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Joined 4 months ago
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Cake day: July 22nd, 2024

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  • It’s not about who gets the sweeter deal. It’s not a transaction. Members don’t buy services from the EU with their contributions. If France gets more payouts, it’s because France has more of whatever triggers those payouts. It’s not the GDI though, so “same GDI, different net payments” is a flawed argument.

    If we’re both in a tennis club and pay the same member’s fees, but I go to play on Thursday, when there’s less people, more space and a free drink at the bar for members, but you go on Saturday, when people are fighting for free courts and you can’t find a seat at the bar, I get the better deal. That doesn’t mean we’re not treated fairly, we’re just using different parts of what’s available.

    Now, if you had to pay higher fees in the first place because I said “I"ll only join if I get a discount”, that would indeed be unfair.



  • You’re confirming that France pays less in.

    I’m not. They paid more in fact. They just also got more back out.

    Obviously I’m talking about Net. Gross doesn’t matter.

    Wrong. What a country pays in and what it gets out are two entirely unrelated questions.

    Payments to the EU are calculated by GDI and that’s that (except when there is a rebate). They are supposed to be fair based on that metric.

    Payments back to the members are not “free money” the government can spend on whatever. They are subsidies bound to specific purposes that have their own specific criteria of distribution. They are not designed to be fair by comparison of GDI or similar metrics. If there were, as a hypothetical example, an EU program to subsidize local winemakers, you can see how France would very likely receive more money out of this fund than the UK.











  • Nuclear is only competitive if you don’t factor in the negative externalities ( it has that part in common with fossil fuels) and the massive amount of government guarantees and subsidies that go into each and every plant.

    Nuclear accidents are not insurable on the free market, that should tell you everything. If they were and owners had to factor in a market based insurance price, that alone would be so astronomically high that no investor would ever touch nuclear.

    So governments guarantee to pay for damages in case of nuclear incidents. Governments bear the cost of waste disposal. Governments bear the cost of security (as in military /anti terrorism measures, because these things are awesome targets). Governments pay huge amounts of direct subsidies or take on debt via government owned companies to cap consumer prices. None of this is factored into electricity prices, none of this is factored into most studies.

    If small nuclear plants are so impractical, why is Google funding seven of them?

    Because, again, google won’t ever have to foot the actual bill. Also, google has a history of investing into things that don’t work out, so I wouldn’t necessarily cite them as an authority.

    Edit: We don’t even know if google is actually “investing” anything here. They only say they agreed to buy power.

    It’s unclear how Google and Kairos set up the deal — whether the former is providing direct funding or if it just promised to buy the power that the latter generates when its reactors are up and running.