No, they are covered in anti-reflective coatings to minimize reflection. Most of the excess is converted to heat (as would happen if the light just hit the ground).

Privately owned publicly enforced monopolies are rife with conflicts of interest. PG&E should be taken over by the state yesterday.

I would posit that the internet and abundant screen entertainment contributed to killing third places far more than cars. The US has had a car culture for a very long time. (I’m not saying that makes it a good thing.)

What if you’re on fire?

I’ve got silksong (ha) and uhh… Umm…

It’s totally logical even aside from the economics. The consequences are too great, which is why nuclear plants are uninsurable. You think this French plant and Vogtle were expensive? Imagine if they had to be insured like everything else in our society. But they can’t, because no insurance company is large enough. By default the public ends up footing that cost to the tune of trillions.

They get revenue from the pre roll ad while you read the summary. Then they don’t have to pay the creator when you click away before watching.

As this chart makes pretty clear, white men are to blame.

As an engineer, Chernobyl is terrifying. It was close to being 10x worse than it was. The thought that capitalism could do it better is the height of hubris. If you think your technology is fail-safe, nature (including humans) will find a better way to fail.

There are many reasons besides safety that nuclear makes no sense. Others have listed them here. But this recent hand-waving away of safety is frightening. Saying that our technology today is so much better while anti-intellectualism is running rampant. Saying facilities could always be staffed by experts while our political system is more unstable than ever. Thinking that we could store waste for 10,000 years when humanity has never built something that has intentionally survived a fraction of that time.

The downside of this equation is just too severe. Nuclear plants are uninsurable for a reason, and by default are insured by the public. That cost is ignored in the equation, because it’s too large for even the biggest insurance conglomerates to consider.

Unfortunately it’s true, whether you like it or not. The amount of times one random radical asshat saying something outrageous turns into a major outlet “people-are-saying” news article is infuriating.

kW is a unit of instantaneous power; kW/s makes no sense. Note how multiplying that by seconds would cancel time out and return you power again instead of energy. You got there in the end, though.

And she has been doing a lot more of this click baity “science bad” shit because they get 10x the views of her actual science content.

In many regions solar capacity factor is much higher than 20%; for example, the entire US. https://atb.nrel.gov/electricity/2021/utility-scale_pv

Mmmm, tastes like supply chain optimization.

I’m kind of a fan of government doing the right thing regardless of the (high) chance of someone else coming in and shitting all over it.

Of course most don’t actually even believe it, that’s just the pitch to get that VC juice. It’s basically fraud all the way down.

Yet he still managed to overturn Roe, stack the scotus and thousands of judgeships for a generation, and sabotage countless government agencies which has been a nightmare for our rights, environment, and the rule of law. We’re still feeling the repercussions and this time is shaping up to be an order of magnitude worse.

The ONLY thing I know for certain after this clusterfuck is that Biden would have lost by even more.

Yup, if we learn anything we will definitely have forgotten it in four years.

Solar panels are incredibly thin and light. There is no reason not to include them.