There have been examples of postponements of elections for emergencies (most notably, the mayoral primaries in New York scheduled on September 11, 2001 had to be postponed for 14 days later), I’m not aware of any instance of an actual changing of swear-in dates being postponed.

Fuckery can still happen, but I’m more worried about threats and governmental terrorism that suppresses votes on the election day that moves forward as scheduled rather than actually moving the election schedule itself.

But lots of things can be pre ordered before they’re actually available.

Services are an obvious example: I can buy tickets to a movie or a live event that will happen at some point in the future. Same with really any tickets or prepaid reservations, like plane tickets or hotel reservations or certain types of restaurant reservations.

But it can happen with all sorts of consumer goods, too. I can put in orders for stuff to be made to order: handmade/custom jewelry or shirts or mugs or commissioned artwork, a pizza that won’t be made until I order it, etc.

For businesses, their supply chains require advance planning and ordering. The people who make peanut butter generally have the peanuts ordered before the start of the growing season, so they’re buying peanuts that might not have been planted yet. The grocery store chain might be buying peanut butter before it’s made.

When pork futures prices drop low enough, McDonald’s will snatch up those contracts and take delivery of a bunch of pork to make McRibs and make them available for a limited time. At the time they buy the contracts (that is, order the pork), the pigs might not even be alive yet, much less slaughtered and processed.

None of this is defending the memory contracts, but the idea of buying things in the future is pretty common in the economy.

Are you talking about battery storage itself being about $126/MW? Yeah, that incorporated into the solar+battery LCOE, because solar itself is $31, battery is $126, and the weighted average of how much energy is expected to come directly out of the solar panels onto the grid (at $31) and how much is expected to be stored for later ($31 plus $126) averages out to $53, presumably because most demand matches the daytime solar curve and doesn’t need to be stored for later.

Which graph? I linked to a PDF with a ton of graphs.

It’s because fuel is such an insignificant percentage of the overall cost of building, operating, and maintaining nuclear power. Increasing the complexity of the reactor in order to make the fuel use more efficient is basically a nonstarter, economically.

Oh, I agree.

I was a big, big nuclear proponent 20 years ago. But seeing how Vogtle and VC Summer played out, and how that “cheaper” and more “scalable” AP1000 design put Westinghouse into bankruptcy, basically turned me off from the economics of nuclear power.

Oh, and because of how utility generation is paid for, ratepayers in Georgia will be paying for the Vogtle construction and cost overruns in their electric bills for the next 75 years, as the nuclear plant is shielded from competition by price regulators (state Public Utilities Commissions and the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission), so even if newer and better technology comes online, customers in 2080 will still be paying for 2020 technology.

The technology is still neat but I don’t believe there’s an economic future for civilian nuclear power generation. Not anymore.

Last week, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission just approved a new construction of a reactor for the first time in 10 years, to the Bill Gates backed Terra Power. Cool, except it’s projected to cost $4 billion and the government is expected to cover half the cost, to build a reactor with 345 MW of capacity.

In contrast, solar panels cost about $1 million per MW, so an equivalent amount of peak capacity from solar would cost about $345 million, or about 1/12 the price. Solar won’t run all day, but the nuclear plants will also continue to cost money to run after construction is complete.

Looking at the different LCOE estimates of each type of power generation shows that advanced nuclear is around $80/MWhr and solar+battery for all day demand tracking is about $53/MWhr.

Basically nuclear is only economically viable with government support at this point, and we should be asking whether we’d rather have the government support towards other forms of energy.

You buy guns to feel safe.

I buy guns to feel dangerous.

We are not the same.

Lots of non-American banks don’t want to deal with the rules, so it’s easier for them to just say that they won’t open accounts for Americans.

It’s not discriminatory.

I mean it quite literally is discriminatory, but it’s legal and justified discrimination.