After two years of famine and genocide, cafés in Gaza are “bustling” (BBC)

Here’s a recent BBC story from a part of the world where, our media informs us, the entirely peaceful population has been subjected to starvation/famine and genocide. The BBC tells us that there was an explosion at “a bustling seaside cafe in Gaza City”:

The article goes on to refer to apparently reliable power and Internet within Gaza: “We were sending reels to each other.” We’ve been informed that all of the hospitals in Gaza were destroyed, but the BBC tells us that people wounded in the café explosion were taken to a hospital and, if necessary, received surgery. The BBC article also tells us that Gazans aren’t afraid to sit right next to Hamas fighters:

In a quiet corner of the cafe overlooking the sea, a Hamas operative, dressed in civilian clothing, arrived at his table, sources told the BBC.

Nobody ran away in fear as soon as the Hamas operative showed up even though the people who were there, interviewed later, said that they recognized him.

Here’s another example of our critical-minded journalists (NBC):

The doctor was “renowned”, but a Google search doesn’t yield any results about his achievements prior to being killed. (Nor is there any source for him having been killed by Israeli fire other than “a Palestinian monitoring group”.)

What is actually known about this person who met a violent end?

Sultan was the director of Indonesian Hospital, one of the largest medical facilities in northern Gaza,

Since Hamas has been running Gaza (after winning a free and fair election, according to Jimmy Carter and the EU), it seems that he was a Hamas-approved manager.

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Defeating stealth aircraft with infrared sensors

EAA AirVenture (“Oshkosh”) opens today so it is time for an aviation-themed post…

The F-35 played a role early in the recent fighting between Israel and Iran, but after air defenses were neutralized, Israel bombed targets using older non-stealth fighters. From Topgun: An American Story, by Dan Pederson, one of the founders of the Navy Fighter Weapons School:

One question deserves to be whether we even need such expensive capabilities as stealth in our planes. I’m not so sure. New sensors that are within the current capability of Russia and China to field don’t even use radar waves. These infrared search-and-track devices can detect the friction heat of an aircraft’s skin moving through the atmosphere, as well as disturbances in airflow.

Maybe the cost-effective approach is to use drones to perform all of the attacks against an adversary’s air defenses and then send in legacy aircraft? The author says that we can’t afford to provide human fighter pilots with enough combat hours to stay proficient, which is another great argument for AI/drones:

At Topgun in my day, a pilot had to log a minimum of thirty-five to forty flight hours every month to be considered combat-ready. This is no longer possible. As the F-35 continues to swallow up the money available to naval aviation, the low rate of production all but ensures that our pilots will not soon gain the flight hours that they need to get good. For the past few years Super Hornet pilots have been getting just ten to twelve hours per month between deployments—barely enough to learn to fly the jet safely. The F-35 has far less availability. Its pilots have to rely on simulators to make up the deficit. Its cost per flight hour is exorbitant.

There are quite a few reminders in the book of the high cost of war against a near-peer, e.g., in Vietnam:

What else is in the book? Here’s a passage that can be used by the pro-open-borders folks:

My parents were immigrants and I was a first-generation American. Dad, named Orla or Ole, was born in Denmark in 1912 and his parents, Olaf and Mary Pedersen, immigrated the next year. My mother, Henrietta, was one of three beautiful sisters from the Isle of Man.

Immigrants, regardless of which society they come from, make the best Americans.

Serving in the Navy is a bad idea for anyone who wants to be a parent:

One night I was aboard ship, ready to take my first ship command, when I got a phone call. Somehow my eight-year-old son had found my direct number. I answered. He was crying. He begged me not to leave. “Please, Dad. Come back… everyone else has a dad home with them. I don’t.”

It worked okay, apparently, in the pre-no-fault (unilateral) divorce world, but it seems that Navy wives eventually turn plaintiff if the officer-pilot doesn’t get killed in an accident or combat. The author himself seems to have been sued by two wives:

My first marriage did not survive the many deployments of the 1970s. Being gone so much finally drove a wedge between us that could not be removed. I married a second time while serving in surface ships. Ever the optimist, I guess. It wasn’t meant to be.

The Vietnam war wasn’t winnable from the air for a variety of reasons:

Afraid of escalating the war, the Johnson administration refused to sanction attacks on Haiphong Harbor or the shipping there. As we started flying missions up north, we would pass near those cargo ships as they waited their turn to offload at the docks. We could see their decks crammed with weatherized MiGs and surface-to-air missiles that would shortly be used against us. But we couldn’t hit them. And we couldn’t mine the harbor, either. What a tragedy. The simple execution of an off-the-shelf aerial mining plan, long before perfected during World War II and carried out in three days, could have shut down that big port—the only one of its kind in North Vietnam. But the word from the White House was no. Those big surface-to-air missiles, as large as telephone poles, would spear up into the sky after our aircraft, homing on their radar signatures. They took a heavy toll. We could seldom bomb the missile sites for fear we might kill their Russian advisers.

When the North Vietnamese began flying Russian-and Chinese-built MiG fighters, the Navy and Air Force asked Washington for permission to bomb their airfields. The request was denied. Categories of targets that could not be struck under any circumstances included dams, hydroelectric plants, fishing boats, sampans, and houseboats. They also included, significantly, populated areas. Seeing the military value of these restrictions, the North Vietnamese placed most of their SAM support facilities and other valuable cargo near Hanoi and Haiphong—places we were forbidden to strike. The airfields around Hanoi became sanctuaries for the MiGs; the commander in chief of U.S. Pacific Command, Admiral Ulysses S. Grant Sharp, who had overall responsibility for the air war, urged the Joint Chiefs of Staff to lift the crippling restrictions. Meanwhile, the enemy fighter pilots could sit on their runways in their planes without fear of attack, waiting to scramble when our bombers showed up.

Postwar research suggests that Hanoi occasionally received updated target lists about the same time we did on Yankee Station. Our own State Department passed the list to North Vietnamese via the Swiss government in hopes that Hanoi would evacuate civilians from the target areas. Of course they cared little about that. They simply used the valuable intel to duck the next onslaught, moving MiGs out of harm’s way and bolstering antiaircraft artillery and surface-to-air missile batteries in the target areas for good measure. Destroying the MiGs on the ground proved difficult enough, but we were also ordered not to attack them in the air unless they could be visually identified and posed a direct threat.

Those rules of engagement negated the way we had trained to fight in the air. The value of our F-4 Phantoms was their ability to destroy enemy planes from beyond visual range. The AIM-7 Sparrow was the ultimate expression of that new way of fighting. Track and lock with the radar system, loose the missile from ten miles out, and say goodbye to a MiG. This is how the Navy trained us to fight. We abandoned dogfight training because of the Navy’s faith in missile technology. Most of our aircrews didn’t know how to fight any other way. Yet our own rules of engagement kept us from using what we were taught. The rules of engagement specifically prohibited firing from beyond visual range. To shoot a missile at an aircraft, a fighter pilot first needed to visually confirm it was a MiG and not a friendly plane. The thought of inadvertent or accidental shootdown of our brothers was of course intolerable. It did happen, sadly, in the heat of combat. Yet three years along, the training squadron in California was still teaching long-range intercept tactics to the exclusion of everything else. Our training was not applicable to the air war in Vietnam.

Assumptions used in engineering turn out to be wrong:

The MiG-17 was a nimble fighter armed with cannons, but no missiles. It was old school, derived from the lessons the Soviets learned in the Korean War. With such a plane, the North Vietnamese needed to get in close and track our planes with their gunsights. They would sometimes wait to open fire on us until they were within six hundred feet. Here we were, trained to knock planes down at ten miles. The F-4 carried only missiles; it did not have an internal gun because contractors and the Pentagon believed the age of the dogfight was over. We brought our expensive high tech into this knife fight in a phone booth. The result? The MiG pilots scored a lot more heavily than they should have.

And the engineering didn’t work:

Over Vietnam, our Sparrow missiles usually malfunctioned or missed. So did the AIM-9 Sidewinders. How could we not have known this prior to 1965? Well, history repeats: The weapons were so expensive that the Navy could not afford to use them in training. Live-fire shooting was done against drones flying straight and level, like an unsuspecting bomber might be caught doing. We didn’t know we had a problem until the weapons had to be deployed against fighters.

Politicians in Washington, D.C. managed to convince themselves that everything was going great:

We had to find a way to win in spite of these technical problems and political interference. Robert McNamara was a numbers guy. Under him, the Pentagon measured success in the ground war by the body count. In the air, the metric was the number of sorties flown over North Vietnam. One sortie equals one plane flying one mission. A ten-plane raid resulted in ten sorties. This became a delusional world. A sortie counted in the total even if our bombers were forced to dump their payloads short of the target, which often happened when MiGs appeared.

Is Trump the first president to give an adversary (Iran) a safe space? No:

At the end of March, in a speech declaring that he would not run for reelection in November, Lyndon Johnson changed the entire dynamic of the air war. He announced an immediate suspension of all bombing attacks north of the 20th parallel. Just like that, Rolling Thunder was over, neutralized by a lame-duck president. Up until then, the MiGs had been forced to operate from China, reducing their effectiveness. When LBJ told the world where we would not be bombing anymore, he essentially told the North Vietnamese we were giving their fighter regiments a safe space again. At the same time, the new restrictions greatly reduced the Air Force’s role in the air war over North Vietnam. The onus to continue it fell on the Navy.

I might print this out and tape it to the panel of the Cirrus SR20 to look at when I’m complaining about the lack of air conditioning:

Some time later, leading a strike mission at low altitude, Skank Remsen took a rifle round through the cockpit, straight through both thighs. He took his leg restraints, slid them up both legs, cinched them tight, and used them as tourniquets. He then flew one hundred and fifty miles and successfully landed aboard the carrier. Flight deck medical staff got him out of the airplane and rushed him to surgery. He refused medical evacuation to a stateside hospital and remained on board to heal. Two weeks later that tough old hombre was back in the saddle, flying combat missions with his boys. Now that’s my idea of real leadership.

Trigger warning: Nobody from Harvard or Columbia should read this book.

The Mediterranean, home of the U.S. Sixth Fleet, became a powder keg on October 6[, 1973]. That was the day our Israeli friends awoke to the greatest crisis of their lives: an imminent Arab invasion. The nation of Israel responded to that gathering storm with a massive preemptive strike. When the Yom Kippur War started, I was at Norfolk with the Dogs. All I could do was hope my Israeli friends, Eitan Ben Eliyahu and Dan Halutz and the rest of them, were out there knocking MiGs down and laying waste to ground targets.

The author eventually was promoted to command an aircraft carrier. The challenge of managing disgruntled and/or drug-addicted personnel turned out to be enormous. His Navy career ended when a sailor died and Michigan senators Carl Levin and Donald Riegle (both Democrats) faulted Pederson’s management of the ship.

A young airman named Paul Trerice collapsed and died while we were in Subic Bay about three weeks after we rescued the refugees. … The ship had just returned from a five-day visit to Hong Kong, where he was an unauthorized absentee. He was next in the CCU that April of 1981. My understanding from

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Why isn’t Cleveland gentrified?

Some photos from a recent trip to Cleveland. Here’s some signage from the Cleveland History Center:

By 1920, according to the local history nerds, Cleveland was rich in precious immigrants, had achieved a dream level of diversity (30 different ethnic groups), and was “progressive”. Just a few years later, though, the economic and population growth was over. It doesn’t seem as though Cleveland per se has ever recovered even as many of its suburbs have prospered and even though Cleveland is home to one of the world’s most successful health care enterprises, the Cleveland Clinic.

Nearly every other American downtown has become gold-plated. How did Cleveland manage to fail?

Across town at the Aquarium, the scientists say that immigrants “cause harm to the habitat”:

Back to the history center… It’s free to anyone who wisely refrains from work (EBT card) and they’ve preserved their COVID signage and mask-wearing habits:

The museum reminds those who are buying Cirrus SR22 G7s at $1.4 million (now fully deductible in Year 1 due to the recent One Beautiful Bill) that we live in an inflation-free society. A P-51 Mustang that could take off at 12,000 lbs. and cruise at 315 knots cost $50,000 brand new or $3,500 lightly used:

If Tesla can get Optimus to work, how about a return to wood-sided cars? The robot can apply polish to the wood every week:

The museum’s collection is especially strong in hybrid and electric cars, some more than 100 years old. Visitors are reminded that Cleveland was at one time a close second to Detroit in mass production of automobiles (which raises the question of why Cleveland auto manufacturing faded into insignificance).

The museum was hosting a special show of Islamic-American fashion:

A temporary exhibition featured Black photographers and, as it happened, all of the photographs on display were of Black subjects (i.e., there weren’t photos of architecture, landscape, or nature taken by Black photographers, but only pictures of Black people by Black people):

(More than half of the money for any museum like this comes from taxpayers, either through deductibility of donations or from direct grants from the government. So taxpayers are funding exhibitions from which some artists/photographers are excluded due to skin color, apparently contrary to the Equal Protection Clause of the U.S. Constitution.)

In a similar vein, the museum had a show devoted to women and politics, ignoring the other 73 gender IDs recognized by Science.

I wonder if nonprofit orgs are, after government and universities, principal sources of division in American society.

Circling back to Cleveland, though, why is this waterfront city such a spectacular failure?

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Boise Zoo offers a solution to the San Francisco housing crisis

According to state-sponsored NPR/PBS, San Francisco is suffering from “intractable housing crisis”. CBS notes that “As San Francisco’s homeless population in city-provided housing grows, few flow out” (unclear how people are “homeless” if they have the right to live forever in taxpayer-funded housing).

Is it possible that San Francisco has an abundant natural resource that can be turned into housing? A sign outside the restrooms at the Boise Zoo:

Separately, it looks as though the San Francisco influence on Boise has been powerful (photos: July 2025):

The “Community is Resistance” sign is an interesting window into the progressive mindset. Human communities previously existed to ensure survival of the maximum number of humans. Perhaps due to overpopulation human communities today exist primarily to “resist” other human communities.

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Bridge the divides in American society by giving immigrants more free stuff

American Haters falsely assert that native-born Americans are being replaced by migrants and that migrants are enjoying taxpayer-funded housing, health care, education, food, and smartphones.

The progressives behind the Boise Art Museum came up with a plan to silence these haters. Membership is $60 for native-born Americans and free for immigrants. Dividing patrons into a group that must pay and a group that need not pay will “bridge perceived divides across cultures”.

What else goes on at the art museum? The sculpture park is nice! Note that admission is also free via reciprocity for those who are members of Florida’s Ringling museum.

We also checked into the Basque Museum, which explains how Basque men came to Idaho to raise sheep on free federal land. Fifteen of them would share a modest-size house (i.e., they did not receive the “dignity” that is a migrant’s right today in the form of a 1BR or 2BR apartment). According to the museum, as soon as the Feds shut down the offer of free land, the Basques stopped coming to the U.S.

One of the restaurants in the Warehouse Food Hall combines Basque and Vietnamese. I can’t figure out why. (We had some great food, conviviality, and Basque language instruction at Ansots (shared a table with a lady who runs the local Basque immersion preschool for 20 kids; two teachers come over every year for 13 months from the Basque part of Spain).)

It looks as though Boise has had at least one immigrant from San Francisco…

Also, Elizabeth Warren was visiting at the same time that we did:

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Kilmar’s Pupusa and Margarita Café

A chain idea to appeal to roughly half of Americans: a Kilmar Armando Ábrego García-themed restaurant. The name: “Kilmar’s”. What should a restaurant named after this hero serve? CNN:

Abrego Garcia, a Salvadoran national, entered the US illegally sometime around 2011, but an immigration judge in 2019, after reviewing evidence, withheld his removal. That meant he could not be deported to El Salvador but could be deported to another country. A gang in his native country, the immigration judge found, had been “targeting him and threatening him with death because of his family’s pupusa business.”

Obviously the menu must include the pupusas that Kilmar’s mom was making at home and that U.S. government employees had no trouble believing were a source of gang interest. The restaurant should offer margaritas just like the ones that Kilmar enjoyed with Maryland Senator Van Hollen and there should be a table with a fiberglass replica of Sen. Van Hollen so that customers can get pictures of themselves like the one below.

There should be a Chevy Suburban inside the restaurant that has been cut away to function as a table. The Suburban should be the same model year as the one that Kilmar was driving when pulled over in Tennessee.

Photos from a celebration of Kilmar Armando Ábrego García that we had in Sun Valley, Idaho last month:

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The Epstein Files

People are expressing dismay that none of the people who partied with Jeffrey Epstein (Emmanuel Goldstein?) are being prosecuted and that we’re being denied access to a possible list of those people.

I’m not too interested in a list of customers for the world’s oldest profession, but I find it fascinating that people can simultaneously hold the following two ideas in their heads:

  1. Jeffrey Epstein was a monster because he surrounded himself with paid young females, some of whom might have been younger than 18 and possibly even as young as 14 (the age of consent in Germany, Italy, Austria, Hungary, etc.)
  2. we need millions more immigrants from places where a standard marriage age for girls is 12
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Toronto Symphony does an “inverse private”

I’ve been reading The Haves and Have-Yachts: Dispatches on the Ultrarich, a collection of New Yorker magazine articles, in order to develop some understanding of what our neighbors down in Palm Beach go through. One chapter is devoted to “privates” in which successful music stars perform at corporate events and private parties, e.g., for a birthday or a wedding. The costs range from $250,000 to $24 million (Beyoncé in Dubai) for something that was considered shameful during the Classic Rock period. Artists who express solidarity with the 2SLGBTQQIA+ are delighted to perform in Muslim countries where homosexual acts are punishable by imprisonment or death. Artists are also happy to perform for various dictators, e.g., in Central Asia. That said, our much-loved stars do have some scruples. With the exception of some Christian bands, no artist will agree to work a Chick-fil-A corporate event.

A recent New York Times article covers a kind of “inverse private” in which the musicians stay where they normally perform and the rich douche comes to them:

The musicians of the Toronto Symphony Orchestra took their seats at Roy Thomson Hall on Wednesday for a performance of Mahler’s “Resurrection” Symphony. Then a stage door swung open, and out walked the conductor.

He was not a world-renowned maestro or even a trained musician. The man who walked out, wearing a crisp white shirt and taking the podium, was Mandle Cheung, a 78-year-old technology executive who had paid the Toronto Symphony nearly $400,000 to lead it for one night.

Cheung, a lifelong fan of classical music who played in a harmonica band in high school and has dabbled in conducting, persuaded the orchestra to allow him to act out his long-held dream of leading a top ensemble.

“I had watched the videos and heard the recordings,” Cheung, the chairman and chief executive of ComputerTalk Technology in Toronto, said in an interview. “I had seen the magic of the guy standing in front of the orchestra with a stick. So I said, ‘Why can’t I do it, too?’”

He added: “I can afford to do it, that’s the main thing. So when it came across my mind, I said, ‘Hey, maybe I should give it a try.’”

This man is my hero!

How’s the book, you might ask? There are a lot of interesting tidbits. Just be aware that it is the New Yorker and, therefore, all of the world’s ills are blamed on the existence of Republicans in general and Donald Trump in particular. Trump is mentioned roughly every three pages, despite his apparent lack of connection to any of the events chronicled. The author never explains why California is plagued by inequality, a high poverty rate, and envy given that nearly everyone there is a Democrat. If Republicans were eliminated, rich Democrats would give most of their money to social justice nonprofits and to community-building (Andrew Carnegie is cited approvingly for his funding of libraries). There would be no war (just as Andrew Carnegie prevented any wars from happening in Europe via his 1910 founding of a peace institute). The author never explains why rich Democrats can’t do all of this starting right now.

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Checking inflation predictions from November 2024

Today we had a CPI update from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Back in November 2024, I predicted that the official number would be 3 percent. (Keep in mind that official CPI does not include the cost of buying and paying ongoing costs for a house, the largest expense for the typical American family.) My reasoning for a persistently high number is that we have “leftover inflation” from union deals struck during raging Bidenflation, from businesses finally adjusting their prices to reflect the new reality, etc. Essentially the wage-price spiral.

Let’s see how I did!

The NYT today says official CPI is at 2.7 percent and 2.9 “core”.

Democrat-sponsored NPR says that my theory is garbage and all of the inflation was created by a single Republican:

Related:

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Is offshore wind the electrical equivalent of California’s high-speed rail project?

One of Trump’s many crimes, according to Democrats, is pouring cold water (so to speak) on their dream of offshore windmills. A Facebook friend in Maskachusetts recently highlighted “Why Undermining Offshore Wind Is a Threat to U.S. National Security”:

Oddly, that directive conflicts with one signed on January 20th, 2025, triggering the withdrawal of offshore wind lease areas and retroactive review of already-approved projects. This initial memorandum threatens not only a once-rapidly developing U.S. power source, but also undermines America’s energy independence and, by extension, our national security.

She pointed out “the industry that took over 20 years to build up in the US is being destroyed in months” (offshore wind is such a great idea commercially that almost nothing was done during the 12 years of Democrat rule within the past 20 years?).

From my conversations with people who invest in renewable energy projects around the world, the main limitation for wind in the US is the lack of modern DC transmission lines. Each state gets to regulate power transmission and the typical regulator is hostile to cheap out-of-state power, unlike in China where they ship power up to 1,900 miles with a single line that can power 50 million houses. The New York Times pointed this out in 2024:

In the United States, the best places for wind tend to be in the blustery Midwest and Great Plains. But many areas are now crowded with turbines and existing electric grids are clogged, making it difficult to add more projects. Energy companies want to expand the grid’s capacity to transport even more wind power to population centers, but getting permits for transmission lines and building them has become a brutal slog that can take more than a decade.

The righteous Trump-haters at New Yorker offered a similar explanation in 2024:

The transmission line Sprouse was talking about is the Grain Belt Express, a planned eight-hundred-mile-long power line that will connect wind farms in southwestern Kansas to more densely populated areas farther East. The Grain Belt Express is designed to carry five thousand megawatts of electricity, enough to power approximately 3.2 million homes. The project has been in the works since 2010. It was taken over by Invenergy, a Chicago-based energy company, in 2020. After years of lawsuits and legislative wrangling, regulators in Missouri granted it final approval in October, 2023. If all goes as planned, construction will start in early 2025 and be completed in 2028. One of the biggest obstacles that the United States faces in its fight against climate change is getting renewable energy to the places that need the most electricity. Many of the best locations for wind and solar farms are, by their very nature, remote. And moving that energy elsewhere requires navigating a byzantine permitting process for transmission lines

Based on a 2011 New York Times article, “Lack of Transmission Lines Is Restricting Wind Power”, the U.S. has made no progress on this front for 15 years.

When I pointed out that offshore wind couldn’t make economic sense without dollars extracted directly from taxpayers during construction and indirectly from peasants during operation, the Maskachusetts Democrat responded with “MA locked in a 20-yr contract with Vineyard Wind for 9 cents/ kWh” as though that were a favorable rate for wholesale electricity. I quickly found that right now, in the middle of peak summer demand, the wholesale rate in New England is about 4 cents per kWh ($40 per megawatt-hour):

Solar, of course, is now down to about 1.3 cents per kWh in sunny places and never more than about 2.2 cents in the U.S. (NREL). See also a real-world 2024 project in Saudi Arabia at 1.3 cents per kWh. As of 2024, the NREL nerds said that onshore wind was just barely competitive with current wholesale electricity rates (4.2 cents/kWh) and offshore was 3-4.5X the cost:

How come Europeans can do offshore wind, then? The Europeans are able to do everything with water at a much lower cost than Americans can. They don’t have the Jones Act that requires everything to be done with U.S.-built, American-crewed ships and, therefore, don’t have to pay 5X the world market price for an oceangoing vessel. A law firm that specializes in these “mine out the taxpayer” projects says “A typical offshore wind farm may require as many as 25 types of vessels–to lay cable, transfer crew, address surveying, lift components, monitor the environment, install, maintain and service turbines–many of which will require construction of new Jones Act-compliant vessels”.

A male (sort of) Massachusetts Democrat responded to the above data with “You are such a fool.”

The magical thinking that what is currently inefficient will some day become efficient reminds me of the enthusiasts for California’s high-speed rail project, but we also see it among those who promote nuclear power plants. As far as I know, no nuclear plant built in the past 50 years has made a profit. The most recent plant (in Georgia) was 7 years late and $17 billion over budget (the final cost should be about $35 billion). Yet the nuclear power enthusiast will posit a hypothetical world in which Americans are capable of building a nuclear power plant on time and within budget. In that fantasy world, the cost of nuclear power becomes competitive with solar+storage, wind, or natural gas.

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