lesser evil. Even though nuclear plants don’t need a lot of fuel, getting that fuel is still typically more damaging than creating a water reservoir, or using an existing natural reservoir.

That’s fair. But lesser of evils, yanno.

You haven’t heard of any advancements in energy storage at all?

Not that we need them, the best energy storage is old AF and excellent

That’s why they mentioned “pumped hydro”

The USA specifically has so much useless land with minimal ecological value, that if an energy project could actually be done at a federal level we could probably not have to worry about it.

There is a whole bunch of land in central USA that is not especially unique or teaming with life, slap down a big renewable energy farm.

I agree it’s safe but idk it’s the best we currently have, I think that probably depends on locale.

Solar and wind (and maybe tidal?), with pumped hydro energy storage is probably cheaper, safer, and cleaner… But it requires access to a fair bit more water than a nuclear plant requires, at least initially.

But nuclear is still far better than using fossil fuels for baseline demand.

That’s not agile.

It’s not bad, it’s just not agile. Agile exists for projects where that simply isn’t possible. Its sacrificing a bit of potential best-case productivity to ensure you don’t get worst-case productivity.

The problem is that people realized that they could sell agile training to middle management if they changed it to be about making middle managers feel empowered and giving progress visibility to upper management.

It seems like our socialized healthcare doesn’t cover our sarcasm detector organ 😅

But in those cases, isn’t fear supposed to be balanced by some reward? Competing instincts/motivations?

But specifically fear instincts seems strange. It makes sense to us because we’re us, but look at it more clinically: we seek out to stimulate the instinct that keeps us safe. That means that it’d doing the exact opposite of its purpose. If we seek to stimulate our fear, that means we seek to put ourselves in situations where fear is a reasonable response, which is exactly what fear was evolved to prevent.
How did this behavior develop, and how did we survive once it did?

That’s still a pretty messed up pass time if you’re not anthropomorphizing. It’s a crazy way to have evolved.

I like that “safe space” theory, that seems very plausible.

It’s still a bit messed up though, because that part of our brain can’t distinguish between play fear and real fear, so we get “rewarded” for both which seems like a very risky move, evolutionary.

I can imagine the aliens being like

How did they survive to become the apex species?

Although with all the brinkmanship and poor threat analysis we’ve exhibiting now on a global scale, perhaps we won’t survive as the apex species for long, so 🤷

HOW DARE YOU 😉

I imagine that’d be just as fucked up to aliens:

Their brain injects feelgood drugs to reward them for being scared??? and they got addicted?!?!

Im gonna edit my post because everyone is too hung up on extreme sports.
Horror movies also fall under the same category of thing. It’s not about the risk, it’s about triggering fear response. I just picked extreme sports because I couldn’t fit the whole premise in the title