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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   30730 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 3, 2023

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I am honestly surprised that you have read his work at all if those are the conclusions you drew from it. His articles about Trump were some of his most popular and he wrote an entire book on the subject

I only read a couple of his articles, the ones where he talks about net returns from energy and explains his ideology and predictions. It reads to me more like he's anti-elite than pro-Trump.

He did not predict permanent stagnation at all - and in fact he even points out that the ragged curve of decline will include periods of recovery and prosperity as society is forced to reduce energy expenditures.

I meant permanent stagnation in the end - he said we'd never be going to space. A wavy line heading down, then stagnation.

Show me the functioning nuclear power plant that generates energy in a sustainably profitable way (this includes taking waste handling into account)

Firstly, waste is not even a small problem. There's so little of it that it can just be put in boxes, taken to a warehouse in a desert and left there, perhaps with some guards. It's only the very stupid people in the US government who insist on ridiculous nonsense like spending billions inspecting the geology of Cheyenne mountain to establish whether any waste will leak out over 10,000 years (unironically having legal cases about whether 10,000 years was too short a time span), promising to build a permanent waste dump and then not doing it for decades. In the US today, waste is just stored in boxes next to the nuclear plants because there's so little. In a smarter world, it'd be taken to breeder reactors to be used for fuel, yet nobody bothered to develop that technology because uranium is too cheap.

Anyway, the functioning power plants that generate energy in a sustainably profitable way! See link, see the chart of nuclear power plant construction costs by country: https://rootsofprogress.org/devanney-on-the-nuclear-flop

The nuclear power plants that South Korea has just built for example, cost about $2000 per kilowatt (USD 2010) in capacity. That is to say they'll then produce energy basically for free, because contra Greer, uranium is very cheap because of its insane energy density. 80% of the cost of nuclear energy is building the reactor, nobody even bothered developing breeders because there's no shortage of uranium.

Nuclear power plants in the US were cheap and profitable to produce, then Three Mile Island happened (a massive nothingburger where nobody was hurt, compared to the hundreds of thousands who die from air pollution annually) and the US decided 'let's make it really hard to build nuclear power plants, let's make it take 5-10 years longer, let's refuse to give a single permission for about 30 years so we choke our nuclear industry to death'. See the graph here: https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Overnight-Construction-Cost-and-Construction-Duration-of-US-Nuclear-Reactors-Color_fig6_292964046

Also, consider this graph: https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Historical-Cost-Experience-Curve-of-Coal-Power-compared-with-Cost-Experience-Curves-of_fig12_292964046

Nuclear power is roughly comparable to coal power in the cost of plants (slightly more expensive), when it's not grossly mismanaged. But the cost of a nuclear plant contributes much more to the cost of the electricity than with coal. Coal needs trainloads of fuel after all. Nuclear power is cheap as long as the reactors don't cost 3x more than they should because govt regulators invent insane nonsense to pump up those costs:

Another example was the acceptance in 1972 of the Double-Ended-Guillotine-Break of the primary loop piping as a credible failure. In this scenario, a section of the piping instantaneously disappears. Steel cannot fail in this manner. As usual Ted Rockwell put it best, “We can’t simulate instantaneous double ended breaks because things don’t break that way.” Designing to handle this impossible casualty imposed very severe requirements on pipe whip restraints, spray shields, sizing of Emergency Core Cooling Systems, emergency diesel start up times, etc., requirements so severe that it pushed the designers into using developmental, unrobust technology. A far more reliable approach is Leak Before Break by which the designer ensures that a stable crack will penetrate the piping before larger scale failure.

A forklift at the Idaho National Engineering Laboratory moved a small spent fuel cask from the storage pool to the hot cell. The cask had not been properly drained and some pool water was dribbled onto the blacktop along the way. Despite the fact that some characters had taken a midnight swim in such a pool in the days when I used to visit there and were none the worse for it, storage pool water is defined as a hazardous contaminant. It was deemed necessary therefore to dig up the entire path of the forklift, creating a trench two feet wide by a half mile long that was dubbed Toomer’s Creek, after the unfortunate worker whose job it was to ensure that the cask was fully drained. The Bannock Paving Company was hired to repave the entire road. Bannock used slag from the local phosphate plants as aggregate in the blacktop, which had proved to be highly satisfactory in many of the roads in the Pocatello, Idaho area. After the job was complete, it was learned that the aggregate was naturally high in thorium, and was more radioactive that the material that had been dug up, marked with the dreaded radiation symbol, and hauled away for expensive, long-term burial.

This is the kind of nonsense that the US government inflicts on the nuclear industry, along with refusing to grant permits for any new plants after Three Mile Island for decades. Meanwhile in Korea they waited ages before shooting themselves in the foot with the renewables meme and built a fair few cheap nuclear plants.

Decommissioning isn't a major problem either. It's because of an irrational phobia of radiation that people even raise this as a problem. A few thousand tonnes of mildly radioactive steel, who cares? That's about 200 truck loads, peanuts in the grand scheme of things. We could put it in another warehouse in a desert. Civilizations produce waste, the planet is big, mining anything creates huge amounts of toxic, often radioactive, waste. We know how to deal with waste.

Furthermore, the onus is on Greer to explain why nuclear power is inherently unprofitable, (and not merely unprofitable but incapable of sustaining technological civilization) he doesn't even provide a single statistic, just cites a first-in-its-class cargo ship. Revolutionary, innovative tech is often uneconomical.

Oh, and remember that if you are trying to make a proposal for a future plant you can't just instantly vaporise the existing US government and replace them with a squad of enlightened technocrats - if you want to get rid of that regulation you have to explain how you're going to do that from within the confines of the current political system, and all the graft and corruption that entails.

I can't vaporize the US government but some combination of the PLA and the American people can and will. It's not competitive to have leaders who pursue bad economic/energy policy. The power of competition automatically rewards the wise and punishes the stupid. People are going to realize that renewables don't work, that we can't just build tens of thousands of kilometres more transmission cables, produce more copper than we've produced in the whole of human history in 30 years... People will go back to tech that actually works, coal, gas, oil and nuclear. We can do some more unconventional exploration and unleash the power of the market, end the sabotage campaign. In my country, nuclear power plants are actually illegal! The idiots in government will change their tune very quickly if they face a lynch mob and efficient, energy-rich foreign war machines.

People are going to realize that renewables don't work, that we can't just build tens of thousands of kilometres more transmission cables, produce more copper than we've produced in the whole of human history in 30 years…

Oh no, not you too with the scary extrapolations. It certainly looks like in the last 30 years we have produced more copper than in the whole of human history, or close to it. (and every thirty years before that too: eyeballing it: 400 million tonnes for 1990-2020, 180 for 1960-1990 , 80 for 1930-1960 and then it decreases at the same pace) .

Remember when we had to scrap our plans to put high capacity telephone/internet wires into every home because we ran out of copper, which previously did the job? Not like we switched to fiber optics, which is better in every way.

When will you learn? We’re not going to run out of anything we need.

I'm sympathetic in general to anti-resource-scarcity arguments, since these resources are fungible in the end. But the whole point of markets is to use cheap resources, not expensive ones. Electric cars, renewable energy and cables all use huge amounts of copper. It makes more sense to use copper where it's most useful and other materials elsewhere. Likewise with batteries. It's possible in principle to dig up a lot more lithium but it is expensive to do so, an uneconomical use of resources. Just build lots of baseload power, then we won't need batteries!

On the broad scale of civilizations, we don't run out of resources because we move from one resource to another, adapting dynamically rather than dogmatically pursuing a chosen energy source. We can locally run out of certain resources and suffer for it if there are manipulations to the market or sudden disruptions. There's not that much coal left in the UK but it's OK because there's North Sea Gas and eventually fracking, plus imports, plus nuclear energy. And once all the uranium is gone we move on to fusion (or well before, depending on prices). Whereas if we just demanded coal production keep rising forever, then there would be problems. Likewise with copper.

Sure. Do you acknowledge my point about the last 30 years of production versus the entirety of the past though? Shows that in resource matters, even informed anti-peakists like you have wrong instincts about how this all really works. It's amazing, really. And it has nothing to do with day-to-day experiences like emptying a bottle, the heuristics are useless .

Sure, those production statistics were really impressive!

I only read a couple of his articles, the ones where he talks about net returns from energy and explains his ideology and predictions. It reads to me more like he's anti-elite than pro-Trump.

Then you did not read enough of his work to form a worthwhile opinion of it. He has been writing essays for the internet since 2006 - and a lot of his work on peak oil and alternative energy sources is in his old, archived blog which he is now selling (you can read it for free in various archive places, but my old links no longer work).

I meant permanent stagnation in the end - he said we'd never be going to space. A wavy line heading down, then stagnation.

This is emphatically not what he has said or predicted, apart from the "never going to space" part. The wavy line heading down is modern western industrial civilisation - eventually it will die and another civilisation will take its place, with its own birth, growth, peak and decline. This process will continue and continue for an awfully long time, but eventually the last human will be born and die. There's no stagnation here - just a continuation of the course of history. Ever heard of the Bronze Age collapse?

Furthermore, the onus is on Greer to explain why nuclear power is inherently unprofitable, (and not merely unprofitable but incapable of sustaining technological civilization) he doesn't even provide a single statistic, just cites a first-in-its-class cargo ship. Revolutionary, innovative tech is often uneconomical.

He has been writing on this subject for close to two decades now, and has had the nuclear energy debate several times. His demand for advocates of nuclear remains the same: demonstrate a nuclear power system that has an EROEI capable of sustaining modern civilisation (i.e. it has to at the very least come close to matching petroleum). "Uneconomical" is actually a death sentence when it comes to energy production in this context.

The assumption all along was that petroleum would eventually run short and have to be replaced by something else, leading to a third technic era. By 1950 nearly everyone assumed that what would replace it was nuclear power. You have to read books from that time to get a sense of just how inevitable the coming nuclear era was thought to be. Even avant-garde ecological thinkers treated nuclear power as the next inevitable thing. Pick up any of the works of Paolo Soleri, Frank Lloyd Wright’s most innovative student, who imagined humanity settling in gigantic city-sized buildings called arcologies so that the natural world could be allowed to thrive elsewhere. Each of his arcologies was supposed to be powered by its own nuclear power plant.

That, in turn, was where the dream ran off the rails, because it turned out that nuclear power doesn’t pay for itself. It’s not economically viable, because its net energy is so low. Thus it wasn’t Chernobyl or Fukushima Daiichi that brought the nuclear dream to a grinding halt, it was a long series of financial disasters suffered by utilities that got suckered into the nuclear hoopla, above all the bankruptcy of the Washington Public Power Supply System (WPPSS, unfondly remembered as “Whoops!” by the many thousands who lost money on it).

That caught nearly everybody by surprise, because net energy analysis wasn’t something you saw even in the energy industry—fossil fuels had so much net energy that nobody had to worry about it, and that led to the delusion that net energy didn’t matter more generally. Frantic attempts to evade the consequences followed. Those of my readers who’ve been following energy news long enough will remember any number of attempts to insist that this or that brand new nuclear technology would surely fulfill the fantasies heaped onto Our Friend The Atom. None of them worked, because the underlying problem of inadequate net energy is not being addressed. It can’t be addressed, because it’s hardwired into the laws of physics.

If you're correct, why hasn't a single nation on Earth produced the kind of nuclear power grid you're talking about? Nuclear power makes a lot of sense for some contexts (does a great job powering military submarines) but I have not seen a single example of nuclear power being used or able to support the kind of energy demands required of a modern industrial society. Nuclear power does not provide the EROEI to sustain modern society - and the kind of nuclear power pipedream you've been describing has been just a few years away in the future for longer than I have been alive. I very much hope and wish that I am wrong in this case and too-cheap-to-meter power is just around the corner, but I just haven't been convinced and neither has JMG.

That said, while I'm more than happy to continue this discussion, I'd prefer it if you went and read more of his work. I enjoy having substantial and weighty discussions on contentious topics like this, but JMG is a better writer than I am and more than capable of explaining himself. You're not getting any value at all from simply having me go "No, that's not what he believes, see this essay.".

This is emphatically not what he has said or predicted, apart from the "never going to space" part. The wavy line heading down is modern western industrial civilisation - eventually it will die and another civilisation will take its place, with its own birth, growth, peak and decline.

But if we're not heading to space, then we must be stuck with pre-industrial tech, right? Notwithstanding individual civilizations rising and falling, we'd be stuck at pre-industrial technology forever, in his model.

Nuclear power makes a lot of sense for some contexts (does a great job powering military submarines) but I have not seen a single example of nuclear power being used or able to support the kind of energy demands required of a modern industrial society.

If you're correct, why hasn't a single nation on Earth produced the kind of nuclear power grid you're talking about?

France? Their grid primarily runs off nuclear power. French electricity is quite cheap by European standards and remember that they export a fair bit, so their prices are pushed up: https://www.statista.com/statistics/263492/electricity-prices-in-selected-countries/

it was a long series of financial disasters suffered by utilities that got suckered into the nuclear hoopla

The financial disasters were manufactured by the US government that sabotaged nuclear industry, deliberately raising costs. After 1978, the US had plants redesigned while they were being constructed, introduced all kinds of regulatory nonsense, having workers strip out parts and replace them... South Korea has been producing cheap nuclear plants in the last decade. China is doing it. India is doing it. It's not hard, it's just that an increasing number of countries are allergic to doing these things correctly. Nuclear energy is like high speed rail. It is completely possible and perfectly practical if you do it right (France, Japan, China). It is very expensive if you do it wrong (UK, California). It's not 'a few years today' it's being done, it has been done 40 years ago by the French.

Take the Washington Power Company. Did it fail in the 1960s? The early 1970s? No, it failed in the early 1980s just after the US decided to start wrecking the nuclear industry. Greer doesn't explain why the cost of US nuclear power plants suddenly spikes after 1978, why construction times ballooned 5-10 years then specifically (and why this EROEI issue apparently doesn't apply to South Korea, China or India). The laws of physics apply across the entire universe. The woes of nuclear energy are based in human stupidity, not physics.

Yes, nuclear energy needs subsidies. But not for the reasons Greer would have us believe but because it's a big long-term investment that pays off slowly, over decades. Once the plant is built, it can run for fifty years or more at very low fuel costs and very high capacity factor. There's an obvious role for government in subsidizing long-term investments like education, sanitation and so on. Nuclear power is similar. Markets don't like investments that governments might regulate into oblivion or suddenly cancel midway through construction, either.

The reason I don't like Greer is because he doesn't provide a single shred of evidence to back up his arguments and prove causal links. I've spent 10 minutes looking for a more detailed analysis from him about nuclear power than a few unreferenced paragraphs. It isn't there. I've linked papers and statistics that actually discuss in a quantitative and rigorous way what the costs of nuclear energy actually are. Since we know they differ from plant to plant, country to country, we can discuss why this might be based upon reason and logic. Greer just tells a story that has no relation to reality. Compare Greer with this book review: https://rootsofprogress.org/devanney-on-the-nuclear-flop. There are numbers! Figures! Graphs! Actual analysis based upon data, as opposed to dogma. Greer is a good writer and is good at telling a story but that story is not true! He combines ignorance with arrogance in a very unattractive way.

But if we're not heading to space, then we must be stuck with pre-industrial tech, right? Notwithstanding individual civilizations rising and falling, we'd be stuck at pre-industrial technology forever, in his model.

No, this is not what his model suggests at all. He wrote an entire book about this and you can just read the blurb to see what he thinks on this topic - https://www.amazon.com.au/Ecotechnic-Future-Envisioning-Post-Peak-World/dp/0865716390

France? Their grid primarily runs off nuclear power. French electricity is quite cheap by European standards and remember that they export a fair bit, so their prices are pushed up:

https://www.cnbc.com/2022/07/06/frances-edf-to-be-fully-nationalised-borne-.html

France's electrical power system is currently about to be nationalised because it has taken on so much debt, and they were forced to import power from other nations during periods of high demand. To argue against the claim that nuclear power generation is unprofitable without government subsidies you have produced a system which is unprofitable, fails to provide adequate power during times of peak demand and is about to receive even more government subsidies in the form of nationalisation. This is evidence FOR Greer's position!

The most concise summation of Greer's position on nuclear I can find is the following paragraph, from the article "Too little, too late."

The shills in question are quite correct, as it happens, that renewable energy can’t be scaled up fast enough to replace fossil fuels. The little detail they’re evading is that nuclear power can’t be scaled up far enough or fast enough, either. What’s more, however great they look on paper or PowerPoint, neither nuclear power nor grid-scale renewable power are economically viable in the real world. The evidence for this is as simple as it is conclusive: no nation anywhere on the planet has managed either one without vast and continuing government subsidies. Lacking those, neither one makes enough economic sense to be worth building, because neither one can provide the kind of cheap abundant electrical power that makes a modern industrial society possible.

Again, the answer here is real easy: just provide the commercially successful nuclear plant which pays for itself with power generation (nuclear power plants are worth having around anyway due to their ability to generate useful isotopes for medical/research purposes). Take EROEI into account and demonstrate that the nuclear power plant can produce enough energy to be economically viable - and remember to take the various invisible subsidies petroleum supplies into account as well. So far this hasn't happened, and while again, I'd love to be proved wrong, I just don't see why this hasn't happened. A successful nuclear power plant of the type you're claiming would be so significant that it would have a major impact on global geopolitics, and yet this just hasn't happened (why has regulation managed to stop nuclear power from achieving viability in every single place on earth?).

Greer is a good writer and is good at telling a story but that story is not true! He combines ignorance with arrogance in a very unattractive way.

You've claimed that his arguments are wrong when you do not have even the slightest clue what his position actually is and routinely make absurdly incorrect assertions about his views because you do not have enough familiarity with his work to debate it coherently. If you are going to speak with confidence about someone, you should have more knowledge and understanding of their position than you've demonstrated here. You're accusing him of combining ignorance and arrogance while you look at a vanishingly small section of his work and assume that you know better than he does on the basis of that tiny slice without even being able to accurately identify which wing of politics he belongs to.

No, this is not what his model suggests at all.

You're splitting hairs. There are three possible outcomes. Technological development and energy use keep going up and we become an interstellar civilization. They stagnate and we get stuck somewhere below where we are now. Or we are wiped out. He clearly dismisses 1 and 3. Therefore he agrees with 2. It's as simple as that.

France's electrical power system is currently about to be nationalised because it has taken on so much debt

So what? Companies take on excessive debt and are restructured from time to time. French electricity prices are low, France exports electricity every year on net. They undertook various manipulations of prices, forcing EDF to sell at artificially low prices to competitors or other countries, forcing them to buy at higher market prices, imposing price caps in 2022 to protect consumers...

EDF was profitable literally every year but 2022: https://www.statista.com/statistics/279640/consolidated-net-income-of-edf/

And yes, there was corrosion and power outages at reactors because they are old and need replacing (which France simply hasn't done because they too have been drinking the renewables cool aid). You crow at one year of unprofitability but sneer at 15 years of profits?

The most concise summation of Greer's position on nuclear I can find is the following paragraph, from the article "Too little, too late."

Right, we're agreed here, this is what he thinks. He does not provide even a single citation or anything at all to back up his point. This guy thinks he knows more about nuclear energy than the actual scientists who write papers about it (with statistics and everything) and doesn't deign to provide any evidence! He's clearly read none of the literature about the reverse learning by doing that plagues US nuclear energy. He doesn't understand the importance of interest rates, regulation, political risks in prices. Even then it's still profitable: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-07-14/why-nuclear-power-once-cash-cow-now-has-tin-cup-quicktake-q-a#xj4y7vzkg

This article alone torpedoes Greer's entire ideology, it explains how cheap gas has been outcompeting otherwise profitable nuclear energy, even in one of the most hostile environments for nuclear energy, the US. It also helps shed light on the complexities he doesn't understand, how there's a role for subsidizing long-term energy sources that temporarily aren't profitable for when gas prices rise.

Just step back and think about what Greer is saying. Nuclear power plants (all of them, in every country) are commercially unprofitable, not just at some times based on volatile oil prices, macroeconomic conditions or political interference but always and forever! Do you realize how insane this sounds? All these investors just line up to get zero returns? Of course nuclear power is, has and will be profitable, despite the best efforts of a very well organized sabotage campaign.

Take EROEI into account and demonstrate that the nuclear power plant can produce enough energy to be economically viable - and remember to take the various invisible subsidies petroleum supplies into account as well.

This is a meaningless and impossible demand. How am I supposed to know what the 'invisible subsidy' of petroleum is? Even Greer admitted that it just comes down to prices at the end of the day. The price of nuclear energy is low. That's why people spend billions building these plants and operating them. I have already linked papers that show that nuclear is as cheap as fossil fuels if the plants are built correctly at $2000, as in Korea.

You're accusing him of combining ignorance and arrogance while you look at a vanishingly small section of his work

He's a crank that projects his own ignorance on nuclear 'fanboys', making snide remarks about them and refuses to provide any factual substantiation at all for his claims. There's no need to look at his 'work', which is free from any basis in fact or scholarly convention.

You're splitting hairs. There are three possible outcomes. Technological development and energy use keep going up and we become an interstellar civilization. They stagnate and we get stuck somewhere below where we are now. Or we are wiped out. He clearly dismisses 1 and 3. Therefore he agrees with 2. It's as simple as that.

Wrong. He has said, over and over, that it isn't stagnation that awaits, and the future that he's describing lies outside the limited options you have presented. The future that he describes falls very much outside those options.

The future we’re facing is not the one that gets shoved at us daily by the corporate mass media. All that pretentious drivel about humanity’s destiny in space passed its pull date a long time ago. Nor are we facing the flipside of those same fantasies, the overnight apocalypse that wipes us all out or plunges us all back to the stone age by next Thursday at the latest. What we’re facing instead might best be called history as usual: the long slow unraveling of a civilization that drew too heavily on its resource base. It’s an old story and, for the historically literate, a familiar one.

That doesn’t mean that the societies of the future will have to get by on the same technological basis as the societies of the past—again, the England of George I had technologies and options that the Egypt of Ramses I didn’t have. In the same way, the societies of the deindustrial age ahead of us will very likely have useful things invented in our age: shortwave radio, ultralight aircraft, and a good solid grasp of basic sanitation are among the candidates that come immediately to mind. Further out, as new civilizations rise on our ruins, technologies well suited to function within the long-term energy budget of our planet will doubtless blossom in turn.

This is from an article that I have already linked! Why do you continue to speak so authoritatively about the content of his work if you aren't going to read it? You do not even have an accurate picture of the most basic and central elements to his worldview and positions yet feel comfortable dismissing his work wholesale on the basis that the tiny sliver of it you read does not contain the type of analysis you're looking for.

There's no need to look at his 'work', which is free from any basis in fact or scholarly convention.

You have set up a standard which no scientific journal article ever published would pass - you read some of the excerpts and writing, don't see any of the numbers or calculations that were done elsewhere, and then assume that they do not exist and the paper is thus worthless and not worth reading. Yes, he hasn't included the calculations done on EROEI on nuclear plants in his most recent essays, and that is because he has been participating in this discussion for longer than I have been alive, and he doesn't feel the need to re-establish the foundations of his work in every single paragraph of his output afterwards (and given that you haven't even read the articles I linked, I doubt you went back and read his earlier work).

Again, I'm not asking you to go read his entire output if you don't find it engaging - but at the very least you should stop making authoritative claims about work that you have not actually read. If you're going to say that his work is entirely free of fact and scholarly convention then you can totally do that and make a case for it - but only after actually reading and engaging with it! You continue to make basic misunderstandings and mistakes of his position that he was tired of repeatedly resolving a decade ago, and I am not going to continue to reply to this conversation unless you actually read his work before dismissing it: pointing out errors that only exist because you just do not bother to read the articles linked is not a worthwhile use of my time.

This is from an article that I have already linked

Yes and it backs up my point. 'technologies well suited to function within the long-term energy budget of our planet will doubtless blossom in turn' = non-industrial lifestyle, no space travel, no exploitation of the enormous resources of space. What is so hard to understand about this? He is describing stagnation in a preindustrial world with some trinkets.

Yes, he hasn't included the calculations done on EROEI on nuclear plants in his most recent essays,

Because he hasn't done them, because they show that nuclear power is cost-competitive with fossil fuels, as is obvious from reading the papers I linked (which actually provide figures to back up their claims and some analysis of what's actually going on).

You have set up a standard which no scientific journal article ever published would pass

Scientific journals demand citations and references from credible sources. Undergraduate level essays demand references. Greer's work would not pass muster at a third-rate university.

because you just do not bother to read the articles linked is not a worthwhile use of my time.

Tu quoque.

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