Yeah. Trump has been ripping out US infrastructure globally. Trumps administration and vance(GOP finance chair) elon(doge) thiel(owns vance) need to be removed ASAP.
The year the ICC was established, Congress passed a law providing enduring authorization for a full scale military invasion of the Netherlands should the ICC imprison any US service member, government employee, or those of allied nations (including Israel).[1] It even prevents any level of the US government (local, state, or federal) from working to assist the ICC. Americans do not want to be beholden to a foreign court.
I'm probably wrong but I could have sworn there was an article that came out when Trump was elected something happened with data on microsoft accounts/server huh. I guess it's ungoogable right now. Might have just been hosted by US gov. Must have been funding related.
Anyway I don't support ICC grabbing power it does not have over other countries who do not sign on.
If the ICC wanted to be consistent they should target Hamas leaders, Iranian leaders, ect
You'd be happy to know that ICC has also indicted three Hamas leaders (Yahya Sinwar, Mohammed Deif, Ismail Haniyeh). Granted all three were withdrawn because their deaths were confirmed, but you're presenting it as if ICC only indicted Israeli leaders, which is not the case.
> If the ICC wanted to be consistent they should target Hamas leaders, Iranian leaders, ect
Iran is not a party to the Rome Statute and the court has not officially opened a case against Iranian leaders.
However, the ICC has issued an arrest warrant for Mohammed Diab Ibrahim Al-Masri, Commander-in-Chief of Hamas' military wing for war crimes and crimes against humanity stemming from the October 7 attacks.
But Ukraine and Palestine are, which is where the crimes are being committed. When you enter a country, you are subject to their laws, not those from your own country.
The Europeans have some amount of leverage over the Americans, much smaller than the Americans have over them. But they use 100% of it to keep the Americans involved in the Ukraine War rather than to defend their own institutions / economies.
The US has chosen not to project all the power they can. That is send soldiers - likely some to die. However the US has the ability to send them if they want, and could supply them if they did - nobody else has anywhere near that ability ready today.
Half a million soldiers and 57,000 dead in Vietnam did not win the war, when you have an adversary who is willing to fight and has a supply line. The same applied to Afghanistan and Korea.
Russia is currently learning that lesson again. After Afghanistan, in the Ukraine, for the US to have any chance of winning in Iran the US needs at least half a million people on the ground. With a trillion dollar bankroll?
The United States is reaching the end. When it comes to the amount of money needed, let alone the human cost, and to top it off, while we’re slogging around in the sand in Iran at every level, we will be getting weaker in relationship to China and the world.
>Hormuz is mostly open last I checked. Iran is shouting, but ships are getting through again.
Hormuz isn't open. Any traffic going through is a small fraction compared to before the war. The US can't even operate close to the Iranian shore for fear of anti ship missiles.
> the US has made the choice to not escalate farther,
They can't escalate further or they would. They can't even hold their bases or protect the countries they are supposed to. What power, short of a nuke, are they holding back on?
> US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent stated on September 27 that between 15 and 22 million barrels of oil currently pass through the strait daily, compared to the 20 million barrels of oil that passed through the strait daily before the war.
> The Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) Navy claimed that Iran has targeted 19 vessels that have attempted to transit the strait since September 25, though Iranian media provided no evidence to substantiate these claims.
Bessent is a liar and an idiot. May as well quote Trump tweets. Iran still being able to attack ships at will in the straight should further dispel any illusion it is open.
There are independent trackers which all show transit levels around 1-5% of what it was prewar. Even with some shadow fleet tankers going, it still isn't getting anywhere close to those levels.
What does that have to do with anything? The need for a draft is one of several reasons why it is unlikely the US will escalate more. However that is a card the US could play quickly, and combined with the existing military would be enough. (Vietnam could have been won as well, but the US made political choices to not do what it takes)
And the George HW Bush administration used that power wisely in the first Gulf War. Every other time not so much.
The main concern for Europeans is accessible by truck over flat ground. They probably need more boats and submarines than they've got, but they don't need a B2 bomber or aircraft carriers.
> The US can't even win a war in the middle east without NATO
That is false. The US could win a war in the middle east without NATO.
The US has consistently chosen not to attempt to do so, but there is every reason to think they could. It is good that the US mostly tries to work with NATO on the middle east (and bad that Trump has not).
The US has also consistently chosen to send minimal ground forces, and when they do send them they are very careful to protect the lives of their soldiers at the expense of winning.
However there remains every reason to think the US could make different decisions and win wars in the middle east alone.
The US has lost every war after World War II, it is also lost in Central and South America when it comes to long-range infrastructure, having a rail system stuck in the 1950s is not gonna go anywhere, not leading the charge in Central and South America and getting that Pan American highway or Pan American railroad built from one end to the other?, and where is that highway or railway leading all the way to Nome, Alaska? The billions, trillions of dollars wasted, and US Steel which is now, owned by the Japanese.
By the way, if it wasn’t for the Russia’s ill fated war, the Chinese would have high-speed rail built out all the way to Europe, and would be making plans to build out all the way to South Africa, the Chinese have even taken the lessons of Oak Ridge, Tennessee, and are gonna have Thorium up and running sometime in the early 2030s.
When it comes to Mercantile and Infrastructure China is one step ahead.
The US's objectives have rarely including a traditional win, so that isn't a useful think to ask about.
I don't know where your US rail system comparison comes from, but the US rail system is not stuck in the 1950s, the US rail system is the best in the world and has innovated. You might be thinking about passenger rail, but that is small subset of rail and not useful for most US needs.
Pan American highway or Pan American - these are feel good ideas of questionable benefit. They would sound good on paper, but they would not be useful for much: flying is faster (and probably cheaper) for things that need speed, while the nearby ocean is much cheaper for things that don't need speed.
You're probably right. The wars have served their purpose, i.e. distract voters from domestic issues. Who in power cares if they win or lose if they're still in power?
The other poster said "to distract from some other issue".
There are various people who point out that winning as most define it was never the objective in the first place, and the US doesn't care.
After WWII England (and to a lesser extent France) decided they didn't want to pay to be the world super power anymore. The US took over that roll, but to appease those who don't like that the US is willing to appear as a fumbling idiot despite meeting their objectives.
There are probably other reads, those are just the 3 I can think of right now.
The tricky thing these days is trying to figure out whether messages like this are coming from Russian or MAGA bots ;) In any case, good work comrade! Here's your potato / Trumpcoin. Now back into your troll cave.
Both the UK and the US fail in rule of law regarding "all citizens and leaders must be equal before the law, supported by strong anti-corruption measures."
UK has stated separation of powers but the crown reportedly nudged Starmer to step down. The king is the one that can formally appoint government following elections.
Prince Andrew had and other royals have control over military forces in the UK, canada, australia, nz, ect. You can hem and haw all you want but the crown has constitutional and ceremonial control over the armed forces.
The King gives 'the kings speech' which is used to set the governments legislative agenda to parliment.
The king also gives royal assent to bills passed by parliment.
Black spider memos
The king also steers diplomatic efforts abroad.
every single aspect of UKs democracy can be cut by the King whenever he wants.
The UK constitutional system is built around mutually assured destruction. If one part doesn't follow convention, the whole system will collapse and everyone loses.
Yes, the monarch can in theory override the government by blocking legislation, but won't because one time a monarch did that, he ended up with his head cut off. If a monarch ever did that in modern times, Britain would quickly be a republic.
Everyone follows convention and stays in their lane and doesn't rock the boat. The last time a bill didn't get royal assent was in 1708. It simply hasn't happened since.
'The kings speech' is written by the government usually based on the manifesto they were elected on. The monarch just reads it. The monarch's role in modern times is to advise the prime minister and act as continuity advisor across governments. While the monarch may offer commentary on legislation, they won't block it, and the government is free to ignore it.
Same with the armed forces. It's ministers that control the army not the monarch. In modern Britain, the monarch's role is purely ceremonial. The monarch cannot order the armed forces into conflict.
Usually legislation gets blocked in the House Of Lords (the unelected chamber) which is why a lot constitutional reform is focused on cleaning that up, but it's game of inches because neither party wants to lose influence.
While the constitutional system may make it seem like the monarch has a lot of hard power, in reality they have none, and since the civil war can't do anything without the approval of Parliament.
Last time I'm aware the monarch did something, it was the firing of the entire Australian parliament and calling a snap election. Which is quite a sensible thing to do if parliament is completely jammed, and since it was reasonably sensible and popular in the situation it happened, nothing happened to the monarch. (Imagine if someone had the power to do that to Congress! Maybe they'd actually do stuff again, and we'd have to rename them to Progress)
Yes. This fits with the UK monarch's modern role which is to ensure continuity of government.
The UK example would be if the UK government lost a vote of confidence, the monarch might ask the opposition parties to see if they could form a government that could pass a vote of confidence to avoid a general election. Although parliamentary math makes such a scenario unlikely in practice.
On the UK end I don't think the monarch can sack the Prime Minister. While the UK monarch could strongly suggest to a Prime Minister that it's time to resign. Usually when a Prime Minister gets to that point, it's usually the end of the road and they won't last much longer anyway even if they pushed forward.
The monarch has a lot of soft power which under the modern system is usually deployed to ensure continuity of government rather than in a controlling manner.
(The Australia, Canada, etc constitutions gives the monarch different powers than the UK and it's usually delegated to whoever is the governor for that nation)
Yeah, I don’t think you have any understanding of how the crown interacts with the rest of the UK government.
There are some oddities, but the idea that the crown could actually exercise any of their powers, without causing a constitutional crisis, and UK rapidly becoming a republic, is farcical.
> The King gives 'the kings speech' which is used to set the governments legislative agenda to parliment.
You’re aware that the kings speech is written by the government, not the crown. It’s how the government lays out its parliamentary agenda to parliament, the civil service and the country at large. Heck there’s a whole ritual around the crown having to beg permission to enter the commons etc to emphasise the point that crown enters and speaks at the pleasure of the commons.
> The king also steers diplomatic efforts abroad.
No, the king is given instructions by the foreign office on what he’s expected to help with. Every trip and meeting the king does is checked and cleared by the uk government, and they can and have vetoed trips before.
> every single aspect of UKs democracy can be cut by the King whenever he wants.
You should watch the Jonny English movies, they’re a great documentary on how this could happen.
What is the actual purpose of freedom of expression in a democracy? Is it being able to call people N-word online with no repercussions, or is it being able to organise, form political parties, and change the country?
If it's the former, then indeed the US has more of it.
If it's the latter, the UK has three new major parties with very different policies that openly and vocally oppose Labour, Conservatives, and Libdems. Mainstream media regularly broadcasts their views. I might strongly disagree with those views, but these parties are clearly freely operating political organisations. How is the US doing with viable non-Dem and non-Republican parties?
I won't comment on your Crown conspiracy theories.
> What is the actual purpose of freedom of expression in a democracy? Is it being able to call people N-word online with no repercussions, or is it being able to organise, form political parties, and change the country?
What is the difference between the two? Because you're going to make a cultural argument and NOT a legal one. The C-word is one you throw around (and the Aussies to) but would cause an American woman be pretty upset. You seem perfectly fine with its use, but we frown on both terms socially but they are strictly legal.
Defamation VS political speech would be a better comparison, and I could make the argument that Americans being more lenient are better off with our freedoms.
From your list of purposes about freedom of expression, you're missing "the ability to criticize powerful individuals". If you cannot prove, in a court of law, that your statements are 100% true, you can absolutely lose your shirt in a defamation suit in the UK. It's so egregious that the US had to pass a law specifically shielding American free speech from the UK's libel laws. (to their credit, in 2013 they improved their laws substantially, such that you can no longer be found liable for provably true statements)
In the US, in contrast, you can say pretty much anything, as long as it plausibly enough true that the plaintiff can't prove you don't believe it. "Donald Trump is a child rapist" is an example of speech that would not be protected in UK courts. Sure, I can point at all his visits to Epstein's Island, and his running child pageant shows, and complaints made against him to establish that it's not unreasonable to believe it, but I cannot prove in a court of law that he did it. So in the UK, he would win a defamation suit against me. On the flip side, here in the States that is quite safe to say in a public forum. It's quite difficult to prove a negative, and even if they passed that bar, they would then need to prove to a court that I did not believe that statement.
>Rather than reviving the large reactors of the past, the government is focusing on small modular reactors, or SMRs, and other advanced technologies that supporters say could be safer, more flexible and quicker to build.
>The legislation does not authorize the construction of any reactors. Instead, it creates the regulatory foundation needed before future projects can be proposed, assessed and approved.
Giant step for SMRs. I'm hopefull for greater NATO collaboration regarding energy security if SMRs prove commercially viable.
I don't understand why people are so bullish about SMRs. 25 years ago we were trying to increase reactor size and testing breeders, no we want smaller reactors, for what reason?
I always thought it was about commoditization: sure a SMR might cost 10x more per watt in theory but if you can reliably roll them off the production line without having to redesign each iteration and without the cost overrunning by 10x, it pays for itself.
Still doesn't make sense. We could have standardized the old reactors too.
Radioactive material and a bit of water.. there's no reason to design those things a hundred times. France actually did that.
France is still shutting down its plants because the rivers are too warm in the summer. As for floating SMBs in the harbour, I don't think climate change will be kind to this idea.
We were still learning about flaws and failure modes of nuclear reactors. Designs kept evolving to try to address these. We never got to the passenger airliner model where we had systematically eliminated nearly every failure mode and could produce this on an assembly line.
They were already safer than coal...by several orders of magnitude. A Chernobyl level disaster every single year would have killed fewer people than coal power. The level of safety you are describing has literally killed millions of people.
Commoditizing the existing reactors of 40-50 years ago would have lead to a dramatically better world than we currently live in, with cheaper power, essentially defeated climate change, better air quality, and fewer premature deaths associated with that air quality.
They don't materially affect the cost of a nuclear power plant. Cooling towers or evaporating ponds are not expensive. Coal and gas power plants also use them.
You just can't easily retrofit them onto an _existing_ power plant.
At least these installations don't need to deal with radioactive material directly, so they will have the same financial infact as similar improvements to, say, coal-fired power plants.
> We could have standardized the old reactors too.
Yes, but the potential market for GW-size reactors is fairly limited.
Now, whether the market for any of these SMR reactors is large enough that any of them will be able to see any of these supposed economies of scale is a big question.
You can’t standardize manufacturing of multi billion dollar facilities. Economies of scale just don’t work that way. Even residential housing has the same problem. There’s too much variation in on-site construction.
Single family homes are very much standardized. You get doors in one of 6 widths (IIRC), and they are all the same height (closet doors are a different height, but otherwise standard). You get windows in a few dozen sizes. You get your wall studs in one of two lengths. And so on.
There is a lot of variation of layout possible within the constraints of the standard. However the vast majority of the hard work is done in a factory to standard sizes, and the onsite work is just final assembly to easy to change specs, so there would be no advantage to a standard.
New suburb housing developments in North America typically use a handful of floorplans that are customized very slightly across many homes specifically so they don’t need hundreds of unique designs
Also the majority of changes someone might want with stud frame construction are simple and require 10 seconds of drawing to show the framer.
The whole point of stud frame construction is that you can do basically whatever you want because it is overbuilt and all the connections and joints simple.
Right. So why don’t we see residential construction costs fall with this standardization? Because wright’s law / economies of scale don’t work when you are doing all the assembly on site.
It will reliably cost only 10x, and it theory it will roll of a production line.
The AP1000 reactors at Vogtle were explicitly marked for the modular construction as a key selling feature, which would reduce time and cost. It came out 20B over budget and 7 years late.
It's a great story: in theory you can produce modular components of a full scale nuclear power plant in a controlled environment. In theory.
In practice the production line wasn't as controlled as it needed to be and ended up delivering modules that needed significant rework. That caused modules to be delivered and ready out of order. In other words they bought a lot of project management complexity that was hidden behind the theory of modularity.
SMRs are turning out to be even more expensive than conventional nuclear power plants, which are so expensive compared to renewables that even without a risk premium they are uncompetitive.
Vogtle, Hinkley Point C- are all one off constructions and have very expensive regulatory compliance requirements
AP1000 (reactor as Vogtle 3/4) in Taishan is estimated to cost $4M-6M /MW compared to $15M/MW+ at Vogtle. if Chinese safety standards seem lax, South Korea does regularly reactors at $4-6M/MW range.
Even Flameville 3 in France was significantly cheaper than Hinkley point C (same reactor type), which infamously required some quite ineffective Fish speakers. The EPR2 series (6 reactors) in France is expected to cost considerably less than Flameville did.
Key to cheap nuclear - SMR or otherwise is regular construction. SMR makes regular construction more likely as each plant is not a $10-20B+ capex that is a tough sell to tax payers particularly when it inevitably overruns, SMR also potentially have a bit less regulatory hoops to jump through due to their smaller size.
Are we prepared to play kingmaker and pick one SMR design to standardize on so that those can ride their theoretical learning curve (assuming we get enough buyers)? Because politically that doesn't seem likely, and I think we'll end up with the units that do get contracted to be spread across multiple firms, none of which make it out of the expensive first few units.
> Even Flameville 3 in France was significantly cheaper than Hinkley point C
Per wikipedia: initial cost estimate €3.3 billion, cost in 2020 (6 years before it was done) €19.1 billion, so 5.8x the budget. Supposed to enter operation in 2012, entered in 2026 "only" 14 years late.
These are terrible results.
That EPR2 series are "expected" to cost less says absolutely nothing. Flameville 3 was expected to cost 83% less too, and I except that if they swindle people for the money to build it we'll see it'll be just as much of an overrun.
The nuclear industry seem absolutely incapable of sticking to a timeline or budget. And any one of these failures should have been disqualifying. But they get to do it over and over again.
That is why even Flameville 3 was cheaper than Hinkley point C, not that it was cheap.
Flameville 3 is the first reactor for France in 21st century and suffers the frequency problem I am arguing. It was a path finder therefore only one was ever ordered. EPR2 is 6 under construction and France does have a track record of doing it consistently at scale for cheap(by nuclear standards).
The Asian giants all do it for cheaper because they build regularly, Japan (post Fukushima policy direction notwithstanding) and South Korea achieve overnight numbers of $5-6M/MW or less, so does China.
Regular construction is key, to the industry having a chance, without SMR that is never realistic anymore.
The most annoying thing about Hinkley Point C is that after all the delays and investments, the electricity it generates won’t even be cheap. £133/MWh!
Right now we have politicians arguing that a £90/MWh strike price for offshore wind - where the construction of the wind farm is entirely encapsulated by the strike price - is expensive.
Overnight costs do not get impacted by guaranteed purchase price or subsidy for it neither does it include interest rates. It is a specific aspect of the TCO.
Nobody is saying nuclear is cheap it is not - we will be building a plant once in while for pure strategic reason no matter the cost anyway. The point is construction cost comes down per MW with higher frequency of plant building, and this is the case SMRs, we can get cheaper construction both Per MW and overall TCO in absolute dollar terms relative to large plants with SMRs.
There is no economic case for SMR that you couldn't make for a larger one with a massive benefit of economies of scale. SMRs are - in my opinion - a dead end, larger reactors could work well but will be delivered later and likely will still not be profitable on a KWh basis when compared to an equivalent installed base of solar and wind and will most likely be deliver much, much later.
Wright’s law is the only way to reduce costs. It’s a generalization of Moore’s law. The more of anything you build the cheaper it gets. Most products get 10% - 20% cheaper every time total production volume doubles. The most obvious example right now is rockets - launch costs are going down exponentially because we (SpaceX mostly) are doing so much of it we are finally getting economies of scale. SMRs will too, but only if they become popular. It’s a little bit of chicken and egg, but the economics are clear. If lots of people start using SMRs they WILL get cheap. And it’s a form factor where it’s plausible lots of people will.
That's another interesting theory, but Wright's law doesn't mitigate many other disadvantages of SMRs: the need for multi site security; the need for on-site technicians at more sites; the need to build grid hook up to more locations, etc. There's a reason reactors grew to a certain size, no smaller and no bigger. Ignoring that lesson has a high price.
Main idea: license once, then repeat and repeat. Scale. The cost to produce energy from one single SMR is higher than fomr a classical PWR (diving output per full buidling cost) but that cost is reduced once you start scaling (all the costs associated with initial license are amortized).
Large reactors require unobtanium-class material engineering. Only a few companies in the _world_ can make large reactor vessels.
In contrast, SMRs are being sold as something that you can weld together in your garage and use them as a replacement for your water heater. And you don't need all those large containment structures and gigawatt-scale turbines.
This makes it much easier to get funding, as you don't need to show that you have a firm agreement with all the suppliers.
I don't like this at all, but it _might_ result in us regaining some experience in building nuclear power plants.
reply