The industry doesn't have to die. I did also use the word flounder. These industries need to be subsidized enough that they could provide food rations to the American people in times of catastrophe. If they're below that threshold and the global food supply becomes significantly restricted, it risks economic and societal collapse. Is the subsidy balanced in that way? I honestly don't know and I've never once seen anyone addressing that in these threads about food subsidies.

In most cases, allowing a business to flounder and die is fine. In the case that the business is producing something that your population would die without (food) allowing the business to flounder and die is maybe not a good idea. The hilarious amount of corn produced in the USA means that the entire rest of the world's agriculture could fail or be made unavailable and the US would still have a good supply. This protects against disaster, war, and other geopolitical events.

Obviously there are negative consequences to subsidizing corn (and other foods) to this degree, but I think it's important to temper any assessments with the fact that the subsidies are meant to prevent mass starvation should things go terribly wrong in the world.

That's probably the issue. People retain fame, not companies. Up until recently, there wasn't really a company trying to capitalize on Tesla's name and it was wholly his own.

>Maybe some russian company can pump out reactors which then don't comply with EU or US safety regulations, so that doesn't help anyone..

Prior to war breaking out, Rosatom was building reactors for countries all over the world. This is public information. If you want a source, you can check wikipedia. Providing sources is more important for information that is niche, newer, or isn't readily available on google, none of which is true here.

But if you want a source that actually is news and makes sense to provide a source for, how about the SMR being build in Ontario. It's slated for completion in 2028, just five years from now.

>Also the cost of energy storage is included, so your whole point about energy not being available is wrong.

No, it isn't wrong. Your own source provided above, the wiki article, mentions this:

>Levelized avoided cost of electricity
>
>The metric levelized avoided cost of energy (LACE) addresses some of the shortcomings of LCOE by considering the economic value that the source provides to the grid. The economic value takes into account the dispatchability of a resource, as well as the existing energy mix in a region.

Which is literally what I just tried to explain to you. So you can ask for sources, but if you aren't even reading your own, is there any point? I'm really not trying to be a jerk here... that's an honest question. If someone was standing in front of you with a Harry Potter book in their hand and you said "Harry Potter has a lightning bolt scar" and someone said they didn't believe you and to prove it, how would you react?

Additionally, even if I did provide other sources, the degree to which they would be useful to this conversation depends on your familiarity with electrical engineering. I think a lot of people take electricity for granted because you stick a cable with metal prongs into the wall and stuff automagically starts happening. But the system behind all that is hugely complex. One challenge that isn't addressed at all by levelized cost studies is the reduction of inertia that is associated with replacing conventional generation sources with things connected through inverters like solar panels and wind turbines. Conventional generation sources don't have inverters and their inertial mass is coupled directly with the grid. That has a number of advantages that aren't accounted for at all in LCOE. I mean this with no disrespect, but if you don't understand the significance of what I just said, how is it that you think providing sources is going to help? Unless I can find a Veritasium video or something like that that takes the time to explain concepts like that in a way that is easily digestible, which I doubt exists, then no source I can provide will be helpful.

Rosatom has been pumping out reactors, taking about six years each consistently for a couple of decades. It's not that nuclear reactors take that long to build. It's that our nuclear construction expertise in the West is trash because we've preferred to burn fossil fuels for the past 40 years.

When stating that nuclear costs more than renewables, you'll have to state what metric you're using. Most likely, you're using levelized cost of energy, which is a flawed metric for measuring the economics of power generation of renewables. For dispatchable sources, LCOE is fine. But renewables are not dispatchable (excluding hydro and geothermal, which are dispatchable), so LCOE is not an appropriate measure. You might ask why. Well, the reason is that it doesn't matter if the energy is cheap if it's being produced when you don't need it, which happens pretty frequently with renewables. To make this clear, if you lived in a place where it did not snow and someone came to you saying "hey, I'll clear snow from your property for $10 a year" you would be stupid to take that deal not because the price is high, but because you don't need that service. That company could advertise itself as being the lowest cost snow removal company in the world, and they would be right, but that isn't relevant to whether or not it makes sense to purchase the service. So sure, advocates of renewable energy can say that the cost of the energy they produce is very low, but the conversation doesn't end there. The analysis to determine how cost-effective renewable sources are depends heavily on the climate of a region and the existing grid infrastructure. For example, every degree of latitude you move from the equator reduces the value of solar.

Vaping legislation in Canada has completely destroyed small businesses that were producing and distributing juice along with the associated retail locations, which were also small businesses. None of the retail stores I bought juice from had any association with the tobacco industry. The juice producer that I liked the most, which was based in my city, likewise had no association with the tobacco industry. Those businesses are now gone. Soon, my options will be to either buy prefilled pods at gas stations (sound familiar?) or make my own juice, which is not convenient at all and heavily incentivizes the former. So yes, Phillip Morris owns Juul... But I don't buy those and don't want to. I want to go to the shops I used to and buy the juice that was being produced a few kilometers from my house. Government legislation is making it so that supporting Phillip Morris is becoming closer to being my only option.

I wouldn't be so sure. Academic institutions have been commercialized and they're going to do what gets them money, not what maintains or increases intellectual rigour. The best STEM university in the region I live is slowly turning into a party school and the university administration is doing little to nothing about it because goddamnit those hooligans are paying customers. Universities, and therefore academia as it is, are complicit.

The universe is very, very large... which makes it hard to believe we're the only life. But that also means communications are basically impossible. The oldest signals originating from Earth are just about 100 years old, so can only have traveled 100 light years. Not only is that not very far-- practically like yelling down your driveway-- but also the signals would be very difficult, or impossible, to discern from background noise.