At least in Germany, they shut down the nuclear plants before the coal plants. When you shut down or decline to maintain, upgrade and expand nuclear, in favor of renewables which do not yet exist, fossil energy (coal, oil, or natural gas) tends to fill the gap.
Just look at Germany. Imagine how much better things would have been today if they'd shut down their fossil power plants before the nuclear plants.
On a continent-wide grid, there will likely be some wind somewhere, and some pumped hydro ready to take advantage of the low prices.
We'll also see micro-storage developing to take advantage of electricity price variability. EVs will charge when electricity is cheapest, household water might be warmed during the day when solar energy is available, etc.
Unfortunately losing nuclear means that we lose the potential for a self-sufficient regional grid. But since the costs of losing base load power are largely offloaded from national budgets, instead showing up as new costs for consumers and companies, it's a lot easier for a politician to advocate for renewables. No need to spend taxpayer money on a project that won't be finished in the 4 years that matter to your government.
A functional public transport system also means that people who are too young or old to drive, or have vision problems, or need to take medication which makes it unsafe to operate a vehicle, have the freedom to leave their homes and go where they need to go.
The issue lies in who those 1 billion people will be. The most anti-LGBT, anti-women, anti-education, low income cultures which have the most kids? Or a "controlled landing" in which most of the Western world doesn't become a ghost town or has its culture more or less replaced because it couldn't reproduce itself?
Governments sometimes demolish highways though. And a lot of the time, the marginal utility of adding another lane to a road is lower than the utility of using that space and public money somewhere else. If we scale a car-centric city to a million inhabitants we often end up with a majority of urban space devoted to roads and parking lots, which cost public money, instead of commercial and residential buildings which generate opportunities for the inhabitants and money for the municipality.
Another problem of car-centric infrastructure is that it doesn't scale as well as public transport - a single bus can, potentially, take 50 or more cars off the road.
I second this. I went through a phase of extremely clean eating and it helped me lose the weight I put on in the first half of the pandemic. Now I just have an intuition as to what to eat and in which quantities, and it has helped me keep the weight off for the past year.
We're going to see more interconnected grids, the sun is usually shining somewhere and the wind is blowing somewhere. And when it isn't, we're going to see higher prices.
Private companies will absorb some part of the societal cost of intermittent electricity, by letting factories and workplaces stay idle when power costs are high - this will filter down to lower wages for the employees of those companies.
Has Google gotten worse in the last few years? I instinctively try to Google these kinds of things, but it is getting harder to find the results I want.
Any car with more than one person in the vehicle should have VIP access. That's at least twice as efficient use of space and natural resources as one person in a 2-ton SUV driving to work or wherever.
I think you're right, but there is also the possibility that people avoiding places and situations which feel unsafe is a factor in the low number of incidents.
Yup - I owe my above-average native fluency to my mother's incessant correcting, and my English proficiency to countless kind strangers on the internet.
Unfortunately that sentiment is just backend developer elitism. The DOM, frontend state, backend state, and networking end up creating considerable complexity once you start creating more dynamic web applications.
Gentle reminder that wages are set by markets generally based on the cost of replacement. If you don't have a moat in the form of education and experience, you won't have very impressive pay. Working in the public sector just makes this worse because politicians need to keep your wages down to have room in the budget for their pet project which will hopefully get them re-elected.
I'm 99% sure that Africa is not going to reach 4.3 billion inhabitants. Climate change, food insecurity, economic growth and global instability will ensure that it doesn't turn out that way.
Both India and China do have high rates of both traffic and pedestrian deaths compared to European countries.
I think the answer is going to be government rules because it's important that self-driving cars are predictable when there's no human driver you can have eye contact with in complex situations.
US productivity, that is, GDP per hour worked, is higher than almost all European countries. Only the Germanic-speaking countries have comparable productivity.
I would say most children in Western nations are wanted by their parents. They're mostly just a cost economically speaking, so no incentive to have more than you want.
I think most people can achieve happiness in their situation, even under bad conditions, if they have a sound mind. Those elites might have a better shot at accidental happiness, but being upset over that will do nothing good for your own state of mind, so why let it bring you down? You can't change how the world works.
Happiness comes from within, and from meaningful social connections.
Russia and Ukraine have the same gauge. The reason the railroads weren't used to invade is because Ukraine managed to damage the connecting infrastructure enough. Turns out that railroads are a lot better defensively than offensively, in an era of widespread drone usage.
Adding more inputs to a production process generally increases output. But many parts of the world are already suffering from soil depletion because of intensive farming, and the fertilizers and fossil fuels which we use to raise yields will run out eventually.
Innovation has been able to outrun resource depletion for the last 300 years of industrialism, but that is no guarantee that it will last forever. Even a lot of that growth has come at the cost of increased emissions and resource depletion rather than efficiency gains.
I didn't like it for years but then I kind of got into it for testing out machine learning and I found it kind of neat. My biggest gripe is no longer the syntax but the slowness, trying to do anything with even a soft performance requirement means having to figure out how to use a library that calls C to do it for you. Working with large amounts of data in native Python is noticeably slower than even NodeJS.
Unlike socialism, capitalism actually seems to fare better when under a siege mentality. The 50s to 70s was a period of strong growth and right-wing support for worker-friendly policies which made the lives of the ordinary person better, not least because of fear that poor working class conditions would lead to communist uprisings in Western Europe.
Every central bank in the world is caught between a rock and a hard place. A recession would be bad for the long-term economy, likely reducing aggregate productivity. But if they don't manage to get inflation under control, we'll see a wage/price spiral as high inflation expectations become entrenched among companies and workers.