China has made significant investments in solar and nuclear technology specifically designed to reduce costs per unit of energy to make it competitive to fossil fuels.
It’s been great for people like me that go off grid at times for travel and their efforts in the solar areas has seen dramatic drops in the cost of solar panels for many. They are possibly at their lowest prices ever now due to their investment in these areas.
This is not say they are perfect and everything is great but it is kind of disturbing with all of their issues (and some would say there are many) they get that living in the 1600’s with coal mining isn’t perhaps the best practices for everyone on a massive scale.
Many of our western local governments fight against alternative sources and even stop projects as they have guzzled the oil, gas, and coal are the only ways to go Kool-Aid. It’s great for jobs and business they say.
There is no "possibly" about it. Right now, solar is the cheapest form of electrical generation ever, in human history, and it is still getting cheaper. It has literally seen price drops of more than 2 orders of magnitude in my lifetime. It is, without a doubt, going to be the primary means of energy generation for the future of our species, assuming our species is to have a future.
It's hardly something the Chinese can claim as their achievement, though. There's a large economy for solar panels -- and frankly, the Chinese production ramped up in response significantly to Californian demand under their (now besieged) rooftop solar policies. A lot of players are involved from research to production to demand and any one country that claims it's all thanks to them is sweet-talking you.
Solar getting cheaper does worry me from an enviromentalist position.
Too many people, governments, and corporations are sticking panels over top of ecosystems that rely on that sunlight, rather than bother with the hassle of installing them on top of existing human infrastructure.
Cheaper panels is gonna lead to more techie investors turning deserts into wastelands, and we dont have any real safeguards against that yet.
Yeah but the same thing was going on during the original cold war. The US and Russia were both doing hot proxy conflicts in other places, just not directly with each other. Korea, Vietnam and Afghanistan were three really notable examples but there were more.
Not for the Russians, for them it’s still a special operation since their leader is also very special…they are not involved in any war from their very special point of view.
My guess: You can remove the tires for flight, paint adds weight and I don’t see the Russian army scraping off the current paint without fucking up the primer/anti corrosion layer.
Light paint keeps the heat away, so it’s the default. Plus, this entire kerfuffle has been a matter class in lack of planning. They never thought they would need it, so why bother painting 50+ year old planes another color.
In the case of strategic bombers, anti-flash white is a key feature to reflect as much of the thermal pulse of a nuclear detonation as possible; theoretically you want these planes to survive the apocalypse that they’re unleashing to return to base and do it again.
I wonder if this’ll lead to any sort of action against China. Generally people have thought that China wouldn’t outright support Russia with war materials because they can’t afford to be sanctioned by “the West”, as they’re much more reliant on trade with the EU and US
Riiiight, you’re going to build a thing that presumably goes mach 10 which can shoot other things moving at mach 10
Biden is slowly just morphing into Reagan
Call it Star Wars Joe!
If it’s laser-based (and it may have to be if it’s going to intercept anything going that fast) it is the Star Wars thing all over again! freedom-and-democracy
Worn on the head by the subject the device can pick up a spike in brainwaves triggered by explicit content, each time an indecent photo appeared, an alarm went off.
telegraph.co.uk
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