E.g., https://www.infantswim.com/

The major benefit is that you can invest much more of your income into a SEP-IRA, which is a before-tax deduction. 25% of income or $75K, whichever is lower. That adds up.

But health insurance is a massive cost. Last time I ran the numbers, which admittedly was a while ago, my income as a self-employed consultant had to be much higher than my income as an employee in order to reach the same take-home amount.

I’m not a CPA and wasn’t interested in squeezing every dollar out of the system. I had a simple sole proprietor LLC. So there may be other tricks to pull. But the tax writeoffs are overrated, in my experience, other than the IRA. It’s not free money; for the most part, it’s a discount on purchases you wouldn’t otherwise be making, and a lot more hassle to boot.

There is something interesting happening in the retail space, though, called a “virtual power plant.” Worth googling if you’re curious.

Think of it this way: if you buy a house, the “operating cost” is fairly small: upkeep and painting, mostly. Does that mean you can buy a house, move out of your apartment, and quit your job, because your cost of living has just dropped a few thousand a month?

No, of course not. Upkeep isn’t the real cost of buying a house. The real cost is the monthly mortgage payment. Unless you were already independently wealthy, you have to keep your job. Sorry.

The cost of energy for a nuclear plant is the cost of paying back the loans. As other forms of power generation get cheaper, those loans stay the same, making it harder and harder for nuclear to compete. As they get squeezed out of the energy market, they have to raise their per-watt prices in order to continuing to service the loans.

Think of it like this. You rent your house to your cousin, who pays you enough to cover the mortgage. But then your cousin finds a sweet deal couch-surfing in the tropics in the summer. He stops paying you for June, July, and August. You can’t get anybody else in your house during that time, so you say, “Sorry dude, you have to pay more for the rest of the year. I’ve got bills to pay.” That works great until your cousin gets tired of your high prices and moves out, and now you’re left with a mortgage to pay and no one renting it.

So we end up using nuclear 1/4 of the time. But unfortunately, nuclear’s cost is in the capital expense, not the operating expense. We pay about the same amount for it regardless of whether we’re using it or not. So if we’re only using 1/4 the energy, the cost per watt of nuclear energy is effectively 4x larger.

This incentivizes further build-out of solar, catching those sweet winter profits (now 4x larger!), further squeezing nuclear’s usage, driving up its prices, and incentivizing even more solar.

Eventually nuclear gets squeezed out and solar’s profit margins go from “astronomical” (naturally, it’s power from the sun, nyuck nyuck) to “low margin.” But they’re still making money. Whoever built the nuclear plant is left with a very expensive stranded asset.

At least, that’s my understanding. I’m not a power company accountant. What I observe, though, is that power companies who do employ accountants aren’t building nuclear. They’re building shit-tons of solar. And I’m pretty sure it’s not because they’re hippies who hate nuclear.

That’s not necessary. Solar panels are so cheap that you can massively overprovision for winter and still come out ahead of nuclear.

I know you’re just trying to show off how superior you are, and you haven’t really thought through the implications of somebody getting fired for making a mistake, but I’d like this rhetorical flourish to end. Making a mistake (or disappointing an internet commenter who’s put in very little thought and even less effort into a solution) isn’t something that should threaten people’s livelihoods.

On a related note, your style of post comes across as immature and/or socially inept. You might want to rethink how you present yourself online.

Although, in this case, given recent news about prediction market plays, I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that the whole farce of a “ceasefire” was just prediction market manipulation. (Well, that and TACO Tuesday so Trump could get out of following through on his threat of genocide. One spot of sanity, if you can call it that, in a shit sandwich of the stupidest US foreign policy blunder since the war in Vietnam.)