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Joined 9 months ago
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Cake day: November 7th, 2025

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  • Germany could have closed their coal plants decades ago and decided not to. Now it has decided to be a leech on France’s and Sweden’s nuclear. Yes nuclear is expensive, so I hope you won’t be surprised when France and Sweden finally put their foot down and let Germany try to run their grid on wind, or pay a premium on baseload.

    And yes it sucks that the USA stirred up shit in Ukraine, throwing Europe and especially Germany under the bus. Luckily Iran is taking care of that.


  • Wait, is your claim still that EVs will form a significant portion of the grid? I thought that trope died sometime around 2020 when it was obvious that Elon is a megalomaniac.

    Industries need massive amounts of energy, and reducing emissions necessitates a significant increase in electricity use (e.g. hydrogen synthesis which is required for many processes to go green is very energy intensive). EVs just aren’t going to feed that. Lithium batteries won’t feed that.

    If we figure this out with batteries, it’s likely going to be sodium or some other storage method. So far large-scale storage methods have been utterly underwhelming and it often borders on sci fi.

    Here’s the thing. I want to reduce carbon emissions now, not in 30 years. That means fusion is not under consideration, and it means that we need way more electricity. Solar and wind are, as you pointed out, cheap ways to add electricity to the grid, but there’s a reason why no grid runs solely on solar and wind for any meaningful amount of time, and that’s because it’s not physically possible. There’s not enough lithium on this planet to realize that fantasy. Sodium, yes.

    So until we actually have an example of energy storage that can deliver to keep steel works and factories going, and that can scale, I’m gonna call bullshit.



  • If there is an obvious connection, it should be simple enough to explain it. If the assumption is that misunderstandings happen due to variances in brain wiring, I think that’s a sidenote rather than the generic explanation fot the phenomenon OP described. What OP tried to say is that misunderstandings happen due to biases - and we all have biases - and they wanted to shut down misunderstandings politely before it derails the thread.

    The issue I’m taking is that you’re claiming something and it’s unclear what, saying that whatever it is must remain mysterious because of differences in brain wiring, because you’re autistic. Meanwhile, OP is autistic and so am I. We’re all fucking autistic. The irony is that this is derailing the thread.



  • I don’t know how it works in the UK, but in Sweden there’s a pretty steep progression for doctors and nurses where performance translates to better titles, schedules and significantly better pay. A specialist nurse is quite well compensated.

    That being said, it doesn’t compare to the best paid doctors in the US, but in return EMTs make good money and everyone gets healthcare.




  • German car manufacturing is doing badly partly because they suppressed electrical or even hybrid tech, but also because of high energy prices.

    High energy prices are partly caused by an irresponsible energy policy. The war in Ukraine is the other part.

    High energy prices also affect Germany’s two other staples, mechanical engineering and chemical engineering. The chemistry sector is flatlining.

    For context, chemical separation methods alone account for roughly 20% of industrial energy consumption worldwide, and Germany is a major player in this field. So high energy prices have a very real impact which can not be offset onto the buyers forever - the factories will just relocate and once they’re gone, they won’t easily come back.