Even the most "normal" person is not exactly a highly rational or compassionate creature all the time. Nobody has a perfect platonic human mind.

Normal people can experience problematic mental states briefly, or under extreme stress.

Mental illness (seems to my uninformed opinion at least) to be more about those who get "stuck" in states for dangerously long periods of time (perhaps even their whole life).

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The question for the criminal justice system is, if you take away blaming individuals as bad/immoral/evil people, what are we left with?

Instead of a system based on punishment and violence, it would focus on protecting society as a whole as the primary objective. Remove those that are an immediate danger, rehabilitate those who can be, and seclude those who can't.

The punitive nature of deterrence has shown over and over to be ineffective at actually reducing crime meaningfully. In fact, it exacerbates crime and hurts everyone else too. But people want to harm bad people, so we continue in a self destructive cycle.

Or just funnel money to politicians promising to cut Western investments and education.

Then pump money into social media propaganda (tik toc and others) to spread disinfo and division.

Seems pretty effective to me.

OF course

But how you approach that fact will make all the difference as you hit major roadblocks, derailments, and challenges to your core identity.

How we imagine ourselves and our lives going is mostly illusion in the face of an infinite universe and it helps keep us going. That illusion gets challenged and its far healthier to find a way forward in the face of temporary but shattering disappointment.

Even actually being able to comprehend the nature of permanent death itself requires a better understanding of consciousness than is current available. Simply a result of the level of scientific knowledge in the short time we exist.

We will not see the end of human advancement, only play our small part in its evolution. To me that is awe inspiring.

Yes, actually.

But not a different life, a different attitude.

"Don't fuck it up" is way to high a standard. Everyone fucks it up, that is a major part of life. Such a high standard for yourself means you can only ever be stressed or disappointed in yourself. This makes it harder to learn and grow, ironically diminishing yourself. Especially common is something bad happens or someone fucks up something big. They can feel broken and ruined, regardless of how much other potential they have and don't see.

Let go of obsessively trying to craft the perfect "play through." Instead, embrace learning and growth, however messy fucked up way you arrive at it. Compassion for others is improved through accepting your own faults.

That is how you can actually lead a better life (just my opinion).

But you forgot that the talking alarm clock can listen to all your private conversations. How exciting

>You're just waving away a very obvious problem, and I don't understand how you can. Lithium production is constrained.

So separate out discussing batteries and lithium.

Batteries are production constrained and require fairly significant capx into new factories to get. That has been happening in a major way for the past few years and is only accelerating. It will take many years of scaling to truly satisfy world demand, but that means a lot of money and investment (again already happening).

Lithium itself has a different dynamic.

Lithium is quite abundant and has been considered a waste product from other types of mining for quite a long time. That has now changed and will be solved in reasonably short order. No new tech is required and tons of reserves are already proven. Within 5 years the price should be reasonably stabilized.

Also, most of the battery mass are what I mentioned. Iron/Aluminum/Carbon/Silicon. People fixate on lithium because it is in the name of the battery, but its a relatively small part by mass. Its just not a serious problem outside of the next few years.

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>Currently, grid-level storage cover at best minutes, sometimes hours in very small areas. To cover windless, sunless periods, we need days, and indeed more like 2 weeks.

The more solar you build, the more predictable it becomes. The solar panel on your house might change based on relative cloud cover, but solar over a whole region becomes quite predictable.

To make power reliable, you have to over build it. The current fossil fuel is overbuilt. So you would need more solar than for you average day. Also major appliances (like EVs) will become more responsive to changing grid prices. Demand will become more elastic.

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>You say nuclear plants take too long to build, but there is no way we can produce enough batteries in 20 years, which is plenty of time to build reactors.

Plenty of time. Now someone actually has to put up the money.

Its already happening in renewables, hopefully government or capital desires to actually invest in nuclear. In the meantime, nuclear is standing still and will waste out another decade.

Batteries are economic for gird use right now. Its just production constrained. Just so happens capitalism is really good at solving that particular issue.

Nuclear is totally different. Massively expensive, high risk, and long time horizons. Something capitalism is bad at solving. Thus gov intervention is required to change the dynamic. This is borne out in the empirical reality of how private companies are currently investing.

Still grid storage can dramatically lag wind/solar for a few reasons:

• Wind/solar naturally complement each other (wind tends to produce more at night, when solar is offline)
• Existing hydro is easily retrofitted to be more on demand and act as grid storage (already currently happening)
• EVs are not picky about charging times and are easily setup to take advantage of low prices and reduce at times of high prices, helping to decouple generation and demand
• If we dramatically overproduce during the day, there are plenty of productive uses for basically free power, desalination is a great place to start

I am not arguing against Nuclear, its part of the solution. But only part.

Solar and wind can be built out much much faster. You can see that from the economics alone.

Nuclear requires government funding to make it feasible. Wind/solar are being built out currently in a major way with private investments. Sure gov incentives help, but are no longer mandatory. Private capital going towards wind/solar is a massive advantage in the fight on climate change because it bypasses political processes that oil money has stymied.

I would like more nuclear. But its simply not economic to do so. If we could get governments to move past inaction and invest in the future grid, sure it would come along. But in the meantime, significant nuclear will be nothing more than a nice idea.

~10 GWH of batteries were produced in 2010

~600 GWH of batteries will be produced this year. That is an order of magnitude in a little over a decade (with primarily venture back companies investing and less governments).

It will take ~10 TWH (transport) and ~20 TWH (grid), per year to transition to full renewable. So yes, 2 orders of magnitude off is about right.

Definitely within reach and cleaner non-renewables (like nuclear) can help bridge the gap sooner. But its coming. And that's just with the current generation of tech, if we think a decade or more into the future, additional material advancements can accelerate this further.

The best part is that batteries at the end of life are high grade ore. So recycling valuable materials will close the loop. After the transition, very little additional mining will be needed to maintain the world's battery supply. Unlike oil, which for generations has to be constantly replenished as the material nearly fully turns over every few months. So much waste.

Hopefully it works. We don't need 1 solution, we need 50 and to pursue them all aggressively.

Its ok if some ideas don't pan out, the cost of not getting at least some to succeed is basically everything.

Just a few basic things we have to do. Deeper changes come from questioning how on earth people still think the senate is a reasonable institution after increasing the number of states by 5x. Many of which have minuscule populations. Of course the Senate is the only body that can approve Supreme Court appointments. How convenient

In general the US population gets most things right over time.

But our current system is designed to constrain the will of the people at many key points. Then the people can be blamed for failures even as the people are basically ignored.

Nearly all our problems can be fixed by more democracy and giving the people a greater influence.

1. Removing money and bribes from political elections
2. Ranked choice to remove the 2 party duopoly
3. Anti-gerrymandering protections and 2 winner districts to reduce polarization

Just a few basic things we have to do. Deeper changes come from questioning how on earth people still think the senate is a reasonable institution after increasing the number of states by 5x. Many of which have minuscule populations. Of course the Senate is the only body that can approve Supreme Court appointments. How convenient 🙄

Actually batteries have come a very long way in just the past decade!

The really bad materials have been basically entirely phased out (cobalt/cadmium).

The main materials have all mature supply chains and batteries will use relatively little of them (compared to other uses, like construction). The main materials are iron/aluminum/manganese/carbon/silicon. All super easy.

Lithium was basically economically useless until recently. So its supply chain is very immature. But the material itself is extremely abundant and shortages are only in the near term.

Nickle is the final material that will be expensive and batteries will stress this supply chain. But they are only needed for the most dense applications (like high performance auto). But grid batteries and most commuter cars won't bother.

The economics of current gird batteries (compared to gas peaker plants) is amazing. The grid battery in southern Australia returned its investment costs in 6 months. That is an insane return for infrastructure.

The only reason its not the dominate form of grid management is because the whole supply chain and factories are taking some years to build. But that is just temporary. Its coming like a train.

I think that is too gloomy of a lens. Maybe you are correct with regards to maintenance schedules. But there is so much more then that.

If an organization is too rigid, it won't be able to respond effectively to newly arising problems. A lot of it comes down to a few basic principles (they are just hard to do consistently).

One major piece is empowering the low-level employees that are actually doing the real work and day to day interactions with the equipment. That means sometimes they are going to raise problematic issues at inconvenient times.

Are these individuals punished or ignored? Or are they taken seriously and allowed to make consequential decisions, like stopping work until a problem is solved? The Toyota Production System is famous for this feature. A line worker can shut down a whole production train if they find a defect at great cost to the company. Yet, over time the company understands that solving defects early on is overall far far cheaper then allowing them to accumulate silently.

But that means a specific plant can't only be judged on total output at any given time, so the incentives and directives given to middle management have to align with longer term company goals. The work culture has to incorporate these ideas into everyday operations, not just tacked on as an afterthought.

A second major piece involves looking at top level design and revisit periodically as time goes by. Etc...

>I’d argue the biggest obstacle is will.

And who's will specifically? Why do we allow those who benefit massively from the status quo to stymie any change or progress?

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>We certainly ended up with a nuclear weapons arsenal that is much bigger then the power generation industy with all the waste products to boot. ... The moon landing and interstate highway system come to mind.

All of those were in the interests of the powerful. Luckily most coincided with the interests of the people as well. Nuclear weapons both protected the country as well as allowed it to have massive leverage over others. The moon landing was invested in out of fear of loss to communism, not some noble good. But the science that came along was a nice bonus.

Coincidentally the interstate highway system just so happened to result in the final dismantling of the US passenger train network. So cars went from a luxury to mandatory for participation in the US economy. Great for oil interests.

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>Sometime in the 1970s, the US lost the will to bet big.

After the whole generation was locked into car culture and the banks got stuffed with middle eastern oil money (foreign money in US banks did not have to fall under US financial regulations).

Suddenly the extremely wealthy interests had sidestepped the US controls that had helped the US dominate in world growth since the great depression. Then using this power to outsource jobs from the US to undermine the accumulated power of the American middle class and employees.

A decade later, enough power and wealth had been concentrated to go after the tax base of the country and dramatically centralize economic power. The power of the American voter shrunk proportionally. Its no mystery why popular reforms and investments are seemingly impossible, yet unpopular changes sail through nearly unopposed.

Its not some magic that caused the US to lose its ability for large investments in the 1970s. It was an intentional strategy to concentrating power in a way that no longer required projects to benefit multiple economic classes. Instead only serving the interests of the same small group of wealthy billionaires.

>Solar, wind, geothermal, and hydro-electric are not really feasible means of space travel

So what % of greenhouse gases are from space travel? Is that what you think we are trying to solve here? Just make everything solar for fun?

If you want to make chemical rockets "green" the propellant can be made from bio-fuels that don't add total CO2 to the atmosphere. But given that it is in the 1-2% range for the entire world, its pretty low on the priority list.

If you want to look at a 100 year timescale, green tech for the grid is inevitable. Its just so much cheaper to produce than fossil fuels. The next generation will look back in shock that we allowed our world politics to be dictated by such a messy and inefficient supply chain, all while obvious alternatives were available.

>people being stupid and lazy that cause problems

That is not how safety engineering works.

If an individual being lazy or making a mistake means the whole thing blows up, you just made disaster inevitable because people will sometimes be lazy.

But good design and good organizational design can nearly eliminate entire classes of failure modes.

The real big problem is creating durable organizational culture that can last for the decades the plant is operational. Maintenance and training are annoying to deal with and get in the way of short term profits. The work culture has to be able to strongly resist these forces for a few generations of employees. From new plant with the builder available all the way to when it is deeply out of date and eventually needs to wind down operations and get decommissioned.

Life cycle management of major projects is challenging in governments with low turnover and long time horizons. Its extremely difficult in the private sector where management can change at the drop of a hat.

The problem with nuclear now is less technological, but startup costs and time.

You can spend 10 Billion for a decade and still need more time and money before its running. But then its good. We can just deploy solar/wind/batteries much faster and in smaller pieces, to save carbon immediately.

That said, we need a ton of power and we need to change with the speed and intensity of a Marshall plan. So it makes perfect sense to get 10-20% of world power from nuclear. That means we have to build a lot of it, right now.

But as governments drag their feet and pretend some new magic will save us in the future (not the working tech we already got right now), its doesn't make sense to invest limited budgets into it.