Maximising for 0 enters into territory of causing more harm than good.
As someone who regularly drives flat out in the autobahn (whatever speed the car maxes out at) - I’d rather not get random beeping at me because I glanced at my rear view mirror for 20ms too long to move out of the way for someone faster behind me.
Especially when you already have a bunch of beeping signals something going wrong with the car like tyre pressure loss.
And that’s before we even start talking how usually driver assistance in cars is crap to begin with, from lane assistance following the wrong lines, to automatic brake systems spazzing out because the camera doesn’t like the reflection caused by a Renault badge (any VAG from 2015-2020 has had this problem), even ACC has it’s own problems that I could rant about.
Anyone who doesn’t want to pay attention to the road will not pay attention to the road - one way to defeat this “assistance” system is to just mount your phone above the dashboard so it’s in your line of sight. Then what? More cameras?
I know a nanny state and nanny-state adjacent entity/system resonates well with the average HN reader but this “driver assistance” system is anything but that.
The real fix is to filter out and keep irresponsible drivers away from operating vehicles, and to teach people how to drive well, and not adjusting to the lowest common denominator.
Anecdotally, in Slovenia to pass the drivers exam you need to pass the motorway portion of the exam, one of the requirements here is to enter the motorway at high enough speed - 100kph on the on-ramp before merging.
I’ve had friends not get their drivers licence because of this - they didn’t have the confidence to drive that fast. Some more hours of driving training and they’re now some of the best drivers I know.
Some people also just do not possess the necessary hand eye leg coordination, reaction times, information filtering, decision making facilities to operate a vehicle well.
Filtering this out is a net positive because ability to drive fast safely without any handholding is a sign of competency, allowing lower competence on the road increases danger.
There is a maximum threshold for speed also once adjusted for biological and genetic realities (see reaction times between your average person and formula 1 driver)
As a real life example of this in action: most fatal accidents on rural roads at 53%, 38% urban areas, 8-9% on motorways.
Point being speed doesn’t kill, incompetence does. Under incompetence I file having the attention span of a squirrel, keep that strata away from the roads, don’t enable them.
Right off the top of my head, to power a 500MW Datacenter we need:
2.2-2.5 GWdc solar capacity which at 600W/panel amounts to 14-17sq mi plus additional 8-12GWh of storage to deal with nighttime, two-three days of cloud cover is not going to work with these numbers.
Ballpark 5-7BN$
Nuclear otoh, 1GW continuous - gives constant power, badly managed first of a kind (or first one after decades) build will be at around 10-15BN and that’ll cover two 500MW data centres.
There’s also the second/third degree order effects nuclear power stations have of creating jobs and industrial manufacturing demand. To run a nuclear power station you need to employ 1000 people (engineers plus support staff) - that’s a small town’s worth of adults. So you’ll need a town with a school, hospitals, stores - those need staffing as well.
Unfortunately building nuclear is not something that’s currently a feasible path as it requires patient capital and long term vision and planning.
This argument cherrypicks legacy cleanup sites and distressed utility balance sheets, then treats them as proof that nuclear electricity is inherently uneconomic.
The real issue is narrower: new nuclear is capital intensive and hard to finance without long term revenue guarantees, while old waste sites can impose large public cleanup costs.
Decommissioning and waste are included in serious cost models and regulatory funding requirements, existing nuclear life extensions can be among the cheapest firm low carbon power sources, and KEPCO/EDF’s debts reflect tariff policy, fuel shocks, outages, state interventions, and investment cycles. Not simply “nuclear power is unprofitable.”
The honest conclusion is that nuclear needs strong regulation and disciplined project delivery, not that nuclear is categorically fake-cheap.
Aka what I said earlier: you need the ability for strategic long term thinking and planning and execution.
You should take note that you’re uninformed or intentionally spreading false information and misrepresenting reality.
Fact of the matter is it takes a large upfront investment to build a nuclear reactor and it has a longer time horizon before it becomes profitable in comparison to something like a gas or coal power plant.
It comes down to whether or not the country, government, citizens and country have the ability to think beyond a 4 year horizon or not.
> The Russians have forced most of the people they have subjugated (except for the 3 Baltic countries) to switch their writing system to Cyrillic, regardless whether they had previously used Latin, Arabic or other alphabets. This happened both during the time of the Russian Empire and of the Soviet Union.
Missing context:
What you’re talking about is Likbez - Soviet program to eliminate illiteracy started as soon after the revolution in 1917 that overthrew the tsar as the majority of the population was in fact illiterate, at around 23% or so literacy.
So you’re saying that they re-educated an illiterate population to stop writing in their native alphabet and instead in Cyrillic? In forced re-education camps?
Maximising for 0 enters into territory of causing more harm than good.
As someone who regularly drives flat out in the autobahn (whatever speed the car maxes out at) - I’d rather not get random beeping at me because I glanced at my rear view mirror for 20ms too long to move out of the way for someone faster behind me.
Especially when you already have a bunch of beeping signals something going wrong with the car like tyre pressure loss.
And that’s before we even start talking how usually driver assistance in cars is crap to begin with, from lane assistance following the wrong lines, to automatic brake systems spazzing out because the camera doesn’t like the reflection caused by a Renault badge (any VAG from 2015-2020 has had this problem), even ACC has it’s own problems that I could rant about.
Anyone who doesn’t want to pay attention to the road will not pay attention to the road - one way to defeat this “assistance” system is to just mount your phone above the dashboard so it’s in your line of sight. Then what? More cameras?
I know a nanny state and nanny-state adjacent entity/system resonates well with the average HN reader but this “driver assistance” system is anything but that.
The real fix is to filter out and keep irresponsible drivers away from operating vehicles, and to teach people how to drive well, and not adjusting to the lowest common denominator.
Anecdotally, in Slovenia to pass the drivers exam you need to pass the motorway portion of the exam, one of the requirements here is to enter the motorway at high enough speed - 100kph on the on-ramp before merging.
I’ve had friends not get their drivers licence because of this - they didn’t have the confidence to drive that fast. Some more hours of driving training and they’re now some of the best drivers I know.
Some people also just do not possess the necessary hand eye leg coordination, reaction times, information filtering, decision making facilities to operate a vehicle well.
Filtering this out is a net positive because ability to drive fast safely without any handholding is a sign of competency, allowing lower competence on the road increases danger.
There is a maximum threshold for speed also once adjusted for biological and genetic realities (see reaction times between your average person and formula 1 driver)
As a real life example of this in action: most fatal accidents on rural roads at 53%, 38% urban areas, 8-9% on motorways.
Point being speed doesn’t kill, incompetence does. Under incompetence I file having the attention span of a squirrel, keep that strata away from the roads, don’t enable them.