thanks!
I’ve only been to Denmark but certainly concur with voting Denmark last.
- society is designed to render people without a CPR № dysfuctional
- could not check out a library book without CPR №
- could not make a photo copy without CPR №
- could not open a bank acct without CPR № (bank falsely advertised to expats the possibility to process paperwork before even arriving)
- could not get student rate on trains until the CPR № was granted. Took a month to get the number, the clock of which only started ticking after finding a seemingly legitimate place to live. Not counting time sleeping in a classroom. No way to get the train fare difference back retroactively.
- society is designed to render people without a bank account dysfuctional
- many restaraunts refuse service to cash payers, including university campus snack shops
- university events required electronic payments (someone has to use their personal bank acct to let cash payers participate)
- someone could not simply do laundry
- university e-mail outsourced to Microsoft, forcing everyone on campus to share their school-related email with a US surveillance capitalist
- university itself used Facebook to announce events, thus excluding those who do not use FB
- university forced 2FA on some academic resources, which then required SMS (thus denying students without a mobile phone or the will to share their number access to school resources)
- university outsourced e-book service to a Cloudflare service (Proquest), who then blocks access to some demographics of people
- banks themselves are cashless. If your ATM card fails because of some persnickety paperwork issue, you have no money access unless you visit a branch during opening hours, at which point a banker actually has to walk down the street to an ATM with you, carrying a special internal ATM card. So getting your own money out of your bank account is comparable to asking dad for money.
- banks app can receive inbound international money, but cannot send outbound international transfers (only domestic)
- housing crisis: the waiting list for an apartment is years; had to sleep illegally in a classroom and dodge night guards, or deal with lots of dodgy landlords exploiting the crisis. Had a landlord who was illegally subletting, who demanded cash payment (fine) but then refused to give a receipt.
- severe shortage of on-campus dorms. Just enough to house foreign exchange students. All “dorms” for locals are scattered in private apartments. Getting one close to campus is a competition.
- was denied a CPR № because the dwelling had more people than officially allowed on paper, despite some of the officially known people not actually living there.
- expected this country with the world’s highest degree of income equality to be quite liberal, but the people & culture were ironically conservative. No concept of privacy.
- cycling actually sucks. You might expect it to be the best place in the world for cycling, but the cycle paths are so popular they are like driving on a highway. Overcrowded. If you cruise along slowly a bicycle traffic jam becomes possible. Car driving stresses are there on the high traffic cycling lanes.
That’s just off the top of my head. The nannying is endless.
Can anyone confirm or deny whether many of these issues are replicated among Denmark’s neighbors?
Luckily you don’t need to burn uranium to avoid 5 steps of energy transformation.
No you haven't. Read your own source. Hint: biogas
biogas was used in 2009, not in 2020 when the stats were collected. Nor would it matter if it were still used. Hint: it would be an increase on the 80%.
recall: fuel energy → heat energy→ steam → turbine → transmission → heat energy
Also, nuclear fuel is not gas, so this speaks for electric stoves, silly.
That’s fuel. That’s in the 80%.
again: fuel energy → heat energy→ steam → turbine → transmission → heat energy
Ignoring other renewables
I have accounted for all the renewables mentioned in the linked wikipedia page, which covers sources as insignificant as hydro (<1%). What else is there? Have you thought about updating wikipedia with whatever you think is missing?
Ignoring French nuclear imports
That would only increase the proportion of fuel energy even more, which only works against your botched claim. If you want to count French nuclear, then the portion of solar, wind, and hydro is proportionally even less. Brussels currently has a nuclear power plant inside the region. Why do you think it would it be sensible to transmit over such distance? That would introduce even more substantial inefficiency in the transmission.
Ignoring current state but talking about possible future plans
The status quo only has 1 year left on it. And nuclear power still has the same stages of energy transition loss you’ve failed to debunk. What’s the point? Your claim is nonsense either way.
Get your facts straight, or update Wikipedia to reflect your understanding:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_in_Belgium
wind + solar + hydro → 20%
80% from burning fuels¹. With 3 new gas-burning plants under construction to replace nuclear, that’s not going to improve things.
Belgium is aiming to reduce its use of gas as much as possible.
Nonsense. I guess you missed the whole “Code Red” march against Electrabel last year protesting the plan to build 3 new gas-burning power plants.
there are two nuclear power plants, not one.
And that’s important why? From wikipedia:
“Belgium decided to phase out nuclear power generation completely by 2025.”
Whether there are 1, 2, or 5 nuclear plants is immaterial when it’s all being phased out, and replaced with gas-burning power plants.
Betting on gas, be it a stove or something else, is just stupid.
Betting in a way that neglects plans that have already been announced is stupid for sure.
¹ recall: fuel energy → heat energy→ steam → turbine → transmission → heat energy
Electricity is usually not made from fuel
You’re generally wrong on that:
“Over 60% of global electricity generated so far in 2023 was produced by fossil fuels” --Reuters
Belgium is what’s relevant in the case at hand. In Belgium ~20% of power is from solar, wind, and hydro. The other 80% is from burning fuel. I group nuclear with fossil fuel because the nuclear power plant in Belgium is being decommissioned and will be replaced with 3 new gas burning plants.
Gas stoves are far inferior in this step, losing most of the heat into the surtounding air. Induction stoves have almost no transmission loss.
That’s true but that’s stoves not ovens. You’d have to exaggerate quite a bit to claim more than half of the heat energy is wasted on gas stoves or ovens.
In order to use gas in the kitchen, you have to have a gas pipe in the kitchen, which has become very unusual.
Where? Unusual Belgium-wide? The cities concentrate populations. Brussels city is mostly old homes likely all piped with gas judging from the dominance of gas boilers. Are you saying there are lots of old homes that did not bother to branch a gas pipe into the kitchen?
During construction, it's easier and cheaper to not lay gas pipes.
That’d be a false economy. Pipes are like ~€7 per meter so it would take ~1—2 years for the pipes to pay for themselves if they are used for daily cooking.
Most people do not have a choice – either you got an old house witha gas pipe in the kitchen or a newer one with a 400 V power outlet.
I do not have a 400V outlet. I have no idea how many electric ovens require that, do you? I’m using a crappy portable 220V oven. If the big properly insulated wall ovens are 400V, then I would have to run a new line to the fuse box. Not sure if I could wire that myself, which I assume involves bridging two 220V circuits.
I guess most people don’t do their own work. So you are implying hiring someone to add one or the other post-construction would be cost prohibitive. Sounds reasonable. But I’m not convinced kitchens lack gas pipes to begin with because gas stovetops are still popular in Belgium. Just not gas ovens.
(edit) In Brussels in 2011, “natural gas consumption was 10,480 GWh and the electricity consumption was 5,087 GWh”, according to Wikipedia.
I’m still waiting for someone to show me an induction oven. This is the same as saying “don’t use an oven at all”. Of course, if you don’t need an oven, then it would not make sense to install an oven at all.
It’s not an assumption. This is how power is produced in Belgium. There is only 1 nuclear power plant and it’s being decommissioned. 3 new fossil fuel burning power plants will be built.
If I were to open the boiler before and after using it just as I have a wood stove, that brief exposure to trace amounts of toxins once a day would not influence a choice to use it. That theory is quite far fetched.
The finding that gas stove toxins can be significant is also more recent than the popularity drop in gas ovens. IOW, to have a cause-effect, the cause must come chronologically before the effect.
(edit) also worth noting that gas stoves are still popular in Belgium, just not ovens. So this theory is bogus. People are not going to avoid ovens out of fear of toxins when the door opens while at the same time having no problem with gas stoves.
Why do you say that in the past tense? You can see from my figures that in Belgium gas is still cheaper.
This is something that varies from one region to another. In the US, some states have cheaper electric than gas. Electric is less efficient because of big losses in all the conversion steps:
fuel energy → heat energy→ steam → turbine → transmission → heat energy
Gas simply has:
fuel energy → transmission → heat energy
It is important to note that gas transmission is also lossy due to the impossibility of leak-free main lines, but it’s still more efficient in the end. Thus in most of the world gas is also naturally cheaper due to the efficiency difference. It gets inverted in some regions because of pricing manipulations as well as the drive to promote green energy (and rightfully so -- social responsibility should be incentivized). And in some regions they cut down on the transmission losses by putting the power plant inside or close to the big city. But in Belgium gas is still cheaper than electric even despite Russia’s war and efforts to get off Russian fuels.
My question is what is forcing me to create an email address.
Does the law force me to create an email address (knowing that it would then be unavoidably used to facilitate the sender sharing whatever they want about me with Microsoft)?
It’s important to note that if your email address falls in the hands of a gov or org, they will use it without encryption. They will share willy nilly anything they want with Microsoft (their email provider) in the loop. And if you make a GDPR art.17 request to have your email address erased from their records after they abuse it, they ignore those requests and continue using your email address. So it’s best not to give them an email address to begin with.
(edit) govs and orgs seem to always put my full name in the e-mail headers, sometimes even including my middle name. And they usually greet me by surname. This ensures that Microsoft trivially knows exactly who to associate the content with. IMO it infringes on the data minimisation principle.