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Cake day: July 1st, 2023

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  • No one should ignore Trump’s tariff threats. Tariffs would hurt the economies of both countries involved. Literally no one wins in a trade war.

    The last time America passed large blanket tariffs like the kind Trump is threatening was the Smoot–Hawley Act of 1930. Which had the effect of reducing both imports and exports by almost 2/3 and was broadly considered to have significantly prolonged the Great Depression.

    I’m not sure why Trump thinks tariffs are a good idea. He talks about it like it’s a way to get other countries to pay money to the US… but that’s not how tariffs work. Tariffs cause inflation for the US consumer, which is bad for the economies of both the USA, and the country being tariffed.

    I suspect Trump framing of this as “external” revenue will be used to justify income tax cuts which will predominantly benefit the wealthy in the US and the expense of both middle class in both countries.

    Countries being threatened by Trump should focus on diversifying their trade partners to mitigate the damage,

    Americans should be calling their representatives and demanding they put a halt to this nonsense.



  • Ummm no.

    In the real world consumers ultimately end up paying the tariffs.

    Domestic suppliers have a tendency to raise prices is response to increased demand and decrease competition from imports.

    When Trump implemented a tariff on Washing Machines in 2018 during his first term. The price of imported washing machines went up, the price of domestic washing machines went up, the price of dryers… which weren’t tariffed went up.

    Eventually it did led to more washing machines and dryers being manufactured domestically. Which did lead to a small increase manufacturing in jobs. But it was a net loss for the consumers.

    Tariffs function as a flat tax on goods. Like all flat taxes this benefits the wealthy and hurts poor and the working class.





  • You seem to be misunderstanding friend.

    I’m all for building as much wind, hydro, and solar power as possible. It is the cheapest option.

    I’m not arguing against that.

    People here seem to think that money spent on nuclear is money NOT spent on Wind/Solar/Hydro/Storage/etc as if there’s a fixed budget for all energy transition projects. That’s not the situation.

    Insurance and financial institutions are losing big money on climate change disasters, and they are getting data from their actuaries and climate scientist, saying it’s going to get massively worse. There is rapidly growing interest from “big money” private sector investors, In any technology that might solve the climate crisis.

    There’s more money investors wanting invest in wind, solar, or hydroelectric projects, than there are projects to invest it. The limiting factor isn’t money.

    Believe me, no one would be happier than me to be proven wrong that we can build enough wind, solar, and hydroelectric to get off a fossil fuels by 2050.

    But if you extrapolate the current data and the current trend lines, they don’t come anywhere close.

    If we also invest in nuclear, we come closer.



  • From an investor perspective, solar farm projects are a slam dunk once they reach the point of being ready to purchase panels.

    There are a lot of things to line up to build a grid-scale solar farm before you get to that point. You need to acquire (the rights to) the land, get permits to connect to the grid, which usually includes construction of the new transmission line to the grid. You need to line up panels from a manufacturer (who in turn has supply chains to manage), and labor to install it. And 100 other things. It typically takes a few years of planning, but get all that in order and it’s a small percentage of the total expense of the project.

    At the point you need to do the larger capital raise needed to buy the panels and hire the labour it’s a slam dunk. The project can be completed typically within 12-24 months so there’s a quick process to get to generating revenue for investors, and because solar has gotten so cheap it doesn’t take long to see positive ROI. It’s not like electricity demand is going away either. It’s a very safe bet, once all the pieces are lined up, and not difficult to raise funds once you get to the point of needing the big money.

    People on Lemmy/Reddit have this mental model that there’s a fixed budget for investment in the energy transition. If that was the case, then yes it would make sense to go all in on the cheapest technology option.

    But that’s how it works. Energy projects are competing with the global market for investment capital with non-energy related investments and there’s no shortage of wealth wanting to throw money at a solar project because they’re low risk/high ROI.

    Nuclear projects are a different story, long timelines from construction to revenue generation and high upfront capital costs make them unfavourable investments, they generally need government support to derisk the investment before investors jump on board. Which the governments are reluctant to do because they lack a mandate to do so from the populace. In part because of this mindset that nuclear investment impedes solar or wind investments.


  • Solar has been growing exponentially for the past decade or so, wind has not. Wind has run into supply chain limitations on rare earth metals such as neodymium and isn’t growing exponentially anymore.

    It’s doubtful that solar will continue growing exponentially for the next 20 years but even if it does, that only gets us to the point of enough capacity to displace the ~17.9 PWh of electricity generated by fossil fuels in 2023.

    To get off of fossil fuels we need to change everything else that’s burning fossil fuels too. That means every vehicle replaced with an EV, every gas furnace replaced with a heat pump. As we do that it’s going to 2-3x electricity demand.

    The world burned 140 PWh worth of fossil fuels in 2023, and we only generated 1.6 PWh from solar power. That 1.6 is up from 1.3 PWh in 2022. A lot of that 140 PWh was wasted heat energy so we don’t need to get that high, but we still need to generate something in the area of 60-90 PWh of electricity annually to eliminate fossil fuels.

    ~4/5th of our energy still comes from fossil fuel, we have a long f’ing way to go. Even with the current exponential growth of solar we don’t get off of fossil fuels within 20 years, and that’s assuming global energy demand doesn’t increase.

    Don’t take my word for it. Extrapolate the data yourself. Your rose coloured glasses aren’t helping.



  • More than anything else I’ve heard, this Trump action scares me the most.

    Military generals recognize the president as commander in chief. They’re generally going to follow the chain of command in situations where the US is attacking a strategic target, regardless of the ‘ethics’ of the situation.

    If Trump wants to level the Gaza Strip or the West Bank or even parts of the Ukraine. They’ll likely follow orders because there’s a strategic value in those targets militarily. They might not agree with the strategy, but they’re primarily loyal to the office of the president regardless of who’s sitting in it.

    But when generals would push back, is any scenario where following orders was a risk to the country with no strategic gain. Like attacking US citizens, using nuclear weapons, attacking strategic allies or starting World War III for no other reason than because Trump wanted to flex his ego.

    The scenarios where these roles needed to be replaced by a Trump loyalist willing to do anything are… nightmarish.









  • Any doctor that performs an abortion in Texas is risking a minimum $100,000 fine and permanently losing there license to practice medicine if lawyers, who are not medical professionals, decide it was medically necessary yet.

    As a result, doctors in TX have been advised by their lawyers not to perform abortions unless the mother is literally minutes away from death, because otherwise you can’t prove that it was medically necessary.

    In the case, the patient died of sepsis. Doctors couldn’t perform the abortion when she needed it because they couldn’t prove that it was medically necessary yet.

    They knew that not performing the abortion would put mom at a much high risk of dying later. But they couldn’t legally prove that risk exists because all pregnancies involve some degree of risk.

    If you want doctors to perform medical procedures when it’s medically necessary, you need doctors making that decision, not lawyers, not the state. That’s what Texas had before this law went into effect.

    It’s literally created a trolly problem, it’s now better for the doctors to let some women die so they can save more lives later.