Without clicking your link, I'm guessing it was either a friendship program of the chinese government (one of the more altruistic governments, even among governments), or possibly a UN program (the UN is sometimes called the "united altruists") which simultaneously eradicated it worldwide. Was I close?
Angela Merkel was a disaster in this regard. The nation went collectively insane after Fukushima and she cowed to the public to win the next election rather than try to calm the public ignorance.
Instead, Germany funded Russia's NordGas II pipeline to replace the nuclear power they turned off with gas. Insane stupidity.
"Anglo-Dutch group Royal Dutch Shell, Austria’s OMV, France’s Engie and Germany’s Uniper and Wintershall will each provide loans covering 10 per cent of the €9.5bn cost of the pipeline, with Gazprom providing the remaining 50 per cent."
Also, clean energy is a long way off and Europeans are still going to have to heat their houses. Personally, I'm happy that we're doing business with Russia, rather than being locked into more expensive, US gas imports.
That's not true. There is an exit strategy for coal in germany and at least for now it's still going. Next year they will shutdown the remaining nuclear plants. That will be the moment of truth.
While I concur with the 'disaster', the pipeline thing seems to be more rooted in our former chancellor, a.k.a Gazprom Gerd. Revolving door, and such, you know? :-)
I'm afraid it usually is - just think of ways to sway it. Now, I would love to agree it shouldn't be, but there is no concrete system I can think of that could decouple it well. Ownership of media by the state oftentimes makes it a propaganda arm of whichever party is ruling. Private ownership, even in case of heavy subsidies, implies ownership by capital...
I take your point, but also don't think that the repackaging of shitty loans into bundles that are somehow magically considered less shitty is happening at that scale anymore. And frankly, ISAs are a lot less shitty than home purchase loans to unemployed people who have near zero likelihood of paying it back unless that home goes up in value. Even if it was happening, there's no incentive towards an upwards price spiral in the code bootcamp space at the current demand levels (and the elasticity curve is very different in scalable bootcamps as compared to housing).
Had the dumb manipulations not happened, loans are actually quite straightforward to value, so I would be shocked if whoever was purchasing the ISAs didn't have at least a "much better than HN" view into what they should properly be worth.
Your comment prompted me to do some research on that line to Poland.
According to sources I've found (all in Polish, so I'm not linking them here), this 220kV line Between Bialostok and Rossj was built in 1962 and is out of use since 2004. The power to the region is delivered by 100kV lines which are not shows on this map.
There was an idea to build a new one double 400kV line to import energy from Belarus but nothing going on so far.
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