This isn’t about shareholders being wiped out. It’s about account holders of what they thought were bank accounts losing everything because their accounts were powered on the back end by a company they’d never heard of or directly dealt with.
These are supposed to have AI facial recognition for matching to government issued IDs, which just sounds like a huge attack surface (or even unintentional bugs).
Cigarette vending machines used to be quite common. Even today, there are some alcohol vending machines in controlled areas (some fancy hotels have 24/7 vending machines stocked with a particular brand of champagne bottles).
leftist themed nujob conspiracy mill
The Republican party is ripe for conspiracy theory targets.
Epstein had close ties with Trump and his attorney general Bill Barr (whose father hired Epstein to teach at a prestigious private high school without a college degree, where he was known for ogling the high school girls and showing up to parties where underage drinking was happening). The waitresses and hostesses at Trump’s Mar a Lago were also regularly recruited to work at Epstein’s island. Alex Acosta, the federal prosecutor who agreed to a secret plea deal where Epstein served a slap on the wrist in a local jail instead of real prison was later elevated to Trump’s cabinet, as Labor Secretary.
Now, Trump has named another child sex trafficker as his nominee for Attorney General.
There are suspicious ties between the Saudi royal family and key members in Trump’s orbit, including his son in law Jared Kushner. Elon Musk has been doing sketchy shit with the Saudis and the Russians, as well. Basically everyone in Trump’s circle, including his nominee to be the director of national intelligence, has shady ties with foreign adversaries.
There’s lots of other little things about financial profiteering by the Trump folks: an SBA COVID bailout that went to huge businesses, a move to privatize or sabotage the public postal service and the weather service to help the private competition, arbitrary or politically motivated regulations to help certain businesses while hurting others, etc.
I mean, it really wouldn’t be hard.
There’s been some reporting that Musk’s Super PAC has been paying its workers so well that it’s poached a bunch of the volunteers from the official campaign, and is so poorly run/audited that a lot of the workers are entering false data into the canvassing reports to qualify for bonuses. If that turns out to be true, then it will have been the case that Musk is burning his own money while hurting the Trump campaign.
I’m not ready to call the race, but stories like this at least reassure me that for Republicans, they’re not sending their best.
I made my own “cell phone service” but it only works within 10m of my home.
Upfront costs are expensive. But operational and fuel costs are very low, per MWh.
So take the upfront costs at the beginning and the decommissioning costs at the end, and amortize them over the expected lifespan of the plant, and add that to the per MWh cost. When you do that, the nuclear plants built this century are nowhere near competitive. Vogtle cost $35 billion to add 2 gigawatts of capacity, and obviously any plant isn’t going to run at full capacity all the time. As a result, Georgia’s ratepayers have been eating the cost with a series of price hikes ($700+ million per year in rate increases) as the new Vogtle reactors went online. Plus the plant owners had to absorb some of the costs, as did Westinghouse in bankruptcy. And that’s all with $12 billion in federal taxpayer guarantees.
NuScale just canceled their SMR project in Idaho because their customers in Utah refused to fund the cost overruns there.
Maybe Kairos will do better. But the track record of nuclear hasn’t been great.
And all the while, wind and solar are much, much cheaper, so there’s less buffer for nuclear to find that sweet spot that actually works economically.
That was true in the 70’s, too. You always needed a way to show that people would pay the long term prices necessary to cover the cost of construction.
The big changes since the 70’s has been that competing sources of power are much cheaper and that the construction costs of large projects (not just nuclear reactors, but even highways and bridges and tall buildings) have skyrocketed.
There’s less room to make money because nuclear is expensive, and cheaper stuff has come along.
One of the great sins of nuclear energy programs implemented during the 50s, 60s, and 70s was that it was too cost effective.
I don’t see how any of this has any bearing on financial feasibility of power plants.
For what it’s worth, before the late 90’s there was no such thing as market pricing for electricity, as prices were set by tariff, approved by the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission. FERC opened the door to market pricing with its Order 888 (hugely controversial, heavily litigated). And there were growing pains there: California experienced rolling blackouts, Enron was able to hide immense accounting fraud, etc. By the end of the 2000’s decade, pretty much every major generator and distributor in the market managed to offload the risk of price volatility on willing speculators, by negotiating long term power purchase agreements that actually stabilize long term prices regardless of short term fluctuations on the spot markets.
So now nuclear needs to survive in an environment that actually isn’t functionally all that different from the 1960’s: they need to project costs to see if they can turn a profit on the electricity market, even while paying interest on loans for their immense up front costs, through guaranteed pricing. It’s just that they have to persuade buyers to pay those guaranteed prices, rather than persuading FERC to approve the tariff.
As a matter of business model, it’s the same result, just through a different path. A nuclear plant can’t get financing without a path to profit, and that path to profit needs to come from long term commitments.
It can take over a decade to break even on operation, assuming you’re operating at market rates.
Shit, it can take over a decade to start operations, and several decades after that to break even. Vogtle reactors 3 and 4 in Georgia took something like 20 years between planning and actual operational status.
Now maybe small modular reactors will be faster and cheaper to build. But in this particular case, this is cutting edge technology that will probably have some hurdles to clear, both anticipated and unanticipated. Molten fluoride salt cooling and pebble bed design are exciting because of the novelty, but that swings both ways.
I still think it’s too expensive, and this contract doesn’t change my position. Google is committing to buying power from reactors, at certain prices, as those reactors are built.
Great, having a customer lined up makes it a lot easier to secure financing for a project. This is basically where NuScale failed last year in Idaho, being unable to line up customers who could agree to pay a sufficiently high price to be worth the development risk (even with government subsidies from the Department of Energy).
But now Google has committed and said “if you get it working, we’ll buy power from you.” That isn’t itself a strong endorsement that the project itself will be successful, or come in under budget. The risk/uncertainty is still there.
What, a ghost choked you in Switzerland?
Leave home with spices on a shopping list, come home with syphilis instead.
He’s 12 and can go on for hours about them, rattling off their armor thickness (in mm), caliber of their guns, horsepower of their engines, declination and traverse speeds of their turrets, etc.
On first skim of this comment I thought these were details about trains and I was very concerned about how weaponized trains had become.
This whole thread has way too many people who see the price as some kind of made up number that dictates how people behave, rather than recognizing that the price is a signal about the availability of useful real-world resources.
Even if the prices were strictly mandated by a centrally planned tariff that kept the same price throughout the day, every day, we’d still have the engineering challenge of how to match the energy fed into the grid versus taken out of the grid.
The prices are just a reflection of that technical issue, so solving it still needs to be done.
why don’t they just charge enough
Because who would pay 10 cents per kilowatt hour when there’s someone else who will pay someone to take that energy off their hands?
The problem is caused when the market clearing price is lower than the cost it took to produce it, and some of those costs are in the past.
It’s like getting a boat and going fishing. If you pay $10,000 for the cost of the trip, and bring back $8,000 worth of fish, you can’t just force people buy them from you for a 25% markup.
Pin it to a carbon atom.
Where’s the carbon going to come from? If it’s anywhere but the CO2 in the atmosphere (or at least sequestered on its way to the atmosphere), your energy solution isn’t carbon neutral anymore. And if it is from the atmosphere, then there are efficiency challenges there at concentrating CO2 to be useful for synthetic processes.
Most syngas today comes from biological and fossil feedstocks, so it’s not really a solution to atmospheric CO2 concentrations.
I have doubts that hydrogen will ever work in any industry, but it definitely won’t work for cars. The storage and distribution challenges are never going to make it cost competitive with just regular lithium batteries on a marginal per-joule basis. Even if the energy itself is free, the other stuff will still be more expensive than just charging car batteries off the existing grid.
Current EV batteries are
And just like that you’ve shown that gravity batteries aren’t feasible.
Storage is going to be a big part of the solution going forward. But it’s going to be chemical batteries and thermal batteries, not gravity batteries.
deleted by creator
The “what is a bank” question is complicated, so “fintechs” have been operating in areas that are in some gray areas in between “definitely a bank” versus “definitely not a bank.”
At the most informal, you’ve got things like a roommate who collects everyone’s fair share of rent before sending one payment to the landlord, or a parent who keeps track of their kids’ virtual balances of what the kids are allowed to spend. These definitely aren’t banks.
Then you’ve got things like short term balances between people who deal with each other: an employer who keeps track of hours and pays the employee at the end of the pay period, a retail customer who has some store credit from a returned item, a contractor who periodically invoices a customer for work performed, etc. Despite the “credit” and “balances,” these aren’t bank accounts.
Some gray areas get a little bit more complicated. You have airline mileage and hotel point programs where the miles/points can be used to purchase goods and services, including sometimes those not even being offered by the business where the miles were accumulated.
Then you get into banking-like structures that might be, or might not be banks. Is it banking when you buy something on a periodic payment plan? What about when you put down a deposit to reserve a preorder for something you expect to buy when that product is released? Or give someone a gift card for a specific store? Does it matter if these programs are administered by third parties separate from the buyer or seller?
Even things like Apple Cash or PayPal or Venmo or CashApp perform functions that can be bank-like, or not really bank-like.
Fintechs have looked at the constantly updated rules of what they can or can’t do before needing to comply with certain banking regulations, and usually try to avoid accidentally triggering certain rules. And the rules don’t divide into just bank versus not bank, as many of the rules apply to non-banks that do certain things, and many of the rules don’t apply to even banks that stay out of certain product lines. So it’s not a binary yes or no, but a series of complicated areas where some are yes and some are no.
The big problem, where this Synapse bankruptcy is hurting people, is when people worked with an entity that provides certain services, who relied on the back end on a middleman that provides other services, and then the middleman fails. People operating in the gray areas are exposing themselves to systemic risks they might not fully understand.