You're moving into delusional territory here. He is not being "exhaustively probed," he is being "constantly spammed by confidently incorrect nonsense."
My approach, finally mostly successful after over a decade, is just "no main feed or subreddit pages." Reading a thread off a Google search or whatever because it has information I want is fine.
Nix the language has issues for sure (error messages for starters), but "complexity" isn't really one of them IMO. It's quite a small and simple language.
The complexity comes in with the ecosystem and nix-the-build-system, each of which has a dozen different ways to do any given thing, all of which are in active use simultaneously. Some are pretty baffling, like nixpkgs' dual role as both the main package repository and the (almost entirely undocumented) de facto standard library
Exactly this. One of the first things I tell people struggling with nix is that nix is simple and almost all of the complexity lives in nixpkgs. Knowing where to look for help (is this a nix, flakes, NixOS, or nixpkgs thing?) is one of the hardest problems for beginners.
Nixpkgs specifically needs to be entirely rethought. It has become too large and complex to manage both technically and politically with the number of contributors. Separating out the lib, stdenv/tooling, and package definitions would be a good start.
But the written breakdowns per type below imply that those are the quadrant labels. Otherwise the write ups should be for term pairs (eg, believer+coaster)
The first half of the title is pretty well-covered, but it seems like at no point does the author even explain what they mean by the term "infrastructure of energy," right? I assume they're not talking about electrical substations
You kinda answered your own question already, I feel. The energy efficiency of cycling a battery (70-90% for grid scale) or pumped hydro (70-85%) is simply much, much higher than chemical storage. Here's a pretty recent one [1] showing 23% efficiency even at lab scale, and as described in the article scale is a big drain on efficiency.
We need massive amounts of medium-term seasonal (3-6 months) stable energy storage, and liquid synthetic hydrocarbons are not a bad solution. Low efficiency isn’t a dealbreaker when the inputs are free.
Those are both explicitly arguments that the author made in the article, how is he missing the point?
He didn't say the lack of carbon tax acts doesn't act as a subsidy. He agreed that it does. His point was failing to distinguish between that lack, versus literal direct payments from a government budget to fossil fuel projects, is confusing and misleading. Which is true, because while both are effectively subsidies, the incentives and challenges in addressing them are wildly different.
Subsidy does not solely refer to direct payment. It can also refer to not taxing certain goods. By that standard definition, it is literally a subsidy to not tax carbon (as in a just market it would be taxed).
Quoting Wikipedia "Subsidies take various forms— such as direct government expenditures, tax incentives, soft loans, price support, and government provision of goods and services."
I think the author has a narrower definition of what subsidy means. They seem to think direct payment is a subsidy and other forms are "effective" subsidies. But this is a false distinction, and the fact that they project that narrow definition onto a standard economic term, does not make the initial communication false, which by the way, is from the international monitary fund, and likely directed towards an audience of the economically literate. In such a context, using the word subsidy is far from misleading.
I've only seen the posters, an early trailer, and a few paragraphs about it here and there, but I've been surprised this comparison hasn't come up more often. Looking at the poster and the plot synopsis, it's all I can think of.
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