Coal plants benefit from massive influxes of cheap fuel that is cheap to convert to electricity. The margins are high because the energy was built up on natures time, not company's dime. Pollution is cheap, for the polluter.
Coal is NOT cheap when you factor in the huge environmental damage it causes. Stop thinking about the environment as a free, infinite asset. It's not.
Have you ever run the numbers on a PV array for your house? I did. If there were no government subsidies, the system would pay for itself 5 years after I had to replace the entire thing.
Granted, a nation buying in bulk can probably get a good discount.
I've said it a million times: Without state intervention, the polluting technologies will always win, because they're already there and (ignoring the environment) they're cheaper. But that's a short-sighted strategy. If we all though like that, we'd be still living in cages.
But these guys are basically using money from everywhere else, taking property from it's own citizens, and holding back the rest of the European economy to do it.
From everywhere else? Where? Taking property? What property? Holding the rest of the European economy? Do you think a 10 million people country with a ridiculous GDP has the power to hold back anything in Europe? You need to go out more.
We don't have siestas. You're mistaking us with Spain. Also, the Portuguese are the second only to UK in number of overtime hours worked (almost all of them illegally not paid).
The main difference is that the northern countries are better managed. The mentality here is that it's OK for people to be in high places and make lots of money not for merit, but because of acquaintances or family. Our managers are the best paid and the worse in EU. It's OK to evade taxes if you're rich and know people in high places. In many northern countries this is unthinkable.
Your reasons do not explain the Gini index. This is clearly caused by poor wealth distribution, which goes against your arguments.
The heavy taxation and the weight of State in the economy that you complain about are a lot bigger in Scandinavian countries that have the lowest Gini indexes in the world.
Your arguments are typical of the right-wing free-market mentality (called neoliberal in Europe), that has guided the policies in most of the world in the latest decades, leading our economy into ruin.
You can be sure I'm not defending our government. Just that there is also a positive point to the picture.
I would say that investing in Information Technologies and Renewable Energy are the only good things this government has ever done. All the rest was simply dreadful. I just can't remember anything else they did right, at this moment.
You're only seeing the tree instead of the forest. Roughly half of the electricity in Portugal is produced using oil, gas or coal, all imported and polluting. If more electricity comes from renewable sources, the dependency on foreign sources is reduced.
Portugal is a small country -- about the size of Maine or Indiana. It has ten million people and a remarkably benign climate (the record low in Lisbon is 30F. The record high a bit over 100F) that results in virtually no use of energy for heating and cooling.
Your argument doesn't make any sense and reeks of lame excuse. Here in Portugal we have towns with a nearby wind farm that are self-sufficient in electricity. How difficult is this in the US? Don't you have towns with lots of windy and sunny desert/mountains/plains around?
Also, for example, the NY state is huge and mostly rural. How hard is it to put wind farms on it to feed the power-hungry city of New York?
Or you take advantage on the sun and wind in Arizona, a huge state with very little population and feed the big Californian cities with renewable electricity. Is it so hard to transport electricity a few hundreds of Km? We do it here. Why can't you?
It won't solve the energy problems, but it will certainly help. If you let the "market" decide, the polluting energies win, because they're cheaper in the short term (they appear cheap because nobody gives a fuck about environmental costs). But investing in the future means taking chances and, when eventually oil and gas get extremely expensive (believe me, they will), suddenly finding you're decades behind in diversifying your energy production sources won't help your economy much.
Don't mistake economics with politics. Socialism is an economic theory. Both Capitalism and Socialism based societies can evolve into plutocracies, like happened in the Eastern block and is now happening with our Western democracies.
What the above research shows is that monkeys are stupid. People do sometimes do stupid things too.
Simplistic statement, not objective, and wrong. The experiment has shown that both humans and monkeys make the same irrational economic decisions. And the results were consistent so, if it "proves monkeys are stupid" it proves the same about humans.
The reality is that in a free society, people (and businesses) have to be allowed to fail. If they don't, they never learn what they did wrong.
I the society model you are defending, only big-ass corporations and banks are allowed to fail. When the average guy fails, he loses his house and becomes an indigent.
Having a strong central government that "guides" the marketplace has never worked and always leads to high unemployment and little to no growth.
You mean, high unemployment and no growth, like... now, in the golden age of ultra-free-market capitalism?
Putting high taxes on businesses does the exact opposite of what you might expect. FDR did it during the late 30's (remember the Great Depression?) and it caused unemployment to go even higher. In fact, his own treasury secretary even said that they'd spent money for years and the unemployment rate hadn't changed. The only thing they had to show for all the spending was a mountain of debt.
You mean, the Great Depression, when the unregulated banks and corporations, in a crazy spiral of speculation, threw the world's economy in the toilet? And then you spin it around and blame it on FDR. I'm always amazed with the mental contortions conservative Americans are able to go to justify the unjustifiable.
You need to cut spending, cut taxes, and reduce regulation. Only then will businesses hire more people and then the economy will grow.
This is just a religious statement like any other. If it was true, we'd all be living in heaven, by now.
Government is the only business which holds the special right to employ coercion (meaning physical force or threat thereof) against you in order to achieve its goals.
I don't give a fuck. I use adblock, of course, so the Internet looks completely different to me than it looks for everyone else.
I hate ads and would be perfectly happy without them. I'm not in the business of providing revenue for websites. If there were more of me the current business model would disappear, but not the Internet. They would just find another business model.
Name me a civilised country where there are no taxes. Nobody likes to pay them, but the truth is this: Societies have administrative costs. These costs have to be financed. So, these costs are financed by taxing the incomes of those who live in those societies and benefit from it. The Scandinavian countries are the ones with the best standard of living, however, taxation there is very high.
If you feel your money is not being well spent, be a useful member of society and get involved in defining the policies that govern where the money goes. Sitting on your ass whining about how "taxes are stealing" is useless and childish.
If you really don't want to pay taxes you might as well move to Somalia. They have no government, hence no taxes. But I guess you'll end up paying "protection" money to some local warlord.
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Coal plants benefit from massive influxes of cheap fuel that is cheap to convert to electricity. The margins are high because the energy was built up on natures time, not company's dime. Pollution is cheap, for the polluter.
Coal is NOT cheap when you factor in the huge environmental damage it causes. Stop thinking about the environment as a free, infinite asset. It's not.
Have you ever run the numbers on a PV array for your house? I did. If there were no government subsidies, the system would pay for itself 5 years after I had to replace the entire thing.
Granted, a nation buying in bulk can probably get a good discount.
I've said it a million times: Without state intervention, the polluting technologies will always win, because they're already there and (ignoring the environment) they're cheaper. But that's a short-sighted strategy. If we all though like that, we'd be still living in cages.
But these guys are basically using money from everywhere else, taking property from it's own citizens, and holding back the rest of the European economy to do it.
From everywhere else? Where? Taking property? What property? Holding the rest of the European economy? Do you think a 10 million people country with a ridiculous GDP has the power to hold back anything in Europe? You need to go out more.
Yes, because the US economy is in such a fucking great shape!
We don't have siestas. You're mistaking us with Spain. Also, the Portuguese are the second only to UK in number of overtime hours worked (almost all of them illegally not paid).
The main difference is that the northern countries are better managed. The mentality here is that it's OK for people to be in high places and make lots of money not for merit, but because of acquaintances or family. Our managers are the best paid and the worse in EU. It's OK to evade taxes if you're rich and know people in high places. In many northern countries this is unthinkable.
Your reasons do not explain the Gini index. This is clearly caused by poor wealth distribution, which goes against your arguments.
The heavy taxation and the weight of State in the economy that you complain about are a lot bigger in Scandinavian countries that have the lowest Gini indexes in the world.
Your arguments are typical of the right-wing free-market mentality (called neoliberal in Europe), that has guided the policies in most of the world in the latest decades, leading our economy into ruin.
You can be sure I'm not defending our government. Just that there is also a positive point to the picture.
I would say that investing in Information Technologies and Renewable Energy are the only good things this government has ever done. All the rest was simply dreadful. I just can't remember anything else they did right, at this moment.
Oh, I see your point. The coal plants don't have any employees. They don't need maintenance, they run spontaneously.
You're only seeing the tree instead of the forest. Roughly half of the electricity in Portugal is produced using oil, gas or coal, all imported and polluting. If more electricity comes from renewable sources, the dependency on foreign sources is reduced.
Portugal is a small country -- about the size of Maine or Indiana. It has ten million people and a remarkably benign climate (the record low in Lisbon is 30F. The record high a bit over 100F) that results in virtually no use of energy for heating and cooling.
Ok, forget Portugal. How about Denmark?
Your argument doesn't make any sense and reeks of lame excuse. Here in Portugal we have towns with a nearby wind farm that are self-sufficient in electricity. How difficult is this in the US? Don't you have towns with lots of windy and sunny desert/mountains/plains around?
Also, for example, the NY state is huge and mostly rural. How hard is it to put wind farms on it to feed the power-hungry city of New York?
Or you take advantage on the sun and wind in Arizona, a huge state with very little population and feed the big Californian cities with renewable electricity. Is it so hard to transport electricity a few hundreds of Km? We do it here. Why can't you?
It won't solve the energy problems, but it will certainly help. If you let the "market" decide, the polluting energies win, because they're cheaper in the short term (they appear cheap because nobody gives a fuck about environmental costs). But investing in the future means taking chances and, when eventually oil and gas get extremely expensive (believe me, they will), suddenly finding you're decades behind in diversifying your energy production sources won't help your economy much.
If you talk about energy, you 're OK. After all, cars don't run on electricity (yet) and oil is energy, too.
If you're talking about electricity, you're just dead wrong.
I think this smudge thing is a bigger problem when people use their phones to watch porn...
Don't mistake economics with politics. Socialism is an economic theory. Both Capitalism and Socialism based societies can evolve into plutocracies, like happened in the Eastern block and is now happening with our Western democracies.
What the above research shows is that monkeys are stupid. People do sometimes do stupid things too.
Simplistic statement, not objective, and wrong. The experiment has shown that both humans and monkeys make the same irrational economic decisions. And the results were consistent so, if it "proves monkeys are stupid" it proves the same about humans.
The reality is that in a free society, people (and businesses) have to be allowed to fail. If they don't, they never learn what they did wrong.
I the society model you are defending, only big-ass corporations and banks are allowed to fail. When the average guy fails, he loses his house and becomes an indigent.
Having a strong central government that "guides" the marketplace has never worked and always leads to high unemployment and little to no growth.
You mean, high unemployment and no growth, like... now, in the golden age of ultra-free-market capitalism?
Putting high taxes on businesses does the exact opposite of what you might expect. FDR did it during the late 30's (remember the Great Depression?) and it caused unemployment to go even higher. In fact, his own treasury secretary even said that they'd spent money for years and the unemployment rate hadn't changed. The only thing they had to show for all the spending was a mountain of debt.
You mean, the Great Depression, when the unregulated banks and corporations, in a crazy spiral of speculation, threw the world's economy in the toilet? And then you spin it around and blame it on FDR. I'm always amazed with the mental contortions conservative Americans are able to go to justify the unjustifiable.
You need to cut spending, cut taxes, and reduce regulation. Only then will businesses hire more people and then the economy will grow.
This is just a religious statement like any other. If it was true, we'd all be living in heaven, by now.
Government is the only business which holds the special right to employ coercion (meaning physical force or threat thereof) against you in order to achieve its goals.
How naive you are.
2048 AES? Wow, you just invented a new encryption algorithm!
You guys seem to make waaaay too many really evil choices.
Massive Financial Fraud? Wait until Wall Street gets their hands on this. It will be a boom!
I don't need Viagra. Your mother never complained.
I don't give a fuck. I use adblock, of course, so the Internet looks completely different to me than it looks for everyone else.
I hate ads and would be perfectly happy without them. I'm not in the business of providing revenue for websites. If there were more of me the current business model would disappear, but not the Internet. They would just find another business model.
Actually, it's called Oracle, now. Some people didn't get the memo yet.
And now, our buddies in the UK are decentralizing their healthcare because the quality of their socialized healthcare sucks.
No, their problem is that it doesn't suck enough. They want it to suck as much as yours.
You metamorph into manbearpig.
Or maybe a ridiculous percentage of frustrated people.
Name me a civilised country where there are no taxes. Nobody likes to pay them, but the truth is this: Societies have administrative costs. These costs have to be financed. So, these costs are financed by taxing the incomes of those who live in those societies and benefit from it. The Scandinavian countries are the ones with the best standard of living, however, taxation there is very high.
If you feel your money is not being well spent, be a useful member of society and get involved in defining the policies that govern where the money goes. Sitting on your ass whining about how "taxes are stealing" is useless and childish.
If you really don't want to pay taxes you might as well move to Somalia. They have no government, hence no taxes. But I guess you'll end up paying "protection" money to some local warlord.
It's the standard notation in my country.