I think it’s about priorities. Selling gas to Germany for $$$ without middleman taking a cut and being able to shut down pipes is priority 1. German investment in Russian nuclear industry is secondary. I think Russia has more domain knowledge in this area than Germany anyways (France would be a better country being able to offer expertise, Germany just doesn’t have the strong history in this area compared to Russia, France, US, Japan). The only thing Germans can provide is cash, Russians have very strong experience with nuclear energy and they can do the tech implementation part. It’s just they have trouble paying bills.

Well, I added to what you responded to that other person, who talked about "these green protesters in germany". These sweeping explanations of what is going on in Germany by non-Germans are hilariously bad 99% of the time, I'm used to that, but here I just think "tell that to them, not to yourself by proxy of telling us". Look them in the eye and tell them that.

And you know, screw Fukushima (which made even China, those crazy hippies, pause for a bit, but hey)... I remember Chernoybyl, and yeah nothing bad happened (to us), but it was real scary in those weeks, when it rained. I remember these stickers... "Unsere Kinder sollen lachen, nicht strahlen" ("our kids should laugh [have a beaming smile etc.], not emit radiation"). The nerve to throw all that, and all these people into one big bucket... I'm at a loss of words that are allowed on HN, to be quite frank.

Oh, and when vaguely important things like human extinction come up on HN, most of the comments are along the lines of how it's all really depressing or best to not have kids, or "AI" this or that. But these ignorant people who don't have the full picture and don't get everything exactly right when they protest between barely getting by on two jobs, they're surely the problem. Jesus Christ.

I know I'm ranting, and please don't take it too personally, but I totally stand by what I'm ranting about. I just don't have good place where to put it, it's off-topic in all of the hundreds of discussions it would apply to, and of course it's nothing to do with HN per se.

> When once you were in the grip of the Party, what you felt or did not feel, what you did or refrained from doing, made literally no difference. Whatever happened you vanished, and neither you nor your actions were ever heard of again. You were lifted clean out of the stream of history. And yet to the people of only two generations ago this would not have seemed all-important, because they were not attempting to alter history. They were governed by private loyalties which they did not question. What mattered were individual relationships, and a completely helpless gesture, an embrace, a tear, a word spoken to a dying man, could have value in itself. The proles, it suddenly occurred to him, had remained in this condition. They were not loyal to a party or a country or an idea, they were loyal to one another. For the first time in his life he did not despise the proles or think of them merely as an inert force which would one day spring to life and regenerate the world. The proles had stayed human. They had not become hardened inside. They had held on to the primitive emotions which he himself had to re-learn by conscious effort. And in thinking this he remembered, without apparent relevance, how a few weeks ago he had seen a severed hand lying on the pavement and had kicked it into the gutter as though it had been a cabbage-stalk.

-- George-Orwell, "Nineteen-Eightyfour"

How many miles is everybody here flying per year on average? I mean, that's just for starters. What about those insanely cheap short holiday flights? How will nuclear energy help there? At some point, you will have to step on toes, maybe make sacrifices, nuclear energy or not. Even if you had perfectly clean, infinite energy, we would have to make uncomfortable changes either, and rethink some things, certainly consumerism as a way to compensate for being unfree. But that's hard stuff, that might require principles, courage, drawing lines and then holding your ground -- painting "green protesters" with a broad brush, that's easy.

Solving problems is fun, being told to stop causing them, that's gross.

> I simply disagree with their assessment of tradeoffs.

And you attributed it to "stupidity", without even having the courtesy to fully type it out.

The assessment of tradeoffs by whom, exactly? Who spoke, to whom is it a response? To nobody in particular, just a very vague cherry-picked aggregate, just like the initial comment by the other poster.