That's only very partially true. The uptick in unpaid mortgages gave the house of cards a little tap; but it was the giant pile of increasingly exotic leverage constructed on top of the relatively boring retail debt that actually gave the situation enough punch to be systemically dangerous; along with the elaborate securitizing, slicing, and trading making it comparatively cumbersome for people to just renegotiate a mortgage headed toward delinquency and take a relatively controlled writedown; rather than just triggering a repossession that left them with a bunch of real estate they weren't well equipped to sell.

It's a lot more complicated. Remember the solar panels to power the data center? They catch Sun light, so you need to add them to the surface of your data center. And to keep it at 300 K, you need twice the area to the other side to radiate off the heat. And those areas should not face each other, because they would then heat each other. It's a lot easier with convection, because then, the moving gas molecules transport away the heat.

You can calculate the amount of heat you can transfer via radiation. It's called Stefan-Boltzmann law. At a temperature of 300 K, you can radiate 460 Watts per square meter as a maximum. But from the Sun, you get 1370 Watts per square meter. That means that you have to have at least twice the area away from the Sun to keep temperatures at 300 K. A spherical body like the Earth would be at equilibrium at 279 K if it gets no other energy except direct Sun radiation.

The average uptime for a coal power plant is between 70% and 90%. Your example should be closer to 8 TWh/year. That means that you would need about 80 of them to provide the same power as Wind and Solar.

It's certainly possible that some people do, sincerely, 'fear' that the onrushing machine god will speak chinese and that it would be just the worst if all humans were rendered obsolete by the wrong side's robot when that's supposed to be our job; but, especially with how tepid the results are for the money poured in, it seems much more the case that we are seeing a lot of nakedly cynical playing of the 'give us what we want, lest the chinese win' by people who are otherwise on deeply shaky ground in terms of things like massive copyright infringement, voracious data mining, and an endless hunger for capital without any signs of returns.

It's like a vastly hypertrophied case of the 'race to 5G' stuff; where, if we didn't give Verizon whatever they asked for, China would have a faster rollout of 5G and we would lose the 4th industrial revolution or something? It was never entirely clearly what losing the race was going to involve.

The existential tone of the claims seem especially curious given how meagre the leads people are pouring billions into seem to be; and how readily 'AI' models can be poked at via distillation attacks or good, old-fashioned, electronic intrusion. If The Singularity kicks off that presumably changes everything beyond the powers of meaningful prediction(though that holds for whoever develops it as well as everyone else; given the odds that it will slip the leash); but as long as you are in the realm of incrementally more or less flakey chatbots it seems a bit weird to even talk like there is some sort of victory condition that will trigger and cause one side to lose.

There is a problem with your argument. The article is about worldwide sales. Of those, U.S. subsidies only affect a small part, which we can safely ignore as a rounding error.

But EV sales did not tank. That's the whole point of the article. Your premise is wrong.

You can build nuclear if you want, But all I see right now is nuclear construction happening in China, and in China only. All new nuclear plants built in the west were to replace older ones or are upgrade of them.

Even France, which never had a problem with nuclear, basically stopped building them in the 1990ies, and the only new plant coming online since then is the Flamanville EPR. It was always easy for electrical companies to stop nuclear projects and blame the Left and regulations, when in fact, the projects simply became too expensive compared to the alternatives. It's similar to the turbine car from Chrysler, where environmental regulation were cited why it stopped, when in fact, turbines still suck in partial-load situations, which is what most cars are in most of the time.

I don't think nuclear will have a great future. It might exist for some niche applications, but in most cases, it's just fricking expensive.

While Methane is a more powerful greenhouse gas, it is also one which gets removed rather quickly from the atmosphere, because it gets destroyed by the sunlight and turned into water and Carbon dioxide. Carbon dioxide on the other hand is stable, and if not actively extracted from the atmosphere, will stay there indefinitely for billions of years.

Streaming resp. IPTV has this curious side effect to be a few seconds late. In my apartment block, it's funny to listen to the different flats cheering at slightly different times when watching the same game.

Let's put it like this.

• Natural Gas accounts for 12% of Germany's electricity generation in 2025
• Wind accounts for 30% of Germany's electricty generation in 2025
• Solar accounts for 19% of Germany's electricty generation in 2025
• Biomass accounts for 8.5% of Germany's electricity generation in 2025
• Lignite accounts for 16% of Germany's electricty generation in 2025
• Hard coal accounts for 6% of Germany's electricity generation in 2025
• Other sources (Coal Gas, Incinerator plants, Oil, Hydro) make up less than 8% of electricity generation in 2025

Now you can throw around buzzwords like deindustrialization, or you can look at the actual numbers.

They might use ADVA (now known as Adtran), which, while technically being owned by an U.S. entity, are developed and build in Meiningen, Germany.

I've seen the George Clooney one, and I've read an interview with Stanislaw Lem later, where he said: "The sexual problems of humans in Space where not my topic in the book."

This reminds me of a Stanislaw Lem SF story (I think published in the "Fables for Robots" series): The Trap of Gargancjan.

Two countries start an arms race by moving their whole military to AI, and then set their armies to fight each other. But when all the robots connect to each other to create the two AIs of cosmic scale, they don't fight, but greet each other, take each other's hand and walk through the flowers. Because Space at its essence is peaceful, and war is not a cosmic concept.

Or to bolster it, in 2024, the market share of Chinese made cars in BEV sales in the E.U. was 20%, and that of Chinese automakers 8%, with a total of 438,034 BEVs imported from China. Source