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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 18th, 2023

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  • Did you mean to reply to me? I don’t see how that is relevant.

    Like, sure, oil and gas companies are corrupt and doing immoral things to prop up their industry.

    But if a coal plant can sell me electricity for 5¢/kwh and the windmill company can sell it to me for 2¢/kwh, I don’t care what immoral stuff they try, the consumer is gonna buy the cheaper option.

    Historically fossil fuels have been the cheaper option, and most of the immoral stuff was to avoid bad press. That strategy doesn’t work if you’re the more expensive option. The market will in fact work for the best in that scenario.

    Which isn’t to say the free market always makes the “correct” decision. Fossil fuels are a great example, as they have continued to be the primary form of energy for the past 100+yrs, since it was cheap. But it looks like natural market forces are bringing us around to green slowly but surely, and Chase Oliver might be right that this is a problem that will, at this point, largely solve itself.


  • I mean, I think that’s what the majority of people are advocating for in green circles too, no? “No New Coal” and all that?

    I don’t hear much advocacy for tearing down working power plants.

    Power plants don’t exactly have an infinite shelf life. They get run down and need to be replaced. Eventually only building green leads to only having green.

    Combine that with the ever increasing cost of actually running a coal fire plant. Shipping in hundreds of tons of coal is eventually gonna get way more expensive than operating a solar or wind farm. At that point the business owners will likely tear the plant down of their own volition to replace it with the cheaper option. (Though that will be admittedly a little slower, as you have to amortize in the construction and downtime costs.)




  • I like Chase Oliver. I don’t agree with him on all the issues by a long long shot, but I think he seems like a genuine dude, and I understand his positions, even when I disagree with them. And he’s ideologically consistent if nothing else.

    I’m in a state where the Electorial College is a hard lock anyway, so I’ll probably vote for him since my vote doesn’t matter otherwise. Just as a protest vote if nothing else.

    Plus, if they can get enough of the popular vote they’ll get federal funding in the next election cycle. The Libertarian Party definitely has an extremist wing to it I can’t stand, but there’s something to be said for rewarding them for picking a reasonable human being for a candidate lol.





  • I think this theory of science is so prevalent in this thread because you have to adhere to it in order to dunk on Elon Musk.

    I doubt most of these ardents would have taken this position in a random thread about sea cucumbers or something.

    I like dunking on Musk as much as the next guy, but the amount of double-think people are willing to commit to to do it is always pretty off-putting to me.

    It’s like every ArsTechnica article on SpaceX has people come out of the woodwork to say that their accomplishments are trash and not even worth reporting because of Elon, which, like, you have to be delusional if you don’t think SpaceX is absolutely killing it.