> If you take the money you'd use for a down payment and mortgage and invest it instead (after paying rent) you end up in about the same place.

Everywhere here rent has rapidly outpaced the mortgage payments and the down payment also pushed down my monthly payments significantly so it's not like nothing comes out of that.

To top it off my home is far more spacious.

Maybe it could work out if you went for the cheapest rent and invested the difference and happened to be that rare case that avoids a market crash. But then you'd also be living in a small appartment for at least 2 decades.

As someone mentioned a lot of the store bought ones have emulsifiers that might be contributing to the colon cancer rates.

I'm no longer convinced those high trust societies will remain so. Every high trust society has been pushed to opened it's doors wide and the changes have been stark.

Not really my thing here since i'm belgian and we have multiple cross industry unions competeting. However from what i hear about american unions it starts to sounds like an argument for acting and arguing against a union if it leans against your politics and you don't have enough influence whilst also not doing enough towards your wage/work conditions.

In Belgium unions exist across industries except for the railway and I think army unions. So I being a programmer can be in the same union as a street sweep. There's also mutliple that compete with eachother (most of which with political alignments tho they tend to coopeerate and organise togheter in many scenarios) and fees are very low. They have additional functions too though which are more debated.

>Tell this to all the creatives who are being disrupted by AI that has, in many cases, been trained on their content

Ironically enough I found the avant garde effort of many modernist artists, architects and such very samey. Like the only way someone could receive any recognition is not by doing something well but only by doing something new. The newness would be forced sometimes for the sake of it and then countless thousands of people would try to do that something new in a similar way and recognising and being able to explain those things would kind of an ingroup thing..

At various points when I did some art schooling and later encoutered professors from the arts who should have been lecturing mostly about UI design and whatnot but clearly didn't want to be doing that type of stuff ended up just giving us some more art schooling.....it too felt like very forced dogma.

To be fair it is fairly onesided towards european history/folklore/tales and noticably always with black people inserted making it feel like there's some very... american focus on this from the opposing perspective as well. (And when it's anything east asian they typically insert a white main character) Which isn't helped by the industry basically farming this situation from both sides with actors and articles claiming queen charlotte, cleopatra and such were back. (to the point of leading to legal complaints in egypt, etc)

>Nuclear is not only the energy source most likely to overrun time and cost, it's one of the worst big projects period.

Which is a solvable problem. We didn't have these cost and time overruns in the past to this degree. China and other places don't have them much either. I presume they don't set up a board of people and file a tower of paperwork when the lightbulbs in the toilet of an unrelated building are due for replacement but no longer produced.

Imagine if people said renewables were unfeasible and pointed at germany's insane expenditure on it to get only part of the easy output done after decades.

There’s an ‘interesting’ dichotomy, echoing the original sentiment:

On the one hand environmental issues from oil and coal are creating an existential pressure that requires mass investment and change as a high public priority.

On the other hand the primary cost drivers of the greenest tech to address oil and gas and industrial process heat usage at scale has paperwork and financing issues that are resolvable by MBAs and some straightforward investment strategies.

Existential threats, paper challenges.

Taken at face value, and considering we have mapped out the physics, these ‘environmentalists’ arguing ad nausea about this online want long term entrenchment of high carbon fuel sources and intimate connections between the global economy and oil despots with no real hope of solving transportation, shipping, aviation, or other major drivers of global energy usage in order to prop up half-solutions for electricity to avoid rational investment or cost-control mechanisms in proven scalable nuclear tech.

Stopping a constant cycle of forced First of a Kind construction, regulatory timebombs unaligned with science, and corporate NIMBY campaigns, is the easiest physics breakthrough humanity will ever have to make. It should be an area of obvious victory, not a show-stopping excuse.

… and, not for nothing, but Oil company PR campaigns a few decades back were explicit: they can’t argue climate change away, they can only confuse the issue, push personal responsibility for national policies, and push half solutions that diffuse actual social opposition. All of this angry knee jerking is following that game plan and the substantial greenwashing propaganda those petroleum giants invested heavily in, to the benefit of rich fossil fuel producers and delay of meaningful changes on our greenhouse emissions.

China has revised down its nuclear build targets and repeatedly had cost and time overruns on nuclear builds, over decades, with different designs. The data just isn't as public.

They've done better recently by building standardised designs repeatedly.

But done even better on wind and solar.

The data is very public for their time spend and verifiably so because they're huge projects and it's quite noticeable when they produce power.

In fact they're one of the main countries pulling the average build time down well below the few notable fuckups in europe recently.

They've also built a number of experimental/new designs and done well.

We did too. And when i read of our fuckups and look at the heaps of nonsensical underlying stories of management and construction in the UK, finland, etc it just seems wild how it can be done like that and be gotten away with.

I've heard of similar in the renewables space (stuff build in contexts/places where it didn't make sense and cost overruns purely for government subsidies) but at least those where individually small fuckups.

And in the meantime you've been putting out insane amounts of co2 for decades.

If we so choose. If we want to move faster than we can mange to balance things, we can also reduce energy use. It's all just political decisions.

I presume crashing your economy isn't too popular of a political decision.

And the balancing thing seems to get fucked up since there's still no proper north south connection in the country and the "easy" grid scale storage options aren't even remotely close to sufficient.

In my country (Belgium) too the prefered option pushed by the greens ended up being....gas plants with 30 year profit guarantees and even then they didn't find much if any takers.