Hacker News: locallost

New comment by locallost in "Trump says US will blockade Strait of Hormuz"

locallost — Sun, 12 Apr 2026 18:29:04 +0000

So the problem of skyrocketing oil prices because of the Iranian control of Hormuz will be solved by a blockade, which will prevent even more oil from reaching the market. Nobody is 1) this stupid to do it 2) this stupid to bite on this threat

New comment by locallost in "Seven countries now generate 100% of their electricity from renewable energy"

locallost — Sun, 12 Apr 2026 14:01:24 +0000

The only slaves right now are people praying Iran and the US make a deal to open Hormuz.

New comment by locallost in "Has electricity decoupled from natural gas prices in Germany?"

locallost — Fri, 10 Apr 2026 02:11:19 +0000

No. If you electrify residential heating and transportation it will obviously go down. If there are sectors where you can't do that, it will still overall go down because those other sectors will not go up to make up for the reduction. Not sure what your argument is.

New comment by locallost in "Solar and batteries can power the world"

locallost — Thu, 09 Apr 2026 08:38:52 +0000

I am big fan of renewables, but I disagree on your conclusion. The main reason is purely financial, the incumbenta do not want to lose their investment so they spend a lot of money on manipulation and lobbying. Another big reason is that politicians simply can't know everything, so they rely on advisors whose opinions are influenced by lobbyists. There is a clear lack of vision in the western hemisphere on how to move forward and see the transformation not as a cost but as an advantage. So they let their opinions and decisions be massaged by people whose intentions are to protect the status quo.

New comment by locallost in "Solar and batteries can power the world"

locallost — Thu, 09 Apr 2026 08:24:29 +0000

Your point does not stand since you are completely wrong. Germany uses less coal and gas for electricity now than at any point in the 21st century. The majority of the nuclear plants were shutdown in 2011. They produced 230TWh from coal in 2011 and less than 100TWh last year. Talk about verbal gymnastics to call that a shift from nuclear to coal and gas! Outrageous.

New comment by locallost in "Has electricity decoupled from natural gas prices in Germany?"

locallost — Wed, 08 Apr 2026 19:17:40 +0000

Electricity consumption will go up* but energy consumption will go down. You will not need 2200TWh of energy in Germany when all is said and done. Heating is one of the top reasons we spend energy and heat pumps are just tremendously more efficient than something like gas heating. You can get the same amount of heating for 3-4 times less energy with a heat pump than gas. So obviously you will not need 2200TWh of electricity like you do now with fossil fuels for energy.

* It's also debatable how much electricity use will actually go up. Logic says this must happen, but logic is not science. We have millions of EVs now in the EU and electricity production is less than it was 20 years ago. Efficiency is a source of energy. If you look at the US for example, it uses almost twice as much electricity per capita than Germany, and I would say they both get the same high level if living. If you look at it that way, Americans can cut their use almost in half and live the same standard of living. This can power a lot of EVs and heat pumps without adding a single GW of new capacity.

New comment by locallost in "Has electricity decoupled from natural gas prices in Germany?"

locallost — Wed, 08 Apr 2026 06:10:49 +0000

Yes those are wrong, but I didn't reply to that. The one I did reply to is also wrong :-).

New comment by locallost in "Has electricity decoupled from natural gas prices in Germany?"

locallost — Tue, 07 Apr 2026 23:21:56 +0000

Your question was how would the prices be without the nuclear shutdown, talking about emissions now is goalpost shifting. Speaking of politics and not making sense, Poland is still at these levels because they put road blocks into renewables deployment and spend their resources on nuclear plants. If those plans go well they will be at around 35% coal in 2040, which is more than Germany is now.

New comment by locallost in "Has electricity decoupled from natural gas prices in Germany?"

locallost — Tue, 07 Apr 2026 23:15:38 +0000

Those are total energy numbers, which includes fossil fuels, but those are famously misleading because replacing those with electricity reduces the number of Wh needed. An electric car needs roughly 15kWh for 100 kilometers, a gas powered car typically at least 60kWh for the same distance.

New comment by locallost in "Why the US Navy won't blast the Iranians and 'open' Strait of Hormuz"

locallost — Sat, 04 Apr 2026 20:10:13 +0000

You're 100% correct, but this is true for the Iranians, Russians and all other "enemies". Most people are however forced into these views because it serves a purpose. You're not afraid of the enemy if they are presented as normal humans with plenty of internal disagreement.

New comment by locallost in "Renewables reached nearly 50% of global electricity capacity last year"

locallost — Fri, 03 Apr 2026 15:21:13 +0000

You can pretend to be meticulous about it but the president of the EDF doesn't go on TV to speak to the general public to say 30 years if he meant something else. He would've said 80 years because it just sounds better. Sorry, it's pretty obvious that stress corrosion was a known issue, so there were no surprises.

It's France, not USSR. Is this why the EDF was involved in rescuing Areva from bankruptcy -- a sound business decision? Is this why the government is giving basically interest free loans to the EDF that will be repaid starting from maybe in 15 years? If you really believe that you are delusional. It's all just backroom wheeling and dealing. There is a good saying "don't get high on your own supply". The delusion of order in the western world will be its end, especially now considering it's crumbling before our eyes. Clinging to this idea is not healthy.

Abundant and low carbon, all nice things, but it's not why they were built. They were built for energy independence, and at this task it failed at the exact point in time when it was supposed to shine. Speaking of which, being built for one purpose doesn't necessarily make it useful for another purpose. It was built at a time when things like carbon emissions, climate change and overall sustainability were not a topic. Since sustainability is a topic today, it requires obviously different considerations. My only gripe with the German shutdown is that they didn't force the operators to pay for the decommissioning and waste disposal in full. That would've ended any debate about how realistic and useful this technology is because the companies would've been insolvent.

New comment by locallost in "Renewables reached nearly 50% of global electricity capacity last year"

locallost — Fri, 03 Apr 2026 12:27:58 +0000

You said the problems were overblown, not me. I don't think they were overblown, so I am not sure you should be lecturing me on duct tape and nuclear plants. The EDF had scheduled a quarter of the fleet for maintenance and then at the peak of the crisis pulled another quarter offline unplanned. This simply wouldn't have happened if it hadn't been necessary, the government wouldn't have allowed it at the time. The problem was not known in 2021, but at the time when they were built. Here is an interview from 1979 (!) with the president of the EDF at the time Marcel Boiteux, who said that this will happen, but it's not a big deal because it will happen after the plants had reached their EOL in 30 years [1]. Additionally there was a government commission or something like that in the early 2010s that basically concluded "we can't afford to build new ones, let's kick the can down the road and try to fix what we have now". And then 10 years later the biggest energy crisis since the 70s comes along, the very reason they were built and you end up relying on the weather forecast and German coal plants. A few years pass again and some people are talking themselves again into this technology being anything except useless.

[1] https://www.ina.fr/ina-eclaire-actu/president-edf-risque-fis...

New comment by locallost in "Renewables reached nearly 50% of global electricity capacity last year"

locallost — Fri, 03 Apr 2026 00:14:54 +0000

This is complete baloney and revisionist history. I followed that topic at the time pretty in depth. It took months and months and delay upon delay to get the plants back up and running. The spot prices in France at times in 2022 went over 1500 euros per MWh. If it was just "an overreaction" there would've been tremendous political pressure to just put the plants back online. The government and EDF are intertwined to the point any talk of new construction etc. always goes through Macron.

New comment by locallost in "SpaceX files to go public"

locallost — Thu, 02 Apr 2026 06:39:28 +0000

He packages things to present them as analytical, but it's really just click bait for people to hear something they want to hear. He did a take over a year ago on why the EV revolution crashed with such gems as presenting less growth (but still growth) as lower sales. The comment section was full of never EV crowd who got their fix that everything will be alright and that nothing will change. Of course a year later there were booming sales worldwide.

The sad reality I'm coming to realize is that there is very little real and quality analysis, critical but with open eyes on the future. Most of it is just pandering to crowds. The war in Iran is the latest example - you have one side saying Iran is almost done, and the other that they're winning. Who's right? Doesn't matter, being correct is not the point.

New comment by locallost in "The truth that haunts the Ramones: 'They sold more T-shirts than records'"

locallost — Thu, 26 Mar 2026 08:42:56 +0000

I don't mean to be crude, but how can it haunt them, when they're all dead?

New comment by locallost in "Iran rejects US proposal, lays out five conditions for ending war"

locallost — Thu, 26 Mar 2026 08:18:28 +0000

What was said was, you are advocating war crimes. There is a reason why even when these are committed, they are not communicated in this way, and there's a pretense of noble action. You don't want to live in a world where destruction of power plants, reducing societies to loosely connected tribes etc. is casually talked about. You are not that safe.

New comment by locallost in "Oil at $150 will trigger global recession, says boss of financial BlackRock"

locallost — Wed, 25 Mar 2026 21:49:39 +0000

I don't think so, he's too much of a nerd. He uses too much reasoning in his communication (I am not saying good or bad reasoning) which is not what people want, especially not today. Even someone like Bernie Sanders was successful because he struck a cord, his message was clear and didn't need too much explanation. Tucker is mostly trying to be the smartest person in the room, an intellectual. Too many voters are turned off by this. FWIW I expected Trump to win in 2016 based on similar things.

New comment by locallost in "IBM, sonic delay lines, and the history of the 80×24 display (2019)"

locallost — Sun, 15 Mar 2026 20:15:34 +0000

I see people doing that today.

New comment by locallost in "Create value for others and don’t worry about the returns"

locallost — Wed, 11 Mar 2026 09:36:41 +0000

Great advice if you want to be old and poor. Yes, there's a chance it works out because you're that good, but there's a chance it doesn't. This doesn't mean do the opposite and only worry about your returns, but strike a balance. The world we live in is not in general a bunch of isolated people in a meritocracy, connections and relationships within your workplace play a huge role. Politics exist. I know a lot of asshats that are highly successful even though pretty useless. Don't be that person, but don't be there for everyone and empty handed in the end.

Better advice would be stay hungry, stay curious, keep learning.

New comment by locallost in "The MacBook Neo"

locallost — Wed, 11 Mar 2026 08:00:01 +0000

Was my first thought also when I saw it. I honestly planned to ditch Macbooks before they released M1, but this hardware is just so much better than anything Intel or AMD can offer at least for laptops. For people that are not too demanding I've recommended Airs for a while, but this basically has the potential to destroy the entire midrange PC market. Some people will be reluctant to switch, but I don't think the OS is as important today as it was before. So much happens on the web anyway.

edit: also on a tangent, Apple's pricing has become weird. It actually feels like it's a really good bang got the buck. Regular iPads are under 400 now, and they're just better than the competition. MacBook Pro is about the same price as it ever was, but it's just so much better than it was etc.