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Joined 7 months ago
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Cake day: July 22nd, 2024

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  • Which do you consider “the real problems”? Because the US government has been organizing and partly controlling the drug trade to the US from central and south America in order to arm fascist groups, destabilize countries and justify US military and intelligence bases.

    Of course Mexico only blocking gun smuggling from the US wont solve things. The US government and intelligencr ultimately needs to be mostly dismantled and completely reworked. But thats a bit much for Mexico to demand at the moment.








  • I am sorry, but your ideas about how these things work are ignoring a lot of issues.

    First of all you have significant losses in the distribution grid. This is minimized the higher your voltage is, which is why longer range grids run on 110 kV and more. Then you have an intermediate level, typically 20 kV. Finally you get your local distribution with 220/230V. Also “current flowing the other way” does not exist in AC, because the “direction” changes 50x per second.

    Then you only have a limited transportation capacity, so moving a lot of electricity from a central plant of course costs a lot of investment and maintenance. The idea that “Transporting it is for all intents and purposes free” is completely out of touch with the reality of the electrical grid.

    But it gets worse. The more producers and consumers you have, the more you will need to balance fluctuations in production and consumption. This is why traditional grids were built around having a high baseload, with incentivizing high demand industries to connect, stabilizing demand. For renewables this is completely different, because renewabls will fluctuate. So the more energy you run through the centralized grid, the more short and medium term storages you will need to provide and the more investment and running costs you will have.

    You mention this with there being too much production on the local grid and then in another place also needing to react to this. This is not a problem exclusive to local grids. It is a problem for any level of the grid with integrating renewables. Note how the article also mentions the limit of 800W without requiring a permit.

    Finally in the long term we need to make the demand more flexible to production. So if the sun shines and the wind blows, household appliances should run, the fridge should cool a bit stronger, and the water heater heats up for the evening shower… Having a responsive demand with millions of agents can easily lead to overshooting, so that the demand spikes up far beyond supply, because every consumer reacts at the same time and it doesn’t temper out.

    This problem is much smaller, if every household can directly see their own production and consumption and already limit how much excess goes into, or is demanded.

    So microgeneration is part of the solution and not a problem like you make it out to be.






  • Upon being awarded the prize of A$10,000 (equivalent to $36,011 in 2022), Young said that he did not know there was a prize and that he felt bad accepting it, as each of the other five runners who finished had worked as hard as he did—so he gave A$3,000 to 41-year-old Joe Record and A$4,000 to the other runners, keeping only A$3,000 for himself.[2] Despite attempting the event again in later years, Young was unable to repeat this performance or claim victory again.[8]



  • The Legislative and Judiciary can only keep the Executive in check, if the people with guns in the Executive are willing to listen to them, rather than the superiors giving them orders.

    You have “Legislatives” in dictatorships too. but when they refuse to obey the military any longer, they either get disappeared, get a sham process over something they allegedly did, or at best you get a civil war.

    Or how Cersay Lannister said in Game of Thrones: “Power is Power”. When push comes to shove, the question is who do the people with guns listen to. Everything around it is just fluff. Unless large parts of the Military and Police defect and take care of their superior and then hand power back to the normal institutions, or there is a peoples uprising and subsequent civil war, the power will not go back.




  • Well, there also is a big amount of rebuilding to be done and no matter who would be in the US government, there would be a strong push for the rebuilding to end in factories, apartments and farms to be owned by US investors. Also the US has a history of combining “security” with resource access.

    In this regards Ukraine is getting fucked by receiving less aid than is needed to push back, but just enough to cause maximal attrition to Russia. And using the vast destruction caused by a prolonged war, was likely part of the strategy to profit off this war, both for Russia expecting victory and the US/Western Allies expecting Russia to eventually succumb to the attrition.

    Now problem is that Russia kept escalating, instead of limiting their losses.