hydroacetylene
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User ID: 128
hydroacetylene
3d ago
The relevant standards under current Texas law are here: https://www.tmb.state.tx.us/dl/1C5CBA1C-052B-403F-A0D1-FAF22ADD05CB
They were updated to respond to cases like this. That seems like relevant information.
hydroacetylene
3d ago
Possible Nuclear Power Push in Texas
Today, the state government's commission on nuclear power expansion released a report(https://gov.texas.gov/uploads/files/press/TANRWG_Advanced_Nuclear_Report_v11.17.24c_.pdf) pushing for Texas to invest in nuclear energy. Not normally a huge deal, but the report was specifically requested by Greg Abbott and is released at the traditional time for Texas to set policy goals. There are seven policy recommendations:
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Create a state agency for coordinating, enacting, and funding the nuclear industry.
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Create a unified point of contact for permitting nuclear projects, to simplify bureaucratic requirements.
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Expand related programs in state run trade schools(and Texas public technical education is generally acknowledged as a thing the state does well at in general), with substantial industry input.
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Foster necessary manufacturing capabilities locally.
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Public outreach about the benefits of nuclear power.
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State fund to mitigate the risk of project cancellation.
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State fund to mitigate the capital costs of nuclear plant construction.
Now I legitimately find this all interesting, and I'm curious for motteizean feedback on the helpfulness/practicability of those seven items and the further considerations listed afterwards in the document. I'm particularly interested in if fancy economic structures are helpful.
As to why this is an even bigger deal 1) the document explicitly calls for requesting a delegation of federal authority by an act of congress and 2) the GOP is going to need something to run on after Trump. The 'red state model' is already the most likely and Abbott has presidential ambitions. Plus, the timeline is about right for it to become a national level issue in 2028. Particularly if the Trump administration doesn't have a particularly good four years, the GOP is just going to need to start running on copying what successful red states do on the national level, and Texas is the biggest wealthiest and most successful red state. Even partial success can have major implications.
hydroacetylene
3d ago
Trump isn't campaigning, conventionally. He's performing kingship. And people love their king.
When Trump visited the hurricane Helene devastation, he didn't say 'when I am elected my administration will release x gazillion dollars for flood relief'. No, his message was that he was already moving assets into place to help them. His strongest retainer was solving communications in the region and he had other vassals sending relief. Royals reassure their people.
Trump's pitch can be summed up as 'if only the tsar knew- put me on my rightful throne, because I'm the tsar who knows'. That's what the McDonald's shift was about, was empathizing with the commoners. He's got a claim on legitimacy from the 2020 stolen election that at the very least isn't any more spurious than descent from Amaterasu or Woden. And people know, intuitively on a pre-rational level, that the gods of the land are angry when the rightful king is usurped from his throne, and they know that the harvest will be poor and the weather bad and the kingdom's enemies stronger because of it. Joe Biden was not making a gaffe when he referred to the 'great MAGA king'.
Trump is a larger than life character playing a role in a storybook that's written in every human mind. There's the kingdom, torn asunder by turmoil(border chaos and inflation) and with foreign conflict(Gaza and Ukraine), ruled by usurpers(democrats) with the rightful prince(Trump), exiled and persecuted(felony convictions), supported by a handful of loyal barons(republican governors), and the viziers(Musk and RFK) who defect to him when it is clear that all is not well. And people listen to and believe in stories. Not economic analyses and statistics. If you want relentless popularity, treat math as a four letter word and imply a story.
hydroacetylene
3d ago
IME homeless people give better advice more cheaply and less judgmentally than therapists.
hydroacetylene
3d ago
Uh, isn't the evidence that therapy- or at least forms of therapy- is genuinely helpful to people with actual mental health issues- or at least some subset thereof, eg PTSD- pretty ironclad?
hydroacetylene
4d ago
Therapy is probably worse than talking to a parent/pastor/friend, because therapists are paid strangers who’ve been trained to see every problem primarily in terms of feelings.
hydroacetylene
4d ago
Why on earth would you talk to either therapists or AI for advice? The ordering of who to go to should be something like elders->good friends->randos->the denizens of your dreams->homeless crack addicts->unfeeling algorithms->anyone who charges for advice.
hydroacetylene
4d ago
The evolutionary drive to form families is the sexual drive. There is no other drive.
Yes there is. Adoption is common enough. Some people- not all- really enjoy raising children and want to do so desperately.
hydroacetylene
4d ago
I mean it’s entirely possible that a slightly larger trivially small fraction of the population in Oklahoma supports themselves non capitalistically; realistically all of his geographical examples are better explained as urban vs rural though, and the class neighborhood difference is probably false.
hydroacetylene
4d ago
I wonder if Gaetz is a maximally unacceptable figure put forth to make the still-controversial real appointment more palatable.
hydroacetylene
5d ago
I'm not sure that 'sexually conservative culture' is the key ingredient. AFAICT Africa generally has no taboo on male adultery and lots of prostitution; you'd expect a sex strike to work worse in a sexually conservative culture with those conditions vs a more liberated society, because presumably prostitutes aren't participating in it.
hydroacetylene
5d ago
I bonded with my own grandfather hunting, and fishing, and when school was out by helping him with various tool-related tasks he wasn't too old for. I legitimately don't know what non-redneck grandfathers do with their grandsons.
hydroacetylene
5d ago
Gaetz is gonna have some radicals in his staff that are much more competent, I’m pretty sure.
Try Into Great Silence about the Carthusians. The Island is another good monastic film.
hydroacetylene
5d ago
This is true, but Niger’s TFR is not driven by low IQ, it’s driven by being full of subsistence farmers. The highest TFR group in the world is the Amish, who are high-IQ subsistence farmers(ish, it’s complicated).
Within country IQ/fertility correlations mostly don’t point towards idiocracy.
hydroacetylene
5d ago
You have South Korea, Taiwan, Japan, the PRC, and some city states. Taiwan is arguably the best comparison for South Korea and it also has a TFR below 1, while the PRC will dip there very soon. The city states are South Korea tier but they’re also city states, I’ll give you that.
hydroacetylene
5d ago
It seems like arranged marriage is another big difference, yes? From my understanding arranged marriages still exist in Japan but are uncommon, while they’re very rare in South Korea and the sinosphere.
hydroacetylene
5d ago
On a global level this is exactly what's happening. The most talented and proficient are not reproducing.
At least in the US, this actually isn’t true- I made a top level comment about it a few months back. Blacks are the only group for whom the unsuccessful have generally higher fertility than the successful. For everyone else, higher income=higher fertility.
hydroacetylene
5d ago
What if the intended effect is not that progressive men continue whatever they were doing and get arbitrarily punished with sex withdrawal, nor that some random conservative men also get caught up and punished
I’m pretty sure that the intended effect is to inspire conservative women that they have safety in numbers and can leave their abusive husbands to become happy progressives.
That this belief is delusional and the husbands are probably not more abusive than the general population is of no matter; this is a small group of radicals.
hydroacetylene
5d ago
Stupid autocorrect. I meant Macao.
hydroacetylene
5d ago
They don't really expect their husbands to love or even like them, they do not expect sex to be enjoyable, and they are expected to be essentially maidservants for their husbands' families. (There is an entire genre of Korean horror movies about evil mother-in-laws.)
This seems common with pagan cultures. Like we knock on Islam for its(tbh, pretty repressive) treatment of women, but Islamic religion does tell husbands to take their wives' wants and needs into account and care for them. Scott just reviewed a book all about how early Christianity spread by telling women that it would make their husbands love them. And a pretty good chunk of the republican fertility advantage in the US comes from telling young women that socially conservative values will make men love them and treat them better(there's an entire genre of country music about loving on women who are babycrazy and have strong family values and how they're worth holding off on sex for and cutting back on drinking to reasonable levels and all that).
You don't have to deny women opportunities on a societal level to make their lives suck. Women are not the same as men, you can totally set up society to make it so they get the short end of the stick in hundreds of little ways.
hydroacetylene
5d ago
Stop worrying about people not having kids! Like, if you're reading this and that is something that you were worried about, I'm begging you, please, it'll be alright. Evolution works! It doesn't need your help! Organisms that are supposed to reproduce, will. Defective organisms that are unable to reproduce will weed themselves out, and rightfully so. It's almost a tautology. Humanity will not go extinct; but if it does, it'll be because it deserved to, and there won't have been anything you could have done as an individual to make a difference either way.
I'm not worried about humanity going extinct. I am worried about losing the ability to maintain an industrial society. Like there will be Amish in 200 years, but an all-subsistence-farmer society sucks. And yes, I am aware that the Amish are not pure subsistence farmers, but they depend on being able to trade with industrial society for inputs like solar panels to maintain the not-subsistence-agriculture parts of their society.
hydroacetylene
5d ago
The 4B movement will not change America because it will be embraced by an extremely small number of people who all come from subcultures with South Korea-tier fertility already.
It's also, as far as anyone can tell, not the cause of Korea's uniquely low fertility, because Korea's fertility is not uniquely low. It's on the low end of average for the region; Japan is actually an outlier up for developed East Asian fertility. Taiwan, the PRC, Monaco, Hong Kong, Singapore all have extremely low fertility and South Korea is on the lower end of average among that group. Not an outlier. The real question is 'what is Japan doing so right to have nearly double South Korea's fertility rate?' not 'why is South Korea's fertility so low?'.
And why developed East Asian countries have such low fertility rates is mostly known- they're highly urban places which generally have non-abrahamic religions which they barely practice in an ultra-competitive society in which childhood sucks. People don't like putting kids through hell, and South Korean and Chinese childhoods are hellacious. Strivers the world over generally have lower fertility rates, and everyone in these countries is a striver. Add incredibly dense urbanism and the lack of religious influence to raise fertility, it's not that hard to explain.
hydroacetylene
5d ago
Genuinely didn't know that, thought polio being eradicated in the western hemisphere+even slightly non-shithole parts of the eastern hemisphere was due to vaccines, like smallpox. Thanks for the context.
In practice I suspect countries which don't have to worry about cholera can skip polio shots, but I now understand why it's still on the vaccine schedule.
How many of them, for that matter, are uninsured patients with hospitals trying to wriggle out of an EMTALA violation.
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