I’m French. I want them 100 times more effective. You have no idea how much the rich French love tax optimization (and fraud – it’s been estimated to 100+ bn/year a few years ago).

The average fortune growth of the top 500 French families for the last 20 years is 14% a year. They can spare a dime.

Not to mention that I keep hearing stories about the IRS getting budget cuts. You guys just have a seemingly-mistaken impression that the IRS knows it all because they have citizens run the numbers while also doing the math themselves due to corporate lobbying from turbotax and the like, but it’s actually a good thing when your tax office has good information. Y’all should concern yourselves with how politicians make them use it.

MoArE dAyS pAyDe MoArE mOnEyE

This missile, just like all missiles, is just a glorified engine and a guidance system. Therefore it is a lot more maneuverable than a jet, be it Chinese or French. It even has a term called the “no-escape zone” beyond which a plane can’t escape the missile.

The pilot error therefore comes down to bad tactics/strategy and allowed themselves to get within that zone.

Whatever you think of the indian military losing planes when they have the attacker’s disadvantage and strict orders not to escalate the conflict by preemptively destroying the anti-air defenses and such, the error happened likely before the missile was even launched. And even then, the rafale is one of the most manoeuverable pmanes in the world, due to its innate aerodynamic instability that’s tamed by a complex fly-by-wire system. If one plane had a chance to escape the missile, it was the rafale.

Yes, due to pilot error. Only a single jet was provably downed and India said they were perfectly happy with the performance of the jet.

China is in conflit with India, they want the worst outcome possible for them, which would be to make the Rafale, which wins air competitions left and right, irrelevant.

Usually in the wrong direction.

In my country, which is part of the Europe, the only decent parties, in my view, do <1% of the vote…

A swiss-like system would be a good start, with a more direct, horizontal democracy, but basically nobody advocates for it.

Enabling a mass exodus of money from the Russian economy? I’m a little surprised the Kremlin is okay with that XD

I remember the start of the war when they froze ruble sales to stop its crash…

Well, in my country, some leftist parties do have an issue with Putin. Sometimes they ignore his behaviour, others they defend his policies. Never they denounce him, and the few times they do, it’s never in terms as strong or as early as the others. But it shouldn’t be so hard ! The guy is evil and is funding tons of parties in Europe in favour or far right populism…

So I think there is actually room for a non-Putin-aligned, science-based, left wing party in many countries, starting with my own.

If it’s anything like my country, it’s also a lack of offering issue…

What’s the difference in your opinion?

Their agenda? Their methods?

I’m not aware of significant differences myself.

Hard to trust the alt-right to do anything, especially the right thing, especially when it’s about Russia, who did finance many of their political allies. (FN/RN in France, Trump in the US, Orbán in Hungary, etc…)

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tang_ping

It’s Chinese, seemingly

I voted.

But we still have those in Europe?

I do.

But replacing those with greener alternatives is easier said than done. Petrochemicals are used to make detergents, lubes (industrial and otherwise), tar for roads, plastics, etc… Importing all those things is a massive undertaking I’m not sure we’ll benefit from, either financially nor ecologically…

Sure, let’s just import it all instead

Yes, I only listed means to store or produce energy because upgrading powerlines won’t fix power fluctuations : that is due to imbalances between production and consumption, no amount of upgraded to transmission capacity is likely to help.

Load management might help, however. But it’s typically hard to get people to consume more when needed and power shedding is expensive on the electrical operator… Especially since those oscillations were unexpected. Also those things already exist in many European countries.

France already has bidirectional power lines to trade electricity with Spain.

They were used to rapidly restore power in northern Spain after the outage and that interconnection actually caused a very short blackout in southwestern France.

The infrastructure France thankfully refused to allow is fossil gas lines, saving Europe decades of gas usage to justify the investment.

While that is indeed not the most objective source, they are actually correct. Even if their stability argument didn’t hold water (it does), they should keep the nuclear plants active and upgrade transmission lines to export to Germany through France and displace coal plants in Germany’s electricity market… And literally save on radioactive waste which coal plants produce tons of.

What does “upgrade the grid” mean to you?

Digging tons of rock and salts to store energy with batteries?

In Europe there are very few remaining sites to build hydro power, and those have serious ecological consequences too… I don’t see to many alternatives. Biogas options are nearly tapped out. There is potential with geothermal using new digging techniques, but they’re mostly in the testing stage still.

How is using batteries better than using said rocks to power nuclear reactors?

There is a limit to how much one can add uncontrollable energy sources to a grid…

I have two answers to give you.

• Flamanville is a new generation of reactor that we are testing out after regretfully stopping the large-scale production of reactors in France. Therefore the welding sector had been lacking work for 20 years, many retiring. The same issue goes for many other highly-specialized skills in the field. Americans had to be brought in to fill in for these positions, at high cost. So the left hadn’t been corrupted by Russia into being against nuclear power in the first place, Flamanville would like gone about as well as developing a fundamentally different design can. I will grant you, however, that this isn’t the design I would have liked to see deployed: France used to be developing the Phoénix and SuperPhénix fast neutron reactors until protesters made them stop. These kinds of reactors are cleaner, more fuel-efficient (by several orders of magnitude!), some variants can even consume previous nuclear waste, although I don’t think these two French designs could. These would have been wonderful to have access to. Russia and China have already developed these designs, in large parts with our researchers when they lost their jobs, and we’ll eventually just buy them from them again. Nice plan.

• What would you replace these with? Batteries? Once again? Coal? Renewables? How would you deal when, all over Europe, every winter, there are weeks on end with next to no wind nor sun? Should we create new mountain ranges and rivers to store more energy hydraulically? Shift demand? Nuclear is the worst system except for all the others.

What do you mean? The cost of an old nuclear reactors’ MWh is 40-50€, that’s really competitive.

And unlike solar and wind, it produces anytime. As a French person, not only do I think we were right to build them in the first place, I’m annoyed we stopped in the 2000s after the Chernobyl scare campaign, it’s safer than Germany’s coal, which also produces radioactive waste and isn’t properly regulated, unlike nuclear.