Episode 360 Scott Adams: Romney, Trump’s Press Conference, Arctic Ice and Nuclear Power
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Hey Angela, hey everybody, come on in here.
It's time for Coffee with Scott Adams.
This would be the Thursday edition, unless you're watching it on a different day.
And those of you who are early, you're fast with your fingers.
You're ready for the simultaneous sip.
Grab your mug, your cup, your glass, your stein, your tankard, your chalice.
Fill it with your favorite liquid.
I like coffee and join me for the simultaneous sip.
So as you all know, Mitt Romney wrote a scathing editorial about President Trump recently in which he complained about the president's, quote, character. Mitt Romney wrote a scathing editorial about President Trump recently letter.
Yes, he complained about the president's character.
I watched Romney on an interview talking about some of the presidents that he considered to have good character.
On his list was JFK. Did JFK have good character?
Is that how you remember it?
It feels to me like JFK should be on the list of Presidents who had bad character but did a pretty good job.
LBJs on that list.
People who were terrible human beings but apparently did a pretty good job.
Bill Clinton, not so good on the personal stuff.
Pretty solid president, in my opinion.
So it doesn't seem to be a great correlation between character and performance in office.
But then there's also the real question of, you know, what is real character and what is theater?
Because there's an awful lot of politics that's just theater.
And this president, President Trump, he does More so than any other president, he adopts a role.
He takes on a character depending on the situation.
So his character that you would see giving a rally speech is really just a different person than you might see in person, than you might see in a meeting, etc.
So it's kind of hard to say what is the president's character exactly because he can modify it for the situation.
He seems to have...
A bias toward effectiveness.
So if the most effective thing is to insult somebody, he does.
If the most effective thing in a given situation is to be nice, he's nice.
Case in point, what was the president's response to Mitt Romney's scathing public rebuke of the president?
The president said...
He hopes that Mitt becomes more of a team player and that he looks forward to working with him.
Now, if President Trump was a person who simply had bad character, and that's just who he was all the time, he wouldn't be able to turn it on and off, would he?
And you can see right in front of you that he just turns the switch and he says, okay, in this situation, Being nice to Mitt Romney is just good for me, good for the country, makes everything work better.
So in this particular case, I will not strike back because it doesn't make sense in this case.
I'm not worried about somebody who can modify their personality for the situation.
I find that reassuring, not scary.
Here's my bottom line at Romney.
People are saying, why did Romney do it?
Why did he do it now?
Romney's saying that the reason he did it now is because he's taking office as a senator.
It's a good time to get on record of where he stands on the issues.
But I don't think that's the real reason he did it.
Here's what I say is the real reason that Romney went hard at the president's character.
Because it's the only thing That Romney feels he has an advantage in over President Trump.
It's the only thing. If you were going to say, tell me some bad things about Mitt Romney, probably character would not be on the list.
I don't think, correct me if I'm wrong, but I don't know a lot of people who are criticizing Romney for any character flaws.
They've criticized him for political missteps, just normal stuff.
But for the most part, I think it's true that on a character role model basis, pretty solid guy.
But here's what I think is his plan.
Keep in mind that Romney is a finance, you know, a numbers guy.
He's sort of a consultant, quantitative, very analytical kind of a background.
What he's doing is one of the smartest things that you'll see in politics.
Say what you will. Say what you will about Romney, about any criticism you will.
But here's a statement that I think is just true.
He's really smart, right?
Does anybody disagree with that?
That no matter what you think of him, his politics or anything else, he's a really smart cat.
What he's doing here is the best risk management play you'll ever see.
Because remember, he comes from a world where risk management and assessing risk and making the right risk-reward decision is the whole game.
That's how he made money.
Here's the risk.
There's probably, I don't know how to put a percentage on this, but just for conversation, let's say there's a solid 20% chance That President Trump will not run for a second term.
For whatever reason.
Either because he changes his mind, he's a certain age, anything could happen.
Maybe there's impeachment, maybe his poll numbers go down so much he doesn't want to.
You could think of a number of reasons, but maybe collectively, if you add them all together, maybe a solid 20% chance the president won't run.
So Romney is setting himself up As the emergency president who, if you need to break the glass and get the emergency president, he's ready.
He's a senator.
He's run for president.
He's made a good run for president.
He's already made his argument for why he should be president when he was running for office.
He's considered a senior statesperson.
He solves the problem that the last president in this scenario.
He would be solving the problem that people cared about the most from the last president.
So if he came in as sort of the emergency replacement, you know, the emergency spare for the Republicans, if they just needed a last-minute, oh God, oh God, we don't have anybody.
Who are we going to put in here if President Trump doesn't run for re-election?
Romney. So on a risk-reward basis, he took a fairly small risk by running the editorial.
The small risk is that it would make you harder to work with people in the Senate.
But not really, because people still need his vote.
President Trump showed that instead of insulting him for this, he was going to play nice because he still needs Romney to be on his side.
So Romney still has all the power he needs as a senator because a vote is a vote and they can't take that away from him.
So he took a risk, it looks to me, To be the most solid, obvious emergency replacement GOP presidential candidate, should President Trump not be running for a second term, or maybe to be ready for the term after that.
But on a risk reward basis, it was a smart play.
I'm going to give Romney An A-plus for political instinct.
He put himself in a position as the emergency backup president at very low risk.
It was a good play.
And I'm impressed, actually, by that.
That doesn't mean that I support him for president.
It only means that in this one limited case, his risk-reward assessment looks quite smart, actually.
You may have seen that Ann Coulter has made news again.
Remember that she has been the President Trump build the wall, build the wall, build the wall.
If you don't build the wall, you're worth nothing.
You know, build that wall. So she has been the most wall-centric pundit who actually has influence in the political process.
Certainly the number one wall proponent.
And she just did an interview with Joel Pollack of Breitbart Radio.
And she was asked the question, would she be okay with a fence?
And as far as I know, nobody asked that question before.
And surprisingly, she said that she would be okay with a situation like Israel has.
Now when I say that, most of you say, but wait a minute, Israel has a wall.
Turns out, that's not the truth.
Israel has some wall, and that's mostly what you see pictures of.
But they have a long border, and I think most of it is a fence-like structure, you know, with different mechanisms for defending as well.
You know, digital and God knows what else.
So Ann Coulter said, and I think it's the first time she's said it publicly, but correct me if I'm wrong, she said that she would be okay with something like what Israel has, which is a wall, where it makes sense to have a wall, but for the larger stretches, more of a fence-like barrier structure, which is another way of saying, leave it up to the engineers.
Now, Ann Coulter did not use the word engineers.
As far as I know, I didn't hear the whole interview.
But it's the same concept, right?
If you're okay with what Israel did, it's a lot like saying you're okay with letting engineers and experts decide where's the wall, where's the fence, where's the no fence, no fall, where are the drones.
That's all anybody is asking.
Nobody's really asking for something that's not that.
Everybody's asking to not be the people who design the border.
You and I are not saying, hey, I'm a citizen.
Let me design your border.
It should be all wall or all fence.
Nobody's saying that.
Everybody in the conversation agrees with this concept, that the people who know the most Engineers, border control, people who are close to it and studying it, really looking at the specifications, really looking at what's worked before in other places.
The people who are really the decision makers, the experts.
They're the ones who need to decide where you put what.
Everyone agrees with that, but we're acting like we don't.
Yes, I saw a comment there.
You probably saw that Greg Goffeld also mentioned the word whence on the five.
And I think that you're seeing the public opinion start to converge.
It felt like there were two opinions, but there never were.
It was a complete illusion.
It looked like somebody was saying, hey, wall, wall, wall, and somebody else was saying, no wall, no wall, no wall.
But nothing like that was ever happening.
It was a complete illusion caused by the way the news is reported, the way people talk in public, the shorthand way that people talk, etc.
It has always been Let's do what makes most sense once the engineers have dug in and told us what makes most sense.
So it was always going to be a little bit of wall and probably a lot of fence.
And that's where we're heading.
Now, apparently Lindsey Graham has said that President Trump has, you know, no chance of reelection, essentially, paraphrasing, no chance of reelection if he doesn't stay strong and get some wall funding.
I think that's probably true.
I would say that's probably true.
I think that's also the reason that we can predict the outcome.
Because the president can actually keep the government closed forever.
He can just ride it out.
Would you want to be in a stone-throwing contest We're the best stone thrower in the world.
If being a badass is the contest in terms of who can keep the government closed the longest, Trump's kind of the bigger badass.
You don't want to get into a badassery contest with the biggest badass.
So I don't see any chance that he's going to fold on this.
And Rand Paul was the funniest person on this.
By the way, Rand Paul, I don't know what's up with him lately, but he's getting funnier and he's just more interesting lately.
So I'm appreciating that from a consumer standpoint.
But Rand Paul said he wondered if the public would ever notice that the government was shut down.
Which is an excellent libertarian kind of a point of view.
Now, personally, I have not noticed it yet.
Can you tell me in the comments, have any of you had a personal experience that was impacted by the government shutdown yet?
I know it's early. Maybe it's too early to see anything.
Have any of you had any bad experience with a government shutdown?
I literally don't even know what's at stake.
Other than the garbage at some parks is not being cleaned up.
Is that it? There's some trash at government parks that will get cleaned up later.
So, under that situation, I think the president can stay as long as he wants with a closed government.
Did you hear President Trump's fairly long press conference yesterday?
It really was sort of a masterpiece of Trump being Trump.
And I was in the car when I was listening to it, so I didn't write down all of the things I wanted to write down to talk about because it was just packed with things to talk about.
I'll give you some of my favorites that I do remember.
So the president had this line.
He said, if walls don't work, You better tell the Pope, because the Vatican has a wall.
Now, here's what's beautiful about that.
I always talk about how the president likes to talk in visual form.
He talks in pictures because our visual senses are most powerful and it's the most persuasive way to communicate.
If you can put something in the form of a picture, you can actually pull somebody into the scene, they'll remember it, it'll have more influence on them, etc.
And when you see the consistency That President Trump talks in visual language compared to people who are not good at this.
You really see the power of it.
So as soon as he said, you better tell the Pope that walls don't work because there's a wall around the Vatican, didn't you immediately imagine the Pope?
And even if you don't know who the Pope looks like, which I don't, If you ask me to recognize the Pope on the street, if the Pope showed up in my room tomorrow and he's not wearing the Pope outfit, I wouldn't even recognize him.
But I have this general feeling of he's an old white guy in that Pope outfit.
So I immediately picture him.
And then I immediately picture the Vatican.
And then I immediately picture the wall.
And so he just brings me right into the scene.
Prior to that, the President said that the Obamas in their new home have a 10-foot wall around it, which caused the news to go out and try to debunk him by taking multiple pictures of Obama's house.
Now, I'm not sure that was good for security.
The last thing that the Obamas need is lots of pictures of their personal home with a story that says the fence situation isn't that high.
So I don't think that the president was intending to do this.
So I'm not going to say that this was any kind of a plan.
But the outcome of it was that the anti-Trump media, which loves some President Obama, they love President Obama, they went and took lots of pictures of his security situation at his personal home.
What?! That actually happened.
And the main story was, well, President Obama doesn't have that much security, I mean, wall-wise.
Now, of course, President Obama has plenty of security, so if you're listening to this and you're thinking, well, I'll take a run at him, don't do that, because apparently even the street approaching the House has stop points and security, so you can't even get to the street.
You can't even get to the House.
Much less get to the wall, and if you got there, there would be lots of people with machine guns, so you wouldn't want to try to climb that wall.
But just the theater of it, that the president caused the mainstream media, the lovers of Obama, to expose all of the weaknesses in Obama's personal security situation...
It's awful and it's funny at the same time.
But again, I don't think the president was intending that to happen.
But I think what he was intending was to put a picture in people's minds.
So now I have, I didn't have this picture before.
Before this discussion of Obama's wall around his own house, did you know what Obama's private house looked like?
I've never seen it.
You know, I know it's been in the news, but I've never seen it.
But now I've seen it.
I know exactly what Obama's house looks like, and I know what his little wall looks like.
And you could argue whether the wall makes a difference or not, but clearly the Secret Service thinks the wall works, because they've got, I guess, some fencing in the back or something.
I think it was added. Yeah, and the wall was beefed up a little bit.
All right. And the other thing that the president did, besides giving the press two visual images of walls that are working in ways that they like, because the press likes the Pope and they like Obama, and they both have walls and it's both visual.
So this is just classic Trump taking your attention to where he wants it and making sure there's a picture there.
The other thing he did was It looked like he was A.B. testing a new brand for Syria.
And he said it a few times.
He said, Syria is nothing but sand and death.
Sand and death.
And he repeated it to make sure we didn't miss it.
Sand and death.
It's pretty good, isn't it?
Yeah, sand and death.
Fire and fury.
Sand and death.
Do you see how similar they are in terms of the stickiness?
Here's what the president does well.
He takes this big, complicated situation, and then he boils down all of that complexity to the part that matters, at least in terms of communication.
So you could argue that other things matter, but in terms of how you communicate, he's boiled all that complexity down to sand and death.
What value is sand?
Nothing. And the other thing is death.
So basically, we're dying for nothing.
If he said, we're over there dying for nothing, That would be a concept.
You couldn't see it.
You couldn't feel it. It wouldn't be as real.
But when he says the entire situation is nothing but sand and death, that's really good.
Branding-wise. Again, separate, you know, his branding and persuasion from whether you like the policies or don't like the policies.
Those are good questions, but we're separating them for now.
Technique-wise, sand and death is really good stuff.
The president also, you could tell that he was going to drive the fact-checker's Crazy, because in the course of, I don't know, an hour or whatever he talked, he said so many things that are directionally true, but maybe not precisely true.
One of them was that he essentially fired Mattis.
He essentially fired him.
He didn't fire him, because Mattis, you know, technically, not technically, but literally, resigned.
Hold on. But the president's statement that he technically fired him makes the media have to deal with that question because they're fact-checking it, trying to debunk it, et cetera. And so how far off is it to say that the president essentially fired him?
Because remember, the situation was that Madison, the president, no longer were on the same page.
If you're the boss and your employee won't do what you want him to do, and then the employee resigns, is that really a resignation?
Is it a resignation when you know you're going to get fired?
Or if you know that you can't do what your boss asks you to do?
Well, technically, the person who writes a resignation letter is the one who resigned.
That is technically not being fired.
But when the president says, I essentially fired him, it's not that far from false.
I think the fact checkers would be on solid ground to say it is false, but it's so close.
And he does this all the time.
It's kind of close, right?
Because once you know that the boss is not getting the employee to do what he wants and he's not happy about it, and your boss is the most famous firing boss ever, it seems to me that Mattis wisely just got in front of it.
So it looks like Mattis might have been fired if he hadn't resigned.
And if somebody says, if you don't resign, I'm going to fire you, or suggests...
Suggests that maybe if you don't resign, you're going to get fired pretty quickly.
Is it unfair to say that you essentially fired him?
It's not that far off.
But it's perfect fodder for the fact checkers to talk about that question.
All right. The funniest part that the president said was he said he called up I don't know who he called up Saudi Arabia or he called up the OPEC countries or something.
He said he got on the phone and he simplified this big complicated situation about oil prices and the geopolitical stability of the world and supply and demand.
This big complicated ball of stuff that determines what the actual oil price is.
He simplified this to he made a phone call and said you've got to lower those gas prices and then they did.
Now, I don't know a lot about geopolitical anything, and I wasn't there when he made the phone call, and I don't remember exactly who he called, but it's hilarious because he again draws a visual picture.
You can see him in your mind on the phone talking to someone on the other end who's dressed in traditional Saudi clothing, whether it's a Saudi or somebody else.
So you've got this picture.
He's on the phone. He's the president.
He's in the Oval Office.
And you imagine him talking to somebody who's dressed in Saudi kind of clothing saying, you've got to lower those gas prices.
All right? Good.
You're going to lower them? Great.
I'll announce this at the press conference.
Click. Now, did something like that actually happen?
Probably. He probably was on the phone to various people who could control how much pumping of oil there was.
He probably did ask them to do this.
And sure enough, gas prices are in a better range.
So, I don't know if the phone call made the difference.
But the way he turned it into a story and simplified this complicated situation down to the president made a phone call and made it happen, to me was hilarious and effective, but maybe won't make the fact checkers exactly happy, but it was just kind of perfect persuasion.
I tweeted around a photo of the Freshman class in the new house.
So the house has their new members now and I tweeted around the picture as there are a whole bunch of them, I don't know how many, 50 of them maybe, standing on the steps and it was a big group picture.
And I tweeted, who do you notice first?
Standing right in the front.
Now, I think the women were in the front, so that helps their visibility.
But there were three women, I think, who wore plain, very easy to recognize dresses.
There was a light green, there was a bright red, and I think there was maybe a cream-colored one.
But they just jumped out.
And the one that jumped out to me the most was AOC. She was in the red dress.
Now, if you wanted to be noticed, in a big sea of mostly men...
Mostly men, but now a lot more women because of the incoming class.
What would you wear to be the most noticeable person there?
You would wear a plain, tasteful, bright red dress.
Once again you see the AOC makes the right move in a sea of people not making the right move.
Now you could argue that the other women who wore the cream colored dress and the pale blue or green dress, they also made good style choices and they stood out.
But not compared to bright red.
Bright red is the one that you think is in charge.
Bright red is the one that's dangerous.
Bright red is the one that's going to change stuff.
Bright red is coming at you.
Bright red means you better pay attention.
Bright red means you better stop.
Stop and pay attention.
So while I, you know, a lot of people said I noticed the other women's dresses first, and I'm sure that's true, one of those colors was the right choice, and all of the other colors were less good.
There was one other woman who seemed to be wearing essentially the same dress as AOC. But in the photo anyway, she put on, I don't know the name for women's clothing, but some kind of a top that covered most of the top of the red dress.
I don't know if she put that on because AOC had a similar dress.
Maybe. I don't know.
Or maybe that was just part of the outfit.
We don't know. But here's the thing.
Here was this group picture of all these people.
Exactly one of those people out of that entire group made the best choice for what to wear that day.
Only one. Now, keep watching for how many times that same one person makes exactly the right choice when everybody else does not.
It's not an accident.
I tweeted around, just before I got on here, I gave two links to opposite stories about climate change, and they're focusing on whether the amount of ice in the Arctic is growing or shrinking.
Now, let me ask you this.
Given that we think, or at least half of the country believes, that climate change might be the biggest problem in the history of humanity, Could be the biggest problem ever.
That's how big it is, for half of the country anyway.
And yet, on this, what you would think would be a simple question, is the ice in the Arctic melting, or staying the same, or growing?
And if you read an article, any article on this point, it's going to tell you with certainty what the answer to that question is.
But the problem is, the next article you read might tell you the opposite.
How is it possible that in 2019, when climate change is the most important question, you know, many people would say, in the history of civilization, that we don't know the answer to that?
Can't we pick, can we agree That we'll never really agree on all of the different, you know, all of the different complexities of climate science.
We'll probably never all agree on that stuff.
But can't we pick just a few things that would be the result of a warming climate to decide whether it's warming or not?
Can we not just say, look, let's forget everything else.
Let's just bet it all on ice or maybe sea level.
Suppose you say, okay, I don't understand enough about climate science as a citizen to have an independent opinion whether the skeptics are right or the promoters of climate change being a big problem are right.
So let me just boil it down to one variable and make your predictions.
You guys say that there will be less ice and it will be quite noticeable and it's going to happen fast.
Meaning that next year will be less ice and we can definitely measure it.
The other side says that's not happening.
That there might be less ice in some places, but there's more ice in other places.
It's breaking even or maybe even increasing.
Isn't that the simplest thing?
For science to be able to do, we've got satellites up there, we can take pictures.
How in the world can we not figure out if ice is increasing or decreasing?
You know, net. We can tell how it's changing in any one place, but we don't seem to be good about knowing how the hole is going.
So I tweeted that out, and I think I'm going to keep sort of a running list Of the points and the counterpoints.
Now, here's the thing that worries me about the counterpoints.
I had been seeing two really good skeptics.
And when I say really good, I mean persuasive.
So for my money, there were two people in the conversation about climate who were really persuasive on the skeptical side.
And so every time I saw a good article that I'd read and I'd say, oh, that's a pretty good argument, I don't know if it's true, because I can't independently judge climate science stuff.
You know, I could just read the article and say, well, it sounded like BS or it sounded legitimate.
That's the best I can do.
And there were two people who just had always the best, solid, legitimate arguments.
And then I found out those two people are the same guy.
So apparently one of them is sort of the internet name he was using.
Probably he was using that because it was dangerous to talk about this in the beginning.
So Steve Goddard was the, I guess, pen name for Tony Heller.
I had been thinking That I was seeing two people with independent opinions who were both powerful skeptics.
Now I know it was the same guy.
What does that do to my impression of his credibility?
It decreases it.
Now again, whenever I talk about credibility, I'm never talking about what's true or false.
Because sometimes you can't know what's true or what's false.
But you can know if something looks believable to you.
You know, does it feel to you credible?
And I was quite disappointed to find out that the two most powerful voices, in my opinion, were actually just the same guy.
Because that means that if that same guy is wrong, You know, you don't have that diversification of opinion that you thought you had.
It's just one guy who could be wrong.
So I would say that my opinion of the credibility of the skeptics has decreased this week as I'm learning more about the arguments.
And somebody says he was public as hell about it.
That's true. So let me be clear here.
My understanding is that there may have been a point when he wasn't, but that's not important because lately, he's published it, he's very public about it.
He's not trying to hide it.
I don't think it's something that somebody else found out about it.
I think he's the one who said it was him.
So I'm not criticizing him for having a pen name because that probably made sense given the topic.
It probably was, I imagine it was risky to talk about this stuff at some point.
So that's not the problem.
But the point is, in my mind, just my understanding of it, it went from two good critics down to one.
Now, somebody said that Judith Curry is another good one, and I think you're right.
But in terms of charts and looking at the numbers, Tony Heller was the strongest voice on that that I've seen in terms of credibility.
All right. So, if we can't figure out the simple question of whether there's more or less ice, and we can't figure out the simple question of whether the oceans are rising or not, Because apparently in some places they don't rise, in some places they do.
Which makes sense because the sea level rises not just because there's more water, but because it's warmer.
And when it's warmer, the volume expands, so the sea rises.
So you could actually have the sea level rise in one part of the world without it rising in the other part, if the temperatures are different.
Yeah, and then there's the question of the land itself rises and falls, and that changes its relationship to the water.
All right. What do I think of the rebuttal charts to the temperature adjustments?
The rebuttal chart to the temperature...
Oh, so, yes.
So, one of the major points from the Tony Heller side of skepticism...
was that all of the adjustments made to the temperature records were in the same direction and then somebody sent me a link to what looked to be a credible source showing all of the adjustments over time and you could see that some it was about equally equal number of them were adjusted up versus down now those are two completely opposite truths And it's not immediately obvious to me how they could both be true,
and it's not obvious to me how it isn't obvious to the people who work in this field which one is completely wrong.
And I still don't know that.
So you have two versions of the truth.
There's the Steve Goddard, Tony Heller, same person, truth that says that all the adjustments were in the same direction And in this case, it doesn't mean the same direction is higher or lower.
It means the same direction means always in the direction that would cause the future graph to look steeper.
So that could be, it could be raising temperatures in the past, but it could be, you know, depending on where you are in the curve, you could raise it or lower it to make the graph what you want.
And then the skeptic's argument is, no, here's a graph of all the adjustments, and it's obvious that about half of them are up, half of them are down.
It's completely random.
They can't both be true.
And wouldn't that be the simplest thing to determine?
Can somebody send me a tweet with two links Showing the argument that says all of the adjustments are in one direction.
One direction meaning causing the graph to look like it's going up.
And the other saying, no, it's all random and here's the data, look at it yourself.
We're in this weirdest world where the most basic, objective, easily checkable fact is in dispute.
I believe we're using the same database, right?
Isn't everybody looking at exactly the same data and one says it's cold outside and the other says it's hot outside?
Terrible analogy, but how is that not agreed on?
It's weird. All right.
Here's another question I can't determine.
Is nuclear power cost-effective Or not cost-effective?
Isn't that a pretty basic question?
Now, of course, there's a big challenge with the rules and regulations.
It would be hard and a lengthy process to get a nuclear power plant built.
But when I talk to smart people, there's a difference of opinion.
And I'm talking about really smart people.
People who are investing, putting their own money into it in big ways.
Some of them say nuclear is definitely the way to go.
And including fusion.
So there are smart people who are close to it who say, yeah, fusion actually has been elusive up to now, but we've got to the point where we think we can solve the last remaining leg of problems.
And other people say, no, not even close.
That's complete garbage.
We'll never get there. Then others say that there's more variations on traditional nuclear power.
From using depleted uranium to thorium, you know, other words that I don't understand.
But that those are closer to being economical.
And then Bill Gates is pushing nuclear.
So Bill Gates, who obviously looks at the numbers, you know, it's not like Bill Gates is making an investment without looking at the financial projections.
He says nuclear is the answer.
Other people, Just as smart, just as well-informed, just as interested, say the opposite.
Say green technology is the only way to go on an economics basis.
Why isn't that most basic question something we all agree on?
Now it would be one thing if we said you can't do nuclear power because of all the regulations.
I think everybody would agree that the regulations are a burden.
But if you could remove those regulations, Why can't we agree that nuclear is either economical or not economical?
Wouldn't that be among the most basic questions?
How do we not know that?
All right. I think we've reached a world that is harder to understand than maybe it has ever been before, partly because it's more complicated, partly because people have naked interests that they hide, No, that would be different. People have naked interests, and they also have interests that they hide.
And it's just impossible to know what's a good idea from a bad idea anymore.
We can't tell the difference, as Mark Twain said, we don't know the difference between good news and bad news.
That's our world. Anyway, that's all I have for now.
And I'm going to keep digging into this climate change thing to find out what's what.
And I'll build up a catalog of links.
So for every individual point, about ice or no ice, sea level, no sea level, coral bleaching, no coral bleaching, I want to have the point and the counterpoint.
And then if I can, I want to get the counterpoint to the counterpoint.