I’m sleep deprived so maybe not the right words, but isn’t there an implicit IRR that a household would maintain and usually a 20 year payoff would be maybe not the first use of investment dollars? I feel maybe that’s more the problem here with renewables. It’s cheaper but not cheap enough to put the dollars there instead of somewhere else
> isn’t there an implicit IRR that a household would maintain and usually a 20 year payoff would be maybe not the first use of investment dollars?
Yes. Also, the risk for industry is going all in right before a new technology comes out. At that point, you either write off your original investment and deploy the new kit. Or you accept a structural energy-cost disadvantage.
I am massively pro renewables. But you have to ignore a lot to pretend it's without risk.
The system already pays for itself. The only thing you lose if a new technology comes out is opportunity cost. You also likely don’t want to be an early adopter of the newest tech anyway if this is a concern for you.
This doesn’t really make sense to me as an objection, so maybe I misunderstood.
There's a sort of mixing of units happening here, and I think it's causing some confusion. Here's an example (greatly simplified) scenario highlighting a flaw in your rationale:
1. Energy at your normal usage costs $1000/yr.
2. You can spend $20k now to have access to equivalent energy output for the next 40 years before it degrades to unusability.
3. Next year, somebody invents a flux capacitor bringing all energy costs for everyone down to $1/yr.
If you don't buy the thing, you spend $1039 over the next 40 years. If you buy the thing you spend $20k, and it's hit its expected lifespan, so you don't recoup any further benefits.
The real world has inflation, wars, more sane invention deltas, and all sorts of complications, but the general idea still holds. If you expect tech to improve quickly enough and are relying on long-term payoffs, it can absolutely be worth delaying your purchase.
If you predict massive improvements in solar/battery/etc tech, the only way it makes sense to invest now is if those improvements aren't massive enough, you expect sufficiently bad changes to the alternatives, etc. I.e., you're playing the odds about some particular view of how the world will progress, and your argument needs to reflect that. It's not inherently true that just because solar pays off now it will in the future.
No, it yields savings. This is a massive difference.
> You also likely don’t want to be an early adopter of the newest tech anyway if this is a concern for you
This is a real concern for any long-term investment, particularly when we're talking at utility/industrial scales. Dismissing it like this is basically arguing that solar is too new to be properly talked about, which is nonsense.
I guess, though, the actual “solar” part of the solar set up is by far the cheapest part.
The vast majority of the set up costs are just getting electrification done right.
Like, even if LNG becomes crazy cheap, a battery set up will still save you money in the long run just by allowing off-peak demand.
This is why I’m confused: for this to me remotely a bad investment, basically everything possible has to go wrong for you, whereas the risks associated with carbon energy production are very obvious and very likely.
> even if LNG becomes crazy cheap, a battery set up will still save you money in the long run just by allowing off-peak demand
See Uruguay. Bet heavily on renewables [1]. Baked in a high cost [2].
If LNG becomes crazy cheap and you're stuck with expensive solar and battery, the countries with cheaper power will eat your industry. On a household level, you wasted money. The alternate you who didn't put money into the solar and battery set-up could have earned more from other investments and had cheaper power.
Put another way: if you remove the decommissioning costs, the same argument could be used for nuclear. Once you've built it, it's sort of "free." Except of course it's not. Building it took a lot of work.
Per your sources it looks like they are subsidising industry use of electricity with household usage:
Household electricity prices are 157% of average in SA, and 200% of industry prices. That's not a case of renewables backfiring, it's a case of strange policy resulting in weird pricing.
> they are subsidising industry use of electricity with household usage
Germany had to do the same thing when their power costs threatened de-industrialisation. The base cost of electricity in Uruguay is higher than its neighbors’ in an environmentally-wonderful but economically-problematic way.
I mean, the payback period is like 5 years if you count all the subsides. My point is only that, you can effectively take most of your house of the grid, even in an urban area, with a relatively short payback period, and an almost guaranteed return.
Is it the most profitable place for investment dollars? Probably not, but it's effectively risk-free, and there are plenty of knock-on benefits, like having power in a blackout, and having the option of getting an EV in the future.
I think most sensible people who are even moderately risk-averse would think that's a fairly winning deal when we're only talking about a small amount of up front capital.
I agree with this, but I don’t trust that it will stay this way.
It always seems like there’s no real way to ‘get ahead’. They’ll always find a way to make the system cost such that it barely pays itself off, by introducing fees or cutting rebates.
For example, there was a proposal in Australia to raise our fixed grid access fee from something like $1 a day to $5 a day.
Or consider even just the feed-in-tariff for solar — that’s gone down as solar power has gotten cheaper, which is expected, but it’s another thing that increases that mythical payback period for the system.
Now to be clear I think the tech is wonderful and would 100% have a big battery and solar system if I could, but not for financial reasons.
For all intents and purposes you’re just pre-paying for the next X years of your electricity. I would at least want my battery warranty to be four times X, which it currently is not. Now in 5 years there might be battery tech that gets to that multiplier that I want and THEN I could start thinking of it as investing in ‘free electricity’.
But I’m sure the government and electricity suppliers will close any loopholes they can to prevent that.
I don’t have time to check flight logs but I personally landed at LGA coming from MDW on Sunday. And I also know people who got diverted within the hour coming back to LGA that night. 30-40 minutes doesn’t seem accurate. That aside, if you’ve ever done operational staffing, you’d know that you should probably have at least one redundancy. When there is any chance of emergency or two events happening simultaneously, you should have more than one person.
One last meta point. We live in the wealthiest country in the history of the world, and the highest air travel prices (some part is a function of longer distances I know). We should expect that we have ample coverage, if not over-coverage, at all times for one of our major metropolitan airports. Pay them.
One of the self-owns of all time. Triggering a global supply chain crisis right before midterms is bottom of the barrel strategy. But then again, who expects competency from any recent American administration, most especially this one?
These people live on manufacturing crisis after crisis in order to exploit the manic status that they generate. Why worry about how the midterms, if you can create a situation where elections cannot be held at all...?
Yes, it sounds crazy right now, but a lot of things sounded similarly crazy 10 years ago, and here we are.
Not recommending first point 3 letter agencies! but if we all did something, volunteer, protest, donate, boycott, we would win tomorrow. Boycotting seems particularly effective, would start there.
Win what tomorrow? An election? There's no election tomorrow. A coup? Intriguing! Probably take a while though.
Volunteer doing what? Donate to what? Boycott what with what demands? What's the most successful boycott in your estimation? I can only really think of buses in Montgomery and the Swadeshi movement in India, but even that started in like the 1910s and they didn't get independence until 1947 and who knows how much it mattered. If there were a big crank somewhere and you could guarantee me that turning it gives better than 50% odds that the world gets better in the ways I consider better, I'd be turning the crank. We'd all be turning the crank! But what's the crank?
these choices are really up to the individual and what is important to them. as for win what, I am specifically talking about opposition to the current admin and political gravity, to which they are not immune. If say a protest of 30 million people happened tomorrow, the Republican's would see the writing on the wall and things like impeachment which previously seemed impossible now become required if you have any hope of maintaining a political future.
As for a recent successful boycott, see Disney Plus cancellations in response to Jimmy Kimmel being taken off the air.
here are some concrete things I can think of:
- don't like that Sam Altman is aligned with the regime? boycott chatgpt, it fell from the top spot in the app store and Sam Altman felt forced to address the controversy to his employees, it wouldn't take much more to turn the tide and other companies take notice and be disinclined to do similar
- don't like that your elected representative was mum on the Iran war? write them an email, call their office
- think that a candidate is best chance at change? donate to their campaign
- show up at the next No Kings protest, politicians take notice of the coverage and what people are mad about
If you are waiting for a guarantee your actions will affect change I can't help you, but I can guarantee doing nothing won't.
Of course Trump will try something outrageous that would result in prison time for any other person. But I think that the states are also still independent, mostly ruled by law rather than man, and there's limited troop power to interfere.
Trump is not all powerful, unless everybody gives up their power. Not everybody is as weak as the SV elite, and the failures of Big Law and others that bent the knee were very instructive to everybody else. Bowing down to the king makes you his servant, but it does not protect you in any way.
This time he has his own brown shirts, even fast tracking to to service without any training. DoJ had been getting their hands on voter rolls from swing states. Bondi and other trump top advisors and relocated to living on military bases. Idk where it's going but it's really not looking good.
Yes, it's going to look bad, and Jan 6 was just a trial run. Now all those criminals that have been freed are in the ranks of a supposed "police" force that self-equips from US Patriot Tactical.
But there's not enough of them. Even for Minneapolis, a mid-size city. There might be a few targeted attacks, lots of voter intimidation, but the US is a very big place, and the ranks are too small, and their popularity is tiny compared to other authoritarian regimes.
It's going to be ugly, maybe really really ugly with violence and innocent voters hurt, but the forces of democracy will win out. Minneapolis shows that there's a strong backbone to this country still, even if some swing voters were tricked.
There's more than enough of them to materially affect election outcomes. The number of votes you'd have to change to flip the outcome of the last few elections was very small, and the parties have a very good idea of which locations they'd have to disturb to achieve the greatest effect.
Now imagine you're a voter who shows any signal of potentially being Dem-aligned - for example a slightly darker complexion, or maybe dyed hair. On your way to the polling station, masked ICE goons "scan your face" with their AI apps, and the apps tell them you're illegal, so they put you into a van and drive you to a holding facility.
What recourse do you have? Even if they let you go the next day, you've lost your vote. And that's not a given, what if they hold you for weeks or months? How many people have others who depend on them, so they can't risk this?
I don't mean to sound dramatic, but if anything like this happens (and there's basically no way it won't) the fascist takeover is complete, and your only recourse left is civil war.
Yes, and Georgia refused. American elections are a lot more complicated than you seem to believe. There’s plenty to worry about in specific locations, but the federal government has no direct control over any of the voting processes or policies.
More than half the SCOTUS is corrupt and bought off, and the Republican Party in congress is just rubber-stamping what Trump wants. I don't have a lot of faith in the word "unconstitutional" anymore.
Well he and his people are far too stupid and incompetent to have come close to succeeding. While it's not great that there was no punishment, we should at least be thankful that they act on emotion and can only loosely follow playbooks for corruption from the past rather than write new ones for modern times.
What's the basis for this war in Iran? Did that stop this administration? This is akin to pointing out that it's actually illegal to drive 30 mph over the speed limit.
Certainly it's possible that could happen to us. If it does I fully expect to have elections throughout the process.
We have the highest concentration of weapons per capita in the world and a deeply ingrained expectation of voting. In a very dark humor sort of way it would be absolutely hilarious if someone was stupid enough to attempt to intervene in the process.
We might go down in flames but you can be absolutely certain we'll have collectively agreed to light them ourselves.
> no mechanism in the constitution for canceling elections
Sure, but there's mechanism in real life that allows cancelling elections like sending your newly funded ICE goons to polling places. Ideally everyone follows the constitution but in reality (even looking at past administrations) there's nothing stopping the executive from taking an action and saying "oops guess we'll let the courts figure it out!"
I agree. Stability of a system is not so much about whether there is some mechanism or force that wants to push it away from equilibrium (because there probably is some such perturber outside of a perfectly controlled environment), but stability is more about whether there exists a stabilizing mechanism to bring the system back toward equilibrium after it starts to deviate.
Yes, of course they are different. We're not embroiled in an active Civil War with tens of thousands dead and a third of the country having seceded. Most things are different from that.
They may be, but if there are no elections, there is no United States. Constitutionally, its government is predicated on having elected representatives.
I could see Trump trying this, but I also can see dozens of other people or groups, some richer, more powerful, more competent, and more ruthless than Trump, just waiting in the wings for the guardrails to come off to make a play to rule the territory of the former United States. If he tries and succeeds at this it's open-season. It's not a Trump dictatorship, it's a civil war, akin to the Chinese Civil War after the emperor fell or the Syrian civil war after the Arab Spring.
The two concepts are not exclusive. You could have "elections" but with heavy ICE presence at the polls "to guarantee security", effectively ensuring only the "right kind of people" will vote. That's not free elections.
Yeah... because Lincoln wasn't a wanna-be tyrant like Trump. The leaders in charge of the elections are diametrically different people. Lincoln fought to keep the Union together; Trump tried to cause a coup to stay in charge in Jan 2020. My god.
The name of Lincoln and Trump cannot and shouldn't be used within the same sentence. Lincoln's story is inspiring and you can see him worried about his country and he grew up learning law books being poor and rose up to power.
Lincoln says, "With malice toward none, with charity for all"
Trump is the exact opposite of Lincoln being "With malice towards all, with charity for none"
The irony of the situation is that they are from the same party.
He believed that the greatest danger to America came from within, warning that if the nation faltered, it would be due to self-destruction rather than external forces
Lincoln's famous speech: , "At what point then is the approach of danger to be expected? I answer, if it ever reach us, it must spring up amongst us. It cannot come from abroad. If destruction be our lot, we must ourselves be its author and finisher. As a nation of freemen, we must live through all time, or die by suicide."
Lincoln was ahead of his time and might as well have predicted something like Trump.
If I try to rob a bank with a plastic toy gun, the charge which I would be arrested for would not be "bad behavior that had no chance of accomplishing anything", it would be "bank robbery". Just "bank robbery", full stop. The abject failure of my attempt would have no bearing at all on that charge.
The argument that "he had no chance of accomplishing anything" has no bearing at all on intent.
"He didn't try" is not in any sense the same thing as "he was nowhere close to succeeding". The goalposts have moved between those 2 statements.
In the current laws you mean, dictatorships usually start by throwing current laws out of the window. Not that I believe Trump would do that, but it is not unheard of in other parts of the world
They can and they did. What the tariff decision shows is simply that, on very specific topics (in this case, big business), their base is significantly split: on one side the populist masses, on the other the wealthy elites. When the chips are down, the current USSC is connected the latter more than to the former, and will vote accordingly.
There is no crisis that would create a situation where elections "cannot be held".
That is to say, if the current admin attempts to suspend elections, the legality of that and the magnitude of the reaction will be the same, crisis or no.
Every non-Confederate state held elections. Two recaptured Confederate states (TN and LA) held elections. The only states which did not are the ones that had seceded, and thus were not US states at the time.
That's not precedent for the federal government declining to hold elections in any way.
How are they downplaying it? Trump can try all he wants, but there is no mechanism in the constitution that allows him to do that. He wasn't successful in 2020 and he won't be successful this time.
The GOP won't even kill the fillibuster in the senate because they know change is coming.
They keep making the same mistake: underestimating that your adversary gets a vote, whether it's Iran, trade partners, colleges, Colbert, the Kennedy Center's audience, or Minneapolis.
I think you're failing to recognize that we essentially live in a post-Truth world. Two opposite statements can be uttered by the same person on the same day, and it won't matter.
He has lived through multiple wars where elections were held. I do not think highly of the man, but he would have to be pretty bad off to come to that belief.
I would wager that someone as selfish as narcissistic as he is would have been oblivious and unconcerned with the day to day affairs of the plebeians unless it effected his income.
Depends, I just want to point out that the US is a net exporter of Oil. They also secured oil imports from Venezuela while at the same time in 2 strokes seriously hurt Chinese oil imports.
If the goal was to hurt China / BRICS and kneecap Iran it seems on point.
It's always hard to predict how the USA will vote when "war" is happening.
> If the goal was to hurt China / BRICS and kneecap Iran it seems on point.
While also hurting Europe, South Korea, Japan, the Philippines, and many more. Very on point...
It will hurt everyone, Americans included, oil is a global market, fertilisers are a global market, those are basic inputs for probably every single thing produced in the world.
So now all of us around the globe have to pay the price for American Imperialism, compounded by the complete shattering of the USA's soft power as an ally, this will only create more animosity against the USA from all sides. Very on point.
But the USA oil industry can make a buck until everything buckles, or perhaps the USA admin will introduce price controls like in the 1970s, that worked very well too.
> It will hurt everyone, Americans included, oil is a global market, fertilisers are a global market, those are basic inputs for probably every single thing produced in the world.
Only because those countries choose for that to be the case. For example, Saudi Arabia and Russia don't do that. Local prices and export prices are different.
But the US, Canada, the Netherlands, and long list of other countries could make this crisis have zero effect on local prices. They choose to take every excuse to raise prices (in fact the Netherlands goes further: if sales tax on gas raises because prices raise, the amount of tax paid is kept constant if prices drop. So they artificially raise local gas prices. So if gas prices are low, tax on gas has at one point reached 72%), but it is fundamentally a government choice.
>But the US, Canada, the Netherlands, and long list of other countries could make this crisis have zero effect on local prices.
The US Government cannot force US companies to sell at a lower domestic price if they can get a higher price exporting. I know that God-Emperor Trump pretends that he can command the oil sector to make less money, but he can't.
>For example, Saudi Arabia and Russia don't do that
2 countries famous for being beacons of free-market capitalism.
And it will go higher now. And given the President's hatered for high interest rates and the next fed chairman being a garden-variety lick-spittle, things are not looking up.
They aren't pumping that much oil since Chavez, the expertise for extracting oil was lost during nationalisation. It needs a lot of work to restart extraction, it will take years.
The 'issue' here is that China has good relations with Iran and in talks to guarantee safe passage for their ships, like they had previously with respect to attacks off Yemen by the Iran-backed Houthis.
Just because the US won’t literally run out of oil doesn’t mean the economy (or populace) will be unaffected by a supply crunch. As everyone in the country can already see when they go to fill up their tank.
You are mistaken to assume there was a goal. Trump has admitted he did this because he was told that Iran were about to attack the U.S. not because of any strategic goal.
Whatever your political affiliation and thoughts on the war, I hope we can all agree that it would an awful thing to base our foreign policy on the US election cycle.
Not so awful as it may seem. It would be even more awful if election cycle had no influence over decision to wage one more war. "Democracy is the worst form of Government except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time".
The Biden administration was actually extremely competent, handled global inflation after the pandemic and Russia's war fairly well relative to peer nations, and set US manufacturing on course to provide us with all the batteries, solar panels, and EVs to prevent oil crunches like this from causing future inflation.
I expect more competency from US Presidential administrations, and also expect more competency and indpendence from the various parts of the executive branch, which should execute their missions without micro-management from the President, and I further expect far more competence from Congress and the US Supreme Court in setting law and enforcing law. It's bad enough that we have an incompetent Presidential administration, but that damage should be limited by the independence of the other parts of the government. The blast radius should be far smaller, we shouldn't have a King.
Biden held back arms support for Ukraine on dubious "we don't wanna test Russia's red line" grounds, gave unlimited support a wannabe despot's (Netanyahu's) wars of aggression even as he tried to backstab democracy in the US, arguably also enabling him to start the current situation in Iran, failed to prosecute an attempt to overturn the US election, and stayed in the presidential race for too long when his body and mind was in visible decline.
We wouldn't be having a discussion about the US having a king if Biden's administration was actually competent at doing its job.
I disagree heartily with Biden and the deeper US intelligence communities assessments, like you do.
Nonetheless, I wouldn't call Biden incompetent on any of that.
Biden did not lose, Kamala Harris lost. Biden was not incompetent, but he was successfully portrayed as incompetent by applying a very different standard to Biden than to Trump 45.
> I disagree heartily with Biden and the deeper US intelligence communities assessments, like you do.
Maybe if they were actually competent they wouldn't have made the mistake then?
> Biden did not lose, Kamala Harris lost.
Harris had no choice but to carry the Biden administration's poor approval on her back. Furthermore if Biden knew he would be unelectable in 2024 earlier he could have dropped out earlier and allow Harris (or other Democrats) more time to campaign. But he chose to stay until a disastrous televised debate forced him out, out of… what, exactly?
> but he was successfully portrayed as incompetent by applying a very different standard to Biden than to Trump 45.
Biden defenders always bring up how we shouldn't criticize him because Trump is worse. Ok. But you realize that's an absurdly low bar to clear, no? We are not upset that Biden is worse than Trump, we are upset that Biden is worse than what we expect from a someone with a letter D next to his name.
> Harris had no choice but to carry the Biden administration's poor approval on her back.
Is that so?
"Vice President Kamala Harris was asked by the co-hosts of The View on Tuesday whether she would have done anything differently than President Biden, responding 'not a thing comes to mind,' before coming back to the question and adding that she plans to appoint a Republican to her Cabinet if she is elected in November."
Bothsides-ism is such a plague. While I don't agree with everything you said, I feel like the pandemic response doesn't get enough credit. Everyone hated how the Biden admin responded in the moment, but looking back the US really came out ahead compared to almost everyone else
The current situation we're facing can be traced back to, in some parts, Trump pulling out of JCPOA and Biden's tepid resistance to Israel's war in Palestine, leading to this situation.
Huh? That's a pretty far out there statement that needs substantial support to be taken seriousl.
By all accounts Israeli leadership also tried to rope Biden and Obama into attacking Iran, but they were stronger presidents that paid more attention to US interests rather than being easily tricked.
Agreed. And I'd say pulling out of the TPP is an equivalently big mistake, and will honestly have far worse consequences for the US but in far different ways. Letting China be the leader of the Pacific by pulling out, in combination with the terrible hostility to all countries there now, especially to South Korea, massively weakens the US economically and military. We just handed everything over, no fight, no fuss, no benefit to the US. Ugh.
The nation is one terrorist attack away from rallying behind the president. And sadly the chances of that happening have gone up significantly in recent days.
What’s baffling to me is how they’re going to attempt to spin the colossal fuck up this is from a “Best Military in the World” perspective, particularly after their unapproved relabeling of the DoD to the DoW.
It doesn't matter how good the military is if the political leadership is incompetent and the strategic objectives are incoherent. You'd think that after Vietnam, Iraq 2, and Afghanistan this lesson would have been learned, but apparently not.
Lockheed Martin already paid for Trump's ballroom (not a joke) and so needed the guy to start a War as their investment must be repaid a hundred fold. Who cares about American voters ?
I have no idea how American will extricate itself. We are nowhere near a Nixonian "Peace with Honor" exit. The Trumpian manuver of declaring victory and walking away seems increasingly infeasible. I think the best case senario is a Pyrrhic victory. The worst case is probably more like Russia's exit from the Soviet-Afghan war.
I would bet Trump just shot himself in the foot with this war, after midterms he will be a "lame duck" pres the remainder of his administration, relying on executive orders, which his opponents will merely take to liberal judges to have them stricken down. The final straw near the end of his term may be selling pardons to any takers.
I’m skeptical of your username and the fact that you commented twice in 23 minutes, ~10 minutes apart ala the dead internet theory. But isn’t this a fairly simple statement? He hopes that the folks at OpenAI are not as gullible as the “Twitter morons.”
If youve spent even a small amount of time with llms you’ll know that these security measures are just window dressing.
This is kind of a strange take to me given that Python is quickly becoming the default for many projects that 1) are not indexing for speed/efficiency and 2) is not on the web (and sometimes this only applies for frontend). There are plenty of cases where that statement is incorrect but I think you get my point.
I think I read a title on HN that was literally titled “Why Python Won” in late 2025.
