The point wasn’t to denigrate solar, but to demonstrate the fallacious beliefs you’re operating under.

Yes, the plant owner will want to maximize the profit of their investments and get as quick a return as possible.

If gas/coal was held to the same exact safety, environmental and waste disposal standards as nuclear, and they should, then those would also need to be run at max throttle to justify the initial expense and have significantly shorter lifespans. It’s a “plant trees under whose shade you do not expect to sit” type issue.

Nothing you have said is an argument against a solar in the day + nuclear at night type of setup. It would certainly be a huge improvement over building out more CO2 based generators.

In the power grid of today (and even more so in the future), that’s fairly slow.

Not really. Reciprocating gas engines are specifically designed for balancing loads with renewables and have maneuvering capabilities in the 25-100% range with the state of the art at ~25%/minute slope.

Startup time is 15min-1hr for gas, 30min-2hr for nuclear.

You’re correct that gas is better on all these metrics, but it’s far more comparable than you’re making it out to be.

Also needs to be mentioned that these are very oversimplified metrics and things look better for nuclear the deeper in the weeds you go imo.

it needs to be able to drop to 0%.

That’s not how any kind of turbine works.

shutting it down means it’s just a hunk of a building costing money.

The same could be said of solar. ‘It’s a very expensive capitol investment and as soon as the sun goes down it’s just a stupidly expensive roof costing money’.

Nuclear can’t quickly scale up and down

It can though. Modern nuclear plants with light water reactors are designed to have maneuvering capabilities in the 30-100% range with 5%/minute slope.

Historically, they were built as baseload plants without load following capability in order to keep the design simple which led to many anti-nuclear activists claiming this. It’s just not true though.

even if it could it’d make nuclear even less economically viable

Why?

It’s why currently gas plants are used as backup: they’re cheap

No. They’re not. The costs are just externalized and safety is, comparitively, neglected.

we don’t have the mental tools

One of the exceptional traits of humans is their ability to build and create tools. Language, reading and mathematics are some of the most powerful tools humans have and they’re all mental tools. Unfortunately that tool making skill is a double edged sword as it’s capable of both creating tools of information/education/etc. and tools of manipulation/misinformation/etc.

It wouldn’t be as much of an issue if there weren’t decades of cultivating mental tools of disinformation and manipulation, marketing/propaganda/public speaking/etc. and if humans can create those tools they can create tools that do the opposite.

Unfortunately, the “evil” tools are currently winning and will take quite a bit of effort to dismantle and healthy/productive tools built in their stead. Hoarding and rampant exploitation are not inherent laws and could be reversed. Seems rather unlikely at the moment, but teetering on the brink of extinction tends to cause pretty radical shifts.

Reduced short term costs. Vaccines aren’t free and operate on a fairly slim profit margin.

More customers in higher profit services. Emergency, surgical and palliative care have significantly higher profits especially since chargemasters are largely given a blank check on which to write the charges on.

“But surely this is bad for the insurance industry who will push against this.” Nope! The biggest obstacle to them raising rates is that to avoid any legal pushback there needs to be something to point at for why their costs increase. Insurance rates will, and currently are, going to rise significantly faster than any payouts.

This isn’t some “Alex jones conspiracy” it’s the entirely predictable outcome of a privatized healthcare system and is only going to get worse. The Alex Jones types are taking advantage of the crisis by selling snake oil cures for it, but they aren’t a primary driver of the problem.

Yes. However the frequency it blocks is ~2.45GHz which is the same frequency as WiFi, Bluetooth, etc. and used to be the only other antenna other than the cellular antenna, where the frequency ranges from 600MHz-2.5GHz.

This used to be good practice because you would first remove the sim card disabling the LTE communication, unless the hardware was compromised, and then place it in the microwave to disable all other signals.

With the introduction and proliferation of eSIM on both devices and carrier sides, removing the SIM card no longer provides much protection and the additional of many other communication methods, most notably 5GHz 802.11x, the microwave trick doesn’t really do anything either.

But it used to work.

Luckily he is American famous.

The usual story here for Americans is that they get arrested for resisting arrest and assulting a police officer and then get sentences to 10+ years in the local gulag.

Immigrants instead get sent to the camps for deportation.

He’s well enough known, there were enough cameras and he’s media/white american savvy enough to avoid the worst outcomes.