The Russian impulse to centralize makes Dead Hand a certainty.

"In that case, someone other than the pencil ought to do that job, don't you agree?"

Good. Social media addiction rates are five to ten times those of gambling, and yet we protect those under 18 from accessing those. There is also a strong correlation between heavy social media use and suicidal ideation.

Just FYI, big tech opposes this. Meta is flooding European digital advertising with "Instagram for teenagers", posturing that parents can implement parental controls on who teens can communicate with, as if that were the issue we're trying to fix.

It's fair to point out that distribution has its own dilemmas, as does storing excess energy. But those are secondary in my view. As far as public policy goes, given that nuclear energy are big public expenditure endeavors, in my view the economics need to make sense to the public to justify nuclear power generation.

Another factor is, of course, time. Is it worth investing in nuclear if the objective is to cut GHGs by X year, when we know a nuclear plant would take Y years to come online?

One big unknown is the total amount of electricity consumed. If the assumption is a relative decline or stable amount of global demand in the future, then nuclear makes limited sense, whereas a spike in demand, possibly caused by unmitigated AI energy demand, could warrant recalculating the cost-effectiveness of nuclear energy.

How so? Shouldn't our societies aim to produce the most cost-beneficial energy? Also, my opinion is based on a range of economic indicators, including Australia's CSIRO's calculations for nuclear energy prices in kWh vs other renewable prices per kWh. I am of course excluding fossil fuels (obviously nuclear energy beats that with respect to GHGs, but drops the ball when matched against scalable renewables like solar and wind).

Nuclear energy is expensive to generate compared to its green competitors. Therefore, it's a waste of time and money to focus on it at a time when renewable energy is currently cheaper to produce, knowing that the gap between nuclear and energy is projected to widen even more.

Even the original quote isn't from Twain. He misattributed it to British PM Disraeli, but the saying originated after Disraeli's death.

A bit ironic given the quote.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lies,_damned_lies,_and_statistics

https://quoteinvestigator.com/2022/06/22/lies-statistics/

Toy Story 5 is on track to earn $1.2B theatrically worldwide compared to $1B for Toy Story 4. Not sure what downward trend you're talking about, given that movie theatres never fully recovered from the streaming rise + pandemic double whammy.