But apparently not to the E.U., where the imports are already plummeting again, especially from the U.S..

The problem with that idea is that the numbers don't match. While indeed, Germany imports now about a million tons more from the U.S. then they did in 2019, it's already down from a maximum in 2023 with 9 million tons to 7.7 million tons in 2025. At the same time, Germany stopped importing coal from Russia completely (11 million tons in 2022, now zero). In total, Germany reduced the imports of coal from 35 million tons in 2019 to 21 million tons right now. The country which increased its exports of coal to Germany the most was Columbia, more than doubling its exports to Germany to 4.8 million tons.

Whatever the resurgence of the coal industry in the U.S. was, it had peaked in 2023 - at least when it comes to exports to the E.U..

The problem is that the crude oil the U.S. is exporting is not the crude oil the U.S: needs to refine into gas and diesel. That means the U.S. is not self-sufficient in crude oil because it is essentially producing the wrong kind of oil for their own refineries. The U.S. would have to redesign their whole refinery infrastructure to rely on their own oil.

You know that in 20D chess, you can't possibly checkmate the king?

People using the word "Dunning-Kruger effect" are in most cases ignorant about the Dunning-Kruger effect. The Dunning-Kruger effect does not mean that people not studied in a field think themselves to be better in the very same field than the expert. It's just that they tend to overestimate their own abilities. An amateur might consider himself a pretty good chess player. But by no means he would consider himself a better player than a grand master. What he underestimates is the actual advantages a professional chess player has over him. And that's the Dunning-Kruger effect (Dunning and Kruger, 1999).

The same for an EV. I don't see the difference. There is no point in letting your EV sitting idle somewhere and not charging, while its battery is nearly drained. The same with your ICE, where you also refuel as soon as the gas tank runs empty. The advantage of the EV is that you can do it in your driveway, which is not an easy task if you have an ICE. Even the cars with the largest batteries are completely charged within 10 hours at a measly home wall charger with 11 kW. That's the time it takes for you to get home, eat dinner, take a shower and go to sleep. In the morning, you will always have a fully charged car - and that's under the condition you get home with a completely empty battery. But you will get home with maybe 40% state of charge, and your car will be back to 60% after dinner, and to 80% when you go to bed. Your ICE car will still be at 40% in the morning.

Large networks of alliances where a common thing long before the First World War. The idea that there at one point in time were just nation states fighting each other, and hence containing wars to a small region is stupid at best. The only reasons why wars were localized was missing logistics, and many wars were over before the armies of an ally arrived.

Alliances which turned local conflicts into large wars exist at least since we have written documents. And a state being involved in many battles at the same time was the constant situation in Antique Rome. They even had a temple which was closed when there was no war going on, the Temple of Janus, and in the first 750 years of Rome's existence, it was closed only on three occasions. For the U.S., this would mean that since the Declaration of Independence, the U.S. would have been at peace only once, if the U.S. had the same average.

The idea of the nation state only appeared in the 19th century, is barely 200 years old, and each new nation state immediately joined some global alliance, because that's what's happening since 5000 years anyway. If there were no global alliances before the First World War, they would have been immediately invented.

And this is a problem exactly why?

On an average day, your car is parked for 23 hours anyway.

Yes, for some use case, nothing beats a loaded cast bronze cannon.

But those use cases are few and far between. For most use cases, EVs beat ICEs. And for the few use cases ICEs indeed are advantageous, EVs don't completely suck either.

I remember ZIP drives a lot. Working with Siemens in their phone switch department, we had a lot of legacy systems to support which used ZIP drives as their backup medium. I still have some disks left in my storage (together with MO disks, which were used in later incarnation, before being replaced by CompactFlash).

So you are saying that a truly free market can only exist if guarded by strong government, which is more powerful as any of the market actors. And the government should not be able to be corrupted by the very same market actors.

Who woulda have thought?

Just because Oman does not legally close its shipping lanes does not mean the Strait is open. The whole Strait of Hormuz is just 3 sea miles wide, and can easily be targeted from Iran. And Iran has attacked targets in Oman in this war already.

Basically you are saying "We have removed the warning signs. The road is now safe."

They do. Because 40 bit addresses waste 24 bits, because a 32 bit architecture works as easy with 40 bits than with 64. 128 bits was just being on the safe side. While it does not allow to address each elementary particle in the universe (which would need about 200 bit), it will be sufficient for all atoms we can reach and come back until our Sun burns out before the invention of faster-than-light travel.

Problem is: It does not get hot in the UK in the summer. The UK is very far to the north, compared with the continuous U.S.. The southernmost point of the U.K. (if we ignore the Channel Islands and oversea territories like the Falkland Islands) is on the 49 meridian, which is the same latitude than the northern border to Canada with the exception to the northern part of Maine. The Shetland Islands in turn are on the same latitude than Anchorage, AK.

If you want to imagine U.K. climate, think of the Pacific coast between Vancouver Island and Anchorage, just with warmer winters thanks to the Gulf stream.

In a truly free market, I can always spend money hire a bunch of thugs and hit you on the head if you don't sell to my conditions. And that's where the term Freedom hits a snag.