• 37 Posts
  • 564 Comments
Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: June 14th, 2023

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  • The trouble with green steel is that coal has like 3 uses in steel production - it’s not just used to heat the metal but also becomes part of the steel itself. There are alternatives but you’re having to replace 1 thing with 3 and it ends up being ridiculously energy intensive, so unless your grid is made up exclusively of renewables you’re really just moving the CO2 production around. Especially as most of the demand is additional on top of regular steel production, we’re already trying to switch to renewables but this pushes that target further away.

    Really green steel, much like green hydrogen, seems driven more by marketing than it being a sound engineering decision.



  • But in practice they aren’t. In practice a represntative is swayed by people with money to go against the people they represent.

    There would be little to no opportunity for that in a direct democracy. Lobbyists can’t bribe everyone, it wouldn’t be cost effective. Meanwhile people will have no choice but to educate themselves, as they’ll feel the effects of their votes directly and won’t be able to hide behind the (sometime inevitable) betrayal of the person they voted for. Even if people are lied to and convinced to vote another way, there’s a huge difference between “You lied to me and didn’t do what you said you’d do” and “You lied to me and got me to do something I didn’t want to do”, and generally there should be more accountability.


  • No, it’s because lawyers can be expected to know how laws work. You kind of want that from someone who writes laws.

    Which actually points to how the EU is structured. The unelected bureaucrats of the European Commission are in fact lawyers selected by each of the member states, they are selected on merit for their skill and they write the proposed EU regulations. These are then voted on by the democratically elected representatives of the European Parliament. The goal being to have professionals write functional laws but ultimately have them put in force through democratic means.

    Still, the major problem with the EU is the way represntatives behave and are voted for. People all too easily neglect voting in the EU, or vote for joke/sensationalist parties that are even less likely to actually represent the people.

    Frankly, I think for better or worse a direct democracy would do away with these issues. People might not know about every matter, but they’ll certainly feel the consequence - and they won’t be able to hide behind their representative screwing things up, it will be their own fault. They’ll learn soon enough and there’ll be much more accountability all round.








  • And then, with the industry under national control, they arrange for it to be critically mismanaged again to use it as justification for the private sector to buy it back so they can “fix it”. However, this time they have to sell it cheap, because it’s critically mismanaged and the private sector won’t buy an apparently failing business otherwise.

    The real conspiracy is that it’s always the same groups looking to get in and “mismanage” the business, for the benefit of extracting wealth.







  • The article doesn’t mention the parents’ opinions, but I think the angle here is that the state is considering the interests of the child and assuming some of the responsibility when the parent “fails” to meet the court’s standard of ensuring they survive the operation.

    So, basically, you can refuse treatment for yourself from 18 onwards, but under 18 someone else has a duty of care. Typically your parents, but if your parents don’t meet this duty of care the courts might intervene, on behalf of the child’s interests.

    Then with teenagers it’s a whole massive grey area, they’re still technically children but they are given limited agency - their opinion is considered, and here the hospital determined she had “capacity” to make the decision. Hence going to court to try and sort the whole mess out beforehand.

    So the court here ruled that a 14 year old girl can’t refuse life saving treatment.