Ben Matthews

  • New here on lemmy, will add more info later …
  • Also on mdon: @benjhm@scicomm.xyz
  • Try my interactive climate / futures model: SWIM
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  • 166 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: September 15th, 2023

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  • Regarding the map - an annual average cost is not so meaningful - in higher latitudes solar is not enough in winter - especially where it’s mostly cloudy during the first half of winter. Wind helps the balance but not everywhere, always. Of course, the sophisticated models behind the article know all that, the issue is simplistic presentation. I note “we assume hydrogen is used for seasonal storage” - this may be rather optimistic - how many dark months can that cover?






  • Stability is indeed a strength of EU - effectively averaging over all the countries smooths over political oscillations - which is useful for tackling long-term policy problems (like climate). I’m not advocating majoritarian voting where 51% overrides 49%. However with ± 30 countries, one or two should not block the rest - the current system leads to transactional brinkmanship where the last hold-outs get some prize in return for postponed obstruction. I’ve seen similar (worse) problems in UN climate negotiations - also due to “consensus” principle.


  • Ben Matthews@sopuli.xyztoYUROP@lemm.eeMost sane Orbán fans
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    2 months ago

    Interesting - especially regarding the linguistic isolation factor, making it easy to dominate media.
    Although even among many similar slavic languages, I wonder how many people are listening to other country’s media. And if we look at other isolated languages in Europe, eg. Finland, Basque, Albania, it’s hard to see a pattern in political consequences.



  • Ben Matthews@sopuli.xyztoYUROP@lemm.eeMost sane Orbán fans
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    2 months ago

    I wonder to what extent the western powers in Trianon were also motivated to punish the experiment with communism during summer of 1919 ? And how memory of this continues to influence modern views?
    Later, the Soviet union extracted products and resources cheaply from its satellites - did this contribute to resentment of Ukraine as the transit country (I heard similar from Romanians)?
    Today, the rural - urban political divide is similar in many other corners of europe, or even usa. I just wonder why the power balance in this case seems to be skewed away from the younger educated ‘city people’ in Budapest - maybe also specific demographics relating to those borders ?


  • Orban is not forever - whereas integrating a country to EU is a long slow process. Also Budapest is geographically a hub city (whose inhabitants didn’t - mostly- vote for fidesz anyway). I find it hard to believe that hungarian people are so fundamentally different from their neighbours. So does it make sense to undo citizens’ EU membership for this? Rather, we need some kind of suspension of rights of the current government based on specific behaviour, such as persistent obstruction, distortion of the national media, etc. (although such criteria could apply to others too which might get embarrassing). And in general, to remove all vetos (aka “consensus”) from EU processes.