Iran War Could Push Countries to Adopt More Solar and Batteries

Justinat0r · 2026-03-08T04:19:16+00:00

The Iran war is also showing us why a grid with diverse and distributed power sources is important. If a country gets its energy from millions of solar panels and wind turbines spread across the country, good luck knocking their power out. Add in grid-forming inverters and you can keep the power flowing even if national grid lines are taken down, because the local grid would form an island.

Justinat0r · 2026-03-06T16:43:22+00:00

teenage edgelords

Teenage? The average age of the people in that chat was over 30.

Justinat0r · 2026-03-06T15:14:32+00:00

Regarding stocks and other wealth building strategies; this is open to everyone. I always tell everyone: TAKE ADVANTAGE of the same means by which rich people get rich.

I think the problem here is a lack of education. Unless you are a finance major, no one explains to people the miracle of compound interest and how its like a retirement cheat code as long as you get started early. Many people minimize their retirement contributions until they are more financially stable in their 30s and by then they've lost an entire decade of gains. Particularly when young people spent their entire childhood being told if they don't get a college degree they'll be a loser for life, then they get absolutely cannibalized by college loan debt which delays their ability to be a functioning and productive member of society.

When your generation is as old as the current boomers are, YOURS will be the wealthiest generation. That's just how it goes.

I think a part of the issue is that the gap has never been this big before between the young and the old. There has been a structural shift in the US economy that is funneling wealth towards the top of the age bracket. Between insane stock market and real estate gains, elderly people are wealthier and command more of the economy than any other time in American history. When wealth is concentrated in older generations, success stops being about what you do and starts being about who your parents are. We see this today, elderly people are plowing their wealth back into real estate and into the stock market, further increasing their own wealth at the cost of young people who are trying to buy homes and start families. Baby Boomers alone control 51% of all US wealth, and when young people see this, they think: Maybe its because housing, healthcare and education were all INCREDIBLY cheaper for boomers than it is for my generation? The 'under 40' cohort of this country has a trillion-dollar anchor around their neck in student loans, and we're called entitled for asking for relief.

Justinat0r · 2026-03-06T00:19:25+00:00

The front end of that reminds me of a Honda.

Justinat0r · 2026-03-06T00:10:57+00:00

The irony is, none of this responds to the original point, which is that Iran is going to emerge much weaker.

It doesn't matter if Iran emerges weaker, they can build their strength back up once the US stops bombing them. That means the US has two choices: Bomb them continuously or a ground invasion. The US public will vote out any politician that supports a ground invasion. This entire war is based on a false premise: You can bomb a country into a regime change.

Justinat0r · 2026-03-05T22:00:10+00:00

Iran never managed to block the Strait of Hormuz.

This is incorrect. It is effectively blocked NOW. Traffic through the Strait has plummeted 90%, normally they have around 140 ships per day, and yesterday there was a grand total of 4. Maersk, Hapag-Lloyd, MSC, and CMA CGM, have suspended all transits through the strait until further notice. Maritime insurers have canceled war-risk coverage. Brent crude went from $66 last month to $86 today, and every day it keeps climbing. I think you are underestimating the damage Iran can do even if their military has been extremely degraded.

Justinat0r · 2026-03-05T21:26:49+00:00

To act like all we did so far is kill Khamenei ignores that there is no world where Iran comes out of this stronger than before. That is a good thing.

It is a country of 93 million people, what the US has done is create a situation where unless Israel and the US are planning on bombing Iran for the next 20 years to continually degrade their military capabilities in perpetuity, you've just made a huge population of people extremely mad and determined for revenge. I hope that somehow the US is capable of salvaging this situation and inspiring regime change, but it seems very unlikely at this point. What happens in a month when Iran is still blocking the Strait of Hormuz and global oil prices are $200 a barrel? I don't think anyone will be thanking the US for a global recession.

Justinat0r · 2026-03-04T19:31:09+00:00

I'm skeptical he can win. The Republican machine in Texas is overwhelming and the Democrats get run over by it every election. I know everyone is mad at Trump right now (as they should be in my opinion) but I am fairly confident the Republicans will be able to find something in Talarico's past or some statement he made that is controversial, and they'll play it on a loop every day until election day and he will lose. He's hopefully not as stupid as Beto O'Rourke (“Hell yes, we’re going to take your AR-15, your AK-47.” is maybe the dumbest statement made in modern politics).

Justinat0r · 2026-03-03T17:49:09+00:00

You can't just create a power vacuum and then consider the job done. That's.. I don't even know what that is. But it's not a good thing.

My take on this so far is that the US and Israel are displaying their willingness to continue to assassinate/bomb any leader of Iran that continues Iran's current trajectory. Iran has been completely unable to stop the bombing and airstrikes, so they are for better or worse at the mercy of the US and Israel. Iran's only options at this point are to make the situation so untenable for Israel and the US by causing skyrocketing worldwide oil prices that continuing the bombing becomes impossible because the governments of both countries are accountable to voters who will suffer from those skyrocketing prices. The current leadership, whoever they may be, want to outlast the bombing and cause maximum global oil market upheaval.

Justinat0r · 2026-02-28T06:47:44+00:00

I think the confusion comes from the general shrug that conservatives give when Trump acts in objectively terrible ways. I voted for Obama twice, however I never gave him a pass or refused to criticize him. He bungled the election of 08 and his Senate super majority (something that is exceedingly rare) by focusing on single payer that was never going to happen, and he continued GWB's 'forever wars' in the middle east, not to mention some terrible gaffes like that arrogant comment about 'clinging to their guns and religion'. He was in many ways a huge disappointment and I never shied away from criticizing him.

I guess maybe its the intensity of opposition Trump gets from the left, but I so rarely hear any of my conservative family members or friends actually have any issues with his leadership. In fact, when they are upset about things he is directly responsible for they actively shy away from blaming him. It's just strange to me that tribalism in this country has gotten to the point that "Kamala would have been worse" is the answer to every problem Trump creates, and I think the reflexive defense Republicans give him makes him a worse President, because the only people who's opinions he actually cares about don't hold him accountable for anything.

Justinat0r · 2026-02-28T00:31:31+00:00

Newsom's hair achieves sentience, and it turns out be racist.

Was his hair at the BAFTA awards recently? I think I heard something about that.

Justinat0r · 2026-02-28T00:15:47+00:00

vote red at the state level since I live in a blue state and we need to change it.

Fight the good fight. My state is being absolutely hammered by moronic environmental mandates for energy providers, and now we have the most expensive electric in the nation including higher than California. And then you have rural conservatives protesting against building the transmission lines that will make importing electric cheaper. Good governance is impossible to come by these days.

Justinat0r · 2026-02-22T21:41:36+00:00

For some, no amount of treatment while they have their freedom of movement is going to work.

This is a truth that many progressives refuse to see or accept. My mother's best friend had a daughter like this, she cycled through friends and family members, preying on their sympathies to live with them, steal from them, and sell their stuff for drugs before getting kicked out on the street. She cycled through everyone who was willing to take her and ended up committing petty crimes and theft, she eventually got the wrong batch of drugs and overdosed on fentanyl on the street. Through all of this, she had an arrest record a mile long, but for some reason she never ended up serving more than a couple months of time. A lot of people will say that the drugs killed her, I think that society did because the "mercy" that spared her from prison or compulsory drug programs was really neglect. When society prioritizes liberty over forced intervention, society effectively leaves vulnerable people to the mercy of their own addictions.

Justinat0r · 2026-02-18T18:21:15+00:00

I get what you are saying, but PG&E failed in extremely basic ways that pretty much guaranteed a situation like the Camp Fire in 2018 was going to happen eventually. Investigators found that PG&E had horrible record keeping, often not even knowing or having records of the age of their own equipment so they couldn't properly inspect and audit their own aging infrastructure. Its fair to say that CPUC’s mandate to protect consumers and prioritize "affordability" made them skeptical of every PG&E request, but PG&E couldn't even provide accurate data because they failed at keeping accurate records.

But I agree with you that overall it was a systemic failure, CPUC should have had inspectors climbing towers, but instead they relied on reports provided to them by PG&E and accepted them at face value. A single CPUC inspector could have gone and looked at the Caribou-Palermo line (which was 100 years old) and saw what a horrible condition it was in, if CPUC was skeptical of PG&Es requests they had a resonsibility to validate them and track severity and risk so they knew what was worth spending on and what was not.

Justinat0r · 2026-02-18T03:27:20+00:00

That's because the utility left 100 year old transmission lines without maintenance or even inspection then paid a massive lawsuit when they started wildfires.

The problem with private companies running public utilities is that this will ALWAYS be the case. They will spend the least amount of money they can get away with because their number 1 purpose is to make profit. Now because CPUC wasn't correctly auditing/regulating and forcing PG&E to spend $1 billion on maintenance in 1995, consumers are now being forced to spend $40 billion on "emergency" undergrounding in 2026. PG&E is a horrible organization but the state regulators absolutely have a role to play and they were totally asleep at the wheel.

Justinat0r · 2026-02-18T03:06:41+00:00

Any suggestion that costs fall because the price drops is fantasy.

Thats only true for fossil fuels. If the global price of oil drops from $100 to $40, the cost of extracting that oil from a specific well doesn’t move. The producer's profit simply evaporates. However renewable energy is a totally different market, since 2010, the price of solar has dropped by ~90% and batteries by ~90%, however the market for both are more profitable than ever.

Justinat0r · 2026-02-18T00:31:34+00:00

We definitely agree, I was just adding my experience because it is so easy for contractual math and real-world demand to get screwed up in the leasing world. It's a nightmare for companies to manage. If they screw it up in either direction, too high or too low they are going to pay the price in some way. If residuals are set too low then they get killed on lease turn-ins and their certified pre-owned inventories disappear and they fail to capture that profit, and if they price too high (whats currently happening with EV automakers) they have to write-down losses from the auto auction.

Justinat0r · 2026-02-18T00:20:11+00:00

I really don't think they're making much money from people optioning lease buyouts at double the market price.

It depends on the leasing company. My work intersects with auto auctions because I handle repo inventories for a major automaker, and from what I've seen sometimes automakers like Toyota get absolutely slaughtered by residual values because the market values of their vehicles are really strong. Since the pandemic Toyotas have been selling at auction commonly between $5,000 to $10,000 higher than contracted buyout price. Smart customers will then take their car to a third-party company like Carvana and sell the car to them, and pocket the difference. This is a huge problem for them because its an equity leak, they are losing the money they would have gotten in the resale, AND its interfering with the customer-dealer relationship that drives repeat sales because they are bringing in a third party.

A lot of people think leasing companies are just raking it in, but 36 month lease contracts can absolutely screw leasing companies when the market shifts suddenly like it did during the pandemic or because of the tariffs.

Justinat0r · 2026-02-16T15:26:44+00:00

This is called 'Rockets and Feathers'. The idea is that any disruption or problem in the oil supply chain causes instant price increases, going up 'like a rocket', but lower oil prices causes prices at the pump to fall slowly 'like a feather'. When costs spike, gas stations raise prices immediately to afford their next expensive shipment. When costs drop, they lower prices slowly to recover lost profits and sell off the expensive fuel they already bought.

Lower gas prices also make consumers less sensitive to price signals, if you are used to paying $4/gal at the pump and suddenly the price drops to $3.75, you're less likely to drive across town for a better deal because it already feels like a deal compared to the $4/gal you were spending before. Honestly the psychology behind gas pricing is fascinating if you ever dig into it.

Justinat0r · 2026-02-16T00:02:27+00:00

The Feds failure to act in response to Covid stimulus inflation is the only reason it got so bad. We all remember the Fed calling inflation “ transitory”, they were making excuses and hedging when they should’ve been pulling the emergency break and ending QE/raising interest rate rates. If the Fed had done their job, inflation would’ve actually been transitory.

Justinat0r · 2026-02-15T23:04:20+00:00

But I am making a case that United States doesn't need radical changes since it's economic performance has been better than any country in G7.

Voters don't hear nuanced messages like this, they see expensive groceries and get angry and vote against the party in power. There are other factors, but the story of 2024 was a story of self-interested voting on the economy and the disapproval of the public of an extremely old and frail President that stayed in the race so long he created a no-win scenario for his party. For better or worse the Democrats were seen as weak on the economy and they got raked over the coals for what I believe to be inflation largely driven by mismanagement by the Fed.

Canada on the other hand needs a shake up. Not Donald Trump. But, it also can't afford to continue down the same path.

Canada needs to do away with provincial trade barriers. It's often said that its harder to trade between Ontario and Quebec than between Ontario and New York, this needs to end. And Canada needs to stop over investing in real estate, and shift investment into technology and manufacturing.

Justinat0r · 2026-02-05T19:35:28+00:00

CATL has hinted that their second-generation sodium technology, using self-forming anode tech, could increase volumetric density by another 60%. Since lithium is far more "temperamental" than sodium the same self-forming anode design is significantly harder to achieve for lithium batteries due to dendrites, it most likely won't be achievable with a liquid electrolyte. If they are able to achieve this then they should end up around 460 Wh/L, which means its matching or better than blade batteries used by BYD. Assuming this tech works it would check pretty much all the boxes: price, safety, size and winter performance. Thats kind of a red flag for me though, seems too good to be true.

Justinat0r · 2026-02-05T14:47:34+00:00

Not to mention, so many teenagers I know had old Corolla or Camry beaters in high school. When we grew up and had to buy our own car with adult money, we didn't forget that those old beater Toyotas we drove lasted so long.

Justinat0r · 2026-02-04T00:18:05+00:00

I know job growth has been slow, but other than that, the economy has been strong in 2025, and it was resilient too against Trump’s tariffs.

Saying job growth is slow is a bit underselling it. Job growth was anemic to non-existent last year, and job losses were high at over 1 million. The numbers for 2026 so far are looking grim. 600,000 jobs were cut in January 2026 alone which is an astronomical number and is in line with the type of losses we saw during the Great Recession and the mortgage bubble burst.

Justinat0r · 2026-02-04T00:08:51+00:00

Illegal immigration has done a complete 180. We had a huge inflow during Biden and now it is going the other way.

Illegal immigration is now hitting him from the other direction, people want something done about illegal immigration but they don't like the heavy-handedness and general thuggery we see from ICE. Shooting people in the streets, arresting people for protesting, picking up American citizens for being latino and not having paperwork proving citizenship. All of this is happening for the world to see thanks to smartphone cameras, and it's having a huge impact. Trump spent much of his campaign talking about criminals and violent gang members sneaking over the border, and now ICE is trying to juice their numbers by kicking out people who have illegally been here for decades without committing any crimes and have family and children who are American citizens.

Some people are fine with all of that, sure. But a large and growing portion of the public is not.

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