This is where China’s “debt trap diplomacy” might actually be beneficial for Kenya…

China’s loans serve to improve the top-line (economic growth), and China’s loan concessions don’t affect that. When Kenya puts Mombasa Port’s 50-year operating and port fees up for collateral, that’s a hit on the bottom line (Kenya’s government revenues) but does not change the fact that the port still exists to drive economic growth. Moreover, often the short-term hit in port revenues is less than the interest that would’ve been paid on the loan, so these collateralized loans are often cashflow neutral or even cashflow positive to default on.

The IMF and World Bank are more focused on padding the bottom line (tax revenues) by increasing taxes and decreasing subsidies. What an insane policy.

If a country can’t grow, how can you expect it to pay off it’s loans? The entire principle of government loans in the 21st century is that GDP growth makes loans progressively less expensive. The IMF and World Bank exist only to keep developing countries poor.

Well, the trade war is also a factor, but what I’m saying is that Chinese government policy is what’s keeping EV manufacturers from selling abroad. The EV supply chain has gotten so robust and cost-efficient in China that the government has to bribe manufacturers to focus their efforts on the domestic market instead of just eating the cake of everyone else.

AC/DC converter losses are on the order of 10%. Negligible, and don’t change the point. Your pedantry is noted and ignored.

Every single Chinese EV manufacturer wants to go make sales abroad because the price war in China makes profits barely attainable, but government policy and subsidies keep sales within the country.

The open secret is that China’s EV subsidies are designed to keep sales within the country, because otherwise Chinese EV companies could make obscenely higher margins selling overseas.

The BYD Seagull ($9700 in China) is being sold as the BYD Dolphin Mini in Mexico… For $21000.

The BYD Seal U (€19400 in China) is being sold in Germany for €41990.

Sanders could’ve won against Trump in 2016 and he could’ve won against in 2020. Yet, here we are in 2024…

Lai is a short-sighted idiot that would rather be dependent on external seaborne LNG imports than maintain any degree of energy independence with nuclear.

I don’t think I need to say anything about how bad natural gas is.

How much internal migration between Crimea and other regions has there been? The population of Crima has hovered around 2 million for decades.

Dividing America by building infrastructure instead of dumping trillions of dollars into the next military superproject.

I shouldn’t need to say that not only natural gas bad, but oil also bad

I’m cautiously optimistic that the burger empire will embrace HSR like the rest of the advanced world. America’s competition is no longer the Soviet Union, but China.

Heat is actually surprisingly easy to moderate with green spaces, water, shade, and wind.

Unfortunately, roads, roofs, and buildings fuck that all up.

Plant trees along every road. Line every building roof with greenery. Water that greenery, and centrally control how it’s watered to create temperature/humidity differentials and thus wind throughout the entire city.

“small creature comforts” like air conditioning and the refrigerants used in them make up 7% of global GHG emissions. How about you take your air conditioning apologism and fuck off?

Can you ban people for spurious reports too thx

The real answer is that most roads are a transient solution as transit gets built out. They should form an auxiliary network, not the backbone of a country’s transportation.

In this case Russia shot down everything and there were casualties.

Yay I love little explosive pellets

It’s not. Americans just can’t live without AC.

Building, or built? Either way, maybe these companies will come out with a better design than Tokamak, but until then they’re literally just research ventures because the vast majority of investment at actually scaling fusion is happening for Tokamak tractors.

That’s from a lack of vision rather than anything else. Google is IIRC

I don’t think you understand thermodynamics.

ACs are heat pumps that use temperature differentials to move heat from one side to another. There are inherent losses there (e.g., moving 1000kJ of heat out of a room might take 500kJ, for 200% efficiency). That excess 500kJ is dumped outside into the world along with the 1000kJvof heat, creating a local heat island effect. That’s why ACs consume electricity, and that’s where the energy goes.

The radiator behind the freezer isn’t mega hot because of advances in insulation that limit the amount of heat that needs to be moved and advances in efficiency when operating in specific temperature regimes. A modern fridge consumes 400kWh a year, which averages out to 1.1kWh/day, or 45W continuous draw. That’s about the same as a laptop charger. But, well, obviously your house is much larger than your fridge. A fridge might average 400L in volume, but your house averages more like 600000L (1500x more).

If you could move heat around without incurring losses, you could use that to construct a perpetual motion machine. Conservation of energy is a thing and entropy always increases.