Spyke

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EU plans to ban under-13s from social media, with 'phased access' afterwards

Good. Social media addiction rates are five to ten times those of gambling, and yet we protect those under 18 from accessing those. There is also a strong correlation between heavy social media use and suicidal ideation.

Just FYI, big tech opposes this. Meta is flooding European digital advertising with "Instagram for teenagers", posturing that parents can implement parental controls on who teens can communicate with, as if that were the issue we're trying to fix.

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What are your thoughts and feelings towards nuclear power?

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How so? Shouldn't our societies aim to produce the most cost-beneficial energy? Also, my opinion is based on a range of economic indicators, including Australia's CSIRO's calculations for nuclear energy prices in kWh vs other renewable prices per kWh. I am of course excluding fossil fuels (obviously nuclear energy beats that with respect to GHGs, but drops the ball when matched against scalable renewables like solar and wind).

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What are your thoughts and feelings towards nuclear power?

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It's fair to point out that distribution has its own dilemmas, as does storing excess energy. But those are secondary in my view. As far as public policy goes, given that nuclear energy are big public expenditure endeavors, in my view the economics need to make sense to the public to justify nuclear power generation.

Another factor is, of course, time. Is it worth investing in nuclear if the objective is to cut GHGs by X year, when we know a nuclear plant would take Y years to come online?

One big unknown is the total amount of electricity consumed. If the assumption is a relative decline or stable amount of global demand in the future, then nuclear makes limited sense, whereas a spike in demand, possibly caused by unmitigated AI energy demand, could warrant recalculating the cost-effectiveness of nuclear energy.

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