Other interesting interviews: the historicity of Jesus of Nazareth with Bart Ehrman and also Thomas Schmidt (using Josephus' Testimonium), the date of Christmas with Philipp Nothaft, 'pagan origins' of Easter with Andrew Henry (Religion for Breakfast channel), Tom Holland. Good weblog posts too.
Thanks for the links. I'd seen her before and liked what she had to say, and just subscribed.
As an ADHD nerd I find myself with "so much to see, so little time to do it", and a fair chunk of that time is learning about religion -- a subject I am not at all a fan of. But I feel compelled to better understand it because the world is filled with people who are effectively insane in their worldview and they want to impose that worldview on me.
> I ride with a comm system that I play media over and trying to be reflective of my past and I don’t see it.
One risk is your focus going from what's on the road to what's coming into your ears.
This may have some useful mental aspects if you're doing a long-distance drudgery ride down Route 66 with nothing much happening in between pitstops, but it's another thing on I-5 or I-95 with all sorts of chaotic lane changes going on.
Visual awareness is much more important for safety than sound especially once your at speed. Distracted driving is completely different and can happen anywhere. We should be arguing that cars should not have any speakers if that’s the case.
It's a debate spectrum / sliding scale on how society wants to go, but at the very least one should be aware of the risk factors and be mindful of where your attention is.
> I am a bit stunned reading this.. Is this a common perspective of motorcyclists?
No.
For example, every beginner-advice thread in /r/motorcycle has a highly-upvoted comment(s) recommending ear protection, including many folks stating they wish they had started using it earlier.
And even if it is conceded that sound may not save you from other vehicles, ear pro(tection) reduces the health risk of hearing loss that would effect other aspects of your life.
> Agreed. Unrelated pro-tip: wearing them while riding a motorcycle. Reduces fatigue and transforms a rough experience into almost luxurious. Highly recommended.
What kind of NRR rating, active or passive, do they have?
I wear disposable foam plugs when riding, and haven't ever considered using the AirPods I have. I find the sound of the machine part of the experience of riding and wouldn't really want to get rid of it; I treat the moto sound as a kind of white noise that's different that everything else in my life (though this is with a short-ish commute, and not long-distance drudgery).
If I wanted music or comms I would probably lean more towards ear plugs plus a Cardo/Sena unit. Or perhaps something with an official ANSI/CSA NRR rating, like Isotunes.
The reason they don't (and won't) have an NRR rating is that they're only useful for constant noise, and not for impulse sounds. There's no question that Airpods are not industrial PPE, for instance.
But I also ride with foamies most of the time (laser lites) and airpods occasionally, and I'd guess that the bike and wind are maybe 10-15% louder with airpods. The foamies win out for actually staying in my ears when I put my helmet on, but if I can get it on then the airpods stay in place fine.
Surprisingly, when I was looking for a rough equivalent to NRR for Airpods, I discovered that Apple does advertise their ANC as hearing protection[1], which I'll assume the FDA has now permitted, because Apple didn't used to make that claim because the FDA wouldn't permit it. They don't offer an NRR and they do warn against impulse sounds, but that KB article suggests a 20dB drop, which is nothing compared to foamies but is in the same range as musicians' earplugs or hardhat earmuffs, and probably better than Loops.
> Any video surveillance system is foiled by a simple mask.
Do not under-estimate the number of thieves on the left-hand side of the bell curve: if you can deal with those that's half the population that's less of a problem.
(The thieves on the right-hand side of the bell curve generally work on Wall Street and generally don't do break-and-enters.)
> I think you mean unbelievably expensive and takes an eternity to build outside of China and Korea.
Japan was able to start construction on a new nuclear reactor and have its construction (and start commercial service) with-in five years, and did so every year from the mid-1980s to the early-2000s:
The first unit you build will be expensive, the second less so, the third even less. Economies of scale work just as well for nuclear plants as they do for widgets: Vogtle Unit 3 was expensive AF, Unit 4 cost 30% less.
Turns out if you don't know what you're doing, things can get be expensive because you're learning lessons along the way, but if/once you do know what you're doing costs drop.
If you have a site that's approved for a nuclear power, there is overhead in getting that approval, but once you have a site you can roll through multiple reactors.
It's similar to the housing crisis: all this talk about pre-built components to make building homes/mid-rises/etc faster ignores all the planning approval and NIMBY objections that need to be ploughed through first.
> No reactor has yet even reached the operating age of 60 years. That 80 years number is wholly speculative.
Ontario's Bruce A site (Units 1-4) have an age of ~45 years, and has just finished refurbishment (ahead of schedule and under budget) to run for another few decades:
> "Cheap nuclear" is a pipe dream that has never been realized. Not even Chinese nuclear (no environmentalists there) is anywhere near as cheap as solar.
In Ontario, Canada, 50% of all power comes from nuclear and costs CAD 0.12/kWh (USD 0.08/kWh); see Table 2:
Ontario's Financial Accountability Office, which reports to provincial parliament and is independent of the government, concluded that at least for the refurbs:
> * The FAO estimates that the Plan will result in nuclear generation supplying a significant proportion of Ontario electricity demand from 2016 to 2064 at an average price of $80.7/MWh in 2017 dollars. (For reference, the 2017 Nuclear Price is $69/MWh and the current price of electricity for most residential and small business ratepayers is $114.9/MWh.)
> * The Nuclear Price will be higher than the average price of $80.7/MWh during the majority of the time that the reactors are being refurbished from 2016 to 2033. Post refurbishment, ratepayers will benefit from a lower than average Nuclear Price.
> * Overall, despite near-term Nuclear Price increases, the Plan is projected to provide ratepayers with a long-term supply of relatively low-cost, low emissions electricity.
> * OPG will realize a financial return from the operation of the DNGS and PNGS. OPG is owned by the Province and any return would improve the Province’s fiscal position. There is no significant fiscal impact to the Province from the refurbishment of reactors at the BNGS as it is operated by Bruce Power, a private sector organization.
I was not able to find a similar report (pro or con) for new build, though I think the current plan with some SMRs in Ontario is dumb: if we decide on more nuclear, we should stick with big(ger) CANDU, as there's little point in small reactors in a large grid like Ontario.
Renewable programs have also cost Ontario ratepayers quite a bit of money, for not a lot of electricity generated:
It was broken up into "constituent" components in 1998, and the a lot of the nuclear plant construction financing debt didn't fit neatly into any one of them, so a separate legal entity was created: Ontario Electricity Financial Corporation (OEFC).
Ratepayers pay their electrical bills, the money goes to local utilities and entities like OPG and Hydro One, which in turn pay OEFC.
The claim that it was bankrupt was a line used by Mike Harris et co to justify privatization.
It was a government owned utility, it couldn’t go bankrupt in the traditional sense since it has taxpayer backing.
But its finances were completely underwater with no way out due to the debt from nuclear construction.
After the breakup the public were left with $38B in debt from nuclear construction. Which the subsequent nuclear company was unable to pay off, or it would of course not have been restructured.
> But its finances were completely underwater with no way out due to the debt from nuclear construction.
The debt from nuclear construction was being paid off then, just like it is being paid off right now: OEFC holds the debt and has revenue to pay it off. An article from someone who is not a fan of nuclear, but is also not a fan of Harris's non-sense:
> Harris claimed Hydro was so badly in debt as to be bankrupt. This claim was proven false by the final Ontario Hydro financial report in March of 1999 which showed that $1 billion of Hydro’s debt had been paid down and was on track to be paid off in 20 years. At the time critics said: “wouldn’t we all like to have a 20-year mortgage on our home because then you have an asset that serves you well!”
That’s an extremely rosy picture not aligned with reality.
You can’t compare it with a house mortgage.
They had X in earning potential in a set time frame.
The debt accumulated was X + Y.
After the restructuring the public were left as bagholders of the ”+ Y” since it would be impossible to pay it off reasonably under the current framework.
A new framework was created where this stranded debt was paid off as a forced separate line item on everyone’s bills.
In other words. They were bankrupt, if the state hadn’t stepped in then they would not have been able to amortize the debt in the expected timeframe.
> In Ontario, Canada, 50% of all power comes from nuclear and costs CAD 0.12/kWh (USD 0.08/kWh); see Table 2:
The website does not open for me. Are the quoted prices consumer prices including tax or wholesale prices before tax?
If it’s the latter, 8 cents is not that cheap and comparable to the average price per kWh (all sources) in Germany. In most cases in most places, the lion’s share of electricity costs is tax and infrastructure refinancing, not actual production. Levellized cost of PV+storage is well below new nuclear virtually in every deployment scenario.
> For many years it was actually cheaper than (methane/natural) gas:
Because NG is one of the most expensive ways to produce electricity, if you are not producing NG yourself locally AND don’t have to pay for environmental costs.
Germany spends 10x more than france on transmission precisely because of ren expansion. Curtailment payments are much higher too. So you are right that taxes are different - depending on your pathway, you have no choice. Germany has highest household prices in EU after ireland despite 18bn/y in EEG subsidies to lower them.
That's because the utility went bankrupt and its construction costs were absorbed onto the public debt.
Nuclear is cheap to operate. It's expensive to build and expensive to decommission. Any analysis that doesn't include those two costs is highly misleading.
> That's because the utility went bankrupt and its construction costs were absorbed onto the public debt.
Ontario Hydro did not go bankrupt.
It was broken up into "constituent" components in 1998, and the a lot of the nuclear plant construction financing debt didn't fit neatly into any one of them, so a separate legal entity was created: Ontario Electricity Financial Corporation (OEFC).
Ratepayers pay their electrical bills, the money goes to local utilities and entities like OPG and Hydro One, which in turn pay OEFC.
The claim that it was bankrupt was a line used by Mike Harris et co to justify privatization.
As an Ontarian, the thought of spending $500B on a couple of reactors makes me furious. Ontario is not going to become competitive again with the most expensive electricity in the world.
At least when it comes to refurbishment, the independent (reports to provincial parliament) FAO found:
> Overall, despite near-term Nuclear Price increases, the Plan is projected to provide ratepayers with a long-term supply of relatively low-cost, low emissions electricity.
New-nuclear is worthy of discussion, but given we have stood up supply chains via the refurbishment process, there's a lot of knowledge out there. My current largest complaint with the new-nuclear plans is the SMRs.
Can you provide a citation for the $500B? Because Carney has mentioned federal money in that amount for projects Canada-wide that include "energy" generally, but not nuclear specifically.
I did find this (potential?) $100B number on Ontario nuclear energy:
but if you take that number and 'ammortize' it over the average 40-year life span of reactors, it comes to $2.5B/year (in capex), which is about ~1% of the provincial budget. I'm not sure how much raw GW capacity that would add, or how many GWh would be generated annually, to do the math on the per-kWh (capex?) cost.
The article goes over the pros and cons of various points in the energy mix debate.
* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lq1ksVVeRWI
* https://historyforatheists.com/2025/04/interview-dr-ada-palm...
Other interesting interviews: the historicity of Jesus of Nazareth with Bart Ehrman and also Thomas Schmidt (using Josephus' Testimonium), the date of Christmas with Philipp Nothaft, 'pagan origins' of Easter with Andrew Henry (Religion for Breakfast channel), Tom Holland. Good weblog posts too.
Also on the Toldinstone channel:
* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-ws87TCojyc