I used to be strictly materialist and atheist. Now I’m pretty spiritual. Don’t necessarily follow a religion and don’t support bigotry but yeah, I’m fairly spiritual now. This is a recent development and I never thought I’d be here like 5 years ago.
The US
That the world was ran by a cabal of evil people, genuinely thought it was mostly conspiracy theory and it wasn’t so organized and fucked up. How naive.
That Dems were a leftist party and cared about helping people.
Then I finished high school and started actually paying attention.
The only thing I’ve gone 180 on is my hatred of Bob Dylan. Couldn’t stand hearing his voice growing up when my parent’s played him. Then I learned to like cover versions of his songs. After a watching a complete unknown I became a Dylan fan.
used to be reddit atheist (extremely cringe). now im much more agnostic and acknowledge that it’s pretty impossible to be sure about anything.
Same here
Homophobia was the norm where I grew up in the '80s and '90s. Took me until the late '90s to start questioning that, and probably a year or two more to become completely cleansed of it.
I used to be anti-nuclear energy until I learned a bunch of science and engineering behind it. Turns out things are less scary when you know more about them.
Edit: I also learned that it’s okay, and usually preferable, to not have a strong opinion about things that you don’t know about.
The main problem with nuclear power is that it’s the most expensive form of electricity. People who say otherwise are only looking at the cost of running the generator, rather than including all the true costs involved in generating each watt, which is called the “Levelized Cost Of Electricity” (LCOE)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Levelized_cost_of_electricity
So there’s no reason to build any new nuclear generators now that renewables+storage are the cheapest form of electricity, and are also the easiest and fastest to build.
The problem is that LCOE is an imperfect metrics that does not take into account storage properly for grid with high percentage of renewables (that requires significantly more battery storage than current 4h window considered in LCOE). LCOE also does not account completely for time effects associated with matching electricity production to demand. There is no clear metric for this, given that the cost depends on the structure of the grid itself and is specific for each country, but the Wikipedia article you posted show in the graph a very incorrect picture. Renewable (solar and wind) + storage is in the $80–150/MWh range, while nuclear is $130–200+/MWh range. It is worth noticing that nuclear cost is very high in Europe and US but can be actually very cheap (reason why china, the world leader on renewable is also world leader on new power plants). Estimation for new Chinese nuclear is at $62/MWh (https://www.renewable-ei.org/en/activities/column/REupdate/20240927.php)
All measures are imperfect, that doesn’t mean it’s totally meaningless and should be disregarded. And it also seems like you’re referencing outdated data, as the cost of battery storage seriously decreased in 2025. But by any measure i can find, nuclear is significantly more expensive than renewables+storage. Regarding China, their data is generally not trustworthy on any topic, but yes I’m sure nuclear can cost a lot less there than elsewhere when you can steamroll over the citizens that would be effected by a powerplant’s construction, operation, and waste storage.
I’m not an expert in this at all, but I believe that private capital isn’t investing their own money in new nuclear construction, and that tells the whole story about the cost per watt of nuclear. If nuclear was cheaper per watt after all costs were considered then private capital would be building new nuclear, but they aren’t, so that means it clearly isn’t.
EDIT
I just looked at your link and it pretty clearly says the opposite of everything you said. Quote from the intro of your article:
[renewable energy] largely prevails over nuclear in China, the United States, and Europe – the world’s three largest power systems, as well as in Japan.
And
New wind and solar projects are much cheaper than new reactors.
That Trumpers can be reasoned with and redeemed.
I held this belief until Jan 6th, but I’ve only felt more validated that Trump supporters are fundamentally irredeemable monsters who should be treated like hostile terrorists rather than fellow citizens.
I used to be excited and optimistic about new technologies. Now I’m just jaded.
I was raised conservative, back-country compound with apocalypse preppers, homeschooling, israel prophecy, the whole nine yards. I was raised with The 700 Club and Rush Limbaugh playing every day and night.
I read science books that distant family members managed to smuggle to me in gift boxes alongside other “safe” books like Kid’s bibles, I learned more and more about the world around me, I started collecting my own book collection and just read and read and read, and the doubts started to grow, uneasy, shameful, scary-as-fuck doubts.
But the big turn happened when I got out of there, and America started one it’s many wars and I was watching FOX news cover it. A humvee passes a civilian box truck and shredded it to pieces with an automatic grenade launcher. Probably a family trying to escape the city… cut to the host, smiling and praising America’s might, and that’s when it hit me: We’re the bad guys.
A few more things really sealed it, when I had friends start to come back from these conflicts in boxes, or a couple guys I knew who blew their own brains out after coming home. I still despair at these horrific wastes of life and I can’t figure out why more people don’t see life as precious. How fucking stupid do you have to be to justify war, murder and causing destruction to society.
And America is doing it again. While I think Iran’s government is even more evil, a war is not the right thing to do.
I used to eat mostly plants. Ended up with NAFLD, had to change my diet entirely.
I used to believe the centrist idea that America needs a strong Republican Party and a strong Democratic Party.
The GOP actively calls all democrats and liberals enemies, demons, terrorists, etcetera while giving the billionaires all on our public wealth, tax breaks and subsidies.
America does not need the GOP at all.
One issue with this is both are right of center.
And exist in a system that can only support two parties, which means that the most effective strategy is not to convince voters that your pictures are superior but to convince them not to vote for the other party. Cue a race to the bottom.
You’re basically down to 0 strong parties. And really 2 is a minimum, since if there’s more, the other parties can just go around any one or two that are being dumb.
The GOP put itself on the fascist downward spiral when the Federalist society took over.
The Democrats started their slow decline when they put Truman as FDR’s VP. Pushing out the left wing part of the party that gave it massive electoral power for a generation.
So many of them. So, so many.
Maybe the only one I’ve kept perfectly intact is my belief that the golden rule is prime.
I was raised a young earth creationist, picketed abortion clinics when I was elementary school aged but don’t worry I was home schooled from kindergarten through high school. Was basically a republican/libertarian until about 2015 when my spiritual leaders, including and especially my parents, began to compromise all of their values.
More recently, probably even until 2020, I viewed myself as an aspiring centrist.
Now I’m an agnostic atheist who is seeing how far left the political spectrum goes, and I still think centrism is a nice idea, in a totally different world than the one we live in, with a totally different meaning to “center”.
Here is the thing I should disclose though, because I suspect it applies to a lot of things.
I was raised steeped in a level of bigotry that was all-encompassing but cloaked in Christian love.
I have intellectually separated myself from that bigotry, but I believe I still have instinctive/subconscious/unidentified bigotries to work through.
I am trying to be very conscious of that as I make my way in the world, trying to love my neighbor as myself, and trying to continuously expand the definition of “neighbor”.
Edit: I also cut my parents out of my life entirely around the time DOGE sent their “fork in the road” email.
Used to be an apple fanboy, use reddit, use Instagram; now I use linux, grapheneos, Lemmy, and self host
What did you do about WhatsApp?
Never used it, so more like iMessage -> Signal
Signal is great for texting and chats
I sadly use Instagram to chat with friends. Don’t use Reddit anymore. Self hosting is something I want to get into but I don’t have time to be a DIY system admin with 0 training right now.
I used to believe capitalism could work if it was just done right.
I still believe that, but we also have to accept that it never actually will.
It could work in a vacuum with a perfectly spherical populace, for instance.
It absolutely can work, so long as it isn’t allowed to run the show: harnessed, constrained, controlled capitalism, with no concentration-of-wealth-archy machiavellianism, can work.
But to do that, then you have to make the pay-ladder be proportionate to difficulty-to-replace, & not a means of “legal” embezzling, you have to make accounting unbreakable ( blockchain, ALL entries getting into an Algorand-type blockchain that all businesses in the economy & the gov’t all have servers participating in ), you have to make Human Capital Investment ( NOT consumable-human-resources: wrong model/paradigm! ) work properly, etc, etc, etc.
A Japanese keiretsu is an example of a semi-autonomous-economy which proves that capitalism can work ( capitalism works within the keiretsu ), & Toyota is a vertical-keiretsu ( profit-efficient ) & Panasonic, Sony, etc, are horizontal-keiretsu ( marketsaturation efficient ).
Another problem is that market-speculators, like those “candlesticks market-timing” people, enforce market-volatility, as a means of harvesting money from others, & that is an antipattern.
Worker-owned-business is the bedrock of it, too…
which unions & political-ideologues hate…
Put ownership, accountability, responsibility, & authority, all unitary!
Anyways, there are ways of making it work, but I think it’s just too … “Japanese” ( in terms of how thorough the management-paradigm has to be, to even understand the system ) … for any Western-mind to think of it properly.
No matter: soon a not-for-profit will begin demonstrating how this all works, later this year, I think…
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