The subsidy per KWh from Hinkley Point C is roughly equal to to the current market rate for electricity because of the guaranteed price needed to build the plant, so the electricity effectively costs twice as much.
Holy crap: "In October 2013 the Government agreed a deal with the French state-owned energy giant to guarantee it a price of £92.50, index-linked to inflation, for every megawatt-hour of electricity the £18bn nuclear plant would produce over a 35 year period."
That's madness. The same madness, IMHO, inherent to most 'targeted' energy generation subsidies. Although, it's a little hilarious that they've managed to get themselves into a situation where their own subsidies will be competing with one another (i.e. subsidising some other non-nuclear generator will reduce wholesale electricity prices, forcing them to pay out more because of their guaranteed 'strike-price' for Hinkley).
However, just reading that Guardian article, there's some pretty questionable thinking going on at the NOA if their quoted statements are representative:
Supporting early new nuclear projects could lead to higher costs in the short term than continuing to support wind and solar. The cost competitiveness of nuclear power is weakening as wind and solar become more established,” according to the report, titled Nuclear Power in the UK.
I don't understand this fixation on short-term costs (and yes I do understand that money has a time-value). Given climate change is a long-term problem, and we're probably going to be generating electricity well into the future, why are short-term costs in any way relevant? Also, despite being depressingly common, weasel phrases like 'the cost competitiveness of nuclear power is weakening' really have no place in a government report on a matter of this importance. Is the financial case presently stronger or weaker for nuclear? And which option maximises net social welfare? Those are the only relevant questions in my mind.
“The decision to proceed with support for nuclear power therefore relies more on strategic than financial grounds: nuclear power is needed in the supply mix to complement the intermittent nature of wind and solar,” it added.
Meaning it is a financial issue? No matter how you choose to solve the intermittancy problem, they all cost money. Very sizeable amounts of money. Pumped-hydro plants and HVDC lines don't exactly grow on trees.
What you've just calculated there is the cost of giving everyone, including middle class and rich people, a $20k tax break. Obviously this wouldn't work, as the amount of tax in and out of the system needs to be the same. The easiest method or distribution to understand is negative income tax:
Would it work in real life? Dunno. Lets see what the outcome of the various tests are. The key question isn't the maths actually, but whether people will choose to work enough to support the system.
> Really, the permissive licenses allow the code to show up in places that copyleft licenses would not allow it. There are a ton of open source projects used in Microsoft Windows or iOS thanks to their permissive licensing -- and neither Microsoft nor Apple are legally obliged to give anything back.
This whole sentence is backwards isn't it? A libre license does not restrict code from being used by Microsoft or Apple, it is those companies that restrict their developers from using libre licensed code. The license doesn't care who uses it. Apple used the GCC project as their primary compiler for many years, contributing objective-c to it.
> Yes, we do "have to meet FDA compliance." I can't define "have to meet" and I work here. Of course, I'm just an engineer.
You are not an engineer. This is a protected term in the US and other countries. If you were a professional engineer, you would be bound by a legal and moral framework preventing you from doing work on unsafe medical equipment.
There is a good argument that there should be a software equivalent of protected engineer status for this kind of work. This kind of story should be a wake up call. I personally had no idea that critical medical equipment would be running on MS windows...
> Imagine what it is like to be black in a country where just a few generations back you carried at all times in mixed-race race situations the possibility of being assaulted without recourse or lynched, or in present times accused and convicted of a crime you didn't commit or shot on sight for being in the wrong place at the wrong time.
> Imagine what it is like to be Jewish and have 85% of your relatives systematically wiped out in living memory.
I think you're taking a devils advocate position here, but this is interesting if true. I'm not sure how the actions of people 60-80 years ago should affect how we view ~20-year-olds today? For example, how is the behaviour of white germans in 1945 related to white americans or british in either 1945 or 2015? I think we were on the opposite side of that war.
As for black lynchings in the american south, again this is a localised issue. But lets say your university is in an area where it happened, how likely is it that someones grandfather was involved in a lynching? Pretty small. But even if they were, should someone today be associated with their grandparents criminal behavior? I don't see how.
These things get carried forward culturally. The modern Jewish experience is very much rooted in the Holocaust, and the fear that it might happen again at any time. The Holocaust was not the first, or even the largest such pogrom -- note that there is a word coined precisely to describe genocide events targeting jews -- it was just the closest to the current generation of jews in western countries. It's hard to explain politics regarding present-day Israel without this context, for example. So yes, many Jews can relate with growing up being told that there were exterminators around every corner and that does have consequences..
Likewise, although I have less personal experience here, even if lynchings were not everyday events or impacted every black American family, the cultural impact carried forward can still be profound.
And yes, I am taking a devil's advocate position. In many cases such as those described in the OP and other comments here political correctness has been taken way, way to far. There is a difference between incitement and a listener's general uncomfort with subject matter. Especially in the context of a university there must be a free exchange of ideas and the ability to have discourse on any subject matter without fear of academic retribution or censorship.
> It's hard to explain politics regarding present-day Israel without this context, for example.
Not really. The Holocaust wasn't a factor in deciding to build a wall along the West Bank. The suicide bombers that would drive from Ramallah to Tel Aviv and blow themselves up in restaurants were.
Europeans and liberals have constructed this narrative that you are espousing. They want to believe that the Holocaust is the key to understanding Israeli policy. This allows them to dismiss Israeli policy decisions in the face of geopolitical events as simply an irrational and tragic response to their cultural trauma.
There is no concept of benefit fraud in a BI system. Everyone by default qualifies for the same level of BI. Your government paycheck starts at the max value and can only go down from there, which happens when you are paying back that money in the form of tax. The only type of fraud detection needed would be the tax fraud system that already exists.
I'm not saying everything about BI would work (although I hope it does), but the fact that you could cut benefit overhead is self evident I think.
Well, that is already tax fraud correct? Someone already has to check for that. The savings come from all the additional checks you would no longer need to do to see if people are really disabled, what their marital situation is, where they live, etc.
In most of European countries, people has an ID card and SS number, and there is a centralized database controlled by the state. A single person cannot have 2 different IDs. At least, it is not something trivial to do.
There is no arguing that basic income, welfare, disability benefit etc. are socialist. That is not deriding them, it is an accurate description. It's strange that this is a bad term in the US, not so here in the EU.
It's not even slightly socialist. People talk as if all government action is socialist, but socialism includes controlling the means of production not just taxes. In the end the problems with socialism are organizational in nature, and large corporations face the same issues of misaligned incentives.
Edit: A minimum wage is socialist a minimum income is not.
Since he mentions he is European, I think that he is thinking about Social Democracy rather than Socialism (which has a very clear economic meaning which, like you said, assumes state/social control of the means of production).
Friedman and Hayek were not socialists. One of the points is to get rid of the massive government overhead of distributing welfare. This particular aspect is anti-socialist.
Sometimes, posts like this appear on hacker news that are completely impenetrable. I read the page for RunC and the only thing I could find out about it from that page is that it is a "Container", and these are its specs. A "Container" is something that is used by "Docker". "Docker" is a program that "allows you to compose your application from microservices". A "microservice" is "a software architecture style, in which complex applications are composed of small, independent processes" (we're down to wikipedia at this point). So a "microservice" is an abstraction of unix design, and finally we're on solid ground. If you were interested you might be able to work backwards through this list of projects, researching what each one does, and then you could find out what RunC actually is.
The unstated assumption of this announcement is that if you haven't heard of Docker, you may have been living under a rock. It arguably has more hype after two years than Java did in 1996-97.
The other part of the problem is that this is a rapidly evolving space with a ton of money and attention being pored into engineering and competitive battles playing out, and not so much in the marketing and clear explanations. runC is in part a symbolic "bury the hatchet" moment for a public feud over standards with CoreOS and others that began in December 2014. If you haven't been following the inside baseball, it it's all kind of confusing.
When you say the amount subsidised, what is your source, and what do you mean by 'more'? Do you mean more in total, or per kwh generated?