I wonder if that will maintain going forward. All the doctors I am business partners/friends with advise their kids to go into commercial real estate/tech/law/finance/engineering.
They say declining pay and difficulties negotiating with bigger players such as governments and larger and larger healthcare employers in combination with the bad quality of life at work no longer make the costs of becoming a doctor worth it.
Scoring first in an annual state wide math contest is not genius level, certainly not once in a lifetime visionary. There are literally thousands of people who would satisfy that condition, including me.
In any case, NG aside the important distinction nowadays is between technologies with and without substantial opex: NG, nukes and geo are on one side, wind and solar on the other. And capex, same division except NG generation infrastructure is readily retrofitted for synthetic fuel.
Wind and solar are so radically much cheaper all around that it makes no sense to talk about building anything else.
How do you measure "cheaper than nuclear"? How much is a life of a dead 10 year old cobalt miner worth in accounting terms? Whatever the price of a coffin is in Africa? What about the ecosystem destruction such mining causes, who is going to put the dollar figure on that?
I don't think we even have enough proven mineral reserves to supply sufficient battery storage to supplement the renewable aka unreliable grid, and hydro dams aren't always right nearby to pump the storage. Long haul transmission eats up huge chunks of generated energy too.
I don't get this weird fetish with fields upon fields of solar panels and windmills, vs a relatively very tiny building that produces gigawatts constantly for several decades.
Why is it better to destroy ecosystems, to destroy fields and kill birds? Just to assuage some irrational phobia around the same thing that's literally heating the Earth's crust?
