401–410 of 424 posts
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You can thank huge Russia funded "green" movement for that
German were incredibly anti-nuclear long before. Blaming this on Russia is nonsense.
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She should have thrown money and equipment at the problem like the US does. That works most of the time. When it doesn't, let French diplomacy handle it. Or even better, just do both at the same time. Italy and Greece, just take this money and patrol ships and do coastal patrol. Hungary, just take this money and build a barbed wire fence, if you think it works. Border states were guarding the Schengen Area dreamland.…
Building barbed wire and stronger coastal patrols doesn't help you take in more refugees. Getting more countries to accept refugees helps take in more refugees. But I suppose you solution is to just kill all the refugees by letting them drown or whatever. Which, I suppose, is one way to solve a perceived "refugee crisis", but it wouldn't be my first choice.
The US has a 650 mile border wall with Mexico exactly for this reason. Most of this border barrier was actually built during the Obama administration, Trump just used it as a campaign objective to build a "big, beautiful wall" instead of a fence.
A fence does not necessarily bar a country from accepting refugees, but offers better border enforcement and so does an adequate coast guard. If a state can't even enforce its borders, there is no state to begin with. When human traffickers are discouraged, they'll look for other sources of income.
I'm not for building fences and walls, but I can't really imagine other alternatives that actually work at enforcing borders at least to some extent.
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Energy politics in the public discourse was often dominated by environmental concerns, and there wasn't a singular focus on CO2 as we have now. Gas has been a popular choice, because it is a lot cleaner than coal / light oil / wood from a local pollution perspective. It burns cleanly, so switching to gas heating significantly reduces pollution in cities. Nuclear energy is NOT clean, because it has the huge unsolved p…
Nuclear fuel is recyclable. The safe place to put it is back in a reactor. There are political reasons that doesn’t happen, but not technical reasons. Globally, nuclear has lower deaths per kWh than even wind, and significantly lower than natural gas or oil. From a US centric perspective, nuclear energy is by far the safest by an order of magnitude[0]. Even a catastrophe like Chernobyl resulted in the deaths of fewer…
In theory, to some extent. But it's mostly an academic argument. The power plants that are currently in use that people are protesting against do not recycle their waste.
This argument feels a lot like you are just passing the ball to the next generation. "Hey kids, we used up all the uranium for cheap power and left you with caves full of radioactive waste. But don't worry, you can recycle it!"
As for the dangers of nuclear vs. gas, the big difference is where the danger is. Nuclear power plants bring the danger close to the population, and people just don't want that.
And finally, another issue that noone appears to mention is that electric heating isn't very popular here. Most people heat their homes with gas furnaces, so even if we'd switch to nuclear power we would need to replace millions of furnaces and massively expand the electric grid. (This is slowly changing. Lots of new homes use good insulation and electric heat pumps for heating instead of gas, but it's not something that can be easily retrofitted in existing homes)
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> It also has contracts with Gazprom in Russia with guaranteed Prices and Deliveries. Is anyone under an illusion that Gazprom in Russia will honor these contracts, now that their branch was seized? And if not, what methods are there to enforce these contracts? The Russians seized the planes, which can fly but need spares and checks. The Germans seized the pipelines and the storage. Both have some utility in the inte…
“We seized your property under exigent circumstances, but you better honor your contracts rather than cancel them under exigent circumstances!” - NATO, apparently delusional The idea people will “honor” contracts while you’re (illegally) seizing their property in effort to enact an economic siege of their nation is mental illness — either delusions or megalomania. That strategy doesn’t make sense. I’m personally sad…
> Da die Gazprom Germania GmbH jedoch kritische Infrastruktur betreibe, müsse jeder Erwerb durch einen Nicht-EU-Investor vom Ministerium genehmigt werden. Unklar sei, wer wirtschaftlich und rechtlich hinter den beiden genannten Unternehmen stehe. Zudem habe der Erwerber "die Liquidierung der Gazprom Germania angeordnet, was, so lange der Erwerb nicht genehmigt ist, nicht rechtmäßig ist".
(Use Google Translate etc.)
So the sale had to be ratified by the ministry, which didn't happen. Gazprom ran afoul of the law, the government stepped in and took over temporarily.
But of course this is the internet, the more radical nonsense you spread, and the more emotional outrage your project, the more clicks you get...
[1] https://www.tagesschau.de/wirtschaft/unternehmen/gazprom-ger...
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If those workers are fine with a substantial fail in their QoL. It’s gonna be most painful for the oligarchs and people in their environment who are used to consuming massive amounts of foreign goods. Btw even the USSR which was generally much more autarkic couldn’t survive without foreign currency for energy exports. What makes you think modern Russia could? Also it was illegal for workers to leave Russia back then,…
"It’s gonna be most painful for the oligarchs and people in their environment who are used to consuming massive amounts of foreign goods." If 'tax the rich' works and reduces the power of the rich, then hasn't the West just taxed the rich of Russia and reduced their power to remove Putin? Democrats can't have it both ways. They propose a billionaire tax in the USA to reduce the power of the rich to interfere with peo…
> West just taxed the rich of Russia and reduced their power to remove Putin?
Arguably no. They’ve lost access to some of their wealth in the west but their actual power relvant (in the form of companies they own in Russia is still in Russia). So the expectation is that loosing access to the west would incentivize them to use any power they still have to get rid of Putin. Considering how intertwined their sources of wealth and power are with current regime I’m not sure how likely is that. But basically the west wants to make it so that keeping Putin in power would seem more expensive than replacing him with something/someone else.
> You can't eat dollars.
Individuals still want to buy foreign good (while they might be harder to access or more expensive it’s still possible to acquire them).
Also most people would probably prefer to store their savings in USD/CHF/EUR rather than Ruble since it’s value is going to collapse the moment Russia lifts capital controls. This arguably only increases the demand for foreign currencies.
Main categories of goods imported by Russia in 2021 were: ‘Machinery & Equipment’ and ‘Medicine’ and it’s not like Russia can just stop importing these of they want to keep their pump jacks and hospital running.
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German were incredibly anti-nuclear long before. Blaming this on Russia is nonsense.
And nuclear is anything but cheaper, full green glasses down but just looking economically - stop that myth :(
And nuclear if you actually produce them in larger numbers it actually gets quite cheap.
Had Germany spend all the money they put into solar/wind into nuclear 20 years ago they would be finishing 1-2 nuclear reactor each year right now.
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It can't be that hard to reverse engineer a spice mixture in 2022.
As we're not talking about small cuts of leaves but some highly industrialized component it is not so easy as counting leaves and mixing them together. You can certainly analyse the flavors, but that won't tell you much on the production process for creating this with all the artificial components. However that could creates some creativity in place and create similar, but different (better? Worse? Who knows) product…
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Nuclear fuel is recyclable. The safe place to put it is back in a reactor. There are political reasons that doesn’t happen, but not technical reasons. Globally, nuclear has lower deaths per kWh than even wind, and significantly lower than natural gas or oil. From a US centric perspective, nuclear energy is by far the safest by an order of magnitude[0]. Even a catastrophe like Chernobyl resulted in the deaths of fewer…
> Nuclear fuel is recyclable In theory, to some extent. But it's mostly an academic argument. The power plants that are currently in use that people are protesting against do not recycle their waste. This argument feels a lot like you are just passing the ball to the next generation. "Hey kids, we used up all the uranium for cheap power and left you with caves full of radioactive waste. But don't worry, you can recyc…
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> then Russia can keep their gas I guess the answer to that would be "and Germany can keep their cash and maybe have to burn it to heat homes or generate electricity"? The war we're seeing (the economic war) is a point of mini-singularity, where a lot of we know to be true about the world is invalid. Such as an assumption that a state having debts will actually pay them.
Except they're actively trying to pay them, so apparently it is true.
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German here: We don't dislike eastern europeans at all, at least not on any society wide level. Of course, there are exceptions. We do dislike backslides into authoritarianism in governance, like in Hungary (who's Victor Orban declared 'illiberal democracy' [1]). 1: https://verfassungsblog.de/illiberal-democracy-beyond-hungar...
Romanian ethnic here. There is no place in germany I can walk safely without feeling that if they hear me speak romanian I won't be verbally abused or looked down upon. Naturally there are exceptions, and there are many romanians in germany, but all of those I spoke with told me that at some point in time they have been racially profiled or outright abused. Their skill ranges from medical PhD, scientists, software de…
And I obviously won't defend German businesses (or for that matter businesses in general).
But believe me when I say that the average German has no problems with Eastern Europeans. Funny that you mention Romania, I work in a decent sized software company and my team lead is from Romania and beloved by us all and the company (and, as a team lead, better payed than most German engineers in the company). However, even among normal citizens, stereotypes and a sense of superiority can be found in certain circles. But I gurantee you it is a (vocal) minority. Salary for tech workers is generally low in Germany (and maybe the EU as a whole?) especially compared to the UK or US.
Racial profiling of the kind you describe is definitely not "according to German law", we have several anti-discriminatory laws on the books. But, of course, reality can't live up the ideals.
If you need help regarding those clearly illegal circumstances or situations (especially regarding police and lodging) there is the Federal Anti-Discriminatory Agency [1], which has guidelines.
1: https://www.antidiskriminierungsstelle.de/EN/about-discrimin...