leftist themed nujob conspiracy mill

The Republican party is ripe for conspiracy theory targets.

Epstein had close ties with Trump and his attorney general Bill Barr (whose father hired Epstein to teach at a prestigious private high school without a college degree, where he was known for ogling the high school girls and showing up to parties where underage drinking was happening). The waitresses and hostesses at Trump’s Mar a Lago were also regularly recruited to work at Epstein’s island. Alex Acosta, the federal prosecutor who agreed to a secret plea deal where Epstein served a slap on the wrist in a local jail instead of real prison was later elevated to Trump’s cabinet, as Labor Secretary.

Now, Trump has named another child sex trafficker as his nominee for Attorney General.

There are suspicious ties between the Saudi royal family and key members in Trump’s orbit, including his son in law Jared Kushner. Elon Musk has been doing sketchy shit with the Saudis and the Russians, as well. Basically everyone in Trump’s circle, including his nominee to be the director of national intelligence, has shady ties with foreign adversaries.

There’s lots of other little things about financial profiteering by the Trump folks: an SBA COVID bailout that went to huge businesses, a move to privatize or sabotage the public postal service and the weather service to help the private competition, arbitrary or politically motivated regulations to help certain businesses while hurting others, etc.

I mean, it really wouldn’t be hard.

There’s been some reporting that Musk’s Super PAC has been paying its workers so well that it’s poached a bunch of the volunteers from the official campaign, and is so poorly run/audited that a lot of the workers are entering false data into the canvassing reports to qualify for bonuses. If that turns out to be true, then it will have been the case that Musk is burning his own money while hurting the Trump campaign.

I’m not ready to call the race, but stories like this at least reassure me that for Republicans, they’re not sending their best.

I made my own “cell phone service” but it only works within 10m of my home.

Upfront costs are expensive. But operational and fuel costs are very low, per MWh.

So take the upfront costs at the beginning and the decommissioning costs at the end, and amortize them over the expected lifespan of the plant, and add that to the per MWh cost. When you do that, the nuclear plants built this century are nowhere near competitive. Vogtle cost $35 billion to add 2 gigawatts of capacity, and obviously any plant isn’t going to run at full capacity all the time. As a result, Georgia’s ratepayers have been eating the cost with a series of price hikes ($700+ million per year in rate increases) as the new Vogtle reactors went online. Plus the plant owners had to absorb some of the costs, as did Westinghouse in bankruptcy. And that’s all with $12 billion in federal taxpayer guarantees.

NuScale just canceled their SMR project in Idaho because their customers in Utah refused to fund the cost overruns there.

Maybe Kairos will do better. But the track record of nuclear hasn’t been great.

And all the while, wind and solar are much, much cheaper, so there’s less buffer for nuclear to find that sweet spot that actually works economically.

That was true in the 70’s, too. You always needed a way to show that people would pay the long term prices necessary to cover the cost of construction.

The big changes since the 70’s has been that competing sources of power are much cheaper and that the construction costs of large projects (not just nuclear reactors, but even highways and bridges and tall buildings) have skyrocketed.

There’s less room to make money because nuclear is expensive, and cheaper stuff has come along.

One of the great sins of nuclear energy programs implemented during the 50s, 60s, and 70s was that it was too cost effective.

I don’t see how any of this has any bearing on financial feasibility of power plants.

For what it’s worth, before the late 90’s there was no such thing as market pricing for electricity, as prices were set by tariff, approved by the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission. FERC opened the door to market pricing with its Order 888 (hugely controversial, heavily litigated). And there were growing pains there: California experienced rolling blackouts, Enron was able to hide immense accounting fraud, etc. By the end of the 2000’s decade, pretty much every major generator and distributor in the market managed to offload the risk of price volatility on willing speculators, by negotiating long term power purchase agreements that actually stabilize long term prices regardless of short term fluctuations on the spot markets.

So now nuclear needs to survive in an environment that actually isn’t functionally all that different from the 1960’s: they need to project costs to see if they can turn a profit on the electricity market, even while paying interest on loans for their immense up front costs, through guaranteed pricing. It’s just that they have to persuade buyers to pay those guaranteed prices, rather than persuading FERC to approve the tariff.

As a matter of business model, it’s the same result, just through a different path. A nuclear plant can’t get financing without a path to profit, and that path to profit needs to come from long term commitments.

It can take over a decade to break even on operation, assuming you’re operating at market rates.

Shit, it can take over a decade to start operations, and several decades after that to break even. Vogtle reactors 3 and 4 in Georgia took something like 20 years between planning and actual operational status.

Now maybe small modular reactors will be faster and cheaper to build. But in this particular case, this is cutting edge technology that will probably have some hurdles to clear, both anticipated and unanticipated. Molten fluoride salt cooling and pebble bed design are exciting because of the novelty, but that swings both ways.

I still think it’s too expensive, and this contract doesn’t change my position. Google is committing to buying power from reactors, at certain prices, as those reactors are built.

Great, having a customer lined up makes it a lot easier to secure financing for a project. This is basically where NuScale failed last year in Idaho, being unable to line up customers who could agree to pay a sufficiently high price to be worth the development risk (even with government subsidies from the Department of Energy).

But now Google has committed and said “if you get it working, we’ll buy power from you.” That isn’t itself a strong endorsement that the project itself will be successful, or come in under budget. The risk/uncertainty is still there.

The median net worth of a 65-year-old in the United States is about $390k, so the income it produces is generally a modest supplement to social security. At the 75th percentile, which is also generally considered middle class, net worth is about $1.1 million and easily enough to provide a comfortable retirement lifestyle.

The idea that someone is middle class because they’ve earned a penny in bank interest is absurd.

No, the idea is that the middle class (defined in the conventional way) spends time in both the “worker” category and the “owner” category.

The ordinary middle class pathway is to work for 30-50 years and then retire on their savings (or a defined contribution retirement plan) or to rely on a defined benefit pension fund that is itself invested in securities, aka capital. This is the baseline expectation of retirement planning for the middle class in the U.S.: the investments/savings provide the cash to live on, while ownership of the primary residence shields the retiree from certain housing costs, or can provide cash flow through a reverse mortgage.

Through the power of compounding, a 40+ year savings plan generally increases its value over time so that the vast majority of the value comes from return on investment rather than invested principal.

If you want specific calculations, we can do that to show that the typical middle class path takes in more than “a very small amount” in their retirement savings/investments.

Or are you planning on coming back with a load of caveats

These details are obvious from my first comment in this thread, that the middle class in the United States works its way into an “ownership class” in time for retirement, through savings/investment. That’s exactly what I meant in that comment, and spelling it out makes it pretty clear what I meant at that time, and that I haven’t shifted my position in this thread.

Its not my definition. Its a different school of thought that has stood up to scrutiny. It is different to what a lot of people would refer to as middle class and, of course, different again from what you, personally describe middle class to be.

I’m specifically pointing out the problem with the “how they earn income” definition, that it seemingly assumes that the two categories are mutually exclusive, to try to argue that there’s no such thing as a middle class They’re not. Most people who are in what most would recognize as “middle class” under the traditional definition get income through both methods, especially over the course of their lifetimes.

So even under that definition, which attempts to pretend there isn’t a middle class, there is still a middle class: those who have income through both methods, or even hybrid methods (ownership of an actively managed business that allows them to earn money while working but wouldn’t earn money without their own labor).

Middle class generally means people whose incomes are in the middle half (ranging from 40th to 60th percentile to the 20th to 80th).

If you want to pull out your own new definition based on whether their income comes from work or from return on investments, then I’d still point out there’s a large number of people who do both, especially when compared across the entire life cycle including retirement. So if you insist on this alternative definition, you still have to account for the big chunk of the population who do both.

If you work for your money, you’re part of the struggle. If you own for your money, you’re part of the problem.

But the middle class is those who are able to leverage working for their money to accumulate capital to where they can live off of the proceeds of that owned capital. If you’re able to retire, you eventually become part of the ownership class.

There is a shrinking middle class but the actual people in it are those who split their adult lives into eventually retiring on their wealth, accumulated through working.

Unions are legal in all occupations.

One caveat: the legal protections of the right to unionize apply to non-supervisors. If you have people who report to you, your power to unionize is pretty limited.

There are also some specialized jobs that aren’t allowed to unionize by either federal or state law: actual soldiers in the Army, certain political jobs, etc.

But for the most part, if you are employed, you’re probably allowed to unionize (and protected against retaliation even in an unsuccessful union drive).

It feels so real in how disappointing the experience becomes for the straight characters.

This hits the nail on the head. It’s funny because of the point of view of the actual participants.

The funny thing about this thread is that there are so many comments essentially agreeing with the central premise of the sketch, that it’s relatable and disorienting when you stumble onto some kind of established fandom and can’t seem to keep up with why it’s popular or what is or isn’t “part of it.” The popularity is confusing in itself, and the need to dissect the lore (as OP is doing, perhaps even unintentionally following the sketch itself) distracts from the original purpose of going there to be entertained.

In other words, the sketch is funny and relatable exactly for the same reasons why much of the audience doesn’t find it funny and relatable.

Why are you sticking with a specific spectrum? You made it hard to read in service of a requirement that doesn’t make any sense.

Where did you learn to write such shitty code?

I learned it from watching you!

Actually, I disagree that DD/MM/YYYY even qualifies as being small to big.

If you actually treat it as a counter from 01/01/2024 onward, note that the first digit that moves is actually the second digit in the 8-digit representation. In terms of significance, the most significant digit is the 5th one in the string, then counting down the significance it’s 6th, then 7th, then 8th, then jumps back to the 3rd, then the 4th, then the 1st, then the 2nd.

Well the convention was to store it as a 32 bit signed integer, so that is any number from -2^31 to (2^31 - 1). Prime numbers are formally defined as a subset of whole numbers, so let’s ignore the negative numbers and the number zero.

Fun fact: the largest signed 32-bit integer is itself a prime. And the wikipedia page lists it as the 105,097,565th prime.

By the time we hit the 2038 problem, there will have been about 105 million seconds since 1970 where the Unix time was a prime number. And it’s a 10-digit number in base 10, where prime frequency is something about 4% of the numbers.

Does that answer your question about prime frequency today? Eh, I’m sure someone else can figure that out. If not, I’ll probably have to wait until I’m in front of a computer.

No, I’m taking back the word “prime” from a company that shouldn’t have exclusive rights to define the term. I’m not going to cede that territory just because I don’t like the company.

If you’re looking for a proof:

Our base 10 system represents numbers by having little multipliers in front of each power of 10. So a number like 1234 is 1 x 10^3 + 2 x 10^2 + 3 x 10^1 + 4 x 10^0 .

Note that 10 is just (3 x 3) + 1. So for any 2 digit number, you’re looking at the first digit times (9 + 1), plus the second digit. Or:

(9 times the first digit) + (the first digit) + (the second digit).

Well we know that 9 times the first digit is definitely divisible by both 3 and 9. And we know that adding two divisible-by-n numbers is also divisible by n.

So we can ignore that first term (9 x first digit), and just look to whether first digit plus second digit is divisible. If it is, then you know that the original big number is divisible.

And when you extend this concept out to 3, 4, or more digit numbers, you see that it holds for every power of 10, and thus, every possible length of number. For both 9 and 3.

It works for 9, too.