Some Links, 09/28/2025
Steve Thomas on nuclear energy; David D. Corey on reducing political violence; Tim Carney on unreality; Andrey Mir on resisting media
Despite a major public relations push in the media and with policymakers for new nuclear, the anticipated nuclear revival will not happen because of the fundamentals of the technology in terms of cost, construction time, and reliability. Commercial financiers will remain very reluctant to fund these projects if any of the risk falls on them. Nuclear projects also take far too long before a return on investment can begin to be earned, typically more than 15 years from investment decision to first power.
…Why are people unwilling to consider the reason that nuclear projects fail so often is the technology itself? Instead, they fall back on old, tired excuses such as unsympathetic regulators, delays caused by local protestors, and simply not getting the right “recipe” for building nuclear power plants.
It is striking to see this in Regulation, published by the Cato Institute. I am not endorsing it but I consider it link-worthy.
the remedies are easy to describe but difficult to bring about. (1) Stop being the dupe of tired ideological systems with their half-truths that put us at war with each other. (2) Recognize that sociological pluralism is not a threat to our personal existence and, above all, do not make yourself seem like an existential threat to others. (3) Scale back the things we try to do with national government. Rediscover the practices of federalism and voluntary association and the philosophy of subsidiarity that underwrites them. And (4) take responsibility for your view of political reality. It is a disservice (to say the least) to your fellow citizens to willingly brainwash yourself with media that have every incentive to distort reality.
Never before have so many people spent so much time face-to-face with strangers they will never meet. The people we watch and read about are so distant, their actual fate so irrelevant to us, that other people become mere characters, even nonplayer characters, or NPCs — characters that aren’t selves and that no one will miss.
“Social dissociation” is a good term for this.
It was exacerbated for Generation Z by the lockdowns and school closures. Much of life stayed permanently remote, virtual, contactless. Without any daily unchosen contact with others — with folks you might disagree with, folks different from you — you socially dissociate more.
Nothing is real and nobody is real.
This helps explain not only Kirk’s alleged killer, but also his online supporters and the supporters of fellow alleged assassin Luigi Mangione. Why would many liberals happily state online that they are glad Kirk and United Healthcare CEO Brian Thompson were killed? To them, it’s as if a reviled movie villain had been killed off.
Learning to read and write pulls attention away from the surroundings. Writing broke situational immersion and enabled the “inward turn.” Prolonged writing and reading favored environmental detachment.
Education—studying the world through abstractions—emerged precisely because of this effect of writing. Diligent self-immersion while contemplating abstractions was both the condition and the product of education. It trained the “inward turn” of literacy from a young age…
learning through entertainment teaches being entertained.
I’ve said before that back when Sesame Street got started and people gushed that it was teaching kids to read I said that it was teaching kids to watch television.
Mir agrees, concluding
long reading is the only detribalizing technology known in a society slouching toward digital orality.
So reading a book can be good for you, even if the book itself is bloated and could be summarized quickly.
I think we need something other than just a return to reading in the age of AI. Ideally, interacting with an AI would prod you to think, in a way that other electronic media mostly fail to do. But that may be a vain hope.
substacks referenced above:
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Thomas is smoking something. "Why are people unwilling to consider the reason that nuclear projects fail so often is the technology itself?"
"Unwilling" is just a slimy word to use here. It's more like "reject after looking at the actual evidence". Let me try to rephrase it so that people can really appreciate how absurd a statement it is. "Why are people unwilling to consider the reason that California high-speed rail projects fail so often is the technology itself?"
Oh, gee, could it maybe be because the problem with something that's been developed for generations and that is built ten times more quickly, economically, and profitably in advanced serious countries is obviously NOT "the technology itself"? China - not exactly known for making a bunch of dumb bets on fundamentally bad energy tech -tripled- their nuclear output from 2014 to 2021, and brought another 2GW online just last year. South Korea did the same in 2022 and KEPCO can practically mass produce APR-1400 kits to be assembled in the US cheaply anytime America says ok (i.e., never) just like they did with the UAE (which, like Iran, obviously does not need nuclear for energy, but for, um, other reasons.)
This is an especially moronic line to get past the editors at -Regulation- which is constantly telling everybody about how stupid US regulations (but never, "the technologies themselves"!) are the heart of the de-facto anti-abundance-agenda because they make so many nice things an order of magnitude more expensive for Americans than they are elsewhere, whether it's shipping under the Jones Act or subway tunnels in New York or whatever.
I am a bit skeptical of all the arguments around literacy and long form reading etc. The core of Mir's thought implies that there was a time when people were reading a lot more and were better humans because of it. Seems possible, but it also seems possible that most people were always short sighted and lacking introspection and long abstract thought capabilities, and long form reading was popular with those who were not so lacking. It seems a bit like saying "People who drink more Gatorade are much more healthy and physically fit than other people, so people should drink more Gatorade;" the causality is backwards.
One way I think about this is "When was having a large shelf of books, nonfiction and literature types, seen as the basic norm and not a sign of unusual intellectual interests?" I am pretty sure the answer is "never" which implies that such a focus on books and long form reading was an activity with a specific enough target audience that it signaled something special about them.
I suspect what changed is less to do with people dropping a technology that makes them more intellectually functional, and more that we spend a lot of time pretending that people are more intellectually functional via sending them through many years of school in which they read and learn very little, and then tell them how educated and erudite they are. All the while we shame people who will honestly admit "I don't know anything about that, really, so I don't have an opinion" next to people who have a second hand opinion of everything and do not admit to knowing nothing.