No, that's what case law is for. Modelling the zillion little details. One party claims something breaks a law another claims it doesn't, and then we decide which is true. The only alternative is an infinitely detailed law.
Case law, also known as common law, is a British legal tradition. Most of the EU does not follow the common law tradition. There may be supreme courts, but the notion of binding precedent, or stare decisis as in the US legal system does not exist. Appeal and Supreme court decisions may be referenced in future cases, but don't establish precedent.
The equivalent doctrine under a civil legal system (most of mainland Europe) is jurisprudence constante, in which "if a court has adjudicated a consistent line of cases that arrive at the same holdings using sound reasoning, then the previous decisions are highly persuasive but not controlling on issues of law" (from above Wikipedia link). See:
Interestingly, neither the principle of Judicial Review (in which laws may be voided by US courts) or stare decisis are grounded in either the US Constitution or specific legislation. The first emerged from Marbury v. Madison (1803), heard by the US Supreme Court (<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marbury_v._Madison>), and the second is simply grounded in legal tradition, though dating to the British legal system. Both could be voided, possibly through legislation, definitely by Constitutional amendment. Or through further legal decisions by the courts themselves.
Yeah I'm really glad we don't have common law where I live. It makes the law way too complicated by having all these precedents play a role. If the law is not specific enough we just fix it.
Also it breaks the trias politica in my opinion. Case in point: the way the Supreme Court plays politics in the US. It shouldn't really matter what judge you pick, their job is to apply the law. But it matters one hell of a lot in the US and they've basically become legislators.
>Case in point: the way the Supreme Court plays politics in the US.
Ah yes, since controversy over how judges decide only exists in the US.
In any case, you're confusing cause and effect.
The US system of having legislators approve/reject nominated judges is not the norm elsewhere. The only restrictions on choices for the Canadian Supreme Court are a) being a member of the bar for 10 years, and b) having three judges being from Quebec; otherwise, whoever the PM chooses becomes one of the nine sitting judges on the court. End of story.
If the Canadian Parliament had to give an up/down vote for a nominee, there would absolutely be far more attention paid to each nominee's opinions and qualifications ... and far more attention paid to that nominee's subsequent decisions.
> Ah yes, since controversy over how judges decide only exists in the US.
Well, pretty much, yes. I've not lived in a country where judges really differ that much. And usually we don't even know their political affiliation. Because it really doesn't matter. This goes even for our supreme court (we call it the high council). Which isn't really that important to our daily lives anyway. They are just a last resort when people can't stop appealing.
In Holland they also don't rule on big things like this. They're not allowed to play politics. Just to apply the law in specific cases only. Something like the supreme court deciding to overturn abortion legalisation is really unthinkable. Besides, if they rule on one case it has zero effect on anyone else, because we don't have precedent-based common law. This is exactly the kind of issue I have with common law.
> The US system of having legislators approve/reject nominated judges is not the norm elsewhere. The only restrictions on choices for the Canadian Supreme Court are a) being a member of the bar for 10 years, and b) having three judges being from Quebec; otherwise, whoever the PM chooses becomes one of the nine sitting judges on the court. End of story.
Isn't that a similar process to the US? Basically the currently ruling party gets to pick the supreme court judges. There's congress validation but they rarely would take the pick of the non-majority party.
Though in our case we don't really have a 'ruling party'. We have many parties and one is never enough to gain a majority so there's always a complicated coalition. It is a bit of a stumbling block forming a government but I abhor the first-past-the-post system like in the US because it makes politics a zero-sum game: A loss for one party is a win for the other. That stimulates dirty politics, smearing, and of course there's the risk of a bunch of nutcases coming to power and nothing being able to be done about that. Most of our governments collapse before their 4 years are up and in most cases this was not a bad thing (especially our last one that was full of populists, they were definitely a ton of nutcases and they didn't manage to stick it out a year before they collapsed in infighting lol).
>Isn't that a similar process to the US? Basically the currently ruling party gets to pick the supreme court judges.
The US Senate must approve all federal judges (among many federal posts, including the cabinet). If the president's party does not have a majority in the Senate, that means the president must nominate someone that at least some Senators from another party will vote for.
In Canada, UK, etc., whoever the PM says will be a judge becomes a judge; Parliament has absolutely no control over the process.
>Something like the supreme court deciding to overturn abortion legalisation is really unthinkable.
You seem to think—likely based on Reddit and Dutch reporters that just copy whatever the New York Times and Washington Post say—that abortion is "illegal in the US". The Dobbs decision in 2022 reversed the Supreme Court's own 1973 decision in Roe that abruptly voided all state laws banning abortion of any kind. In Dobbs, the court ruled that it had exceeded its remit, and returned the ability to legislate on abortion to the individual states.
I think blanket tariffs are dumb don't get me wrong.
But tariffs have been used in the car industry for decades. If you got rid of them completely within 5 years the American car companies would be closing plants.
The whole reason Japanese auto manufacturers build plants in the US was to avoid tariffs. Shipping costs are actually incredibly minimal for a vehicle.
So in my opinion, we've seen where they can work. If you value American jobs anyways. It does get hard to math out when you have to weigh the money the average consumer would save over the 10 million auto jobs in the US.
What if, instead of all of us paying in order to have a car industry, we take that tax money and pay to an ecological restoration industry or functioning healthcare industry or whatever. Have you seen the map of superfund sites? Statistically speaking, you are almost certainly living within 10 miles of a superfund
Japan, India, Germany, Mexico, etc all have massive auto manufacturing industries. If we're at war with all of those countries at the same time then maybe we deserve what's coming
China only became an auto industry power house in the 00s.
I wonder if the argument turns on Michigan being a helpful state in presidential elections - many other parts of the Midwest have lost their former industry and fallen on hard times.
That sounds to me like spending money to fix broken windows, rather than building our own windows (and not buying the old windows that were always breaking)
> It does get hard to math out when you have to weigh the money the average consumer would save over the 10 million auto jobs in the US.
Not that hard to math out, the deadweight loss of tariffs is always non-zero. IIRC there was a pretty good paper that mathed out the impact of Obamas tire tariffs and concluded that it cost the economy significantly more jobs than it saved.
That's pretty much impossible. If it costs a company 1% less to make a widget that takes 1000 hours of labor to make it overseas instead, the company is incentivized to move overseas.
The thousand of hours labor, the material to source the widget, the real estate for the factory, the transportation now all occurs overseas.
At the very least, you can't spew something like that then not even bother to link a source.
The problem is that it's all connected. Sure, the widget company may have local jobs saved, but what about the downstream companies that buy the widget to make something else? They can't hire as much because they are paying the higher price. Look at the steel tariffs. Sure they saved some steel jobs, but were a much larger net loss for jobs impacted by the higher prices.
Don't American cars have some of the lowest levels of reliability?
I'm not super educated on all the happenings in the car industry globally, but I've seen a few videos of Chinese EVs that put anything Ford, GM or other US brands have put out to absolute shame.
The purpose of the US auto industry is primarily a jobs program and secondarily a way to ensure the existence of supply chains for national security. The fact that it produces cars is tertiary at best and explains the quality of vehicles it produces.
I think American car companies are orthogonal to the question. The larger point is that _Japanese and German_ cars for the American market are largely themselves American by many important metrics.
Protectionism in the auto industry led to american auto makers being the laughing stock of the world. Acting like it is a good thing is absolutely insane
> I think blanket tariffs are dumb don't get me wrong.
Then add a conjunction and use a single example to just make a point opposite to what you started with.
> So in my opinion, we've seen where they can work.
I can't help but think that you don't believe blanket tariffs are dumb because it worked for one industry and helps American jobs. Just start with that please.
I mean no shit though? People calmly said this in Trump's first term where he (unsuccessfully) first tried to go tariff crazy. What does it add though? Nobody is freaking out saying "all tariffs are bad", they're saying "blanket tariffs for no/the stupidest reasons possible are bad".
The problem with these is always who pays for fraud.
With credit cards, they actually claw that money back from the merchant, and then if the merchant can't pay they just eat it themselves.
So the merchant has to work in fraud rates into their pricing, and the credit card company has to work in fraud rates that the merchant can't cover into their rates.
It always seemed toxic it to me that the merchants are the one's responsible, despite the fact that they easily have the least power to do anything about it. But the ease of payment processing, and the number of people who just won't buy it if they can't use a card, outweighs dealing with fraud I guess.
In theory merchants can notice some fraud signs so shifting fraud losses onto them gives an incentive to take action on those signs. In practice banks have a better overall view of fraud and this is just externalizing bank fraud losses onto stores.
India’s UPI is national service so fraud is “relatively easy” to combat but it depends on banks’ responsiveness.
However, i heard from my Indian friends is that UPI fraud is on the raise and becoming a big challenge.
Edit: UPI fraud rate is similar to CC fraud rate but only about ~6 % of the money lost to UPI fraud has been recovered. If this trend continues (fraud pct continues to grow and recovery rate does not improve) UPI system might get into trouble.
Btw, the stats say that the UPI fraud rate is doubling every year for past few years.
I do think it's addictive, but also the very idea of media in general is to keep you around. Television channels try to display content their viewers enjoy, but they can only target broadly. The web allows sites to have way more personal recommendations, but banning it is essentially banning sites because people enjoy it too much.
I think short form content especially is basically brain rot, but I also don't know how you ban something simply because it's too good at providing content people enjoy. The result would just be a worse experience across the board, is that a win?
I guess a forced 5s video saying take a break after 20 minutes of doom scrolling wouldn't be the end of the world, but truely making it illegal doesn't make sense.
Reddit once told me to take a break (i was on the sick for a foot injury).
So I did.
I now check in once a week, for one hour, max.
Ahhh, creatures of habit, that we are.
How did you find factories, and trustworthy ones at that, at all? I know you mentioned just being happy that the factory existed at all, but I'm doubting you just found someones email and then wired them cash?
Previous experience? Or you know someone? To me that always seems like 90% of the battle with manufacturing.
I stopped reading when I realized it wasn't a deep dive into the most interesting question I had, which is the technical hardware design process and finding a factory to actually take your design and manufacture it.
I was surprised hitting one of these limits once, but it wasn't as if they were 100% out of servers, just had to pick a different node type. I don't think they would ever post their numbers, but some of the more exotic types definitely have less in the pool.
If you work at AWS in a technical role you can check the capacity of each pool in each AZ using an internal tool. Previously the main reason for pool exhaustion was automated jobs at the start of each working day as well as instance slotting issues (releasing a 4xl but only re-allocating a l means you now cannot slot another 4xl).
Yea I had to Google their total headcount when I saw the headline since the number does sound high, but in reality is only 5%.
When you factor in low performers and how most people here would view middle management in any other topic thread, it's not that insane. If in a pool of 20 workers around you, you can't find 1 worker you don't think is a step below the others, your hiring pipeline is better than most.
This is the flight where one pilot tried to pull up to recover from the stall, and the warning for dual input (which Airbus just averages together) was snoozed by the system yelling about the other errors and was reduced to a light they didn't notice. The captain commented towards the end"no don't climb". The stall alarm was the one the system chose to display over all others and was mishandled (by the pilot who didn't know how to recover from a stall).
Boeing there's physical feed back, when one control moves so does the other.
This was not the first time pilots were having conflicting input without noticing.
IMO that’s the wrong take about that crash. The stall warning stopped once the attitude was above a certain amount, which was an insane decision on airbus’s part.
You can see in the CVR that the stall indicator stopped many times despite them being in a stall the entire time. The pilot (like every other pilot) knew how to recover from a stall on paper. But he had the plane telling him his airspeed was good (frozen tube) and that bringing the pitch down was causing a stall.
The stall voice alarm sounded 75 times, during this time the stick Shaker also was triggering (if both pilots had let go, or just the one who was ignoring the stall warning, the plane rights itself).
It's in the last column in the transcript I linked.
Imo the whole average input issue would have been it's own Boeing MCAS level issue if it happened a decade later, that's more of the root here imo, since one pilot making a mistake is hardly unheard of.
It doesn’t matter how many times it sounded. It matters that it stopped while still in a stall and began again during the process of recovering the stall.
When you’re panicking and the airplane is telling you what you’re doing is starting to cause a stall again, you tend to listen.
>Solar prices in the US are criminal, protecting oil and gas who bought all the politicians.
>Canada here. 7.6kw on our roof for $0 out of pocket thanks to $5k grant and $8k interest free loan.
This very well may be true, but taken at face value Canada seems to be paying you around $7k to install solar panels on your roof (that's 8k interest free loan is losing out to inflation + any interest it would have earned).
Definitely a great deal if you own a home, if I was a renter/condo owner I'd be annoyed that everyone is subsidizing your free solar however.
> Definitely a great deal if you own a home, if I was a renter/condo owner I'd be annoyed that everyone is subsidizing your free solar however.
What kind of selfish point of view is this? Don't you want people to use energy sources that are better for our entire world, even if it costs you like $10 more in taxes per year? Seems like a no brainer deal if you like "the outside" and you want it to still be there.
I'm a renter, been all my life, I'd be happy to pay more in taxes if it means more solar panels for everyone except me. But I also feel the same about elder care, health care and a bunch of other things, do you feel the same for those things too, or this is specifically about solar or owning vs renting?
>I'm a renter, been all my life, I'd be happy to pay more in taxes if it means more solar panels for everyone except me. But I also feel the same about elder care, health care and a bunch of other things, do you feel the same for those things too, or this is specifically about solar or owning vs renting?
There's an alternative, and almost certainly cheaper per watt with cost of scale, where your tax dollars go to a new solar farm instead, something everyone could take advantage of.
It's not zero sum but different physical layouts of energy generation do have different captial and operating costs. Rooftop solar power goes into the grid but maybe not at the most ideal time and scale for the grid operators, which justifiably affects what price they're willing to pay for that power, which justifiably affects the ROI for homeowners with rooftop solar panels.
Rooftop solar has lower distribution costs. A solar farm needs new transmission and upgraded capacity distribution lines to get the power from far away to the users. Generating solar right next to your neighbors lets them access your surplus cheap power with existing slack capacity in the distribution lines. Our current monopoly utilities don’t have a mechanism to recognize that value created, and they would prefer to keep building more infrastructure as that’s what increases profits for them.
Because you get far higher ROI for the large-scale installations. In case you weren't familiar, Canada has a lot of other things which need the money than paying 5x per watt to subsidize panels on your roof instead of on the ground.
> Because you get far higher ROI for the large-scale installations.
Right, but as always, ROI is hardly the most important thing in life, there is more considerations than just "makes more money". For example, as someone affected by a day long country-wide electricity outage where essentially the entire country was without electricity and internet for ~14 hours or something, decentralizing energy across the country seems much more important, than optimizing for the highest ROI.
But again, this is highly contextual and depends, I'm not as sure as you that there are absolute answers to these things.
Grid-tied solar is fragile. If the grid is not nearly-perfect, it won't generate. It will not help society as a whole.
If you personally have battery backup, that helps you personally and you should pay for it, just like you might pay extra to turn up the heat while I keep it lower to save money.
Consider the lower production cost of renewable electricity: in the long run, it offsets the investment. Bonus: no risk of accidents, no hazardous waste, no dependence on a fuel source, no weapons proliferation...
Decentralizing solar power reduces electricity transmission costs and improves reliability. This doesn't offset the additional cost, but it's not negligible.
If the grid gets heavily overloaded, the frequency and voltage drop. And home-based grid-tie solar will shut itself off when it's most needed. This is fragile and DEcreases reliability.
It's not as if homes outside of cities have their own diesel generators to power their house.
(Since I'm guessing from this line of comments you'll point out the less than 1% of people who actually do do this, maybe it's better to focus only the 99% here).
> It's not as if homes outside of cities have their own diesel generators to power their house.
Yeah, no true, I don't understand the point/argument though?
More people relying on renewables == long term better for everyone on the planet
That includes moving people outside of cities to renewables energy sources, is your point that this isn't so important because they're a small piece of the population usually?
The solar farm produces more energy per dollar spent. Rooftop solar is expensive. It produces comparatively fewer kw to amortize the fixed costs over - permitting, getting up on the roof etc.
If a country has abundant land and expensive labor, the money is probably best spent improving grid transmission capacity and otherwise getting the f- out of the way of utility-scale renewables. Places like Pakistan, which is going through a rooftop solar boom, are arguably the opposite - scarce land in the cities, but cheap labor to get up on roofs.
Happy to hear any analyses to the contrary and update my knowledge accordingly.
OK, so rooftop solar is a higher <currency-unit>/kW solar farm. That's one argument against it.
On the other hand, it is also distributed which from some perspectives is a benefit, and is also do-able with very little planning and grid extension. So that's one argument for it.
How things come out on balance depends a bit on what you value and how you imagine the future.
The generation is distributed. That only benefits the people who have panels on their rooftops. If we want them to share the excess with others during a power outage it requires further grid investment.
I think homeowners should install solar panels and batteries where it makes economic sense. If there's money left over after funding utility-scale solar then it should be used for EV incentives and/or funding electrified mass transit. The whole point is to electrify everything rapidly and reduce carbon emissions.
You absolutely do not want them sharing the excess with neighbors during a power outage, this is how you get dead linemen.
Solar panel grid tied inverters generally will refuse to function if there's no external power coming in.
The benefit from the distributed generation means that if your local area has large loads added you don't necessarily need to upgrade the HVDC lines from the power plant to accommodate.
This is not as big a problem as it sounds - you cannot provides enough power for you neighbors and so your breakers (fuses) will cut power long before the lineman gets there.
though linemen are trained that they are working on a live line unless they have personally shorted it out. There are many other ways a seemingly dead line can be live so they don't take a chance.
> This is not as big a problem as it sounds - you cannot provides enough power for you neighbors and so your breakers (fuses) will cut power long before the lineman gets there.
The load side (your neighbors) cannot pull more power than is being generated. My 7kW array can generate 7kW and no more. No breakers will trip in a hypothetical scenario where my inverter fails to shut down during an outage, and my neighbors are trying to drawing 10kW.
That's not how that works. Your breakers are sized to support your panel size. If you have 10kW panels that can push 10kW onto the grid when the grid is live, they can push 10kW when the grid is down. The limiting factor is the power your panels produce which in this case is also...10kW.
You're probably right about linemen but there are a lot of other reasons not to feed power onto a dead grid.
> What kind of selfish point of view is this? Don't you want people to use energy sources that are better for our entire world, even if it costs you like $10 more in taxes per year?
Only if those who make the same or more than me are paying that same tax. After their subsidies of course.
Rich folks getting even richer off the backs of poor folks is bad. Even if it's dressed up as good for the environment or whatever justification you want to come up with.
As a homeowner, I would not take these subsidies as I find them to be immoral. Doesn't mean I won't be installing solar, but I'm doing it for far different reasons than saving money.
By your logic, shouldn't homeowners stop being selfish and just pay for these things themselves in order to make the world a better place? Why do they need renters, other taxpayers, and other ratepayers to subsidize them?
As a renter, I'm
moderately more in favor of utility-scale solar subsidies rather than subsidizing private solar. It seems like another way to make the arrangement more "fair" is to subsidize private solar, but credit the grid up to the original grant's amount. In other words, in the GP's case, they would only get $1000/year in free money for 15 years instead of 20.
(This is very low on my list of things that I care about, to be clear.)
>I'm a renter, been all my life, I'd be happy to pay more in taxes if it means more solar panels for everyone except me.
That's because you're rich like most people on HN.
Environmental protection is a luxury good. This has been proven time and time again.
A great reason to prioritize growth and wealth creation. Poor countries don't make those tradeoffs, they're worried about survival not what percentage of their energy usage is renewable.
Solar hardware is so affordable now that it's booming even in poorer countries. The most remarkable recent example is Pakistan, which has seen explosive growth of rooftop solar power, most of it receiving no government subsidies:
Pakistan has imported almost 45 gigawatts worth of solar panels over the last five or six years, which is equal to the total capacity of its electricity grid. Almost 34 gigawatts have come in only in the last couple of years.
It’s a very bottom-up revolution. This is not government deciding this is the route to take. And it’s not being driven by climate concerns, it’s all about the economics. Renewables are out-competing the traditional sources of energy.
Not really, unless you are just guessing. A quick read shows that solar gained popularity because of an unreliable grid and a removal of subsidies on diesel. Solar ended up being the cheaper and more reliable option. Labor costs for installation are also lower. In remote areas you may not even have a grid option. Simple general assumptions don't hold across vastly different geopolitical circumstances.
Great job of indirectly implying that there must be a tradeoff. Funny thing though: those poor countries? They're not building nuclear, or oil fired, or coal fired, or natural gas plants. They're installing solar. Not necessarily because they care about what percentage of their energy usage is renewable, but because there is no tradeoff.
Further, environmental protection is not a luxury good, it's a long term investment. Ask me more in another 30-50 years when the larger impacts of climate change are happening. Or ask someone else about how much we've spent on superfund cleanup sites.
Everything has a tradeoff. That's a foundational truth of economics.
Environmental protection is a luxury good in economic terms. The Environmental Kuznets Curve is compelling to me. It's extremely difficult to assess the ROI on long term investments, particularly when your country has unstable rule of law or conflict.
I'm pro-solar, it's amazing technology that empowers individuals and communities. I just don't agree that everything I love I must force other people to pay for.
Sam said he doesn't force other people to pay for things he loves, so I'm wondering how he doesn't force his neighbors to pay for his house with their view.
Environmental protection may be a long-term investment, but reducing CO2 emission is probably not. The results are too diffuse and you're at the mercy of other countries' energy policy. If you're a small country, you can invest in CO2 reduction all you want, but what actually happens will be up to the US, China, and India.
> That's because you're rich like most people on HN.
Probably, but I also haven't been rich all my life, I've also been broke and borderline homeless, and my point of view of paying taxes so others get helped, hasn't changed since then. In fact, probably the reason my perspective is what it is, is because money like that has helped me when I was poor, and I'd like to ensure we continue doing that for others.
And I agree, poor countries can't afford to think about "luxury problems" like the pollution in the world, but since we're talking about people living in such countries where we can afford about these problems, lets do that, so the ones who can't, don't have to. Eventually they'll catch up, and maybe at that point we can make it really easy for them to transition to something else?
Environmental protection IS about survival for poor countries. YOU can afford to not care and burn gas because you won't have your life completely and permanently destroyed by global warming. Poor people don't have that luxury.
Rethink your position because it's completely upside down
the only reason environmental protection could conceivably be considered a luxury (and not a necessity) is because certain sectors of the capital class refuse to convert their means of production away from generating waste and pollution. that's it. time and time again we see direct action by Chevron, BP, Shell, Exxon, ARAMCO et al to stifle change, refuse scientific evidence of the nature of their pollution, and attack anyone who comes anywhere near impacting their bottom line. look at Steven Donzinger if you need proof of this.
this is not a matter of some fictional invisible hand. these are decisions made by real people who do not care about you, society, the health of the environment or the people who inhabit it. stop carrying their water.
> A great reason to prioritize growth and wealth creation. Poor countries don't make those tradeoffs, they're worried about survival not what percentage of their energy usage is renewable.
Tell that to places like Pakistan where solar is allowing people to have cheaper electricity without connecting to the grid
That's exactly my point. They're making decisions based on their economic reality not sacrificing for environmental principles like the above commenter.
Solar is great. It can stand on its own without subsidies.
Keep in mind the standard of living. If you’re in a country that experiences routine long power outages, having a solar panel that you can use to charge your phone during the day is pretty great. Having to get ahold of and burn diesel fuel is not so great. Doesn’t produce at night? Doesn’t matter much, it’s better than nothing.
There is line that connects gov't subsidies in wealthy countries for the last 50 years funding private R&D to poorer countries being able to afford it. Arguably the poorer countries don't get to make the "decisions based on economic reality" in favor of solar without the subsidies in wealthy countries happening first. There is also an argument to be made that the R&D isn't finished and it still makes sense to subsidize it to drive the cost down further.
> There is also an argument to be made that the R&D isn't finished and it still makes sense to subsidize it to drive the cost down further.
Maybe there is an argument to be made, but it sounds like a very poor one if poor countries are now putting up solar panels because it's the cheapest form of energy production. Sounds like subsidizing the same panels going up on houses is a bit silly now that the costs have shifted so much.
The argument can probably be made for direct subsidies of R&D for bleeding edge solar tech, and perhaps even battery installations to get volume up. Or maybe even subsidizing local production vs. buying everything from China.
The arguments for wealthy countries to subsidize their wealthiest citizens to install solar for personal gain seems rather weak at this point in the game. It certainly made sense 20 years ago, but in most areas where it makes economic sense to begin with solar penetration has hit a tipping point.
> But at a national level the data is compelling. I'm convinced by the Environmental Kuznets Curve.
Which data do you find compelling?
For people who don't know the Environmental Kuznets Curve is basically the hypothesis that as economies grow past a certain they naturally start to cause less environmental damage.
As far as I can tell the main empirical evidence in favour of this is the fact that some western countries have managed to maintain economic growth whilst making reductions to their carbon emissions. This has, of course, partially been driven by offshoring especially polluting industries, but also as a result of technological developments like renewable energy, and BEVs.
On the other hand, taking a global sample it's still rather clear that there's a strong correlation between wealth and carbon emissions, both at the individual scale and at the level of countries.
It's also clear that a lot of the gains that have been made in, say, Europe have been low-hanging fruit that won't be easy to repeat. For example migrating off coal power has a huge impact, but going from there to a fully clean grid is a larger challenge.
We also know that there are a bunch of behaviours that come with wealth which have a disproportionately negative effect on the environment. For example, rich people (globally) consume more meat, and take more flights. Those are both problems without clear solutions.
(FWIW I agree that solar power is somewhat regressive, but just for the normal "Vimes Boots Theory" reasons that anyone who is able to install solar will save money in the medium term. That requires the capital for the equipment — which is rapidly getting cheaper — but also the ability to own land or a house to install the equipment on. The latter favours the already well off. There are similar problems with electric cars having higher upfront costs but lower running costs. The correct solution is not to discourage people from using things, but to take the cost of being poor into account in other areas of public policy).
Agreed. But there are poor people in Canada, and forcing them to pay more money (and slightly lowering their own quality of life) so that wealthier Canadians can install solar panels is, at least, a debatable policy.
We have progressive tax rates in Canada which should offset this to some extent.
Also, you keep ignoring that the environment is a public good. Poor people in Canada will also be disproportionately impacted by bigger temperature extremes (heat waves, extreme cold), worse air quality, etc.)
Does Canada not have progressive taxation? How do poor people pay more than rich people?
To be clear, I don't think rooftop solar subsidies are the best use of government money either. Governments should subsidize utility-scale solar, EVs, efficient buildings, and mass transit. They should focus on cheaper and more efficient permitting, and better grids.
> Does Canada not have progressive taxation? How do poor people pay more than rich people?
It’s not that they’re paying more than rich people. It’s that even with progressive taxation, tax(everything the government currently spends money on) < tax(current spending + solar subsidies). That is to say… giving solar subsidies to rich people causes the tax paid by everyone to increase. Those making more money pay a larger fraction of the increase because of progressive taxation but everyone who is paying taxes pays incrementally more when the government spends more money.
Canada should invest in Nuclear. Solar is far less efficient in Canada than somewhere like California - whether rooftop or utility-scale. The short winter days, low angle of incidence, and snow means that panels are basically non-operative for 3-4 months a year. This is a huge problem if you also want people to switch to efficient electric-powered heating in the form of heat pumps.
Great, if the break ground today the first nuke will be online in absolute minimum 10 years (likely 20) and cost absolute minimum of $15 billion (likely closer to $30 billion)
Do you want to guess how cheap solar will be in 10-20 years, and how much power we could generate in the mean time.
The efficiency of solar does not matter in 2026. Panels are so cheap that just you don't have to think about it if you have abundant land. If solar is 4x less productive in the winter you just build 4x as many panels. Panels have to be angled more vertical the further north you go so the snow will just slide off. They are not "non-operative 3-4 months a year" - this is just Big Oil FUD.
Everything has tradeoffs - those panels themselves take energy and rare earth minerals to create, and getting both of those requires pollution, primarily in China where they have lower standards than western nations.
So filling Canada with panels because they're cheap isn't likely the best environmental choice, on net. Though I admit I haven't done the math here, it's just an intuition that "just build 4x panels" isn't the solution.
Your intuition is flat out wrong. Building new nuclear takes too long. "Just fix the nuclear regulations" is a vibes-based statement. Even China built 100x as much solar as nuclear in 2025. Wouldn't they "lower standards" to build more nuclear if it made any economic sense?
As for
> those panels themselves take energy and rare earth minerals to create
You've swallowed Big Oil propaganda and are choosing to parrot it without thinking. The actual truth?
"Every year, [ICE vehicles] consume over 17 times more tons of oil (2,150 million tons per year) than the amount of battery minerals we’d need to extract just once to run transportation forever. Even when including the weight of other raw materials in ore and brine, one-off mineral demand would still end up over 30% lighter than annual oil extraction for road transport. And unlike minerals, oil products are promptly burned in internal
combustion engines and must be replaced each year, forever
Admittedly this is about minerals for batteries. But solar panels are also recyclable.
The reason Nuclear takes so long is that people are neurotic about it and so the regulations are totally excessive. If we had a standardised reactor, it wouldn't be that difficult to churn them out.
The nuclear industry rightly fears excessive standardization because the more units of a given reactor model are built, the more drastically production is reduced by the discovery of a serious bug that leads to their immediate shutdown.
This is one of the major design problems of SMRs (along with the abandonment of economies of scale).
Since you clearly didn't read past the second sentence in my post I'm going to repeat myself. Why doesn't China repeal "excessive" and "neurotic" regulations and build more nuclear instead of solar? Rather than the other way around?
Maybe I'd prefer to spend the same public money on building nuclear power plants, or gigantic solar panel arrays in the desert, rather than subsidizing individual roof-owners being able to save money on their electricity bill and not mine.
>Don't you want people to use energy sources that are better for our entire world, even if it costs you like $10 more in taxes per year?
If everyone gets the benefit it's either A) exactly the same cost but with additional government program or B) some form of wealth distribution and not necessarily in a direction you favor
Also large solar installations are significantly more cost efficient.
Mind you I am IN FAVOR of subsidized residential solar, but let's not pretend government money is free.
In Japan, where we're currently getting rooftop solar (like nearly every single house everywhere) there are indeed some large solar installations, but the point of rooftop solar (which the government is encouraging) is that it reduces the pressure on the grid itself, and upgrading the grid in Japan to where it should ideally be is a huge, no, astronomical undertaking. For various reasons.
Not sure how it is where you live, but when I pay taxes they don't go to politicians. The taxes go to health care facilities, infrastructure, education, etc. etc. Only a small percentage goes to pay politicians, and it's all in the open - we know exactly how much each of them is getting.
Not OP, but it wasn't presented as a fact. Literally used the word Seams.
> There is nothing more unjust than forcing someone to buy something they do not want simply because you think it would be good for them
Seatbelts? Circuit breakers? Literally any safety equipment. You're required to have them because it's not just good for you, but expensive to society if hospital beds are low or there's not enough firetrucks to go around.
Similarly, if you're polluting more than you have to be due to the source of your electricity, that's bad for everyone. I also rent, but I still understand that it's to the public's benefit that home owners (a class that is already above me in assets and wealth) be given motivation to consume cleaner energy if I don't want to have the climate get even worse. It's the same thing, just the effects feel less direct. That doesn't make them any less valid.
> There is nothing more unjust than forcing someone to buy something they do not want simply because you think it would be good for them.
Who said that? Taxes are what you pay to be a member of the society you live, and also to help those less fortunate, like your neighbors. You can skip paying those, if you stop living in society, many done that before, and it is still possible.You can't possibly see taxes as "forcing someone to buy something they do not want" right? Two completely different things.
And yes, this is all my opinion, like most comments on HN.
It certainly is possible, people do it all the time, in various countries. Most of the time we call them "homeless", but also there are people who literally set up camp in the forest then stay there, it isn't unheard of.
The book "The Stranger in the Woods" is one such case, about a man who lived in the woods for 27 years by himself.
That said, it isn't easy, and it's harder in some countries than others, but I'd still say it's possible in many countries today, YMMV.
> As a non car owner are you annoyed everyone gets subsidized roads?
Yes, and people should be annoyed by this given the underfunding, poor urban planning, and outright hostility by many local governments against anything that dares encroach on the sanctity of car culture.
"Car culture" and "public roads" are not the same thing.
I'm a militant cyclist and I'm extremely unhappy with the state of urban planning in the world. But... Roads are a really good thing and I'm glad my government builds them.
I just wish they'd built them a bit differently, at least in the city.
I am not trying to equate the two concepts. Just that in most of North America car culture is what dictate the roads we have and who they’re built for.
So you do not use busses,taxi or road travel? do you fly all the time?
Do you have stuff delivered by truck/cars or only by air?
What about shopping? do you think the items you buy or the things needed to make those items use roads ? In a perfect extremist capitalist word there would be a road tax included in the products and services so you would still pay the text for the roads.
No, in a perfect world, there would be a use tax, and those doing the delivery would pay the cost, and then pass that cost on to you. You might have meant it that way, but it sounded more like a gov. imposed tax based on the price of goods or something.
Yes, the costs should be apportioned to those who are making them. If the bus causes the most road damage, then it should be charged. Then it'll make financial sense to invest in rail. Financial incentives are how capitalism works and the purpose of governments under capitalism is to apply externalities to the source causing them.
It'd be interesting to try charging vehicles relative to the road damage they do as it's proportional to around the fourth power of weight. It would likely change the nature of logistics as it could mean that large trucks would be more expensive that using two or three smaller trucks. Similarly, buses would benefit from being smaller and lighter.
Okay, so there is a maximum. Charging proportionate to the road damage costs would still change the cost benefits of using single large vehicles vs multiple smaller vehicles, or possibly lots more axles.
1. As soon as the roads are all paying best-possible-use property tax for the space they take up and it's completely paid by automobiles, in addition to all maintenance, we should try to proportionally assign dedicated bicycle infrastructure costs toward bicycle users, now and anticipated.
User pay formerly-public-infrastructure is what I identified as libertarian. Would you also advocate for residents of high crime areas to pay more taxes for police coverage?
"User pay" is typically associated with regressive per-use taxes. It's perfectly compatible with socialism to ensure the cost of the road system is applied to only automobile users in a progressive manner. Relatedly, Finland moving violation fines are not a fixed fee and are proportional to income: https://nri.today/wealthy-speedsters-beware-finlands-million... Stop thinking "cars=default", they are not.
Legally criminal actions are violations against the state, which is why a prosecutor decides whether to file charges and does not need the consent of the victim to do so. We already have what you suggest with civil law and private security.
It's pure pedantry to distinguish between "user pay" and "progressive fees" based on usage. You're advocating for private payments on public infrastructure, it doesn't make it socialism just because it's infrastructure you disapprove of.
> So you do not use busses,taxi or road travel? do you fly all the time? Do you have stuff delivered by truck/cars or only by air? What about shopping? do you think the items you buy or the things needed to make those items use roads ? In a perfect extremist capitalist word there would be a road tax included in the products and services so you would still pay the text for the roads.
"Yet you participate in society, curious!"
> In a perfect extremist capitalist word there would be a road tax included
There's nothing capitalist about that. Driving around and polluting the environment is currently done for free. That should be taxed. Highways and streets are by and large (in NA) used as a publicly subsidized private good at the expense of everyone else. Subsidized to the detriment of all because it pulls funding away from public transit that would move more people, prioritizing convenience of drivers over the safety of everyone else (to say nothing of it creating dead spaces with nothing but parking as far as the eye can see).
Public transport uses the roads too.
In my country Romania there are road taxes included in the fuel prices and there are vehicle tax that is proportionalw itht eh engine size and vehicle age and how mych it pollutes. So people that drive more use more fuel and pay more tax. If you use your bike then you will not pay that taxes, now what should we tax for the bike lanes ? And how should we convert he fuel road tax for electric cars ?
That already exists. In large parts of North America there isn’t a tax proportional to vehicle age, and the tax on gasoline doesn’t cover road wear (to say nothing about the unproved externality of pollution). So municipal property taxes and the like are used to cover the costs of road repair.
> electric cars.
The same way we pay for electricity and natural gas, report your kms and then have the odometer inspected on a semi regular basis and when you get rid of the car.
Why are you acting like subsidizing a homeowners free power is like any of these?
If I instead phrase it as "I'd rather subsidize someone's health care than pay for your free electricity", would that help you understand that there tends to be a priority system when spending tax dollars?
You don't have infinite tax dollars to spend after all.
> Are you annoyed corn farmers get subsidies for growing corn?
Yes we should immediately end these subsidies.
> It feels like the US can’t have nice things because people are hell bent on others not having nice things.
The US as a whole has lots of nice things. And sometimes the things the US has are not as nice as they could be because an unwise subsidy is paying for something inferior, and a small group of people who financially benefit from the subsidy advocate politically against changing it.
If you're a renter/condo then you're probably getting excess solar generation delivered to you from homeowners with nearby solar roofs. So presumably there is some benefit to you in terms of cheap generation.
Your last argument could apply to anything really.
Why should I subsidize farmers if they can't compete?
Why do I have subsidize our own manufacturing companies if they can't compete so their workers have a job, at my expense?
Why do I need to subsidize car owners to have yet another lane but can't get a decent train instead?
Here in Poland suddenly all miners pretend to be subsidized by the state, even if they work for private companies.
Why do I need to subsidize them if the companies they work for can't turn a profit, or when they did for decades chose to pay dividends and do buybacks instead of investing? And now I pay the bill?
I mean, at some point you need to cope with the fact that money has to be spent and circulate in some fashion to promote economic activity and projects.
You could argue that subsidizing solar brings energy prices down in any case.
When rules are vague enough you can pretty much always find a rule someone is 'breaking' depending on how you argue it.
It's why countries don't just have a single law that says "don't be evil".
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