| ▲ | goda90 2 days ago |
| This really illustrates how important it is to switch to renewable energy. I know it's not an easy task for impoverished communities to get the startup capital to install solar+batteries, especially one in such a politically tumultuous position, but that really is a path to stability for so many people around the world. A YouTuber known for talking about dishwashers and Christmas lights recently put out a long rant about how ridiculous it is that humanity still leans so much on single use fuels: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KtQ9nt2ZeGM |
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| ▲ | rented_mule 2 days ago | parent | next [-] |
| A fascinating takeaway from that video for me... If you take the US land that is dedicated to growing corn for ethanol that is put in gasoline, and replace all the corn on that land with solar panels, how much energy would it produce? Twice today's total electrical generation in the US, from all sources. And that's in the corn belt, which is far from ideal for solar. It would be billions of panels, but it's a pretty interesting perspective on the questions about the land use requirements of solar. |
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| ▲ | nozzlegear 2 days ago | parent | next [-] | | Another genuine question: I wonder how that would change the climate in those areas. I live in Iowa and "corn sweat" is a thing that never fails to make several weeks of summer completely unbearable. | |
| ▲ | pfdietz 2 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | It shows that bioenergy is very land inefficient. There was a book about renewable energy in Britain about 17 years ago, "Sustainable Energy -- Without the Hot Air" that tried to make the argument that renewables could not power Britain, there wasn't enough land. But if you drilled down, this conclusion was due to use of biofuels. | | |
| ▲ | _aavaa_ a day ago | parent [-] | | The significant problem with that book is that it commits the primary energy fallacy. It sees that we need X GWh of chemical energy from fuels and says we have to replace it with X GWh of electricity. Which is of course completely wrong since it ignores the efficiencies of the processes and conflates two different things simply because they are measured in the same units. |
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| ▲ | adrianN a day ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Germany uses less land for energy crops and is further north, but still could satisfy most of its electricity needs if it replaced the plants with solar panels. | |
| ▲ | johng 2 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | Genuine question: How much energy, minerals, transportation, manufacturing, etc, etc. goes into making the panels. How much are the panels going to make back percentage wise in it's lifetime vs. the cost to make and transport, install? Corn kind of reproduces itself every year (If you don't get the GMO kind), so you only need natural resources to continue to grow it right? Water, sunlight and labor? | | |
| ▲ | MrDrMcCoy 2 days ago | parent | next [-] | | He goes over that in the video. It's long, but very much worth watching. | |
| ▲ | tfyoung 2 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | > Corn kind of reproduces itself every year (If you don't get the GMO kind), so you only need natural resources to continue to grow it right? Water, sunlight and labor? At industrial scale, it has a huge petro-chemical fertiliser input. | | |
| ▲ | pfdietz 2 days ago | parent [-] | | Total energy input to agriculture in the US is less than 2% of total energy consumption. So "huge" there has to be taken in context. All the energy inputs to agriculture could be replaced with non-fossil inputs. Fertilizer in particular needs hydrogen to make ammonia, but that can be produced from non-fossil sources. |
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| ▲ | cosmic_cheese 2 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Extensive deployment of renewables and battery storage is perhaps the best thing that can be done anywhere (even in developed countries) for making the grid more robust. Not only is there no fuel supply to be cut off, targets become too diffuse and decentralized to take out quickly, especially if you can manage to cover 30-40% of cities with rooftop solar. |
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| ▲ | bryanlarsen 2 days ago | parent [-] | | You can hit a solar plant with a missile, and it can be back in operation with a reduced capacity within a week: https://www.wanhossolars.com/news/ukrainian-solar-power-plan... | | |
| ▲ | pixl97 2 days ago | parent [-] | | Honestly I'm not sure if it would take a week in most cases, just took this long in this case. Its really not worth going after the panels with a conventional missile. Maybe something that explodes well above it and litters it with ball bearings would be far more effective. | | |
| ▲ | toomuchtodo 2 days ago | parent [-] | | If you know it’s coming, you can command the panels on single axis trackers to avoid damage. This is done today for hail and hurricane risk. Panels are also rated to withstand all but the most aggressive hail. |
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| ▲ | lokar 2 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| I think of him as known for his thoughts on the “color” brown. |
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| ▲ | propagandist 2 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| It also illustrates the importance of not getting caught on the wrong side of the global hegemon right next door who can choke you out and prevent you from importing energy and integrating with the global economy. A lot of food for thought all around. |
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| ▲ | nradov 2 days ago | parent | next [-] | | It also illustrates the importance of not wrecking your own economy through pursuing socialist policies and driving the most productive people out of the country. | | |
| ▲ | lokar 2 days ago | parent | next [-] | | Is that your summary of the causes, goals and impacts of the Cuban revolution? | | |
| ▲ | nradov 2 days ago | parent [-] | | Causes and goals, no. Impacts, yes. Regardless of intent, socialism inevitably destroys everything it touches. | | |
| ▲ | lokar 2 days ago | parent [-] | | Or, a prolonged embargo, threats of invasion, actual attempts at invasion, diplomatic pressure to isolate, etc all by the most powerful empire in history on your doorstep destroyed everything. It’s pretty hard to sort out after the fact. | | |
| ▲ | inglor_cz a day ago | parent | next [-] | | It is not hard, because you can look at other examples besides Cuba. Once upon a time, there was COMECON, a huge bloc of socialist countries trading with one another, whose intent was precisely to limit Western pressures. It included some fairly developed countries like Czechoslovakia and GDR. 500 million people in total, similar to the US and Western Europe together back then. A huge market in total, from Leipzig to Vladivostok to Saigon (after it fell). (BTW Cuba was a member of COMECON and it was a very non-productive member, being heavily subsidised by the Soviet Union all the time. I still remember the Cuban oranges sold in Czechoslovak shops, which were so full of stones/seeds that they were barely edible. No one would voluntarily buy them unless there was no alternative available, but there usually wasn't one. A good metafor for what was going on.) They still ran their economies into the ground because Marxist-Leninist economy doesn't work in practice. Marxism as a theory is catnip for intellectuals, but neither Marx nor Lenin ever tried to run a corner shop, much less an actual factory. The resulting misalignment of interests throws off almost everybody and a country practicing Marxist-Leninist approaches to economy will end up with just two really functional institutions: the secret police, to keep the comrades in power, and the (very non-Marxist) black market, which is tolerated because otherwise the population would starve. If it is not tolerated, the population will starve, but only a few countries like North Korea were crazy enough to go down that road. The same happened all over again pretty much everywhere where it has been tried. China only started to economically grow after ditching Marxist economy for market reforms in 1979. India was never totalitarian, but toyed with Marxist approaches until 1991, when the "License Raj" was reformed; since then, it has been following Chinese economic growth along a very similar line. Heck, even very early idealistic Israel ran into somewhat similar problems, although all the kibbutzniks were there voluntarily and eschewed use of state violence to build their utopias. | | |
| ▲ | imtringued a day ago | parent [-] | | Communism doesn't work because its originator (Marx) used Hegel's dialectical method, which was only ever meant to be used in conjunction with an idealist (=reality is derived from the mind) philosophy, and misappropriated it into dialectical materialism. The dialectical method is acceptable when the contradictions are between concepts during the process of gaining knowledge which if completed results in "the truth being the whole". In materialist philosophy, the real world exists entirely outside the mind and the mind only interprets it. Having dialectical materialism would imply that material reality has a final destination (=communism) that it is striving to achieve and that rather than concepts such as life and death contradicting each other, it's people that are contradicting each other (capitalists vs proletariat). Because forward progress is guaranteed, there is no need to have knowledge/discussions about how to arrive at the final destination. The best way to accelerate the process is to simply destroy the existing order no matter what it is. Reformists (people who demand incremental improvements) are slowing down progress toward utopia while supporting the status quo and should be held in contempt. What this ultimately means is that Marxist socialism has never been about building a good society for people to live in, but to dismantle the status quo, no matter what it is. This makes Marxist socialism an extremely attractive ideology for ruthless, violent or narcissistic individuals, while simultaneously luring in unsuspecting people who just want a better life and have reasonable grievances with the status quo. These subtractive ideologies fail because they're biting the hand that feeds them. There is this socialist streamer (Vaush) that summarized all of this in a single sentence. "I don't care about principles, I only care about winning." |
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| ▲ | nozzlegear 2 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | That's just a longer way of saying socialism inevitably destroys everything it touches. | | |
| ▲ | ofrzeta 2 days ago | parent [-] | | Is it? It's more like "you can't succeed with any political system if your powerful bullies dislike it". What do you think about Vietnam? Everything destroyed as well? | | |
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| ▲ | a day ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | [deleted] | |
| ▲ | FpUser 2 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | The way things are going it looks like late capitalism is on a way to eventually catch up. And all 2.5 "productive" people left would own the world and the rest will be cattle, potentially culled to keep things in check |
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| ▲ | mothballed 2 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | That's definitely part of the equation, but the blockade has been over for a long while. They have suffered not only the brutal effect of US colonization/hegemony but also the brutal effect of the legacy of Castro's brand of economics. If they were just suffering one or the other, they'd be significantly better off. Edit since I am throttled on posts and cannot reply below: The US briefly blockaded Cuba in the 60s, but they have only embargoed them since then. They are not blocked from international trade by the US, except with the US. There is no meaningful block from Cuba engaging in the greater international non-US "global economy" such as EU,Asia, etc. | | |
| ▲ | neves 2 days ago | parent | next [-] | | You are wrong. Any company that wants to do business with USA must also join the embargo. | | |
| ▲ | throw0101c a day ago | parent | next [-] | | > You are wrong. Any company that wants to do business with USA must also join the embargo. Air Canada flies to the US and flies to Cuba: * https://www.aircanada.com/en-ca/flights-to-cuba | |
| ▲ | mothballed 2 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | This is a bald-faced lie. For instance, I can buy Malibu rum, no matter that Pernod Ricard does business with Cuba. Or flights in USA with Air France, no matter that they also do business in Havana. Or ZTE phones which are imported into both USA and Cuba from China (carrier limitations but only because USA government won't do business with ZTE associated businesses, not because they can't be sold in USA). Or Sinopec (oil) which does business in USA including a large investment of presence in Texas but also does business with Cuba. Yes your blanket any is a lot more applicable if you said the truth which is any business that wants to do business with USA federal government which is much closer to the truth (but even then, Sinopec for instance has through its subsidiaries been allowed to bid on strategic oil reserve transactions no matter their ownership is a major trader with Cuba). Cuba is actively trading with EU, Asian, etc companies that are also trading with USA. |
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| ▲ | roumenguha 2 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Do you mean Batista? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fulgencio_Batista | |
| ▲ | user982 2 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | > the blockade has been over for a long while. What are you talking about? | | |
| ▲ | bryanlarsen 2 days ago | parent [-] | | The embargo was partially lifted in 2015. The article is about the effects of the re-tightening in 2025. | | |
| ▲ | user982 2 days ago | parent [-] | | > The embargo was partially lifted in 2015 And then reinstated in 2017. How has that been "over for a long while"? | | |
| ▲ | mothballed 16 hours ago | parent [-] | | Put down Motorcycle Diaries long enough to learn the difference between an embargo and a blockade. And then note, blockade was the word I used. |
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| ▲ | imtringued a day ago | parent | prev [-] | | That's not enough to keep people fed. I think the primary reason why Cuba remained socialist is that all the "capitalists" (perceived as boogieman for social ills) are voluntarily fleeing Cuba rather than opposing the government. |
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| ▲ | lstodd 2 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| > At length I remembered the last resort of a great princess who, when told that the peasants had no bread, replied: "Then let them eat brioches." |
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| ▲ | buckle8017 2 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Much of the developing world is close enough to the equator that solar and batteries just have to last a few days. In most developed countries solar is seasonal. |
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| ▲ | NedF 2 days ago | parent | prev [-] |
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