Maybe I just have patriotism poisoning but I really do think there's a difference between "being surveilled by a company that's subject to my country's courts" and "being surveilled by a company that's subject to another country's courts."

This is of course subject to the epistemic modifier "everything I know about both China and the US is run through a heavy propaganda filter" but China and the US are super different and if I have a choice of which hegemonic superpower to be subject to that choice is (1) the same for almost every conceivable domain and (2) *not hard.*

This and my opinions about nuclear power are probably the most traditionally "right-wing" opinions I hold, and the spot where I'm most likely to disagree with an opinion a coworker might bring up at work.

I think a lot of situations have to be analyzed not as "US imperialism vs. all the good things from the US-backed order and none of the bad ones" but as "US imperialism vs. someone else's imperialism."

I am most interested in and sympathetic towards arguments that rest in the fact that my direct experience of US imperialism is extremely limited and pretty much exclusively involves the upside.

Like even to the degree that I interact with folks who have been on the receiving end of American-produced pointy objects, they're folks who have then self-selected into working in the US (and, often, naturalizing!)

@nat What are your opinions on nuclear power?

@ratkins Extremely pro. Everything has improved so much since the first round of plants was built! Better cooling systems, smaller plants, designs that physically *can't* "fail open" and will always "fail closed" etc.

Solve the waste problem by dumping it into the ocean but spread it out a lot, I'm not even kidding.

@ratkins California *should* solve our water and power problems with mass nuclear desalination but since we won't Utah should build a ton of nuclear and sell us electricity in exchange for us giving up our (ridiculous) claims on the Colorado river.

@ratkins I do think we probably shouldn't build plants or store waste literally on faults, and that's tricky in California because there are faults we don't know about, but that's my only reservation about California-specific nuclear power.

@ratkins Oh I guess my other caveat re: nuclear everything is that the heat generation is a problem so in the long run solar is the Way.

Also I haven't significantly updated my power opinions in a few years and my sense is that solar has gotten just radically better in that time.

@nat I agree with you up to dumping the nuclear waste in the ocean. There are ways to reprocess it with modern nuclear plant designs aren’t there?

@ratkins Oh probably and that would be better but my basic position is that people's intuition about radiation is really off and really undercounts just how much background radiation there already is.

I think @anEXPer knows the actual numbers but basically he convinced me that the amount of radiation with nuclear waste is surprisingly low and that the big problem that needs to be solved is the concentration.

@nat @ratkins I’m extremely pro, but after reading Atomic Accidents, I am very skeptical of this claim!

designs that physically can’t “fail open” and will always “fail closed”