I thought that they were being decommissioned due to seismic risks?
They may not have a house to heat if tremors get too bad.
And our German neighbors, I can still see them laughing at the Orange Man Bad... Boo hoo... what a shitshow.
If I lived in the region I wouldn't really care if the economic risk is single digit percentage. I would prefer my house to keep standing.
> they are actively and very costly going to fill them with concrete to ensure in the future (even in whatever extreme scenario) they cannot be used again.
I think you are arguing in bad faith. If you hollow the underground, filling it with something is a way to mitigate the seismic risk.
> And our German neighbors, I can still see them laughing at the Orange Man Bad.
Okay, I see now that talking to you is a waste of time.
Have a great afternoon.
(to clarify, the concrete has nothing to do with the seismic risks, and is solely intended to make it impossible to extract gas later, which some people see as a valid way to lower potential seismic impact in the future due to no extraction... as if it is the only way to deal with seismic risks... and the whole point of the profits being ample to mitigate any economic loss is that people's houses can be either made resistant, or, you know, we could buy affected people a brand spanking new house)
Good luck with the rest.
Losing all your personal items and memories + living homeless for a few years while the reconstruction is in progress isn't minor inconvenience.
Some jurisdictions even have “tenants rights” laws that literally force landlords to terminate all contracts whenever a tenant is about to have lived in a location for too long.
And I didn't say kick everyone on the street while the reconstruction is taking place. Everyone can stay where they are. Earthquakes are rare and so far in 50 years of extraction there have been no injuries. Groningen isn't the only place with earthquakes in the world you know?
This seems, uh, awfully optimistic.
That's it. That's the best they can do.
Even nominally selfish far-sighted things like genuinely funding a deep research program for life extension is not really something they're into. I mean some of them are "into" it in that they talk about it and occasionally toss money at things but they're not interested in funding or being involved in the kind of multi-year high-focus moonshot program it would actually take to deliver. The problem is that's hard and it takes a long time when banging girls and winning power games is instant dopamine.
It makes me keep thinking of paperclip maximizers. It's like we are paperclip maximizers, only our paperclips are sex and dopamine hits from winning power games. A paperclip maximizer with such resources would squander it all on paperclips, and we squander it all on these goal functions built in by evolution. Are we actually intelligent or just clever animals? We can seek what we want, but we don't think much about what we want to want.
I really don't like how Bill Gates and Microsoft made their money, but at least he has realized that in his twilight years to try to make amends via humanitarian work. Buying the stairway to heaven.
As an aside this might indicative of today's defective rich. Carnegie built over 2,500 libraries for example.
> he gave away around $350 million (equivalent to $6.9 billion in 2025 dollars), almost 90 percent of his fortune, to charities, foundations and universities
Those famously "richest Americans" were worth single digit billions in today's money. Musk is reportedly worth $600-800 billions. Imagine what he could do with that money. The Gilded Age industrialists were already devils, but to say the quality of the ultra-rich today is in the gutter would be an offense to the gutter.
Most either do nothing really of note, or donate it to "causes", which may be good, but kind of boring.
God does not come down from the heavens and bestow money that one spends on what one chooses. People value his companies because he’s there. TSLA will instantly collapse in valuation if he exits.
I’m not even kidding. If you can pass the regulation, environmental, land permits, local opposition etc. you will be a hundred millionaire maybe a billionaire.
It's a tale as old as Plato: those most likely to WANT to rule are exactly the 'candidates' who absolutely should not.
In the 1980s, I assume getting rid of the "strategic reserve" of anything would have met more pushback, because of primal fear overriding greed.
> BLM was required by Congress in the Helium Stewardship Act of 2013 to sell off the stockpile the government first began collecting in 1925.
Which was the Obama administration. But then was the Obama administration ideologically aligned with privatization? Not familiar with American politics enough to know, but that doesn't sound right to me.
Unless we consider all mainstream politicians to be aligned that way, but then I'd argue there's not much ideology going on anymore.
Sounds like Obama kept the gas taps flowing, instead of locking it up because authorization to sell it had expired. Here is the whole record: https://www.congress.gov/bill/113th-congress/house-bill/527/...
Messer Completes Acquisition of Federal Helium System from BLM | June 27, 2024 | https://www.messer-us.com/press-releases/messer-completes-ac...
I don't think I have ever heard a MAGA talk about AI.
This whole administration is such a fiasco.
ReptileMan•2h ago
"Let the lord of chaos rule" ...