• 2 Posts
  • 20 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: September 11th, 2023

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  • Thanks for the formatting, helps me a lot. I’ll do my best to have the discussion you want.

    • If it’s your opinion it’s your opinion. I don’t think that ‘wanting more power over more things’ is something inherent to socialism. All governments take power over things when they think it’s necessary. A particularly controversial example would be abortion restrictions. That is an extreme intrusion by a government into the literal organs of its citizens but to a religious capitalist it makes sense. Need more workers and more consumers after all.

    • I don’t see that there’s any meaningful difference between an interest free loan and a subsidy. Say the farmers don’t pay up and ask for another loan, are you gonna starve on principle?

    • Lots is wrong with dirt roads, they’re just inefficient. So much money and resource spent on fixing and maintaining vehicle suspensions and the extra time needed to go slowly which is all unnecessary with a proper road. I love trains but they can’t do everything, we’re not running tracks to every home in order for the mail train to come deliver your package etc.

    As for private parties, this is also just the least efficient way to do things. Roads need to be compatible with each other, have the same spacings the same areas for communal services like electricity water and gas and so on. Who’s gonna enforce all that with no profit motive? It would have to be a government entity, at which point the government might as well just build the roads in the first place and charge everyone a general usage fee, but since it’s a government this is called ‘Road tax’ and is already implemented in most European countries. This isn’t even socialism it’s just the basics of what governments are for: taking care of ‘societal chores’.


  • Your point is not very coherent, I’m struggling to understand you due to how much you’ve written and the lack of formatting.

    Some brief things to pick out:

    • Corruption is not just a socialist thing it’s everywhere. India has huge corruption problems and is capitalist.

    • Taxes are not ‘accepted feudalism’ they are the basis of communal living. Even anarcho-capitalists recognise the need for roads and farming subsidies.

    • You’re right that good can be done in any system but the idea of all of this is to find a system that encourages good and discourages greed. If we could rely only on everyone just deciding to be good there would be no need for any politics. You’ll notice this has never happened in millions of years of human existence.










  • What do you mean by a distributed power grid? Do you mean power generation happening locally? This is already a thing and is growing in the form of Combined Heat and Power. This doesn’t get rid of the need for base load, the overall grid will still need balancing and will still have a base load unless you plan to disconnect local grids from each other in which case welcome to Texas…

    Money is not the point here (even though nuclear really doesn’t cost much per kWh). I’m talking about the need to build a system that will produce more power over it’s lifetime than it costs to make. This is still something that is surprisingly close in many cases so any extra bit of inefficiency risks making the overall system pointless.


  • The argument is one of efficiency and load distribution. Base load power plants are capable of greater efficiency than variable ones. This is down to optimisations made around specific output levels and the infrastructure required to support said loads. For example if you know the characteristics of your power output and that of the grid you can build a transformer or switch mode power supply to bridge that specific gap. This outperforms variable input transformers in every case.

    There is an argument that low efficiency doesn’t matter if the source is renewable, but this fails to take into consideration the embodied energy cost of producing renewable generators, not to mention the increased cost. An inefficient system may not produce enough energy over the course of its lifetime compared to the energy it cost to make.

    Finally, most sources of renewables are intermittent and are not necessarily related to the population’s power consumption. This makes the storing of energy necessary in order to regulate supply. Storage of energy is a large source of inefficiency and one of the key areas that is being focused on. Base load plant is absolutely necessary to minimise this inefficiency as much as possible.

    For a good overview I recommend this site from Penn State Uni: https://www.e-education.psu.edu/eme807/node/667