> Hard times create strong men. Strong men create good times. Good times create weak men. And, weak men create hard times.
Good times have made weak men. People unwilling to stand up for our values. Afraid to even declare what we stand for. Afraid to be proud of our traditions and what makes our way of life superior and worth defending and fighting for. These weak people will vote for candidates who demoralise us and weaken us and ensure our demise.
One characteristic of democracy is that it is ever-rewritten by those who strive to change it and vote. (Also, occasionally assassination, in Long's case)
Renewable energy is really expensive. [About 4x more expensive than nuclear, and 14x more expensive than gas.](https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4028640) People mistakenly think that because wind and sun are free, renewable energy generation is cheap.
Your four year old paper shows wind+solar costs as on par with nuclear in the final (LFSCOE95) model in the ERCOT market before factoring in dropping battery farm costs.
Other papers exist with a different opinion (eg: Australia's more recent CSIRO energy report finds nuclear not providing bang for the buck in the Australian market)
Further, despite claiming Level Full System Costs, there's no factoring in for externalities - eg: climate costs of dragging out fossil fuels while waiting for nuclear to come online, political costs of being steadily reliant on outside countries for fuel and supply (cost of gas to non gas nations, etc).
There are other issues - it's a paper with an opinion - not the foundational rock you want to base strong assertions on, as you did.
An odd criticism about the paper being four years old. I assure you, the laws of physics both existed back then, and we had a good understanding of how electricity is generated. Solar and wind costs have reduced since then but nowhere close to bridging the gap. Feel free to provide some evidence if that’s what you’re implying. Let’s take a look at CSIRO report, because I don’t think you have.
The ERCOT LFSCOE-95 scenario assumes another generation source supplies the remaining 5% of demand. Even then, wind and solar cost $97/MWh versus $32 for gas. And in Germany, the same model gives $220/MWh for wind and solar, $90 for nuclear and $31 for gas. So even your preferred scenario doesn’t support the conclusion you’re drawing.
Dismissing a peer-reviewed paper published in Energy because it’s four years old is particularly weak when you haven’t demonstrated which assumptions are invalid or how newer data overturn its conclusions.
And here’s a May 2026 peer-reviewed ERCOT study using detailed hourly dispatch modelling. It found that a more renewables-heavy electricity mix increased average costs by 12.1% relative to the alternative:
As for externalities, those are legitimate additional costs to quantify, not an excuse to pretend that intermittency, storage, backup capacity and grid integration are free.
Calling a quantitative study an “opinion” while offering little more than your own opinion is rather ironic.
Your data is way out of date. Renewables, particularly solar+battery, are incredibly attractive from an economic perspective. That’s why the build-out has accelerated so much. It’s not government hippies (I wish—have you seen the state of world politics lately?), it’s cold hard capitalism.
That matters not at all, unless you reveal how many digits it is. Why isn’t anyone in this thread willing to reveal theirs? Just brag about it?
Mine also began with a 2. It was 279866. My girlfriend’s was slightly lower, as she introduced me to the new service. We both felt like pioneers in those halcyon days.
Mine was quickly usurped by a Russian hacker. The profile was replaced by Cyrillic writing. I never knew how they did it. None of my other accounts or socials have ever been usurped like that!
I remember a lot of low number ICQ accounts being taken over back in the day, including my own and several security-minded friends. Because of how prevalent it was and how it was the only account we'd had compromised we assumed they found a flaw or had access to reset passwords, or could social engineer support etc.
It's good to finally know there was a critical flaw like the one in OP that was likely used.
Mine was in the 3.5 million range. My roommate at the time had a 6 digit number and didn't sign up that much before me, I remember it felt wild that they had grown so quickly. And then not long after that it was all 8 digit numbers.
And also yes, the last time I looked, my account was all cyrillic.
We've been having an existential crisis in the SaaS industry for at least six months now. See stock prices and internal panic. The recent recreation of the Adobe suite (the hard way, not a decompile) is the nail in the coffin. A company worth $98B just had its most valuable software copied by one guy with a laptop. Software patents have always been difficult or impossible to secure and defend, all over the world. So there is little legal protection.
On the one hand, everyone gets all the software they could ever want now. That's cool. On the other hand, the entire profession and industry is soon worthless. That's a lot of lost jobs and companies. We are not ready for this level of change this fast.
Have you looked at the issues page on Github?
Looooooooong way to any recreation, and I doubt anyone is even wanting to walk that way.
It was all for hype, and hype it got.
Bugs yes, but it's also free. Most features are strikingly close to the official suite. Again, this was done by one guy with a laptop. If more people participated, or he spent more time and effort on this, and/or the LLMs get even better (which they are), most of those bugs would also be gone. This is a proof of concept which proved the concept.
I think it's also worth touching on the concept of good enough. Most studios have been building software which is FAR past good enough. Most people use a few features in any given app and rarely venture outside of that. Most people never experience any of the recorded bugs. They're just trucking along. I think this Adobe suite clone is good enough for most people.
There are other free and not that buggy alternatives. Features mean nothing it cannot export the result right.
It is not a proof of concept, it is a dancing bear - yes, it if fun to see a bear dance, but it dances terribly still.
The money spent on tokens to make it useable would buy you lifetime Adobe subscription...
+1. Many people do not see the value in storing their own adult content but mine is high quality, full length, VR, niche, and full of the stuff and actresses I like.
If it makes you feel better, it's usually a matter of when, not if, cavities form between the impacted wisdom teeth and the back molars. They're usually very difficult to clean properly each day. If cavities do form, they can be difficult to fill, and they're often bad enough they require root canals or extraction. Which means you now have no wisdom tooth and no rear molars.
I dated a dentist for a while. She found (and filled) more cavities than any dentist prior or post. No profit motive. She was also a high achiever. I posit that they are seeing cavities, but there's a large and subjective gap between "we should do something about it now" and "it can wait a long time before we need to consider work." Some cavities are tiny and never grow with proper oral hygiene. The "correct" approach is probably to fill them because it arrests any future risk.
> The "correct" approach is probably to fill them because it arrests any future risk.
But it doesn't. A filling has an expected lifetime. A good proportion of them will eventually crack, dry up, or fall out, or bacteria will find a way in. It may well be that a sufficiently well executed filling will reduce the overall risk, I don't know, but filling overall are by no means risk free.
> Hard times create strong men. Strong men create good times. Good times create weak men. And, weak men create hard times.
Good times have made weak men. People unwilling to stand up for our values. Afraid to even declare what we stand for. Afraid to be proud of our traditions and what makes our way of life superior and worth defending and fighting for. These weak people will vote for candidates who demoralise us and weaken us and ensure our demise.
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