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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: September 29th, 2023

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  • Landlords take on risk. For example, when I rented an apartment, I came home one day to a plumbing disaster. I called emergency maintenance and left. The landlord fixed it and paid for my hotel in the meantime. As a home owner now, that would be entirely on me to figure out. I’m pretty handy, but I have no disrespect for someone who doesn’t want to be responsible for that.

    More importantly, selling a house costs about 10% of the value of the house, and the first few years of a mortgage you’re mostly paying interest. If you move every 3 years, it’s actually cheaper to rent than to buy. It’s just that your money is going to a landlord instead of to banks and realtors.

    So while I see your argument that landlords don’t “deserve” the money they make, practically they’re an important part of the housing market, and I respect people who make an informed decision to rent.


  • There are a lot of good arguments for wind, and I’m not arguing against it, but density and consistency are well known issues. You absolutely cannot replace a nuclear plant with a wind farm of the same size and get the same output. That’s not necessarily a bad thing, wind farms can often coexist with other land uses, but that’s still a disruptive environment.

    It’s good to put pressure on nuclear, the reason it’s so incredibly safe is because it’s highly regulated, but to completely ignore it is throwing the baby out with the bath water.

    The question isn’t “are nuclear plants perfectly safe”, the question is “will adding nuclear plants to our energy portfolio reduce the risks from climate change enough to offset the risks they introduce.”

    I think, in that framework, replacing existing coal power plants with modern nuclear reactors is a huge overall benefit.

    Wind and solar are great but there’s still a lot of work needed on storage and transmission before they can be viable grid scale. Realistically, saying no to nuclear doesn’t mean more wind, it means more natural gas. And those LNG tankers really are floating bombs.