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InitialsDiceBearhttps://github.com/dicebear/dicebearhttps://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/„Initials” (https://github.com/dicebear/dicebear) by „DiceBear”, licensed under „CC0 1.0” (https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/)TO
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  • You're also burning lignite coal now, which you take from Africa who is now having blackouts. But it went pretty poorly overall phasing out nuclear for renewables.

    https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_in_Germany

    Key to Germany's energy policies and politics is the Energiewende, meaning "energy turnaround" or "energy transformation". The policy includes nuclear phaseout (completed in 2023) and progressive replacement of fossil fuels by renewables. However, contrary to plan, the nuclear electricity production lost in Germany's phase-out was primarily replaced with coal electricity production and electricity importing. One study found that the nuclear phase-out caused $12 billion in social costs per year, primarily due to increases in mortality due to exposure to pollution from fossil fuels.

  • This study disagrees after taking into account storage.

    https://advisoranalyst.com/2023/05/11/bofa-the-nuclear-necessity.html/

    Storage and production of renewables is also done by shipping in Chinese products created burning coal and ignoring environmental concerns. This all hinges on exporting emissions and labor to areas that don't care about pollution.

    I'd also argue that nuclear tech can likely proceed faster than storage, given the dangerous nature of energy storage. Even something as basic as storing water can cause deaths given what happens when dams break, stored energy is volatile by nature.

  • Well we have a negative productivity growth as well at the moment. Hence the BoC ringing the alarm bells. That makes it harder to pay our growing debt load even with spreading it out to more people.

  • Well wind farms won't help, if you need 100% reliability. Storage I figured was more expensive than nuclear after adding all the costs together, creating enough hydro for backup is extremely expensive as well.

    You're essentially building a hydro power plant, water storage, pumps, and wind turbine at that point.

  • Why do you need to force industrial users off during the day, and how do you decommission your backup nuclear power with intermittent wind, when all you did was move from 100% uptime nuclear to variable uptime wind and solar?

  • If they funded it with taxes I would give them props. Future austerity with interest is an unsustainable program used only to drive short term votes, and is nothing like our universal healthcare, which was fully funded from the start so that it lasts.

  • Making room for the intermittent nature of solar imposes upon the grid a large cost for backup power, adding to the levelized cost of electricity, yet this cost is never ascribed to the cost of the solar panel. The more solar you have the more idle backup power you need.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Levelized_cost_of_electricity

    In France 70% of their power came from nuclear and they added renewables, they then need to throttle the nuclear power plants which is not an easy task, and they then make less money and require tax funded bailouts.

  • Canada has had 0.7% per capita GDP growth since 2015. Which puts us 2nd last only to Luxembourg in all 38 countries of the OECD.

    We elected a person who said oil needs to stay in the ground in their book, who wants to grow population at more than 450k a year (1% cap, plus births) to prop up GDP despite the current high unemployment and the severe housing shortage, and who wants to join Germany and the UK in spinning up solar and wind which clearly did not go well for either of them.

    https://newsletter.doomberg.com/p/let-ed-run-it

    Through that lens I could see how they could be fearful of Canada's demise, especially if we have another 10 years like the last. Gross government debt also somehow doubled since 2015 as well to achieve this lethargic growth, before subtracting pensions to create the net debt figure the government generally uses.

    Then theres yesterdays Alberta separation fear with bill 54, and the fact Alberta contributes significantly more to Ottawa than any other province. As tariffs have a chance to wipe out manufacturing and you'll be asking Alberta to contribute even more to fund unemployed auto workers and the like, after some provinces block Alberta's access to new trade routes, I could see some clear catalyst for separation. Which would put Canada in a deeply negative current account balance and would be the end of Canada as we know it now.

    https://www.fraserinstitute.org/sites/default/files/understanding-albertas-outsized-contribution-to-confederation-infographic-thb.jpg

  • rule

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  • Central bank monetary policy requires that we pay 2% more for goods every year as technology makes things cheaper and we exclude asset price inflation. They construct a wall of debt via low interest rates for inelastic goods like housing in order to provide a windfall to boomers in order to force the prices of goods upwards, every new mortgage new money supply being created.

    That wall of debt that is gatekeeping inelastic shelter is what poverty looks like, prices can't rise without providing new money supply, and some poor smuck holding that IOU for the first movers to consume. Blaming the rich, whose nominal asset value is inflated by this system, is a naive view; they are simply being spoon fed wealth in a desperate attempt to get them to consume a portion of it. Every bailout for any type of correction caused by an error or oversight in the system is then funneled back to them as wages are debased.

    This likely explains the fanaticism around Bitcoin and gold, I think we can all see who is served by the existing system, and its definitely not the poor.

  • we got in this morass because the neoliberal state and its accompanying economy financialized every damn thing

    The problem is monetary policy, not deregulation. Deregulation of zoning and housing policy would actually prevent monetary policy from creating such a large housing bubble.

    Our Bank of Canada targets a 2% inflation, which means prices need to continuously rise as technology actively reduces goods prices, and we then exclude investments and housing appreciation entirely, and we do hedonic adjustments to discount goods inflation. Then there's likely an element of shrinkflation, as company find tricks to cheapen products or degrade services, which lead to no inflation in the CPI but higher profits and then lower prices.

    So the money supply needs to grow via low interest rates, in order to provide a windfall to boomers to encourage them sell their real estate holdings, to create new bank loans, to increase the money supply, which turns into aggregate demand, in order to create inflation in the CPI.

    But we can't build enough houses due to reverse neo-liberalism, so housing acts as liquidity sponges for cheap debt, and people hold them as investments in perpetuity since they think prices are always going to go up. Also as interest rates fall inflation falls, as interest expense is included in the CPI while housing appreciation is not, its a feedback loop due to its poorly constructed nature. The Bank of Canada now also buys half of all mortgage bonds to attempt to reverse this, so they're actually printing money in order to cause deflation funnily enough, again due to the absurd way the CPI is constructed.