▪️This meme makes the classic error of equating electricity with energy (i.e. a country “running on renewables”). Typically, electricity is only about 20% of energy consumption. Transportation, heating, agriculture & industrial uses, etc. make up the rest and are dominated by fossil fuels.
▪️Portugal had a recent streak from Oct 31 to Nov 6 where their electricity was provided by “renewable sources,” primarily wind and hydro. The weather was windy and rainy, which was ideal for Portugal’s unique grid.
https://www.ren.pt/en-gb/media/news/renewable-energy-production-sets-new-records
▪️If you look at their current grid today, it fluctuates but you see about 1/3 nat gas and 1/2 hydro, with wind supplying most of the remaining. (I’ll post a photo in comments)
https://datahub.ren.pt/en/electricity/daily-balance/
▪️Hydro in Portugal is much greater than in most countries, supplying nearly 1/3 of their total electricity, and sometimes well over 50%. In the US, hydro provides just 6%. So this is the answer to the meme’s question “if Portugal can do this why can’t we?”
▪️Hydro is not very scalable, as it needs the right geography to work. It’s also opposed by environmentalists nearly everywhere, as it impacts river ecosystems, so building any new plant let alone enough to power a modern economy is virtually impossible in most countries.
▪️Portugal also has issues during droughts, like during the winter of 2022 when 45% of the country was in severe or extreme drought and they had to shut down 5 hydro plants to ensure enough drinking water.
https://www.euronews.com/2022/02/02/portugal-limits-hydroelectric-power-amid-unusual-winter-drought
▪️While hydro is much more reliable than wind and solar, in most cases it still can’t be relied on to power a modern economy without a fossil fuel/nuclear backup (Portugal chooses a natural gas backup for when their renewables fail).
▪️The left keeps using this meme but they don’t actually believe it. If you believe SNAP subsidizes companies to pay below a “living wage” this implies that if you take food stamps away they would suddenly pay a higher, “living” wage. So why not get rid of food stamps, then?!
▪️Except they know, and everyone knows, this isn’t true. Wages are set by supply and demand, not some mythical “living wage” metric. Absent food stamps there would actually be downward, not upward, pressure on wages, because the reality is food stamps subsidize the poor to not work as much as they might otherwise need to.
▪️Without SNAP, some low income people would need to work more hours to make ends meet, increasing the availability of low-skilled labor and lowering wages (all else being equal).
▪️Plus, we all know the left loves and supports food stamps. Which means, by this meme’s logic, they love to subsidize corporate profits. But they don’t really, they just think this ...
▪️Wait, this is the guy libertarians and the new right rave about being a great historian?! This sounds like a clueless meme from The Other 98%, except they wouldn’t add in the bizarre defense of feudal lords. Feudalism didn’t deprive peasants of their livelihoods for abstract goals? This is total fantasy.
▪️Amazon employs 1.55M, so this is less than 2% of their workforce, although these cuts will be to corporate, which employs 350k, so 8.5% of that. The CEO says there is an excess of bureaucracy at Amazon, and AI can automate certain repetitive tasks. Also, much of the cuts will be to HR, which is expected shrink by 15%, yay. Managers and HR are peasants now?
▪️I don’t know the inner workings of Amazon, and neither does Darryl, but this seems to be normal management practice to keep a company efficient and competitive. Given the immense size of Amazon the numbers look large, but far bigger shakeups happen all the time in the private sector. Apparently, under the new ...
▪️This statistic is just made up. The reality is that there hasn’t been a real study on this since 2013, when Pew did a poll. They found that Democrats were actually more than twice as likely as Republicans to report ever using food stamps (22% vs 10%).
https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2013/07/12/the-politics-and-demographics-of-food-stamp-recipients/
▪️Obviously, those percentages could have changed over the past decade, but it’s very likely that Dems still receive more SNAP benefits. Certainly, without an actual study or poll the claim should be thrown out, as it wildly contradicts a previous study.
▪️The meme probably comes from a 2024 analysis by Social Explorer, which found that 78.7% of US counties with the largest increase in SNAP since 2010 voted for Trump in 2020. But that tells us nothing about the actual number of Republicans (or Democrats) who are receiving benefits, just county-wide trends.
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