Every study I've read that supports the "cheap solar" thesis assumes sunny days in normal temperatures, and never includes enough storage to maintain consistent output overnight (after sunny days in normal temperatures, let alone bad days).
In other words, they count on non-solar backup... which not only makes solar more expensive, but basically redundant.
Until Solar+storage is the cheapest form of energy while delivering its promised output at 4AM after a cloudy day in freezing temperatures, the "solar is cheap" stuff is simply dishonest.
That is true. We should not discount the drawbacks of solar and wind, nor their upsides. When they are working, they are producing energy almost completely for free. The advantage of free energy, even when intermittent, is so great that we should spend considerable effort trying to make the grid use it as much as possible.
Basically all centralization of political power in human history has been accomplished by force. See Rome, Persia, Germany, USSR, etc. etc. etc. Even the USA's transition from a union of united States to The United States occurred under force of arms.
Sadly, this centralization of political power has been a disaster for mankind IMO.
Even as we've transitioned from monarchies to democracies over the last few centuries, the trend has largely resulted in the replacement of actual, determinative choices with merely having a millionth of a share of a choice. Not a determinative choice, but a say.
Consider the holy roman empire, for example. [0]
Under this scheme of decentralization, people had an actual choice of their government. Say you were a merchant in Mühlhausen circa 1700, and you found yourself in opposition to your local government. You could simply move a short distance to a different area and be beholdened to an entirely different government. You'd have 50 choices within 100 miles! While it's true that the HRE was all under the administration of one government, but it was extremely weak. It lacked, for example, the ability to levy direct taxes. After unification in 1870, the same merchant would've had to move much further to escape his government, and his options had been diminished by 95%. After European unification, he would have to travel to another continent!
While democracy has given us control of our governments in theory, in practice the "choice" it offers is much less empowering than the determinative choice afforded by decentralization. The larger our political entities grow, the more diluted our "say" and the fewer full choices are available to us. In the United States, we have less than 1/100,000,000th of a share of the choice in our chief executive!
While democracy is obviously preferable to Aristocracy/Monarchy/Tyranny, on it's own it is still only a marginal improvement. At worst, you can still end up with 49.9% of people living under a government they oppose. Decentralization solves this lingering problem, because it allows people to self-sort in and out of countries they don't like, allowing for people who truly despise their governments to choose themselves a new government.
In the absence of such a safety valve, people are forced into a zero-sum struggle for power. It is rule or be ruled. Dominate or be dominated. We're seeing this in the United States right now. We're not at each other's throats because we hate each other. Not even because we hate each other's politics in the abstract. We're at each other's throats because neither side is content to be ruled by the other.
The same reason that centralized entities only arise by force is the same reason they fall apart in the end. People don't want them. They don't want to be dominated.
Centralization of political power forces people into an inescapable struggle for power. It is the enemy of peace and tranquility, and a blight on humanity.
I believe your view of what democracy is tainted by what USA democracy looks like.
Quite a few countries have more or less successful parlamentary democracies, where winner-takes-all situations are avoided by design. In these, a party rarely has the upper hand and coalitions are the only means of reaching power. The agreements these coalitions forge to govern are a proxy of the compromises all societies have to agree on to function.
Which countries do you have in mind? In my experience, most parliamentary democracies have rules which actually exacerbate the issue. See for example the elections last year in Germany, where the CDU/CSU + SPD coalition won a majority in the Bundestag with less than 45% of the popular vote!
How do you account for the increased competitiveness of economies of scale in a globalized economy with free international trade in your recommendation?
I'm not quite sure what you mean by "economies of scale", which is normally a benefit of mass production.
It's true that centralization of political power can bring economic benefits, but the economic benefits stem from the elimination of economic/trade friction, not directly from the centralization of power per se. Which is to say that (most of) these economic benefits can be had without incurring the non-economic costs of political centralization.
Fair market value: the price at which a thing would change hands between a willing and informed buyer and seller.
A company's market cap is, by definition, its fair market value.
> Tesla is not priced according to its underlying assets or technical analysis (e.g. P/E ratio), but solely based on hype/sentiment.
You're right that it's not priced according to underlying assets, but it doesn't follow that it is priced on vibes. Its price is based on potential future earnings; the expectation that Elon can pull off his plans for a robotaxi fleet or building an Optimus robot that might unlock the massive demand for household and/or general use commercial robots. Both offer the prospect of being the first mover into markets which could be worth trillions. It's speculation, sure, but not mere "vibes". The company is also led by a man who has made and delivered on massive, seemingly impossible promises, which adds credibility to the idea that Tesla might actually bring these markets into existence.
> Fair market value (FMV) is similar to market value, which is the price that the asset would trade for in the open market under current conditions. However, fair market value has the following additional assumptions: Both buyer and seller are reasonably knowledgeable about the asset, Buyer and seller are behaving in their own best interests, Both parties are free of undue pressure, Each is given a reasonable period for completing the transaction.
However that's why I said "something closer to FMV" as yes - what you described is generally how FMV is calculated for things like stock options.
> but it doesn't follow that it is priced on vibes. Its price is based on potential future earnings
To be clear, I also didn't use the word "vibes," but rather "hype/sentiment" which refers to things like "the expectation that Elon can pull off his plans for a robotaxi fleet or building an Optimus robot that might unlock the massive demand for household and/or general use commercial robots." I'm not sure where you got "vibes" that you quoted in your reply.
Technical analysis uses statistics (e.g. P/E ratios) and marketplace analysis to determine if future potential earnings are worth the price of the stock. TSLA's price is far in excess of any technical analysis I have seen.
> The company is also led by a man who has made and delivered on massive, seemingly impossible promises, which adds credibility to the idea that Tesla might actually bring these markets into existence.
We might have to agree to disagree on this one. (Are we FSD yet?)
Fair market value is different from market value and appraised value.
FMV makes a lot of sense in things like insurance payouts and private equity, cuz the assets aren't liquid and have to be assessed. If the thing is already being bought and sold on public markets, like Tesla, FMV is less useful to talk about. Now you enter the realm of financial analysis (like some analyst's report about a publicly traded stock) and even financial audits and such, it's orthogonal.
Talk about market cap, especially meme stock maket cap, reminds me of that old XKCD comic on extrapolation. Market cap is what you get when you extrapolate the fair market value for the 1% of a company's shares currently on the market all the way out to 100%. But demand doesn't work that way - it doesn't scale linearly.
> The ice seem to have roughly the same priorities and roughly the same methodology as the SA had in the beginning.
How do you figure?
> I mean I saw the pretti videos and it certainly seems to corroborate what media is saying.
Media coverage of the Pretti shooting has been awful. All seem happy to show the slow-mo recap of the officer disarming Pretti, but none show him reaching for/toward his holster in the moment before being shot (0:12-13 in this video https://www.reddit.com/r/Libertarian/comments/1qm4b0v/slow_m...). If the officer heard the "he's got a gun" callout but didn't see him be disarmed, this would obviously justify the response.
> As a European I'm also somewhat confused. I always thought that the reason the second amendment was made into such a big deal was because Americans felt they needed to be able to protect themselves in case the government ran amok.
This is the reason for the second amendment. Trump and some others have seriously fumbled the messaging on this point. The issue isn't that Pretti had a gun, nor that he had a gun at the protest, but that he had a gun at a protest, obstructed law enforcement (a felony), then resisted arrest. Of course, doing so didn't mean that "he deserved it". Fighting the cops while armed with a firearm was extremely reckless and stupid, but that alone doesn't justify a shooting. Most attacks from the left are (whether honestly or disingenuously) based on only these facts, but ignore the most pertinent fact in play here, which is that cops have rights, too. Among these is the right to defend themselves. If a police officer perceives an imminent threat of lethal force, they are permitted by law to use lethal force in self defense. That is why it was so reckless for Pretti to fight the cops--because it is extremely easy, when fighting someone who is armed with a lethal weapon, to reasonably perceive an imminent threat of lethal force. Pair this with Pretti's aforementioned rapid movement of his right hand toward his hip in the moment before the first shot, and it is not a stretch at all to see this shooting as a justifiable use of force. Tragic, of course, but still legally justified.
> Isn't this the exact scenario those arguments were talking about?
2A supporters often spitball about scenarios that might justify a revolution. I've never heard anyone suggest that they would fight for protestors' imagined right to fight cops with total immunity from consequences.
And the big European nations own ~ 23% of US debt.
This is not a one-sided contest.
Oddly, it does feel like trump is what europe needed to wake up from its slumber. With new AI / startup funding, the rebuild of their military, and opening up to china this could be the making of the EU into a true superpower. About time.
1) This wasn't a poll of all Europeans, only of ten EU countries polled (Germany, France, Italy, Spain, Poland, Denmark, Estonia, Portugal, Hungary and Bulgaria).
2) Participants weren't asked if we were any ally, they were asked if we were "an ally - that shares our interests and values". Shared values have little to do with what an "ally" means in the common parlance.
3) Excluding the full context could give you a false idea of how they view us. The full results:
16% - An ally—that shares our interests and values
51% - A necessary partner—with which we must strategically cooperate
13% - Don't know or refuse to answer
12% - A rival—with which we need to compete
8% - An adversary—with which we are in conflict
4) The idea that Europeans don't see us as allies is belied by their answer to the question "At the current time, would you support or oppose developing an alternative European nuclear deterrent that does not rely on the US". Only 16% strongly supported it. So they don't "see us as an ally", but they're happy to rely on us as their strategic bulwark? Hmm.
5) In my mind, the only question that actually matters on this survey, w/ regards to the opinions of our European friends, was this one: "If your country was forced to choose between being a part of an American or a Chinese bloc of countries, which would you prefer it to end up in?" Sadly, European responses to that question were not provided! If anyone delves into the underlying data, I'd love to know the results for this question.
Yeah, sorry. You can spin it any way you want. The fact is the glitter has rubbed off the American wagon, and Europeans are starting to see a pretty ugly underskirt. If you don't think bullying Greenland is a net negative, I've got a small banana republic to sell you.
The question isn't "Is bullying Greenland a net negative"... that's too obvious and empty to get clicks. The spin here is in taking a survey designed to produce a specific result, and then using it as some kind of anchor to express a feeling that may or may not have a basis in reality. Is Trump a terrible president? Yep. Is that leading to the death of the EU/US alliance? No, and this poll is a poor excuse for evidence of that.
He's clearly alluding the fact that the Biden admin did far worse.
The great sin of Trump's FCC was a single ill-advised tweet by FCC chair Brendan Carr... in which he threatened to enforce the law as written. For comparison, the Biden admin's FBI actively engaged in purely political media manipulation in service of the sitting president's campaign, such as when they lied to Facebook (and presumably others) to "prebunk" the Hunter's Laptop story, which directly lead to a near-total ban of a factual news story.
He wrote that the FCC wasn't a government agency. Hard to argue that is correct, or that their political pursuit of one of trump's "enemies" isn't actually political.
It was more that a tweet no, but an interview with Benny johnson, an avowed political figure paid by Russians at one point?
> He wrote that the FCC wasn't a government agency. Hard to argue that is correct
You're harping on a detail that hardly matters in order to avoid the broader point, which is rather silly. The FCC is a government agency. Brendan Carr made an ill-advised tweet, which doesn't hold a candle to Biden's use of the FBI to spread misinformation and induce censorship for political purposes.
> or that their political pursuit of one of trump's "enemies" isn't actually political.
Of course it's political. It's political when both sides do it.
When you're ignoring the comment talking about people arrested for criticizing a political pundit to argue about minutae and claiming "both sides are bad", yes.
You got me. I am avoiding the comment about the Perry County Police Department, as it's so incredibly damaging to my worldview. The cognitive dissonance is simply too great to bear.
> We were nomads before we settled in cities, and it's only the designs of the empowered few that ever made the idea compulsory.
Reasoning from pre-agrarian living patterns is, quite frankly, hippy nonsense. And no, we didn't settle in cities because of "the designs of the empowered few", but because agriculture leads to more permanent, prosperous settlements, which attract raiders, and settling close together allowed for common defense. In other words, as soon as people earned a living by their own planning and sustained effort, (as opposed to merely collecting the bounty of the earth) they settled down and drew borders to protect what they had built from people who wanted to just show up and reap the rewards of their effort, at their expense!
> I also lived where I could see Tijuana from my back yard and all the pearl clutching and self-fanning over "illegal immigrants" is a giant crock of blustery nonsense.
We can't have borders because you could see Tijuana from your back yard?
> We have bigger problems than normal folks just trying to live their lives.
Defending borders is the most basic function of the state. It quite literally does not have anything better to do than to defend its borders.
> Defending borders is the most basic function of the state. It quite literally does not have anything better to do than to defend its borders.
Fundamentally, everything in your post down to this ending boils down to whether or not you think that immigrants coming into the country is a good thing or not. People will try to split hairs over "doing it the right way," when until the 1900s doing it the right way was basically just having enough financial stability to make it here - many states had nothing beyond 'means testing' that would easily be passed if you could afford to make it to America rather than stowing away, and many states had less than that. For most of American history, immigrating properly was literally just showing up.
For the overwhelming majority of illegal immigrants, the only difference between them and the legal immigrant is the amount of paperwork on file. And many of us arguing that that paperwork matters are beneficiaries of a time where that paperwork wasn't necessary.
It's very explicitly a case of "Fuck you, got mine."
You know, ideological differences aside, there are some brass-tacks reasons that this particular brand of rhetoric does you no good, and actually hurts you.
Bought groceries lately? Kind of expensive, no? A significant portion of that is due to the central valley labor shortage. Which is a direct result of ICE enforcement. Same goes for price increases in restaurants across the country. Those increases in prices at the grocery store also translate to inflationary pressure across the board. People have to spend more to eat, so they demand bigger salaries, so their companies raise prices. Not rocket science.
Which makes me wonder - what exactly do you think the value prop is, here? Are you directly benefitting from this or is it just a balm for some vague jingoist need to feel superior? I'm genuinely curious. The common arguments like 'they're importing rapists' is... well I don't even know where to start with that one it's just preposterous and demonstrably false. Immigrants aren't taking your job, are they? Like what is it?
> Which makes me wonder - what exactly do you think the value prop is, here?
I want to leave my country to my children and theirs. Whatever America would be after the endless waves of third world immigrants (most of whom are grasping collectivists who value none of the things that have made America worth preserving, and would happily neuter the bill of rights and tax every dollar out of my pocket) it would not be my country. Bored cat ladies and wishcasting liberals are apparently happy to roll the dice with the futures of our children on the line, but I'm not. Let Canada or the UK or whoever carry the experiment to its conclusion, and if it works, then by golly let's jump in with both feet. But a blind gamble? Hard pass.
Perhaps it would be different if I thought we had good faith partners on the other side, but I don't. Biden tried to bum-rush millions of illegals into the country with the full stated intent to amnesty them, enfranchise them, and use them to control the congress, admit new states (DC/PR), and cement permanent demographic-guaranteed progressive/collectivist majority. The democrats attempted most of these steps during his tenure, but were 1 vote short in the senate.
I was hesitant to even support deportations before the Biden regime jumped the shark. (Remember when they said we needed to pass a new law to "seal" the border--and explicit lie--when the law actually codified mass, unvetted illegal immigration at ~10X historical levels? I doubt it.) Knowing now that the left (the leadership, if not the rank and file) clearly intended to weaponize demographic change for their political benefit, of course I oppose them.
Again, the entire commentary you have here is all more FYGM.
If the Native Americans had this attitude (and Europe didn't just go to war) we wouldn't be here at all. If earlier European-descendant Americans had this attitude, a huge chunk of us wouldn't be here.
People said all of the same things here that you're saying about Irish, Italian, Chinese, and many other immigrant classes over the years. None of your rhetoric is new or unique.
> Again, the entire commentary you have here is all more FYGM.
Typical progressive inversion of reality. If you think it's selfish for Americans to expect the American government to put them first, I'd hate to hear what you have to think about the foreigners who demand the same!
> If the Native Americans had this attitude (and Europe didn't just go to war) we wouldn't be here at all.
The Native Americans did have this attitude, which is why they consistently resisted the colonization of their territory.
> If earlier European-descendant Americans had this attitude, a huge chunk of us wouldn't be here.
Earlier European descendant Americans brought in immigrants to further their own goal of colonizing the North American continent. It wasn't a welfare policy for the benefit of foreigners, it was a policy enacted by Americans for the benefit of Americans. They also drastically cut immigration when it suited them, as with the Immigration Act of 1924.
> People said all of the same things here that you're saying about Irish, Italian, Chinese, and many other immigrant classes over the years. None of your rhetoric is new or unique.
Are you suggesting that earlier European-descendant Americans did, in fact, share my attitude? Pick a lane.
> Typical progressive inversion of reality. If you think it's selfish for Americans to expect the American government to put them first, I'd hate to hear what you have to think about the foreigners who demand the same!
Because I don't think it's actually beneficial for Americans to do what you're suggesting we do. America became what it was through accepting immigrants from all over the world.
> The Native Americans did have this attitude, which is why they consistently resisted the colonization of their territory.
Did you ignore the part of the message that literally covered that? Or is your stance that might makes right? Alright Mr. Redbeard
> Earlier European descendant Americans brought in immigrants to further their own goal of colonizing the North American continent. It wasn't a welfare policy for the benefit of foreigners, it was a policy enacted by Americans for the benefit of Americans. They also drastically cut immigration when it suited them, as with the Immigration Act of 1924.
> Are you suggesting that earlier European-descendant Americans did, in fact, share my attitude? Pick a lane.
Are you suggesting that I believe that Americans are monolithic in thought? I believe it is quite obvious that I am speaking to the overall attitude of the country on the broader level - obviously there are groups that have held a wide variety of views. But for the majority of our history - as you pointed out, only the last 100 years or so have had particularly strict immigration laws - the prevailing view as evidenced by the actual laws of the country was obviously not a country that felt that restricting immigration was the right thing to do for her citizens, despite the fact that many people obviously had the same sentiments then that you do today.
if you look at that chart, there's a price spike between jan-march of '25, precisely when ICE started cracking down in CA.
Biden also famously did not do what you are saying he did. He continued the work on the border wall, much to the chagrin of everyone who sees immigration differently than you do. The idea that immigration was "10x historical levels" is not backed up by the data - see, I found a chart too [0]. True that we now have a greater percent of the population than any time in history [1] - around 16%. If that's "they're taking over the country" then I'd say you're just being dramatic. Since it also looks like we're talking about legal immigrants here, let's take a look at what they provide because you did mention taxes.
So we've already identified that 16% of our population is immigrants, more than ever before, sure. In 2023 we made about $2.2T from individual income taxes [2]. Of that, immigrants paid $651B [3]. So despite being 16% of the population, they paid nearly 30% of our total individual tax revenue. I'd say that's a pretty good deal!
In other words, they count on non-solar backup... which not only makes solar more expensive, but basically redundant.
Until Solar+storage is the cheapest form of energy while delivering its promised output at 4AM after a cloudy day in freezing temperatures, the "solar is cheap" stuff is simply dishonest.
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