Comment by TheSpiceIsLife
18 hours ago
Yes yes, The Sky Is Falling™.
All the more reason to give our ounce great nation away to fuck wits who think shooting up Jews is a reasonable idea, making electricity expensive chasing a target that will have approximately no impact on global carbon emissions and further drive manufacturing out of the country, all the while making even my generation (Xillenials) worse off now than we were ten years ago.
Young people and the working poor? They can freeze in the dark on the streets, fuck them.
Turn up unannounced and utter the shibboleth asylum seeker and we roll out the red carpet. Low interest loans so they can start businesses, and priory social housing. Fuck the locals.
And you cum guzzlers keep voting for more of it.
There’s only so much ideology we can take. Check One Nations recently polling.
I’m encouraging young people to get in to the trades, especially brick laying and masonry because if things keep going they way they are…
We’re going to need more walls.
Know what I’m sayin’.
I like the false equivalence between reducing air pollution and not doing hate crimes against Jewish people. I haven’t asked them all individually, but I’m pretty sure my Jewish friends all enjoy breathing clean air.
You’re going to have to explain how you read from what I wrote.
From the site guidelines:
Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
It's quite impressive to quote the guidelines to someone when your first post breaks a whole bunch of them.
2 replies →
I think you've been listening to the wrong people. That's a whole lot of dog whistles in that screed.
Right, don’t address the substance of the message, just drive-by-dismiss the concerns of a growing segment of voters.
My comment you responded to didn’t happen overnight.
You’re welcome to go through my comment history and address my concerns as detailed over the previous thirteen years, many of which are much more level headed and many contain references to thinkers much more intelligent and way more eloquent than anything I’ll ever write.
Yes yes, The Sky Is Falling™. :)
Haha! Yeah, embarrassing to say that then go on to write that screed.
Time for a top-up!
> Know what I’m sayin’.
I do, and if I were you I would stop to think about your priors. You have stacked an awful lot of ideas on top of each other to build a world view that has lies, misinformation, and unsound science at the base of it. Worse, a lot of it is selfish, but in a way that only works if the entire global economy is a zero sum game. Enlightened self-interest can be right, and even noble, but only if you know the game well enough to comprehend why altruism is still important, and you don't. The world is NOT a zero sum game, and this kind of self-interest is the bad kind.
Some of the logic at the top of your pyramid would be sound, if the bottom wasn't a pile of mush. A few minor points:
1) Solar is (far) cheaper than fossil fuel's now (for net new electricity). It's been that way for awhile now, but one particular bubble tries really hard to stop people from learning that. If cost is your concern you should be pushing for more solar, and less of the fuel you literally set fire to and have to keep digging up forever until it runs out.
2) Giving money to hostile Arab nations who hate you is not going to stop anyone from "took 'er jorbs"ing you. In fact, you would have more money if your car didn't literally burn your money constantly and also require expensive oil changes and other maintenance constantly.
3) Pretty much everything you said about loans and housing is based on absolute fabrications, or extreme exaggerations. Even if it weren't, other people receiving assistance doesn't actually cost you anything. The national debt has INCREASED at a record pace under Trump, exactly as it does during every Republican presidency, and it's not because Trump loves helping people so much.
Republican presidents have added about $1.4 trillion per four-year term, compared to $1.2 trillion added by Democrats since 1913. During my lifetime there has never been a Republican president who was fiscally conservative in the slightest. Trump is somehow making it worse while also letting children starve thanks to cutting USAID.
4) There's nothing wrong with the trades, if your body can physically handle it for 40-50 years. It's good and honest work, and we need more folks to go into them. It's also likely to be more stable and less demanding than the kind of work most of us here do.
5) Why in the hell would anyone WANT the manufacturing jobs? The only reasons humans have them is that humans (in some places) are cheaper than robots. Robots are getting cheaper every day. Moving them here will get us a few (even richer) billionaires. Not more jobs (at least not the kind you're probably thinking of). It will also increase the cost of ALL THE THINGS.
The worst part of this mistake is that while normal people spend most of their money billionaires spend only a miniscule fraction of their income. Billionaire money just idles non-productively most of the time, or is engaged in parasitic interest gathering via obscure financial instruments. Giving money to billionaires is kind of like throwing it in the garbage. Giving it to the middle class is good for everyone, because they buy things and drive demand.
Lastly, I'm also a Xennial, and I have to say that I'm better off now than 10 years ago. Maybe I just made better choices?
Either way, drink plenty of water before bed. It will help with the hangover in the morning.
> 1) Solar is (far) cheaper than fossil fuel's now
No, that's simply not true.
It's cheaper for MOST of the year, but overall, it's more expensive. Because you can't just tell people, "Well, now, during this cold January, please don't waste electricity because our panels are producing almost nothing." You either need batteries that store energy for weeks of consumption, or backup with fossil fuels, and in any case, that makes solar panels more expensive than fossil fuels.
> Trump is somehow making it worse while also letting children starve thanks to cutting USAID.
It's very strange. In all cases of interaction with the USAID that I know about directly from those interacting with it, and not from media sources, in EVERY case it was liberal propaganda or direct anti-Trump propaganda. And none of the starving children that I know about directly from those who interacted with them, and not from the media, have ever received any food aid from.
I know, of course, that this is an anecdotal case, but I prefer to trust people with whom I am at least superficially acquainted, rather than media companies that are apparently run by pedophiles.
> 5) Why in the hell would anyone WANT the manufacturing jobs? The only reasons humans have them is that humans (in some places) are cheaper than robots.
Because the era of US hegemony is ending, and at some point you simply won't be able to live off the rest of the world. At that point, you'll either have production or you'll simply starve to death. Because food (and robots) don't fall from the sky. And if you don't produce it (and don't take it from the rest of the world through your hegemony), you'll starve and die.
> Billionaire money just idles non-productively most of the time
American workers spend as much money EACH YEAR as billionaires accumulated over generations (mostly in the form of productive capacity, not idling in the piles)
> and I have to say that I'm better off now than 10 years ago. Maybe I just made better choices?
The best choice is to rob the rest of the world and live off them? Well, congratulations on making the better choice that allows you, unlike the REST OF THE WORLD, not work for less than $2 an hour (as 90% of the Earth's population does, thanks to American hegemony).
You do not need backup with fossil fuels.
You need backup with hydrocarbon fuels synthesized from water and CO2, like all the living beings have done for billions of years.
Storing energy in hydrocarbons has a lower efficiency for short term storage, but it has a better efficiency for long term storage, in which case batteries would auto discharge.
So energy storage must use a combination of batteries for short term (for a few days at most) together with methods useful for long term (from a few months to many years), including hydrocarbon synthesis, pumped water, etc.
Synthesizing hydrocarbons from concentrated CO2 has already been done at large scale almost a century ago. Now there are much better methods, e.g. using the electrolysis of CO2.
The most difficult part remains capturing the CO2 from normal air and not from exhaust gases where it is concentrated.
This is a difficult engineering problem, but one solved by bacteria billions of years ago, and which probably would already have some good solution if any serious and well-funded research effort would have been done in this direction, instead of only talking about how it would be desirable but without any concrete action.
> You either need batteries that store energy for weeks of consumption, or backup with fossil fuels, and in any case, that makes solar panels more expensive than fossil fuels.
I love the wild mental gymnastics and cherry picking data these people put themselves through in order to delude themselves in to believing solar is cheaper than gas.
How can it be, when you need to build both. Or freeze in the dark.
As you said, in practice you either need batteries that don’t exist and would be prohibitively expensive because they would sit idle most the year where only hours to days of backup are required, but in winter you need weeks of storage and the output from the panels are significantly reduced so you need to massively overbuild…
OR you need to build gas peaker plants, which also sit idle most the year, but need to be run frequently and maintained to ensure they’re ready to run when needed.
The real world data is available for anyone who wants to run the numbers.
I was in Adelaide and participated in the discussions where Dr Barry Brook[1] and others ran the numbers over ten years ago. Exhaustively ran the numbers, both with real world data from recently built solar and wind, and optimistic projections of future improvements
The fundamentals haven’t changed. Even if the panels themselves were free, the amount or steel and concrete required to replace total global energy requirements with solar and wind is… it’s incomprehensible.
If I recall correctly, it worked out to requiring something absurd like more copper, steel, and concrete, than humans have produced to date (2013 figures) since the start of the Industrial Revolution, every year for the next fifty years just to replace existing energy production and distribution infrastructure, and in so doing we would double or triple atmospheric carbon dioxide levels. We’d then have to work out how to pull those emissions back out of the atmosphere, which wound require further resource use to produce the infrastructure to generate the energy required to extract and sequester the carbon dioxide.
Compare to what we’re doing now which has barely scratched the surface in replacing global energy requirements, with no reduction in carbon dioxide levels.
It all makes a pretty strong case for existing nuclear technology (Gen IV / Gen IV+) to give us time (hundreds of years with existing know uranium reserves) to perfect fast breeder technology so we can use Thorium as nuclear fuel for thousands of years.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barry_Brook_(scientist)
3 replies →
All in good spirit:
> 1) Solar is (far) cheaper than fossil fuel's now (for net new electricity)
You’re going to have to show your calculations with references for LCOE - Levelised Cost of Electricity. I’ve run the numbers, you can find them and references in my comment history, and I’m not impressed with solar. Solar needs batteries, or some other type of storage, and there are roughly none of those in service so we can only theoretically predict life time costs. I can’t be fucked repeating myself here at the moment for the benefit of someone who thinks I’m a right wing nut job or whatever. Wind too.
> 2) Giving money <blah blah> more money
Again, you’re going to have to show the numbers here. Prove that an equivalent electric vehicle I need for my job is going to be cheaper on a total cost of ownership basis. This is going to be difficult to prove as there isn’t an equivalent EV that can do the miles per day required. And even if there is, can it do it for 500,000km on the same engine and gearbox / battery whatever? Without getting StacheD[1] in my garage while I sleep? It remains to be seem.
> 3) Pretty much …
No no no. The correct answer is: I’m an Australian living in Australia, reading my own governments policies, the social welfare entitlements to new arrivals, seeing the result of zoning restrictions across the road, and experiencing the results of the locals having a fertility rate below replacement, 100,000 abortions a year, resulting in the “need” to import 500,000 foreigners a year from counties no one wants to live in. I actually prefer white culture, I think it’s better, and that we should import more people from the countries we traditionally have, including India, China, Japan, the Koreas, Vietnam, and the Europeans too. I’m not racists, I just like the level of multiculturalism we had not this shoot up a Jewish festival / pro Palestine bullshit.[2]
4) There's nothing wrong with the trades
No shit cunty. I am a tradesman with … 28 years experience in and adjacent to fabrication / manufacturing / primary industries. I’ve also worked as remote-hands for the likes of Google and Akamai in data centres, so a bit of technical experience. I also have some higher education qualifications, and acquaintances in academia.
> 5) Why in the hell would anyone WANT the manufacturing jobs?
Now listen here mate ;) because lots of people, but particularly men, some women too, enjoy making things, breaking things, building things, and getting dirty. We’ve been doing it for millennia and it’s got us this far. It’s my belief that taking that away from society is going to turn out to be a general bad idea, if it ever eventuates.
> I'm better off now than 10 years ago
So am I, for various reasons. Mostly luck really. But that doesn’t negate the numbers. Houses cost more years of income, food costs more hours of labour, eggs cost more than chickens! on a per kg basis. Rent around here tends to cost more than one third of income, which is the definition of housing stress. I wouldn’t necessarily want to be a young person starting out today. The young people around here who are winning are in the trades and come from families who made at least some good choices and can offer finance from the Bank of Mum & Dad, so there’s some hope for ‘em.
I don’t drink alcohol, and I don’t smoke.
____
Edited to add:
> Either way, drink plenty of water before bed. It will help with the hangover in the morning.
It sort of doesn’t though. Most of the effects of alcohol consumption that result in a hangover are caused by an accumulation of acetaldehyde[5] in the blood, the clearance of which is rate limited by an aldehyde dehydrogenase enzyme[6]. That is to say, the clearance of acetaldehyde isn’t rate limited by water …
And the dehydration hypothesis can be debunked empirically by anyone who drinks, for example, beer, which, around here, tends to contain less than 7% alcohol by volume, so beer drinkers are getting a lot of water already and yet they get hungover too. So it can’t be the water.
You can’t say I’m not thorough, and if you check my comment history you’ll find a multi-year period where most of my comments contained extensive references, because that used to be the done thing around here.
_____
Try not to characterise everyone who disagrees with you as wrong, uneducated, out of touch, or whatever. Some of us have been watching and living this slow moving train wreck and we reckon our country deserves better. We’re not uneducated, we are politically engaged, we don’t place all the blame on brown people or whatever. We voted No to the Voice[3] because we see ourselves and each other as literally one nation. We’re not racists, we’re not homophobic or whatever, but the + can go fuck themselves.[3]
Anyways, I appreciate your thoughtful response, and appreciate the conversation (Y)
1. StacheD - https://youtube.com/@stachedtraining?si=Lp6dDc5wstRvltFU
2. https://www.abc.net.au/news/2025-12-16/bondi-beach-terrorist...
3. Referendum on the Indigenous Voice to Parliament - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indigenous_Voice_to_Parliament
4. Aussie comedian Jim Jeffries on ‘+’ https://youtube.com/shorts/zoPxLAE6jEM?si=veUBBHTBiv9aVysJ
5. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acetaldehyde
6. aldehyde dehydrogenase ADLH2 - ALDH2 plays a crucial role in maintaining low blood levels of acetaldehyde during alcohol oxidation.[7] In this pathway (ethanol to acetaldehyde to acetate), the intermediate structures can be toxic, and health problems arise when those intermediates cannot be cleared.[3] When high levels of acetaldehyde occur in the blood, facial flushing, lightheadedness, palpitations, nausea, and general "hangover" symptoms occur. It also is thought to be the cause of a medical condition known as the alcohol flush reaction, also known as "Asian flush" or "Oriental flushing syndrome". - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aldehyde_dehydrogenase
> Republican presidents have added about $1.4 trillion per four-year term, compared to $1.2 trillion added by Democrats since 1913.
That doesn’t sound right, so I spend twenty three seconds looking it up:
New Report Reveals Democrats Generated 90% of Federal Debt Held by the Public since WWII - https://www.jec.senate.gov/public/index.cfm/republicans/2011...
As of April 5, 2024, the national debt has grown by about $6.17 trillion, or 21.7%, since Joe Biden was inaugurated in 2021, according to the U.S. Treasury Department. - https://www.consumeraffairs.com/finance/us-debt-by-president...
Joe Biden - $6.66 trillion - https://www.usatoday.com/money/blueprint/banking/national-de...
Your last source contradicts your first (partisan) source, and also mentions:
> The national debt grew by more than $8.1 trillion during Donald Trump’s presidency, the largest four-year increase in the nation’s history.
2 replies →