America can’t solve this problem democratically. Trump has taught the GOP you can win elections through targeted bribery (e.g. No Taxes on Tips), avoiding hard decisions (e.g. no cuts to entitlements), and distracting people with expensive spectacle. Meanwhile, Democrats are a collection of interest groups held together by patronage. In the recent election, Democrats were knee-capped because inflation made it impossible to promise expensive new programs. With expanding benefits off the table as a carrot, Trump was able to make big gains among Democrat groups (e.g. Bangladeshi immigrants in Queens, Muslim immigrants in Michigan) that lean more conservative on issues other than government welfare.
That leaves everyone dealing in fictions: the fiction that you can reduce debt by cutting taxes, the fiction you can reduce debt by increasing spending, and fictions about how much you really balance the books by targeting only “billionaires” instead of taxing the middle class.
The only problem that exists is spending too much money. They could fix this overnight if people were willing to give up public entitlements and healthcare support. But they aren’t willing to so the US will eventually see hyper inflation or less likely bankruptcy
No, you can also raise taxes. The deficit is 4% of GDP. If we raised taxes by 4% of GDP, we'd still be less than the OECD average. We'd be the same as Australia, which is the second lowest-tax Anglosphere country.
If taxes are raised then the people have to pay for the services, which is exactly what they don't want to have to do. That is the whole appeal of having those services — that they are, for all intents and purposes, free.
I mean this is the problem with half a century of global-hegemony-fueled debt binging. We could balance the budget our taxes would still be $2.7 trillion lower than what they would be if we were at the EU average.
It also doesn’t appear on the ALL CAPS list of campaign priorities: https://rncplatform.donaldjtrump.com/. The word “debt” doesn’t appear anywhere in the document. And the word “deficit” appears just once in the context of the trade deficit.
Trump was the first candidate to release a list of itemized priorities in small words and ALL CAPS so the average dumbass could understand. There are many, many things you can say about this list. But it’s very hard to inject ambiguity into what he was running on.
Or solar / wind (which mostly anticorrelate) + biomass + storage + interconnectors + smart demand.
The amount of baseload we technically need can be pretty slim.
Take Denmark: fossil powers just 9% of their electricity generation, the majority of it is wind and solar. Wind is strong in evenings/nights, solar during the day.
Then they have biomass (indirect solar) as a form of baseload, more sustainable than coal/gas.
Then there's interconnectors, they're close to Norway which can pump hydro, and Sweden, each day about 25% of the electricity is exchanged between these two countries, and that's a growing figure.
With more east/west interconnectors you could move surplus solar between countries. Import from the east in the morning before your own solar ramps up, export your midday surplus west before theirs peaks, and import from the west in the late afternoon as yours fades.
With interconnectors you can also share rather than independently build peaker capacity. Because a lot of peaker plants only run a small amount of time and therefore much of the cost is in the construction/maintenance, not the fuel.
And of course there's storage, which will take a while to build out but the trendlines are extremely strong. Just a fleet of EVs alone, an average EV has a 60 kWh battery, an average EU household uses 12 kWh per day so an average car holds 5 days worth of power a home uses.
And then finally there's smart demand. An average car is parked for more than 95% of the day, and driven 5% of the time. Further, the average car drives just 40km a day which you can charge in 3 minutes on say a Tesla. Given these numbers (EVs store 5 days of household use, can sit at a charger for 23 hours a day, and can smartly plan the 3 minutes a day of charging it actually needs to do) just programming cars to charge smartly, is a trivial social and technical problem in the coming 10-20 years.
Given this, baseload coal/gas can really be minimised the coming decades. It's not going to go away as a need, but I don't think it requires gas/coal or nuclear long-term going forward.
Lot of the biomass used in Denmark to form baseload power generation is imported.
"The utmost amount (46%) of wood pellets comes from the Baltic countries (Latvia and Estonia) and 30% from the USA, Canada and Russia.6 Estonia and Latvia have steadily been the primary exporters of biomass to Denmark, mainly in the form of wood pellets and wood chips."
No but every region has their own pros and cons. The idea Belgium has no other option than coal gas or nuclear is refuted, and biomass is just one of the reasons.
> "just programming cars to charge smartly, is a trivial social and technical problem in the coming 10-20 years."
One problem I've heard about this idea in the past is that cars and their batteries are expensive, and people won't want to run down the lifetime of their car battery more quickly by also using it as a home battery rather than just for driving.
Obviously this can be solved either by making it so cheap to replace car batteries that nobody cares, or by legislating that people have to use their cars this way. But is either of these solutions easy to happen any time soon?
I don’t think its a long term issue. The cost of battery storage is below 10c per kWh, whereas a peaker plant costs above 20c per kWh and runs 10% of the time.
So if you get paid double the value of your battery the incentives are there for an economic model to work. Today.
And batteries are only getting cheaper, gas is the opposite.
Plus batteries take surplus solar/wind, at these times they have a negative value. Add that and the economics are a no brainer. It’s a matter of time.
The issue with "base load" is that people usually omit to mention how much GW they are talking about and for how long. Which makes it a bit of a bull shit argument.
As an insurance against unspecified lack (how much for how long?) of wind and solar (and batteries, cable capacity, hydro, etc.) base load is supposed to swoop in and save the day when those temporarily fail locally. So, it's a valid question to ask how much insurance we need against that. Nobody seems to really know. There are loose estimates of course. And people seem to assume it's months and that renewables are going to 100% be offline throughout that very very long period. In reality in most connected energy markets, we have a short gap of a few weeks or so in winter at higher latitudes of reduced output that we already manage to cover with flexible generation.
It's more constructive to think in terms of dispatchable power rather than base load. When the sun doesn't shine or there is no wind, it's nice if you can quickly bring online additional generation, tap into battery reserves, or bring in power from elsewhere (via cables). That favors flexible power, not inflexible power. Nuclear and older coal plants are a bit inflexible. Shutting down and starting up a nuclear plant is really slow and expensive and requires a lot of planning. And especially older coal plants need quite a bit of time to bring their boilers up to temperature such that they build up enough steam pressure to generate power. Until then, they are just blowing smoke out of the chimney. Modern coal plants are a bit better on that front. Same with gas plants.
The modern ones only need about 10-20 minutes or so. Still quite slow but something you can plan to do. Slow here means expensive as well. Because shutting them down when there is a surplus of renewables (which is a very common thing now) is really inconvenient. Which means consumers have to pay extra for perfectly good electricity from renewables to be curtailed. That happens by the GW in some markets and keeps consumer prices higher than they should be because they have to pay for gas/coal that is technically not actually needed.
Batteries have a much lower LCOE than gas or coal plants (never mind nuclear) and it's being produced by the TWH per year now. A lot of markets are serving much of their peak demand using batteries now. Australia and China are good examples. Even in the US, you see batteries being deployed at a large scale now. That's starting to push gas and coal out of the market. A gas peaker plant that rarely runs is just really expensive.
When it comes to residential/consumer use base load is irrelevant - but when it comes to business (especially industrial) use base load is a strict necessity. The proportional requirements of base load are fading but it is still something that needs to be considered carefully.
Do fossil fuel companies overstate the importance and scale of base load to justify additional fuel subsidies? Indubitably - but don't let their bullshit hide the truth within it that actually is a critical requirement for our power grid.
What you need - the only thing you need - is dispatchable power. That is power supply that can rise and fall to meet demand. That is not what baseload is. It's also not what wind/solar provide.
What baseload is is electricity supply which is only economical if you use it all the time. Nuclear falls into this category because of its very high capital cost and low op-ex. If it's cheaper than dispatchable power (nuclear isn't) it's nice to have as much of it as the minimum demand that you see on the grid, to lower costs. If it's as expensive, or more expensive, than dispatchable power, that's fine, you just don't need it at all and can replace it entirely with dispatchable power.
It's similar to wind and solar in this, which also aren't dispatchable (though there supply curve looks different than the constant supply curve which "base load" is used to mean). Except wind and solar actually are cheaper than dispatchable power so they make economic sense.
The term is half marketing term and half a theory that constant supply non-dispatchable power would be significantly cheaper than dispatchable power so we should organize the grid around it. That theory didn't really pan out (apart from some places with non-storable hydro, and a few with geothermal).
basically, base load means the lowest point of demand on the grid. And you matched that with slow-to-respond thermal power plants (coal mainly, also nukes). Because those are slow to respond and are most profitable running at 100%, so you tried to keep them there. So called base load generation.
But note there is no rule of the universe that says you have to meet the base load demand with some static constant power source, you can get it from anywhere. And now, since renewables and batteries are cheaper than this base load generation, it knocks them off the grid rendering it unprofitable. So the whole concept of base load supply is obsolete. Anyway, the linked blog explains it better.
You don't need to run coal power plant close to 100% to be profitable. You want to run nuclear power plant close to 100% because fuel is cheap and you want pay back CAPEX as early as possible.
The article you send is perfect example why it's not economic to build new coal or nuclear power plants in US. The reasons are: very cheap natural gas and no CO2 tax. In US natural gas + solar is the cheapest way to generate electricity.
In Europe the situation is very different.
"Europe is in the opposite spot. The continent's main gas point, the TTF benchmark, nearly doubled to over €60/MWh by mid-March."
Renewable + battery is already the cheapest and fastest way to build new power in many domains + geographies, and the number of and range keeps expanding as the price keeps dropping.
It's always a peculiar response that outright ignores certain power combos, and it always seems to come in nuclear discussions.
so what should europe do? gas being expensive doesnt make nuclear economics better for the role of variable backstop of an increasingly renewable grid. Its still a fatal economic equation for nuclear.
Btw battery is rapidly changing the math on
> US natural gas + solar is the cheapest way to generate electricity
california went from 45% gas in 2022 to 25% gas in 2025 almost entirely because of batteries (and more solar), and they're just getting started. I know its not generally true across the US, but very soon batteries are going to be pushing a huge amount of gas off the grid.
it actually is a choice between nuclear and PV, because base load supply is an obsolete concept. Because actually nuclear is terrible in a grid increasingly full of nearly-free variable sources (solar&wind). The nukes need to stay at 100% all the time selling their power at a high fixed price to have any remote chance of being economical. Cheap variables push nuke's expensive power off the grid during the day, and increasingly into the evenings with batteries. This is unavoidable in an open energy market, and is fatal to the economics of nuclear. You cannot make them work without massive state subsidies.
Gas is far better suited economically to backstop a variable grid. I wish it werent true, because i dont hate nukes, but it is just economics.
I will also point out that california is down to 25% fossil sourced power in 2025, from 45% in 2022. Due to renewables and batteries, and there's far more coming. The amount left to backstop on gas in a few years could plausibly be 10%! which is amazing.
In the long term nations will likely end up with whatever renewables work for them (hydro/solar/wind/thermal) plus the appropriate amount of batteries and expensive, low use (stored) gas/oil plants for "emergencies" where the renewables do not deliver and the batteries might be exhausted. Some nukes will be in the mix obviously but they will not be widespread globally.
The future is all about sovereign power generation and distributed reliability.
The article’s second sentence disproves its title: “Section 2 — a provision that broadly outlawed discrimination in voting on the basis of race.”
Exactly. The purpose of the VRA is to ban racial discrimination in voting. That’s why the Supreme Court ruled that you can’t use race to draw district lines. You can’t try to create white majority districts because you think that’ll get white candidates elected. And for the same reason you can’t do that if you replace “white” with any other group.
The article then conjures up a different purpose for the VRA: deliberately using race to increase the prospects of minorities being elected. The article concedes that was added as an interpretive gloss after the fact. But it condemns the Supreme Court for interpreting the VRA consistent with the law’s actual purpose instead of this other purpose that courts came up with after the fact. That’s what it means when it says the Court “limited” the VRA. It means that the Court limited the scope of the law with regards to this after-the-fact purpose.
The civil rights laws prohibit treating individuals differently based on race. That’s what they say and that’s what they were trying to achieve. Unless expressly stated, they were not designed to be a remedial system that allowed racial discrimination so long as the people doing it purported to have good intentions.
I disagree. Let’s have a look at the bigger picture.
Nearly a third of the state’s residents are Black. However, the Republicans, who hold a majority in the Louisiana legislature and also hold the governorship, drew the congressional districts in such a way that Black voters had a majority in only one out of six districts.
Activists and organizations filed a lawsuit challenging this. The state subsequently revised the district boundaries so that two of the six districts had a majority of Black voters, reflecting their proportion of the population.
In response, a group of white citizens who felt they were being discriminated against filed a lawsuit with the Supreme Court.
The court has now ruled in favor of these plaintiffs. In his opinion, Justice Samuel Alito, a member of the court’s conservative majority, argued, that the category of “race” should not play a role in government decisions.
This argument about a “color-blind” Constitution always surfaces in the U.S. context whenever there is an attempt to roll back social progress.
It ignores the fact that the Constitution was not written to be “color-blind,” but rather to discriminate deliberately. Enslaved people were counted as three-fifths of a person, not as full citizens. That did not change until the 1860s, after the abolition of slavery had been decided through the most violent conflict in U.S. history.
Like other advocates of “colorblindness,” Alito now invokes, of all things, the constitutional amendment adopted at that time and the Equal Protection Clause it contains, which guarantees all citizens equal protection under the law.
Yet this clause was specifically intended to safeguard the interests of minorities. And it took nearly another century and an additional law to force the Southern states to apply this part of the Constitution.
As early as 2013, the Supreme Court struck down part of the Voting Rights Act.
Until then, states that had previously enacted racist laws to discriminate against voters needed permission from the federal government if they wanted to change their election laws. The Supreme Court struck down this requirement, reasoning that the conditions that had made this restriction necessary no longer existed.
As if the racism that runs through the history of the United States had suddenly vanished.
Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg once remarked that this was like throwing away your umbrella in the pouring rain just because you didn’t get wet under it. She would be horrified to see how some of her former colleagues are now, some six years after her death, further eroding the hard-won civil rights. And this just a few months before the 250th anniversary of the United States.
But at its core, it simply follows a tradition that is as old as the nation itself. Every step forward that brings the United States closer to fulfilling the promise it made at its founding, yet denied to a large portion of its population, that all people are created equal and must therefore have equal rights, is followed by a step backward.
The Voting Rights Act of 1965 significantly increased the proportion of Black voters. But efforts to weaken the law have been going on for just as long as the law itself. Now, with the right-wing majority on the Supreme Court that Donald Trump helped create, those efforts have succeeded.
The coming months and years will likely reveal what happened after the initial ruling in 2013. States used the Supreme Court’s decision as a pretext for implementing numerous measures that made it particularly difficult for Black voters to cast their ballots. Now the Court has set another precedent.
Therefore the title "Supreme Court limits the voting rights act" is correct. To be more specific it is missing a ",again".
As you might have noticed, for months now, a redistricting war, a veritable battle over the drawing of electoral districts, has been raging in various states.
Sadly, the Democrats have also gotten drawn into it, adopting the motto “fight fire with fire”, and now want to manipulate electoral districts to their own advantage in order to keep up with the Republicans.
The latter now see this as their chance to prevent defeat in the November congressional elections.
In Alabama, Georgia, Mississippi, Tennessee, and South Carolina, all states in the Deep South of the U.S. where people were once enslaved and which later enacted racist discrimination laws, leading Republicans are already planning special legislative sessions to quickly approve redistricting plans.
Marsha Blackburn, a staunchly pro-Trump senator from Tennessee who is running for governor there, posted a map of her state on social media in which every single county is colored red as in the color of the Republican Party.
They no longer need to worry about anyone stopping her.
The Supreme Court has made sure of that.
Nitpicking, but this has bugged me for a while and I'm taking this opportunity to vent:
"Enslaved people were counted as three-fifths of a person, not as full citizens."
They were not counted as three fifths of a person in a way that matters for what we talk about today. They got zero percent of the vote they deserved. They probably got, on average, quite substantially less than three fifths of the respect and dignity they deserved. They were counted as three fifths of a person for how much they magnified the power of the votes of their captors and how much taxes their State had to pay. Slavery would have been every bit as wrong if they were counted as whole persons (or half persons, non-persons, double persons) for apportionment and taxation.
> Nearly a third of the state’s residents are Black. However, the Republicans … drew the congressional districts in such a way that Black voters had a majority in only one out of six districts.
That’s the expected outcome in the absence of racial discrimination. If a group is 1/3 of the state population, and you divide it into districts, you’d expect the population to be 1/3 in each of those districts as well. If there is not an even population distribution you might expect one district to be majority minority. But two would require extreme gerrymandering unless the population distribution was highly uneven.
> In his opinion, Justice Samuel Alito, a member of the court’s conservative majority, argued, that the category of “race” should not play a role in government decisions.
Yes, absolutely. This is a core principle, and a necessary principle in a multi-racial democracy. Especially one like ours, which has no majority race any longer.
> This argument about a “color-blind” Constitution always surfaces in the U.S. context whenever there is an attempt to roll back social progress.
Creating race-based voting districts is the opposite of social progress. The idea of organizing politics along racial lines—and drawing that into our voting maps—is retrograde and racist.
> It ignores the fact that the Constitution was not written to be “color-blind,” but rather to discriminate deliberately.
It wasn’t, then we fought a big war, and we got the 14th amendment, which was designed to be color blind. It was designed to protect the interest of minorities in being treated identically without regard to race. So were the civil rights Laws.
You should watch the movie “RBG.” Justice Ginsberg built her career as a lawyer advocating to interpret the laws regarding sex discrimination in exactly the same way Justice Alito interprets the laws regarding race discrimination. She represented men challenging laws that purportedly discriminated in favor of women. Her argument was the laws say “equal,” and they mean what they say. They don’t permit discrimination in either direction.
> As if the racism that runs through the history of the United States had suddenly vanished
It doesn’t matter whether racism has “vanished.” Two wrongs don’t make a right. The government can’t discriminate based on race in one place to cancel out asserted race discrimination in another place. If you want to combat racism, you have to do it directly.
The appeals to history also ring hollow. It’s not 1965. Today, whites in Louisiana will overwhelmingly vote for a non-white who shares their politics over a white who doesn’t. In 2007, a brown guy became the first non-incumbent in a Louisiana history to win the governor’s race in the first round without a runoff.
I will take you at your word that you genuinely want a politics free of racial discrimination, but all of the points you’re trying to make here are being immediately disproven by the reality on the ground. Florida has already passed a redistricting that massively and transparently disenfranchises black voters as a direct result of this decision. Louisiana is currently trying to postpone their already-underway primaries to push through a redistricting which I expect will do the same.
The MMT folks think that, when inflation gets high, you need to raise taxes to take money out of the economy. The fatal flaw in that is raising taxes is politically impossible.
We spend $100 billion a year on SNAP, which goes primarily to feeding children and mothers. Why is it so important to you to structure the program in one way (providing kids lunches in school) versus feeding kids a different way (providing parents cash to feed their kids)?
But why, to answer your question? Because those studies show, among other thing, that a non-negligible number of parents, given cash, can't or won't use it to feed their kids.
Why should a system that's already designed for a fraction of the population be further beholden to an even smaller fraction of the population?
The SNAP system we have is good, and it's generous. The SNAP benefit for my family of five (two adults, three kids) would be $1,183 a month, which is about what we spend on groceries shopping at ALDI and LIDL. It's good to let parents choose how to use that money to feed their kids, instead of the government imposing a top-down, one-size-fits all system.
Why do conservatives hate doing anything for children so much? WTF. He gave you a clear answer which you just ignored so you could repeat your ideal of how things should work instead of addressing the realities of how they do. You are smart enough to understand the difference, but chose to give a BS reply.
It’s not liberal versus conservative. I’m a liberal on this. I support SNAP. It’s a generous benefit and that’s okay with me. We should give parents plenty of money to make sure their kids can eat.
Your position isn’t just liberal, it’s post-liberal. You’re saying that it’s not enough to have cash benefits that gives parents reasonable choices in feeding their kids. It’s not about having broad-based policies that work for the typical person in need. It’s a post-liberalism that’s obsessed with changing systems that work for normal people to cater to the most dysfunctional few percent of the population.
I would love to have a Japan-style universal lunch program. But this point is an empty appeal to emotion. Kids are being fed. The U.S. spends $100 billion a year on SNAP and $18 billion a year on the National School Lunch Program. We just focus most of the money on cash benefits to parents of children rather than feeding kids at school.
Not sure whether you're intentionally spreading misinformation on this subject or not, but based on who I'm responding to it probably is intentional.
Anyways in contrast to "Kids are being fed". Almost 14% of children in the U.S. face food insecurity according to the U.S. government. There is real evidence this improved during covid when the government did offer additional funding for school provided meals. The number of food insecure children is on the rise. And every year republican administered states make it harder to obtain and maintain SNAP and WIC benefits whether you qualify or not.
So no it's not an appeal to emotion because there is real data that disagrees with you, and no the kids arent universally being fed. I'm glad you and your family are so secure in your situation you can comfortably argue against children receiving meals on the internet. But for some of us any number of children going hungry for any reason is too many, it's not justifiable as "good enough" or "we spend enough" if there are still hungry children whom have no control of the situation themselves.
> Almost 14% of children in the U.S. face food insecurity according to the U.S. government
What does that term mean? My dad spent his career working in maternal and child health internationally. The way experts define this in the field of child nutrition is based on objective numbers. How many calories are kids eating? What macronutrients are they getting?
Are you saying 14% of kids can’t afford to get the calories and nutrients that nutrition experts say they need? Because if that were true that would be shocking and would certainly justify your position. But I haven’t seen any data to support that.
That leaves everyone dealing in fictions: the fiction that you can reduce debt by cutting taxes, the fiction you can reduce debt by increasing spending, and fictions about how much you really balance the books by targeting only “billionaires” instead of taxing the middle class.
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