Sconrad122
There would be no economic power to back up a UN currency, meaning it would be dependent on voluntary participation from the bulk of the member states’ economies, which likely means that it would quickly devolve to either a protest currency used by anti-west regimes, a slightly federated version of the dollar that is responsive to the needs and desires of mainly the US and partially the EU, or it will be dropped/ignored by both the West and the Anti-west and become a currency of minimal value that is used only on the fringes of the world economy. The UN simply does not have the centralized capacity to operate a currency and enforce that currency’s use amongst it’s member states, especially those that already have a hegemony that would be threatened by such a currency
It’s not a baby until it’s born. It’s still a fetus even if it would have been viable if born. Any other deadline is going to be either arbitrary and not a good fit for some subset of cases. Also, wanting something to be legal is not equitable with wanting something to happen, and you should avoid falling prey to that false logic. I don’t think the person you are replying to is saying they would celebrate a last minute abortion, just that they think it shouldn’t be something that the blind hand of the legal system is applied to
OP is from sigmoid.social according to the profile, and that is a mastodon instance. They tooted on Mastodon with the correct @ mention of the community, resulting in the toot showing up as a post in this lemmy community. We can reply to and interact with this specific post, although I’m not sure how it shows up to a mastodon user, seeing as the front end is quite different. We are unable to interact with Mastodon toots that aren’t tagged in a way that tie them to a Lemmy community and create a correlating post
The issue isn’t really comparing high noon to midnight. The issue is comparing prices at either high noon (when supply is large) or midnight (when demand is small) to the space in between, especially dinnertime (when demand peaks just as solar supply finishes tailing off). There are ways to move some of that peak into noon (e.g: if homes are well insulated, they can be cooled or heated while solar is still up and used as a thermal battery to at least bridge over to the nighttime hours), but some of the peak is much harder to shift around. If everybody starts cooking and turns on the television around dinnertime, the only way to distribute that is to stagger dinnertime, which is easier said than done for a lot of people’s schedules. Having power storage to bridge that gap (wouldn’t it be nice if everyone that has an electric car got home and used whatever range they had leftover in their battery to absorb their extra demand and then start charging again at nighttime rather than immediately start charging at the worst time of day. Or having solar plants that store excess daytime power in thermal, hydro, or chemical batteries to discharge and increase supply later) is likely easier than convincing enough people to work odd shifts or delay their after work leisure activities
Powering a couple appliances for a few hours is nothing for a car battery, those things are huge and powerful because cars are so inefficient. That’s not to say that V2G or V2X will work perfectly for everybody, but with the average commute around 25 miles and plenty of EVs out there over 200 mile range (which equates to mutliple days of typical electrical usage), there’s certainly some extra capacity. If you were compensated for the power you sold back at peak times, it could help justify paying for and lugging around the kind of battery capacity that is specced for your weekend/holiday road trips just to make your likely shorter daily commute. I’m using you generically, I don’t know your specific situation, so you certainly could be someone who would not feel a need to engage in that kind of scheme
It is a very solvable problem, and mechanical or thermal batteries are likely to be at least part of the solution. Of the three kinds of gaps/shortfalls that grid storage would have to cover, the milliseconds-long and hours-long gaps are probably the easiest to solve. The days-long gaps (stretches of cloudy days, low winds for extended periods) is probably the most expensive to solve, but even those are not really that difficult (hydro storage is a tested technology that works well and HVDC transmission linking regions together can allow local shortfalls to be covered by remote surpluses). It’s all more a matter of building capacity than needing new technology to solve an unsolvable problem, from what I understand
Last one in Europe other than those two. Georgia, Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, China, Mongolia, and North Korea all remain in Asia. None are likely to join NATO anytime soon. Georgia may be the most likely, but they have the same problem with outstanding Russian occupation that Ukraine has/had going into 2022. Azerbaijan is aligned with Turkey, who is a NATO member, but does not have contiguous borders with NATO. Kazakhstan has distanced itself from the Ukraine invasion, but is otherwise more similar to Belarus than Finland in terms of alignment. China and North Korea have nukes. Mongolia is up shit creek without a paddle hoping that China and Russia continue to rival each other enough to not want the other to expand into Mongolia really