eldaisfish

this economic output comparison is brought up often, without proper context.

During the time that the British were looting India, the industrial revolution happened. That also helped India's economic decline, as does the fact that today, around half India's population are in agriculture, while contributing around 14% to the GDP.

The industrial revolution separated economic output from population size.

India's total exports are in the same ballpark as the Netherlands, a country with half the population of the city of Bombay.

India may not be a poor country, but GDP doesn't capture the real state of india's wealth.

I see now why people downvote your comments.

Please, if you do not understand the indian caste system, don't use that term, even in the context of a comparison. This is like comparing a balloon popping to a thermonuclear explosion. The scale, history, and implications are entirely different.

What you are referring to is xenophobia, not a caste system. Xenophobia can manifest in many different ways, only one of which is racism. Are you going to seriously argue that west germans and dutch people are two entirely separate ethnicities? Yet, go to the Netherlands and Hans Muller will likely be treated differently compared to Jan van Assen. The two are almost certainly indistinguishable on the surface but their names give away their origins. This is what you are getting at, but the differences between ethnicities are not sharp, rather they are a smooth continuum. Xenophobia relies heavily on perceptions. Often, differences are difficult to perceive, but sometimes they are, as in the case of Japan which is famously a monoculture.

As a counter to your last point, the UK was and is at the forefront of integrating immigrant groups into mainstream society. Most historical immigrants to the UK are well settled, although there is now a renewed push for racism and xenophobia in politics.

Most highway exits in Ontario, Canada and some part of the US have highway exit ramps where the right lane widens into two, one exiting and one continuing. The two lanes are not marked until the buffer before the exit. What you have is essentially one widening lane.

The cruise control in my Hyundai is tied to the lane centering feature and this keeps forcing me onto exit ramps i do not intend to take. One time, it was quite aggressive during rain. The lane keep feature does not handle off-ramps in Ontario well at all.

The problem with these "safety" features is that they do not work reliably and do not handle edge cases well.

would you say that a swiss german and someone from Hamburg have more in common than someone from Bavaria and someone from Helsinki?

these conversations are always incredibly frustrating.

On one extreme are people who believe that white people are inherently better than black people because of some genetic inheritance. This is obvious nonsense.

On the other extreme are the people like the one you are arguing with who claim that race does not exist because all humans are biologically identical. This is also nonsense as any black person in the US will tell you.

What you seem to be arguing is that ethnicity, and the genetic effects of ethnicity, are real. They are. Race as biological construct, with consequent societal effects is also not real. White people are not inherently more intelligent that Black people.

The other person is technically right, but is one of those people who seem to believe that biological differences do not matter in society, one of those "i don't see colour" types. Race as a social construct is very much real.

Your argument ignores one important aspect - incentives.

English is the global lingua franca, hence the incentive to learn English is incredibly strong. Outside of Germany, what exact benefit does the German language get you?

sad to see this downvoted because it is very much true. European society loves to pretend that they are these progressive, enlightened people. In reality, what they are is just better at hiding their racism and xenophobia.

Your last point is largely wrong. The primary difference between immigrants to the US and to Europe is in qualifications. The majority of US immigrants are skilled. The majority of immigrants to Europe are not skilled. It is then no surprise that immigrants to the US tend to integrate better than immigrants to Europe.

no, that's not true. The nation of Germany might not have existed, but the ethnic groups who would later define Germany very much did.

There is yet another angle that people don't like to discuss because it is uncomfortable. Every European nation state is built around ethnicity as the bedrock of society. This makes it nigh on impossible to integrate fully in these countries.

The way this manifests is different in each country, but the fundamental reason is the same. In the german case, take the words of Messut Ozil, the former footballer - when the German team wins, he is German. Lose, and he is the immigrant. He is ethnically Turkish, i.e. not ethnically German.

The same will apply to your kids as well.

I want to be clear, not every German person is a frothing racist, i would argue that the racists are a minority. It is, however, important to note that the reactions of the individual and the reactions of society can be different, sometimes polar opposites.

In sharp contrast to this are the US and Canada, where there is no shared definition of "white" even though the majority of their populations are ethnically European. In that case, "European" spans everything from Irish and Greek, to French and Austrian. Less than a hundred years back, Irish people were not seen as white. Today, that idea is laughable. The fundamental difference between the US and Canada on one side and German or european society on the other is that the old world is built around exclusion, while the new world is built around inclusion.

This is one important reason why skilled immigrants leave europe, and is also why i left.

i am curious - why are you not in favour of adding regulation? The point of most good regulation is to avoid consumer-hostile situations like this.

right, but back in the 90s, the onus of maintaining a working copy of any software was on you. Now, Sony simply reaches into you home and can deny you access to software/movies you "bought".

These are not the same situation.

at least in Ontario, fines, starting at $ 25,000.

Your latter point is legally incorrect. The protected term in Canada is “engineer”. If someone calls themselves an engineer without a P.Eng, that’s an offence.

i strongly suggest you look this up before making claims like this. Nearly 60% of china's electricity demand in 2025 was met by coal generation.

china is building coal plants because china has coal deposits. Please can you answer the question of where China is supplying its growing electricity demand? it is mostly coal or not?

way to miss the point.

What use is hundreds of hours of weather records when the climate is changing in ways we do not yet understand?

"somewhere" on the continent being windy is useless unless we have the transmission capacity to move that much power across thousands of kilometres. See also what just happened in australia last week - nearly 40% of the country stuck with very low wind speeds for nearly a week. What then?

yes, i am.

Are you aware of the context of this bat killing "problem"? it is almost entirely a problem for older, unregulated wind farms in Germany. The "problem" has a simple solution, which has been proven to work - stopping wind turbines when bats are known to be moving, for a total of about twenty minutes per day.

the comment you replied to is a homophobic dogwhistle.

The tech sector is rife with blatant homophobia, racism, and a false sense of intellectual superiority. Hacker News is an excellent cross section of the typical techbro culture.

no, this is not an "actual" problem. It is a problem in the sense that it happens, but not at a meaningful enough scale.

The bats and birds is an issue that the oil and gas industry regularly pushes because it sounds concerning, but really isn't.

every single one of Ember's analyses are based on historical situations. That is certainly useful, and serves to demonstrate an important point - that wind and solar make economic sense.

There is not a single analysis out there that tackles the twin problems of meeting growing electricity demand with a power source that depends on an uncertain and changing climate.

You say "occasional" dunkelflaute, but we have no idea whether occasional is once a season or once a decade.

This is exactly where nuclear shines, because although it is expensive, it insulates a country against the vagaries of external forces. Whether or not that guarantee is worth the price tag is the question a lot of governments are grappling with and they mostly seem to agree that the value is indeed worth the cost.

china has confirmed building new coal plants until at least 2030.

Is china building new coal plants or not?

Do you want to hazard a guess as to why?

The answer is because we still do not know how to supply expanding electricity demand with wind, solar and batteries. The side of the story that people on this website love to bring up is the fact that China happens to be the largest builder of solar and wind, which is true, but the increased electricity demand is being met via coal, for the most part.

people making this argument always forget the most critical aspect - people generally need healthcare when they are not working, almost always when retired.

Your argument is then essentially that people should be working indefinitely.

Football in Brazil has history, legacy, and mind share. I can name several professional teams from Brazil - Flamenco, Corinthians, Santos, etc. I also know of River Plate, Rosario and Boca Juniors from Argentina. This points to the fact that Brazilian and Argentine teams are older than the Mexican teams.

I cannot name a single Mexican team, and that is partly because the oldest club dates back to the 1940s. The oldest Brazilian and Argentina clubs date back to the 1900s.

Respectfully, it is you who should be more open to learning history and the story behind how things ended up the way they are.

The modern education system is far from perfect, but it did not evolve in a vacuum.

These supposedly better ways to do things are how we ended up with disproven ideas like while language learning and a generation of kids who struggle to read.

Being able to opt out of calculus is not the same as being unable to add single digit numbers. I do not share your belief that a child or the average parents are anywhere near qualified to follow their interests and produce people who are competent members of society.

this is exactly how you create a population that is mathematically illiterate and ripe for manipulation by foreign powers and marketing agencies.

Our society and any democracy relies on a shared minimum level of competence. If you cannot compare costs per unit, do not understand basic biology, or cannot compare evidence, just because it does not interest you, you are cannot function in modern society.

That is not what your link says?

How do you explain the fact that the average residential electricity price is higher in Australia than in most of the US?

This is not as simple as people here make it out to be.

Consider also that solar is profitable today because it does not set the price of electricity in most markets. In a world where solar dominates, the prices of electricity could be negative. The economics of negative electricity prices becoming the norm are not yet fully understood.

LCOE is a terrible metric for the power grid because it does not capture the cost of balancing the power grid.

Excess renewable power is great but it creates a problem and the cost of that problem is not borne by the generators that created the problem.

What LCOE captures in this context is that solar panels are cheap and that the fuel cost is zero.

The average price of electricity is greatly affected by this, which is why electricity is Europe is generally more expensive than in North America.

Edit - the response below is also incomplete. The trouble with modelling the cost of balancing the power grid is that it depends on many variables, many of which are difficult to forecast. The primary challenge with depending on the weather for power generation is that the climate is changing. What that change looks like in 20 years is impossible to forecast. A great example is from the winter o 2023, during the "dunkelflaute" in europe. Both wind and solar power generation were low for three days.

The estimates for solar plus battery storage typically only account for eight or twelve hours of storage.