Don 'Quixote' Trump

When you say 'Australian grid prices are coming down a lot' I don't think you're talking consumer prices.

I don't have the exact 'before' numbers on me, but our peak electricity costs went up from around 42c/kWh to 56c/kWh around 18 months ago.

At the same time that feed-in was halved from 4c/kWh to 2c. Having said that, I'm pretty sure 'Shoulder' and 'Off-Peak' went down slightly.

(I'll update this when I can access my spreadsheet with the actual numbers and dates)

I should also say that I'm fairly insulated from this price rise having recently gotten a battery installed, plus moving to a special EV plan, so I charge the car and the house battery at the very cheap off peak rate (special for EV owners) and run the house entirely off battery, topped up with solar.

It's a privileged setup, but one that I planned and worked towards for a fair while, having seen ever increasing electricity prices always on the horizon (even before AI started eating all the resources).

That’s just the stickiness of prices, not a problem with solar.

Inflationary money is basically an ugly hack to allow prices to fall without falling.

But it's not happening in areas that keep coal on their grid - Wyoming, Texas, Utah, China, etc.

It's primarily the places that try do both solar an fossil fuel retirement that are experiencing high energy prices - California, UK, Europe, Australia, etc.

To be clear: Australia has always had fairly high electricity prices, and Australia is also not specifically doing 'fossil fuel retirement', although there are coal plants closing they're closing because they're reaching the expected end of their natural life.

Texas has the most wind power of any us state.

High energy prices happen when you don't do the basics to be ready for a change before making it. Or when you skip basic maintenance until everything falls apart. I'm sure there are many other complex factors I don't know about.

Texas also has the most coal power of any state. As with China, success with renewables appears to depend on a policy of compatibility with fossil fuels rather than opposition.

And equally less visible (or legally visible).

That will be the case, ie. cognitive dissonance / denial, for many future climate change caused incidents as well.

This kind of reasoning: "California wildfires and tornadoes have always been part of the US weather patterns"

Whilst ignoring the increasing frequency and magnitude / intensity.

In California wildfires, how do you separate climate related effects from the effects the invasive gumtree problem?

Gumtree forests tend to need more frequent low intensity burns to clear fuel build up, which Australian Aboriginals used to manage.

Other discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46582420

That is the truly scary thing.

And from what I've seen, the rest of 'the west' has similarly sized undercurrents of similar sentiment.

Strangely, that 40% will be made up of, largely, people whose grandparents lived through WWII.

'Oh gramps, for once, stop talking about the war'.

People really don't want to hear those stories because it makes them uncomfortable. I'm in an absolute minority in that I wanted to hear the stories even if they made me uncomfortable. But the vast majority of the people would love to get through life without learning history's lessons and as a result are much more likely to repeat them.

This was true for a majority of users even fairly recently, but the 'niche' for which Linux is a better option has grown such that those who are worse off with Linux (better off with Windows) are becoming the 'niche'.

...and Altered Carbon (primarily the book but also the TV series), which does things a lot better than "In Time".

Noem's straight up defense of the shooting appears to have been the declaration of "open season".

The precedent for which disciplinary action will be taken has not yet been set.

A couple in Portland were shot by ICE yesterday. Open season indeed.

https://www.cnn.com/2026/01/09/us/portland-oregon-border-pat...

There were things about Jobs around before he died, I'm pretty sure.

The denial of paternity of his first born being one of them.

(I think that was relatively well known well before he died)