Or, you know, finally unfuck your riddiculous system where paid vacations is a luxury, minimum wage is pathetic and health insurance is not the standard...
Would you please stop posting rage rhetoric to HN? We've asked you this before, but you're still doing it a lot. Fulmination lowers the quality of discussion, even when you're not attacking anyone personally.
No joke, just finished watching HyperNormalisation[1].
The most depressing part to me is that Adam Curtis isn't off on an easily dismissed tangent in this documentary, he's essentially cross cut the last 40 years into a 3 hour cliff notes guide to some of the darker corners of postmodern philosophy.
Specifically, Baudrillard. His 2002 essay, The Violence of the Global[2] has some interesting food for thought:
>We believe that the ideal purpose of any value is to become universal. But we do not really assess the deadly danger that such a quest presents. Far from being an uplifting move, it is instead a downward trend toward a zero degree in all values. In the Enlightenment, universalization was viewed as unlimited growth and forward progress. Today, by contrast, universalization exists by default and is expressed as a forward escape, which aims to reach the most minimally common value. This is precisely the fate of human rights, democracy, and liberty today. Their expansion is in reality their weakest expression.
HyperNormalism is bleak and offers no solutions for course correcting international affairs, and there's the rub: universal solutions may not exist.
For me, my mind's left reeling by the complexity of the times, leaving me at a loss for how to integrate information from sources like Baudrillard into my worldview guiding day-to-day behavior. My typical response is a hyperlocal focus on the people around me in meatspace and trying to at least get the basics right like the golden rule.
Well, wasn't Rogue One exactly that treatment? It was a visceral and brutal experience (especially when one compares it to fable tales of SW). I left the cinema quite unsettled by how gray everything was, the sacrifices and commitment to the cause.
I'd really love SW movies to be more like that, less bland and mentally lazy (AND NO MORE DEATHSTARS FFS)
With more and more negative interest rates, or attempts to lock down on how money is used (total removal of cash for example) on the horizon I think governments are quite right to fear bitcoins or any other currency that would let people get out of the attempts to "walled garden" finances
That and the mass adoption of cheap, handheld, and powerful computers with easy user interfaces and lots of short range wireless peripherals...
Imagine being able to pay your bar/coffee/restaurant/hotel tab with NFC or something, exchanging whatever virtual currency units, as an expected social norm.
The point isn't the just the payment mechanism but the network it connects back to plus the payment mechanism.
[edit] to clarify: if vendors actually accepted (something like) bitcoin at restaurants or wherever, this would cut out the banking middle man entirely. Also we already collectively have the tech to do this now.
These vendors still need to access fiat currencies to pay wages, rents, taxes, suppliers, etc. Until workers, landlords, governments, and suppliers begin accepting BTC, there's no incentive for vendors to take on the risks of accepting BTC.
Do you even know just how much it costs to run a power plant?
You need a few hundred (400-600) tons of coal per hour per one decently sized BLOCK (few hundred MW), usually power plants have several of those, sometimes a dozen or more, a few jet engines running at full blast its a big deal compared with a FUCKING POWER PLANT /rant
Also, none of the renewable energy sources are cheaper than coal, especially when you look at the bigger picture (mostly unutilised capacity, grid overbuild requirements, volatility)
They could transition to a combined cycle plant if they wanted to increase efficiency. I'm obviously not an expert, just like 99% of people here. If you look at the basic sentiment here it is that this seems like a fake solution to the problem of coal power plants and I somewhat agree. I think that it would help to know that they are at least attempting to move away from coal towards nuclear or renewable sources. It seems like there are a lot of solutions that could be pursued.
>They could transition to a combined cycle plant if they wanted to increase efficiency.
And who is going to pay for that? How do they fuel them? They already have to import a sizable part of their natural gas consumption. Do they spend even more and add coal gassification?
India is building out nuclear, obviously after Fukushima retards made sure to obstruct as much as they could
Again, the issue is smog, that is killing right fucking now. Should they just ignore the problem and develop a massive program so you feel better?
You can use coal and avoid smog. It's an incentive problem without enforcement pollution is slightly cheaper. So, really the core problem is corruption not technology.
If you actually manage to go off grid then yes, maybe you are able to save. Good luck doing it without either massive lifestyle change or tons of capital for storage in most of the world.
Once you take the feed-in away the benefit is not so clear cut. Also, many people dump the externalities of home solar on everyone else (the negative spot electricity price) and then use cheap power from the grid for most of the 24h cycle
For people like me that use less than 600kwh / month or 20kwh/day just about anywhere in the US works as long as you are not in an apartment. In the northern US you will want a solar hot water heater, but that's got a 2-5 year ROI.
Granted, my electric would only be 50-60$ a month so the savings is also not huge, but that still adds up to 9-11k in 15 years and panels last well past that.
PS: Solar quietly got really cheap, installation is often one of the major costs.
