81–90 of 124 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
very jealous of how cheap AUS solar prices are. < $1 AUD per watt after rebate
Don't be jealous of our peak power price though: $0.56/kWh (I have a battery though, so I rarely pay full tote - which is one of the reasons I got a battery)
Oceania too: Australia installed 442 MW of residential solar and 2.5 GWh of residential batteries in the month of April alone . Both numbers are partly juiced by changes to a rebate program from May, but the overall trend remains explosive growth. https://reneweconomy.com.au/households-still-going-big-on-so...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Well apparently over 95% of that 45 years of preparing has been obliterated, their currency is in free fall, 2M people have become unemployed over there in the last few months, and a handful of idiots are playing a game of chicken with global implications. What a mess.
I mean, their planning has been very effective. It's a decentralized strategy that plays to their strengths; it doesn't take a lot to hold the strait closed, and they can pressure everyone in the region very easily by attacking infrastructure (oil, but also desalinization plants). Their planning is so good it's turned this into the largest strategic embarrassment in the last... 80 years?
I'm assuming that China, with its industrial power and leadership position to produce a bunch of green energy components (like solar panels), is well-positioned to benefit from this.
Hormuz being closed hurts Iran way more than it does the US. It's shocking that they're persisting on this strategy. That's the problem with authoritarians though: they'd rather rule over rubble than be an average citizen in a prosperous society.
Iran’s doing orders of magnitude more absolute economic damage to the west and its allies than vice versa.
Even the drone strikes followed this math: The patriots were intercepting drones that cost 1% as much as the interceptor.
As far as I can tell, Iran has won every tactical and strategic engagement so far in this war.
Ok, I have to comment about the chart on oil prices that shows a massive rise from 2020 to 2022, which the article blames on the Russian invasion of Ukraine, even though that didn't happen until early 2022 and the spike began 2 years earlier. That's just jouranlistic misconduct. Let me tell you what actually happened because, for some reason, nobody actually talks about it. First, some context: 1. OPEC/OPEC+ meet eve…
Macroeconomics 101 says this will cause inflation on a few year delay, which is what happened, and Biden was also blamed for that.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I mean, their planning has been very effective. It's a decentralized strategy that plays to their strengths; it doesn't take a lot to hold the strait closed, and they can pressure everyone in the region very easily by attacking infrastructure (oil, but also desalinization plants). Their planning is so good it's turned this into the largest strategic embarrassment in the last... 80 years?
Conversely, Tehran is losing almost half a billion dollars a day. Nobody wins this stupid thing.
They also now know they will beat the US in an all out conflict, which was unthinkable before this war started.
The main loss seems to be that with the Iranian / US supply lines into Ukraine slowing down, Ukraine has been able to build a domestic military drone complex that’s arguably more advanced than Iran’s.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Far left will continue to rule in Europe.
I can't think of any European government that is far left? I am not familiar with all of them of course, so happy to be proven wrong.
Ok, I have to comment about the chart on oil prices that shows a massive rise from 2020 to 2022, which the article blames on the Russian invasion of Ukraine, even though that didn't happen until early 2022 and the spike began 2 years earlier. That's just jouranlistic misconduct. Let me tell you what actually happened because, for some reason, nobody actually talks about it. First, some context: 1. OPEC/OPEC+ meet eve…
I’ll just add that from 2016-2020, Trump perpetuated a zero interest rate policy despite the economy booming. Macroeconomics 101 says this will cause inflation on a few year delay, which is what happened, and Biden was also blamed for that.
1. After the OPEC oil shock of 1973, the US banned crude oil exports (in 1974 I believe);
2. In the early 2010s, hydraulic fracturing ("fracking") was invented, which created the US oil boom in the Permian Basin (from west Texas up to the Dakotas). Almost all oil wells in the last 10-15 years have been fracked. This was a massive capex outlay by oil companies at the time. This is important;
3. Obama, facing a hostile Congress in 2015, wanted solar and wind subsidies so he made a deal with Congress that included lifting the 1974 crude oil export ban. Oil production quickly went up and ever since we've been exporting ~3Mbpd of crude oil, which is essentially excess demand, and this is how the US became the largest single oil producer in the world;
4. OPEC but really Saudi Arabia in particular crashed the oil market in 2015-2016. There are two competing theories on why they did this. A lot of people think it was to kill the frackers. I don't think this makes sense. It was years after fracking came about. I think it was to punisht he US for becoming a crude oil exporter. And it worked. Roughly half of oil producers and services companies went bust [2];
5. When oil prices are low, producers will generally suspend production until prices increase because they're selling at a loss. They'll layoff staff and come back when prices improve. So this is self-correcting. But oil companies had to keep selling because of their massive debt;
6. Because of (5), oil inventories exploded and when Trump took office in 2017, oil experts believed that oil prices would remain low because of persistently high crue oil inventories [3];
7. Trump pulled out from the JCPOA in 2018. To counter expected Iranian sanctions, Trump got OPEC to increase production [4];
8. In October 2018, Saudi agents, allegedly on the orders from MBS, killed Saudi citizen and US permanent resident Jamal Khashoggi in a Saudi embassy in Istanbul. I actually believe this is relevant to what happened subsequently; and
9. In November 2018, Trump granted 8 waivers to Iranian oil exporters to continue exporting [5]. This crashed the oil markets [6] and basically screwed over OPEC. But I think MBS had to eat it because of the Khashoggi fallout.
So come 2020, it is my belief that when Donald "Art of the Deal" Trump got MBS to cut oil production and then MBS later refused to increase production (to both Trump and Biden), it was payback for 2018.
So I don't think there's any causation between ZIRP and the inflation shock. It was a combination of two things: the oil price shock and the pandemic became the perfect environment for companies to raise prices, something many believed they'd get punished for prior. This is the era when dynamic pricing really took off.
[1]: https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/us-oil-producers-pac...
[2]: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/FEDFUNDS
[3]: https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=29532
[4]: https://www.cnbc.com/2018/06/22/opec-ministers-strike-deal-o...
[5]: https://www.cnbc.com/2018/11/02/trump-will-grant-8-waivers-t...
[6]: https://www.cbsnews.com/detroit/news/the-great-oil-crash-of-...