masta

Wow, the site wants write access to my mastodon account, without even telling me who they are?

Same when we went from horse carriages to gasoline powered cars. There was no infrastructure in place to buy hydrocarbons for otto-engines, other than in pharmacies.

Industries are built when demand is rising, infrastructure always has to change to cover the needs of the population.

EVs will be important sinks for electrical energy in the future, to balance out demand.

They can be, and there are demonstration plants doing this already. With more EVs on the road it is even going to make economical sense at some point.

But those darn batteries just won't break as fast as some petrolheads predicted, they are still holding up long after 150.000 km and more.

Not to mention second life uses, like grid- and homestorage, which will drive up the time for when you really want to recycle an EV battery.

I hate to break it to you, but the hyperinflation of the Weimar Republic ended around 1923 and the Republic prospered afterwards. Till the Great Depression, which was in big parts driven by speculative assets .... Wonder where I've heard that before. And in the aftermath, the 1930s introduced austerity and deflation policies to the Weimar Republic, which was the final straw.

In the end it's mainly about developing an habit to check your expenses. This can easily get to 100-150$ recouped per month. Which, when going into settling high interest debts makes a huge difference.

Open a second account and move 10-20% of your salary to that account on the beginning of the month, or whenever you receive your salary. Pay yourself first, before you pay the bills.

Use at least 50% of that money to pay off any short term debt, starting with the high interest debt first. Try to avoid any new purchases which are not necessary. Do you really need that new TV right now? Could you live 1/2/3 months without a TV if the old one breaks? Everything which remains after paying off your debt should go into short term and long-term savings. Your short-term should approach at least 4-6 months of salary, to make sure you can cover any sudden expenses without going into debt. Put the remaining money into assets like index funds. Try to increase your initial share taken from salary over time. When you get a raise, make sure to adjust the amount you put aside every month.

See how to change your life do adopt to the now reduced income. Eating out less and start to cook for yourself is one thing to start. Check your monthly recurring expenses, do you really need NetFlix, Disney+, HBO AND Youtube Premium?

But whatever you do, putting money to the side as soon as you get your salary is the most important step. Maybe start with 5% and increase disproportionately on your next raise. This is what keeps the lifestyle inflation away (Just buying more because you earn more).

Not to mention that it requires capturing and probably liquifying the CO2 first, which is also energy intense. If we do CO2 Hydrogenation, it will be for Methane gases, not liquid. Methane is easy to store, has rather flexible uses and would help in keeping the grid stable.

Liquids, especially when used in ICE engines later on, would result in an energy efficiency of 5-10% max. This is abysmal and we could use that otherwise wasted energy to decarbonize many other things by directly electrifying them.

Look up how the energy market works, thats one of the main culprits here, because it has been designed to shovel money towards large fossil baseload powerplants. Which are owned by large corporations with lobby groups just as big as your friends in the internet troll hut.

Reality is a lot more complex. Conservative parties rule the majority of german states. Over time they added more and more rules to local law, which implicitly prevented more renewable generation, especially from wind.

Also there have been a lot of astroturf groups spawning up over the years. From hard climate change denial, blackout FUD-spreader and false claims about health impacts. They feed a huge load of BS to the locals, as soon as a developer wants to create a new windpark.

It does not have anything to do with the European Green Deal, and you probably even know that. Putin is putting pressure on Europe, because his only lifeline for money is going to run dry if we require less fossil fuels in the future.

One of the main problems is the market design for electricity in Europe. It uses a merit order based pricing model.

Simplified version: - Everyone lists how much power they can produce at which marginal price (Renewables = 0c/kWh, Nuclear/Lignite = 4-8c/kWh, Gas peaker = very much based on the current gas prices) - Offers get sorted by marginal price. - Buyers put in the amount of power they want to buy. - The transaction (which is always a 1h timeslot) is resolved by adding up all buyers and take all offers from the list, till demand is fulfilled. - The price of the last kWh bought, will determine the price for everyone.

So, as soon as a single gas power plant is required to fulfill demand, the whole market price is going up. With the extreme rise in gas-prices, due to Russia playing games with the gas-market, The average market prices have gone up. Especially Nuclear and Lignite plants are very happy about the current situation, as they make much more money due to market mechanisms.

While lots of renewables drive the prices down (as they are usually valued at zero due to feed-in tariff regulations).

Another issue is, France has multiple nuclear reactors in unplanned maintenance due to failures. Their fleet is missing more than 10% of their capacity, while most of France is heating with direct electricity heating (not even heat pumps).

Result: The electricity market is in a massive crunch right now in Europe, electricity prices are driven by natural gas prices. And there we've got a huge dependency on Russia. .... And Russia is arguing that all Europe needs to do is certifying their new pipeline (Nordstream2), which comes with massive geopolitical problems attached to it.

Sorry, but that's just wrong, the maximum you're paying for public health insurance (as an employee) in Germany is around 7.5% of your pre-taxed income. BUT, there is a limit called "Beitragsbemessungsgrenze" which caps the amount of yearly income when calculating the amounts. The cap is currently at 58050 Euros, which translates to roughly 385 Euros.

Only if you also include the public pension and unemployment insurance deductions (both of which are also percentage based and capped) you'll max out at about 1050 Euros.