The only thing stunning about this, is how anyone ever could've believed that cryptocurrencies would not end in the dystopian future of a government knowing every single transaction of yours plus being able to confiscate every single e-penny at will.
Optimism and naivety on my part. When I bought a few (legal) things with bitcoin I have acquired from my friend around 2014 I really thought I was living in a better, more free future. Reality only started to dissapoint me more and more from there.
>government knowing every single transaction of yours plus being able to confiscate every single e-penny at will.
Ah, nothing says "credibility" like reiterating the good old burning covid-corpses of india lie, or removing India from your scary looking chart of new infections, because it would show India's steady drop in new infections.
Hopefuly Thomas gets a bit more convincing scaredata for the Lambda Variant.
As a German, it's cringe-worthy to me that a German state-run media outlet runs such a piece. The Crown Enstate Entity isn't "mysterious" at all if you engage with a country's history. But I think this is the spirit of our relations going forward since the Brits decided to not go with the program.
Also: The gap in housing affordability isn't driven by a palace outside of London, or some sea-floor property. It is driven by city governments and their "Highwaymaning" via zoning and more.
The ones where they silenced "Far-Right" Sceptics of Corona-Measures in Europe? A rapper responding with "ok, dude" to a trans person? HK Virologist Li Meng-Yan? The government of Hungary?
Or where they permanently ban conservative cartoonists, the MyPillow guy, Project Veritas – but not the Ayatollah?
AFAIC there's nothing special here to see. Standard Twitter Behaviour.
Also OP's critique is misguided, as there is no specific Indian law Twitter would have broken (according to the article) if it hadn't complied with the government's request. Likewise, there was no law forcing twitter to permanently ban the accounts I've mentioned.
Twitter is just a typical SV org, laden with upper-class virtue-signalers, who couldn't even notice their own bigotry if the stench of human-feces covered San Francisco actually made it into their comfy homes.
Ah Sweet, the old “exportweltmeister” scam never seems to get old.
Germany is exporting so much energy because (and only because) without the base load provided by conventional power plants it’s energy grid routinely is on the brink of collapse, whenever there are weather based shifts in renewable energy production.
This causes the electricity price to routinely go negative because our neighboring countries don’t want to have it either.
What a failure. And what a failure that people still fall for that exportweltmeister lie
Do you have a source for your claims? I mean its obvious that renewables are dependent on the weather, but that's no issue since a neighbour can always produce & Germany is building up power storage capacity. Including a fat line to Norway where Germany sends wind power and receives renewables power when there is a need.
Additional the German power grid is super stable, black- or brownouts simply don't happen.
> This causes the electricity price to routinely go negative because our neighboring countries don’t want to have it either.
This has and probably will always happen. For example Aluminum smelters are getting paid to burn electricity almost since the beginning of the industrialization, otherwise this industry wouldn't exist.
> What a failure. And what a failure that people still fall for that exportweltmeister lie
So building up massive renewable capacity while starting to sell more and more of it is a failure to you? Either your expectations are crazy high or very low...
And, while yes, the prices tend to spike into negativity for short periods, that's actually pretty normal to happen for countries which partake in the Synchronous grid of Continental Europe then and now.
The base issue, or at least a bigger part of that then wind/solar is, of that is actually coal. A coal plant needs tens of hours, up to days to shut-down; and then another few days to start up again - and such starts-stops are quite taxing on the plant; it can only survive a dozen of those before requiring major maintenance to happen.
Wind can actually be turned off quite dynamically (rotate the blade such that the angle of attack for the wind goes down to zero), not milliseconds, but a few seconds to minutes.
For the reverse you need storage, things like batteries or hydro (pumped storage) can and are used for that already.
Using terms like "Exportweltmeister" (export champion) in context of the European energy market is just rather non-sense, Germans energy politic is far from perfect, but it was never trimmed for export.
This is why you build continent-sized electric grids. It’s always sunny somewhere.
Making a nation-sized renewable-based electric grid is very hard to stabilize, because you’re not working at the right scale. It’s the same with other large infrastructure like freeways: they’re only worth the investment if you connect vast areas.
Always be wary of studies conducted by people taking a political assumption and turning it into the basis of their paper.
It's not coincidal that said studies either lack specifics in some areas, while being over-specific in others or are cited in the same manner (leaving out details where it helps the political camp, being over-specific in others).
One can already see this turning up in general rebuttals of agriculture, or citations that leave out the critical detail that soil erosion is caused by corn specifically, not crops in general. Or which kind of geographic reagion was used. Or how well farmes tilled their land (see the picture about erosion down-hill: its just a question of the right tilling-technique to prevent that from happening).
And as a last resort you can always toss it into some meta study to "prove" your point.
I have lived in the corn belt my whole life. I was just surprised that anyone might think there is significant topsoil left. The average field is continually beat to hell by machines that create magnificent dust storms twice each season--spraying glyphosate and planting, and then harvest.
All the major farmers in my region use no-till but they dump lots of fertilizers and/or must rotate between corn and soya (beans create and accumulate nitrogen at the roots, leaving it behind in the soil for the next crop).
All the fields I'm used to are very pale and clayish. Dark soils in newish-virginish soils stand out like a sore thumb and can really only be found in small non-factory fields.
Uh no, not backdoor climate emergency denial. I survived in the 2018 Paradise fire. The main problem there was no rain for 200+ days, coupled with strong, dry winds in a particular direction, and PG&E's 100+-year-old under-maintained, bare powerlines that broke off their ancient fasteners. The reason for the 200+ days of no rain is likely related to both rising average temperatures, breaking record-after-record each year, and the lack of enough Arctic sea ice pack to stabilize the Arctic's jet-stream. Without a stable jet-stream, it breaks off into disjointed loops and also dips down into lower latitudes. This causes havoc and seemingly more random/variable/intense weather in N America. Blizzard in Austin, for example, which never anticipated such an occurrence that far south.
> Blizzard in Austin, for example, which never anticipated such an occurrence that far south
The ERCOT report [0] on the 2011 Texas outage states, verbatim,
> "The winter weather event of February 1-5, 2011 was determined to be a one in ten year event for some regions of Texas in terms of low temperature extremes and duration."
Or, if you'd rather be kinder to Texas power generators while using the same report,
> "Taking these temperature extremes into account, and coupling them with the sustained winds of this event, it is estimated that the resultant [...] event suffered by many Texas generation facilities approached a one in 25 year severity."
With this decade-old report suggesting extreme cold may well occur roughly once per decade, I will respectfully follow up with: Never anticipated my ass.
Yes and no. I wouldn't blame just Trump per se, because forest management policy implementation across jurisdictions moves glacially-slow. There is likely enough blame to go around, such as not clearing fuel around the electrical grid and not setting intentional, controlled clearance fires.
The most economically-destructive fires are at the Wildland-urban interface (WUI), especially new residential developments that build right up to and in large, dense forested areas. Without proper fire mitigation for houses, infrastructure, and communities, devastating Camp Fire scenarios are entirely possible again.
People who rejoice about this study because they want to use it to defend policies that are criticized for potential negative mental health impacts willingly neglect the nature of suicide: Of course sucide numbers go down because many suicidal people want their death to be noticed.
Say the policies are lifted and suicides go up again, will the rejoicing ones account for that as well? Of course not, they will rather gaslight the argument by blaming the increase on the lifting
