With our billionaires looking to nuclear power for their emerging AI data centers, I was wondering about costs. Found some data in various places and it was looking like nukes were 9x the price to generate electricity compared to wind and solar. Then I found an article on the new Georgia nuclear plant that does the math for me. It’s 10x. And nuclear is getting more expensive while renewables are rapidly decreasing in price. When you figure in operational costs of nukes are 20% it is starting to look like shutting down existing plants could be a big saver. Well, a saver for energy users. A big problem for people who own the debt used to finance those nuke plants. Whoops!

Georgia’s new nuclear plants drive US power sector clean-up

While I don’t follow it too closely there seems to be significant changes happening in Mexico. As Llosa famously said:

In 1990, Peruvian writer Mario Vargas Llosa famously described Mexico under the PRI as being “the perfect dictatorship”, stating: “I don’t believe that there has been in Latin America any case of a system of dictatorship which has so efficiently recruited the intellectual milieu, bribing it with great subtlety. The perfect dictatorship is not communism, nor the USSR, nor Fidel Castro; the perfect dictatorship is Mexico. Because it is a camouflaged dictatorship.” The phrase became popular in Mexico and around the world until the PRI fell from power in 2000.

Since the final losses of the long empowered PRI party, Mexico has seen a legalizing of abortion, a woman president and now an undoing of the lifetime powers of their supreme court. From The Guardian (UK).

Mexico supreme court judges resign over reforms to allow voters to elect judiciary

i would call it a sobering report, but it’s worse than that. From the Commonwealth Fund via the Guardian: Comparing Deaths from Gun Violence in the U.S. with Other Countries

The interesting bit is some US states have higher gun death rates than countries at war or with significant civil unrest.

For instance, Mississippi’s rate of firearm-related violence (28.5 per 100,000 people) was nearly double that of Haiti (15.1 per 100,000) in 2021, when mercenaries assassinated the country’s president, unleashing a fresh round of gang warfare which pushed the country into a state of civil war.

Some US states have firearm death rates comparable to countries in conflict, report says

i was in Phoenix this weekend and saw lots of Waymo self driving taxis around. I have had a Tesla for quite a while now and have been skeptical of their self driving technology. While the Waymo cars look a bit odd with a big lidar (?) sensor on top and other sensors bulging out around the corners, I was intrigued. I also learned that they were only for surface roads and would not take the highways. Ok.

Had a short trip to make and decided to give it a go. Installed the app and found it easy to use, more or less an Uber clone. First thing was it didn’t come right to us like a taxi or Uber would. We had to walk out to the road from the hotel front door. Not a big deal. I used Bluetooth on my phone to open the doors and we were off. The car was a nice, nondescript Jaguar and was a brisk ride. It talked to us and gave information on how the system worked (door locks, etc). Got to the destination and again it dropped off on the side street two doors down from the actual drop off location, which was on a sort of busy street. Again, not a huge problem. I was wondering if the robots were going to ask for a tip, but it did not. All in all a pleasant experience.

Technical details: first, I spent most of my adult life working with fairly high end image processing hardware and software, including a stint in my youth working on the military’s Autonomous Land Vehicle. I was a bit skeptical of Teslas approach and claims. Taking an “AI” approach seems problematic to me, since such systems are difficult to analyze and often fail spectacularly. Not things you want in a vehicle. When Tesla moved to an image-only approach and even eliminated some basic sensors, I was even more skeptical. But I like the Waymo approach and will use it again. Granted it is just for local roads and Phoenix seems to be a near ideal environment, with good weather most of the time and grid-like streets that are mostly in good repair. I can even see owning this sort of technology in some future vehicle.

18 Life-Learnings from 18 Years of The Marginalian

i noticed a few years back that there seemed to be big spurts of inflation after wars. Makes sense, since it is usually a big government expenditure. I suppose economists all know this, but I don’t recall seeing this anywhere. I will go so far as to say COVID was a sort of war, and the entire world had a bout with inflation afterwards. Saw this in the French newspaper Le Monde today. Glad I’m not applying for a mortgage in Russia.

Russia hikes interest rates to 21%, highest since 2003

Been organizing my files. Old emails, photos, etc. I was making a backup when everything slowed down and died. Couldn’t even reboot. Thought maybe my new little 1 TB SSD drive had died. Managed to mount it on a other machine and it was readable — but 100% full! Never thought I would need more than 1 TB for personal storage, but I just ordered a new 2 TB drive from Amazon.

The Baffler takes on data analytics in the NFL.

Knowers of Ball

i used to read Martin Sosnoff’s financial column in Forbes many years back. I was wondering what happened to him and I see he is retired, 93, and still putting out them occasional blog post. Really enjoyed this one.

You Can’t Take This Boy Outta The East Bronx

I have never been a fan of Cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin. Mostly because I don’t see a use case, besides crimes like money laundering. There is a mostly untold story about how Silicon Valley Billionaires lurched from the Democratic to the Republican party just in the last few months. It happened very quickly and happened after a brief meeting with one of the candidates. As best I can tell it is all about cryptocurriencies and huge windfalls coming to venture capital firms like Andressen Horowitz if crypto regulations are loosened. There may be better articles on the subject but I haven’t found them. Of course it isn’t complicated. Rich guys promised lots of money for supporting a different candidate. From The American Prospect magazine.

Valley of the Shadow