Do you just burn piles of money for fun? Is that your hobby?

Who gives a crap what the maximal power output per land area is? It’s utterly irrelevant.

I don’t want to be a statue!

The United States could meet its entire electricity demand just by putting solar panels on the land we currently waste growing corn ethanol.

The land argument is beyond grasping at straws. The last refuge of the incompetent.

People have been trying to do small scale fission for decades. They always slam headfirst into the square cubed law and the fact that fission plants were built giant for a damn good reason. Fission is so cost inefficient that the only remote hope you can have of making it profitable is if you build giant reactors and hope for big economies of scale. The hope of building small reactors on assembly lines has proven to be a pipe dream. Many have tried it, and it has failed again and again.

It is literally impossible to operate a fission plant without government subsidies. Private insurers won’t touch the things, as the potential damage they can do in a worst case scenario is something only the budgets of nation states can absorb. Nuclear plants always rely on national insurance schemes to make them viable.

Not among the general population, but among internet nerd culture, nuclear has a certain level of support purely for cultural reasons. There’s a culture of people on the internet who like nuclear primarily as a cultural shibboleth. If you can convince yourself that the only reason nuclear hasn’t taken off is due to unreasonable fear and technical illiteracy, then supporting nuclear is extremely self-affirming. Supporting nuclear is a way of saying to yourself and others “I am a rational and scientific person. I know the facts about nuclear. I know the fears of its safety are overblown. I’m smart and intelligent while the common rubes are scientifically illiterate fools.”

The truth is that while groups like Greenpeace exist, nuclear has failed largely because it’s just too damn expensive. But fission fanboys never talk about the cost. They just wax endlessly about how safe nuclear is, or repost old canards about how coal releases more radiation than nuclear, or the per-watt death figures. Etc. Endless repetition of factually correct but utterly irrelevant information.

A lot of people support nuclear for largely cultural reasons.

There will be diversity in the future grid, but that diversity will be in the forms of energy storage used. I think the grid of the future is almost entirely solar but with different energy storage systems optimized for different time scales. For storage on the order of seconds, you use fly wheels to replace the spinning mass once provided by gas turbines. For daily swings, vast warehouses full of old electric car batteries work well. For longer term storage, you can use chemical energy storage or flow batteries. Think making vast tanks of ammonia or methane. You use excess electricity in the summer, store it as chemical energy in vast tank farms, and then burn it or run it through a fuel cell in the winter.

Although, for seasonal variation, the most practical solution might be just to spam solar panels. It just depends on the price ratio of solar panel cost to storage cost. You could have a grid that just had so much solar deployed that it is able to cover energy demand even on cloudy winter days. You just flat out build that many panels. Maybe then in the summertime you’re capable of producing 10x your normal power needs.

Seems wasteful, but this would just encourage a lot of very energy-intensive industries to become more seasonal. We have a farming season, why not an steal smelting season? Why not an AI model training season? Maybe for datacenters, the big runs are done during the summer when power is dirt cheap. Then the companies spend the winter planning next year’s runs, etc. Or the extra power could be used to make synthetic fuels from CO2 pulled from the air. Maybe we never figure out how to make batteries good enough to power a trans-oceanic jumbo jet. But maybe we don’t have to. You offer dirt cheap energy on a seasonal basis, and people will find uses for it eventually.

I propose we use antimatter energy storage instead. No risk of it catching fire if you use anti-hydrogen!

Most people don’t. Having bitcoin doesn’t mean you have to be your own bank. Just that you have that option if and when the need arises. It’s not one extreme (be your own bank) or the other (reject bitcoin entirely).

Then there’s no god damn point. Bitcoin at a Bitcoin bank is just a regular bank with an incredibly, comically inefficient transaction tracking system.

Well, what do you do if someone breaks into your house and threatens to shoot you if you don’t hand over your cash, credit cards, and valuable possessions?

Cash and possessions are one thing, but that’s not how most people keep their real financial assets. A thief can steal my credit card all they want. They’re not getting much use out of it.

There is literally no better option in terms of holding and protecting your own wealth.

Crypto is the glass cannon of financial security. Yes, you optimize for a single variable…at the cost of everything else.

Crypto is good at resisting computer-based hacking and money printing, but it’s far worse than the conventional banking systems at social hacking, physical coercion, or accidental loss.

Basically, nerds love to latch onto crypto because they view it from its interesting technical properties. But they ignore the real risks to money. Banks aren’t being hacked left and right to have their funds drained. But social engineering drains accounts every day. The crypto nerds are more comfortable with computers than with people, so they focus on the computer-centered threats than the human ones.

Why would we assume a troll farm is even a physical thing you can bomb? I imagine 99% of those are work-from-home jobs that people just log into.

But femboys aren’t girls. That’s literally their entire thing.

Hogwash. You forgot the other half of the equation. We don’t have as many children to support. Notice how people obsessed over birth rate always focus on the retiree:worker ratio rather than the dependent:worker ratio? The problem disappears once you realize we can simply take money that we were spending on childcare and shift it to eldercare.