We will dismiss this like Hughes if it's too pricey!

Give us something to tell Spectrum to shove it.

...space is definitely worth it, since consumer junk trumps everything.

Elon Musk is a world class asshole.

If that is your criteria for being an asshole, then I'm an asshole x10. Cars, made in America, that don't pollute the air, don't require motor oil, don't drop coolant into our storm drains, don't muck up our ozone, are the safest on the road...

As opposed to someone like Zuckerberg, who is just a selfish egotistical asshole who doesn't give two shits about anything but the almighty dollar, not matter how much it hurts others.

for Earth's species, with the possible exception of the homo sapiens who come after us.

His car depends on enslaved children digging cobalt in the DRC.

The electricity to charge it is largely generated by dangerous fossil fuels, in a highly questionable thermodynamic shell game. There's plenty of literature on both the social and environmental costs of electric cars, and the absurd fantasy that a car can be "green."

I don't buy it; he's just another rich asshole inflating himself. Most of those who worship him are decidedly bourgeois and in general completely unaware of what is happening in the world of ethics.

Just asking, since you seem to know a better way to make the world a better place, one worth living in.

Do you own an EV, solar, wind power, off the grid, have a butterfly garden, volunteer to plant trees, etc? Anything?

Since you're casting stones in a shotgun approach, taking down people who are at least trying, I'm all ears to hear how you know of a better way that could be a role model for the rest of us.

...the environment as well as studying issues in sustainability especially as it applies to human development goals and the interface therein.

Since I know fairly intimately the details of industrial processes, I would never assuage my guilt with nonsense about wind and solar energy.

I for instance am acutely aware of how many resources have been squandered on solar and wind in the last ten years. Here's a clue: this amount is greater than the GDP of India, a nation with well over 1/7th of the world population. This money has been squandered in a world where over 1 billion human beings lack access to any kind of improved sanitation.

I also continuously monitor carbon dioxide concentrations in the atmosphere.

Since you are hyper aware of the world, and feel entitled to question my ethics, perhaps you can tell me if all this wind power and solar power and enthusiasm for Musk's car for millionaires and billionaires has lead to an increase or decrease in the rate of CO2 accumulations.

How about I simply say that what I am doing is something other than embracing smug feel good platitudes about reality, that it consists largely of knowing shit from shinola?

Were I to own a big array of solar cells - I don't - I'd want to know what became of them when they morphed into yet more electronic waste.

My personal feeling is that it's a good idea to question advertising. Without it, one's deleterious impact is obscure.

By the way, I am in fact a bourgeois asshole, but at least I know enough to be ashamed of it.

is that it doesn't meet real-world expectations. It doesn't seem to be getting better, either.


https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/supreme-court-lets-us-stop-work-on-8b-sc-nuclear-fuel-plant/2019/10/15/4f4a74c0-ef65-11e9-bb7e-d2026ee0c199_story.html

It did so using technology developed in the 1950's and early 1960s. There were no high speed computers.

Hundreds of thousands of lives that would have been otherwise lost to air pollution over many decades were saved.

The United States at the peak of its nuclear power production has some of the lowest electricity prices in the world.

What happened? Why has what already happened become impossible?

For one thing, we built a generation of journalists who could not pass a simple an introductory college level science course.

The other is that we built a public who considers one death from radiation as a tragedy but doesn't give a flying fuck about 7 million air pollution deaths per year.

We will spend a billion dollars, ten billion dollars, so that any radiation leak that any uneducated asshole can imagine is impossible and not $200 to provide vaccinations to children who need them.

I really, really, really, really, really couldn't give a flying fuck about an article in a newspaper about the "cost" of nuclear power plants.

I would be really really really really interested if newspapers focused on the cost of 7 million air pollution deaths per year, the cost to future generations of abandoned fracking fields leaching unimaginable shit forever, the cost of destroying the planetary atmosphere.

Real world expectations?

Really?

What we should be expecting is what we are creating with our idiot selective attention. A reactor built in 1953 that was connected to the grid in 1954 in England, designed without access to high powered computers, with primitive knowledge of materials science, by people working literally with slide rules, ran until 2003 without a single loss of life.

You know what's not getting better? Thinking.

We are unbelievable asses that things like this are allowed to take place, that nuclear engineering programs are focused on non issues in so called nuclear waste, and that we have a penny pinching public that give not a fuck about poisoning the atmosphere forever because we, unlike our parents, are unwilling to pay for nuclear power plants that will be operating after we've been dead for well more than half a century. The nuclear power plants my parents generations built were gifts to mine. We have our heads too far up our asses to care about our children, and our grandchildren and their grandchildren.

History will not forgive us, nor should it.

is that all of the associated lifetime costs aren't worth it.

That's why they aren't getting replaced/built.

What is wrong with that thinking and how do we change?

...of a destroyed atmosphere.

That's not actually "thinking." That's contempt.

What's wrong with it is obvious: We lack a shred of decency.

Look who we've put in the White House: A self absorbed fool with no concern for any human being now or forever.

When we don't build nuclear plants it is because we are all that guy. The payback for a nuclear plant, given modern technology and design, will last for 80 years, Our problem with it is is that other people rather than we ourselves will reap the reward of this expense.

A destroyed atmosphere will last forever or what may as well be forever.

That's my "thinking."

I have done whatever I can to change current "thinking,"by merely stating what is obvious.

If you are asking me how can we change it, I don't know. To quote Shakespeare, "What's done, cannot be undone." He put these lines in the mouth of a murderer.

We have murdered the future, because we think nuclear plants are "too expensive" and 7 million deaths per year, not even addressing climate changes, is "cheap."

We thought our toys, electric cars and rocket ships being only small examples, were more important that the entire future of humanity.

Personally my life is more or less over, and I am decidedly resigned to the shame with which my generation will be regarded by history. The only consolation left for me is I have taught my sons everything I could teach them, as much as I fear for their times.

for space based internet services.

Where is this going? I don't even know where you came up with such a concept. Mind blowing!

That won't be solved by not launching anything. Starlink can be designed to minimize the risk of creating impact debris. No reason to think it isn't.

At some point there is no doubt we'll have to consider a janitorial service.

Nuclear waste and orbital debris share some similarities.