integer42

Its a nice appeal to simplicity to say nuclear is just 'heating water and spinning a turbine', I could also say the sun is a very large carbon-free maintenance-free opex-free reactor in the sky and we just need to design a secondary stage of the power plant to transform the energy to electricity. And instead of pistons OR turbines, we can use a new type of machine specifically built for this purpose aka renewable energy technologies.

The reality is it doesn't matter how you word it or what you think should be simpler. Its what the economy can actually build, and including risk, buying solar panels which have no moving parts and last for decades are currently the more efficient way to add a watt to the grid.

Your "blunt" assertion where you predict the capacity of the grid to accomodate renewables and the quantity of battery storage and the feasibility of every potential upcoming storage technology probably requires a few sources to be taken seriously as well.

Nuclears not some secret unexplored concept at this point. If it were competitive it would be competing. Its costs are too high, not due to regulations due to the sheer amount of resources involved in mining, refining, and operating. Not to mention initial construction.

I agree we can't predict the future, so why hydrogen is the only synthetic fuel being discussed. There is a laundry list of contenders. Each with different properties, some exceeding hydrogen in terms of energy density, ease of storage, efficiency of production, and so on. Methanol, dimethyl ether, etc.

Manufacture of synthetic fuels pairs nicely with overproduction of cheap renewable energy sources, and some amount of it is necessary for a niche of applications that require energy density or other aspects of combustion.

So, exactly as you said, why should we pick winners wrt hydrogen vs any other synthetic fuel?

This is another problem that would simultaneously be solved with simpler tax. Government pays for things by paying for things, and also effectively pays for things by giving tax breaks hidden in the 50,000 pages of tax code that now simultaneously how the government collects revenue and pays for things, and is completely incomprehensible to most people.

See ~26 minute into this interview for a more in depth proposal that makes a lot of sense. Separate collecting money and spending money. https://www.econtalk.org/john-cochrane-on-economic-growth-an...

When 4g/LTE was new, a coworker was an early adopter of whatever cellphone that was one of the first to support it. They were getting somewhere ~250 mbps on speed test.

Fast forward to everyone having 4g phones, now in practice I see like 1-2% of those speeds typically.

I have no idea the inner workings of starlink's protocol, but these aspects of wireless seem inevitable. once theres more simultaneous connections than in limited beta, each connection gets a smaller time slice or less frequency band, no?

I do not see how its solved either.

Currently I have rural DSL, approximately 3mbps down, 1 mbps up, but cheaper and reliable. The one person who has starlink beta is posting 200+ mbps screenshots but if everyone here connects I'm skeptical the result isn't slower, less reliable, more expensive than what's already here.

Or you're just a regular person who can detect silicon valley flavored self help platitudes