Canada has government-rune liquor stores, they're doing ok. Not exactly a "grocery store", but still PRETTY SHOCKING. UK has co-op (chains). There's Mondragon in Spain - I know it's employee-owned but that's not much different than government-owned if you really think about it.
Public-transit where I live is not free, but it is subsidized, with various recent efforts from municipal and state governments to further reduce costs for all residents.
Germany is defined as Social Democracy or a Social Market Economy. It marries free-market capitalism with social welfare policies, state regulation, and collective bargaining to ensure economic growth and social security, including robust social safety nets.
The US once had stronger unions and basic worker-oriented safety nets. This has been dismantled since the 80s, while piling on the National Debt by pilfering the treasury and "returning" the money to the (rich) end of the tax base.
There was a great quote in the original Deus Ex: "In 1945, corporations paid 50 percent of federal taxes. Now they pay about 5 percent."
In my mind the DSA is trying to shift the Overton window towards something more reasonable, that has already existed in the US. Focusing on the extremes to dismiss the DSA entirely is like throwing the baby out with the bath water.
In the past 18 months I've seen experienced developers turn out incredible work using llm-assisted tools, over and over again. With the right harnesses, processes and result-oriented testing, you can simply produce so much more high-quality work.
I know it's anecdotal, but I have so much data from my own experiences and those of my peers that I know these new tools are here to stay. It also makes me believe that those studies are either flawed or out of date.
It triggers me that there's an obvious typo in 'Oxford' right under the author's name. I wonder if it was originally published like that since 1997 and never caught or changed with all the updates.
I wanted to say the exact same thing! No matter the subject, if you write the name of your own institute with "Oxfrord", I have a hard time taking it seriously.
Geretsried (the town) apparently sits in an ideal location for geothermal power and heat plants, in the same basin as Munich and other surrounding municipalities who have been leveraging geothermal energy to great effect.
For more details what already exists, there is a map of deep geothermal power plants in the "Energie-Atlas Bayern" (in German) published by the government of Bavaria:
> The cause for this geological change has been identified as a drilling operation conducted in the summer and autumn of 2007 to provide geothermal heating to the city hall.
That project was about transferring heat. Perhaps for geothermal electricity production which can happen away from population centres this is less of an issue?
There is a huge difference between "Geothermal Energy" technologies.
The project in Staufen seems to be about a heat pump, which is a really simple technology that can be used pretty much everywhere. The problem seems to be that the drilling hole hit a gypsum layer that started swelling. But this should be pretty easy to know if it is in an area at risk.
Lots of houses here in Sweden has this technology, my house has, and it is a 2 day project to drill a 150m hole for a standalone house and install the heat pump, maybe $20-30k investment.
Wikipedia claims Sweden is #2 in the world for geothermal energy, but it is because of these simple heat pumps.
Why would I ever do a geothermal heat pump for $20-30k when you can get a proper central air heat pump and air handler for less than half? The split unit heat pumps a good portion of the world like would be even cheaper. Not sure how much those would cost.
Geothermal heat pumps are more efficient. They also ignore air temp so they keep working efficiently when cold outside.
The downside is that geothermal is expensive and hard to retrofit. They make the most sense in new construction in cold climates or adding to large properties.
Geothermal heat pumps can work great in retrofitting old system with a water heater. My family house is over 100 year old and the original water heater used coal in 1920, then it was changed to electrical around 1980s, and is now fitted with geothermal heat pumps. Geothermal was installed as a cost saving measure and cut down the heating bill by more than half. All the old cast iron radiators are still the original ones.
Yeah, best deal if you already have water based central heating and radiators. Which is pretty common here in Sweden since don't really have air/gas heating systems, so our houses are not built with air ducts.
Better efficiency (you use maybe 30% of the electricity), connects to the central heating so it supports the entire house.
I installed mine for $15k but that was 20 years ago and included subsidies.
Some projects are a mix of private and public investments. A freeze on the public portion affects the risk/trade-offs of the private investment portion and therefore on the overall project.
Thanks for posting this. I was not inclined to respond after already providing information that he could have viewed when time afforded him. Here's hoping he has time to read a Wikipedia article instead of having people do the work for him.
