Governments have gotten in the bad habit of acting like nothing will ever go wrong. Living paycheck-to-paycheck, so to speak. Cali not the only one suffering this fate. It doesnt matter if it's Trump's fault or not. Lets just say it is. Bad things happen. You have to be ready.

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alpha_squared 5 hours ago | parent | next [-]

> Bad things happen. You have to be ready.

You're not wrong, but also how "ready" is "ready enough"? What about things the US doesn't generally have access to? Rare earth minerals? Helium? Cobalt? Coffee?

It also costs money to build the infra for storage and more money to maintain. There's always a trade-off. I think governments have done an acceptable job of being ready, but they are predicated on the assumption that the global order that the developed world has largely enjoyed for several decades remains largely intact.

It's a bad assumption in hindsight because some folks chose to go over a cliff over fixing deep-seated problems. You can't really control for chaos.

	▲	unethical_ban 5 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Moving to green and nuclear energy, pressing hard to upgrade the national grid would be the obvious things to reduce our short-term dependence on fossil fuels. Energy independence is not a pipe dream, and it isn't ever going to be 100%. We should be working toward it. We may be somewhat dependent on China or other sources for solar panels, for example, but once we have the product, it has a multi-decade lifetime compared to an instantly-consumed fuel. Even if you're a fossil fuel fanatic, one should be advocating for more of our refineries to be tooled for processing our own crude oil. But that isn't as profitable in the short term, so we don't do it. P.S. politically, we've seen our system does not have the capacity to deal with a malicious executive taking total control of the government. We need a complete rebuild of our legislative and executive branches.

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tialaramex 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Surely an example of being ready would be to electrify everything?

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vkou 5 hours ago | parent [-]

The rest of the developed world is banning ICE car sales, meanwhile the US is scrapping its wind farms, because doing it trolls the left.

	▲	mikeyouse 4 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Not just scrapping them - literally paying foreign companies billions of dollars to not build wind farms. Illegally as well, there’s absolutely no authority for these payments to happen outside of Congress.

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AtlasBarfed 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

We were fully warned of this with the supply chain disruption of covid.

Global supply chain has become dangerously dependent upon a stable geopolitical environment that has been unnaturally provided by the United States for the last near 100 years in post world war II.

This unipolar naval supremacy is not a normal situation. One of the things that triggered world war I was an escalating arms race in battleships between Germany and Great Britain.

I would recommend the United States practically every country, Force its automobile manufacturers to go very hardcore down the plugin hybrid electric vehicle, which will maximize the battery supply to electrify the largest amount of daily consumer transportation.

I would say you should impose a minimum of 40 to 50 mi for an all-electric range, The 20 mile range which is degraded to really about 12 now is not sufficient in my four phev.

Hybrids also weighs far less gasoline and idling and low torque low RPM situations like stop and go and sitting in traffic jams, by utilizing gener of breaking, using the electric motor for the 0-25 acceleration that ICE engines are incredibly inefficient at.

It's my opinion that the equipment and manufacturing switchover should be much less of an imposition on car manufacturers than the full EV switchover. Consumers do not have such a shocking switch to driving habits because a phev just functions like a normal ICE car if the battery drains, it solves long-range transportation issues and concerns with EVs.

Most car manufacturers know how to make turbocharged high efficiency compact engines, most major manufacturers I believe know how to use Atkinson cycle with variable valve timing combined with a hybrid drivetrain to further boost gas efficiency

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Teever 6 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

[flagged]

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empyrrhicist 5 hours ago | parent | next [-]

> The President isn't to blame.

I mean, there's a lot of blame to go around, but tearing up a working deal that gave us unprecedented, multilateral access to Iran's nuclear facilities, and then later jumping into a war of choice with no clear objectives and seemingly being surprised by the most obvious geopoltical realities that people with any shred of a clue have been talking about for DECADES would seem to have at least something to do with the current mess.

In my book, the silver lining is that this might finally push the world to move away from fossil fuels in a meaningful way.

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Teever 5 hours ago | parent [-]

Yeah but he wouldn't have been in the position to do any of that if the people who funded his campaign like the Adelsons, Kushners, Musk, Linda McMahon, Lutnick and so forth didn't contribute millions to his campaign and leverage whatever other resources they have to promote him.

And they in turn couldn't do any of that if the teams of professionals from lawyers, accountants to engineers didn't help them acquire and use those resources.

Just like violent crime is overwhelmingly perpetuated by a handful of repeat offenders we see the same pattern in white collar crime. A handful of white collar criminals cause damage to American society that cascades through the world resulting in food and fuel shortages that we're talking about.

I get that it's really hard but you have to view this dispassionately and from a systems thinking perspective. The professionals and oligarchs are responsible for the mad king scenario that we're all living through right now. They're responsible for the social decay that affects us daily.

And it's just going to keep getting worse and worse once the mad king eventually goes the way all mad kings do.

	▲	empyrrhicist 5 hours ago \| parent [-]
		I don't disagree with that, but it seems kind of like a acute cause/proximate cause sort of distinction to me. That, and I don't forgive the general populace either.

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__loam 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

He started the war!

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CPLX 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

This is being downvoted, but it's correct. President is the symptom of the problem, not the cause.

	▲	vablings 5 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Correct, he is the symptom of the problem created by himself. The Iran nuclear deal rode off the back of Stuxnet and concessions were easier with that damage. The recent strikes with the B2 were largely ineffectual so well done.