chonglibloodsport

A trillion bucks, but not in cash; in shares of those companies. Try to sell it all for cash and you tank the share price. People lose their jobs, pension funds that own shares in those companies lose value.

That’s the trouble with taxing wealth. It’s not liquid like income. All that net worth is tied up in the companies and not easily accessed.

I thought this was some kind of new, futuristic house design.

Congrats! I’m really surprised you didn’t use darts! Once I discovered how good they are I can’t imagine ever not using them!

This is great. Just a few simple lines evoke so much raw power from those boosters. I can hear the overwhelming roar! Love it!

That’s just a coincidence. 吗, meaning “what?”, is pronounced má which has the ascending tone. This is not true of all questions in Chinese. For example: 谁在你的右边 meaning “who is on your right?” does not end with 吗, and 边 is pronounced bian which has the flat tone.

800 hectares is 1976 acres. That’s a huge property. What sort of maintenance would you be doing? Farming? That’s almost 5 times the size of an average farm in the US. You’re talking about a large commercial farming operation, not an “off-grid lifestyle” property.

It needs to be water pressure because atmospheric pressure can’t lift water more than about 10 metres.

It doesn’t matter how much solar you build; without storage you’ve got zero power available at night.

The issue with overbuilding solar is that you drive daytime electricity prices to zero so that everyone is losing money on all these solar plants. Furthermore, base load plants such as nuclear plants also start losing money and they have no ability to shut down during peak hours. So you end up driving the base load plants out of business and they shut down permanently. Now you have even less capacity available at night! This causes nighttime power to become extremely unreliable, potentially leading to rolling blackouts and skyrocketing nighttime energy prices.

Another issue that people rarely discuss is the quality of power on the grid. All the grids in the world operate on 50/60 Hz AC which must be carefully maintained at an accurate frequency and synchronized with the grid. The main base load turbines are the source of this waveform which is carefully monitored and adjusted to remain stable.

Solar panels produce DC power which needs to be converted into AC with an inverter and synchronized with the grid. The problem is that if all the base load turbines are taken off the grid then there is nothing for the solar inverters to synchronize with! Turbines are nice and stable because they’re literally an enormous, massive spinning flywheel. Without them you’ll have an extremely unstable system where all of the solar plants are trying to adjust their frequencies and phases to match each other and the whole thing wanders all over the place.

The issue with the green energy transition (renewable energy, grid upgrades, grid scale storage, EVs, and elimination of fossil fuel household heating) is that well over 90% of all the critical minerals we need are mined and/or refined in China. No one wants to move any of this stuff to the US because the environmental damage and refining waste are extremely toxic, far more so than any other resource extraction we do here.

Furthermore, all the end-point usage of these resources (making solar panels, capacitors, semiconductors, printed circuit boards, and finished electronics assemblies) is all done in China as well. So if we mined and refined all the minerals we’d end up shipping them all to China to be used in manufacturing.

So now if you want to avoid all that you’re talking about building the entire electronics supply chain inside western countries. But then you face the further issue that there simply aren’t enough electrical engineers in the west to work at these factories. So now you’ve got to retool the entire education system to train a new generation for this critical work.

At the same time, you’re having to deal with the fact that most Americans don’t want to work in these places. TSMC has been very vocal about their struggles to build these chip foundries in the US and hire Americans at the low wages it actually takes to make this stuff competitive against the obscenely cheap products coming from China. Now consider the fact that TSMC is considered a crème de la crème employer in Taiwan, and the factories in China making capacitors and other bulk commodity components pay far less and have far lower margins, and you can begin to see the issue.

Americans want the green energy revolution but they don’t want to give up even an inch of quality of life to get it. Neither the rightest of the far right Republicans nor the leftest of the far left Democrats has expressed any desire to volunteer to lower their own standard of living. The whole story thing is a big fight to try to force other people to lower theirs.

Ahhhh this is an absolute tragedy. The same thing goes with many movies from the golden age of Hollywood. I love to watch these old films. It breaks my heart that so many are lost forever.

You rub them so hard it starts producing smoke!

“Economic problem” isn’t merely short form for “if we had a socialist system we could solve it with free money.” These solutions require us to dig huge amounts of minerals out of the ground and tear the earth apart in the process. And we’re already doing that at a rate exponentially larger than we ever have in history. Plus these are the same materials we need to build the batteries for EVs, so building them for grid storage competes with the EV transition.

And then you factor in the rapidly increasing electric demand we’re producing by switching over to EVs and that means the demand on the grid is even higher. The grid wasn’t built to be able to source power from everywhere so putting solar panels on everyone’s rooftops is making the situation even worse.