Most things get cheaper as you build more of them. However, those economies of scale never seem to kick in for nuclear as a) we don't build enough of them and b) the safety are requirements are always going up.
Sizewell C is being built by EDF, a French company. And it seems that every time they go over-budget they hold their hand out and the British Government coughs up some more. I read that it is likely to cost in the region of £40 billion.
Are you thinking of Hinkley Point C? My understanding was that there has been no additional funding provided. The project is way over budget, but it is EDF and its owner (the French taxpayer) who appear to be on the hook.
The project is funded by a pre agreed electricity price for the plant once it is operational, and private investment.
It is however likely to impact negotiations for Sizewell C which has not yet been greenlit, as funding terms amenable to the U.K. government and EDF have not been reached. EDF want terms that would cause cost overruns to be born by energy consumers, to avoid a repeat of Hinkley Point.
France built a bunch of them, they're still expensive and hard projects. People talk about economies of scales but there are only so many power plants you need to build in the world.
I'm sure there are strategies that could, at the very least, make things predictable. I think the biggest trouble with huge projects isn't so much the cost as it is the uncertainty.
I remember being able to have the live football scores over the top of any TV show. Most of the Ceefax/Teletext page would be 'transparent' with only a small box on the bottom of the screen showing the live updates.
Is it possible to do the same kind of thing with any smart TVs?
Modern smart TVs could hypothetically overlay virtually anything, however, you would not be able to overlay on to another “app” or channel as it opens cans of worms. For example, Roku had a lot of fraud from channels which showed one thing to the viewer while downloading ads in the background to persuade the backend the ads had been seen.
Back in the digital satellite era there was a transition where it was possible for the interactive content from one channel to be overlaid on the video of another as long as both were on the same satellite and underlying channel (a bit like “frequency” but not always 1:1). This is because digital TV multiplexes multiple videos for different user visible channels into a single stream with their interactive gunk, and the gunk can switch video streams. The fun part was this bandwidth is auctioned, and because every shady gambling company (half of cyprus it seems) wanted to be overlaid on sports the most expensive bandwidth was any spare around the sports channels. Not sure anyone ever made use of this in the end though.
I was under the impression that in UK law at least, (and obviously not in this case) the trustees of a non-profit would be bound to work in the best interests of that non-profit. And so allowing an asset like this to somehow slip out of their control would be the sort of negligence that would land you in very hot water. I'd be interested to know how this isn't the case here.
I think it is the case here, and I hope Elon Musk persists in his lawsuits about this. As a large donor to the nonprofit in its early days he’s one of the people with the strongest standing to sue / strongest claim for damages.
Obviously Elon is mostly doing this suit as a way to benefit Grok AI but honestly I don’t mind that; competitors are supposed to keep each other in check, and this is a good and proper way for companies to provide checks & balances to each others’ power and it’s one reason why monopolies are bad is the absence of competitor-enforced accountability.
> somehow slip out of their control would be the sort of negligence that would land you in very hot water.
> how this isn't the case here.
Its not the case because they are doing the opposite of what you are suggesting. They are increasing the value of the asset that they own.
Sure, the asset itself is being diluted, but the individual parts that it owns are more valuable.
It is perfectly reasonable for a non profit to prefer to own 30% of a 100 billion dollar asset, lets say, compared to 100% of a 10 billion dollar asset.
Isn't the goal of a non-profit by its very definition... not profit?
The goal of the openAI non-profit is something something control the development of AI for the good of all humanity, then it seems that they explicitly shouldn't care about making $20 billion, and explicitly should care about maintaining control of openAI.
If you listen to their rhetoric, $20 billion is peanuts compared to the lightcone and the kardashev scale and whatever else.
> Isn't the goal of a non-profit by its very definition... not profit?
Yes, and if you have a bunch more money then you can do more non profit activities that help the world.
Getting as much money as possible, so that the money can be used for your great cause, is the best way to effectively run a non profit.
> then it seems that they explicitly shouldn't care about making $20 billion
Of course they should, because that 20 billion dollars can be used for its goal more effectively than having control over a lower value asset.
> compared to the lightcone and the kardashev scale and whatever else.
You are pre-supposing that openAI's model itself is some magic, infinitely valuable asset already.
Its not. If it were, then it would already be worth 10 trillion dollars. But its not worth that.
Therefore the money is worth more than the asset. There are lots of other AI groups around here. OpenAI is just one of them, and they are not infinitely valuable.
While I'm sure this argument makes sense in some utilitarian world-model or another, it is definitively _not_ one that has been accepted by the courts, largely because both federal and state governments have explicitly legislated against nonprofits doing "general moneymaking" as part of their mission. We already have legal vehicles for that, they're called for-profit companies, they pay tax, and donations to them are not tax deductible.
> Getting as much money as possible, so that the money can be used for your great cause, is the best way to effectively run a non profit.
In anywhere but Silicon Valley is a great way to violate Unrelated Business Income limits and get your charitable status revoked. It is not sufficient that a non-profits "goals" be charitable, their day-to-day activities must be as well, and it's not acceptable to put off those activities until some future date when you'll "make up" for all the regular for-profit work.
Good thing this wouldn't be that. Instead, it would be about promoting the cause.
And yes, non profits are allowed to own assets and maximize the value of those assets.
Of course their mission also matters and they should push towards that. But throwing away billions and billions of dollars for nothing isn't the way to do that.
> their day-to-day activities must be as well
Yes.... and they should also do that.
That has absolutely nothing to do with refusing to sabotage your non profit by throwing away a bunch of money for no reason though.
Of course the non profit should work towards their goal in their day to day activities.
> until some future date
Who said anything about waiting for a future date? Of course their current actions should push towards their goal.
That still has nothing to do with refusing to set money on fire for no reason though.
If anything, I think that the people who were attempting to set their valuable assets on fire and sabotage the non-profit are the ones who should be prosecuted by the legal system to the fullest extend legally allowed for going against the mission and intentionally engaging in charity fraud.
At one point, some of those board members said something about how that they were seriously considering shutting the whole thing down. I would absolutely consider that to be extremely illegal charity fraud, deserving of jail time if they did that.
I understand it more as "it turns out composting tons of organic material makes the soil more fertile"
Which is far from a breaking news. I'm just curious about how composting this much agrumes didn't unbalance the soil's pH, but that they don't mention it at all in the article.
It sounds like upsetting the ph balance was a key reason it worked so well. The article mentioned that displacing the invasive grass was part of the reason it worked so well.
Eh, sorta. Biodynamic farming in the form promoted by Rudolf Steiner is kinda semi-mystical and involves astrology, lunar phases and manipulating the 'cosmic forces of the soil' by doing things like burying quartz inside a cow horn.
But biodynamic farming does also emphasise the kind of cohesive view of your crops as an interacting system that you'd find in modern permaculture. It's just that biodynamic implies a bunch of other spirituality stuff that you wouldn't normally consider part of permaculture.
Heh. Sounds like something that works by accident.
In that vein, I'm reminded of the old tradition of consulting oracles to make decisions when hunting or before a battle. If we see an even number of crows we do this, else we do that, things like that. The reason this worked was because the oracle was acting as a random number generator, and being unpredictable can have advantages in such situations (a lesson from game theory).
Well, not entirely by accident - things like companion planting were very much observable as advantageous for pest control or nutrient efficiency. Think like how carrots and garlic both like being next to radishes, and while carrots thrive with being near peas, garlic suffers. It's quite actionable stuff whether you're deciding the layout and planting sequence of a small kitchen garden or a large plot of land.
I am unsure exactly how much of the biology was understood at the time, but it also wasn't entirely drawn out of thin air. A lot of it was just drawing a bunch of known good practices together as a cohesive design philosophy for how to run a farm.
Spirituality stuff was very in vogue at the time, so it's hard to say if it would have even gotten popular without the cosmic forces type stuff. Even if it was a dubious contribution to the actual mechanics :)
"If you're not driving by the age of thirty, you've failed in life" was a quote I believe was attributed to Thatcher. She did some great stuff, but I'm not sure I agree with that one.
You might want to re-read what I've wrote. You've entirely misconstrued it ... (and I'm in the 'pull down the Thatcher statues and dump them in the ocean' brigade).
One rather fabulous example I encountered had speakers rigged up to the wallboard that displayed pipeline info, and when someone broke the build, a clip of "Father Jack" from Father Ted profusely swearing was broadcast out across the dev room.
Gnosticism has the pattern that there is a demiurge that created this world as a prison. This is the capitalist economy. Gnosticism says that those initiated into secret knowledge will become of aware of the real nature of the world and seek to wake everyone else up. This is the idea of the revolution fixing all problems and bringing about the great communist utopia by transferring all capital ownership to the state. Marx doesn't say a whole lot about how the Utopia would actually operate, those were details Lenin, Stalin and Trotsky were figuring out in Vienna.
Hermeticism, specifically the emerald tablet, says that we can make things become believable by just willing them with our minds. Those who believe the things should be treated preferentially, and those who don't should be persecuted because they stand in the way of the implementation of those things. This applies to Marx's beliefs in the labor theory of value among other totally non-empirically backed beliefs being treated as ideological indisputable truth.
The credit for the labour theory of value goes to Adam Smith, specifically the Wealth of Nations. Whether it was true or not is a separate question, but it was based on empirical data available at the time. Marx is usually credited with it because he altered it, and saw a flaw in Adam Smith's version. The idea that "what something costs is what people are willing to pay for it" was something Adam Smith was familiar with and addressed in the Wealth of Nations.
> Those who believe the things should be treated preferentially, and those who don't should be persecuted because they stand in the way of the implementation of those things.
The Gnostics and followers of Hermes were one of the most hounded and persecuted groups throughout history. The Cathars were wiped out, and Giordano Bruno, an early proponent of the Copernican model of the solar system was burnt at the stake by the inquisition. It seems to be the other way around.
> Hermeticism, specifically the emerald tablet, says that we can make things become believable by just willing them with our minds.
I don't think this is correct, but I can't prove a negative.
You're talking about genocide and religious discrimination.
Wikipedia: Raphael Lemkin, who coined the word "genocide" in the 20th century,[110] referred to the Albigensian Crusade as "one of the most conclusive cases of genocide in religious history".[111]
I thought the demiurge was simply ignorant not malicious. It found itself in a chaotic world and tried to make sense of it. In doing so it mistook itself for a god. That said I'm not an expert in gnosticism.
Whether the truth is found in Sophia or quintessence, I think transcendent claims are the real problem. This applies to both the orthodox traditions in the west as well as the esoteric traditions.
Gnosticism is not a term that can be used to define a uniform metaphysical system. There are a variety of metaphysical schools that are bundled together in the modern usage. For example, in what German scholars of early 20th century came to call "Iranian Gnosticism" (in reference to Manichaeism [1]) it is in fact the Father of Light that "sacrifices his sons" as 'food for daemons' so that the battle between Light and Darkness is taken to 'their turf'.
> Capitalism
Interestingly enough, another Iranian gnostic school derivative of Zoroastrianism - that of Mazdak [2] - shared everything, including "women".
In general, one should be careful to be quite specific as to what metaphysical school of thought they are referencing when using the currently ambiguous term "Gnosticism".
~
Mani's metaphysical vision is rather wild. I was just reading up on it the other day - apparently he even resorted to diagrams to make things clear.
One of the criticisms of Gnostisicm, even going back to the ancient Greeks is it never makes positive assertions about what the new world will be like. It's only negative saying things like "all this is illusion," "all this is bad." It never puts up its own program for criticism. So if you say anything about Gnosticism, the Gnostic can just respond, our faith isn't that, it's better than that. However, they never tell you what it actually is so it can be objectively criticized.
Literally yes - generational farms are expected to go out of business when the head of the family dies as a result, and have to sell up to massive farm businesses.
Excluding any type of income from taxation means every other type of income needs to be taxed at a higher rate, all to protect whatever is being carved out. Thus we tax income from investments, salaries, and yes inheritance.
Inheritance tax has positive externalities as inherited wealth discourages people from being productive members of society. Meanwhile taxing salaries discourages work, and taxing investments discourages savings.
That reductionist analysis treats people as individualised economic drones. What do you mean by "productive" - earning a salary? Contributing to civic society? People don't just do nothing if they have means.
Inheritance tax damages filial peity and encourages the disintegration of society.
A hobo is less damaging than an unproductive trust fund kid. Many people contribute nothing which directly disintegrates society no encouragement required.
If a moderately larger inheritance seems to impact filial piety then it didn’t exist in the first place.
You seem to be very cynical about the input of people with money. This "unproductive trust fund kid" seems to be a sort of caricature which is easy to rely on because it evokes the "undeserving rich".
In reality, inherited wealth leads to the security which can result in great feats in music, the arts, new business, and the growth of civil society.
And encouraging generations to rely on one another directly, rather than via a welfare state, ensures that people take care of each other properly.
The alternative is the sort of degenerate individualism which has so severely weakened western society.
It might occasionally have positive outcomes but this is rare enough I’ve never seen it. I have seen the far more likely destruction personally and repeatedly. You may assume there are close family bonds with such situations, but for someone who’s never worked child rearing is an unpleasant shift, time for nanny’s etc.
People picture retirement just early, but there’s many social structures built to support people leaving the workforce in their 60’s. A 15 year old who knows they will never need to work is set adrift, why exactly go to college or even get good grades in high school? In their 20’s it’s hard to maintain relationships with people who are unavailable most of the time and can’t suddenly travel on a whim. Spending time with others set adrift can be fine, but tends to result in extremes like BASE jumping, drugs, etc. Even hobbies like general aviation can get surprisingly deadly when you have extreme amounts of free time for decades.
Honestly, the negative impact on the individual is seriously underappreciated. It’s bad enough I am not handing personal wealth to family and advise everyone else to do the same.
PS: A possible exception is matching income. 1$ of inheritance per 1$ earned seems like it would mostly solve these issues, but I don’t have enough examples to know if it actually works and I am not willing to experiment on family members.
> "Inheritance tax shouldn't be a thing in the first place."
The problem with entrenched intergenerational wealth is you eventually end up with a feudalistic society, with a small population of extremely wealthy families controlling all the capital but essentially just becoming rent-seekers, with no incentive or need to innovate in order to maintain their wealth (on the contrary, they will seek to suppress innovation and disruption in order to maintain the status quo). In the long run this leads to violent revolution or other forms of societal collapse.
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