Ah yes, the vibes are the problem. Those silly, goofy vibes. They’re to blame for:
My rent has increased 13% from lease to lease
My grocery bill has gone up 33% in the past year
I can’t afford to buy a new or used car
I suddenly became unable to buy a house in the past six months
My credit card interest rates are almost 20%, which is considered to be on the low side
My yearly raises at work (5.5%) have not kept up
Others have pointed out problems with the article, and I want to add that economists are inherently biased because they earn a median salary that is twice the national median, meaning they do not personally experience price increases as difficult as the typical American. And finally, the description of society as “performative” makes me think they may have their head up their ass.
It’s not a mystery, it’s a problem with averaging. The bell curve is shifting over because it is being skewed by whoever is raking it in due to artificially increased pricing. Many people keep a budget and aren’t relying on their feelings about the economy when they tell you that groceries cost them more than double their pre-covid budget thresholds for less and lower quality food, unsustainably high rents have increased from 10 to 30 percent for many (at least in cities), and electricity costs have continued to rise. If your wages didn’t increase enough to cover all those increases than you are personally worse off. Who cares how it averages out in the larger economy.
I went to the Ford site to look into their EVs earlier this week. Their site on EV info is so disorganized and unhelpful. Trying to figure out how much charging would cost and the logistics of long-distance travel is way too confusing. They’re even messing it up with a subscription plan to their in-network chargers.
I suspect this is part of the reason people aren’t buying Ford EVs. Buying a car from a dealership is already too antagonized because we all know they’re trying to rip us off. To try to balance it out, shoppers try to gain as much knowledge on the car so they know what they’re agreeing to. However, when the car comes with all this new technology that changes the way we maintain them, and available info is scattered, indirect, unclear, and potentially costs even more, that will push away people that don’t want to deal with it.
Your electric bill absolutely will not go up by as much as your saving on gas. It’s tough to figure out how much because it depends on your electric rate and how much you drive as well as your charging habits.
I charge my car to full every night and live in western PA, but not sure of what the rates are for electric. My bill is under $150/month though. Gas is almost $4/gallon. Before our first EV in 2018 we spent about $200 a week on gas and gas has only gotten more expensive. We spend less on Electric per month for the entire house (not just the car) than we did on a week in gas.
As for long trips, that’s an area seriously lacking. I use ABRP which is a mapping software that uses your specific model, battery charge, distance, elevation, traffic, and weather to figure out when to charge and for how long. You can also link up a OBDII sensor to get live data for more accurate route adjustments. I’d recommend giving that a look and mess with different cars to see what cars fit the routes you drive the best.
I drove to Kentucky from western PA and only had to stop three times for about 2 hours of charge total in a Kia Niro 2022 EV. But we then didn’t stop to eat at other times we would have because we stopped in places with restaurants so it wasn’t 2 hours lost.
We also did a trip to Washington DC to see the pandas before they left and made it the whole way with no charge. We only had to charge on the way home.
And masking it by restricting the ability of journalists to report on it, by targeting buildings associated with journalism, refusing journalists access, creating unsafe conditions for journalism and cutting power.
This is the reason that counterfactual reports about this bombing have been able to become so prevalent.
The amount of billionaires in Russia has increased by 22 people during the first year of the war. That’s while some of them dropped out of windows. Deripaska is one of those who benefited immensely, so for him everything is bloody amazing and he’d welcome even more sanctions.
I doubt the title of this article very much. Ukraine is getting F-16's and probably JAS-39 Gripens very soon. Offensives and counteroffensives have to be slow and methodical by nature against entrenched forces, otherwise you'll take massive losses for very little gains.
Ukraine is on its way to gaining air superiority, and more vehicles and air defense is coming into their forces every month, and the longer this conflict lasts, the more likely it is that they'll gain more advantages over Russia as the sanctions keep draining them.
The lack of air superiority is hampering what Ukraine can do, and once that issue's settled, I think we'll start seeing more steady progress. Plus in the wide world, Japans and South Korea are settling their differences over WW2 and will probably keep cooperating, and part of that will be to send more stuff to Ukraine in order to help win there so they don't have to fight WW3 with China over Taiwan.
It's not just the West that supports Ukraine, it's also the Democratic parts of Asia.
But the people understanding desinformation are spending significant amounts of free time on it, while the propagandists are getting paid and the morons just soak up the headlines and go on... so both ignore any actual argument or link to facts someone spend time one anyway.
So, no. There is easy way to deal with this that doesn't involve heavy moderation...
I jusy went over their posts and maybe 20 percent cover Ukraine, most are jusr critical of US and most are widely accepeted western news sites ( ft, economist, independent ).
I counted his posts and he has 24 non duplicate posts. Of those 10 are critical of ukraine. The rest seem to be anti-vax or anti-us. 10/24= 41% So almost half of his posts are critical of ukraine. Also widely accepted sources doesn’t change the fact that this OP has an obvious agenda. Weird that you would try to defend him with disinformation though. Isn’t that a common authoritarian trick?
I love how you framed an article by the Independent (a liberal UK paper) on the relationship between the pharma industry and western governments as anti-vax. Is disinformation a common liberal trick?
I just assume that everyone has some kind of agenda, so I don’t see real problem with it.
Can you find many accounts that equally represent pro and against war stances and reportings? I most certanly haven’t seen them, nor did I see comentes negating their stance.
I don’t have a goal to chamge yoir opinion I am commenting for other people seeing your comment so that they get differet view point and check for themselves.
I think the biggest issue is that a lot of people from US never before ventured on non-US part of the net and have problem accepting that some people have negatinve opinions on US foreign policies (which would be whole non white part of the world). And now that you are exposed to differences of opinion you react the same as for your internal politics - by seeing it as an enemy and not another human beings with different life experiences.
People are allowed to post what they want, you’re allowed to post any pro ukraine stuff you like. You can’t just piss and cry because people have different opinions than you, and can link pro-western sources backing up their point of view. The mind bending is unreal.
For a Trekkie, You do know Star Trek is supposed to be influenced by a post resource scarcity communist society right?
The dude has the flag of the DDR as his profile picture. German tankies are a particularly special breed of stupid, with all that the opening of the STASI archives revealed about the horrible shit going on under Sowjet rule.
Trying to frame supporting the right of Ukraine to defend themselves against an illiegal invasion, genocide, torture, rape and all manner of other war crimes as "being pro-war" needs a very special kind of brain damage...
Pro-Ukraine? Sure, that's probably includes one agenda or another. But that's not what you said there.
As for the insult: Sorry, for that. You instantly understood that you framed self-defense as being pro-war, so I think I need to retract that suggestion of brain damage.
Instead you seem to know perfectly well what you're saying so: Crawl back to you Russian (or Russian-paid) cave, troll. (Also: Not sorry for that, as it isn't even an insult but just stating a fact...)
I’ve been an American a very long time. Russia doesn’t have to pay me to see that all sides use propaganda. Also, still using insults isn’t going to help someone see your point of view.
You can call me whatever you want. As long as it’s understood that geopolitics requires all sides to use propaganda. I’m not here to make friends. I’m here to learn. I’m actually a pretty forgiving guy. I just can’t tolerate bull 💩.
Geopolitics doesn’t happen in a vacuum. There were agendas before the war that led to the war. To believe differently is naive and absurd. This goes back to the fall of the Soviet Union for Russia. Russia was installing a puppet government with Yanukovych. NATO couldn’t allow that because it threatened capitalist hegemony in Europe. There will be agendas after the war. Ukraine deserves sovereignty from Russia and NATO. There’s a reason 40 countries want to join the BRICS trade alliance. The world is tired of America and NATO extracting their wealth.
“Are banks investable?’ was a common question asked at the height of the global financial crisis 15 years ago. Back then the main concern was a complete breakdown in trust in how they valued their assets. Today, a similar question is again being asked, but this time due to political meddling in the sector.
Last year the Spanish and Czech governments introduced “windfall” taxes on banks, despite there being no windfall to tax. The UK government seriously considered such a move prior to its autumn budget. Last month the Financial Conduct Authority, the UK’s consumer watchdog, threatened action against banks that don’t raise their savings rates enough. And this week the Italian government revealed a surprise windfall tax (though the finance ministry has since announced a cap on the levy in an attempt to calm market jitters).
This political meddling in the sector is dangerous, coming at a time when economies are flirting with recessions. Governments need to tread very carefully, in part because their actions will clearly spook bank investors — thus raising the cost of capital — and in part because weakening banks isn’t a smart thing to do when those same banks may be required to maintain free-flowing credit during a downturn.
Specifically, windfall taxes are dangerous. There are numerous arguments against such a tax, perhaps most glaringly that for the majority banks there is no windfall to tax. While the recent reporting season has been full of headlines of European banks reporting “decade high” profits, basic financial analysis shows a somewhat different story. The return on the equity deployed remains uninspiring — averaging 10 to 13 per cent — for many of the banks that are in the media and politicians’ cross hairs. That barely covers their cost of equity, the return demanded by investors.
Furthermore, there may be a recession coming and when recessions bite bank profits tumble, as loans turn sour and losses soar. There is a debate — there is always a debate — on whether this time banks might be better able to cope with a downturn. But by far the most likely scenario is for impairments to rise and profits to fall. So from relatively modest starting levels, profitability will probably fall. That’s why the share prices of European banks have fallen almost 10 per cent since March despite enjoying apparent “windfalls”.
But perhaps the most powerful argument against a windfall tax is that regulators and politicians in effect argued against such a step in the recent past, albeit from a different perspective. In March 2020, at the start of the pandemic, bank regulators across Europe, encouraged by politicians, forced banks to suspend dividend payments. Their argument was simple and apparently compelling. If banks retained more of their profits, that would position them better to cope with the upcoming recession, allowing them to lend more to the real economy and to have more capital to recognise loan losses.
Indeed, in summer 2021 the European Central Bank, reviewing the dividend ban, said: “[Our] analyses suggest that the ECB’s dividend policy has been effective: banks that altered their dividend distribution plans increased provisions . . . and lending to the real economy . . . relative to banks that left their distribution plans unchanged.”
Now, that lesson appears to have been forgotten. In 2020 it was the payment of dividends that was threatening to weaken the capital base of banks, with implications for the wider economy. Yet today a windfall tax — similarly weakening capital for those same banks — is apparently a good idea.
Companies and citizens have a right to expect policymaking to be based on fact and evidence and not driven by the clamour of a baying public or a frenzied media. Grown-up politicians should rise above public demands for a windfall tax on banks and instead do the right thing. Else, sadly and ironically, their actions run the risk of making any coming recession worse.
Notice how it doesn’t actually involve the government doing anything other than setting up the website and then tells you that it’s your responsibility.
They’re supposed to run the administration of the country, they’re the ones that are supposed to supply the emergency supplies when needed, what’s the pointing government if they don’t do that.
I can store 3 days worth of water but that rather assumes I have only to do it for myself. It for a large firmly would take up more space than most people have access to. You also can’t keep bottled water for very long because the plastic eventually contaminates the water. So your best bet would be to buy a water filter and keep that full and regularly refreshed, but you’re still not going to have enough water for 3 days for four people.
I don’t really see how it’s pointless? The average person probably underestimated the risk of the UK being dragged into a conflict in this decade or the next and thus also the risk they’d need to prepare for that, so it’s probably helpful to bring how much people think they need to prep in line with how much they should prep, could save some lives.
Well I don’t think that’s a given and I also don’t think that if that was the case it’d then follow that this policy is silly but I see and agree with the general points you’re making
I believe the thinking is that three days is (hopefully) enough time for whatever issues to be resolved, or for you to look for other sources of supplies. You're not expected to stockpile enough to live on for months!
Desalination at any scale above miniscule is just creating new ecological disasters. I don’t know why we keep getting/seeing articles and projected plans to try it again and again. 🤦
Edit: getting down voted because people I guess didn’t want to read up on it themselves, so:
Dealing with the Brine is a two fold problem: it’s incredibly toxic and caustic, AND you have to run leeching/extraction treatment on it before putting it somewhere else.
You can’t just “put it back” in the ocean, because then you’re increasing the concentration of salinity and toxicity in a localized area and killing everything, and you almost certainly can’t store it as-is in a bunker like nuclear waste, because it’s also incredibly volatile. So, sure, you have some clean water now, but you’re just kicking the can down the road on dealing with the byproducts which have no practical use as of now. Almost worse than dealing with nuclear waste with all the extra steps involved.
Desalination at any scale above miniscule is just creating new ecological disasters
Why? The only ecological impact of desalination is concentrated brine, and that’s only an issue if you dump all of it into a single spot, creating a small local dead zone. If you put the resources into properly distributing the brine across a wide area, it’s literally a drop in the ocean. You’re using a tiny logistical issue easily solved with a bit of money as a reason to blackball an entire technology that could save the lives of millions of people.
Despite your edits, I don’t see anything in the linked articles that suggests brine cannot be diluted or dissipated.
You can’t just “put it back” in the ocean, because then you’re increasing the concentration of salinity and toxicity in a localized area and killing everything
Not sure why you’re still insisting on this after your edit, since as several commentors have pointed out there’s no reason for you to dump it in a single localised area. Toxins and heavy metals can also be extracted, and might even be done so profitably (according to your own links, in fact).
The only point you might have so far is Israel, since they are using a small lake as their source of water, and can’t reasonably dilute the brine. However, with seawater desalination none of these issues apply.
Seawater desalination can have this Problem too, if they are not continously discharging polluted brine, I.e. run a batch process. I believe some japanese build desalinator is doing the sensible continous discharge, but cant be fucked to Google right now.
Then you didn’t read enough. Israel has the largest Desal operation in the world with their combined facilities, and they’ve still managed to cause issues every operating year for a decade. Whether it be pipeline leaks, transport issues, or not controlling the byproducts well enough when they dilute it back to the ocean. It’s just not sustainable, and prone to error at every step.
Whether you think feasibility is enough in the “can we do this?” way is irrelevant. You just can’t use this type of system to solve the entire world’s issues, because eventually the intake vs output becomes unmanageable, and it’s basic math to figure that out. Storing this stuff in a mountain like we do with toxic waste has the same implications, and then you’re just adding to the pile for future generations to deal with. Same with air pollution, nuclear waste, fertilizer runoff…etc.
Seriously, if people like you are what future generations are contending with in that this is “not my problem now, they’ll figure it out”, this planet is certainly fucking doomed.
Israel has the largest Desal operation in the world with their combined facilities, and they’ve still managed to cause issues every operating year for a decade. Whether it be pipeline leaks, transport issues, or not controlling the byproducts well enough when they dilute it back to the ocean.
What exactly does operational issues and equipment breakdown have to do with a technology being viable?
It’s just not sustainable, and prone to error at every step.
Pretty much everything in modern industrial processes are prone to error at every step. Somehow, we’ve figured out how to follow checklists and procedures and avoid blowing stuff up. Your statement implies incompetence among the operators more than anything else.
Storing this stuff in a mountain like we do with toxic waste has the same implications
Nobody has EVER suggested this, and you’ve set up a strawman argument out of thin air.
Seriously, if people like you are what future generations are contending with in that this is “not my problem now, they’ll figure it out”, this planet is certainly fucking doomed.
I’ve been pointing out how and why the technology can operate. You’ve been resorting to strawmen arguments and ad hominem attacks.
I “can” shit in the sink instead of my toilet. Of course it will eventually get down to the sewer.
I “should” shit in my toilet, for obvious reasons.
If your argument is that we “should” do something just because we “can”, you’re not thinking much of the world around you, or the rest of the population you affect with your actions.
I’d thank you not to mischaracterise my statements. I’ve been pointing out how and why the technology is sustainable, contrary to your claims. You are now merely resorting to puerile, kindergarten level arguments.
And yet, you’ve provided zero documentation or study backing up such claims, while I’ve provided plenty in the negative to yours. You can find way more if you just search for it instead of relying on your uninformed instincts and position because you don’t work in the field. Sorry, I wasn’t about to link every damn thing on the Internet proving my point. I thought four was enough.
Wikipedia is a topical resource. It’s not the real world, friend. My links are the real world, and the real implications of that. Every link explains the same problems I’ve mentioned, so that is evidence. Everyone sees this, so why don’t you?
Ah, we’ve moved on to the ‘Do your own research!’ phase. Complete with a helping of ‘If your conclusions don’t match mine, you didn’t research enough’.
Can we pretend we’ve progressed through all the various fallacies already, and call it here?
Did the research for you. Gave you journals and articles. I think we’re in the “I’m in denial phase” where you can’t process what you’ve been handed. Pretty sad considering how deep you’re willing to go in defense of this thing you seemingly know nothing about and are just learning about today.
Edit: brah, you’re on the same IP and downvoting me twice. Pathetic. Get a VPN at least.
Facilities can mitigate the environmental impact by, for example, mixing the brine with seawater before pumping it out, to dilute it. They might also take care to expel the byproduct where currents are strongest, thus dissipating the brine quicker. Inland, a plant might evaporate the water in pools and cart away the remaining salt.
The discharge can also contain precious elements like uranium. This might be enough incentive to turn desal brine from a noxious byproduct into a source of revenue. Or you might use evaporative pools inland to produce commercial road salt for deicing roads.
To me, it doesn’t sound as though brine disposal is an insurmountable problem.
Never said insurmountable, but if it’s so easy, why the world’s largest desal operation still having issues 10 years on? They’ve solved zero of the issues, and are just hoping there is a solution in the future. As we’ve learned with so many other solutions in the past, kicking the can down the road and hoping someone figures it out does not work.
Cause it ain’t 0 cost to implement a dispersal mechanism and without government incentive just dumping the brine straight in the ocean is more profitable.
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