pbmonster
2d ago
and it was built mostly to serve their own national needs, not to be the powerhouse for all of Europe. They can export some energy, but not nearly enough to power the continent
That's true, there's also not nearly enough transmission capacity installed for them to literally do that. But still, that's a lot of base load taken care of. France exports about 17% of the total electricity it generates. So on average, around 10 of those nukes permanently power its neighbors (and peaks go significantly higher, of course).
I also don't think the solar situation is at all comparable to China.
You can just look that up. The world bank has a pretty through study on the solar potential of different countries. They made a nice map to show the results and published their methods. Inner Mongolia is less than 10% better for solar than Spain, and has similar seasonality. The better regions are thousands of kilometer further west, and have "challenging terrain" (lots of mountains).
Building solar panels in Spain to export energy all the way out to Germany, the Baltics, and Eastern Europe doesn't seem like a real solution, even if you ignore the difficulty of crossing multiple international borders. I know they've gotten some energy from solar and wind, and that's great, but they haven't increased capacity nearly as much as they would need to "just stop burning oil," let alone the natural gas they import.
Yeah, they basically have to roof over half of Spain, and quickly, if they stay committed to the current strategy - but they could do just that, and indeed have started to do so. It's the cheapest way to make power, after all, they just need to invest. And I wasn't joking about the DC subsea cables. They're already building the first one, to France. The EU is investing in GW scale DC power lines to strengthen the internal electricity market between direct neighbors.
And that's just par for the course with large scale solar. China is miles ahead with doing all that, and the US will also have to put up many GW of new transmission capacity towards the East Coast. Solar has gotten to cheap not to do that. The alternative is to just move all the data centers, aluminum smelters, ect. to where the panels are. We'll certainly see both.
pbmonster
3d ago
I worry about Europe's energy situation though... they don't have much oil, they seem culturally dead set against nuclear, and they have terrible geography for solar.
This seems to equate Europe with Greater Germany.
France loves their nukes, they're going to add another 6 modern reactors to their existing fleet of 57, and are planning a second tranche of 8 more for the 2030s. Zero reactors are scheduled to go offline, they intend to run them until the reinforced concrete itself reaches its lifetime limit.
The solar situation is clearly worse than the US (top tier solar potential, globally), but actually comparable to China. Both have a few thousand kilometers between the good solar locations (Spain, Italy, Inner Mongolia, West Chinese Deserts) and the major energy consumers (European Blue Banana, Chinese Coast), so both will have to put down a lot of ultra high voltage DC power lines. Europe has a lot less distance to bridge, but needs maybe 20% more panels than China. Both can (and do) also just move the big consumers to where the panels are. Greater Germany can also somewhat compensate the lack of solar potential with better land-based wind resources. Those can make very cheap power as well (but are less well suited to integration with battery storage, so they'll need serious innovation with flixible loads).
Of course, the biggest problem of the EU in all of this is the same as the US: its insanely difficult to get permitting for anything of that scale. China needs to bridge thousands of kilometers more with power lines, but can just build those. A 50 GW UHVDC link between Germany and Spain pretty much needs subsea cables, because no way you'll get the permit for 2000 km of fat power poles - not in Spain, not in Germany, and certainly not in France.
Oil is funny. Europe just needs to stop burning it. Norway alone makes enough crude to satisfy the entire European chemical feedstock demand, if you add the UK you don't even need to retool the refineries to crude-to-chemical optimization.
pbmonster
8d ago
I find the sudden switch to non-Canada to be a bit out of left field, wasn't the OP about Canada specifically?
I mean this specific discussion thread started because I mentioned ~5% of all deaths being pretty normal for a western country with legalized assisted suicide. All I wanted to say is that they all have various schemes to regulate access, and they end up with similar rates. If Canada is frequently killing health people to safe money, so are the Euros.
In practice, they already took out someone who changed their mind and requested hospice care.
Criminal, if true.
In the end, suicide (for whatever reason) has always been something humans did. There's many arguments that making it to easy is unnecessarily increasing the number of successful attempt, but most of the time we don't care all that much. Decreasing the pack size of popular sleeping pills, closing the most popular bridges for foot traffic, psych tests for guns... All very inconvenient.
But the cleanest, most dignified path is worth arguing over? Just regulate it, regulate it better, and let people go if they really want to.
pbmonster
8d ago
False, Canada's track 2 euthanasia is applicable to non-terminal cases
I was talking about Netherlands/Belgium, but translated it badly. They require incurable instead of terminal.
voluntary and well considered
Again, in the non-Canadian case you have to voice the wish repeatedly, a month apart.
What is supposed to be the relevance of this?
Stops a single doctor from sending of people on his own, which is better than the alternative.
In the end, the question is if the process is any harder than just putting a gun into your mouth. I'd say it is, in all three countries.
pbmonster
8d ago
Symptom of a society that has solved many causes of early death. The reality on the ground in a hospice ward or a dementia care facility makes this number seem low. If you know any medical professionals, ask them what they'd do with a diagnosis of Alzheimer's or multiple myeloma.
There's no glory in a slow and painful death.
pbmonster
8d ago
While this number does not include self-inflicted gunshots (IE Suicides)
And why the hell wouldn't we include those if we're speaking about medically assisted suicide? That makes no sense, the only answer is that otherwise the stats don't look like a headline.
Also, the Canadian number doesn't really rise eyebrows. That's roughly 5% of all deaths, a bit lower than Netherlands' number, a bit higher than Belgium. Both have stringent rules (terminal, suffering with no chance of improvement, voluntary and well considered, review committee affirms), so I'm not too worried about a healthcare system running quick and cheap cost optimization...
In all 3 countries the rate is rising quickly, which doesn't surprise me. I've already decided to take that route for a long list of possible future diagnosis, as have many of my family members. A growing part of society seems to have come up the same conclusion.
pbmonster
8d ago
To be fair this is my opinion on a lot of Europe as well, so Canada certainly isn't the only one being subject to this withering assessment
But then, who isn't? California had those exact fuck-ups, all of them, in the recent past. So does the east coast (albeit a bit further back). And in between them, there's pockets of insane structural poverty,
Australia also seems to do it's best to squander an entire continent full of natural resources while crippling itself politically. With a starting position like that, being China's mine seems to be a substandard outcome. Tragic loss of state capacity seems to be the story all throughout the West.
I'd just take that as a sad fact, and wait for China to shakes us out of that collective stupor (might take a catastrophic loss to accomplish that, so let's not wait in hopeful expectation).
Until then, I try to see the good. With Canada, I associate Bombardier, oil sands infrastructure and CANDU reactors. Universities of Toronto, Waterloo, McGill. They can still built, if they'd wanted to. They'll retain that ability for a while.
pbmonster
10d ago
I'm not sure that's a particularly promising path to success. The jet engines you put on drones (or, with a few caveats, classic fighter jets) don't have much in common with commercial jet engines for airliners. The latter are much more complex. Requirements on fuel efficiency and reliability are much, much less forgiving in commercial aviation. Catching up with the last 10% on fuel efficiency while pushing time-on-wing past 20k hours will be a gigantic effort.
I expect Chinese industry to be perfectly capable of mass producing drone jet engines today. It's just not very difficult to build one that's better than a piston engine. And they already have mass production of a domestic design of military jet engines, after all (until recently, they just weren't all that good - but certainly good enough for drone operations). They also have decades of experience designing and building (ground bound) heavy duty natural gas turbines.
Whether they will catch up with the west on commercial aviation jet engines is mostly a matter of investment. If they decide to invest the resources, it's only a matter of time. But its enormously difficult, so I'd say its unclear if they'll do that and if it's even worth all that much if/when they succeed.
pbmonster
15d ago
They're no worse off than they would be if they had just left when they were supposed to.
This is incorrect, being deported gets you hit with a reentry bar automatically, 5 years is the minimum, 10 or 20 are not uncommon. Also, getting the next visa will be significantly more complex, almost certainly requiring visiting a consulate and applying for waivers, ect., which might get denied arbitrarily. You'll probably never get a ESTA ever again.
If you are a normal tourist or business traveller from a visa waiver country, getting deported from the US is a catastrophe, and you might as well make peace with never seeing the country again.
pbmonster
26d ago
Good post, got a strong resonance in me
do I have trouble convincing anyone to attend (and attending a concert alone just feels sad)
I can only recommend to get over that feeling, especially because you can enjoy live music the way you describe here. Sure, it's even better in good company, but going through it alone is well worth the time/money/potential awkwardness. I've long made peace with the fact that my taste in music is... exotic, so I almost always go alone nowadays. There's also advantages. I can fight my way into first row if I want to. I can mosh for two hours if I want to. Or I can just chill in front of the mixer. And nobody to interrupt that zen flow state if the show is good...
Niche metal bands play in small venues. These venues are the only good way to listen to live amplified music. The speakers are sufficient to fill the space without distorting. The deleterious effect of the relatively slow speed of sound is not as noticeable in a small space. And the audience is typically much better: they are there because they are true fans and not to show off on instagram. Small venues also get loud. Hearing protection is a must to avoid permanent damage.
Very true. I often regret not having cought today's juggernauts before they hit mass appeal. I'm a Maynard James Keenan fan boy, and live I enjoy A Perfect Circle and Puscifer so much more than Tool just because of that.
The transmitted power isn't nearly high enough to cause significant tissue heating, and the energy isn't nearly high enough to cause radiation burns or mutations. Even more esoteric effects (i.e. electric fields having... I don't know, an influence on the calcium signaling mechanism, or changing membrane permeability) haven't really been measured conclusively ever, and all modern smartphones are EMF tested extensively anyway, so they reliably induce only extremely low electric fields at every point inside the body.
Smartphones are boring, from a radiobiology point of view, but people are still trying to find something.
pbmonster
1mo ago
American insanity, this entire thread.
Cars are built to handle much, much worse abuse. As long as you don't smack the next car with your door, there will be zero visible changes from leaning a door against it. Touching other cars is normal and acceptable, just take a little care with it.
If the boomer insists, we can both take photos of the crime scene and she's free to call my liability insurance. Further discussion is unnecessary.
After, she can petition the store/city to widen all the parking spaces to better fit modern SUVs. They probably haven't done that since the 80s, when cars where half a foot slimmer. That will only take a little paint, and reduce the number of spots, but by less than 10%.
Until then, I will park in any and all spots I can physically squeeze my car into.
They're all absolutely terrible. The one I had got about 20% better after a few hundred chapters, but still very close to unreadable. I've read fanfic by 7th graders with better prose.
You kind of get used to it.
Someone should burn a couple of hundred million tokens and have a frontier LLM do a fresh translation or an extremely liberal English rewrite. Especially pretty much all original dialog needs to go. The problem is you probably need to supervise it, to keep all foreshadowing intact and all world building elements consistently named. That part of the translation was actually decent, the factions, Gu, ect. have passable or even good names.
While we're at it, liberally cutting all the superfluous explanations would probably help. Doing the absolute opposite of show-don't-tell got really annoying after the first million times he did it.
pbmonster
1mo ago
So is it freedom of movement that's demanded, or deeper labour market integration?
It's the latter, and more. Automatic work permit, full access to the education system at every level, full access to the health care system, ect.
No limits on where you move, live, study, work, retire.
pbmonster
1mo ago
No, that's the normal pattern. The German speaking region always votes a few points more right wing than the rest of the country, pretty much no matter the question.
pbmonster
1mo ago
Because that's not what they voted about. They voted about putting a hard limit on their population. And realistically, limiting immigration from non-EU countries wouldn't have bought them much time - that's consistently less than a quarter of new immigrants. But again, they didn't vote about that. They could have, but decided to vote on something else.
pbmonster
1mo ago
A large ratio of the population supports at least some immigration (the Swiss referendum to cap the population failed).
To clarify, that referendum failed because it was stupid. Capping the population directly requires dissolving all ~20 bilateral agreements with the EU in the near future, which has been voted on several times before and which is (for prudent economic reasons) extremely unpopular with the constituency. It would be more catastrophic than Brexit, economically.
And the EU has repeatedly been very clear on the matter: if Switzerland wants to keep its current level of economic integration into the EU, freedom of movement is not optional. All bilateral agreements will be dissolved if freedom of movement goes.
So, the referendum was a pointless populist gesture. The votes it got (45%) was from people who want to cancel all the ties to the EU anyway, and people who didn't care enough to understand this simple point.
I mean, you can't really force it. You would have to break up their communities by force and reeducate them, in a "kill the Indian and save the man" kind of way. Perhaps it is not physically impossible, but it would certainly require the kind of cruelty you are trying to avoid here.
I think it could be done way less cruel. Start with the ghettos - most immigrants live in rentals, and you can require apartment buildings and/or street blocks to be inhabited (in the case of Sweden) by exactly 80% natives, 7% Arabs, 2% Finns, 1% Poles, ect - by law. A bit draconian for the land lord, who now needs to choose from a far smaller pool of applicants, but not exactly horrible. And if you remove the ghettos, being "clannish, inward-looking, and outwardly hostile" becomes a lot harder.
The education could be a requirement for the work permit or welfare payments. Target women and children specifically. In the end I'm an optimist, I think the western value system itself is so superior, it will propagate itself eventually when/if enough friction towards active resistance is introduced. Get woman and children out of the house early and consistently, enforce language.
Segregated communities (which do and will form naturally), then policing their border.
Has the formation of ghettos ever turned out well? Usually, you'd want to do the opposite. Force integration, encourage assimilation. Teach the language, the culture, make attending mandatory. Even if they re-migrate (voluntary or not) later, you almost certainly will get better social outcomes for the host population that way - and outcomes for people not caged in ghettos is certainly better. Most famously, Singapore was rather successful in integrating their (poorer, less educated, majority Muslim) Malay minority into society by doing just that - they went as far as requiring single appartment buildings to mirror the ethical make-up of Singapore itself. No ghettos, by any means necessary.
In the end, it sounds like you want to minimize welfare spending, so you can't keep up ghetto containment very well anyway since everybody needs to get to work.
My impression is that most able-bodied refugees will voluntarily take low-paying jobs.
That's not very leftist of you. Doing that will depress working class power, making your native low-skilled population poorer, which is exactly the reason most right-wing governments absolutely suck at limiting immigration effectively.
pbmonster
1mo ago
Huh, interesting. That one was firmly on the long list of labels I was fairly confident to be complete garbage. I never buy that stuff, and my last three cars made it well past 200k without a single instance of engine troubles. "Gunk" in the engine itself sounds like such a 1970's problem, I haven't ever heard of anybody having trouble with that.
pbmonster
1mo ago
That's called fraud.
In the US, the FDA defines what "SPF50" even means. They have norms and test protocols to ensure this significance. Without the FDA, coconut oil has SPF50 for all intents and purposes. Could some other industry committee define "SPF", and sue cosmetic companies that use it wrongly? Sure. But I have to think for a long time until I can think of the first product at a supermarket that has an industry-defined label I respect (in fact, I can only think of greenwashing labels I don't trust ("fair trade", "organic") and technical standards I trust unconditionally ("USB-C" is a very reliable label, even on AliExpress).
We can enforce against fraud without requiring genuine suppliers to pay tens or hundreds of millions of dollars "proving safety" of something widely used around the world without issue.
Can we? Sunscreen is like the lowest common denominator, and it already gets tricky. Someone has to check for efficacy and side effects. The age of mineral-based UV filters is long past, today sunscreen often contains organic UV filters. A common conspiracy theory is that those organic rings are more harmful than sunburn itself - so someone better check side effects. And, sure enough, the organic UV filters from the 80s easily end up in detectable doses in blood, urine and breast milk of people who use them, and sure enough, they interact (weakly) with estrogen, androgen, or thyroid hormone receptors. Should this be allowed? Is this still acceptable? And should we really let sun screen producers answer those questions for us? (Ironically, those old aromatics are still in use today in US sun screen, most other countries have moved on to newer, larger and better organic filters, which the FDA hasn't evaluated yet and which pass through the skin much less readily)
Lots of regulations are even made just to make it more difficult for competition to exist
Yes, without doubt. I'm not actually all that pro regulations. But that doesn't mean we can just remove them all, Chesterton’s Fence is there for a reason - maybe not a good reason, but I like my food and my drugs well tested. My barber may be held to lower standards.
the FDA seeks out products that meets its standards, and/or creates its own approved baseline?
To preserve any kind of quality, this means multi-stage trials and double blind studies. That's where the cost is. Don't get me wrong, I don't think the current system is good. But it is extremely difficult to improve it.
Better start small: I think FDA exemptions for terminally ill patients with informed consent should be fast-tracked and default-approved. Maybe add some profit limit to prevent exploitation of the desperate.
Or a larger step: identify international partner organizations with adequate quality control. If something has been legal in Japan or the EU for five years, strongly accelerated approval should be possible.
pbmonster
1mo ago
Since that "FDA approved" label on the box is likely to cost millions (maybe billions) of dollars, I don't think you can make it optional. The price discrimination would be too large, and many products categories would stop entirely having new products FDA approved, leaving us only with the "legacy FDA" products already in the market.
pbmonster
1mo ago
The FDA is already really bad for this, the US government takes an approach that everything is basically banned until "proven" safe. Our default is that you are a moron who can't be trusted to take any risk. And this means small stuff like why you can't buy good sunscreen, to more serious issues like why it's difficult for terminally ill patients to try new risky procedures
The alternative is clearly worse. Because what sucks more than not having Euro sunscreen? Giving someone money for a jar of "SPF50 coconut oil" and burning lobster red. Giving somebody money for bootleg Asian sunscreen and getting a batch contaminated with benzene (carcinogenic in California, and everywhere else). Both happened. Both are worse than having a small selection of reliable sunscreen.
And sure, I can do the research myself. But I don't want to do that every time I go shopping. I also don't trust 90% of the population to do it right, especially not against hostile advertising. And sure, both sunscreen brands can be sued under some libertarian arbitration scheme. But I like not having skin cancer more than a 7 figure settlement (or getting nothing besides the privilege of watching my opponent go bankrupt). I can see the argument for experimental drugs for terminally ill patients. But terminally ill people are desperate, and absolutely need some form of protection - at least against financial exploitation.
And don't get me wrong, the FDA isn't really doing a good job here. But it's a job that needs to be done, and probably to a standard that's not so far removed from what is done today. Regulations are written in blood, ect.
From a technical perspective, you could do an "ID lite" without biometric data. Give out "federal payroll tax numbers" (call it what you want) that come on a credit card sized NFC enabled card with private and public keys. Expand E-Verify and make it mandatory for every single form of income, and force employers to tap the NFC card to a phone when they sign up an employee. Force them to tap in freelancers. Have the system report nothing back but success or failure to enroll. Then soft-roll-out over a period of time (you'll have a few percent of citizens having trouble proofing their status, but you'll always have that) and slowly take SSN out back and shoot it. Make the cards easily revocable and replaceable when stolen or lost.
Then nail everybody not complying for tax evasion.
More options
Context Copy link