Germany itself is desperate for power because they decided to shut down power plants without building replacements, but they are apparently still better off than France.

The problem in Germany is mainly grid related; there's a lot of power in the north, but insufficient North-South grid capacity. This combined with the extreme cold of the last few weeks had lead to them powering up their reserve power plants (mostly old, unprofitable oil and coal power stations).

And just for clarities sake, because it's something that has mislead a lot of people: they didn't decide to shut down their power plants without building any replacement, they first decided to keep open plats which where scheduled to be shut down and then reversed again.

This again? This train will *never* be built. And it's a stupid thing to build. Passenger rail hasn't made money since the mid 1800's, going faster won't make it any more viable.

Perhaps not in the US (though even there the ACELA semi-high speed is by all account quite profitable) but the almost all high speed lines are profitable en there a quite a few systems that are profitable, especially if you count the revenue from high speed lines.

The US (or more correctly the Allies) also won because the Soviet Union kept fighting, even after losing a shitload of soldiers (to say nothing of civilians) in fighting the Axis forces. Arguably they couldn't have done it without US industrial support (especially trucks), but that is what actually broke the German war machine.

(Yes, not the point of the comment, and somewhat informed people will know this, but the shorted version: "The US singlehandedly won WW II" is a pet peeve of mine.)

That's actually why we are a representative democratic republic and not a pure democracy. The "mob" doesn't always know what's best for itself and tends to be just a wee bit reactionary at times.

I see this argument a lot, mostly from Americans, And I wonder which countries *are* supposed to be pure democracies? Apart from classical Athens (and then only for a small subset of inhabitants) I canâ(TM)t think of one. Unless the existence of referenda is the issue in which case the US may be a Republic on a federal level but many states clearly are not (including the *Republic* of California). Classically the name republic is not to differentiate from democracies but from Monarchies (and other less frequent systems such as true aristocracies). Iâ(TM)m honestly curious why this apparent straw man comes up so often. Yes, the founding fathers didnâ(TM)t trust the electorate, but most of their checks on that (requirements to be allow to vote, the non directly elected senate, the electoral college etc.) have either been removed or lost most of their use.

Wind power isn't a solution, because the turbines only last a few years and cannot easily be refurbished -

Sorry, but that is simply not true. Modern mass produced windmills (on land) are build to last around 20 years. Off shore ones are targeted at 25-30 years. Both can relatively easily be refurbished (as a mater of fact in Germany quite a few land based wind mills where upgraded to more efficient turbines long before the old ones where use dup, because it made more financial sense). Some earlier, workshop-produced one have lased longer.

and they don't work if there's no wind (like today) or too much wind (like last week). Hydro-electric? Yeah, let's just flood a few thousand square miles of mountain wilderness, that surely won't have *any* ecological impact!

The thing is you need significant backup with nuclear power as well. Electricity consumption varies by more than 50% during a 24 hour cycle. (i.e. if highest demand = 100, lowest demand is 50 or less). Because quite a bit of that is hard to predict (as opposed to the normal variations between day and night, summer and winter etc.) and since nuclear plans tend to be quite slow in regard to varying their output, you need (most gas fuelled) backup any way. Beyond that, there is geographical variance. Yes there might be too little or too much wind in, say, Naples. But generally there will be wind in for example Turin.

No one (well almost no one, there's idiots in every group) that wind should provide 100% of power. But almost any country can use up to 20% without any large modifications to it's network en more depending on other factors (availability of existing Hydro, connectivity to neighbouring countries, number of gas plants etc.) And lets not forget that any new nuclear power plant in Italy wouldn't be online for a decade, maybe longer while new wind turbines can be installed within 2 years (assuming some planning and licensing time).

It's not 50% +1 though. The summery is somewhat misleading. While around 57%* of the voters turned out, the actual results for the four questions where as follows:

• Return to Nuclear power: 94.1%
• Immunity from trial for government ministers: 94.6%
• Water privatization: 95.3%
• Water profit: 95.8%

All against the laws in question. Partly this is because Berlusconi has always tried to stop referenda by calling upon his supporters *not* to vote. Thereby making them no binding if a quorum of 50% wasn't reached. This result shows that over 50% of *all* voters rejected the plans. Which seems a high enough threshold for a non-constitutional issue. Rather high even considering that the Berlusconi government was supported by around 40% of all possible voters in the last lection (47% at an 85% turnout).

While I'm not in favour of too many questions being decided by the electorate directly, this seems a fairly clear question (yes or no on new nuclear plants). You can be disappointed or disagree with the result but this is clearly what should happen in a democracy. The German example shows that the only difference betweens this referendum and âoeonlyâ having regular elections is that it would take one or two years more and included the removal of the party that is pro-nuclear from power.

* The official turnout is 54.8%. However, in a further effort to invalidate the referenda because of a lack of a quorum, it was decided that all oversea Italians would count towards the possible total as well. Regardless wheather they have ever voted in any Italian election. This is being challenged in court.

So while the Dutch parliament does seem to be less in the pockets of major companies, a part of the difference between US and the Netherlands seems to be the argumentation used by the companies. Basically they explicitly argued they wanted to block certain apps because they where cheaper for consumers. Which is a far worse argument than the one that has been used by many US opponents of net neutrality, e.i. "Google/youtube/etc. are using soooo much bandwidth we have to make them pay for it”. Which is a bullshit argument, but easier to hide behind.