Elerond

I would think so, considering that they sold their nuclear reactor business in 2017. "In June 2016 Areva's restructuring plans were made public, including the sale of the majority of its reactor business to EDF in 2017, excluding the Olkiluoto 3 EPR under construction in Finland which will remain with Areva SA. In December 2017, Areva and EDF signed agreements on the transfer of Areva NP's nuclear reactor operations."

That is why it is 12 years late, they have failed to starting from mixing cement and welds adhere Finnish standards. Also Areva seem to though that 2009 deadline was more guideline and actual deadline, but they have had quite harsh lesson both Finnish standards and that deadlines in contracts are actual deadlines, as because of that delay all the extra building cost over that original 3.2 billion comes Areva's pocket. Meaning that Areva is paying over 5.3 billion euros from their own pocket to build that plant.

It is build by French company using Polish workers

Building phase is biggest risk in nuclear power. Because nuclear power plants are complex to build and they are heavily regulated and fault tolerance is almost zero, which can cause massive delays in building them. Like for example here they build new nuclear power plant that starts to operate this year finally (in February 2022 it will be able to produce its full capacity 1600 MW), originally it was scheduled to start operating in 2009, but because of multiple issues it has been delayed for 12 years (project started in 2000, so 21 years to start to finish) and it estimated building cost has increased from 3.2 billion euros to 8.5 billion euros and it delay has caused additional billions of euros lose in forms of needing to buy electricity and heath from alternative sources During that 21 years that it has took to build that power plant they have also build wind power plants that produce 2548 MW with fraction of cost of that nuclear power plant (about 1.5 billion euros). Over 90% of those wind power plants have been build in past 5 years. And there are plans to build 18.5 GW more wind power plants to land and 3 GW to sea in next two decades. So even though nuclear power is much more reliable than wind power, it is easy to out produce nuclear power with wind power and still make more profit from it as long as you are willing to live with the noise and landscape discomfort caused that wind power plants cause.

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/20/us/texas-storm-electric-bills.html?referringSource=articleShare This is reason why I don't like electric market tied price of electricity, as even in best scenarios it gives quite minor savings compared to fixed price and it is vulnerable to price spikes during disasters that will eat all the savings that you could make in decades in couple days. And it does disaster does not need even to be that big, like for example machine break down in one of the base power plants (nuclear power plant, or giant gas/coal power plant) can easily cause 1000% spike for hour or two, even when there is ability to buy electricity from other countries during the outage.

Yeah, although Facebook estimate was "News makes up less than 4% of the content people see in their News Feed." , so they don't see news as something that brings them lots of revenue EDIT: I like that they call it 'News Feed' when 96% content in it is not news

Australian News services don't pay for Facebook for publishing their content there, as Facebook makes its money from ad revenue and selling visibility for the posts. Facebook point for blocking Australian news companies from posting their content in Facebook is that it does not want to pay for them for publishing content in Facebook.

The legislation that caused this was hardline legislation by Australia, which forces US tech companies to pay Australian news companies for their content that appears in their sites. Facebook point in blocking Australian news sites is that it does not want to pay them for content that they publish in its service for free

https://judithcurry.com/2021/02/18/assigning-blame-for-the-blackouts-in-texas/amp/?__twitter_impression=true

Yeah, Facebook is still private company and US based company which allows them to decide what to publish, which includes foreign governments and news organizations, without fearing closure of their business or retribution from their government. US government cannot force them to publish anything because of US constitution, but US constitution of course don't protect them outside of US if they want to do business in countries that aren't US (I mention this because previous discussion about this was about social media companies blocking US politicians and organizations). As in this case Facebook decided not to publish any of Australian news sites because of change in Australian law which they welt were such that they didn't want to even try to comply with it and decided draconian measure of blocking all the content which the new law impacts.

Wind turbines seem to work fine here in -23 degrees of Celsius (-9.4 degrees Fahrenheit), also Gas, Coal and Nuclear plants work, so I would guess that Texas' problems are caused them saving in cold resistance of their infrastructure

Isn't that wrong way, I mean your choice of heating should be effected by your GPU

Does that include transfer or do you pay it separately to company maintaining electrical grid? Like I pay for electricity 0,04€/kWh, but then I pay 0.06€/kWh for transfer plus 4€ per month as base price. It is so nice that you can bid price of electricity (and get that 0.01€/kWh cheaper electricity), but with transfer, grid maintain company has monopoly so there is nothing you can do except to move area where grid is controlled by another company

No, I get my income by making software for public sector, more efficient public sector means less money to me But in real I have campaigned long time for more efficient public sector, and which is why UBI experiments as good as they bring in light how cumbersome current system is and that there is clear need to fix it. And it brings fresh outlooks how system could work.

It is simple bureaucracy + infrastructure to run social security system cost much more than the money that is distributed to people. As officials need to know that nobody who should not get money will not get money even if it adds couple billion per year in the bill

Point of UBI is that everyone gets it and everyone gets same amount. 30% tax for $1000 salary seem extreme high even from Finnish stand point and especially from USA point of view. And $1000 for 40 hours with 30% tax including $300 child care + $200 to travel will make many people opt out even if other option is no income at all. Because that just is not worth it. Lets look Finnish example UBI was 630€ with 0% tax and you can earn your taxes are kept to 0% until you reach 1000€. then it increases bit by pit until you reach 2000€ when you overall tax rate is about 15% Public transportation inside of city cost about 250€ per year and you can travel as much you like. Child care, schools, hospitals, etc. are paid from taxes, so they doesn't cost anything extra over your taxes. So almost all that person earns over 250€ is extra income until they reach salary numbers that are considered high enough to motivate people to work Yeah there should be consideration if UBI should cover living expense or should there be another benefit for low income households, in FInland's UBI experiment later was the option that was tried. As I said 7.2% is the number of people in Finland who live on social security which you get if you don't have any other income even if you actively refuse to take any jobs. That social security is about same size as tested UBI. Finland is still one of the riches countries in the world and its economy has grown quite lot in past 40 years when our social security systems has been in effect. Finland's UBI experiment showed that people in social security were more likely to take job if one was offered them, among unemployed (not including people on social security) there was not indication that UBI any way impacted likelihood that them getting new job. Unemployed people on UBI reported higher happiness than those unemployed people who received unemployment benefit. UBI experiment was too small to make conclusions of its impact to state finances

I am pretty sure that over 90% of population will not do that, at least if about of UBI is about minimum that you need to get by. Playing games all day isn't that nice when buying one means that you don't have money to eat in next two days. I mean that we have system where you get money even if you don't do anything and still only 7.2% of Finland's population lived with our social security in 2019. UBI would improve current system as it would mean that people could take any job without fearing losing their social security, where in current system all income that you get is deduced in amount of social security you receive, meaning that there is no point to take job where you earn less than what social security is.

borrowed money on housing market that increases price of house such speed that it is better to keep house empty than rent it for somebody, as renters lower price that you get from selling the house. Many of the big cities have tens of thousand empty apartments where nobody never lives just for housing markets to make money from selling them around.

Each city has their own system where they either own apartments that rent, or own company that rents apartments or they have deal with private companies that rent houses (or all the above) to homeless regardless of their history. Rent is paid directly from social security and housing assistance

Economic reality is that it has been cheaper Finland to get homeless people homes than deal with problems that rise from people living in the streets. Home first policy has dropped number of homeless people in Finland from 18k (4000 living in streets/shelters) in 1987 to 4600 in 2019. From those 4600 less than 739 has slept one or more nights on streets and number of people who have been homeless more than year is 987 from which 177 people have slept mainly on streets or shelters. Most homeless people currently live temporally with their family members or friends, meaning that they don't have permanent residency in the place where they are currently living. Cost of public assistance for homeless people has drop to less than quarter from what it was in 1987 when you include inflation. Yeah, there are people who for some reason prefer to live on streets and there are always new people who end up to streets, so getting number of homeless people to zero is almost impossible, but by minimizing that number society can safe quite lot as it decreases crime, ensures that people have stronger ties to society which increases change that people get job and pay taxes.

We can see from Venezuela's oil exports that 2002 law changes and PDVSA's workers strike and 2003 firings started the destruction from which PDSVA never recovered. Trade deal with China brought short recovery, but after that it has been just down hill. I don't doubt that Venezuela buying those development projects from foreign companies (excluding ConocoPhillips ) and forcing ConocoPhillips give their share didn't help, but in that point Venezuela's oil industry was already pretty much doomed, because of bad trade deals all around that worsened PDVSA's debt year after year.

"Venezuela has been one of the leading proponents of a new international economic order. As a major oil producer it was instrumental in the creation of OPEC. It has also realized a basic element of a NIEO — the nationalization of basic economic resources. The oil industry was nationalized on January 1, 1976, while the second-ranking export industry, iron and steel, had been expropriated one year earlier. " https://www.jstor.org/stable/422789?seq=1 President Carlos Andrés Pérez was one who nationalized Venezuela's oil industry Chávez set law in 2002 that big sunk of Venezuela's oil money needs to be put in social programs in such extent that oil industry could not sustain itself, which lead 12000 PDVSA's workers to go in strike and Chávez firing them and replacing them with people who didn't know anything about oil industry (Chávez referred to regaining control of the industry as "re-nationalization". ) and then in 2005 he started to sell oil to China in price that could not sustained for long period of time and then 2007 he also started to sell oil to Brazil under market value again, all these interesting decision lead Venezuela's oil industry fail to produce enough money to pay the social programs that made Chávez popular and losing big sunk of Venezuela's oil reserve in ridiculously low price.

If half of the effort that is put to prevent homeless sleeping in public places would be put in getting homes for them you would not have to worry homeless people sleeping in benches in metro stations. I mean there are estimated 4000 people in New York who live on streets, so even with New York's apartment prices it would not be that expensive for the city to find them place to live. EDIT: Although there are also ~80k people who live in city's shelters, so there is higher need for homes than I first thought "Home first then other issues" is probably best money saving policy that our government has ever invented.

More there are infections more there are possibility for new mutations which may cause more severe symptoms and which vaccines are less effective against.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/feb/08/oxford-covid-vaccine-10-effective-south-african-variant-study "The Oxford/AstraZeneca vaccine offers as little as 10% protection against the Covid variant first seen in South Africa, researchers have suggested. Scientists who conducted a small-scale trial of the vaccine’s efficacy said it showed very little protection against mild to moderate infection, though they expressed hope that – in theory – it would still offer significant protection against more serious infection." 10% is worrying low, even if it gives 50-80% protection against serious infection, as it will not help to bring over all infection rate down.