Both France and Germany are net electricity exporters on an annual basis.
But when France sends surplus nuclear electricity to its neighbors that's supposed to be a plus for nuclear technology. When Germany sends surplus renewable electricity to its neighbors that's supposed to be a minus for renewable technology. Both nuclear and renewable generation are rigid in their own ways; neither is as flexible as gas powered generation, but of course neither has the substantial fuel costs or emissions of gas powered generation either.
This is because in energy production timing matters. If you over-produce and dump your energy into our shared grid then I must throttle back my base load production, and then when the sun goes down and you do not have enough capacity to handle your needs and require me to increase my production so that you avoid brownouts then your energy production plan is flawed. If the only way you can make your energy production look acceptable is 'on an annual basis' then your plan is pushing the negative externalities onto your neighbors.
When they have their surpluses - they are actually paying their neighbors to take power from them. I.e. they are selling it at a negative rate.
When the renewables are offline - they are paying a premium for electricity from fossil fuels.
While Germany does indeed _produce_ stellar amounts of renewable energy. They are completely dependent on their own and neighbors fossil power production.
Thus they can claim that they are "exporting" renewables. The turth is that their renewables infrastructure and the retarded system of incentives they have set up - result in one of the most expensive electricity prices in the world: https://www.ovoenergy.com/guides/energy-guides/average-elect...
Notice how the more renewables a country has - more expensive the electricity is.
Why? Because renewables are really not all that ecological as the activists would like to claim.
Simply because renewables cause more problems than they solve. And the surplus resources spent (or rather wasted) on "green" energy are also a form of energy. Thus one can argue that "green" energy is actually a net contributor to pollution - due to the aforementioned externalities.
Until we get insane amounts of storage (which will also pose a significant potential for pollution) - green energy industry is actually contributing to problems.
And while you are sarcastic - current state of affairs is not due to common sense or economics. But due to politics.
But it's a private market? the only people who should be suffering are those who own generation equipment which can't keep up with the higher rate of change of dispatch. E.g. Steam turbine operators.
I think your point has some merit if the net effect is higher power prices overall. Unfortunately I don't have this information...
Either way, the reality is that renewable technology is making the slow-ramping generators uneconomical. Even if you remove wind-farms from the supply side of the equation you still have roof-top solar eating into the demand side and creating a daily demand profile which requires gas/liquid fuel generators to match.
I've seen a recent example of a cool summer day (Australian) where the daily demand minimum actually occurred at mid-day due to coincidence of maximum roof-top solar generation and low air-conditioning use! Under this kind of scenario your nuclear/coal steam turbine will be running at a horrible financial loss...
The point is that Germany is exporting energy when nobody needs it and is thus causing problems for the grid.
France exports energy when German solar cells and wind are in a dip.
My point is that German exports are peak surpluses that cause problems for the grid and French exports are on-demand because steel mills need to work when wind doesn't blow and sun doesn't shine.
But thank you for proving my point. Although you tried to obfuscate away the context.
If "nobody needs it" then there will be no consumption in another country to take the German production. (Some production does actually get curtailed, never matched with consumption in Germany or in a connected country). It's not like Germans are smuggling waste-electricity past customs agents into another country. French reactors do very little "on-demand" adjustment either. You can see graphs here; look at the yearly ones: http://www.gridwatch.templar.co.uk/france/
French electricity trade with neighboring countries makes a exports make a jagged line. Fossils make a jagged line. Nuclear is the smoothest line of any of them: it does hardly anything on-demand. It does the same thing day after day. That is an advantage in certain ways (no worries about lost production on a windless night) but a disadvantage in others; you cannot save money/resources by stopping a reactor the way you can by stopping a gas turbine.
I am someone interested in post-fossil electricity. 15 years ago that meant I was primarily interested in nuclear power. Much to my surprise, the nuclear industry basically stalled and the renewable industry expanded scale and cut costs much faster than I thought possible. Following the change in the numbers, I am reading more about renewable technology than nuclear technology nowadays. That's where the most rapid improvements are coming from. I'll change my opinion again if the numbers change again and nuclear starts delivering aggressively on scale-up, costs-down. I'm interested only in numbers from real hardware, though. I've seen enough daydreams in the forms of PowerPoint and TED talks (from nuclear dreamers and renewable dreamers alike) to last me a lifetime.
Milgram and Stanford Prison experiments show us that "ordinary good people" are the ones who turn into monsters if you give them the right incentives/conditions.
What was one of major factors in bringing down the Soviet Union - was information campaign of which Radio Free Europe was a major part. While, indeed their policy was dissemination of truth. Undoubtedly it would have been seen as "fake news" by the Soviets.
While I have no idea what is the solution to this problem, I am pretty sure that censorship is the worst thing we can do.
Also consider - that the main stream media conglomerates have recently justified "fake news" sources by doing a horrendous job themselves.
I wish people would stop touting the Stanford experiment as some sort of truism. It was a deeply flawed experiment that didn't observe proper scientific principles and the conclusions were largely subjective and anecdotal.
> This touches on one glaring problem with libertarian utopia. Their replacement for the evil gubmint is a host of other bureaucracies (giant consumer groups, a bunch of non-profits doing testing, insurance for everything, etc.) that presumably will have many of the same pathologies as the gubmint.
Which is kind of the point. Institutions can be functional or disfunctional. The only way to prevent disfunctional institutions bogging down the government is by not having the government run them in the first place.
The easiest way to deal with a dysfunctional institutions is by letting them die. Which is a lot easier when government is not involved.
Last but not least, there is also the element of freedom. One cannot opt-out of government and its institutions - without having to move or worse. While as proposed above - the possibility of opting out of institutions - is necessary for having any hope of not being stuck with corrupt institutions.
So, if government didn't do anything, it would be functional, but only because private actors would stand in and provide incompetent bureaucrats or self-interested bureaucratsof their own?
I don't give a damn if Oracle is stupid, incompetent, malicious or all of the above. I decided to have no business with Oracle and they have no way of forcing me into a relationship with it.
If, however - Oracle were a government institution - then it could leverage its monopoly over violence to get me to do its bidding - regardless of what I thought of its services.
And as one goes through history, one notices that most if not all of the institutions that governments provide - have started outside of government, yet have been included into the scope of government. Either because the ruling party at the time saw it as a means of expanding their reach OR because people have observed that it would be cheaper/more effective to run these institutions "collectively" - where the state pops up immediately as an endeavor that is already done for the "good of all".
Unfortunately - no institution is ideal. And as we have seen time and again through history, all institutions succumb to corruption eventually. And being stuck with corrupt institutions is no fun at all.
I have no idea, how you maligned my argument into the garbage you presented. But I would argue, that you are actually presenting an excellent case for striving towards preventing dishonest people such as yourself from getting power over others. Thus while you undoubtedly think yourself an edgy cynic - you are merely solidifying my point.
Unless your branch of libertarianism also gets rid of contracts, there are many scenarios where contracts between parties can and will affect you, and without the ability to petition the government for redress, you are screwed. Private parties are generally motivated by their own private interest -- we have democratic government at different levels to represent the interests of the people.
This kind of stuff happens every day between property owners. That's why we have things like zoning, permitting and environmental regulation. Nobody wants government intervention until their neighbor puts up a big ugly fence.
In my personal experience, I've been in disputes with government bureaucracy, and was able to get a reasonable resolution because we have elected representatives who care about constituent issues. I've also been party to disputes with large corporate bureaucracies, and your ability to push the needle as an individual is very limited.
If characterizing me as dishonest makes you feel good, go for it. But I'd return the favor by saying that like most libertarians, your position reflects an immature, self-centered and unsophisticated understanding of the world and how it works. I encourage you to take a few hours and study the history of how the negative outcomes of industrialization in 19th century America re-shaped societies thinking about regulation and property rights.
As a minor, your parents decided for you, but once you're 18 nothing is stopping you from either trying to re-negotiate the contract (i.e. become politically active) or trying to find a better deal (emigrate). You can also decide to simply unilaterally break the contract (become a criminal) and in practice you could even live without such a contract in a variety of vast areas that are largely uninhabited.
You're not being compelled to accept this contract, but it's such a good deal that few people decide otherwise.
You're right that nothing is stopping you from trying to become politically active or to emigrate, but the chances of doing either successfully are very low.
Politics favors people of certain backgrounds and/or very high charisma. The more substantial the change the higher the level of politics you need to get involved in, and the less likely you are to successfully be involved.
Emigration suffers from the problem that the less money and education you have, the more difficult it is to successfully emigrate. You can't just decide you want to move to a country, they need to decide to let you in. The bar for entry in a lot of countries is very high so it's just not an option for a lot of people.
It's 2016, we have Amended the Constitution so the Senate is democratically ellected, we have live video footage of police brutality for when we are abused...and yet the collective constituency of the nation has to pick between two presidential candidates with the lowest approval ratings in theirown parties that anyone has ever seen. Yet, you try and say that social contract theory applies to an individual? When it clearly can't even apply to the masses? This is the 21st century, this is most likely the best moment in human history. This is the worst evidence for social contract theory. Think about it.
well if every generation had to write their laws from scratch we'd never get anything done. You have to accept that as someone coming into an already occupied world that some rules will have been made prior to your birth.
You can campaign against them but just don't expect not to be challenged if you break them.
I would just like to note, that the gist of the problem with Hogan is that Gawker has been ordered to remove the said tape by a court and they refused to comply.
That is the real reason why they got obliterated in the end.
That may be true. But my parent poster said that it was because they ruined people's lives. I don't think that refusing to comply with a court order, however dumb that may have been, was ruining anyone's life.
Without knowing the details of the people's private lives, their relationships, and the impact this has had, it's impossible to say. From the outside, you don't know what's happening in someone else's life except for what they publish / gets published about them.
This could have had a very real impact on personal relationships in both of their lives, which they've chosen to not publicise precisely because it's personal and none of our business.
No, parent comment said they went down because they ruined people's lives AND broke the law.
Trying to argue whether or not someone's life was actually ruined is irrelevant. That's not for you to decide. It clearly damaged someone enough for them to dump millions of dollars into a totally legal retaliation effort.
Gawker had no right to do what they did, as determined by a court. This is the crucial point. They tried to screw someone by financially strong arming them out of justice, so Thiel did that to them instead.
It's absolutely tone deaf to say that outing someone as gay or posting a sex tape couldn't have devastating effects.
What an excellent strategy to move conversation forward. Just take the peripheral argument, attack it, then act like that was the only argument ever presented.
Oh, I'm sorry, I wasn't aware that you had blessed the general concept under discussion as having truthiness, making it inappropriate to discuss the parts of it that weren't true.
Gawker certainly were judged to have broken the law, and certainly did pursue a legal strategy that was at best unwise.
HN regularly anoints as justified activities that break the law if we find the law unjust or unwise, and typically looks pretty badly on legal authorities who impose massive disproportionate penalties on people who disrespect the legal authority.
The person who kicked off this thread asserted that this issue had "absolutely nothing to do with free speech", and that Gawker had ruined lives as a way to argue that this was not appropriate, hacker-like lawbreaking, but inappropriate, opprobrium-worthy lawbreaking.
The idea that this case had "nothing to do with free speech" is farcical in a "black is white" kind of way. It was about whether it was okay for reporters for a news organization to print a story.
The idea that it "ruined lives" runs up pretty hard against the evidence that pretty self-evidently, neither Thiel's nor Hogan's lives were ruined. Now, could we argue that perhaps they did suffer in some way for the story? Sure! Which is why I noted that the "ruined lives" thing was overheated rhetoric, rather than saying that it contains no truth of any kind.
Context matters, a lot.