Having grown up in Australia I agree with everything you say. The percentage of property parasites as a % of the working population is staggering.
Agree with all except maybe this:
> It's a deliberately created problem by tying the money supply to housing as an effort to decrease the population.
I don’t think there’s a grand evil plan. it’s just people acting selfishly, on selfish incentives. It looks similar around the world because property rights and local planning controls look similar around the world, a huge number of such systems derived from common old Europe roots
If this is your situation consider asking for an ISO to NSO conversion. Many companies these days will allow you to do this, as they’ve realized it’s in their best interest to not retain checked out employees
88% seems impossibly high. “Or controlled by” must be doing some heavy lifting. Government owned power is 9% of the US, 25% of Australia, 1% of the UK.
If “or controlled by” means privately owned plants that are subject to local regulations, then that is not particularly interesting or relevant to the discussion
Because no one wants to pay for a lifetime of inflated energy costs (nuclear) for the off chance of it helping in a black swan event. Humans aren’t wired that way, and neither is capitalism
Your proposal is to use nuclear as only backup? Or for only late nights (after batteries have discharged)? That dooms nukes economically, they need to run and sell power at close to 100% 24/7 to have any chance paying back the capex & opex.
What you’re saying makes sense but only for a planned state economy where the government owns (or subsidizes) all generation. It’s not possible in a free market economy, the nukes would go bankrupt/ never be built
I absolutely agree we could see cost reductions with scale. Maybe 2x ? But solar is a much more simple manufacturing process that’s amenable to massive massive volume. Print silicon, add traces, assemble. 100% automated. As such it has seen a 20x cost reduction since 1994. Nukes will never be able to touch that reduction.
> If solar and wind can be made profitable, I don't see how nuclear is any different.
Nuclear is fundamentally way more complicated than wind and especially solar. Nuclear is 10s of kilometers of high pressure piping, 1000s of tons of concrete, exotic pressure welding. Solar on the other hand is brain dead simple and amenable to mass production in a way that nuclear can never be. As such, nuclear will never see the same scale of cost reductions.
The increased demand is absolutely and categorically not being met by coal. Look it up, chinas total coal emissions have declined the last few years, despite overall demand growth.
Finland is the definition of an outlier, and folks in similar situations make up a tiny percentage of the world population. They can burn gas for the next 50 years, and we can still be good.
Huh? Solar is widely acknowledged to be significantly cheaper than building new coal. And it is everywhere, you can just buy containers of it and have it delivered anywhere in the world.
I hear this theory a lot but it doesn’t actually make sense given the numbers