What assertion are you lacking citation for? The hubble and webb telescopes vs the ??? communist space telescopes? Tony Hawk vs the ??? communist skater? John Carmack vs the ??? communist game developer? VW and Toyotas 20 million cars per year vs Trabant?

Maybe you could provide some examples of how communism has provided opportunities to all in a way that capitalism hasn't?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Chinese_Famine

The industrial revolution took at least a century depending on how you count, and it created more jobs than it destroyed.

The introduction of computers obliterated whole office floors of employees at banks and insurance companies but it created even more work at companies that sold computers and software and consultant hours.

Ai takes millions of jobs and replaces them with a few thousand caretakers at megawatt datacenters. The workforce at Anthropic and OpenAI is comparable to a game development studio. If all they end up doing is reducing the workforce of JP Morgan by 10%, society still has a net loss of jobs.

That said, it's at least possible Ai will eventually end up creating a bunch of new work indirectly, by enabling people to do more than they ever imagined they could. One can hope.

It's a catch-22 for the companies as well, since white collar work is presumably done because a company has customers, and most of their customers are white collar workers. At least in the US and Europe.

I agree but it's also better. On average for most programming tasks I think humans are as "defeated" as coders as we are as chess players.

The machines will not only be as good or better than you at the DB design, the business logic, the performance critical algorithms, the UX, the performance tweaks, the accessibility standards, security holes, browser compatibilities, laws and regulations and whatever else you need to make the whole solution.

It will also write user manuals in any language, and rewrite them when needed even on a friday evening. It absolutely will not stop, ever, until you are DE...wait, I mean DONE!

So the situation for coders is even worse than it was for the weavers. The machine delivers not only cheaper and faster, but also better. :-/

I think a better summary is that capitalism creates more opportunities for all. Not equal, just more.

It creates more food, more clothes, more libraries, symphony orchestras, skateboard parks, cars, ships, planes, particle accelerators and space telescopes than any other system we have come up with, which means more opportunities for people wanting to be pilots, captains, skateboarders, scientists or violinists.

Whenever someone has tried to remove the inequality aspect of this, it has resulted in a loss in opportunities for all. Including the opportunity to have food every day.

CD's, LP's, 8-tracks, CRT's, minidisc, microcassettes, VHS, Jaz and Zip drives, laserdiscs. Needed lasers, magnet sensors, tiny motors, gears and whatnot.

Today everything seems to be a chip in a box and still it's often more expensive.

It sure used to be, but I think battery backups that cover a whole house for 24h is cheaper than a diesel generator that can do the same now. Depending on your situation you can make it back in savings even without solar panels. (Charge when electricity is cheap, use when expensive).

Piped gas generators is a thing I had no idea existed until now! Edit: Curious to learn if they are a common thing?

Combine it with rooftop solar to get the equivalent of free fuel for your generator every time the sun shines.

Right now it's like "whoopsie our experiment hacked another co because we have no control over our experiments" and the reaction is like "What's that old boy?" from people having no clue what it all means. There are no consequences, no guardrails, and the "voluntary slowdown" is just words.

An experimental agent run from Anthropic or OpenAI or someone else can already cause deaths. They can order hits, dox political dissidents, locate people with secret identities, alter medicine prescriptions. It shouldn't have to actually happen before legislation catches up.

This happens daily even with the token-limited models customers run, and even more so when Anthropic & co run agents basically unlimited on large percentages on their total compute capacity.

It's not nonsense but you made a different statement than I.

Switzerland doesn't use market prices. Electricity in Switzerland is regulated so they pay vastly more than the european market at most times.

This Sunday for example, Germany enjoyed spot wholesale prices of 2 centimes per kWh while Switzerland had 12. You can verify the German prices on nordpool and an equivalent swiss energy market site.

Citizens in Switzerland pay much more than wholesale, averaging over 20 centimes last year. They are forced to do so by regulations.

When you force your population, aka the taxpayers, to pay 5-10x as much for electricity as it costs in the open market you using taxpayer money to subsidize electricity.

You follow?

>Edf was not bailed out. It was renationalized

Thats synonymous, and it was actually the second time EDF were bailed out, France had to pay for the overruns on the plant in Finland too. Lucky Finland!

The mechanism varies by country, but the bottom line is that taxpayers always have to pay for nuclear. They have no choice.

There is no option to walk away, you can't leave it, it has to be taken care of. Every other power plant you can shut down and walk away but nuclear is, again, unique in this respect.

When all the swiss nuclear operators go bankrupt, the swiss will still have to pay people to operate the plants, or decommision them, and then store the waste, for longer than Rolex has existed as a company.

Nobody else will. So it's the taxpayers, always.

>by some absurd reason nobody can cool the spent fuel to avoid boiling,

Absurd reasons are not that uncommon. War for example. Also, landslides, earthquakes, terrorists, pandemics, sinkholes. Stupid politicians. Lots of things. Non-zero.

>something much more terrible happened,

The spent fuel fire will be the most terrible thing that happened that day, unless the cause was an actual nuclear weapon strike.

Or well, since it's Switzerland I guess CERN could have come up with something worse but I can't imagine what. ;-)

The permanent truth phase yes. Coal is so much safer than nuclear that a comparison is hardly meaningful.

Let me put it this way - If coal power plants were run with as much security as nuclear plants they wouldn't kill mosquitoes sleeping in their chimneys. If nuclear power plants were run with as little security as coal plants however, we would not be here to have this discussion.

You seem to be well aware of the dangers of fossil fuels, but you come across as entirely ignorant of the dangers of nuclear power. Good decisions need knowledge of both.

I'm as anti coal as I am anti nuclear because both are terrible ideas. Renewables, batteries, e-fuels and other storage options are here now. They're better, faster, cheaper, safer. Let's do that.

Of course not, if I did that's 20 000 dead from a "nuclear accident" right there. But that would be dishonest and silly, and I aim for rationality.

>And people in Scotland are in substantially greater danger from the emissions of coal plants in China

Not even if you assign all the blame of global warming to chinese coal plants would this be even remotely true.

>I don't see any reason to limit the discussion to electrical power plants.

You responded to a claim that no other power plant represent as great a risk at a nuclear power plant.

Maybe you should have created a new thread saying something like "a nuclear plant is not as bad as the entire fossil fuel industry worldwide"? ;-)

>The consequences are no worse than the dominant alternatives

You completely ignored the facts that clearly tell you that the consequences are orders of magnitude worse.

That's no way to convince anyone. Just saying.

But I also think that what we have today in Gnome and KDE is pretty good, and a part of the problem is that people don't realize how good they can be.

I think demo videos showing actual power users doing real work in each of the major DE's would go a long way. Part of the allure of tiling VM's is that they are an efficient way to work for certain types of users, but part of it is that those users are advocates and have impressive demo videos showing exactly how tiling VM's can be awesome, while a Gnome or KDE user is left to kind of figure it out, or worse, discover how they differ from a familiar windows or macos.

(I may be unaware of a great source of exactly what I ask for and if so please tell me!)

I'll also grant that Apple has gotten more boring with age - the G4 imac is still the coolest computer I've seen to this day. Just so outrageously out there. Current offerings are efficient but a bit boring. Apple Silicon could make something like the trashcan design work, when it basically failed with x86 PC components.

Having said all that I wouldn't mind seeing an ecosystem of ARM-based components even if they followed the ATX standard. Being able to buy an ARM-compatible motherboard and upgrade my ARM-based CPU and pair it with separate RAM and SSD's would be nice!

It's not, the estimated production cost for existing swiss nuclear plants is 4-6 centimes per kWh, which is already expensive electricity and frequently higher than the market prices today. That is also the self-cost price, meaning whenever the market pays less for electricity, ch nuclear plants lose money.

And as always, swiss taxpayers cover that loss so you won't ever see it in the operators financial reports.

Also worth noting is that EDF in France sells for 7 cents after being bailed out when sellng at 4 cents. This is not cheap electricity.

> What non zero chance of millions of casualties?

Just to take one trivial example:

If nobody is able to refill the water in spent fuel pools at any nuclear plant, they will catch fire. Assuming a radial spread of the fallout it will be near guaranteed lethal for at least 50 miles, probably lethal for some 500 miles, and you "won't want to live there" for even further than that. And this will remain the case for millennia to decades, depending on weather and distance.

So basically 500 miles radius, uninhabitable for several generations if you run out of water.

Then consider that Switzerland is covered by a circle of some 120 miles, and has a population of several million.

Do you think the 4-6 centimes per kWh covers a scenario like that? I don't. Good thing Switzerland has lots of water...

What are you thinking of here? ATX is from 1995 and ITX from 2001, since then we've had stuff like the lamp imac, trashcan mac pro and nowadays the finger-thin imac and tiny mac mini from Apple.

The incident was a typhoon that caused 60 dam failures in a densely populated area prone to flooding. Estimates range from 26000 to 240000 people dead, but rationally one has to assume the typhoon would have caused some damage in these areas even without the dams.

So claiming this was a single hydro dam causing 250 000 dead is hardly rational.

If you live in a narrow valley downstream from a dam you are aware of the danger. You as an individual can take action to protect yourself. If you live upstream by even 10 feet you are in no danger at all from the dam.

With nuclear, people in Scotland are in danger from a plant in the Ukraine, can't do anything to protect themselves from it, and have to live with the consequences for 30+ years. That's much worse by any metric.

Deepwater horizon was bad, but nowhere near as bad as Chernobyl or Fukushima. Also it wasn't a power plant, not even indirectly as oil is mostly used for transportation, not electricity. Chernobyl and Fukushima were power plants.

So again, there is just no comparison between nuclear plants and any other power plant. Nuclear really does have a unique level of risk.

Risk is often defined as consequence x likelihood, and for nuclear the consequence is immense. Meaning effort has to be spent keeping the likelihood extremely small, in order for the risk to be low.

This has to be accepted and considered in any discussion about nuclear power. Pretending it doesn't exist is not rational.