Extinguishing any fire with water is like saving the environment with nuclear energy. It might work, but if the fire turns out to be a metal or grease fire, you have a problem just like when the final waste repositories later turn out to be unsuitable.
> How did Germany evolve to be so anti-nuclear? Given the alternatives nuclear seems the way to go.
Nuclear power is currently by far the most expensive way to generate electricity. And this despite the fact that the insurance sum for the power plants is capped and the remaining risk is assumed by the state and the money that was invested for final waste storage will predictably not be sufficient either. Our early attempts for final storage since the 60s have failed and since 2013 we have been planning how to recover hundreds of thousands of barrels from a salt mine from which radioactively contaminated brine is leaking. And we have yet to find a suitable repository where long-term safety can be guaranteed.
We also does not have sustainable energy storage and that's the reason for burning more coal, while spraying everyone with radioactive ash from coal in the process. I find it so funny when you are worried about waste from nuclear power plants, while there are literal tons of uranium every year being exhaled into the atmosphere and stored on ash heaps under the open air.
We did that indeed for decades and then it turned out that the site was unsuitable, because of water inflows, and now we have been planning since 2013 how to recover the barrels again. The beginning of the recovery is planned to start in 2033 and is estimated to last for decades.
It's not true that Germany has no seismic activity btw.
We tried to bury the waste deep underground in the 60s and 70s already. Let's say it didn't work out so well and now we are still planning how to retrieve it since the decision was made in 2013.
We have not yet found a geologically suitable site in Germany. In contrast to the less disturbed granites of Finland and Sweden, the formations occurring in Germany are more fractured and thus less suitable. Currently, several salt and clay blocks are being investigated for their suitability as repositories, but they have other problems. (Water solubility for salt and lower stability for clay).
"According to the report of the Repository Commission, the final disposal of highly radioactive waste in Germany will drag on well into the 22nd century. The commission expects the end of emplacement to occur between the years 2075 and 2130, while the "state of a sealed repository mine should be reached between 2095 and 2170 or later." Accordingly, highly radioactive waste could be housed in interim storage facilities until after 2100. At the same time, final storage costs are projected to range from about 49 billion to 170 billion euros; significantly more than the 23 billion euros in payments transferred by nuclear power plant operators to the government for this purpose on July 3, 2017."
Watching Germany do anything related to nuclear energy or waste is like the people in in infomercials failing to do very basic tasks. Get your act together.
I tend to agree. However, turning them off is partially exactly getting the act together.
The very big problem is that at the same time particularly southern German states fail to support renewables and power distribution lines.
So while there was a time line. One part of the time line was missed. So everyone decided to rather count on Russian gas as an intermediary solution with the known geopolitical consequences that followed.
PS: Strange twist: There is a German company that now wants to produce fuel elements for Russian nuclear power plants...
> turning them off is partially exactly getting the act together.
Only from an old-school deeply irrational fear of nuclear energy perspective. Now that we know how catastrophic climate change could be the rational choice would be to replace all coal and gas with nuclear. Germans also really need to understand just how critical cheap and reliable electricity is to quality of life and GDP. Germany is making very bad decisions for deeply ideological reasons divorced from any understanding of real world technological limitations.
You find "interesting" that someone just wants to report a security vulnerability without having to accept any conditions first?
Funny, I find it interesting that they want to pay a bugbounty even though nobody asked for it. But I guess paying hush money is just cheaper than having to seriously fix the issue.
They just marked something the way exploit was done as "malacious", without fixing the root problem, or informing the the reporter that they "fixed" it. Instead claiming it was never there. That is very unprofessional!
And if these guys were to go though the NDA route, The company may choose just not to fix it at all, and tell these researchers to be quiet about it. And you'd never know there was such a exploit ever.
If they had taken the risks and incurred the costs of development themselves, of course. But they were massively subsidized. In that case, the state should either get a share of the profits or negotiate fair prices that exclude all too huge profits.
For creating a vaccine which solves a global pandemic I think the rewards should be pretty steep. 60 billion is peanuts on the global scale. Millions of lives have been saved.
The costs of the pandemic are one side. The other is the cost of developing and producing the vaccines. In a normal market situation, prices are determined by supply and demand. But that's really not such a situation here. The question from the government's point of view has to be whether you could have had the vaccine cheaper. After all, large sums of money have already been invested by the states for research and development. The question is what the contracts and conditions were for these investments. But if the manufacturers had hardly any costs and risks during development and are now allowed to hold the rights to the patents and make large profits with the vaccines, then in my opinion something has gone wrong. However, I don't know if that is actually the case here.
Vaccine manufacturers are making $20-25/dose in revenue, not profit.
The price for vaccines currently being charged is absurdly reasonable. I would pay 10x the price out of pocket without a second thought, and I wouldn't care how much of that is profit for the manufacturer.
Around $20 for the incredibly new mrna based vaccines. Other versions, like oxford-astrazeneca, are single digit USD per dose. As I recall ISI has set a price ceiling of about $4/dose there.
These vaccines are so stupidly cheap and cost effective that the priority is, has been, and will be simply manufacturing and distributing enough.
> The question from the government's point of view has to be whether you could have had the vaccine cheaper.
The answer to this is emphatically no.
Countries that paid more per-dose got vaccines earlier. Manufactures are producing vaccines as fast as they can, but there's still unfilled demand for over 5 billion more doses. And in low-income countries which can't afford to pay as much, even today only 1.1% of the population has been vaccinated so far...
> there's still unfilled demand for over 5 billion more doses.
Because US and Europe can pay that much more the Big Pharma is going to make the 3rd, 4th,... booster shots instead of trying to satisfy that low-income countries demand. And making new vaccine against delta seems also less profitable than just pushing the booster shots. Immunity falling in 6 months - sounds like a situation somewhat between subscription model and 12 hours Vicodin, you can be sure that the MBAs know how to exploit it.
What happens around covid is well outside just the supposed medical issue of pandemic fighting. If anything it is seems to be primarily about business and politics. For example US officially pressured Brazil to not take Russian vaccine https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2021/03/16/hhs-brazil-s... .
> In a normal market situation, prices are determined by supply and demand. But that's really not such a situation here.
Isn't it exactly the situation here?
I mean, a few months ago we even had central governments bid against their own local governments to have access to vaccines. Doesn't that lay out quite clearly that this is a demand-driven market?
The market is not normal because countries have invested massive sums of money into these companies without acquiring shares in return, so I just hope they have negotiated other terms to get the vaccines at fair prices.
> The market is not normal because countries have invested massive sums of money into these companies without acquiring shares in return (...)
I don't believe this is a fair or accurate description of what really happens.
Countries invest in education and free and open research, countries invest in entrepreneurship and in people launching startups, and countries invest in partnerships between their public research and private companies to foster the creation of added-value products and services.
And in the end those companies pay taxes back to the state, which in Europe (where BioNTech is from) is higher than 20%.
Furthermore, your comment has nothing at all to do with markets. You're trying to pin onto the "market" tag one of the most basic characteristics of social democratic societies, where the state invests in infrastructure and in lowering or eliminating barriers to entry in business.
The initial thesis was that governments get nothing in return from their investment in education and research. This is patently false. Companies pay taxes, and the higher income they make, the more taxes they pay.
You may argue that over 20% in income tax is not enough, but in the case of BioNTech and Pfizer, you're arguing between two scenarios: seeing the states get about 20% from the profit extracted from billions in revenue, or getting zero due to the absence of any investment in education and basic research and supporting research projects.
Getting paid a 20% chunk of a multi-billion euro revenue is not small change, and this also ignores the fact that this prior investment in education and research shared with startups, which mind you supported the bulk of the development cost of these vaccines and thus enabled humanity to have vaccines with such a low turn-around time, was what ultimately allowed the world to start seeing the light at the end of the tunnel. How valuable is that?
Not to mention the externalities in fostering the creation of industries and high-value tech jobs.
With sugar I could at most harm myself, not others. A tax on sugar but not on fat would be discrimination of one diet form or even lifestyle over another. I can offset a lot of sugar with a lot of sport myself.
Sugar isn't an externality so it doesn't have the same justification as a carbon tax, you are right about that.
But, it's still significantly better than taxing productive work (the current system), which is why I support it so strongly. In my mind, it's not a question of whether the sugar tax is a great idea, it's a question of whether it's better than current taxes (due to the incentives it fixes). Unless externality taxes can fund the whole budget, we will need to branch out.
I don't like the contrast with fat since fat isn't known to be bad. See studies on olive oil consumption, or see studies on how the keto diet might help with chronic disease. Sugar is bad. Taxing sugar will save lives. I'd say the same for alcohol and cigarettes.
I also view this as somewhat important for a functioning society. Even though sugar isn't an externality per se, having a society full of sick people isn't conducive to its flourishing, and might have pretty bad unintended downstream consequences. If everyone is depressed and sick, might they vote for a populist autocrat, after being unable to put their finger on what exactly is wrong? See Hitler's 10x explosion of popularity one year into the Great Depression. This is a broad view of externalities which I pay mind to.
Regarding sugar vs. fat: large amounts of saturated fats are known to be unhealthy. In small amounts, sugar can even be healthy, e.g. after exercise.
One problem with taxes on addictive substances is that they have little effect on consumption behavior. A higher tobacco tax makes smokers poorer, but only very few will smoke less as a result.
> One problem with taxes on addictive substances is that they have little effect on consumption behavior.
Has this been studied? I get that we expect a lot of price inelasticity due to the nature of addiction, but I wonder how true that is.
One study[1] I'm reading now about a natural experiment on cigarette taxes. It worked a bit. There was an immediate decrease of 0.75% after the 25% tax was implemented, and it continued to decrease by 0.02% month-on-month afterwards (although part of that 0.75% decrease might be the existence of untaxed substitutes, and part of that 0.02% monthly decrease might be a global trend).
This[2] seems quite optimistic about taxes' ability to reduce demand. However, the data they share is not a nice natural experiment, so I don't put too much weight into it.
This one[3] is saying demand isn't inelastic at all.
This one[4] on sugar is saying a 10% price increase leads to a 13% reduction in demand.
> A higher tobacco tax makes smokers poorer
Yes, but an income tax makes workers poorer. I'd rather tax destructive behavior than productive behavior, as long as demand isn't too inelastic, given that we literally have to choose between them in order to raise sufficient revenue for the state. I admit that I should read more studies on exactly how inelastic it is before coming to a conclusion on that, though, but my cursory reading seems to support that it isn't overly inelastic.
> large amounts of saturated fats are known to be unhealthy
I wouldn't mind taxing that as well. I'm aware there's a point at which it becomes a bit too complicated, though. Start simple with sugar, alcohol and tobacco, and add other things like saturated fats based on the weight of evidence and whether it can be done simply and easily.
> In small amounts, sugar can even be healthy, e.g. after exercise.
Yeah. Similar to how alcohol might be healthy for people with heart disease. These are edge cases, and the tax will distort the market for these edge cases. But taxation is always a blunt instrument, and the broad alignment of incentives 99% of the time with a sugar tax is correct, unlike with a property tax (not a land tax) or an income tax where you get a misalignment almost all the time.
Interestingly, the whole thing now seems to have turned into the opposite. sugar = bad, fat = good. But that is not true. Sugar is actually only problematic because it's a bit addictive and it's easy to eat a lot of it. The real problem is taking in too many calories (in whatever form) and/or burning too few.
Carbs cause a sugar rush and after the pancreas deals with it, you get hungry again a couple of hours later. This is why people snack between meals, increasing their caloric intake. If you avoid carbs and focus on proteins and healthy fats, you can go 4, 6 or even 8 hours without getting hungry, effectively reducing your caloric intake.
