That is an article about a prediction, not actual data about a drop in price.

An article from a month and a half in the past.

Still waiting.

Yep, exactly. Due to the deranged Net Zero policies of successive Australian federal and state governments, Australia have experienced skyrocketing electricity prices, so any small decrease in residential and industrial prices now is effectively a shit sandwich.

> What's going to replace it? Rapidly aging China?

Using the age profile of a country with over a billion people to dismiss its geopolitical power has no credibility.

More appropriate to point out their (our) lack of domestic chip production and outsourcing of critical technologies.

You don’t need a numerical advantage to dominate if you have a technological / organizational advantage. The British empire was outnumbered 10 to 1 and still managed to control a large portion of the world for a while.

US government is working overtime to make sure legacy technologies stay around while the rest of the world is investing into the future.

> What's going to replace it?

I'm not sure if I'm mis-reading your comment, but:

The idea that you "need a single extremely powerful country to replace it or the US will stay in its position" just doesn't add up. I'm not fully sure if that is what you meant but I have seen that argument a few times.

_There doesn't need to be a replacement._

For most of the worlds history there wasn't a single leading world supper power, just regional super powers, or supper powers in specific sectors.

And if we speak about who could become a supper power _after the US stops being one and there isn't one for some decades_. Then there are a bunch of candidates.

E.g. China has a population collapse issues, but due to it's cut throat ruthless government and total population number and lead in factory automation might be from all countries with similar problems by margin the most likely to overcome it without power collapse.

E.g. the EU might have many issues (as it's members has many issues) but the general concept has proven hugely successful. And what people forget is EU is the cherry on top of a huge stack of treaties which can be extended to 3rd parties independent of full EU membership. Like e.g. Canada, which doesn't plan to become an EU member, but might join some of this treaties as result of the non stop hostility from the US. Same for military treaties between NATO members which are independent of NATO like e.g. JEF, which would likely be open for letting Canada join. Anyway way to many words. But the end result may be a world supper power which is not one entity but a complex lossy coupled network of countries.

Then there have been some other cross country unions and countries, which want to gain super power relevance but have so far been too irrelevant due to a combination of corruption, bad luck and sabotage by existing powers etc. But if we speak about going for a few decades without any leading super power and maybe prime canidates harming each other (e.g. a US <-> Chineese war) then they do actually have a chance.

lol… you don’t know anything about the Chinese government if you think they aren’t already preparing for this. And the difference between them and us is that when they prepare for something, they actually prepare for it with real state capacity and planning. You know they are building armies of industrial and humanoid robots for exactly this reason?

Also, sorry but the economist hates China with a passion, you really shouldn’t believe a thing they say on the topic.

Isn't the US also approaching a peak?

https://www.reuters.com/graphics/USA-POPULATION/AGING/gdpzao...

There's so many ways to slice the data, I'm not sure there's an apples-to-apples comparison between US and China. However, it's fair to say both economies face demographic headwinds.

Why do you think Americans don't grasp it? There are really two groups here:

- MAGA who doesn't care what Europe thinks - not-MAGA who are just as shocked and disappointed as everyone else on the planet

[flagged]

> Why would the US ally with Russia, who is a Chinese and Iranian ally?

I don’t think the comment above you is suggesting that is a possibility, but rather saying “things are so bad that the only imaginable way to get worse would be <outlandish unimaginable scenario>”. In other words, it seems to be hyperbole.

It is, as the USA has a large population. We can be more nuanced.

By absolute dollars, single country: US > EU institutions > Germany > UK

By absolute dollars, bloc vs. bloc: EU/Europe combined (~$237bn+) now exceeds the US (~$130bn), especially after 2025

By per-capita/GDP burden: tiny front-line states (Denmark, Estonia, Lithuania, Norway) far outstrip both the US and the larger Western European economies — the US actually ranks closer to the bottom of the pack on a relative-effort basis, behind Germany, the UK, and virtually all Nordic/Baltic states

Between February 2022 and January 2025, average expenditure per European resident stood at $394; by April 2026 that figure had risen to $618, driven by the total spending by European NATO countries on Ukraine exceeding $237 billion, including $96 billion contributed just since January 2025.

Average European (across NATO's European members) $618 per person (2022-2026)

United States (my estimate: ~$130bn total ÷ ~340m population)≈ $384 per person

> feeling powerless to stop it

You guys are the meekest sheep to ever been led astray by a howling, undisguised wolf.

What more does this regime have to do to warrant massive, historic, disruptive, non-peaceful protests in the USA?

Have you seen protests in France? Bringing the country to a halt is the least you have to do in order for us to ever have faith in the USA again.

Until then, nothing any US citizen can say online will do anything to restore trust. If you're not rioting, you're complicit. It's as simple as that.

I didn't say we'd choose wisely. But since there is still a range of possibilities, I'm not giving up on the whole thing.

That’s true. China dominates globally but I found that the US installed European and Japanese models. There is a big supply chain concern and set of reviews happening all across the entire government sector. Energy is a national security concern. [1]

1. https://www.energy.gov/cmei/systems/solar-photovoltaics-supp...

"connected power inverters produced in foreign countries"

I think home devices that phone somebody-elses-home are a cancer anyway.

[1] https://docs.fcc.gov/public/attachments/DOC-423682A1.pdf

> Even if I assumed maximum malice, how are these inverters going to perform a coordinated attack on the grid?

They’re network-connected and remotely controllable. The concern is compromise of the vendor/cloud infrastructure allowing large numbers of inverters to be manipulated simultaneously.

Or even Trojan horse style malware is a possibility I suppose (Stuxnet).

That’s basically the threat model that they are using. If people want to argue with that, then that’s something to poke at

AC power needs it's sine wave aligned or it's very bad. If a huge chunk of inverters all start dumping power onto the grid that isn't synced, things break.

I have been trying to look for sources myself and I feel like this whole sector is rampant with "noble lies".

If you dig into the sources you will find

Economic predictions:

The most serious mainstream institutions[1] will dress it up us an imminent catastrophe as if humanity itself will collapse if we don't do anything. But once you read the real predictions, you will realise that that it they just say things would be better if you had reduced emissions compared to if we did not, but not compared to today (crucially)

Tail risks and irreversible damage:

I have read on tail risks, ecological collapse, species death and all of these models are strange and not supported by the mainstream generally. For example [2] article says that 5% of our species will go extinct by 2100 or so. That means more than 200k species! And in the last 50 years fewer than 1500 or so went extinct and it is not some abnormal number.

I would encourage you to actually read the studies and see what people believe and the models used.

[1] https://www.oecd.org/en/publications/investing-in-climate-fo...

[2] https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.adp4461

Edit, can't reply:

> Your argument is just linking to credible sources that make the opposite argument as you, and then stating "I disagree" afterwards?

Dude, read the first document and then tell me whether they say things will get worse than now or not. They explicitly compare the counterfactual against with or without emissions not against today. This is my issue with this kind of misinformation.

Not much. 0.04% of US water production. For context, that's about 3% of the water consumption of our golf courses, and less than 1% of what we use to water our lawns.

All US data center water usage is less than the total water used for golf courses or the total water used to grow alfalfa. Less water used in evaporative cooling means more electricity is used for cooling given that the efficiency almost doubles if you add evaporative cooling to a chilled water loop.

It’s bad to pump non-renewable fossil aquifer water in Arizona for evaporative cooling, but using cooling towers in an area that gets 30” or more of precipitation per year is probably not going to hurt anything.

The question is does DC building bring added costs to local communities. My small town has a backlog of home builders waiting for permits because of constrained municipal water capacity. We are still paying off the bonds for the last capacity we added. Golf courses/etc are already factored into current costs. Additional new use brings significant cost (bonds to build new capacity), funded by increasing expenses on the entire community, not funded by those who financially benefit from the new build outs.

The issue isn't comparative usage to existing hookups, it's new cost burden on the local community where a data center is built. Which is why DC propogandists switched to the golf course measurement, it confuses the original concern, the cost to the community of new DC hookups to municipal water or the very limited amount (of expensive to the community) available hookups that were intended/funded by the community for other purposes.

That the only nation which sent man on the moon uses acre-feet as a unit of volume blows my mind

Do Alfalfa growers traditionally use limited (and funded at large expense by the local community) municipal water hookups to grow their crops? Are alfalfa growers asking for new water hookup permits to access these resources?

Because DCs are, and that is the concern local communities have. Not random comparative statistics whose purpose seems to be to take valid local community concerns and pretend they're just a joke. How much do alfa growers in California add to my water bill? How much will new municipal water hookups by new data centers impact my water bill? One is a valid concern. One is just a BS attempt to discredit the valid concern. Because that is how this shady industry operates. On BS. On manipulation. And they wonder why they are more and more disliked.