Why the myopic focus on profitability? Only one nation has succeeded in making healthcare profitable, please tell us how that has led to the best outcome for society?
Because for power creation there are alternatives, but for healthcare there aren't. Renewables are cheap now and they also solve the sovereignty issue. Ideally we could use land currently dedicated to energy crops to install solar panels that operate at a significantly higher efficiency.
I'm not talking about manufacturing. I am talking about raw materials for chips, battery cells, etc. You can't be sovereign if you have the capability to build something but don't have the resources to build it
If your electricity usage isn't growing like crazy, existing batteries can simply be recycled to make new ones.
What chips are you talking about?
Again, by your definition, almost no country is "sovereign" for anything. Not fossil fuels, not PV and renewables, and certainly not nuclear. It's an impossible standard but only renewables get held to it.
Electronic chips in wind turbines, hydro stations, etc.. Believe it or not but all of these use chips...
> Again, by your definition, almost no country is "sovereign" for anything. Not fossil fuels, not PV and renewables, and certainly not nuclear. It's an impossible standard but only renewables get held to it.
I am not holding renewables to it. The person I was responding to made the erroneous claim that you would be sovereign with renewables. "Renewables are cheap now and they also solve the sovereignty issue." I am just pointing out that most countries wouldn't actually have sovereignty and would still be reliant on other countries.
I am the one holding the consistent standard since I believe most countries wouldn't be sovereign regardless of them using fossil fuels, nuclear, solar, wind, etc.
No one meets the ImJamal Standard of Sovereignty. It's completely useless.
Might as well go with the source of energy that pollutes the least and allows you to be import-free for the longest amount of time - solar, wind, and batteries.
So you think oil and coal doesn't use electronics?
They use exactly the same stuff. Nearly all power generation is just spinning magnets, obvious exception is PV. There are no particular electronic components you need for wind turbines that you don't also need for a coal or gas fired power plant. Everything uses electronic control systems.
Why do you people argue so incessantly when you clearly don't know what you're talking about?
We did have electronics in 1900: Kirchoff's circuit laws date from 1845, the first semiconductor device (crystal detector) is from 1874 and the first vacuum tube is from 1904. What we didn't have is transistors and the miniaturization technology that gave us integrated circuits and microprocessors.
The conversation was clearly about more modern electronics since I was talking about rare earth minerals which were not used in the devices you are talking about.
You are able to drill and burn oil along with transmit the electricity without technology that requires rare earth minerals which are the electronics I was referring to.
You were able to drill and burn oil without modern technology. These days, pretty much all those easily accessible wells are drained and the only oil left is in harder to access wells that you'd never even find without modern technology. That's why we're fracking and messing around with oil sands and building offshore oil rigs etc.
We also had windmills long before we had electricity. And the west has plenty of rare earth deposits, despite the name they're not actually that rare. They're just expensive to refine and the refinement process causes a lot of pollution. China does it cheaper, polluting itself in the process and that's why we don't do it. If they were to stop giving us access to these minerals we could restart our own production. It's not just used for electronics by the way, it's also used for magnets which are a key component in electric motors/generators, so without rare earth minerals you're not generating electricity regardless of having oil.
They don't need to make things themselves, they just need to have the capability to make it themselves to be sovereign.
If you get cut off from global oil trade while having oil in the ground but no ability to make drills, what use is the oil? If you want sovereignty then it is critical to have the ability to make drills, tankers, etc in your country if you rely on oil.
This is no different than solar panels, wind turbines, batteries, etc when it comes to renewables. If you don't care about sovereignty then great, you are good to go. If you do, then you need to be able to handle everything yourself otherwise you are always going to be reliant on other countries.
> Your existing drills and pumps might work long enough for you to stand up a domestic drill manufacturing industry.
> Same for solar, except that panels and batteries operate for way longer than drills and pumps.
This is not about factories, but raw material as I said in a previous comment that you responded to. Most countries don't have uranium. A lot of countries do not have rare earth minerals for electronic chips.
> If no one is sovereign then sovereignty is meaningless. Who cares
The person I was originally responding to did and was claiming that you could achieve sovereignty with renewables.
An awful lot more countries in the world have the potential to sovereign manufacture relatively simple renewables than the massive engineering in reactors
The person I was responding to made the claim that renewables makes a country sovereign. I am saying it doesn't and it seems like you agree so I don't understand your point.
I never made the claim that nuclear would make a country sovereign. Only a small number of countries could have sovereignty with nuclear.
And in a society that hasn’t made health care profitable (Italy), I waited 12 hours, literally on the floor, with a broken arm and covered in my own blood, before I was seen after a motorcycle accident.
I literally would’ve been better off flying to New York. I still have scars and nerve damage from the incredibly poor care in Italy’s medical system.
In the US, I was rushed into the ER in an ambulance and seen immediately after a car hit me while I was bicycling — and that was just because they were worried about the speed at which the accident occurred. They had me patched up within the hour. I was fine, road rash and sore for a couple weeks.
There’s no silver bullet here, but I’m very sure that healthcare is not a good analogy for nuclear power.
I’m also very sure that anyone that advocates for government healthcare should try actually using it in one of these countries. I hope you enjoy waiting and long-term adverse health effects from poor, delayed, and inaccessible care.
I had an non urgent injury in Spain last week. Went to A&E and was seen by a doctor, x-rayed, and given advice and the results within 90 minutes. I paid zero euros for that on top of my taxes. Maybe it's an Italian problem... And for sure Spain has its own issues as well, but private is not always necessarily better.
I've lived in Spain a couple years ago. I've seen the quality of its health care. Its easily 20 years behind the US and that's being charitable. The family that lived next to me had a man who had the exact same break I had had 20 years before. He had worse, more primitive care than I did in the US decades before. I had to explain to them why it was a bad idea for him to sit in his wheelchair all day because nobody in the Spanish system seemed to know how to care for a simple broken leg. You got what you paid for...
PS Spanish taxes are absurdly high...insurance in the US is still cheaper than the difference in taxes between the two countries. All that and an actual working economy and energy system.
> insurance in the US is still cheaper than the difference in taxes between the two countries.
If you are a white male. But what about suppressed minorities and women (and especially minorities women and nonbinary persons) that can't get job because of chauvinistic billionaires?
>I’m also very sure that anyone that advocates for government healthcare should try actually using it in one of these countries
I actually do since I'm Italian lol
Don't get me wrong, what has happened to you feels at best a bad practice, at worst something that goes on the news or that has a legal proceeding afterwards. I've known people with good and bad experiences, I can't complain too much about it. Can I ask in which region? Italian Healthcare is somewhat region-dependant
Uhhh, some nerve damage, news worthy? Ho qualche dubbio al riguardo.
Fellow italian here, let's not act like our third rate ERs never leave people suffering for hours without caring that it may have lasting consequences. I understand it's partially due to understaffing, but this is the reality. My dad had this happen to him as well. Thanks
> I waited 12 hours, literally on the floor, with a broken arm and covered in my own blood, before I was seen after a motorcycle accident.
So literally just a broken limb. Non-life threatening, can wait. Sorry, triage is a bitch. Some patients will literally die within minutes/hours if not actively treated. Go figure.
> In the US, I was rushed into the ER in an ambulance
The second they dispatch an ambulance, you owe them how much exactly these days? $5000?
A broken limb, fractured elbow, deep cuts/lacerations/abrasions on my legs, elbow, and arms. I was in pain, my wounds were filled with gravel and dirt, and I just closed my eyes and laid on the floor and disassociated for twelve fucking hours. My girlfriend was losing her shit trying to advocate for me.
Subjectively applied, uncaring triage that leaves people poorly cared for is exactly what happens when you lack sufficient capacity, aren’t paying your staff enough to care, and staff's incentives aren’t sufficiently tied to their outcomes.
My father, an ER doctor in the US, was losing his shit over their quality of care when I FaceTimed him afterwards.
Your lack of compassion is also exactly what produces these kinds of systems. Who cares about the actual outcomes or the affected individuals, as long as your ideological ideals aren’t challenged.
> The second they dispatch an ambulance, you owe them how much exactly these days? $5000?
My insurance covered all of it. The driver’s insurance reimbursed my own.
And even if they hadn’t, I’d rather be in the hole financially than spend 12 hours in pain and have persistent issues caused by free health care doing a hack job putting me back together.
The US healthcare system isn’t perfect, but I’ve got at least another four decades left on this planet, and the cost of US healthcare is nothing compared to the cost of living out those decades in a body that’s not as healthy as possible.
Count me in. I'd rather be poor in the worst neighborhood (or village) in Nigeria but healthy than in a European mansion and unhealthy. Feel free to tell me all about how I can't understand, champion of the proletariat.
Because for healthcare profit isn't a motive to begin with (or at least, it shouldn't be) and there aren't many different alternative sources for it either.
