ZeroGravitas

Poignant and useful writing.

Also avoiding literally supporting Hamas would help weaken Hamas:

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

The Onion’ Stands With Israel Because It Seems Like You Get In Less Trouble For That

https://theonion.com/the-onion-stands-with-israel-because-it...

Standard Ebooks version:

https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/epictetus/short-works/geor...

It's useful to rewind and see the tests people put in place before the thing happened.

Like this VOX article surveying experts on fascism in 2015 and then revisiting in 2020:

https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/21521958/what-is-fas...

> But there is still no state management of the economy here (as there was to a degree in Nazi Germany and fascist Italy). Trump is content to aid business by reducing government protections of the environment and of workers … and his economic policy is mainly just to let businessmen do what they want.

Well, we can check that one off the list with 2024 hindsight.

>He’s never actually done a Putin and tried to make himself a permanent president, let alone suggest any coherent plan for overthrowing the constitutional system. And I don’t even think that’s in his mind

And another one bites the dust.

Note that all the scholars who get very technical on what they want to call Fascist all compare him to Marcos, Erdogan, Milosovic. That's still not a good review.

How is their plan failing?

Fox viewers are being told that violent terrorists are trying to murder ICE to protect criminal Somalis.

They have even better data on what lies resonate with their base to excuse the next killing.

How does this not advance their agenda?

That's a blue state being targeted for revenge and for practice and so they can spin stories for their voters in other states. They'd probably target blue cities in swing states if they wanted to impact votes.

They have people who are experts in this. Before the latest wave of open fascism, many of the rising stars in the Republican party where people who were experts at removing people with Democrat sounding names off voter registration databases shortly before elections.

They have the data to target this effectively if they want to do it.

California government has a great claim to advancing the state of the art in EVs (and hybrids and just ICE before that).

Some people credit Tesla with kick starting the EV revolution. Californian governance kick started Tesla.

Their EV efforts go back to the ZEV mandate in 1990.

Shot and immediately branded a violent terrorist by the highest levels of government.

It's a bit of a catch-22 that they keep shooting and lying about the people who are filming them shooting people to provide evidence that they lie about what happens.

Yes. Stepping in front of cars to give reason to shoot occupants was a repeated pattern in the Border Patrol, while against standard practice for most law enforcement.

So assuming it's random lack of training when he does it again seem far too charitable.

His wife Clara Ford drove an EV until the 1930s.

https://www.thehenryford.org/collections-and-research/digita...

And newer cars get driven more than old cars on average so 1/20 cars being EVs will do more than 1/20th of the miles.

Just transitioning from coal to gas for electricity production has a big impact.

The graph is adjusted to compensate for the efficiency of the power plants, but it's an average and one they need to update every so often as plants get more efficient.

But we're phasing out the oldest and least efficient coal plants and replacing them with gas plants that are twice as efficient (33% vs 64%).

The graph under discussion assumes 40% as discussed here:

https://ourworldindata.org/energy-substitution-method

Not if you compare states with similar levels of economic development, like US states or EU countries.

Iowa, South Dakota, Kansas, Oklahoma have around 50% wind and 10 cent electricity.

When comparing EU states, the correlation is more about who taxes electricity and who builds wind. Comparing pre-tax prices has a very slight downward trend as the country has more wind.

You see a lot of propaganda graphs online that have the EU states clustered in the top right and a cluster of unlabelled Petro states and dictatorships who subsidize electricity in the other quadrant.

The intended implication is that you should emulate the countries they are afraid to name because it would make their graph ridiculous.

"Clown show" and "clown world" are two different things. The latter has some dark associations so I wouldn't recommend using them interchangeably.

I was confused by your mention of "clown world" as I'm more familiar with it being used by far right people who support Trump to undermine basic government competence and encourage anti-democratic nihilism.

Your whole middle section reinforced that, as it sounds like the kind of things that Trump voters believe.

So there's your answer, people who consume similar information sources as yourself voted themselves into danger and poverty by electing an angry bullshitter.

Maybe there's a lesson there.

If you don't propose what you think is a better alternative we don't know what we are agreeing with by upvoting. Is it:

1. Let Russia take most of eastern Europe in exchange for gas

2. Make Europe Great Again i.e. complain loudly about current politicians then do everything even worse with no plan or logic

3. Fully automated Luxury Communism

4. Ask Harry Potter to make chemical inputs with his magic wand.

5. Nuclear, just because we think it's neat.

> The question is rather why they want front financing. But I have some clues considering who is their current head of govt

I assumed it was, like the UK, because it let them avoid committing to a specific price like all the other competing technologies so they could raise the price later once the project was too far along to cancel.

Sadly we got a warning in 2014 with Crimea being seized and fossil apologists like Bjorn Lomborg argued against rolling out wind and solar faster in response.

Because he's so "reasonable" and "pragmatic", he didn't say we shouldn't phase out Russian gas, he just said solar and wind don't work and so we should invent some totally new type of energy for this purpose.

It's only with a few years hindsight that he's obviously a shill. You had to be paying close attention at the time to notice.

And sadly that kind of engineered delay is widespread.

Only if it the nuclear didn't need refurbished to keep running.

France and Canada are currently estimating costs to refurb old nuclear that are higher then new build renewables.

Russia did have a big incentive to not antagonize Europe.

But sadly they have a political system that doesn't reflect what is best for the ordinary person. So those incentives can be ignored by those making the decisions.

See also, Trump invading Greenland.

I was going to comment something similar.

I was reading some GitHub comments earlier and the AI tone and structure in the comments posted by some users made me feel really uneasy for some reason.

I know a Brazilian who puts lots of emails through ChatGPT because they aren't confident in their English, but this seemed to be AI generating the majority of the content of the message too.

Carbonbrief put out a report with a similar theme last July.

They calculated that Chinese green tech exports in 2024 reduced the rest of the world's carbon by 1%.

It's mostly solar (though they calculated EVs and some other stuff too) so assuming 25 years life that would be equivalent to 25% of the world-minus-China's CO2 emissions or about 18%.

So Chinese exports in one year cancel out 2/3rds of their yearly CO2.

https://www.carbonbrief.org/analysis-chinas-clean-energy-exp...

In 2025 they exported about 25% more in dollar terms, though prices keep falling so that can be misleading in terms of impact.

I'm old enough to remember when Wired was excited about free market capitalism. Apparently competition is bad when solar panel manufacturers do it.

To be charitable, they may be trying to meet an insanely misinformed American audience half-way, and wake them from their fossil slumbers before they surrender their global leadership.

But if that amounts to just half misinforming them, then it's still not great.

Evolution is an aggressively progressive idea for some people in the US.

So which specific ideas made you think "I'll vote for the rapist gameshow host?"

12 weeks of paid family leave? More solar power? Only government run prisons? Buying into Medicare at 55? Free in state tuition for families earning less than 125k?

That's what Gemini lists as her most progressive positions.

I dislike the macho framing of much of this, talk of trade "weapons" and "striking back".

It more like a friend having a schizo episode and trying to help them. And now they've pulled a knife.

Yes that's an escalation and needs responded to in a new way for your own security, but it's not a cage match to be cheered on. It's a sad situation where everyone is losing for no good reason.

He's been quite consistently writing unhinged stuff on his Truth social, and in his speeches for years now.

I'm weirded out by how little this gets mentioned. A real emperor's new clothes moment.

But apparently declaring war on a country because he didn't get the Nobel Peace Prize from a different country is slightly breaking through the firehose of insanity.

I'm sure we'll be back to ignoring this soon though.

There's a weird recursion here though.

I wonder what supply and demand curves look like if you keep telling people that the increased costs will be paid by foreigners and not them?

I assume it has an impact eventually but it must dampen the speed of response if people believe that.

Solar and heat pumps across all of Europe is in fact one of the quickest and best ways to sideline Russia.

See the RepowerEU plan for more details:

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

Germany does have half the CO2 emissions of the USA.