> Is it the best bag? No, of course not. Is it a good bag? Absolutely not
Plastic is absolutely the best packaging material ever created, it's so good, it feels like magic. It's light, it's cheap, it's waterproof, it's durable and doesn't just decompose, it comes in a miriad shapes and forms and so on. There is a reason it's everywhere
One of those adjectives describes the plastic bag I'm familiar with. Sometimes it lasts long enough to get the food in the house without spilling through a hole which spontaneously appeared in the bag.
> It is irrational to spend the same amount of energy on mining a digital token when it can be used to build and power actual productive robots
It's just as irrational as it was 10 years ago, there have always been more productive uses for energy, but it doesn't really matter, people will always chose their own short-term profit, expecting anything else is delusional
No, 10 years ago the threat was from financial collapse given the past 16 years of bubble induced recessions, energy usage was a store of value hedge against inflation. 10 years ago the first approved ETF was still 5 years away and institutional buyers were nonexistent.
People will not always consider short term profit; thinking such is an irrational expectation.
The article uses the words "more power" and "overtaking fossil fuels", but the graph is actually about electricity generation. They are not the same thing, at least, in my head, because not all energy consumed in Europe comes in the form of electricity. If I heat my home with natural gas and drive an ICE car, this is me using fossil fuels in a way that has nothing to do with electricity and it won't be reflected in that graph. This is an important stepping stone, but it is not "solar and wind overtaking fossil fuels in Europe"
Good catch. Electricity is maybe 20-25% of final energy consumption in most EU countries. The real test is whether cheap renewable electricity can pull heating (heat pumps) and transport (EVs) onto the grid fast enough. The encouraging sign is that both are happening - heat pump sales have surged in several EU countries, and EV adoption is well ahead of most forecasts from 5 years ago. But you're right that "overtaking fossil fuels" in total energy is still years away.
Refusal to learn and change, even if it means learning from people you disagree with, is simply arrogant and stupid. The US is the biggest economy in the world with the strongest tech sector in the world, they are obviously doing something right. And many personal accounts from people doing business in the EU in this thread show that the EU is doing at least some things wrong.
We don't care only about money. We're doing pretty great, we have some issues like housing cost but the US has those too. I'm happy with my life and I don't feel like there's something missing that having more money would fix. Less employment and welfare rights would cause a lot of worry and uncertainty though.
It's not all about economy and getting ever more more more like the US. I'm pretty happy living here and I would never move to the US. In fact right now I wouldn't even visit it but hopefully the status quo doesn't last forever.
And it's not all about business. But about people, the employees.
> And it's not all about business. But about people, the employees.
Everyone here is missing this critical point.
The USA does not value human life as having value itself outside of what someone can contribute economically. Everyone talking about GDP, and "missing out" on AI, tech, etc.
Life has value outside of economic contributions. It's not a matter of "missing out" it's different priorities and philosophies of how to structure a human society.
Endless growth is not sustainable, and the late stage capitalism happening in the US right now is not sustainable. Why would anyone want to model themselves after it, seeing all of its failures and the enormous wealth gap it has created?
It's so fun watching Europeans reinvent the Soviet approach to building that they used to mock and shit on
reply