I used to be strictly materialist and atheist. Now I’m pretty spiritual. Don’t necessarily follow a religion and don’t support bigotry but yeah, I’m fairly spiritual now. This is a recent development and I never thought I’d be here like 5 years ago.
AI. Back in the olden days when I first played The Talos Principle, I was convinved that AI would be cool and offer us fascinating insights into the mysteries of consciousness. I never expected… this
The biggest ones were I was religious and became atheist, was vegetarian and now eat meat sometimes, and I was a nominalist and am a platonist
Israel.
I thought it was complicated but they had a right to the land because of the holocaust, that countries around them should learn to get along with Israel
Now I know founding Israel was a mistake. Explicitly saying it’s a Jewish state will inevitably lead to other groups being suppressed, i.e. Apartheid if not outright genocide. And they are not hated in the region because Muslims and Jews cannot get along, but because Israel was built entirely on stolen land, and they are still in the process of stealing more and genocide those who stand in their way
The US
That the world was ran by a cabal of evil people, genuinely thought it was mostly conspiracy theory and it wasn’t so organized and fucked up. How naive.
Oh don’t worry, there’s plenty of unorganized and fucked up pieces in there. Just enough to eventually jam the gears and make it year itself apart and kill us all. So it’ll all work out in the end.
That Dems were a leftist party and cared about helping people.
Then I finished high school and started actually paying attention.
The only thing I’ve gone 180 on is my hatred of Bob Dylan. Couldn’t stand hearing his voice growing up when my parent’s played him. Then I learned to like cover versions of his songs. After a watching a complete unknown I became a Dylan fan.
Homophobia was the norm where I grew up in the '80s and '90s. Took me until the late '90s to start questioning that, and probably a year or two more to become completely cleansed of it.
I used to be anti-nuclear energy until I learned a bunch of science and engineering behind it. Turns out things are less scary when you know more about them.
Edit: I also learned that it’s okay, and usually preferable, to not have a strong opinion about things that you don’t know about.
Doesn’t matter how great the engineering is behind it, it’s the human part that scares me.
The main problem with nuclear power is that it’s the most expensive form of electricity. People who say otherwise are only looking at the cost of running the generator, rather than including all the true costs involved in generating each watt, which is called the “Levelized Cost Of Electricity” (LCOE)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Levelized_cost_of_electricity
So there’s no reason to build any new nuclear generators now that renewables+storage are the cheapest form of electricity, and are also the easiest and fastest to build.
The problem is that LCOE is an imperfect metrics that does not take into account storage properly for grid with high percentage of renewables (that requires significantly more battery storage than current 4h window considered in LCOE). LCOE also does not account completely for time effects associated with matching electricity production to demand. There is no clear metric for this, given that the cost depends on the structure of the grid itself and is specific for each country, but the Wikipedia article you posted show in the graph a very incorrect picture. Renewable (solar and wind) + storage is in the $80–150/MWh range, while nuclear is $130–200+/MWh range. It is worth noticing that nuclear cost is very high in Europe and US but can be actually very cheap (reason why china, the world leader on renewable is also world leader on new power plants). Estimation for new Chinese nuclear is at $62/MWh (https://www.renewable-ei.org/en/activities/column/REupdate/20240927.php)
All measures are imperfect, that doesn’t mean it’s totally meaningless and should be disregarded. And it also seems like you’re referencing outdated data, as the cost of battery storage seriously decreased in 2025. But by any measure i can find, nuclear is significantly more expensive than renewables+storage. Regarding China, their data is generally not trustworthy on any topic, but yes I’m sure nuclear can cost a lot less there than elsewhere when you can steamroll over the citizens that would be effected by a powerplant’s construction, operation, and waste storage.
I’m not an expert in this at all, but I believe that private capital isn’t investing their own money in new nuclear construction, and that tells the whole story about the cost per watt of nuclear. If nuclear was cheaper per watt after all costs were considered then private capital would be building new nuclear, but they aren’t, so that means it clearly isn’t.
EDIT
I just looked at your link and it pretty clearly says the opposite of everything you said. Quote from the intro of your article:
[renewable energy] largely prevails over nuclear in China, the United States, and Europe – the world’s three largest power systems, as well as in Japan.
And
New wind and solar projects are much cheaper than new reactors.
I have never disputed that in general solar+storage is cheaper, I am disputing the data in that Wikipedia article that make it looks like it is 20 times cheaper. It is not that much cheaper, and china build lot of nuclear because grid diversification is more valuable then just making it cheaper. Production cost and energy price are independent variables and nuclear bring energy price down as it stabilizes the grid.
Storage cost is going down, but storage demand by energy produced is going up as you need much more storage then just peak hour demand as you are shutting down load following power plant generator like coal, nuclear and gas.
The link I shared is to provide the reference to $62/MWh stated above.
used to be reddit atheist (extremely cringe). now im much more agnostic and acknowledge that it’s pretty impossible to be completely sure about these things.
Religions are dumb, at least that’s clear
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Ok
Same here
That Trumpers can be reasoned with and redeemed.
I held this belief until Jan 6th, but I’ve only felt more validated that Trump supporters are fundamentally irredeemable monsters who should be treated like hostile terrorists rather than fellow citizens.
I lost that when a family member looked me in the face and told me that flu shots are called “flu shots” because they aren’t actually vaccines. We are in a psychic war, and we are losing
I wasn’t a supporter of euthanasia until I worked in a residential aged care facility.
That’s dark. People really do just be putting their parents in those buildings to die, aren’t they?
I used to be excited and optimistic about new technologies. Now I’m just jaded.
Google, Reddit, etc. are good. Now I know the horrors and they are obviously our worst enemies.
That we don’t need school and it’s useless. I used to not like going to school when I was younger. Now I love it and look forward to almost every day, especially now that this is my last year in high school.
Well, both started out fine. It’s just that greed always drives everything down the shitter.
Google once had the Slogan “dont be evil” but not anymore.
Yeah I used to love google. They were the plucky upstart disrupting the microsoft ecosystem.
Used to be that Google offered applications and services that rivaled or surpassed the established pay-for alternatives. Now… FOSS is the new Google, Google is the new Microsoft, and Microsoft is innovating a whole new category of shitty and ubiquitous slopware.
Nah, FOSS isn’t the new google.
It’s a normal part of a market cycle that a cheeky upstart, a disruptor, will enter with less inertia and a fresh approach. Inevitably they become the incumbent with the same problems as those they displaced.
I think FOSS holds the same position it always has - low cost, generally low “perceived” quality. However, as the higher perceived quality brands become hostile to users regarding privacy and features like AI, that perception of quality around FOSS is changing, but not to an extent that’s significant in the market.
What I mean is, FOSS has become an appealing option to you and I because we care about privacy. In general though FOSS is in the same position it always has been.
I was raised conservative, back-country compound with apocalypse preppers, homeschooling, israel prophecy, the whole nine yards. I was raised with The 700 Club and Rush Limbaugh playing every day and night.
I read science books that distant family members managed to smuggle to me in gift boxes alongside other “safe” books like Kid’s bibles, I learned more and more about the world around me, I started collecting my own book collection and just read and read and read, and the doubts started to grow, uneasy, shameful, scary-as-fuck doubts.
But the big turn happened when I got out of there, and America started one it’s many wars and I was watching FOX news cover it. A humvee passes a civilian box truck and shredded it to pieces with an automatic grenade launcher. Probably a family trying to escape the city… cut to the host, smiling and praising America’s might, and that’s when it hit me: We’re the bad guys.
A few more things really sealed it, when I had friends start to come back from these conflicts in boxes, or a couple guys I knew who blew their own brains out after coming home. I still despair at these horrific wastes of life and I can’t figure out why more people don’t see life as precious. How fucking stupid do you have to be to justify war, murder and causing destruction to society.
God it’s awkward now to look back but I used to vote conservative.
There’s a phrase here “temporarily embarrassed millionaires”, referring to people who vote for policies that benefit wealth people because they identify as a wealthy person even though they are absolutely not. That was me.
And America is doing it again. While I think Iran’s government is even more evil, a war is not the right thing to do.
