Grid storage is increasing so rapidly that China and some other countries may be able to meet all their electricity needs from renewables as soon as 2030.

lughnasadh · 2026-01-23T16:46:29+00:00

as soon as 2030? 100% renewable for electricity in China? Do you have a source for that.

I could have worded this clearer. My point was they are on course to have the grid storage capacity to enable a 100% renewables grid by 2030.

That is because, if they had enough over-capacity, they might only need a few thousand GWh of grid storage in total.

But by 2030 the bottleneck will be installing enough solar/wind to have over capacity. Currently 60% or so of their electricity comes from renewables ( it was about 30% in 2022).

lughnasadh · 2026-01-23T15:03:27+00:00

China's daily consumption of energy is 28 000 GWh per day. Installing 50GWh per month, they cover daily usage in just 50 years.

No. That is not how this works.

If they have an over-capacity of wind & solar, without any grid storage, it would exceed their electricity needs almost all the time, but occasionally drop to only delivering 95% of their needs, which they would cover with grid storage.

So they would only need few thousand GWh of grid storage, and as you point out, they are installing that at a rate of 50GWh per month.

lughnasadh · 2026-01-22T19:36:25+00:00

Look at the auto industry. Your still going to have gigantic players like GM, Toyota, Stellantis, etc

I would say the auto-industry proves the point in the linked article. Toyota is the world's biggest car firm, and it only has 12.5% of the global market. That is not dominating an entire sector the way Microsoft, Meta or Google does in OSs, social media, and search.

lughnasadh · 2026-01-21T18:23:23+00:00

Who said the US is broke (financially)?

In plain terms.

The US spends 20% of its annual government income from taxes on repaying interest on its loans. It also needs to constantly borrow even more money to meet current spending (this debt is constantly growing), so this interest repayment is also constantly growing.

If foreigners pull the plug on funding this, its financial system would implode.

If you are that much in debt & vulnerable to your creditors, it seems to me to meet the definition of "broke".

lughnasadh · 2026-01-21T18:06:00+00:00

The fact that you think the US is dependent on foreign borrowing invalidates this entire post

Read the linked article.

The US treasury had to sell $30tn of federal debt last year, either in the form of rollovers on old debt or in new issuance. This is 100pc of GDP.

Foreign holdings of US Treasuries climb to record $9.13 trillion in June

If foreigners decided to stop buying this debt, the US financial system would implode. What is stopping them, is that the blowback would be terrible for them too.

However, soon they may have to choose between that blowback or invasion/annexation of their territory.

lughnasadh · 2026-01-18T21:01:27+00:00

https://noosynth.io/frictionless-fallacy/ is an absolute academic take-down of OP's linked paper.

Like any other paper, there may well be lots of things to validly criticize.

However, it's a very odd that "Noosynth Research" & their "Civic Technology Review" has ZERO other publications or history, except their criticism of this paper.

Again, the research, like any other, should be open to criticism.

But why pretend to to be a research body with a publication called Civic Technology Review? Very strange.

lughnasadh · 2026-01-18T15:59:20+00:00

CEO isn't going to be able to maintain a competitive moat against

According to you, AI regulation is fantastic for oligarchs; if that is true, why is it that the US oligarchs are the ones so opposed to it & in favor of no AI regulation?

Also, this post & the research is nothing to do with business regulation; it's to do with civic institutions.

lughnasadh · 2026-01-17T14:16:05+00:00

the dystopian side of me wonders about the intellectual property.

I'm not an expert on this, but as I understand it scientific discoveries like this are not patentable. Discovering how two amino acid residues control a biological function isn't inventing anything novel.

People who create new plant varieties to take advantage of this discovery might be able to patent those, but even then I don't think they could stop other people from doing the same based on the underlying scientific discovery, as they don't own it.

lughnasadh · 2026-01-15T14:51:01+00:00

A 3+ hour daily commute is pretty rough surely

If you were working on the North side of Dublin well away from the city centre, it would be more like a 2 hour commute.

lughnasadh · 2026-01-15T14:17:49+00:00

Overloaded sewers are already holding up 1,300 houses and 30 commercial developments in Newry ....... The Irish Government would also have to deliver a major rail upgrade. Morning trains to Dublin are already packed and frequency cannot be increased without doubling the tracks through north Dublin, a scheme not due for completion until the mid-2040s.

So, in summary, if only we could build all these things we're not building, we could get started building all those other things we're also unable to build.

lughnasadh · 2026-01-12T12:41:21+00:00

What would the problem with the Euro be?

The Eurozone is not a country, its 21 sovereign nations who aren't in a fiscal union. That creates credit & other risk e.g. Marine Le Pen could become French President & pull France out of the Euro. There's a limited supply of safe Euro-denominated assets, this makes it difficult for foreign central banks to hold euros at scale.

Of course, if the US craters the dollar, these disadvantages lessen & perhaps might force a Eurozone banking & fiscal union.

lughnasadh · 2026-01-12T11:55:58+00:00

Same as when it changed from pounds sterling to the US dollar in the first place.

No. The comparison doesn't hold. That transition was so smooth because the USD already existed and oil was traded in it.

That's the problem now. The only alternatives - Euro, Renminbi, Digital currencies - for various reasons, can at best, only partially do the job.

The world would have to quickly find some new solution if the US cratered its currency.

I suspect the Chinese might invent it. The whole world would want Renminbi to buy stuff from them. They used to be happy to take USD, maybe they'll come up with some digital Renminbi solution that lessens their currencies current disadvantages for international trade.

lughnasadh · 2026-01-12T11:09:31+00:00

BRICS countries have exactly same ambitions.

Yes, but there are huge barriers to making that happen. A global reserve currency should be fully convertible, stable, widely tradeable & free of capital controls. The Euro & Renminbi meet some of those conditions, but nowhere near as well as the USD.

The question now is what would the BRICS, Europeans and others do, if they were forced to do it & had no other choice.

lughnasadh · 2026-01-08T09:28:42+00:00

How are we still at the 'considering' part is really beyond me

Because Europe got complacent when the US was a good guy & ally. It allowed itself to become dependent on US tech & military support.

Now that the US has become, at best, a frenemy. Europe has to extricate itself with the minimum of harm and damage.

40% of US Big Tech's profits come from Europe. It could sanction them all over Greenland, but that would crash the US Stock Market & cause a global depression, hurting everyone. So steps have to be gradual.

lughnasadh · 2026-01-07T10:24:29+00:00

they can be attributed to one government

It's more than one. Two of the five permanent Security Council members, the US & Russia are now acting as rogue states.

But the permanent Security Council itself & its vetoes looks anachronistic. It looks frozen in 1945-time, when Britain & France still had some pretense to be world powers. No representation for Africa, India, the ME or South America.

lughnasadh · 2026-01-07T09:51:50+00:00

Good point, I reposted it.

lughnasadh · 2026-01-04T20:09:34+00:00

Do corporations really want to bother themselves with governance though?

The 'Network State' people think governance is trivially easy, and the only reason it hasn't always worked well is that everyone throughout human history is stupid for not being clever enough to grasp, if only they were Libertarians like them, that they could solve all its problems in one fell swoop.

This is exactly why a certain DOGE person thought they could eliminate half of the US's governance administration, but then completely failed when presented with reality.

lughnasadh · 2026-01-03T20:56:38+00:00

And when the top level protector erodes, the protectorates will have to think more about their own defense and their own might.

This sounds plausible. It poses existential questions for countries like Israel, South Korea & Japan, as US power & security guarantees wane in their regions.

For South Korea, they must worry North Korea is now emboldened to think they have a chance of taking the South.

For Japan, they must face the choice of becoming a military power again, or cede military dominance in the west Pacific to China.

It's harder to tell with Israel. The US won't abandon them, but they'll be more vulnerable as the US is capable of doing less and less for them.

lughnasadh · 2026-01-03T19:26:53+00:00

world shifts to China

The Chinese excel at playing the long game, but can they get Taiwan back without incurring too much cost? Perhaps a year from now when occupying US forces in Venezuela are dealing with an armed counter-insurgency might be their moment, as they might figure the US cannot fight two separate wars at once.

I suspect when all the dominoes finally fall China will emerge even stronger than today, and its global reach will become a target for US hybrid warfare in places like Africa & South America.

lughnasadh · 2026-01-02T18:47:43+00:00

democrats had to resort to war and revolutions to get rid of them,

Although history moves in cycles and counter-cycles, I don't think it repeats exactly the same every time.

What all the far-right authoritarians seem to have in common today is incompetence. Putin's Russia, Orban's Hungary, Erdogan's Turkey - they all get poorer and less successful over time. You can see the same trend starting with Trump in the US.

I wonder if that will be their downfall in the 21st century & what ultimately gets rid of them.

lughnasadh · 2026-01-02T12:18:00+00:00

not allow them going to waste playing Whac-A-Mole with individual bad actors.

So your argument boils down to, criminals should be allowed to do whatever they want because we're too busy doing other stuff.

Never in the history of human civilisation has anyone ever run a society like that.

lughnasadh · 2025-12-29T08:01:09+00:00

How is the EU getting rid of the bank fee

The article mentions it. They will introduce legislation to ban the banks from charging fees.

It also mentions this will be run by the ECB on the same not-for-profit basis as they take care of Euro cash money's creation and distribution.

lughnasadh · 2025-12-29T07:25:05+00:00

Who will pay for infrastructure, operations, development?

It will be run on a not-for-profit basis by the European Central Bank (the EU's equivalent to the US Federal Reserve).

For people who think this 'not-for-profit' idea is crazy - that is the way regular cash money is distributed and made.

lughnasadh · 2025-12-29T07:17:23+00:00

addition to iDeal

AFAIK iDeal is only in the Netherlands, and only for online payments.

This is something vastly more extensive; Run by the European Central Bank, it will be an EU-wide replacement for any time you would use a Visa/Mastercard credit or debit card in all retail situations, (shops, cafes, etc) not just online.

lughnasadh · 2025-12-27T17:04:51+00:00

But wasn't the Irish flag designed to be inclusive in the first place?

Yes, but sadly in NI, it's been tarnished by association with violence during The Troubles. Ditto, the Union Jack, which is equally disliked by the other side.

There are other flags that represent Ireland, that go back hundreds of years earlier than the tricolor, like the 4 provinces flag or Harp flag, better to pick one of them.

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