If a country changes course every four years, how can the success of a long-term project be ensured?
And what of its negotiating credibility? How can the other side trust that an agreement will hold in the future?
This is not a critique, but a genuine curiosity, because there's an obvious drawback with a system with opposing world views.
Unless, of course, something still unites them in the first place, with acceptable disparity on each side turning it into an advantage of flexibility and adaptability while keeping the focus on long-term ideas and plans.
vvpan 1 hours ago [-]
Which is largely why presidencies do not mess with the order they inherit too much (subjective statement I know). Most institutions and projects are not stressed and the government branches just keep doing what they always did. The current administration is an outlier, but we all know that.
sirspacey 1 hours ago [-]
you’ve landed on the core of politics
the shape of how things actually work is what’s left when constant churn (and now budget blocking) is a fact of life
nomel 1 minutes ago [-]
> you’ve landed on the core of politics
And, why it's hard to compete with China.
shimman 1 hours ago [-]
No, this is the core of a particular brand of politics: neoliberal politics. Where the financialization of everything is what's most important. There was a time, still in lived memory, where the US government was able to complete many types of projects and it also coincided with the period of lowest economic inequality (the great compression), the expansion of civil rights, and had the highest taxes against the elites this country has ever seen.
Obviously if you hate democracy you'll want to destroy this system, which is what they've been working at for the last 50ish years.
s1artibartfast 12 minutes ago [-]
Tax rates are not the same as effective taxes paid, and US taxes as a percent of GDP are at an all time high. This is besides the fact that gdp is many times higher, growing geometrically.
It is an interesting question of what changed, but lack of funding isn't the answer. I suspect it is a combination of scope creepy, application to intractable problems, and baumols cost disease at work.
pwarner 2 hours ago [-]
I'm not advocating their system, but here's one pro for China obviously.
chongli 1 hours ago [-]
China doesn't have flip-flopping like this with its attendant massive waste. Instead it has endemic corruption which siphons off funds all over the place, perhaps with the exception of the big projects that command the full attention of central leadership.
tehjoker 4 minutes ago [-]
Yet somehow they've managed to eliminate extreme poverty and challenge the U.S. in GDP. Sounds like cope to me. They couldn't do that with extreme corruption like we tolerate in U.S. allies.
ncr100 60 minutes ago [-]
Also, China can lobby indirectly through media manipulation, and relatively cheaply disrupt our already clunky-feeling Democratic governmental processes.
SecretDreams 1 hours ago [-]
Dictatorships work as long as they're benevolent, much like democracies work as long as they aren't bought.
Octoth0rpe 2 hours ago [-]
> how can the success of a long-term project be ensured?
Well, for one by ensuring that 'long-term' means it starts at the start of a term and ends before the end of that term. At most that only rules out nuclear, at least wrt long term energy projects. And it's not like recent dem administrations were unfriendly towards nuclear. Vogtle 3/4 were approved early in Obama's term, and finished under Biden's.
Sharlin 46 minutes ago [-]
"Long term" means decades when it comes to energy strategy, major infrastructure initiatives, and decarbonization. Four years is woefully inadequate for strategic planning, you’re operating on a tactical level at best.
SpicyLemonZest 2 hours ago [-]
I'm not sure I follow the questions. The success of a long-term project can be ensured through the procedures described in the source article: you set up a durable judicial system, and invest them with the power to require that the country uphold its end of the bargain, no matter how much its current political leaders might want to change course.
CamperBob2 2 hours ago [-]
you set up a durable judicial system, and give them their own army.
That's the only way to work around Trump. According to the Constitution, no one can actually make the executive branch do anything it doesn't want to do.
SpicyLemonZest 1 hours ago [-]
No, that's not accurate. The courts frequently make Trump and his cronies do things they don't want to do, and prevent them from doing things they do want to do. Multiple such cases are described in the source article.
vel0city 6 minutes ago [-]
> That does not end the Court’s concerns, however. Attached to this order is an
appendix that identifies 96 court orders that ICE has violated in 74 cases. The extent of ICE’s noncompliance is almost certainly substantially understated. This list is confined to orders issued since January 1, 2026, and the list was hurriedly compiled by extraordinarily busy judges. Undoubtedly, mistakes were made, and orders that should have appeared on this list were omitted.
This list should give pause to anyone—no matter his or her political beliefs—who cares about the rule of law. ICE has likely violated more court orders in January 2026 than some federal agencies have violated in their entire existence.
This is absolutely nuts to read, and yet isn't the first time we've read such kind of language in court opinions and publications with this administration.
CamperBob2 1 hours ago [-]
That state of affairs is seen as a bug, and is being fixed. [1]
If Trump defies 1 in 3 of the court orders against him, that still means judges successfully stopped him 2 times out of 3. I'm not interested in a discussion where we equivocate between what's true today and worst case scenarios that could become true in the future, sorry.
bdangubic 37 minutes ago [-]
you should have learned by now what trump et al are doing… these “cases” they are “losing” are just smoke&mirrors for the general public to go “see, they obey the law” on things they do not particularly give a hoot about. the ones they do care about no one is “stopping” - the way you can tell which one is which is when they completely ignore the constitution and any existing law(s) or when they hit up the judicial extension of their party - the scotus - to rubberstamp something. even there, once in a while, they’ll make a call to (often temporarily) “lose”
alextheparrot 2 hours ago [-]
I mean, you could also frame this as an issue the electorate could actually prioritize instead of just hoping the courts work it out
jaco6 1 hours ago [-]
[dead]
softwaredoug 6 hours ago [-]
If these projects ultimately end up canceled they’ll be the largest “mostly done” infrastructure projects to be cancelled. A huge waste. And a monument to US incompetency.
kabdib 4 hours ago [-]
> incompetency
"corruption"
verdverm 3 hours ago [-]
spite of one man child
bmitc 3 hours ago [-]
The sad truth is that it's millions of people. These people just want to see the world burn due to nothing but narcissism and hate of the imaginary "other side".
bigstrat2003 57 minutes ago [-]
There are not in fact millions of people who want to burn the world just to spite others. If you truly believe that then you have really failed to understand people around you, and should try to better empathize. As a rule, people do what they do because they believe it to be the right thing. They might be misguided in that belief, of course, but the idea of millions of people deciding on a cartoonishly evil course of action is not an accurate analysis of anything.
donkeybeer 11 minutes ago [-]
If not evil, then we must admit magas are insane.
PaulHoule 2 hours ago [-]
There are a lot of people on "both sides" who choose their positions on the issues to fit their political party as opposed to choose the party that fits their positions. Particularly for an issue like offshore wind or Keystone XL that is basically "out of sight and out of mind" there are millions of people who would change their position if the right people told them to.
estearum 2 hours ago [-]
99% of every person's beliefs are driven by what "the right people told them," of course.
That's not really the point nor the problem, because some people choose to listen to very stupid or malicious people and others are (by chance or by skill) more susceptible to being steered by more credible people.
Half the country is in thrall with a uniquely malicious and moronic force, and the other half is vaguely in alignment with the vague directional gestures of expert consensus (even though it's sometimes wrong!). These are not at all the same, even if they both are technically "believing what people told them to."
jfengel 2 hours ago [-]
That's how parties work, of necessity. They are all uneasy alliances of people who can barely tolerate each other. People find the one that supports their most important issues and hopefully few things they really detest. Then they have to pay at least lip service to all of it. By getting everyone else's support, at least one or two of your favorite issues get worked on.
In doing so you need to find a way to live with the cognitive dissonance. The best way is to truly buy into all of it, as hard as you can. That wins and keeps on winning. Or you can try to mitigate things to your conscience, but that leads to a lot of halfhearted efforts and poor turnout.
CrossVR 2 hours ago [-]
> That's how two party systems work
Fixed that for you.
There are democracies with proportional representation out there. Those have their own problems in forming coalitions, but the parties themselves are much closer aligned with their base.
smallmancontrov 60 minutes ago [-]
There it is, the both sides brigade, right on time!
No, Keystone XL was not the same level of pettiness as offshore wind. Find me the IPCC report equivalent that makes the case for wind farms doing whatever social damage Trump says they do. I'll wait.
threethirtytwo 4 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
mbivert 3 hours ago [-]
> Less corruption
there's been, in 2025, 983 000 people receiving disciplinary sanctions[0]. then:
1. either there's no corruption, and people are getting sanctioned for no reason
2. there's corruption
> Less incompetency
one thing they seem to do correctly in China, is to select their leaders not based on pure political skills, but on actual thinking skills: many of them come from technical backgrounds, and have been trained to think rationally.
furthermore, in my experience, Asian people, and Chinese in particular, also have better working habits − stronger wills − than most Westerners.
I'd still be careful about assuming they're really _that_ more competent. intellectual theft, propaganda, rushed work, all could contribute to a temporary illusion of superiority.
> Less freedom for stuff like protesting
this is a watered-down description of the actual situation.
you can get jailed, beaten up, tortured, killed, etc. religious groups seem to be the main target of the most violent treatments[1]. there's really no reason to target peaceful people, via such extreme means.
> one thing they seem to do correctly in China, is to select their leaders not based on pure political skills, but on actual thinking skills: many of them come from technical backgrounds, and have been trained to think rationally.
Is that true?
threethirtytwo 3 hours ago [-]
Not strictly true. There's more of a tendency for this to be true-ish.
threethirtytwo 3 hours ago [-]
>there's been, in 2025, 983 000 people receiving disciplinary sanctions[0]. then:
>1. either there's no corruption, and people are getting sanctioned for no reason
>2. there's corruption
> Less incompetency
You're just compressing reality so the logic becomes simple. But your analysis loses the nuance. First of all no one said there's no corruption in China. Corruption is everywhere... saying there's none is a practical impossibility.
Second. In 2025 983,000 people received disciplinary sanctions.... If what China claims is true or even partially true it means corruption was reduced on a scale that cannot be replicated in the US.
You analysis is valid, but inconclusive.
>furthermore, in my experience, Asian people, and Chinese in particular, also have better working habits − stronger wills − than most Westerners.
>I'd still be careful about assuming they're really _that_ more competent. intellectual theft, propaganda, rushed work, all could contribute to a temporary illusion of superiority.
First of all let me be frank. I am asian. I am genetically Chinese and culturally western. My comment was purely about centralized systems of government and how THAT effects competency and not at all about the competency of the population seperate from that.
That being said, average IQ in China is higher than the US, that is a statistical fact. I did not comment on how that translates into this argument or what IQ even means in reality. I'm going to avoid that argument because I have no opinion on it.
>this is a watered-down description of the actual situation.
>you can get jailed, beaten up, tortured, killed, etc. religious groups seem to be the main target of the most violent treatments[1]. there's really no reason to target peaceful people, via such extreme means.
You're right. I did water it down. But I still stand by my point. I won't in actuality participate in activities that will lead to these types of consequences so restricting me of these freedoms is something I practically don't care about.
The religious argument is valid. But what do you think of scientology? Cults. Basically the religions that China cracks down on are religions it considers to be similar to scientology. Ultimately these things are bullshit. I'm not religious so, again practically speaking it doesn't affect me. I think most HNers are also atheist or agnostic.
elmomle 4 hours ago [-]
It's not a linear relationship where you trade one for the other. You don't just get a more competent government by giving up freedoms.
threethirtytwo 3 hours ago [-]
There is a relationship here. It is not a perfect one, but it is real, and pretending otherwise just avoids the tradeoff.
Take California’s high speed rail. Every individual has the right to object. No one wants an eyesore in their backyard. Everyone gets a hearing. Everyone gets a lawsuit. Everyone gets a veto in practice, if not in theory.
The result is predictable. I will never see a functioning high speed rail system in California in my lifetime. Neither will anyone alive today. Not because we lack money or engineering talent, but because the accumulation of individual rights makes collective action nearly impossible.
Now look at China. They decide to build it, and it gets built. If you are in the way, you move. If persuasion fails, coercion follows. Freedoms are not part of the equation.
That contrast is uncomfortable, but it is real. Freedom buys dignity and protection from abuse. It also buys paralysis. China sacrifices individual rights and gets infrastructure. California preserves individual rights and gets endless meetings, delays, and nothing on the ground.
You can argue which system is morally superior. You cannot argue that they produce the same outcomes.
macintux 3 hours ago [-]
Autocracy can (and perhaps usually does) produce corruption, and there's no guarantee that progress will be beneficial. I agree there are tradeoffs, but it's worth pointing out that sacrificing freedom does not reliably produce useful results.
AnthonyMouse 2 hours ago [-]
> Take California’s high speed rail. Every individual has the right to object. No one wants an eyesore in their backyard. Everyone gets a hearing. Everyone gets a lawsuit. Everyone gets a veto in practice, if not in theory.
If there was actually freedom and you wanted to build high speed rail, you would solicit investors, go negotiate for some land -- the power company has a bunch of transmission lines up the coast that run approximately parallel to the highways, maybe get that land, your trains were going to need power anyway -- and then you hire some people and start laying tracks.
"Everyone gets a veto" is the thing where you can't do it because the government won't let you even when you have the wherewithal and inclination to do it. That's the opposite of freedom.
verdverm 3 hours ago [-]
What do N Korea vs S Korea or Poland vs Belarus tell us about the forms of government and their relative outcomes?
bmitc 3 hours ago [-]
Those are unique situations not solely born out of differences of forms of government.
verdverm 1 hours ago [-]
China seems to be the more unique situation or exception to the rule
Has there been any autocracy in the last century that has had better outcomes when compared to liberal democracy? (other than China)
elektronika 3 hours ago [-]
>Now look at China. They decide to build it, and it gets built.
Look up "Nail Houses". The USA used eminent domain heavily in the same situation back when they were still building new infrastructure.
>Take California’s high speed rail. Every individual has the right to object.
It's not the result of many individuals objecting. It's the largely the result of a few wealthy individuals objecting. Elon Musk has admitted to publicizing hyperloop largely to take the wind out of the sails of the proposed high speed rail. American democracy is for the rich.
threethirtytwo 3 hours ago [-]
>Look up "Nail Houses". The USA used eminent domain heavily in the same situation back when they were still building new infrastructure.
Yeah. China is not THAT strict. But still building the rode around the nail house is something that wouldn't happen in the US. Eminent domain for other people is something I believe in for a better society.
>It's not the result of many individuals objecting. It's the largely the result of a few wealthy individuals objecting. Elon Musk has admitted to publicizing hyperloop largely to take the wind out of the sails of the proposed high speed rail. American democracy is for the rich.
Still it is freedoms + capitalism that enables this. Rich people objecting can get silenced. Jack Ma for example.
angled 3 hours ago [-]
But what of the culture? For years now the art and music has felt like poor cousins to what is in the west, similar to what we see generated by AI now, and consumed be people doomscrolling on WeChat moments while they wait for their didi to deliver their food from the shop down the street.
Every time I visit SZ now it feels like the scooters are misrouted neurons firing in any which direction, with no respect for pedestrians, parking, or the rest of the city.
eli_gottlieb 3 hours ago [-]
> Take California’s high speed rail. Every individual has the right to object. No one wants an eyesore in their backyard. Everyone gets a hearing. Everyone gets a lawsuit. Everyone gets a veto in practice, if not in theory.
That has absolutely nothing to do with civil liberties and everything to do with the adversarial legalism of the Common Law code and with property rights, which are quite a different matter. There are any number of Western countries in which individual or household property rights are not taken to constitute an arbitrary veto on otherwise legal state action: if a train is scheduled to get built, it gets built, and compensation is paid but vetoes cannot be exercised.
threethirtytwo 3 hours ago [-]
Every additional "right" you have is a "freedom" you can choose to execute or not execute on. A right is an additional freedom. If you have no rights, you have no freedom, if you have unlimited rights, you have unlimited freedom.
I agree there's things like eminent domain. I'm just saying China leans more in the direction of less rights overall which in turn leads to a more productive society.
AnthonyMouse 2 hours ago [-]
> Every additional "right" you have is a "freedom" you can choose to execute or not execute on. A right is an additional freedom. If you have no rights, you have no freedom, if you have unlimited rights, you have unlimited freedom.
Suppose there is one city where everyone has the right to build new housing on any piece of land they own and another city where everyone has the right to prevent anyone else from building new housing. These things are the opposite of one another, so they can't both be increasing the "freedom" of the public at large.
Now which city actually has more freedom?
threethirtytwo 2 hours ago [-]
I guess the keyword is "individual freedom." Technically, freedom can be expanded in the way you're implying but usually in common parlance they are referring to individual freedoms. That is what people mean when they say the US is "more free" than China. Under your expanded definition it's not clear which one is more free.
Extreme individual freedom is often called anarchy.
AnthonyMouse 2 hours ago [-]
There is nearly universal agreement among humans that nobody should have the "freedom" to commit non-consensual violence against another person. This is often cast as interfering with their freedom to be left alone and then the argument is that you don't have the freedom to deprive someone else of their freedom. But as soon as you have a government that so much as prohibits murder you're not doing something that can be described as anarchy.
The question is, in a "free country", does the government limit itself to punishing compelling violations with near-universal consensus like murder, or does it seize control over the micromanagement of dubious and petty violations like hypothetically marginally increasing traffic by carrying out a construction project?
It seems like the thing you're objecting to is the latter.
wbronitsky 4 hours ago [-]
I think parsing out what kind of freedom would help here. The US has a lot of “freedom of” but not a lot of “freedom from.”
dboreham 3 hours ago [-]
Freedom Theater
threethirtytwo 3 hours ago [-]
Any freedom. For example you don't have the freedom to own guns in China.
tclancy 3 hours ago [-]
Is that a freedom? You're defining everything as though the US were the optimal model of society. Couldn't I just as easily define the freedom to be safe from guns?
mixmastamyk 54 minutes ago [-]
I contacted RINSE and got no answer as well, thanks for the reply even if HN mgmt doesn't like it. Join me in downvoting their post.
threethirtytwo 3 hours ago [-]
What? I'm defining China, a country with less freedoms, AS more optimal then the US.
I think that comment about guns threw everyone off. People are very liberal on HN and at the same time very patriotic. They support gun control and ironically more freedoms at the same time so I think you and the other guy didn't realize that you both support China's lack of freedom in the aspect of owning guns.
bmitc 3 hours ago [-]
Who cares?
threethirtytwo 3 hours ago [-]
Exactly. I don't care about owning guns. I don't care about the overwhelming majority of the freedoms the US provides to me for which China does not provide.
3 hours ago [-]
bmitc 3 hours ago [-]
The U.S. doesn't have that much real freedom. It is nearly completely controlled by a concentrated oligarchy of people and corporations. Sure, there are rights, but these are almost entirely enforced via a massively beauractic and expensive judicial system. So if your rights are violated, it can take months and perhaps thousands or millions of dollars to prove and correct such violations. A cop murders someone? That takes like two years or more of trials and appeals if it even escapes internal affairs and the district attorney's office.
As an example, Texas is a state that prides itself on freedom but is incredibly privatized. There's hardly any public land. The entire electricity grid is privately owned. Toll roads abound in every major city. Over 20% of homes have an HOA, so those Texans have people (basically a small corporation) telling them how to cut their lawn. Women can't get medically suggested abortions. Universities are told what to teach by donors and politicans. For a while, the Texas DMV was collecting fingerprints just to get a license. Is that really freedom?
threethirtytwo 3 hours ago [-]
You're right. Maybe freedom is not the most fitting word here. Less centralized control is what I'm going for.
tosapple 4 hours ago [-]
Wait until you live through what Argentina or Brasil have then see how you feel about redress, petition and speech.
threethirtytwo 4 hours ago [-]
I'm specifically talking about Chinas' lack of freedoms... which is entirely different then Brasil or Argentina.
I don't have the freedom to own a gun in China, but it's safer in China to the point where you don't need a gun. Practically speaking I prefer to have less freedoms simply because you need less freedoms for society to function better AND most of these freedoms that are taken away by China are freedoms most people never exercise.
Yes, the event is Tiananmen Square. And on the moral axis, there is no ambiguity. It was a tragedy. People were killed for demanding political change. History does not need softening there, and I am not interested in doing that.
But morality alone does not explain how the world actually unfolds. And using morality as a trump card to end the discussion only works if we pretend the world is clean, fair, and reversible. It is not.
The uncomfortable reality is that history does not grade outcomes on intentions. It grades them on stability, continuity, and what comes after. The question is not whether Tiananmen Square was morally wrong. It was. The harder question is whether allowing that movement to succeed would have produced a better long term outcome for China, or whether it would have fractured the country into something far worse.
At that moment, China was not a mature liberal democracy waiting to be unlocked. It was a fragile state emerging from famine, revolution, and internal collapse. Power vacuums do not fill themselves with enlightenment. They fill with chaos, factionalism, and often bloodshed on a scale that makes a single atrocity look small in hindsight.
The leadership chose order over moral legitimacy. They chose continuity over uncertainty. They decided that dissent, even righteous dissent, was a risk they could not allow. The cost was horrific. The result was a state that remained intact, centralized, and capable of executing long term plans.
And execution matters. A lot.
Today, you can live in China and experience a society that functions at scale. Infrastructure appears where it is planned. Cities are built. Systems work. The future arrives on schedule. For many ordinary people, daily life feels stable, predictable, and materially improved compared to what came before.
Now contrast that with San Francisco. A city that prides itself on moral clarity, individual rights, and moral signaling. A city that debates endlessly and acts reluctantly. A city where compassion has become so fragmented across competing claims that enforcing basic order is treated as cruelty. The result is visible on the streets. Not theoretical. Not symbolic. Real decay, real suffering, real dysfunction.
This does not mean repression is good. It means the world forces tradeoffs whether we consent to them or not. There is no system that gets everything. There is no button you press that yields justice, freedom, stability, and progress simultaneously.
China accepted moral debt to buy coherence and speed. The West often accepts paralysis to preserve moral self image. Both choices carry costs. One is just easier to condemn from a distance. The other is easier to live with emotionally while things quietly fall apart.
If you want to argue morality, you will win the rhetorical point immediately. Tiananmen Square ends the conversation. But if you want to understand how nations actually become what they are, you have to step into the grey zone where history operates, where choices are made under uncertainty, and where the alternative paths are not clean, heroic, or guaranteed to be better.
The world is imperfect. Every society is built on compromises it would rather not examine too closely. The honest discussion is not about pretending one side is pure. It is about acknowledging that values shape outcomes, and that no outcome is free.
nothrabannosir 2 hours ago [-]
I love the opening of this comment, very poignant. I’m not convinced however that the conclusion follows from the setup. “The West” is more than just America. And America is very easy to condemn from a distance. Actually everything is easy to condemn from a distance.
There’s more to disagree with in the second half, but I’ll stick to my biggest gripe: America’s founding is steeped in moral principles, from its very founding document. In fact it is a two and a half century experiment on building a society around transparency, with the question of what is Right and what is Just at its core, and how does a society follow from that. And compared to where the world was when it was conceived, the experiment has certainly yielded vastly more results than your comment gives it credit for, by only looking at San Francisco today. It is evidence that the dichotomy between morality and building a society is a false one.
Meanwhile, tian an men square was in 1989, and the tension of “moral debt” is ever present, evidenced by its persistent censoring. When will it be paid off? And will the Chinese then say, “ok, we get it, that’s the price we had to pay”? Because if the ball suddenly drops and they rebel after all, as soon as censorship is lifted, you didn’t buy anything for that debt. So what then—keep taking out more moral debt? Forever?
China’s moral debt feels much like America’s national debt :)
Anyway like I said I loved the opening half of your comment though.
CodingJeebus 4 hours ago [-]
This is one of the most insane things I’ve ever read on this forum.
The assertion that being able to summarily execute people you accuse of corruption somehow reduces corruption is absurd. If that were true, places like Russia would have no corruption. Being a dictator just ensures that corruption flows your way as the leader.
3 hours ago [-]
threethirtytwo 3 hours ago [-]
Calling something “insane” is not an argument. It is a way to terminate a line of reasoning before it forces you to confront tradeoffs you would rather not look at. Once you label a position as madness, you no longer have to examine whether it explains real outcomes in the world. That move shortens the discussion, but it does not strengthen your position.
You are also arguing against a claim that was not made. No one is saying that executions somehow purify human nature or permanently eliminate corruption. The claim is narrower, colder, and more uncomfortable: extreme enforcement can sharply reduce certain forms of corruption for long periods of time, and that reduction can produce real, measurable benefits that save lives at scale.
This is not theoretical. Take food safety. In China, officials and executives have been executed for large scale food adulteration scandals. Morally, that is horrifying. Practically, it created an environment where cutting corners suddenly carried catastrophic personal risk. The result was a rapid tightening of compliance in industries where negligence or fraud can poison millions. Fewer tainted products means fewer dead children. That tradeoff does not become imaginary just because it makes us uneasy.
The same logic applies to infrastructure. When corruption in construction is treated as a capital crime, bridges do not collapse as often. Buildings are less likely to be built with fraudulent materials. Rail systems are less likely to be sabotaged by kickbacks and subcontracting fraud. One execution looks monstrous in isolation. The thousands of lives not lost to structural failure rarely make headlines because they never happened.
Singapore offers a milder but still illustrative example. It did not rely on executions, but it imposed severe, credible punishment and relentless enforcement for corruption. The outcome is one of the least corrupt governments on the planet and a state that functions with extraordinary efficiency. The lesson is not that brutality is good. The lesson is that consequences matter, and when they are weak, delayed, or politically negotiable, corruption flourishes.
Russia is not the counterexample you think it is. Corruption there thrives precisely because enforcement is selective and loyalty based. Power protects insiders rather than disciplines them. That is not what happens in systems where even high ranking officials can be credibly destroyed for crossing certain lines. Treating all authoritarian systems as identical collapses meaningful distinctions into a slogan.
You are framing this as a moral debate because morality is the easiest place to win rhetorically. Summary execution is evil. Everyone agrees. End of discussion. But that does not answer the structural question of why some societies manage to enforce standards at scale while others drown in fraud, decay, and institutional rot.
The world does not offer clean choices. Every system kills people, just in different ways. One system kills visibly, deliberately, and brutally. Another kills slowly through negligence, corruption, drug tainted streets, collapsing infrastructure, and the quiet abandonment of public order. One death looks shocking. Ten thousand avoided deaths look like nothing at all.
If you refuse to engage with that reality, you are not taking the moral high ground. You are opting out of the analysis entirely. And calling that insanity does not make it go away. It just signals an unwillingness to sit in the grey zone where cause, effect, and moral cost actually live.
JumpCrisscross 5 hours ago [-]
> A huge waste. And a monument to US incompetency
But a windfall for the litigation financier that buys those claims off the U.S. government.
These leases are contracts. Sovereign immunity is curtailed when the U.S. contracts.
zobzu 2 hours ago [-]
have you met the california high speed rail or not yet?
sephamorr 1 hours ago [-]
Well, that's not 'mostly done'
bgroins 5 hours ago [-]
Worse than the Superconducting Supercollider?
Retric 5 hours ago [-]
Yes far worse, the superconducting supercollider produced science which has debatable value. There’s an argument we lost nothing by canceling the project.
Wind farms produce electricity which pays for the investment when you finish but pays nothing when a stop early. This makes stopping early extremely economically harmful.
watersb 5 hours ago [-]
Esoteric programming language developed for the superconducting super collider, Glish, was picked up by the National Radio Astronomy Observatory, which used it well into the 2000s.
Glish supported networked remote procedure calls, made then almost transparent to the program. Otherwise, Glish was roughly similar to Tcl or Lua.
I don't know what other bits and pieces got salvaged from the SSC project.
The effective electricity rate in MA is already $0.37/kWh. How much further could it go?
_aavaa_ 4 hours ago [-]
That’s a joke right?
5 hours ago [-]
xeonmc 5 hours ago [-]
Or that space telescope?
toomuchtodo 6 hours ago [-]
Well, judicial checks and balances should protect them until regime change, which is coming.
Waterluvian 5 hours ago [-]
I dunno. The Americans stuck their hand in a blender for four years and then four years later needed to try it again. Alas, Stumpy McNubs remains long on limbs but short on memory.
tzs 3 hours ago [-]
The first time many of Trump's desires to do illegal things were somewhat restrained by non-political government employees who remembered that their oath is to the Constitution, not the President.
Based on what I've read a lot of people who voted for him subsequent times thought that would continue.
toomuchtodo 5 hours ago [-]
I have similar concerns, but the evidence so far is encouraging.
"The President's party loses seats in the midterms" is a long-term trend and it seems pretty likely to hold this time.
The real question is, once the Democrats are back in control of at least one house of Congress, are they going to be sane or are they going to spend two years making such fools of themselves that we end up with another Republican President in 2028?
actionfromafar 5 hours ago [-]
Don't look into laser with remaining eye! (Unless it's really shiny, and red?)
Waterluvian 5 hours ago [-]
Science demands rigour and repeatability.
softwaredoug 5 hours ago [-]
It's going to be dicey whether you can keep all the suppliers engaged with start / stops over 3 years.
toomuchtodo 5 hours ago [-]
From the piece:
> Several of these projects are near completion and are likely to be done before any government appeal can be heard.
Just gotta keep grinding towards success.
int0x29 3 hours ago [-]
This will kill most future investment in offshore wind even if those projects are sucessful.
toomuchtodo 3 hours ago [-]
It’ll come back when there is more policy certainty, China isn’t going anywhere and they’re going to keep building. Luckily, there is manufacturing supply chain safely outside the US. China is roughly a third of global manufacturing capacity after all.
Don’t think in years, think in half decades and decades. This too shall pass.
There's no regime change coming when those in power run the elections, have already cheated in the past, and know that they are now untouchable.
rootusrootus 3 hours ago [-]
It is not too useful to make bold unsupported claims that the current administration has the power to subvert elections. That just lowers us to their level, and the last thing we need is for a further erosion in confidence in our democratic system. The states run elections, and no matter what Trump says to get people to keep paying attention to him, they don't jump when the president tells them to. The feds have money and nukes, but States have a lot of the actual power.
amanaplanacanal 4 hours ago [-]
States run the elections.
prawn 3 hours ago [-]
The US president just today said that Republicans should "nationalize the voting" in future elections.
rootusrootus 3 hours ago [-]
It certainly gets us to keep talking about him. Which seems to be his primary skill. It does not have any basis in reality, however.
Dylan16807 2 hours ago [-]
That sounds like a call to get rid of the electoral college...
estearum 2 hours ago [-]
Well that's nice (i.e. an impeachable, despicable offense), but it doesn't actually change how elections are run.
SpicyLemonZest 2 hours ago [-]
He also said his polls are the best they've ever been today. Trump works hard to cultivate an aura of inevitability, but he simply does not have the power to make false things true by declaring them so.
dyauspitr 4 hours ago [-]
GOP cronyism and deep corruption.
pjdesno 6 hours ago [-]
In the 70s the oil companies were furious that Venezuela (if my understanding is correct) revoked their leases and forced them to abandon their equipment investments.
That's basically what the administration was trying to do here, under a legal system which (unlike Venezuela in the 70s) is very keen on protecting corporate investment. It seems like a classic "takings" case.
fsckboy 6 hours ago [-]
the Venezuelan oil leases you are talking about was 1990s, not 1970s.
for Venezuelan oil leases to be comparable to wind farms you'd have to have the Venezuelan govt say "we are taking the leases away because we don't want any more offshore oil production", rather than "we are taking these leases away because you are rich and we want to pump the oil ourselves"
the cancelled Venezuelan oil leases were a taking, but that word is less useful in the case of wind farms. I would imagine firms with wind farm contracts would be made whole (i.e. get back lost investment, but not get back potential profit) but it's not a case of the wind farms being given to somebody else or those areas being put to some other use.
if you are "environmental" you might think it's a great loss not to pursue the wind approach, or that it's a great idea to shut down offshore drilling, but that's political not property ownership/taking.
unyttigfjelltol 6 hours ago [-]
If the concern is the control module of the wind turbine— that’s not a nationalization and confiscation program. It might look similar in the near-term to participants, but that’s simply because they are functioning as instruments of the control module supplier, extending the inference, which isn’t a legitimate owner of the wind farms or US electrical grid anyway, and is quite unlike the fossil fuel companies in Venezuela of the 1970s.
WatchDog 3 hours ago [-]
> ...the Department of the Interior settled on a single justification for blocking turbine installation: a classified national security risk.
To speculate on what this risk is, the two obvious risk I can think of would be:
- Susceptibility to seabed warfare[0]. A rival nation can sabotage the infrastructure and maintain deniability, like we have seen with the Nord Stream sabotage[1].
- Potential interference with passive sonar systems, the turbines are likely to generate a fair bit of noise, which could potentially make it harder for SOSUS[2] to detect rival submarines.
If the latter were true, the permits would have never been granted. The permits took years of back and forth, public and government commentary.
The former is a threat vector but one that can be priced into the ongoing maintenance costs.
ggm 7 hours ago [-]
posted this at ars forum: (it should be clear I think it was a stupid move by the WH, but I am trying to think what might have "informed" it)
Steelmanning the risks, its the link to mainland as a weakness in supply chain of power, compared to onshore sources possibly. But, the construction is in close water, well inside the exclusive economic zone. You would think passage of a craft capable of causing a power shock with an anchor chain was raising hackles well before this, because it's hugely unusual for a warcraft of another nation to be that close without an explicit permit. Under the Jones act, all inshore commercial craft delivering goods to and from named ports have to be US badged, for international shipping it's clear from the baltic there's a concrete risk, but that's a matter of policing the boats, not banning the structures at risk.
A second steelman might be some belief about the intermittency. Thats easily knocked over because the system as a whole is building out storage and continuity systems, is adapting to a mix of technology with different power availability throughout the day, and of all the sources of power, wind is one of the most easily predicted to a useful window forward. You know roughly when a dunkelflaut is expected inside 48h, if you don't know exactly when, or for how long. Thats well north of the spin-up time for alternative (dirty) sources of power, if your storage capacity isn't there yet to handle it.
wattso 5 hours ago [-]
The pretext for the suspension was radar noise.[1]
US wind farms are 30 miles from the coast at most? No country is attacking that under some plausible deniability and it not being seen as an act of war.There are more important power lines further from civilisation running through rural areas in the US. These are not fiber cables a 1000 miles from the coast.
Gas generators can be spun up to provide megawatts in seconds btw. With less than a quarter of the grid being renewable, intermittency is not an issue. Grids are built with resilience in mind (or at least should be...).
CGMthrowaway 6 hours ago [-]
Treating offshore wind like ports and pipelines from a security POV makes sense, it's exactly what we do with offshore O&G. The rub is that securing offshore wind installations is an order of magnitude more resource-intensive than securing a deepwater rig, bc you're talking about a perimeter than spans 100's of square miles, not a single platform with a limited # of risers
defrost 6 hours ago [-]
From an attack PoV that's hundreds of square miles to destroy or disable many structures Vs taking out a single target.
ie. They can nibble a bit at an array before you're onto them Vs everything gets thrown at a point source target.
anonymousDan 6 hours ago [-]
What about some kind of mass underwater drone attack? Feels like it might be feasible in the not too distant future...
ggm 6 hours ago [-]
Is that especially simpler than e.g. an attack on the above ground cabling systems by firing carbon fibre conducting wires over them, as the US is said to have done in the Iraq war? Not that I don't think underwater drones are a future risk, but the belief its a risk which can't be mitigated, or a worse risk than ones which exist onshore, seems a bit weak.
But none the less, yes. This would be a risk. Perhaps one which demands better drone detection and defence systems around wind turbines and O&G fields?
wombatpm 5 hours ago [-]
Aluminized Mylar streamers is what was used to take down the grid in Balkans back in the 90’s
defrost 6 hours ago [-]
Say that it is .. it's still hard to near simultaneously take out all wind generators than to mass swarm (with a smaller number) a single platform, well head grouping, or onshore processing facility.
Recall the context - a field of many wind generators Vs one or two platforms in order to "take down" a state's power grid.
Ropes are strong because of many strands.
ssl-3 5 hours ago [-]
That would seem like either an excellent way to start a new war, or a galactically stupid way to try to end one.
ggm 6 hours ago [-]
If you wanted to defend an O&G field, wouldn't you need to consider a similar extent? per wellhead, yes. but the go to a concentrator for onshore feed don't they? or some kind of attached floating rig, which itself is a SPF.
I thought fields had 100s of square km of extent too. The exclusion zone after nordstream is now pretty big, albiet "temporary" according to the web its 5 to 7 nm so 9 to 13 km so close to 100 km^2
CGMthrowaway 5 hours ago [-]
All of which are continually manned. Not so w/ offshore wind
rootusrootus 3 hours ago [-]
Don't wind turbines get serviced a few times a year? I would bet that on any given day there will be people at the farms.
mschuster91 4 hours ago [-]
> Treating offshore wind like ports and pipelines from a security POV makes sense
No it does not. Even if you'd manage to disable an entire wind farm, the impact on the grid as a whole is negligible. An attacker has to spend a whole lot of effort on such an attack for very little, if any at all, gain.
In contrast, shell a port or the right piece of infrastructure [1] and entire economies can get wrecked. And shell an oil rig... I mean, I seriously hope even the Russians don't sink that low but hey they did attack a goddamn NPP and a hydropower dam... anyway, taking out an oil rig risks an environmental disaster similar to Deepwater Horizon. That's a lot more effect for an opponent.
The actual threat to wind farms is software. We've seen that in the early days of the Russian invasion of Ukraine - the Russians took down satellite modems [2], causing about 6000 wind turbines to lose their command infrastructure and thus stop generating power.
Even if there were legitimate concerns surrounding defense of the wind farms, it makes more sense to instead de-risk with redundancy elsewhere, which is increasingly cheap and quick to do thanks to the combo of solar+batteries. That’s what we should be doing anyway if AI data center energy requirements are to continue to increase.
Its completely in-line with his personality to hold onto personal grievances for decades to the point that they become policy.
rootusrootus 3 hours ago [-]
> Its completely in-line with his personality to hold onto personal grievances for decades to the point that they become policy.
I feel like much of what he does today can be directly attributed to the epic roasting he got from Obama at the correspondents' dinner. Most of us would be absolutely honored by being roasted by the sitting president, but he seemed at the time to take it very personally.
ggm 6 hours ago [-]
The Judges appear to have responded to something specific. If it was made-up, they would have thrown the case out harder and sanctioned whoever submitted false evidence. So I assume somebody with an ability to legally bind intel into the right form was persuaded to say something.
duskwuff 6 hours ago [-]
Perhaps the objection started out with something fundamentally irrational or opinion-based, and someone was ordered to "reverse-engineer" an objection out of that which wasn't trivially refutable - e.g. "the noise from the turbines will keep our submarine sonar from working" or "reports say that human smugglers are hiding aboard the windmills" or whatever.
ggm 6 hours ago [-]
Yes, I think thats very plausible. "inshore defense operations in an area of strategic importance will be excessively impeded by both development of this site, and future operations in ways which <REDACTED>" type thing.
maxerickson 6 hours ago [-]
In the quote in the article there, the one judge responds to something specific by calling it "irrational".
defrost 6 hours ago [-]
This is very much a root cause.
Not just the fact that Scottish wind farms prevailed, also that he was relentlessly mocked, ridiculed, and protested against in unavoidably visible ways by the Scots.
( Note: while a recent youtube clip, the anti Trump protests in Scotland date back to well before his campaign for his first term as POTUS )
5 hours ago [-]
aqme28 4 hours ago [-]
I think that wind farms dotted along the entire US coast would be a bad target for crippling US power compared to a few coal/gas/nuclear mega power plants.
lovich 5 hours ago [-]
Weird how these security risks only show up to tank projects in blue states
maxdo 2 hours ago [-]
People mix up freedom and dicatorship here:
1. Freedom — free markets, minimal regulation
Early USA had both political and economic freedom. Modern China has only economic freedom (plus heavy protectionism).
2. Dictatorship of a certain group
Modern USA and the Western world have a dictatorship of lawyers, regulators, and ideological enforcement. Communist China has straightforward political dictatorship.
As you can see, it's not black and white. China struggled when they had both economic and political dictatorship, but thrived once they introduced economic freedom.
3. It's always a race, freedom of the past is not enough.
What the West should do is focus on better planning, less politics, more economic freedom, and a dictatorship of data-driven decisions instead.
firejake308 3 hours ago [-]
I mean, we need all the electricity we can get to run all of these datacenters, right? So I think this might be one of those things that the Republicans quietly allow to continue so that the corporate interests can maximize electricity production
petcat 6 hours ago [-]
3 more years. I don't know who the Dems can elect to go against JD Vance, maybe Tim Walz, but they need somebody.
> MINNEAPOLIS (Gray News) - Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz said he will not run for elected office again.
> Walz touched on his political plans in a recent interview with cable news channel MS Now.
> “I will never run for an elected office again,” Walz said. “Never again.”
> The 2024 Democratic vice-presidential nominee said he plans to “do the work” while finding other ways to serve the country.
rootusrootus 3 hours ago [-]
I would guess that many politicians (of both sides, see also MTG) suddenly start to rethink how bad they want the public job when Trump turns the firehose of death threats their direction.
estearum 2 hours ago [-]
Classic third world dictator shit
aaronbrethorst 5 hours ago [-]
There'll be a ton of people running, any of which I think would be highly competitive against Vance: Walz, Pritzker, Newsom, Chris Murphy, Harris, Josh Shapiro, etc.
But I think Mark Kelly is likely to be a top-tier candidate from the jump. He's not my favorite of the bunch, necessarily, but I'd consider putting money on him being the Democratic nominee in 2028.
rootusrootus 3 hours ago [-]
3 years of Trump getting progressively weaker as more and more Republicans in purple districts decide they are more likely to be reelected by going against Trump than by supporting him. Not to mention the midterms will at least make it impossible to get any legislation passed that they want (which, thankfully, they have been mercifully incompetent at so far).
dyauspitr 2 hours ago [-]
Newsom, maybe Mark Kelly
toomuchtodo 6 hours ago [-]
Pritzker.
actionfromafar 5 hours ago [-]
A wet towel could go against JD Vance, but what if Vance shutters polling stations in blue districts? Because "terrorism".
carefulfungi 4 hours ago [-]
Weird to see this so downvoted on the same day that Trump asked republicans to "Nationalize" elections in 15 places. Whatever that means.
> “Republicans should say, ‘We want to take control of this. We need to take control of voting in at least 15 places.’ Republicans should nationalize voting,” [Trump] said on the podcast of former FBI deputy director Dan Bongino, which was relaunched on Monday.
rootusrootus 3 hours ago [-]
> Whatever that means
It means Trump is sucking the oxygen out of the room. Again. I wish we would quit reacting to every stupid thing he says.
bpodgursky 2 hours ago [-]
If the Democrats nominate Tim Walz they deserve to lose the next ten thousand elections. My god.
zthrowaway 5 hours ago [-]
3 more years til the next dog and pony show but different colors.
mschuster91 4 hours ago [-]
The midterms this year can already seriously throw wrenches into the Project 2025 plans. Trump's failure to address the economy situation, the constant and ongoing wars, ICE seriously disrupting agriculture and construction sites, ICE executing white people in front of cameras [1] and now the latest Epstein crap... Democrats are flipping what used to be solid-red seats these days.
People are fed up. Assuming there will be free elections - as absurd as it is to even write this sentence referring to the US, but here we are [2] - it most probably will end in an utter wipeout for MAGA. They'll have the President, of course, but assuming the Democrat leadership finds some spine - again, an assumption, given Schumer - stuff has the potential to change.
On top of that are state and local level elections that are all the time. Stuff like school boards, sheriffs, whatever that is where MAGA and the Evangelicals built out their initial networks. All of that can be flipped around as well, if people actually bother to show up and vote.
Trump banning offshore wind projects is why oil and gas workers vote for him.
The only way they can keep their jobs working on vastly inferior, dangerous technology is to ban new, safer, better technology.
defrost 4 hours ago [-]
The reality, of course, being that wind farm construction is big on labour, specialist transport machinery, crane operating, jacking, bolts, working to weather extreme thresholds, etc.
Different as from a distance but still a lot of applicable skill and team work experience transfer for many workers.
chmorgan_ 3 hours ago [-]
[dead]
einpoklum 6 hours ago [-]
Judge: "Why were these projects put on hold?"
Government lawyers: "Uh, well, we could tell you, but then we'd have to kill you."
Now, I would point out how the US is making itself into a joke, but I'm afraid the joke's on us, because carbon output is not decreasing dramatically like it must, and the effects of global warming will, slowly but surely, become worse with every passing year. I live in a region where warming is predicted to be near twice the global average, so I'm particularly worried about what it's going to be like when I'm old, or in the generation following mine.
IhateAI 3 hours ago [-]
Offshore windmills legitimately do interfere with some of these military radars monitoring the coastline that are probably top secret, or so I'm told by people that would know. However, I doubt that's the only reason of course.
sandworm101 6 hours ago [-]
I am all for green energy, but these windfarms were designed years ago. Since then, solar has progressed in leaps whereas wind has not. Im not so sure that fighting the olds over wind farms is the fight worth winning. Let them cancel the wind farms if that means a free hand to develop solar.
ianburrell 6 hours ago [-]
Solar and wind are good complements. Solar works during the day and best on clear, windless days. Wind blows best during the night and on cloudy, stormy days. Solar is best in summer and wind in winter.
Wind also works better in some areas that don't have solar. UK has a lot of offshore wind, but less solar. The US Northeast has a lot of wind but lags behind on solar.
Wind has dropped significantly in price over the decades and is competitive in price with solar. I saw article about early Scottish wind farm being upgraded so that one new turbine equals the whole old farm.
sandworm101 5 hours ago [-]
I theory yes, but grid storage favors solar. Solar can be placed much closer to consumption, literally on the roof of the consumer. Wind exists in large farms away from cities. They are not perfect partners.
The rich/old paticularly hate wind because they do not like looking at it. (The link to golf courses is not by accident. Wind farms and golf course tend to appear together due to them both gravitating towards areas with shallow waters.) We still here stories about blinking shadows interupting sleep cycles, even causing cancer. So perhaps we let them alone for another decade and allow solar+storage to take up the slack. Then, when the nimby people are no longer in power, we bring back wind.
(Shallow sea means no commercial traffic/ports. That means cheap land for non-industrial things like yacht clubs and big houses, which give rise to golf courses. So the rich/old dont like seeing the wind farms that, inevitably, want to live just offshore of their yacht/golf clubs. See Nantuket.)
sunshinesnacks 3 hours ago [-]
None of the points you were responding to are “in theory”.
You are proposing something that sounds like killing the US wind industry and then simply bringing it back later. That probably would work well, especially when projects have development lead times of several to many years.
Dylan16807 2 hours ago [-]
> grid storage favors sola
In what way?
> Solar can be placed much closer to consumption, literally on the roof of the consumer. Wind exists in large farms away from cities.
You still need the grid to exist, so 100 miles one way or the other doesn't affect cost very much.
> Then, when the nimby people are no longer in power, we bring back wind.
NIMBY never goes away. There are some situations where you don't want to burn up your political capital fighting them, but in general if you can get a project through then do it.
marcosdumay 3 hours ago [-]
> I theory yes, but grid storage favors solar.
With solar you get to overbuild it and charge you batteries once a day. Wind has way more peaks and bottoms, so you can sell your battery capacity several times most days.
But the GPs point is exactly that you need fewer batteries if you have both. Fewer batteries tends to be cheaper than more, and this pair is a very common case.
Rapzid 6 hours ago [-]
Whether or not these wind farms are economically viable sounds like something for the companies building them to work out.
monero-xmr 5 hours ago [-]
They are 100% not viable without tax dollars
bronson 4 hours ago [-]
Neither is petroleum, nuclear, or the highway system. What's your point?
monero-xmr 4 hours ago [-]
Wind is the worst of all, otherwise the UK would have the cheapest energy in the West, instead of the highest
Or maybe if not for wind their electricity would be even more expensive.
See? Anyone can make kill-shot arguments when there's no data.
malfist 5 hours ago [-]
You don't appear to be "all for green energy" if you want to prohibit some forms of green energy. In fact that appears to be the stance of someone who opposes green energy
leosussan 4 hours ago [-]
That definitely won't be what they're using that free hand for, unfortunately. I wish it weren't true, but the Republican party is sticking to its blanket opposition to anything that isn't fossil-fuel related. Add it to the growing list of stuff to be annoyed / angry about.
aspbee555 6 hours ago [-]
solar only runs during the day and when it is not cloudy, wind farms can run constantly with low weather impact
multiple energy sources are what is important to make up for where solar falls short. sure solar is amazing, but it will never replace everything on its own
anon7000 6 hours ago [-]
Solar + battery is good enough & cheap enough (and recyclable enough). But agreed that multiple renewable energy sources aren’t a bad thing!
Solar + battery is just so good at staying stable and productive for decades with no moving parts, minimal maintenance, and unbeatable scalability
Rapzid 6 hours ago [-]
The market realities don't pan out. Texas has a huge and diversified renewable energy sector. Wind was supplying nearly 45% of energy capacity last night, with solar providing close to 57% during its peak yesterday. Power storage discharge peaked around 13% and it's typically only used to round out capacity in the early morning and evening when peak demand coincides with low solar generation...
And that's in Texas where there is tons of sun and wind. I would imagine markets where wind, and in particular off shore wind, could make a lot more sense compared to attempting 100% solar generation. If I had to wager, maybe where they are building offshore wind generation..
Jedd 3 hours ago [-]
> solar only runs during the day and when it is not cloudy
Solar PVC output directly and immediately correlates to sun landing on the panels.
Solar thermal runs well into the evening, and its output is not impacted by the occasional cloud.
sunshinesnacks 3 hours ago [-]
That’s only because of the thermal storage. The output of the solar collectors is massively impacted by clouds, also just by haze and aerosols, much more than PV, which is happy with diffuse and direct sunlight.
Then there’s the cost, which has not been good for CSP’s market share.
tzs 6 hours ago [-]
It doesn't mean a free hand to develop solar. The Trump administration hates solar, too, and is doing as much as it can to hinder solar development.
Also, wind and solar have different production patterns, such as how they perform seasonally, how weather affects them, and how they perform at different times of day. You are much better off including a good mix of them in your system.
Analemma_ 6 hours ago [-]
What olds? The shutdown here was ostensibly for national security reasons.
> Let them cancel the wind farms if that means a free hand to develop solar.
That's not actually a bargain anyone has the power to agree to in a binding way. The people protesting the appearance of wind farms are on the coasts, the people protesting solar are in the country's interior. There's no "deal" you can make to get the latter instead of the former. Just build all the power generation and then we'll have cheaper electricity and a more resilient grid.
Rendered at 05:28:55 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time) with Vercel.
And what of its negotiating credibility? How can the other side trust that an agreement will hold in the future?
This is not a critique, but a genuine curiosity, because there's an obvious drawback with a system with opposing world views.
Unless, of course, something still unites them in the first place, with acceptable disparity on each side turning it into an advantage of flexibility and adaptability while keeping the focus on long-term ideas and plans.
the shape of how things actually work is what’s left when constant churn (and now budget blocking) is a fact of life
And, why it's hard to compete with China.
Obviously if you hate democracy you'll want to destroy this system, which is what they've been working at for the last 50ish years.
It is an interesting question of what changed, but lack of funding isn't the answer. I suspect it is a combination of scope creepy, application to intractable problems, and baumols cost disease at work.
Well, for one by ensuring that 'long-term' means it starts at the start of a term and ends before the end of that term. At most that only rules out nuclear, at least wrt long term energy projects. And it's not like recent dem administrations were unfriendly towards nuclear. Vogtle 3/4 were approved early in Obama's term, and finished under Biden's.
That's the only way to work around Trump. According to the Constitution, no one can actually make the executive branch do anything it doesn't want to do.
https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.mnd.230...
This is absolutely nuts to read, and yet isn't the first time we've read such kind of language in court opinions and publications with this administration.
1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federalist_Society
That aside: https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2025/07/21/trump-cou...
Edit due to rate-limiting: that makes two of us.
"corruption"
That's not really the point nor the problem, because some people choose to listen to very stupid or malicious people and others are (by chance or by skill) more susceptible to being steered by more credible people.
Half the country is in thrall with a uniquely malicious and moronic force, and the other half is vaguely in alignment with the vague directional gestures of expert consensus (even though it's sometimes wrong!). These are not at all the same, even if they both are technically "believing what people told them to."
In doing so you need to find a way to live with the cognitive dissonance. The best way is to truly buy into all of it, as hard as you can. That wins and keeps on winning. Or you can try to mitigate things to your conscience, but that leads to a lot of halfhearted efforts and poor turnout.
Fixed that for you.
There are democracies with proportional representation out there. Those have their own problems in forming coalitions, but the parties themselves are much closer aligned with their base.
No, Keystone XL was not the same level of pettiness as offshore wind. Find me the IPCC report equivalent that makes the case for wind farms doing whatever social damage Trump says they do. I'll wait.
there's been, in 2025, 983 000 people receiving disciplinary sanctions[0]. then:
1. either there's no corruption, and people are getting sanctioned for no reason
2. there's corruption
> Less incompetency
one thing they seem to do correctly in China, is to select their leaders not based on pure political skills, but on actual thinking skills: many of them come from technical backgrounds, and have been trained to think rationally.
furthermore, in my experience, Asian people, and Chinese in particular, also have better working habits − stronger wills − than most Westerners.
I'd still be careful about assuming they're really _that_ more competent. intellectual theft, propaganda, rushed work, all could contribute to a temporary illusion of superiority.
> Less freedom for stuff like protesting
this is a watered-down description of the actual situation.
you can get jailed, beaten up, tortured, killed, etc. religious groups seem to be the main target of the most violent treatments[1]. there's really no reason to target peaceful people, via such extreme means.
[0]: https://www.brasildefato.com.br/2026/01/30/investigations-in...
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_rights_in_China
Is that true?
You're just compressing reality so the logic becomes simple. But your analysis loses the nuance. First of all no one said there's no corruption in China. Corruption is everywhere... saying there's none is a practical impossibility.
Second. In 2025 983,000 people received disciplinary sanctions.... If what China claims is true or even partially true it means corruption was reduced on a scale that cannot be replicated in the US.
You analysis is valid, but inconclusive.
>furthermore, in my experience, Asian people, and Chinese in particular, also have better working habits − stronger wills − than most Westerners. >I'd still be careful about assuming they're really _that_ more competent. intellectual theft, propaganda, rushed work, all could contribute to a temporary illusion of superiority.
First of all let me be frank. I am asian. I am genetically Chinese and culturally western. My comment was purely about centralized systems of government and how THAT effects competency and not at all about the competency of the population seperate from that.
That being said, average IQ in China is higher than the US, that is a statistical fact. I did not comment on how that translates into this argument or what IQ even means in reality. I'm going to avoid that argument because I have no opinion on it.
>this is a watered-down description of the actual situation. >you can get jailed, beaten up, tortured, killed, etc. religious groups seem to be the main target of the most violent treatments[1]. there's really no reason to target peaceful people, via such extreme means.
You're right. I did water it down. But I still stand by my point. I won't in actuality participate in activities that will lead to these types of consequences so restricting me of these freedoms is something I practically don't care about.
The religious argument is valid. But what do you think of scientology? Cults. Basically the religions that China cracks down on are religions it considers to be similar to scientology. Ultimately these things are bullshit. I'm not religious so, again practically speaking it doesn't affect me. I think most HNers are also atheist or agnostic.
Take California’s high speed rail. Every individual has the right to object. No one wants an eyesore in their backyard. Everyone gets a hearing. Everyone gets a lawsuit. Everyone gets a veto in practice, if not in theory.
The result is predictable. I will never see a functioning high speed rail system in California in my lifetime. Neither will anyone alive today. Not because we lack money or engineering talent, but because the accumulation of individual rights makes collective action nearly impossible.
Now look at China. They decide to build it, and it gets built. If you are in the way, you move. If persuasion fails, coercion follows. Freedoms are not part of the equation.
That contrast is uncomfortable, but it is real. Freedom buys dignity and protection from abuse. It also buys paralysis. China sacrifices individual rights and gets infrastructure. California preserves individual rights and gets endless meetings, delays, and nothing on the ground.
You can argue which system is morally superior. You cannot argue that they produce the same outcomes.
If there was actually freedom and you wanted to build high speed rail, you would solicit investors, go negotiate for some land -- the power company has a bunch of transmission lines up the coast that run approximately parallel to the highways, maybe get that land, your trains were going to need power anyway -- and then you hire some people and start laying tracks.
"Everyone gets a veto" is the thing where you can't do it because the government won't let you even when you have the wherewithal and inclination to do it. That's the opposite of freedom.
Has there been any autocracy in the last century that has had better outcomes when compared to liberal democracy? (other than China)
Look up "Nail Houses". The USA used eminent domain heavily in the same situation back when they were still building new infrastructure.
>Take California’s high speed rail. Every individual has the right to object.
It's not the result of many individuals objecting. It's the largely the result of a few wealthy individuals objecting. Elon Musk has admitted to publicizing hyperloop largely to take the wind out of the sails of the proposed high speed rail. American democracy is for the rich.
Yeah. China is not THAT strict. But still building the rode around the nail house is something that wouldn't happen in the US. Eminent domain for other people is something I believe in for a better society.
>It's not the result of many individuals objecting. It's the largely the result of a few wealthy individuals objecting. Elon Musk has admitted to publicizing hyperloop largely to take the wind out of the sails of the proposed high speed rail. American democracy is for the rich.
Still it is freedoms + capitalism that enables this. Rich people objecting can get silenced. Jack Ma for example.
Every time I visit SZ now it feels like the scooters are misrouted neurons firing in any which direction, with no respect for pedestrians, parking, or the rest of the city.
That has absolutely nothing to do with civil liberties and everything to do with the adversarial legalism of the Common Law code and with property rights, which are quite a different matter. There are any number of Western countries in which individual or household property rights are not taken to constitute an arbitrary veto on otherwise legal state action: if a train is scheduled to get built, it gets built, and compensation is paid but vetoes cannot be exercised.
I agree there's things like eminent domain. I'm just saying China leans more in the direction of less rights overall which in turn leads to a more productive society.
Suppose there is one city where everyone has the right to build new housing on any piece of land they own and another city where everyone has the right to prevent anyone else from building new housing. These things are the opposite of one another, so they can't both be increasing the "freedom" of the public at large.
Now which city actually has more freedom?
Extreme individual freedom is often called anarchy.
The question is, in a "free country", does the government limit itself to punishing compelling violations with near-universal consensus like murder, or does it seize control over the micromanagement of dubious and petty violations like hypothetically marginally increasing traffic by carrying out a construction project?
It seems like the thing you're objecting to is the latter.
I think that comment about guns threw everyone off. People are very liberal on HN and at the same time very patriotic. They support gun control and ironically more freedoms at the same time so I think you and the other guy didn't realize that you both support China's lack of freedom in the aspect of owning guns.
As an example, Texas is a state that prides itself on freedom but is incredibly privatized. There's hardly any public land. The entire electricity grid is privately owned. Toll roads abound in every major city. Over 20% of homes have an HOA, so those Texans have people (basically a small corporation) telling them how to cut their lawn. Women can't get medically suggested abortions. Universities are told what to teach by donors and politicans. For a while, the Texas DMV was collecting fingerprints just to get a license. Is that really freedom?
I don't have the freedom to own a gun in China, but it's safer in China to the point where you don't need a gun. Practically speaking I prefer to have less freedoms simply because you need less freedoms for society to function better AND most of these freedoms that are taken away by China are freedoms most people never exercise.
Right?
But morality alone does not explain how the world actually unfolds. And using morality as a trump card to end the discussion only works if we pretend the world is clean, fair, and reversible. It is not.
The uncomfortable reality is that history does not grade outcomes on intentions. It grades them on stability, continuity, and what comes after. The question is not whether Tiananmen Square was morally wrong. It was. The harder question is whether allowing that movement to succeed would have produced a better long term outcome for China, or whether it would have fractured the country into something far worse.
At that moment, China was not a mature liberal democracy waiting to be unlocked. It was a fragile state emerging from famine, revolution, and internal collapse. Power vacuums do not fill themselves with enlightenment. They fill with chaos, factionalism, and often bloodshed on a scale that makes a single atrocity look small in hindsight.
The leadership chose order over moral legitimacy. They chose continuity over uncertainty. They decided that dissent, even righteous dissent, was a risk they could not allow. The cost was horrific. The result was a state that remained intact, centralized, and capable of executing long term plans.
And execution matters. A lot.
Today, you can live in China and experience a society that functions at scale. Infrastructure appears where it is planned. Cities are built. Systems work. The future arrives on schedule. For many ordinary people, daily life feels stable, predictable, and materially improved compared to what came before.
Now contrast that with San Francisco. A city that prides itself on moral clarity, individual rights, and moral signaling. A city that debates endlessly and acts reluctantly. A city where compassion has become so fragmented across competing claims that enforcing basic order is treated as cruelty. The result is visible on the streets. Not theoretical. Not symbolic. Real decay, real suffering, real dysfunction.
This does not mean repression is good. It means the world forces tradeoffs whether we consent to them or not. There is no system that gets everything. There is no button you press that yields justice, freedom, stability, and progress simultaneously.
China accepted moral debt to buy coherence and speed. The West often accepts paralysis to preserve moral self image. Both choices carry costs. One is just easier to condemn from a distance. The other is easier to live with emotionally while things quietly fall apart.
If you want to argue morality, you will win the rhetorical point immediately. Tiananmen Square ends the conversation. But if you want to understand how nations actually become what they are, you have to step into the grey zone where history operates, where choices are made under uncertainty, and where the alternative paths are not clean, heroic, or guaranteed to be better.
The world is imperfect. Every society is built on compromises it would rather not examine too closely. The honest discussion is not about pretending one side is pure. It is about acknowledging that values shape outcomes, and that no outcome is free.
There’s more to disagree with in the second half, but I’ll stick to my biggest gripe: America’s founding is steeped in moral principles, from its very founding document. In fact it is a two and a half century experiment on building a society around transparency, with the question of what is Right and what is Just at its core, and how does a society follow from that. And compared to where the world was when it was conceived, the experiment has certainly yielded vastly more results than your comment gives it credit for, by only looking at San Francisco today. It is evidence that the dichotomy between morality and building a society is a false one.
Meanwhile, tian an men square was in 1989, and the tension of “moral debt” is ever present, evidenced by its persistent censoring. When will it be paid off? And will the Chinese then say, “ok, we get it, that’s the price we had to pay”? Because if the ball suddenly drops and they rebel after all, as soon as censorship is lifted, you didn’t buy anything for that debt. So what then—keep taking out more moral debt? Forever?
China’s moral debt feels much like America’s national debt :)
Anyway like I said I loved the opening half of your comment though.
The assertion that being able to summarily execute people you accuse of corruption somehow reduces corruption is absurd. If that were true, places like Russia would have no corruption. Being a dictator just ensures that corruption flows your way as the leader.
You are also arguing against a claim that was not made. No one is saying that executions somehow purify human nature or permanently eliminate corruption. The claim is narrower, colder, and more uncomfortable: extreme enforcement can sharply reduce certain forms of corruption for long periods of time, and that reduction can produce real, measurable benefits that save lives at scale.
This is not theoretical. Take food safety. In China, officials and executives have been executed for large scale food adulteration scandals. Morally, that is horrifying. Practically, it created an environment where cutting corners suddenly carried catastrophic personal risk. The result was a rapid tightening of compliance in industries where negligence or fraud can poison millions. Fewer tainted products means fewer dead children. That tradeoff does not become imaginary just because it makes us uneasy.
The same logic applies to infrastructure. When corruption in construction is treated as a capital crime, bridges do not collapse as often. Buildings are less likely to be built with fraudulent materials. Rail systems are less likely to be sabotaged by kickbacks and subcontracting fraud. One execution looks monstrous in isolation. The thousands of lives not lost to structural failure rarely make headlines because they never happened.
Singapore offers a milder but still illustrative example. It did not rely on executions, but it imposed severe, credible punishment and relentless enforcement for corruption. The outcome is one of the least corrupt governments on the planet and a state that functions with extraordinary efficiency. The lesson is not that brutality is good. The lesson is that consequences matter, and when they are weak, delayed, or politically negotiable, corruption flourishes.
Russia is not the counterexample you think it is. Corruption there thrives precisely because enforcement is selective and loyalty based. Power protects insiders rather than disciplines them. That is not what happens in systems where even high ranking officials can be credibly destroyed for crossing certain lines. Treating all authoritarian systems as identical collapses meaningful distinctions into a slogan.
You are framing this as a moral debate because morality is the easiest place to win rhetorically. Summary execution is evil. Everyone agrees. End of discussion. But that does not answer the structural question of why some societies manage to enforce standards at scale while others drown in fraud, decay, and institutional rot.
The world does not offer clean choices. Every system kills people, just in different ways. One system kills visibly, deliberately, and brutally. Another kills slowly through negligence, corruption, drug tainted streets, collapsing infrastructure, and the quiet abandonment of public order. One death looks shocking. Ten thousand avoided deaths look like nothing at all.
If you refuse to engage with that reality, you are not taking the moral high ground. You are opting out of the analysis entirely. And calling that insanity does not make it go away. It just signals an unwillingness to sit in the grey zone where cause, effect, and moral cost actually live.
But a windfall for the litigation financier that buys those claims off the U.S. government.
These leases are contracts. Sovereign immunity is curtailed when the U.S. contracts.
Wind farms produce electricity which pays for the investment when you finish but pays nothing when a stop early. This makes stopping early extremely economically harmful.
Glish supported networked remote procedure calls, made then almost transparent to the program. Otherwise, Glish was roughly similar to Tcl or Lua.
I don't know what other bits and pieces got salvaged from the SSC project.
Based on what I've read a lot of people who voted for him subsequent times thought that would continue.
https://old.reddit.com/r/politics/comments/1puwkpj/democrats...
https://old.reddit.com/r/politics/comments/1qu6vyu/trump_cal...
https://thehill.com/homenews/campaign/5716988-democrats-scor...
https://www.npr.org/2026/02/01/nx-s1-5695678/democrat-taylor...
The real question is, once the Democrats are back in control of at least one house of Congress, are they going to be sane or are they going to spend two years making such fools of themselves that we end up with another Republican President in 2028?
> Several of these projects are near completion and are likely to be done before any government appeal can be heard.
Just gotta keep grinding towards success.
Don’t think in years, think in half decades and decades. This too shall pass.
https://ember-energy.org/data/china-cleantech-exports-data-e...
That's basically what the administration was trying to do here, under a legal system which (unlike Venezuela in the 70s) is very keen on protecting corporate investment. It seems like a classic "takings" case.
for Venezuelan oil leases to be comparable to wind farms you'd have to have the Venezuelan govt say "we are taking the leases away because we don't want any more offshore oil production", rather than "we are taking these leases away because you are rich and we want to pump the oil ourselves"
the cancelled Venezuelan oil leases were a taking, but that word is less useful in the case of wind farms. I would imagine firms with wind farm contracts would be made whole (i.e. get back lost investment, but not get back potential profit) but it's not a case of the wind farms being given to somebody else or those areas being put to some other use.
if you are "environmental" you might think it's a great loss not to pursue the wind approach, or that it's a great idea to shut down offshore drilling, but that's political not property ownership/taking.
To speculate on what this risk is, the two obvious risk I can think of would be:
- Susceptibility to seabed warfare[0]. A rival nation can sabotage the infrastructure and maintain deniability, like we have seen with the Nord Stream sabotage[1].
- Potential interference with passive sonar systems, the turbines are likely to generate a fair bit of noise, which could potentially make it harder for SOSUS[2] to detect rival submarines.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seabed_warfare
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nord_Stream_pipelines_sabotage
[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SOSUS
The former is a threat vector but one that can be priced into the ongoing maintenance costs.
Steelmanning the risks, its the link to mainland as a weakness in supply chain of power, compared to onshore sources possibly. But, the construction is in close water, well inside the exclusive economic zone. You would think passage of a craft capable of causing a power shock with an anchor chain was raising hackles well before this, because it's hugely unusual for a warcraft of another nation to be that close without an explicit permit. Under the Jones act, all inshore commercial craft delivering goods to and from named ports have to be US badged, for international shipping it's clear from the baltic there's a concrete risk, but that's a matter of policing the boats, not banning the structures at risk.
A second steelman might be some belief about the intermittency. Thats easily knocked over because the system as a whole is building out storage and continuity systems, is adapting to a mix of technology with different power availability throughout the day, and of all the sources of power, wind is one of the most easily predicted to a useful window forward. You know roughly when a dunkelflaut is expected inside 48h, if you don't know exactly when, or for how long. Thats well north of the spin-up time for alternative (dirty) sources of power, if your storage capacity isn't there yet to handle it.
[1] https://www.nbcnews.com/business/energy/trump-offshore-wind-...
Gas generators can be spun up to provide megawatts in seconds btw. With less than a quarter of the grid being renewable, intermittency is not an issue. Grids are built with resilience in mind (or at least should be...).
ie. They can nibble a bit at an array before you're onto them Vs everything gets thrown at a point source target.
But none the less, yes. This would be a risk. Perhaps one which demands better drone detection and defence systems around wind turbines and O&G fields?
Recall the context - a field of many wind generators Vs one or two platforms in order to "take down" a state's power grid.
Ropes are strong because of many strands.
I thought fields had 100s of square km of extent too. The exclusion zone after nordstream is now pretty big, albiet "temporary" according to the web its 5 to 7 nm so 9 to 13 km so close to 100 km^2
No it does not. Even if you'd manage to disable an entire wind farm, the impact on the grid as a whole is negligible. An attacker has to spend a whole lot of effort on such an attack for very little, if any at all, gain.
In contrast, shell a port or the right piece of infrastructure [1] and entire economies can get wrecked. And shell an oil rig... I mean, I seriously hope even the Russians don't sink that low but hey they did attack a goddamn NPP and a hydropower dam... anyway, taking out an oil rig risks an environmental disaster similar to Deepwater Horizon. That's a lot more effect for an opponent.
The actual threat to wind farms is software. We've seen that in the early days of the Russian invasion of Ukraine - the Russians took down satellite modems [2], causing about 6000 wind turbines to lose their command infrastructure and thus stop generating power.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Francis_Scott_Key_Bridge_colla...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Viasat_hack
Its completely in-line with his personality to hold onto personal grievances for decades to the point that they become policy.
I feel like much of what he does today can be directly attributed to the epic roasting he got from Obama at the correspondents' dinner. Most of us would be absolutely honored by being roasted by the sitting president, but he seemed at the time to take it very personally.
Not just the fact that Scottish wind farms prevailed, also that he was relentlessly mocked, ridiculed, and protested against in unavoidably visible ways by the Scots.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-NNWmZwObZc
( Note: while a recent youtube clip, the anti Trump protests in Scotland date back to well before his campaign for his first term as POTUS )
1. Freedom — free markets, minimal regulation Early USA had both political and economic freedom. Modern China has only economic freedom (plus heavy protectionism).
2. Dictatorship of a certain group Modern USA and the Western world have a dictatorship of lawyers, regulators, and ideological enforcement. Communist China has straightforward political dictatorship. As you can see, it's not black and white. China struggled when they had both economic and political dictatorship, but thrived once they introduced economic freedom.
3. It's always a race, freedom of the past is not enough. What the West should do is focus on better planning, less politics, more economic freedom, and a dictatorship of data-driven decisions instead.
https://www.uppermichiganssource.com/2026/01/29/tim-walz-say...
> MINNEAPOLIS (Gray News) - Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz said he will not run for elected office again.
> Walz touched on his political plans in a recent interview with cable news channel MS Now.
> “I will never run for an elected office again,” Walz said. “Never again.”
> The 2024 Democratic vice-presidential nominee said he plans to “do the work” while finding other ways to serve the country.
But I think Mark Kelly is likely to be a top-tier candidate from the jump. He's not my favorite of the bunch, necessarily, but I'd consider putting money on him being the Democratic nominee in 2028.
> “Republicans should say, ‘We want to take control of this. We need to take control of voting in at least 15 places.’ Republicans should nationalize voting,” [Trump] said on the podcast of former FBI deputy director Dan Bongino, which was relaunched on Monday.
It means Trump is sucking the oxygen out of the room. Again. I wish we would quit reacting to every stupid thing he says.
People are fed up. Assuming there will be free elections - as absurd as it is to even write this sentence referring to the US, but here we are [2] - it most probably will end in an utter wipeout for MAGA. They'll have the President, of course, but assuming the Democrat leadership finds some spine - again, an assumption, given Schumer - stuff has the potential to change.
On top of that are state and local level elections that are all the time. Stuff like school boards, sheriffs, whatever that is where MAGA and the Evangelicals built out their initial networks. All of that can be flipped around as well, if people actually bother to show up and vote.
[1] See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_shootings_by_U.S._immi... - it is notable that widespread outrage only followed after the execution of Renee Good and Alex Pretti
[2] https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/feb/02/georgia-fult...
The only way they can keep their jobs working on vastly inferior, dangerous technology is to ban new, safer, better technology.
Different as from a distance but still a lot of applicable skill and team work experience transfer for many workers.
Government lawyers: "Uh, well, we could tell you, but then we'd have to kill you."
Now, I would point out how the US is making itself into a joke, but I'm afraid the joke's on us, because carbon output is not decreasing dramatically like it must, and the effects of global warming will, slowly but surely, become worse with every passing year. I live in a region where warming is predicted to be near twice the global average, so I'm particularly worried about what it's going to be like when I'm old, or in the generation following mine.
Wind also works better in some areas that don't have solar. UK has a lot of offshore wind, but less solar. The US Northeast has a lot of wind but lags behind on solar.
Wind has dropped significantly in price over the decades and is competitive in price with solar. I saw article about early Scottish wind farm being upgraded so that one new turbine equals the whole old farm.
The rich/old paticularly hate wind because they do not like looking at it. (The link to golf courses is not by accident. Wind farms and golf course tend to appear together due to them both gravitating towards areas with shallow waters.) We still here stories about blinking shadows interupting sleep cycles, even causing cancer. So perhaps we let them alone for another decade and allow solar+storage to take up the slack. Then, when the nimby people are no longer in power, we bring back wind.
(Shallow sea means no commercial traffic/ports. That means cheap land for non-industrial things like yacht clubs and big houses, which give rise to golf courses. So the rich/old dont like seeing the wind farms that, inevitably, want to live just offshore of their yacht/golf clubs. See Nantuket.)
You are proposing something that sounds like killing the US wind industry and then simply bringing it back later. That probably would work well, especially when projects have development lead times of several to many years.
In what way?
> Solar can be placed much closer to consumption, literally on the roof of the consumer. Wind exists in large farms away from cities.
You still need the grid to exist, so 100 miles one way or the other doesn't affect cost very much.
> Then, when the nimby people are no longer in power, we bring back wind.
NIMBY never goes away. There are some situations where you don't want to burn up your political capital fighting them, but in general if you can get a project through then do it.
With solar you get to overbuild it and charge you batteries once a day. Wind has way more peaks and bottoms, so you can sell your battery capacity several times most days.
But the GPs point is exactly that you need fewer batteries if you have both. Fewer batteries tends to be cheaper than more, and this pair is a very common case.
See? Anyone can make kill-shot arguments when there's no data.
multiple energy sources are what is important to make up for where solar falls short. sure solar is amazing, but it will never replace everything on its own
Solar + battery is just so good at staying stable and productive for decades with no moving parts, minimal maintenance, and unbeatable scalability
https://www.ercot.com/gridmktinfo/dashboards
And that's in Texas where there is tons of sun and wind. I would imagine markets where wind, and in particular off shore wind, could make a lot more sense compared to attempting 100% solar generation. If I had to wager, maybe where they are building offshore wind generation..
Solar PVC output directly and immediately correlates to sun landing on the panels.
Solar thermal runs well into the evening, and its output is not impacted by the occasional cloud.
Then there’s the cost, which has not been good for CSP’s market share.
Also, wind and solar have different production patterns, such as how they perform seasonally, how weather affects them, and how they perform at different times of day. You are much better off including a good mix of them in your system.
> Let them cancel the wind farms if that means a free hand to develop solar.
That's not actually a bargain anyone has the power to agree to in a binding way. The people protesting the appearance of wind farms are on the coasts, the people protesting solar are in the country's interior. There's no "deal" you can make to get the latter instead of the former. Just build all the power generation and then we'll have cheaper electricity and a more resilient grid.