opo

5 ms·

1.
by opo 5d ago
When you look at the first half of the year, Germany was a net importer of electricity: >Net imports amounted to only 1.3 TWh, compared with 9.6 TWh during the first half of 2025. Though 1.3 TWH is a huge improvement over 9.6 by any stan
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by opo 5d ago
I think no one outside of Germany particularly cares about their internal politics, energy prices, or what role the Energiewende placed in the long-term industrial slowdown. The criticism that Germany gets for the Energiewende is that the
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by opo 13d ago
Vague assertions with no evidence don't really help the discussion. If someone is going to assert such a strong claim like "We have more than enough taxes on working people and not enough on the wealthiest classes.", they re
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by opo 27d ago
>...Not quite how he phrased it, but close. The "temporarily embarrassed millionaire" quote is from Ronald Wright. The Steinbeck quote is actually very different than the Ronald Wright quote. The actual quote is mocking wealth
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by opo 29d ago
>...This way of spending temporarily available resources on expanding the welfare state got a name: The Dutch Disease. The term "Dutch Disease" is a bit more general than that: >...The term was coined in 1977 by The Economis
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by opo 29d ago
>...Funny thing is: if you tell the hospital that you do not have an insurance they will charge you a price that actually sounds reasonable, say $700 for a CT scan That has not been my experience. Insurance negotiates lower rates and wi
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by opo 1mo ago
Think about this for a minute. If three months of filming actually cause an increase in cancer rates the long-term residents of St. George (the downwinders), would have have devastatingly high cancer rates, right? The nearby residents wer
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by opo 1mo ago
Considering that about 39.2% of the population is expected to get diagnosed with cancer in their lifetimes, do you actually think a rate of 41% is statistically significant? https://seer.cancer.gov/statfacts/html/a
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by opo 1mo ago
One thing that I think would be helpful for anyone is to think about a contentious issue you hold a very strong opinion on. Consider what would make you change your mind on this issue. If there is literally nothing anyone could say to you
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by opo 1mo ago
The important issue to focus on isn't that long ago people had a model that was not a good model of reality. The issue is that now we have better models and the person who claims they have an educated opinion should know it. Blindly
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by opo 1mo ago
>Calling the Gateway 2000 customer support 800 number was my introduction to understanding computers and I am grateful to their staff for being patient with a 12 year old. You had a better experience than I had. Bought a Gateway, the ch
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by opo 1mo ago
If the building costs for the nuclear plants are paid for, nuclear costs are comparable to the costs for utility solar today (and much less than solar 10 years ago). Closing down nuclear plants while you keep burning coal is not a good deci
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by opo 2mo ago
>[1] No, PLATO was never nearly so widespread Plato often gets overlooked, but it was highly influential. A well written book on it is: "The Friendly Orange Glow: The Untold Story of the PLATO System and the Dawn of Cyberculture&qu
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by opo 2mo ago
>This hatred is irrational, but has incidentally done the world a lot of good. Turning off nuclear power plants while you still are burning coal does not meet the criteria for a crime against humanity, but that decision has resulted in t
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by opo 2mo ago
This is a common claim, but it is a misleading simplification of US politics and European politics. (In simple terms, many of the economic positions taken by the Democratic Party would be considered centrist in Europe, but if you include p
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by opo 2mo ago
>...had Russia not also invaded from the North with 1.5 million troops, there's a chance they would not have surrendered The Japanese had already moved all of their experienced troops from Manchuria before the Soviet invasion. They
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by opo 2mo ago
Marginal utility tends to diminish as you consume more of a good, but you can't compare utility between individuals. Utility is ordinal, has no common scale and is subjective. It doesn't make sense to try and claim that redistri
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by opo 2mo ago
The 1% limit is a limit on the level of the property tax. If property tax values somehow fell by 50%, in theory, the property tax rate would double to ensure city operations remain funded. However, Seattle is almost at the statutory limit r
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by opo 2mo ago
One big limitation is RCW 84.52.050 (Limitation of levies) which I think implements the 1% constitutional max allowed levy. I read somewhere that Seattle is at a levy of about 9.4, so that would be a hard limit right there.
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by opo 2mo ago
>...If total citywide property value drops by 50%, the property tax rate doubles that year. This claim is simply not true. Even in a budget based system like Seattle, there are hard statutory limits on how much the tax could increase. I
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by opo 4mo ago
Other papers have found both employment losses and more significant price increases. A discussion of the topic was in the Ask Economics subreddit: https://old.reddit.com/r/AskEconomics/comments/1smjx29/w
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by opo 4mo ago
>You're going to have a hard time convincing me the wealthy aren't gaming the tax system after all the reporting and leaks over the last ~40 years. Obviously every person tries to avoid taxes - you don’t have to be rich do do t
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by opo 4mo ago
The buy, borrow, die idea came from McCaffery in the 90s which was before various IRS sections like 1259 and 7701(o) were codified. Go get a calculator - if you took out a loan and had the interest set a the minimum of the AFR, what would i
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by opo 4mo ago
>...Additionally, wealthy people can use securities as collateral for near zero interest lifetime loans which also bypass having to pay income tax. This is just Internet mythology. The IRS would go after such arrangements very quickly -
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by opo 4mo ago
This is sometimes referred to as Pournelle's Iron Law of Bureaucracy: >Pournelle's Iron Law of Bureaucracy states that in any bureaucratic organization there will be two kinds of people": >First, there will be those who
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by opo 4mo ago
Well many government pension funds are horribly underfunded, so likely it would just add to the underfunding till eventually the government would bail it out. It is an expensive, inefficient way to try and solve the issue - when they scre
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by opo 4mo ago
If sending military advisors to a country is starting a war, the list of wars started by each President will get MUCH larger. (For some reason most people associate the Vietnam war with the President who deliberately lied to congress to
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by opo 4mo ago
Depends on what you call a “war” since the last time the US declared war was in WW II.. In terms of military operations, a partial list would probably include: Democrat Presidents: Bosnia, Haiti, Iran, Kosovo, Libya, Niger, Somalia, Syria,
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by opo 4mo ago
>... If retirement age was say 80 instead of 60, there would be 25% fewer jobs to go around. (using imprecise simple math). Economists refer to this idea as the lump of labour fallacy. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L
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by opo 4mo ago
>...I don’t know why people downvoted this because it is obviously correct. In a democracy you have to buy the votes of the largest constituency with other people’s money, In the last few decades both political parties in the USA have t

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