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

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  • 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]



  • 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.





  • The same could be asked about the Vietnam invasion, the First Gulf War, Iraq invasion, Afghanistan invasion… From my perspective none of these had any convincing reason to give to the people, still Vietnam lasted for almost two decades. The occupation of Afghanistan also lasted two decades and there is still US troops in Iraq.

    If push comes to shove some bullshit reasons will be made up and i don’t trust the US executive to not obey. They are also letting some mid twenties kid fuck up the treasury system to hide payments being made or not made. And this is directly risking their own salaries.





  • Until the NATO countries have removed the US soldiers from their soil, most of the populated area of Canada would have been occupied already. There is around 100.000 US soldiers stationed in Bases in Europe. They need to be captured and disarmed first, before any forces can be send to defend Canada. That will take weeks at least. The US has the largest navy by far. Breaking the US naval blockade will take months if not years.

    An US invasion of Canada will mean months of war in Europe, before any chance of European troops getting to Canada.

    Unless the EU prepares quickly to kick out all American soldiers as well as build up a stockpile of anti-ship weapon, building jets and ships ourselves will take years, there is no way EU countries can come to the aid of Canada in time.




  • The US army is much larger and better equipped than the Canadian army. And the US has about 10x the population of Canada and most of the population lives within a few dozen miles of the US border.

    Also who is to support Canada with arms to defend against the US invasion? China? Russia? Because South Korea and the EU would first need to purge all the US bases they have.

    I think US vs. Canada would play out very different than Ukraine vs. Russia. Could end in a long and bloody incursion, but for the conventional side of things the US would steamroll Canada at first.



  • The congress and the Courts don’t matter. They don’t have the actual physical power to enforce anything. The ones who enforce are the police and the army. That is the difference between constitutional states of laws and authoritarian regimes. Which system do the people with guns protect. And the people with guns receive their orders from the President and lower hierarchies of the executive branch.

    So either the people with guns obey their superiors and abolish the division of power, or they disobey their direct orders and remove the authoritarian upstarts from power. If they choose to enact an authoritarian regime instead of removing the authoritarians from power, the only way out is resistance. Resistance against the people giving the orders and resistance against the people enforcing the orders.