All in good spirit:
> 1) Solar is (far) cheaper than fossil fuel's now (for net new electricity)
You’re going to have to show your calculations with references for LCOE - Levelised Cost of Electricity. I’ve run the numbers, you can find them and references in my comment history, and I’m not impressed with solar. Solar needs batteries, or some other type of storage, and there are roughly none of those in service so we can only theoretically predict life time costs. I can’t be fucked repeating myself here at the moment for the benefit of someone who thinks I’m a right wing nut job or whatever. Wind too.
> 2) Giving money <blah blah> more money
Again, you’re going to have to show the numbers here. Prove that an equivalent electric vehicle I need for my job is going to be cheaper on a total cost of ownership basis. This is going to be difficult to prove as there isn’t an equivalent EV that can do the miles per day required. And even if there is, can it do it for 500,000km on the same engine and gearbox / battery whatever? Without getting StacheD[1] in my garage while I sleep? It remains to be seem.
> 3) Pretty much …
No no no. The correct answer is: I’m an Australian living in Australia, reading my own governments policies, the social welfare entitlements to new arrivals, seeing the result of zoning restrictions across the road, and experiencing the results of the locals having a fertility rate below replacement, 100,000 abortions a year, resulting in the “need” to import 500,000 foreigners a year from counties no one wants to live in. I actually prefer white culture, I think it’s better, and that we should import more people from the countries we traditionally have, including India, China, Japan, the Koreas, Vietnam, and the Europeans too. I’m not racists, I just like the level of multiculturalism we had not this shoot up a Jewish festival / pro Palestine bullshit.[2]
4) There's nothing wrong with the trades
No shit cunty. I am a tradesman with … 28 years experience in and adjacent to fabrication / manufacturing / primary industries. I’ve also worked as remote-hands for the likes of Google and Akamai in data centres, so a bit of technical experience. I also have some higher education qualifications, and acquaintances in academia.
> 5) Why in the hell would anyone WANT the manufacturing jobs?
Now listen here mate ;) because lots of people, but particularly men, some women too, enjoy making things, breaking things, building things, and getting dirty. We’ve been doing it for millennia and it’s got us this far. It’s my belief that taking that away from society is going to turn out to be a general bad idea, if it ever eventuates.
> I'm better off now than 10 years ago
So am I, for various reasons. Mostly luck really. But that doesn’t negate the numbers. Houses cost more years of income, food costs more hours of labour, eggs cost more than chickens! on a per kg basis. Rent around here tends to cost more than one third of income, which is the definition of housing stress. I wouldn’t necessarily want to be a young person starting out today. The young people around here who are winning are in the trades and come from families who made at least some good choices and can offer finance from the Bank of Mum & Dad, so there’s some hope for ‘em.
I don’t drink alcohol, and I don’t smoke.
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Edited to add:
> Either way, drink plenty of water before bed. It will help with the hangover in the morning.
It sort of doesn’t though. Most of the effects of alcohol consumption that result in a hangover are caused by an accumulation of acetaldehyde[5] in the blood, the clearance of which is rate limited by an aldehyde dehydrogenase enzyme[6]. That is to say, the clearance of acetaldehyde isn’t rate limited by water …
And the dehydration hypothesis can be debunked empirically by anyone who drinks, for example, beer, which, around here, tends to contain less than 7% alcohol by volume, so beer drinkers are getting a lot of water already and yet they get hungover too. So it can’t be the water.
You can’t say I’m not thorough, and if you check my comment history you’ll find a multi-year period where most of my comments contained extensive references, because that used to be the done thing around here.
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Try not to characterise everyone who disagrees with you as wrong, uneducated, out of touch, or whatever. Some of us have been watching and living this slow moving train wreck and we reckon our country deserves better. We’re not uneducated, we are politically engaged, we don’t place all the blame on brown people or whatever. We voted No to the Voice[3] because we see ourselves and each other as literally one nation. We’re not racists, we’re not homophobic or whatever, but the + can go fuck themselves.[3]
Anyways, I appreciate your thoughtful response, and appreciate the conversation (Y)
1. StacheD - https://youtube.com/@stachedtraining?si=Lp6dDc5wstRvltFU https://youtube.com/@stachedtraining?si=Lp6dDc5wstRvltFU
2. https://www.abc.net.au/news/2025-12-16/bondi-beach-terrorist-attack-maps-videos-explain-how-it-happened/106145448 https://www.abc.net.au/news/2025-12-16/bondi-beach-terrorist...
3. Referendum on the Indigenous Voice to Parliament - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indigenous_Voice_to_Parliament https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indigenous_Voice_to_Parliament
4. Aussie comedian Jim Jeffries on ‘+’ https://youtube.com/shorts/zoPxLAE6jEM?si=veUBBHTBiv9aVysJ https://youtube.com/shorts/zoPxLAE6jEM?si=veUBBHTBiv9aVysJ
5. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acetaldehyde https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acetaldehyde
6. aldehyde dehydrogenase ADLH2 - ALDH2 plays a crucial role in maintaining low blood levels of acetaldehyde during alcohol oxidation.[7] In this pathway (ethanol to acetaldehyde to acetate), the intermediate structures can be toxic, and health problems arise when those intermediates cannot be cleared.[3] When high levels of acetaldehyde occur in the blood, facial flushing, lightheadedness, palpitations, nausea, and general "hangover" symptoms occur. It also is thought to be the cause of a medical condition known as the alcohol flush reaction, also known as "Asian flush" or "Oriental flushing syndrome". - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aldehyde_dehydrogenase https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aldehyde_dehydrogenase
> 1) Solar is (far) cheaper than fossil fuel's now
No, that's simply not true.
It's cheaper for MOST of the year, but overall, it's more expensive. Because you can't just tell people, "Well, now, during this cold January, please don't waste electricity because our panels are producing almost nothing." You either need batteries that store energy for weeks of consumption, or backup with fossil fuels, and in any case, that makes solar panels more expensive than fossil fuels.
> Trump is somehow making it worse while also letting children starve thanks to cutting USAID.
It's very strange. In all cases of interaction with the USAID that I know about directly from those interacting with it, and not from media sources, in EVERY case it was liberal propaganda or direct anti-Trump propaganda. And none of the starving children that I know about directly from those who interacted with them, and not from the media, have ever received any food aid from.
I know, of course, that this is an anecdotal case, but I prefer to trust people with whom I am at least superficially acquainted, rather than media companies that are apparently run by pedophiles.
> 5) Why in the hell would anyone WANT the manufacturing jobs? The only reasons humans have them is that humans (in some places) are cheaper than robots.
Because the era of US hegemony is ending, and at some point you simply won't be able to live off the rest of the world. At that point, you'll either have production or you'll simply starve to death. Because food (and robots) don't fall from the sky. And if you don't produce it (and don't take it from the rest of the world through your hegemony), you'll starve and die.
> Billionaire money just idles non-productively most of the time
American workers spend as much money EACH YEAR as billionaires accumulated over generations (mostly in the form of productive capacity, not idling in the piles)
> and I have to say that I'm better off now than 10 years ago. Maybe I just made better choices?
The best choice is to rob the rest of the world and live off them? Well, congratulations on making the better choice that allows you, unlike the REST OF THE WORLD, not work for less than $2 an hour (as 90% of the Earth's population does, thanks to American hegemony).
> You either need batteries that store energy for weeks of consumption, or backup with fossil fuels, and in any case, that makes solar panels more expensive than fossil fuels.
I love the wild mental gymnastics and cherry picking data these people put themselves through in order to delude themselves in to believing solar is cheaper than gas.
How can it be, when you need to build both. Or freeze in the dark.
As you said, in practice you either need batteries that don’t exist and would be prohibitively expensive because they would sit idle most the year where only hours to days of backup are required, but in winter you need weeks of storage and the output from the panels are significantly reduced so you need to massively overbuild…
OR you need to build gas peaker plants, which also sit idle most the year, but need to be run frequently and maintained to ensure they’re ready to run when needed.
The real world data is available for anyone who wants to run the numbers.
I was in Adelaide and participated in the discussions where Dr Barry Brook[1] and others ran the numbers over ten years ago. Exhaustively ran the numbers, both with real world data from recently built solar and wind, and optimistic projections of future improvements
The fundamentals haven’t changed. Even if the panels themselves were free, the amount or steel and concrete required to replace total global energy requirements with solar and wind is… it’s incomprehensible.
If I recall correctly, it worked out to requiring something absurd like more copper, steel, and concrete, than humans have produced to date (2013 figures) since the start of the Industrial Revolution, every year for the next fifty years just to replace existing energy production and distribution infrastructure, and in so doing we would double or triple atmospheric carbon dioxide levels. We’d then have to work out how to pull those emissions back out of the atmosphere, which wound require further resource use to produce the infrastructure to generate the energy required to extract and sequester the carbon dioxide.
Compare to what we’re doing now which has barely scratched the surface in replacing global energy requirements, with no reduction in carbon dioxide levels.
It all makes a pretty strong case for existing nuclear technology (Gen IV / Gen IV+) to give us time (hundreds of years with existing know uranium reserves) to perfect fast breeder technology so we can use Thorium as nuclear fuel for thousands of years.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barry_Brook_(scientist) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barry_Brook_(scientist)