Miscellanea: The War in Iran

> But an electric grid based on renewables, if we add the costs for storage, backup generator, power lines upgrades needed for smoothing out regional variations of production, is more expensive

Show your work. I'm telling you right now you're wrong. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45446112

Even the Texas power grid makes heavy use of wind and solar.

> So stockpiling few years worth of fuel is not a problem

Weird you were oddly concerned about being "China dependence for PV" but this you just wave away. Stockpiling a few decades of PV and batteries is also not a problem.

"Rare earths" (not really used in panels) are plentiful too. Refining them is polluting and low-margin so developed countries prefer not to deal with them. Btw uranium is the same.

> Nuclear energy also quite safe

I didn't say anything about it being unsafe. But making it that safe currently costs a lot of money in materials, labor, and regulations.

Honestly it feels like you decided beforehand "nuclear is the way" and are trying to make every fact fit that. Or you're a troll/paid off by Big Oil. Sorry.

> The word genocide is not appropriate because it refers to the aim of destroying a national or ethnic group and Gaza is neither. Even if Israel wanted to kill, and killed, all Gazans that does not fit the commonly accepted definition of this word prior to the war in Gaza.

Your definition of genocide is so narrow that it also excludes the Armenian genocide, are you okay with that? Some groups like those in Constantinople were spared, so a denier might claim that only rural Armenians were targeted, not the whole ethnic group (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Armenian_genocide_denial#Rheto...).

I'm not necessarily saying that, only that it's not an unreasonable concern given the history. Venezuela (a communist country) with Chinese ties, was going to invade Guyana before we captured Maduro. Cambodia, a country with communist remnants and Chinese ties was attacking Thailand. China has a long-standing threat to take Taiwan. It already took Tibet and helped try to take communist control of Korea.

Do you think if you were Japan, South Korea or any of those other countries, you would be sitting comfy on the belief that China has good intentions for them?

So, no, I am not _certain_ that is what China is doing with its military build up. Only that, I see it as a possibility that we can't sleep on.

Your argument about whether Chinese people are pro war isn't as relevant in a country like China as it might be in some democracy, but even in democracies war still occurs even if the population is anti-war. In China, it's just even less relevant, because they have strict social control. You could say the relevance has other angles, like more of the population has to be dedicated to enforcement and repression which takes some of that capacity away from military duties.

China can definitely reproduce a lot of technologies, but if they confirm again that they are a critical threat then there is a lot more we can do to slow their progress if necessary.

Think of it in evolutionary terms. There is physical evolution, but there's also mental evolution, moral evolution, legal evolution and so on.

We also see education as being useful, yet education seems to not teach many critical things which we often leave up to parents. Yet, many parents do not fully teach essential morals or lessons. It wasn't that long ago that the only real kind of formal education was a sort of religious education.

Religion in a way, carries forward crystallized values that people felt were important enough. You can look at all the religions around the world and identify the various elements of how those people behave. Is the way they behave useful, logically?

Not everyone is a scientist or a computer programmer, many people do not invest heavily in their minds. We might think that religion only served a purpose 500+ years ago, because it was an inverted solution to a surveillance state, letting people police themselves from within their own minds when external surveillance apparatus was basically not sufficiently viable.

I would argue some, but not all religions, still offer value as they bring forward crystallized behaviors that serve an actual purpose.

We've all seen how easy it is for people to get manipulated, become violent, etc. That seems to happen even if they aren't religious. So, if the people who are most susceptible to manipulations are pre-manipulated into a positive format that encourages them away from violence, that doesn't sound useless.

It's true that religion has been involved in many wars, but not all of those wars were for religious ends, even if religion was used. If religion wasn't used, it might have been something else. Societal structures and law enforcement have advanced a lot since then.

No, stop trying to pull out of your bs. You said communism is something that can only exist if indoctrinated into in childhood, in a comment where you whined about religions feeling "threatened" while pointedly ignoring the elephant in the room. Just answer me a simple question in a Yes or a No. Does religion survive if it isn't indoctrinated into as a kid?

Why not, if religion wasn't available, we'd wrest one major weapon away from warmongers. They will have to search much harder to galvanize large groups of people to fight for nonsense reasons over. If they didn't have this strong identity ready made on a platter to tap into, things become much harder.

Religion is simply not worth the baggage, it posits and requires faith in the infinitely wrong. Values can be taught without religion, you don't need to be a scientist to have values. Everyone has values including atheists. I see no reason why we can't simply teach values minus religion. I don't see atheists who believe in the American constitution as a good system have by virtue of atheism any less support for it, as an example. For the tiny amount of good you may find religions have provided, on the scale of balance the bloodshed and negativity it has caused are simple far worse and not worth it. And even if you think in terms of some values religions might impart, its also again counterproductive. Almost all religions are very karen and nosy often violently so about lgbtq, so much for the values side of the equation. If a religion might be good for values, such a religion at least hasn't yet emerged.