If this law, or some future version of it, passes, I will derive great pleasure from a simple bash script sending a gdpr right to be forgotten request to eye European parliament in a daily basis
Yes well, they're running out of good arguments to show how bad the EU is, so they have to force some bad decisions through so that they may have something to cry about.
A core trait of my personality can be summed up as "always look on the bright side of life". To that end:
This war seems more than likely to drive up oil prices not only in the near term, but in the medium and long terms too! In addition, petroleum usage seems likely to become dependant on sucking Iran's proverbial dick, a notion that very few people in The West will find palatable.
Optimistically then, perhaps this will finally light a fire under everyone's asses to switch to renewable energy sources! Wether it's wind, solar or hydro, a underappreciated property of renewable energy is the energy sovereignty they provide. Once deployed, international trade can stop completely, and you'll still have electricity to heat your homes, cook your food, and drive your car.
No more being dependant on dubious regimes like Iran for your day-to-day.
Admittedly this is true for coal, too, but I think we've already established that it cannot economically compete, so that should play out in favour of renewables in the long run.
In January, the youtuber Technology Connections did a whole rant about how ridiculous it is that we're not rushing as quickly as possible to get off of non-renewable energy. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KtQ9nt2ZeGM
It really is crazy that environmentalists were like, "hey look, free energy," and suddenly everyone started screaming "No, boo! We like the way things are!" I have a friend who has never used an induction range before that is dead set that he never wants one. I just don't get it.
To be fair induction ranges aren't without issues, not due to the concept itself but failures in implementation.
Touch screen controls are rife and not only become impossible to use when, say, grease is splattered on them or your hands are wet/wearing gloves (common when cooking on a stove top), they can even be falsely activated by such things. Cold spots can also be a concern depending on your cookware.
Unfortunately a lot of promising technology has matured in a time of consumer product enshitification, and there is no established track record for people to be nostalgic for.
At least as recently as a few years ago, a lot of induction ranges on the market would tend to break and need expensive repairs. I've forgotten which part it is, I think it's the inverter or something. I've seen it happen once at somebody's house then I remember reading about that very same problem on reddit from a repair guy IIRC. I think some of the electrical equipment is somewhat under spec'd and can't handle the current. Repairs tend to be in the several hundred dollar range and can happen somewhat frequently, like annually. (This may not be a common problem anymore)
Again, I’m talking about someone who has never used one who has their mind made up.
I don’t think there is anything wrong with preferring gas. It has many superior use cases. My point is that “no, I like things this way and won’t ever consider trying the other thing, much less changing, even though the other thing ends up being effectively free in the long run” is silly, and almost certainly based in some kind of identity.
Where as I think most curious people would think "Oh, neat, a new cooking surface. I'd like to try that thing."
> environmentalists were like, "hey look, free energy,"
It's not free. It costs trilliions of dollars to build and maintain. I think it's worth it. But one place where the climate-change movement lost the plot was in underplaying costs and overplaying the doom.
If I install solar panels, a battery, and a next gen breaker box in CA, even with premium equipment and no subsidies, I'm looking at a max payback period of like 20 years, right? At that point yea, it's effectively free energy.
Is it an investment? Sure, but it's an investment that trivially pays for itself.
I’m sleep deprived so maybe not the right words, but isn’t there an implicit IRR that a household would maintain and usually a 20 year payoff would be maybe not the first use of investment dollars? I feel maybe that’s more the problem here with renewables. It’s cheaper but not cheap enough to put the dollars there instead of somewhere else
> isn’t there an implicit IRR that a household would maintain and usually a 20 year payoff would be maybe not the first use of investment dollars?
Yes. Also, the risk for industry is going all in right before a new technology comes out. At that point, you either write off your original investment and deploy the new kit. Or you accept a structural energy-cost disadvantage.
I am massively pro renewables. But you have to ignore a lot to pretend it's without risk.
The system already pays for itself. The only thing you lose if a new technology comes out is opportunity cost. You also likely don’t want to be an early adopter of the newest tech anyway if this is a concern for you.
This doesn’t really make sense to me as an objection, so maybe I misunderstood.
There's a sort of mixing of units happening here, and I think it's causing some confusion. Here's an example (greatly simplified) scenario highlighting a flaw in your rationale:
1. Energy at your normal usage costs $1000/yr.
2. You can spend $20k now to have access to equivalent energy output for the next 40 years before it degrades to unusability.
3. Next year, somebody invents a flux capacitor bringing all energy costs for everyone down to $1/yr.
If you don't buy the thing, you spend $1039 over the next 40 years. If you buy the thing you spend $20k, and it's hit its expected lifespan, so you don't recoup any further benefits.
The real world has inflation, wars, more sane invention deltas, and all sorts of complications, but the general idea still holds. If you expect tech to improve quickly enough and are relying on long-term payoffs, it can absolutely be worth delaying your purchase.
If you predict massive improvements in solar/battery/etc tech, the only way it makes sense to invest now is if those improvements aren't massive enough, you expect sufficiently bad changes to the alternatives, etc. I.e., you're playing the odds about some particular view of how the world will progress, and your argument needs to reflect that. It's not inherently true that just because solar pays off now it will in the future.
No, it yields savings. This is a massive difference.
> You also likely don’t want to be an early adopter of the newest tech anyway if this is a concern for you
This is a real concern for any long-term investment, particularly when we're talking at utility/industrial scales. Dismissing it like this is basically arguing that solar is too new to be properly talked about, which is nonsense.
I guess, though, the actual “solar” part of the solar set up is by far the cheapest part.
The vast majority of the set up costs are just getting electrification done right.
Like, even if LNG becomes crazy cheap, a battery set up will still save you money in the long run just by allowing off-peak demand.
This is why I’m confused: for this to me remotely a bad investment, basically everything possible has to go wrong for you, whereas the risks associated with carbon energy production are very obvious and very likely.
> even if LNG becomes crazy cheap, a battery set up will still save you money in the long run just by allowing off-peak demand
See Uruguay. Bet heavily on renewables [1]. Baked in a high cost [2].
If LNG becomes crazy cheap and you're stuck with expensive solar and battery, the countries with cheaper power will eat your industry. On a household level, you wasted money. The alternate you who didn't put money into the solar and battery set-up could have earned more from other investments and had cheaper power.
Put another way: if you remove the decommissioning costs, the same argument could be used for nuclear. Once you've built it, it's sort of "free." Except of course it's not. Building it took a lot of work.
Per your sources it looks like they are subsidising industry use of electricity with household usage:
Household electricity prices are 157% of average in SA, and 200% of industry prices. That's not a case of renewables backfiring, it's a case of strange policy resulting in weird pricing.
I mean, the payback period is like 5 years if you count all the subsides. My point is only that, you can effectively take most of your house of the grid, even in an urban area, with a relatively short payback period, and an almost guaranteed return.
Is it the most profitable place for investment dollars? Probably not, but it's effectively risk-free, and there are plenty of knock-on benefits, like having power in a blackout, and having the option of getting an EV in the future.
I think most sensible people who are even moderately risk-averse would think that's a fairly winning deal when we're only talking about a small amount of up front capital.
I agree with this, but I don’t trust that it will stay this way.
It always seems like there’s no real way to ‘get ahead’. They’ll always find a way to make the system cost such that it barely pays itself off, by introducing fees or cutting rebates.
For example, there was a proposal in Australia to raise our fixed grid access fee from something like $1 a day to $5 a day.
Or consider even just the feed-in-tariff for solar — that’s gone down as solar power has gotten cheaper, which is expected, but it’s another thing that increases that mythical payback period for the system.
Now to be clear I think the tech is wonderful and would 100% have a big battery and solar system if I could, but not for financial reasons.
For all intents and purposes you’re just pre-paying for the next X years of your electricity. I would at least want my battery warranty to be four times X, which it currently is not. Now in 5 years there might be battery tech that gets to that multiplier that I want and THEN I could start thinking of it as investing in ‘free electricity’.
But I’m sure the government and electricity suppliers will close any loopholes they can to prevent that.
To be fair, CA is one of the only places that's true, largely due to PG&E fuckups paired with a legislature keen to grant them unlimited money to kick back to shareholders.
Every place I've lived other than CA has had >3x cheaper electricity. If the max break-even period in CA is 20yrs, that's 60yrs in those other places, which is both longer than I practically care about (not that I'm not a fan of non-renewables for other reasons, but we're in a thread talking about costs) and also far beyond the useful life of any of the renewable tech involved, meaning I wouldn't achieve a full 60yrs of benefits in the first place, even if I let the system run for an indefinite period of time.
I know there are other places with high energy costs, but for the majority of the US (both by land area and population count) solar doesn't make economic sense without additional incentives.
And even that analysis assumes that you're forced to use electricity. Many home appliances are vastly more efficient dollar-wise when powered by various petroleum products.
Some people (myself included) are quite attached to cooking with gas. Induction seems to be the best alternative and doesn't require non-renewable fuel.
See, when I initially wrote that comment, it legitimately did not occur to me that there was even such a thing as a "gas stove" until I walked away from the computer. In my world they're a strange novelty.
Resistive electric stoves aren't super popular for cooking on. Gas stove use gas which can't be powered by traditional renewables. Induction cooking is competitive with gas cooking and can be powered by renewables.
Self-sufficiency is a myth. Even if you wanted to try and be energy independent, for the short and medium term (and maybe longer, who knows?) you will be dependent on China and all the baggage that they bring because of their dominance of rare earth mineral processing. Need a new solar panel? Don't make a certain country mad (whether that's your local Ayatollah or CCP official).
And that's just energy. What about pharmaceuticals? Financial markets? Who protects your shipping lanes? Who builds your semiconductors? Where do those factories get their energy from?
I support the diversity of energy sources because they all have strengths and weaknesses. We've got to figure out climate change. But we also can't have, even if you want to somehow "move off of oil" a single country run by lunatics who can decide whenever they don't get their way that they get to seize 20% of the global oil supply. We can't have China dominating rare earth processing either. For some others it may be a reliance on American military technology.
There is a huge difference between buying a solar panel once and having it generate energy for the next 30 years vs. buying a barrel of oil now and consuming it by next week.
It's the same difference as buying a house now and owning it until it collapses vs. renting a house and being at the mercy of your landlord, or buying a piece of shrink-wrapped software and using it for the next 18 years vs. renting a SaaS subscription that provides a different product next month.
He had upgrades, but I was running Kubuntu about 20 years ago, still have a bunch of Red Hat and Mandrake ISOs from the early 2000s, and can confirm they still work.
Old hardware or emulation of old operating systems on new hardware.
Quite common on old industrial machinery and other capital equipment like lab equipment. San Francisco BART for example has to scrounge eBay for old motherboards that still allow DMA to parallel ports via southbridge because it’s too expensive to validate a new design for controllers.
I have a G5 with a bunch of old boxed software that runs as well as it did the day I bought it. And an Xbox 360 with the same. Not everything has to keep up with the times.
Not all software can be sufficiently insulated from external changes, but almost all software I care about can be. My normal update cadence is every 2-3 years, and that's only because of a quirk in my package manager making it annoying for shiny new tools to coexist with tools requiring old dependencies. The most important software I use hasn't changed in a decade (i.e., those updates were no-ops), save for me updating some configurations and user scripts once in awhile. I imagine that if I were older the 18yr effective-update-cycle would happen naturally as well.
My gut reaction is that the software you're describing relies heavily on external integrations. Is that correct?
Beside, on the rate earth materials, it just happen that China is able to exploit it cheaply but other countries also have access to them and could very well exploit.
> other countries also have access to them and could very well exploit.
only in your wet day dreams.
let's just look at Gallium which is arguably one of the most critical for defence. to produce 100 tons of Gallium, which counts for 10% of the global supply each year, you have to have 200 million tons of Alumina capabilities. "other countries" won't be able to do it, as they don't have affordable electricity and skilled workers to make the Alumina business itself profitable. how they are going to use or sell those Alumina? to absorb loss of 2 million tons of Alumina for each 1 ton produced Gallium, "other countries" will have to lift their Gallium prices to stupid level.
that is assuming Chinese choose not to fight back on the Alumina front - they control 60% of Alumina production worldwide, they can just flood the global market with cheap Alumina to bankrupt your Gallium production.
remember - 2 million tons of Alumina for 1 ton of Gallium.
>It's the same difference as buying a house now and owning it until it collapses vs. renting a house and being at the mercy of your landlord,
I always take issue with the expression "buying a house now" when you actually mean "pay a mortgage for a house now". With a mortgage, you are at the mercy of the bank and whatever contract you signed. With a rent tenancy, you are at the mercy of the landlord and whatever contract you signed. A landlord will wake up tomorrow and tell you to leave, you have some notice period. Your fixed period deal ends and you can only get a deal that triples your rate.
It's like when people say that self-employed people have no boss, your customer becomes your boss. And you always have one. Everyone that exchanges services/products for money has one.
For some people "buying a house now" actually does mean "buying a house now, with cash". My mom bought her last house with cash - she just rolled over the money from the sale of my childhood home, which they paid off in the 80s. I needed a mortgage for mine, but now that I have it I'm clinging to my 2.75% rate, it's less than I can make with basically every other investment. In Silicon Valley it's not uncommon for people to buy houses (even $4-6M ones) with cash because they're sitting on an 8-figure exit.
Even besides that, there is a dramatic difference between a typical (U.S.) mortgage that locks your payments for 30 years, and a month-to-month rental where your rent can go up next month. It's the same difference as buying a solar panel that fixes your costs for 30 years vs. paying whatever electricity rates the local utility charges this month.
(And there is also a dramatic difference between having 1 boss vs. 10 clients vs. 1000 customers vs. 3 billion users. The amount you can ignore any one of them goes up exponentially, and the risk that they will all stop paying you goes down correspondingly.)
Self sufficiency exists on a spectrum. On the idiot end is autarky, which only works to keep a small group in power at the cost of national weakness. On the other end is a lack of stockpiles and domestic production that essentially negates sovereighty.
A country running a solar grid with EVs can withstand more economic shocks for longer than one importing oil. And while mining metals is geographically limited, making solar panels and batteries and cars is not.
Recycle one of your old ones. You don't burn solar panels to make energy.*
I think people are still stuck in the fossil fuel mindset. I've started calling it gas brain.
* What happens if China stops selling you panels while you embark on electrification? Nothing. You already have enough electricity from your existing sources (presumably) so you just pause the PV rollout until they wise up. And other countries are starting to get into PV manufacturing. Exhibit A: https://solarmagazine.com/2025/08/india-solar-supply-chain-f... So you can always just buy from someone else.
It doesn't though, it's the illusion of removing of a dependency which is rather dangerous. You're not only swapping one dependency for another in this specific case, but you're ignoring the rest of the global economy and its own dependencies and how they affect you.
> A country that goes all in renewable is in a stronger position.
Depends on the country.
> UK power grid doesn't give a fuck about this war.
Power grid =/= economy. You're missing the point. Rising prices affect the United Kingdom economy even if it was fully run on renewables. The ships bringing products to the country don't run on renewables, the cars mostly don't, your fighter jets don't, your fertilizer doesn't. &c.
It's important to not be dogmatic and be practical about this stuff. Every country on the planet needs and utilizes oil and gas and that will remain true for the foreseeable future because of globalized supply chains.
> Sure China. But unless they send in an army to retreive previously sold panels, or block the sun they can only harm future increases to supply.
Which, in the case of a war with the US would be true because the UK will be involved and sided with the US and/or certainly assumed to be by China. (This is indisputable). So sure you build up those panels, but then you see a war and now you lose access to those materials and if it isn't solved in the near term you have to switch all of your energy back to fossil fuels. No new EVs during the war, for example.
1. It’s closer to 50 years, and even a partially degraded panel will work, just with less output
2. Even if we say 20 years, that means that you only need to buy panels once every 20 years! Not continuously. A complete and total interruption of solar panel production lasting 4 years will only mildly interrupt current output. How long can we last with a total disruption to oil supply chains?
The long operating life of a solar panel compared to a barrel of oil is a selling point when it comes to self-sufficiency. With 20 years of warning, any country that pretends to be a globally-relevant power can get itself to the point of producing acceptable solar panels if its survival depends on it.
You're swapping a dependency which hits very quickly if disturbed, for one that would take a much longer time to manifest.
When Russia invades Ukraine or Iran cuts the straight of Ormuz energy prize go up instantly, chocking the entire world economy in the course of a few weeks. Even if China stops exporting rare earths, it would take years before it affects the energy market.
It's absolutely incomparable.
Cuba is a good example by the way: a country can survive for decades while being cut from most technology import due to sanctions, but if you cut its access to oil, it becomes dirty real quick. And because Cuba has been stuck in the middle of the 20th century, it's actually much less dependent on energy than most developed or even developing countries.
> You're swapping a dependency which hits very quickly if disturbed, for one that would take a much longer time to manifest.
That's not the entire point. You still rely on global supply chains. Those semiconductors in your MacBook Pro are made in Taiwan - many steps (perhaps most) in that supply chain to go from raw material to MacBook Pro, or EV, or fresh produce rely on oil. When Iran holds 20% of the world's oil supply hostage then prices go up for you too. Even if you are 100% renewables you are still dependent on oil for your economy.
Even the renewable power grid relies on fossil fuels for maintenance and service, many parts and components are built using materials made from oil (hello plastic), &c.
Right: My body will never be able to survive without taking in elements from the outside, but I'd rather have an interrupted supply of calcium than an interrupted supply of oxygen!
Eh, an operational dependency that immediately raises costs across your entire economy, across all geographies, all industries, within a couple days of disruption is very different from these more strategic dependencies.
The key would be to simply not ignore all the other dimensions of dependency.
Oil is disposable, solar panels are not. If you have solar, and then piss off the CCP to the point where they attempt to stop you from acquiring more of it, you don't lose the solar you already have. Those solar panels will continue generating energy for years, if not decades, afterwards.
It's also important to note that the US also produces oil[0]. There are some quirks of the market and refineries that make it difficult to consume our own oil, but we could potentially build more domestic processing. The real problem is that pesky global market that puts costs on the state's ambitions for power. To put it bluntly, American oil is expensive. We can survive an oil crisis iff we are willing to pay astronomical prices at the pump; but if we are doing this assuming we can just enjoy cheap gas while the world burns, we are going to get a rude awakening.
Think about it this way: buying your energy in the form of oil is like exclusively using streaming services for your entertainment needs. It's cheap, easy, convenient - until the plug gets pulled and it suddenly stops being those things. Buying solar is like buying physical media - you have to pay up front and it's more of a hassle to get started, but it can't be turned off on a whim.
[0] It also used to produce rare earths, too. The mines closed down because they were too expensive to operate - not because rare earths are actually rare.
It's a complicated picture. Some Americans did not like the advice to "turn down the thermostat, and wear a sweater", and the next president removed the solar panels from the White House. It may be amusing to learn the country some of those panels ended up at, and the propaganda value in having such. Other Americans have improved water conservation ("Cadillac Desert" is a short and relevant read here) and those horrid land whales now leak far less oil; it used to be every parking spot had huge stains of oil beneath them. And the leaded gasoline, yum! Still other Americans howl about the toilets that use less water, and hoard inefficient light bulbs that do not last too long. So there are folks moving both towards and against reneable energy and conservation. Granted maybe there has not been as much movement as should have happened between now and when "The Oil Crisis: This Time the Wolf Is Here" (1973) got published, but that's not saying nothing has happened. Trends may help rule out some of the noise, or one might try to model things like the "Limits to Growth" study did, though other folks really did not like that report, and so these things go on and around.
I think a lot of people simply want to be contrarian to their perceived opponents: People in the other political clan like X so I have to hate X. No matter how much X might help them or how much better it is, they have to oppose it.
The remaining oil companies will profit tremendously from the high oil prices. I am sure they will have no problem allocating some of those extra profits to sabotage attempts to consider any alternative energy sources.
This may have been true in the past but the economics of today is "whether this is good for 1% of the population" and not in general, yes? If I can buy cheap solar panels from China (or say for the sake of argument someone "friendlier" like Germany) but that gets slapped with tariffs or other means the "administration" (bought by the 1% crowd) has at their disposal to prevent this from happening. If we lived in a free market this would be true for sure but we don't (by we I mean USA :) )
> very recent history has shown (in the US at least) that we are moving backwards and trying to resist renewable energy
A longer view of history shows a clear pattern: "After a gasoline price shock, households respond in the short run mostly by reducing travel, although estimates from the literature suggest the response in the short run is quite low (e.g., Hughes, Knittel, and Sperling 2006). Over long horizons, households adjust their vehicle technology and reduce further their consumption of gasoline.
...
The market share of full-size pickups, utility vehicles, and vans fell more than 15 percentage points between its peak in 2004 and early 2009. Small cars and the new cross-utility vehicle segment picked up most of this market share" [1].
The petrochemical industry is huge we've yet to find alternatives for it. Half the stuff around you was made with something derived from oil, and you can't replace that with wind or sunlight in the foreseeable future.
In Europe between 4–6% of oil and gas is used for producing plastics and globally around 6% of global oil is used. By contrast, 87% is used for transport, electricity and heating.
If we could reduce our oil usage by 94% I'd weep with joy. Yes that's still a lot of oil. But it would be a complete sea change from what is currently happening.
there are pathways to produce synthetic oil from coal or using carbon capture if you have cheap energy.
I hope they will catch up if fossil oil prices skyrocket.
Pretty much all chemical changes can be made with reasonable amounts of energy. That includes making "bioplastics" as well as the typical plastics we use today like polyethylene, polystyrol and so on, from biomaterials. What doesn't work in a way that's remotely economical is transmuting elements. It is, for example, possible to make gold today, the old dream of alchemists. But it's several orders of magnitude too expensive.
Common plastics are made from highly abundant elements, so running out of oil as a chemical feedstock is a quite surmountable problem given cheap enough energy.
This is the secret flipside of solar power's duck curve: it makes a lot of stupidly energy intensive paths towards non-fossil oil production a lot less stupid if you just have the energy to burn. Think about how in the 2000s we had a weird obsession with ethanol and other biofuels, only to learn that they were merely 40-50% efficient. If your energy mix is predominantly fossil fuels, you're better off just not burning the oil. But if you have solar, suddenly it becomes a good option for energy storage, especially in industries that need the weight properties of chemical fuels (i.e. aircraft, where you HAVE to be able to burn and exhaust your fuel or the plane will be too heavy to land).
A lot of what the petrochemical industry does took over from other stuff or isn't vital, there just hasn't been enough push back against it.
Stuff like medicine, sure, crucial and very hard to find replacements for.
But single use plastics can probably be replaced 95% (the environment would appreciate it if we banned them), dyes are mostly not vital, synthetic fibers can be replaced 95% with minor critical impact, just using natural fibers, etc.
The petrochemical industry is just the cheapest option in many cases in a world driven by conspicuous consumption of non vital items.
Yeah but at least the byproducts produce a solid that can last for years vs treating it as a consumable.
I'm fulling expecting someone will reply to me and say that making plastic wastes 75% of the oil or something during production, and that it's just as wasteful amortized across the lifespan of a wind turbine. I'm tired, man.
According to International Energy Agency mineral demand for clean energy technologies would rise by at least four times by 2040 to meet
climate goals, with particularly high growth for EV-related minerals.
It will be a boost for renewables, but hardly the end for natural gas. Keep in mind that while ~20% of natural gas was supplied via the Persian Gulf, that means 80% was not.
I expect that batteries will eventually solve the day-night cycle for solar, but for seasonal storage, natural gas is much easier to store, so this still looks to me like a mix of energy technologies, with renewables getting a larger share.
Not really. If we only need it for petrochemical products, like medical plastics etc, losing 20% of available crude globally is a non-issue.
We can probably stand to use a lot less plastics too. Outside of medicine it's mostly replaceable, and reducing our usage to less than 80% of current usage would be trivial if we didn't burn it for energy.
In that scenario Iran can keep their strait. We won't need them.
On the dark side, it will take quite a while to offset the environmental costs of this war, even if this provided an essential incentive for switching. (In reality, energy infrastructure is often locked in longterm and not easy to switch in just in a decade or so.)
> Wether it's wind, solar or hydro, a underappreciated property of renewable energy is the energy sovereignty they provide.
If your sovereign territory happens to support them geographically. This is true for many, but not all countries.
Also, without large storage capacity, you might end up being self-sufficient during sunny, windy days, but find yourself very dependent on your neighbor countries for imports on overcast days or at night without wind.
The combination of all of this is especially unfortunate for hydro, where you're pretty much fully dependent on the geography you've been handed.
So I'd say the self-sufficiency story of renewables doesn't fully hold. They benefit from regional cooperation and trade just as much as fossil fuels, if not more. (In my view, that's not really a counterargument, but it does raise the importance of having a well-integrated, cross-border grid even more.)
These 20% will still make you dependent on foreign country.
For example Germany was dependent on Russian gas (before year 2022), which they later swapped for dependency on US LNG.
In addition, Germany is dependent on China for PV panels.
Panels aren't burned to make electricity. If literally everyone stops selling you panels (nearly impossible) you continue generating electricity the old way. Nothing bad happens. The panels you already have continue working.
Other countries make panels too. India has a glut right now.
> Germany was dependent on Russian gas (before year 2022), which they later swapped for dependency on US LNG. In addition, Germany is dependent on China for PV panels
There is merit to putting one's energy policy on autopilot by doing the opposite of whatever Berlin is up to.
If a kid lives on their own but their mom buys them groceries once per month and their dad swings by on thursdays with pizza and beer, that kid's still pretty darn self sufficient.
Similarly, if a country can use 80% less oil or imported fuel than they would have without renewable energy, I think they're pretty self-sufficient. They don't have to be isolated from trade, it's okay to import some things and export others. Energy sources can be one of those things. But if they rely on energy imports, then when something disrupts their supply then they are in trouble. However if they get 80% of their energy from renewable sources, then they have significantly less of a problem.
Losing 20% of your electricity supply is a calamity, not an annoyance. So unless you want the calamity, you're still dependent on imports.
Personally, I don't see an issue with that, as long as the neighboring countries you're importing from are reliable and will be able to supply at the times you need (i.e., they don't have the same possibly spiky import dependency as yourself). The other option is massive storage capacity.
I just don't think it makes sense to just equate renewables with automatic sovereignty.
Dunno about you, but losing 20% of my electricity supply is an annoyance. I just don't run the clothes dryer and hang my clothes on a rack instead.
(And yes, I have solar + battery, and have lost 100% of my outside electricity supply on a half dozen occasions since having it installed, and my actual response has been to not run the clothes dryer.)
More countries are able to produce renewable energy than are able to produce fossil energy. As such, renewable energy providers more energy sovereignty than fossil fuels which is what matters. If it's 100% or not is mostly irrelevant for the decision making. If we're being rational.
Going for the worst possible option, only because the better options are not 100% perfect, is to be considered irrational behaviour.
That's like saying without gas stations good luck getting gasoline to the people. It goes without saying that batteries are an essential part of most renewable solutions.
> war seems more than likely to drive up oil prices not only in the near term, but in the medium and long terms too
"This recovery period doesn’t just get pushed out by 24 hours each day it gets longer as more production is forced to shut down or is damaged in the fighting. As I write this, futures markets for the WTI seem to be expecting oil prices to remain elevated (above $70 or so) well into 2028."
Only a small fraction of a typical barrel of oil is allocated to energy generation. The majority goes to transportation/industrial use-cases. The transportation usage can be allayed with sonar energy, but the industrial use-cases cannot.
I don't think anyone is making the argument that solar panels can completely replace fossil fuels in the short term. However, more electrification is better all around.
Pessimistically, this will lead to the return of old-school Imperialism to secure the necessary oil supplies and increased exploitation of known deposits.
Just because there's an obvious good choice for the average citizen doesn't mean we'll take it, as recent history has more than proven.
For the US to start going that route we need a certain group of politicians to stop telling everybody that windmills are killing whales and birds en masse, claiming solar "isn't there yet" (somehow it never is), and that there is such thing as "clean coal." Literally the only thing I don't hear them fighting (loudly) against is hydro power.
As evidence supporting the "bright side" outcome of this conflict, two separate people I know here is Australia have fast-tracked a decision to replace their ICE vehicles with an EV. It only took a week's sticker shock at the fuel bowser to take them from "Eh, sometime next year" and "comparing a hybrid with ICE" to "Buying a BYD car ASAP". I'd be curious to know if there has been any significant effect of the market for electric scooters and bikes, also.
Because it would have been an act of aggression to close off the strait. Iran did not want to invite war, the US and Israel have entirely been the aggressors in this recent conflict.
It's very helpful to understand energy density to evaluate what a shift to renewables actually entails or what is even possible. Vaclav Smil is a good source or for a less dense version Nate Hagens has podcasts about it.
I am not sure getting a million people killed in another decades-long middle-eastern war (one whose scale and tragedies will likely overshadow all the previous wars we have seen so far in region) in a country of 90 million people is really worth the push to renewables.
There are a few passages in there that in isolation are not very notable, but taken together are kind of interesting:
>But countries do not go to war simply to have a war – well, stupid fascist countries do, which is part of why they tend to be quite bad at war – they go to war to achieve specific goals and end-states.
>Again, it is not a ‘gain’ in war simply to bloody your enemy: you are supposed to achieve something in doing so.
There are a few other passages to similar effect, but for brevity, these two will do to illustrate the point: the author seems to be subtly implying that America is a "stupid fascist nation". Actually, the way he keeps clarifying the obvious, I think he expects a good amount of his readers to be "stupid fascists".
I cannot say I wholly disagree with his assessment!
> the author seems to be subtly implying that America is a "stupid fascist nation"
He does nothing of the sort.
I can clarify for you: the mention of fascist countries being bad at war is a link to another article by the author, which explains that fascist countries such as Mussolini's Italy and Nazi Germany were very bad at a war even while they mythologized and romanticized it, and derived their "sense of nation" out of symbolic struggle and might. The article you linked to describes many fascist or fascist-like nations, like Putin's Russia, but does not mention liberal democracies such as the USA.
I recommend you read it.
So why did the author mention that article in this context? Because he wanted to explain that countries -- unless they are fascist countries -- have strategic goals for going to war, and so does the US in this case, and therefore it's warranted to look into those goals and whether they have a chance of being met.
Again, I recommend you read the article in question (the one about fascists being bad at war) before jumping to unwarranted conclusions.
We read the article rather differently it seems. My reading is that he's pointing out the lack of goal for America here. Or at the very least the lack of a realistic goal. As he points out, it was clear 40 years ago that the stated objective stood very little chance of being achieved, which in turn makes one wonder if that was even a real objective at all.
And having a stated objective is quite different from having a real objective. Hitler had various stated objectives for all his wars (Lebensraum, fostering the Ubermensch, and rescuing Germans from the supposed oppressions of the Jews, which of course never existed and was purely a fiction to justify unspeakable horrors). If you take Hitler's words at face value, they were all motivated and not at all stupid wars. But you'd be very stupid to take Hitler's words at face value, especially with the benefit of hindsight!
I think the same arguments are applicable to trump. He has stated several goals, none of which are reasonably achievable. Take trumps words at face value and the war makes sense, but he has shown himself to be a pathological liar, so you'd be an idiot to believe him, especially when his statements lack any connection to the real world. Given how he tends to argue, it wouldn't surprise me at all if trump thinks that "bloodying your enemy" is a win in a war. That's how he works. That's how he handles trade. Doesn't matter if tariffs damage America, so long as they also damage other nations, it's a win. Of course he thinks that way about war too!
The end state trump is looking for is damage to Iran. He'll have it. But the rest of the world (including USA) will suffer tenfold. He doesn't care. Because he's a stupid fascist leader.
Thus, we end up with the conclusion that America had no real reason to start this war, and starting it anyway is an action historically only done by stupid fascist countries, therefore America is a stupid fascist country. It's a fourth order implication, which admittedly is not at all clear, and might not have been intentional.
I'm severely biased of course, I generally hold last week's turd in higher regard than I do trump (turds make great fertilizer!). So grain of salt and all that...
Usually I would expect proof for a positive - like that it was an inside job, or there being an indication of it. I'm not saying whether it was or not, just that it seems unusual for you to ask about proof of it NOT being an inside job.
When it comes to crypticurrencies, no, the "hack" that turns out to be an inside-job rugpull is so common that the correct burden of proof is on the people who think this wasn't an inside job.
Is there any proof that it was an outside job? If we don’t have any proof of either we should probably look at what is most common when it comes to crypto heists
I mean they use Blockchain, right? Isn't that like the only real requirement for the name crypto?
As long as you burn as much electricity as Andorra does in a week just to make a transaction, you're probably a cryptocurrency. And that's their sole benefit it seems.
>I mean they use Blockchain, right? Isn't that like the only real requirement for the name crypto?
Absolutely not. Cryptocurrently exclusively refers to permissionless, decentralized, cryptographically secured, irreversible, fungible monetary system with a disinflationary or non-inflationary supply, following a voluntary, collectivized governance model.
A vast majority of tokens colloquially referred to as "cryptocurrency" couldn't be further from these principles. There are no stablecoins that are cryptocurrency. Ethereum is not cryptocurrency. Any coin issued by a corporation (e.g. Ripple) is not a cryptocurrency.
Ethereum is a great utility token. Smart contracts absolutely have utility in the digital economy. It's just not a cryptocurrency, is all. It had a massive premine, there's no supply cap, it's subject to OFAC censorship, and has effectively demonstrated that just ~4.8% of the total ETH supply can vote to cause rollout and widespread adoption of a fork that reverses transactions.
We need different words for these fundamentally different things, because conflating them causes real confusion, as this very hack demonstrates. People are surprised that an admin can lock transactions precisely because the word "cryptocurrency" led them to assume properties that don't exist in stablecoins.
Where did the 4.8% number come from? Is it based on the validator stake? How does that compare to the number required to fork Bitcoin as a function of it's supply?
There was a vote after the DAO incident to roll back. 87% of those that voted voted yes (for the rollback), but only 5.5% of the total supply voted at all.
Is there even any currency that meets that definition? Iirc even bitcoin had some kind of reversal back in the day, or am I misremembering? I seem to recall bitcoin splitting in 2 for a while as there was some disagreement on whether the reversal should be made or not.
What is the point of stable coins? Like why does anyone buy them?
It seems to me that their initial value is 1usd per token (or some other fiat I guess) and that's also the roof of their value: they kinda guarantee that they won't become more valuable than that.
They are less usable than fiat: more businesses accept fiat than crypto, especially weird and small coins like all stable coins are.
There isn't really a floor to their value, as demonstrated here.
I see plenty of downsides of owning one of these coins, but not a single upside?
Yet people apparently do buy them, so what is the upside? There must surely be something that's good about them?
Why have cash? A: as an intermediary between better uses of money (buy cool stuff or invest)
So why use stablecoins and not use cash? When you want to quickly convert to/from a token (60 second not 6 days), but for a short period have a stable value. Or you want to avoid banks.
I.e. trading, gambling, drug deals, money laundering, etc.
The main use is just having something dollar-like that you can move around easily. That’s useful outside the US, but also for plenty of people inside the US depending on what they’re doing; especially businesses that have a hard time getting or keeping normal banking (cough gambling, porn, weed cough).
They’re handy inside crypto since you can move in/out of other assets without touching a bank. And sometimes you can earn yield on them, which is part of the appeal (with the usual “this can blow up” caveats).
Also, there’s a reason every company wants to launch one: if you control the stablecoin, you get the float and the rails. That’s a pretty nice business if people actually use it.
If you already have solid access to USD and don’t care about that flexibility, they’re less compelling.
But yeah, not risk-free at all (depegs, issuer risk, etc). And honestly there probably isn’t much real need for dozens of slightly different stables beyond the business incentives.
Stablecoins present less frictions, have cheaper transaction costs and less intermediaries susceptible to block them. It greatly increases the velocity of money.
What utterly horrendous payment solutions are you using that have more friction than crypto?
The ones I use are several orders of magnitude less friction and most are 100% free. The ones that do have a cost (for recipients outside Scandinavia basically) are still way, waay cheaper than crypto transactions.
Many banks from where I come from (France), will require, for larger payments:
- Print a paper form, fill it by hand, scan it and send it. A human will review it next week and agree (or not).
- If you receive money, you have to prove the origin. If you can't, or if the bank finds it unsatisfactory, they'll freeze it. Often, they'll freeze your account right away. You have little legal recourse.
For the record, I once wanted to buy a car in a foreign EU country. I had the contract, it was from a recognized dealership, etc etc. The bank refused to send it. I had to open a Wise account, wire the money there, and then sent it to the dealership.
Overall banks are nice, most of the time, but can create a lot of problems when you need them, especially now that the EU is having an AML inflation under the US and FATF pressure and everything is managed by AI with no human in the loop.
I understand that you couldn't care less about people who aren't having the exact same life as you, but maybe consider that one day it will change and you'll need a freer transaction infrastructure.
And crypto transactions are almost free nowadays, if you avoid Ethereum and Bitcoin. A transfer on Arbitrum L2 costs 0.002$[0]
No sign-up fee, no recurring fee, and no transaction fee. I guess it's a loss leader for banks? But if one bank stopped supporting it, they would find themselves without customers in less than 24 hours, so it's a worthwhile loss I guess
Let’s be honest, it’s principally for illicit use, a tiny fraction of privacy folks and then a lot of people caught in between who don’t understand yield but want to bet on a volatile asset and have to use a stablecoin to go between. (Because the backers of the volatile thing are doing something illicit.)
> stablecoins are commonly used in international trade
For a rounding error value of "commonly," sure. (Catering to a financially-constrained market is good business. But it, by definition, will never be an important one in the grand scheme of things.)
Something can be common, while not representing a large volume. And given the current aggressive policy of the US administration, you may soon have to find new payment rails for your international trading, depending on where you live.
As always, things are certain until they aren't. Technological innovation always starts with fringe use cases, before becoming more widespread.
I think the idea is if you're attempting to actually use crypto in the way that you would normally use money (ie, to buy/sell stuff) then you don't want the volatility. So in theory, it takes away the volatility while living within the crypto ecosystem.
But obviously...things happen. Just like cash is usually relatively non-volatile, but financial crashes happen.
I've had mandated gaming on Friday after lunch. But this was in the gaming industry so it's "market research"!
We also often played board games. My favourite was playing secret Hitler with my team that one time. That was fun! (I managed to become "untouchable" while also being Hitler. That's a memorable moment!)
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