Comments by "Luredreier" (@Luredreier) on "TLDR News EU" channel.

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  5.  @demoniack81  You're making several assumptions there that's just wrong. The process of getting a nuclear power plant up and running involves a lot more than just building the plant itself. You need a mine that's mining the fuel itself (unlike nuclear power plants these can't be made safe for the surrounding environment and the people there, so they've been closed down rapidly with the fall in demand and increasing hostility towards them, so supply isn't what it was in the eighties. Even if you get a mine willing to sell to you there's the issue of transporting fuel into and waste out from the plant from the mine and to the disposal site. That's a logistical nightmare that takes years to set up in a democracy because people there have a right to be involved in the process of what happens near them. Then there's the complete lack of people willing to invest in or insure nuclear power plants. As it turns out that when you factor in the costs of dealing with the waste products and decommissioning a nuclear power plant isn't profitable anymore as these easily outstrip the income generated in its lifetime, because nuclear waste while technically does become safe one day in practical terms never does so and remains a permanent cost from the day of their creation, long after the plant has shut down and no longer generate power. In the eighties it was possible to get fuel and store waste and get financing where these concerns didn't need to be factored in as costs, in today's world companies and goverments are held responsible and that kind of behavior is no longer possible. Getting past all of that and setting it all up as well as just training the engineers needed and qualified to run a power plant safely takes time. The ones that used to run them have retired. And while the fifties where seen as the age of nuclear power when a lot of people studied the field there's a shortage of qualified engineers now. Training people in the field takes time. Time we don't have. Technically we're already too late to avoid irreparably damaging our planet and causing huge amounts of suffering. It takes time for the damage we've already caused to move through the system of our Earth climate and even if we produced 0 new CO2 and even started removing was one from the atmosphere the effects of climate change would continue to get worse for many years to come, especially when you factor in feedback loops and Earth running out of one of the major stabilizing factors that held climate change from impacting us much in the nineties (the sea floor used to be full of alkaline substances that helped neutralize some of the acidity then, that's practically all gone now). So, no, we don't have time for this. Also the very concept of a base load that traditional power grids built on is a problem for renewables. And sure, you can disconnect a powerplant from the grid, but all that does is making them even more uneconomical. And they still need power for the cooling etc. And nuclear fuel being radioactive can't just sit there unused without degrading in quality. So nuclear power ends up always being a base power that other sources has to come on top off. Works great with coal, gas etc that can be turned on and off as needed. Works poorly with renewables that needs a system where power is distributed over much larger areas from much larger areas, where customers themselves will produce power at times completely and utterly outside the control of the electricity companies destroying the very concept of base load, where power production will exceed what's needed but actually be stored for sale when prices are higher (something that requires them to sometimes *get higher) again a base load is problematic. And if you have the energy production of a powerplant it ensures a constant amount of power in the market that discourages investment in other power generation at a industrial scale (customers will still do it) meaning that power prices will be too low for building of large scale renewable power, and continued CO2 production from nuclear fuel mines, fuel and waste transportation etc. All of this ignores nuclear accidents, terrorism, wars faught on ground powered by nuclear power like Ukraine right now. Russian forces only recently retreated from around Chernobyl, and when they took the Chernobyland other nuclear sites they where shelling them. You can't build a nuclear power plant immune to the ingenuity of humans that wants to cause damage. They can be as smart or smarter then the engineers and others that got the powerplant and the surrounding systems (fuel mining and refining, waste management, transportation, security etc) up and running to begin with. And there's always people who don't care about the suffering of others. Putin being a example here... Basically, we don't live in the eighties anymore.
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  27.  @ausoleil8269  The third and fourth republic both had many issues. But they wheren't a confrontational culture. Rather that confrontational culture is a side effect of other problems, in the the fifth republic one of those things is the first past the post electoral system... In the previous two republics it was other issues like the conservatives losing their credibility due to being monarchists in the early days and taking a long time to recover, other flaws in the electoral system making people still not feel represented (being a colonial empire definitely didn't help, nor did the cold war and all of that chaos)... Also, it's a good idea to change from a system where you need a majority to vote in favour of something to one where you just need more people voting in favour of something then against, with abstains being ignored in the calculations in parliament, allowing people to indirectly support other parties without loosing face... And it makes it easier to have a system where you can have a goverment voted in without a majority of parties actually officially endorsing them. Allow any party to propose laws. If the cabinet fails to get their proposals through just make them run with the alternatives, like say another partys budget proposal. And let the majority (or lack of majority against proposals) shift on a case by case basis. The more incentives you give towards cooperating the better. And yes, you need time for the more collaborative politicans to make their way up through the party systems...
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  29.  @testman9541  My point is that a single person elected directly by the electorate, regardless of if it's a president or a member of parliament elected in a single member electoral circle is a problem as it leaves a majority of the population essentially voiceless. Such a person should not have political power in my view, and at best be a figurehead. In Norway our president (who is not currently our head of state since we're a monarchy) and prime minister are both elected by our parliament and can both be removed by our parliament because we use a pure parliamentarian system, instead of a semi-presidential/semi-parliamentarian system. (Our president essentially just leads proceedings in Parliament kind of like the speaker in the UKs parliament, who is also elected by their parliament while it's our king who signs things into law and technically appoints the prime ministers, but legally and traditional both the threshold for him to go against the parliament is very high) So as you can see I'm not objecting to the proposed law. I'm objecting to how the whole French political establishment is elected. To the very foundations of the French democracy itself, as I'm not finding it particularly democratic, just like the American ones, and given that there's restrictions on who may run in France, it's actually a touch worse then the British one the way I see it... At least they're using a parliamentarian system and anyone can run for mp and in theory be elected prime minister or speaker even as a independent although in practice they won't.
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  30.  @testman9541 Because the president is a single position if 90% of the voters are against the person winning the first round with a single vote and the second highest number of votes goes to someone even further away from the majority view of the voters base they both get into the second round, and then you end up with a round where people vote for who they hate the least instead of who they actually support... By contrast in a parliamentarian system a prime minister and possibly the president is elected by the parliament through negotiations where it's not enough to just get more votes then the next guy, but you actually have to be a good compromise candidate reflecting the political views of a majority of the population. Someone voting for a president in the second round that does not support his or her views is not being heard in my view. Likewise, the president deciding who should be the prime minister is just as loopesided. By contrast in my country even the smallest party in the parliament can in theory win the prime minister if they can get a majority for their candidate in the parliament (usually only happens if all the bigger parties fails to do so) Meaning that every single MP is involved in picking who the prime minister is, and while technically the prime minister picks his or her own ministers the negotiations usually includes picking what minestries should be lead by what party. And we have indeed had prime ministers that where not among the biggest parties in parliament as a result, being the best compromise solution. Our prime ministers regularly run on budgets designed by other political parties etc. All depending on what majority exists for any given policy. Our MPs are also elected proportionally in 19 electoral circles, so there's no wasted votes involved... It's impossible to run a election for a single outcome without breaking some principle or other of what's a fair election, as much has been proven already by scientists. The jury is still up on if it's possible for a proportional system.
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  32.  @Orbirik  You're talking farming here, the thread started about the topic of *fishing*. But regarding farming, yes, that's why I'm in favor of tariffs rather then subsidies for countries like Norway or Iceland where honestly production is never going to be able to meet demand anyway but where some way of permitting the farms to increase their profit is required in order to keep them alive when facing competition from other countries. And yes, for those who believe in the "free market" just letting them go bust might be tempting but there's side effects to that. For instance, a lack of food security, in the case of a global food crises for whatever reason the countries that normally have a food surplus are going to cover their own needs first anyway in most cases. And the competition will be fierce for what remains of the food as we don't have much food stored anywhere on this planet for issues like running out of phosphorus or reduced farming yields due to climate change etc. Tariffs allows certain industries to be protected while still allowing non-native products to compete as the tariffs can be balanced in order to allow a equilibrium of supply and demand to be meet. Ideally of course the countries selling products into our country should be able to pocket the higher prices themselves though... Norway tries to do that by allowing a certain amount of goods to enter without any tariffs each year and then applies tariffs on anything above said quota. Also, tariffs for developing nations in say Africa is lower then vs for instance the EU (and countries like the Netherlands who has an advanced enough agricultural sector to out compete anyone)
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  33.  @bizu08  Trust me, whales are not *it*... For instance whaling is dying in Norway due to a lack of market for their products even within Norway... Whaling being allowed is mostly due to Norways whaling history and history of polar exploration etc... Honestly I'd be fine with us outlawing whaling here. Keeping it is more relevant in places like the Faero islands or Greenland where there's actually a firm cultural background for said whaling that I don't really feel that we have here in Norway or for that matter in Iceland... There the minority ethnic groups actually depended on whales for survival and a significant part of their food traditions and culture revolves around the whales. For Norway it's more about just the pride of having established whaling bases all over the artic and antartic region and having historically played such a huge role in that industry (and therefore in things like setting off parts of the industrial revolution that actually used to run on whale oil). There's also the same annoying ideas about the whole "whales is a resource and we have a right to make use of the resources within our waters" kind of silliness that most nations probably deal with... Oh, and the whole, Norway is kind of hunting crazy in general... A lot of parts of Norway is emptied out during the various local hunting seasons with villages looking like ghost towns because the villagers are out hunting moose or l or whatever... In the mind of a lot of Norwegians nature exists for us to use. It's the whole Lutheran christian idea that humans are stewards of earth but also have a god given right to use it kind of thing filtered through culture and some generations of secularism etc... So in that mindset we have a duty to "cull the herd" of animals to avoid overpopulation or disease, kill animals that's suffering, but also make use of the resources around us... As a vegetarian I obviously don't share these values... But that's the general gist of it as far as I can tell...
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  44. ​​ @Nordahl_Grieg  Not exactly. The majority of the green voters in Norway are from either the liberal party (center-right) or the socialist left party (left wing or far left depending on who you ask and who's in charge) The two greenest parties in our parliament before the greens entered. And progress is the grayest party in our parliament and the conservatives the second or third grayest As a result we do have a slight preference towards a left wing government in general. But labour is messing up big time right now. And that's costing them voters as well as support from other parties. Both indirectly through the loss of voters for parties allies with it them, and directly in the sense that parties like the greens genuinely are considering working with the conservatives. Still, as a party we are slightly left of center in terms of policies. It's just not enough to rule out working with the conservatives. But any coalition between the greens and the conservatives is definitely going to see the greens as a counterweight to the conservatives, pushing in pretty much the opposite direction. We'd just do so far, far less then a party like labour or the socialist left party would. And we're willing to make compromises on economic policies as long as our main goals of environmentalism is meet. Also, the liberals who has contributed many voters to us care about the wellbeing of companies, especially the small and medium sized ones, that's been a nice counterweight within the party against socialist left party members that might see capitalism as evil to begin with. Pushing for either death of capitalism or a laissez-faire requires actual arguments, it's not just assumed as being automatically true. That leaves a lot of room for scientific evidence to do its job of swinging the vote within the party, in both directions.
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  48. ​ @valcarlin2537 Fighting alongside the Nazies in WW2 doesn't necessarily mean that you are one. Just look at Finland for instance. The USSR always tried to paint the opposition as being foreign influences or attached to their foreign enemies. It gave them a pretext for persecution. With such a hostile force as the Soviets and now Russia to deal with the enemy of my enemy ends up being my friend. Finland faught to regain territory lost in the winter war as a co-belligerent but not a axis member (never signed the treaty). And likewise when trying to achieve Ukrainian independence after having their language and culture suppressed as has happened many times since the Russians started treating "Rus" as being a single ethnicity instead of a collective term for all Slavic people as it used to be used as at the time of the principality of Moscow if I don't remember wrong, and started acting as if they where the rightful rulers of all Slavs. Refusing to acknowledge that the Kievian Rus where not a single ethnic group but rather a state with many ethnicities, made up of many tribes that had faught each other in the past. (Edit, okey, sorry about the long sentence, just too tired to fix it right now) Yet now Moscow was supposed to rule over all the other Slavic peoples and only the culture of Moscow where to live on... Obviously this didn't go down too well with peoples who didn't belong to their culture... Who had their languages and cultures suppressed in attempts at Russification... Crimea and much of eastern Ukraine used to be Ukrainian speaking, but isn't anymore. Between settlement of Russians there and suppression of Ukrainian culture... And indeed the intentional death of many Ukrainians... Still every part of Ukraine, even Crimea voted to leave the USSR and had a majority in favour of independence, although it was awfully close in Crimea (54,19% in favour of independence in Crimea vs 90,13% in Kherson, 83,90% in Donetsk, 83,86% in Lugansk etc)
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