I thought the joke was about the common mutation where your second toe is longer than your big toe.

Your explanation makes way more sense.

That’s a solid critique. We can math it out more.

So each 1.2GW reactor works out to be 17bil. Time to build still looks like 14 years, as both were started on the same time frame, and only one is fully online now, but we will give it a pass. You could argue it took 18 years, as that’s when the first proposals for the plants were formally submitted, but I only took into account financing/build time, so let’s sick with 14.

For 17bil in nuclear, you get 1.2GW production and 1.2GW “storage” for 24hrs.

So for 17bil in solar/battery, you get 4.8GW production, and 2.85gw storage for 4hrs. Having that huge storage in batteries is more flexible than nuclear, so you can provide that 2.85gw for 4 hr, or 1.425 for 8hrs, or 712MW for 16hrs. If we are kind to solar and say the sun is down for 12hrs out of every 24, that means the storage lines up with nuclear.

The solar also goes up much, much faster. I don’t think a 7.5x larger solar array will take 7.5x longer to build, as it’s mostly parallel action. I would expect maybe 6 years instead of 2.

So, worst case, instead of nuclear, for the same cost you can build solar+ battery farms that produces 4x the power, have the same steady baseline power as nuclear, that will take 1/2 as long to build.

The 2 most recent reactors built in the US, the Vogtle reactors 3 and 4 in Georgia, took 14 years at 34 billion dollars. They produce 2.4GW of power together.

For comparison, a 1 GW solar/battery plant opened in nevada this year. It took 2 years from funding to finished construction, and cost 2 billion dollars.

So an equivalent in solar power generation/storage vs nuclear is about 7x faster and 1/8th the cost than nuclear.

HVDC cables don’t have the same losses as the more common AC cables.

Indeed, but a lot of earthship building is just rough manual labor useing cheap or free materials. It doesn’t take specialized tools, although they will save you time.

Effort is something the poor have to supply much more of than the rich to reach a steady state, but with the above design its possible instead of out of reach.

For anyone with a work ethic but more time than money, an earthship is a stunningly efficient passive home designed in the 70s that uses rammed earth tires covered with adobe as walls, thermal mass to maintain heat, and giant windows to bring in light. The roof is designed to drain into water cisterns, and grey water (kitchen, bathroom sink) is used to water crops grown inside a beautiful inner garden. Its fully ready to be integrated with PV.

Here’s an example if you want to see one of the many that people have built. Here is some more analysis of the viability.

Paris Hilton is a sexual abuse survivor that built a public persona of an “airhead” to sell to people to build up her own wealth away from her brutal family. The “rich spoiled girl tries common people’s things” was an act.

Shes at this point working as an activist to shut these abusive organizations down.

The tooling is likely a lot better now, ironically because of oil and gas companies developing advanced drilling tools for fracking.

Some of those ex O&G employees are working on "geothermal anywhere" projects with that tooling, some of which are live now.

Vim doesn’t hate you. It loves who you could be.

“God put all of that there, and then made it work to ensure we had quality lead gasoline, pipes and paint to poison our brains with cause freedom.”

Desperation is a powerful motivator.

Sure. It was a single stall shower room, beautifully tiled in black and enclosed with a full glass door. It had two knobs, hot and cold on the wall that had the rain head. Turning the knobs turned all of the water on everywhere.

The rain head was on non stop, but you could adjust each wall jet like a round garden hose tip. Tighten to concentrate the spray, loosen to make it wider. Tighten all the way to turn off the jet. The wall jets could also be moved in a wide circular arc from their fixed point on the wall.

It was all mechanical, no smart features or anything. I left all the jets on because why the fuck not.

My strangest shower thought came from my strangest shower.

I worked for a small company years ago that paid for a “spa day” for its employees after completing a year long death march project. I had a mediocre massage, but afterwards I went to change I their shower room and decided to give the shower a go.

My god. It had a 3ft square rain shower head and no less than 12 separate side jets on the walls, all adjustable. Every inch of my body was hit simultaneously with hot, pressured water. It was like wearing a suit of hot water armor, head to toe. No matter how I moved, water. It was basically a standing bath. They must have had a city water main hooked up to that shower stall, as the pressure was just ridiculous.

I stood in there for nearly 30 minutes. It was wonderful, and also made me realize that this is how the ultra rich lived. This kind of luxury as an after thought, an expectation. For that moment of time, on someone else’s dime, I was in that world. That realization was almost as surreal as the physical experience itself.

Meme of wizard walking hand in hand with “fireball” while looking over his shoulder at “wish” passing by the other way.

Dude had both mountain view and waterfront property in Los Angeles.

Man should have just kicked out a wall panel and got himself a nice glass of lemonade.

Yup. It’s an old and indeed legitimate tweet.

This kills me, but its not as bad as the habit of new articles/print authors to switch between first and last names of the same person within a few sentences.

They will introduce Jeff Snoms, and then refer to them has “Jeff” and “Snoms” interchangeably for no discernable reason. It gets really maddening when they are doing it with 3 or 4 people, so suddenly the story has 2x as many characters involved.

You can go “all I one” pretty easily at this point. Something like the ecoflow delta pro fits your needs. It’s a whole house battery system with its own inverter. They have a grid tie smart panel that you can itergrate it with, the batteries are expandable by stacking them under one inverter, and each inverter can hook up 6kwH of solar. If you need more battery storage or solar panels, you can hook more stacks together.

Here’s a solid review by someone who installed one.

The drilling is limited to the making the channels for water flow. They are using maneuverable fracking drills and tools to get to the depths they need. They then inject water for use in the heating loop. This water should be used continuously, although it a unclear if it will need to be topped up.

Some of these geothermal startups are creating “natural” cracks via drilling to circulate water, while others are using the drilling to place fixed piping. The latter is hard, more expensive and likely more efficient. The company in the article is doing the former if Im not mistaken.

So German?