Construction costs have been outpacing headline inflation by a huge amount. This has accrued to costs of repairs easily exceeding 20-30% over a few years ago.
I’ve been curious myself to the economics of construction. Wondering if there’s a cool place where this type of stuff I broken down, otherwise I’m having a hard time believing some of these estimates.
Anecdotally my homeowner's insurance increased 34% from last year. When I talked to the underwriters about the huge jump I was told that it was due to the increased cost of rebuilding associated with inflation.
I applaud the aim to make lean and fast websites, but the lack of timer and drag+drop on this game makes it unusable, so I think this actually makes the reverse point -- one should not put non-functional requirements ahead of the function of a product. In other words, this was not a good compromise.
Hard to imagine the tradeoff of using a third party binary library developed this year vs just using urllib.parse being worth it. Is this solving a real problem?
According to itself, it's solving the issue of parsing differentials vulnerabilities: urllib.parse is ad-hoc and pretty crummy, and the headliner function "urlparse" is literally the one you should not use under any circumstance: it follows RFC 1808 (maybe, anyway) which was deprecated by RFC 2396 25 years ago.
The odds that any other parser uses the same broken semantics are basically nil.
I agree that the stdlib parser is a mess, but as an observation: replacing one use of it with a (better!) implementation introduces a potential parser differential where one didn’t exist before. I’ve seen this issue crop up multiple times in real Python codebases, where a well-intentioned developer adds a differential by incrementally replacing the old, bad implementation.
That’s the perverse nature of “wrong but ubiquitous” parsers: unless you’re confident that your replacement is complete, you can make the situation worse, not better.
> unless you’re confident that your replacement is complete
And that any 3rd party libs you use also don't ever call the stdlib parser internally because you do not want to debug why a URL works through some code paths but not others.
Turns out that url parsing is a cross-cutting concern like logging where libs should defer to the calling code's implementation but the Python devs couldn't have known that when this module was written.
It seems unlikely that this C++ library written by a solo dev is somehow more secure than the Python standard library would be for such a security-sensitive task.
Hi, can_ada (but not ada!) dev here. Ada is over 20k lines of well-tested and fuzzed source by 25+ developers, along with an accompanying research paper. It is the parser used in node.js and parses billions of URLs a day.
can_ada is simply a 60-line glue and packaging making it available with low overhead to Python.
Ah, that makes more sense -- it might be a good idea to integrate with the upstream library as a submodule rather than lifting the actual .cpp/.h files into the bindings repo. That way people know the upstream C++ code is from a much more active project.
Despite my snarky comments, thank you for contributing to the python ecosystem, this does seem like a cool project for high performance URL parsing!
I guess you are right that there are 2 commits from a different dev, so it is technically not a solo project. I still wouldn't ever use this in production code.
Ada was developed in eoy 2022, and included in Node.js since March 2023. Since then, Ada powers Node.js, Cloudflare workers, Redpanda, Clickhouse and many more libraries.
"Every few decades an unknown author brings out a book of such depth, clarity, range, wit, beauty and originality that it is recognised at once as a major literary event. This is such a work."
Nevertheless, Infinity and the Mind: The Science and Philosophy of the Infinite by Rudy Rucker is, in my opinion, a better choice for the mathematically inclined layman interested in Goedel's discoveries and plenty of related mathematics. Rucker's book even includes an account of his (somewhat over-enfusive) meeting with the great man.
This doesnt take into account capacity factors. A "800MW" solar plant would be expected to actually product 10-25% of that after day/night and seasons are taken into account. Nuclear plants are more of a 90+% capacity factor.
So even if you discount the capacity by a 25% capacity factor, and use the lower cost per reactor that I originally quoted, this is still cheaper than nuclear. And that's just the up-front investment. Operating costs are much cheaper for solar as well, the majority of the cost is in the initial build.
Given that transmission isn't free, there are areas of the country where solar has a lower capacity factor than this, and solar and wind take more land, there are still cases where nuclear may be a better investment. I'm just pointing out that there are plenty of simple, economic reasons why solar and wind are growing at a much faster rate than nuclear; it's cheaper overall, it requires less up-front capital, etc. Nuclear is likely to fill niches for a long time, but investment in nuclear is not going to be the major way to decarbonize.
Building nuclear in a desert feel a bit like building hydropower dams in a desert. It does not really make sense and whatever the capacity factor is, being in a desert should increase it.
The only real drawback to building solar power in a desert is sand storms. That means the capacity factor is less relevant but life span and repair costs is a different matter. It is a bit similar to ocean wind farms. The capacity naturally goes up, but the salt water and transportation (as well as increased risks to engineers) makes life span and repair a bit more of an issue (it should be noted that most ocean based wind farms tend to use shallows and nature reserves near large cities).
But again, this project is built in a desert. The very definition of a place with consistent amount of sun. I hope the project works out.
There is an ecological cost to miles and miles of solar panels. Desert ecosystems are extremely fragile, and these kinds of projects can be very damaging. It’s not just wasteland. (Said as a desert Southwest denizen and lover who gets the impression that many people think, “oh, there’s no trees? It’s unimportant land.”)
I want the Utes to have success in this, but I don’t want the general attitude to be “trash the desert because there is sun there”.
The ecosystem will change, no doubt about that. Just like it changes when we start agriculture somewhere, or pastoralism. Even if we consider that the new ecosystem of desert with a lot of shade might affect neighboring pristine desert within quite a radius, there will still be a lot left in the foreseeable future. Very much unlike agriculture and pastoralism, which have been pushed into almost every corner even remotely viable for millennia.
It might be worthwhile to exclude certain areas of particularly rare variations of the ecosystem to be built in. But it's easy to end up with too much red tape that will be abused for NIMBY and by people who hide a fossil yolo attitude behind a facade of conservationism.
Perhaps there could be some mechanism for operating some veto quota, "pick the project you want most desperately to be stopped"? That scheme would probably end getting gamed in the ugliest ways, with sacrificial decoy projects getting proposed, not vetoed and then getting built to keep up appearances. Better not, heh.
There is the concept of "agrivoltaics" where solar and agriculture can be colocated. Apparently, certain fruits and veggies grow better with a bit of shade provided by solar panels.
The LCOE cost advantage of alternative energy vs ... everything ... at this point is well known and calculated in Lazard's yearly LCOE study.
Nuke advocates do themselves no favors playing shell games and weasel words with the economics. Nuclear is expensive. The nuclear industry needs to figure out how to make it a lot cheaper. And no, it's not just the NIMBY regulation.
The legacy nuke industry has a ton of deeply embedded lobbying and relationships with the regulatory agencies and congress, including ancillary groups that do fuel rod reprocessing and waste transport, cushy high-cost satellite industries.
Nuclear is stuck in a rut. Economically viable nuclear needs a clean-slate redesign and all the old players need to be thrown out. Computer designs, modern software and sensors, materials, etc. Research LFTR to the wazoo.
One of the big pushes IMO should be the US Navy, which should start using nuclear power for all its fleet ships not just subs/carriers.
Solar is cheaper when you have a flexible and well interconnected grid capable of smoothing out, say, a cloud passing over Ute nation land and abruptly pulling 1GW out of the grid. That kind of grid costs money and we have no idea how much and how achievable it is. The alternative, grid scale storage for the full rated power, is still insanely expensive and makes renewables completely uncompetitive.
Yes, nuclear is getting buried on price, but you make out the total cost of solar much lower and much more certain than it is in reality. Nobody really knows how much will renewables end up costing when they start to make up the majority of production.
Australian research on this suggests renewables will still be cheapest as the grid moves to fully carbon free, includin the cost to integrate with the grid:
> Even with this extra VRE cost in 2030, the answer to whether renewables are the cheapest form of energy is still yes. And it remains so when VRE is at 90 percent of the energy system
Considering that full economies of scale and technology has not yet been matured in solar certainly, and possibly wind, and certainly in battery storage...
Look, you're treating the current LCOE numbers and making the (mistaken or disingenuous) implication that solar/wind won't fall EVEN FURTHER, but they almost certainly will.
With solar, there is perovskites and many other avenues of improvement in the core technology. Both wind and solar will still drop in price from increased economies of scale. And battery storage is going to plummet with sodium ion in the near term, and hopefuly sodium-sulfur techs in the future in addition to whatever grid-specific use cases are developed.
So it's true! Nobody know how much renewables will cost... or HOW LITTLE they will cost... in the long run.
Existing already-built nuclear is woefully noncompetitive, but I'll take it for grid levelling over gas turbine and (ugh) coal, so keep the lights on.
But NEW nuclear? What price are you targeting? I would guess in the timespan of a new nuke plant construction (10 years), solar will drop by 50%-60% in costs (inflation adjusted), and I think wind still has 33% drops coming. I mean, how does a sensible person approve a nuclear project with this degree of uncertainty/evolution/revolution in power costs?
And if you want to talk uncertainty in cost of electricity, the unreliable final construction and operation costs of nuclear are much more unreliable from that standpoint.
Again, this is not about the production price of renewables, which is low and falling quite predictably, but the unknown long term costs of integrating substantial intermittent production into the grid.
Believable models of achieving that goal call for setting up capacity markets where traditional suppliers are paid to not emit, and stand by to intervene when required by weather conditions, achieving close to net zero year round emissions (¹. Nobody really knows how this will end up costing because no such grid exists today.
Grid scale battery storage is still very far from competing with traditional baseload production, even when supplied with free renewables. Sodium has been the next big thing for the last decade, but its only deployments are in the experimental, MWh range. It's still far from a mature, proven technology, let alone one that can disrupt lithium in the gridscale storage space.
Perhaps you are handwaving substantial technical and economic details away and making too bold claims insufficiently supported by data. Not unlike the nuclear fanboys who are seeing thorium fast breeders just around every corner.
(¹ Btw, this is just another nail in the nuclear coffin - coal too - because they can't play nice with a fast moving grid.
> The nuclear industry needs to figure out how to make it a lot cheaper. And no, it's not just the NIMBY regulation.
It is very expensive, there is no way around the extreme engineering costs of nuclear reactors. Even before trying to make then safe from threats extant and possible.
That is before the unknown costs of handling long term waste using technology that has not been proven, or invented, yet
I’m curious, what’s the basis for that claim? I’m surprised to learn that the constellation, incidence rate, and intensity of bullying behaviors don’t vary along sociocultural lines. Do you mean that there are no examples of areas or situations that have been more successful than others at addressing these kinds of youth behaviors?
Of course there is variance, but I'm not aware of any culture that doesn't have bullying in school. Many places generally applauded for being high-trust, harmonious adult societies (the Nordics, Japan, Australia etc) certainly have a problem with it.
Not to advance a position either way here but I will point out that Australia is not a counter example to the thesis that "bullying is ingrained in UK culture".
Canadian, Australian, and other Commonwealth colonies are heavily influenced in education practices by their UK roots.
Nordic countries and Japan make for better counter examples.
One of the best counter examples to the assertion that bullying and anger is ingrained in child rearing across the world might be:
How Inuit Parents Teach Kids To Control Their Anger
LOL since when is Australia seen as "high-trust, harmonious adult society"? It is very USA-like in many ways. And the nordics are hardly any different to anywhere else in Europe in that regard.
Says who? I happens all over the world, but it's hardly very common everywhere, to the degree we hear about it in US and UK. I was very minor and uncommon in my experience.
