Yeah, that does make sense.

However I suspect that what’s charged in Portugal for that cost is way beyond a fair value, with rent-seeking “administrative costs” of the power provider which far exceed actual real costs in the era of smart-meters and computing (plus which are already included in the price for power itself, which is why retail power prices are much higher than bulk market prices, thus there’s double-dipping going on there) as well as “taxes” to pay for subsidies for renewables which were often de facto politicians needlessly shoving money to their mates so that they had higher profits - the big power company in Portugal is very well connected politically and is involved in at least on major Corruption case - rather than actually needed to incentivise provision of things which would otherwise not be provided.

The only place in the EU with surveillance anywhere as bad as the US was Britain and they aren’t in the EU anymore.

And this is just State surveillance.

When it comes to Private Sector surveillance, nowhere in the EU are things anywhere close to as bad in the US since EU countries have far tighter Privacy regulations and even outside the EU-wide regulations most countries have had pretty strict Medical and Banking data regulations for quite a while.

That Propaganda in the US is a mix of straight bullshit about government surveillance in Europe - which in reality is not much of a thing outside dictatorships or Britain - and the insiduious take of, anchored on the Hard-Neoliberal Fable that Public Is Bad, Private Is Good, not even considering private sector surveillance and its impact, when that’s a far worse problem in the US than in Europe.

The part the people peddling the Free Market as self regulating never say is that only markets with no barriers to entry like for soap or teddy bears are actually Free and most are no such thing.

Yes, several dams in Portugal do have the capability of pumping water up to the top reservoir when there is excess power from other sources to latter use it for power production when conditions change.

However most don’t and for those, given that the long term trend is that hydro-generation is going to be a lot less effective in Portugal and in the meanwhile it’s already become less reliable, they’ll become a lot less effective, hence why Renewables in Portugal was just 45% a years ago when the country wasn’t having an unusually high-precipitation period like now and instead was at in its second year of draught conditions (a situation which has become much more common in the last couple of decades).

Further, solar is hugelly underdeveloped in what is one of the countries of Europe with the most sunshine, no doubt due to amongst other things policies that de facto reduce incentives for home solar all in the service of keeping the profits of politically well-connected local Power Companies high.

The country needs more solar generation, especially home generation as well as the kind of solar technologies - like molten salt solar concentrators - that are capable of keeping generating power at night.

In light of Global Warming trends there’s still a long way to go for Renewables in Portugal, IMHO, and local policies are still quite disjointed and poluted by politicians putting the interests of a handful of private companies above all else.

Actually the Iberian peninsula countries - Spain and Portugal - want to sell their excess of Renewable to the rest of Europe, but France keeps blocking creating a connection for that throught their territory as it would negativelly impact the price they get selling their Nucleal power.

It would make a lot of sense to have an Europe-wide high capacity grid across large enough distances that it averaged out a lot of the local weather factors, but some countries are blocking it to maintain the profits of their own private electric power businesses.

The fixed part of an electric bill in Portugal is insane, both because of a good chunk of it are taxes charged via it and because the “fixed network connection costs” are very high.

This means that if one invests in saving power the returns of that are pretty bad because there’s still this huge immovable cost chunk from merelly having a grid connection: I’ve been an early adopter of things like LED lights and tend to take power consumption in account for my computing equipment and nowadays outside Winter (when I spend a lot of power in warming as over 70% of houses in Portugal have very bad insulation and mine is one of those >70%) my bill is literally only half actual electricity costs and the other half is that fixed componen - my incentive for saving power is mainly one of principle because the actual financial incentive only goes so far before you start seeing diminishing returns from investing into more efficient electric devices.

Meanwhile policies in Portugal are such that they almost try and stop people from having home solar - for example if you try and sell excess power to the grid you’ll get at best 1/4 the price that it costs when you buy power from the grid, so it’s simply not worth it to have an installation which produces excess power, all this in one of the countries with the highest number of sunshine hours in Europe were it would make a lot of sense for people to have home solar.

And then, of course, there’s the French problem: specifically France keeps refusing the creation a proper connection for the Iberian countries to sell its excess of power due to Renewables to the rest of Europe (because France wants to sell their own from their large number of Nuclear Power Plants at a higher price), so there are actually plans to do it with cables in the middle of the Med going around France and enter the rest of the continent via Italy.

Most of Renewables in Portugal is hydro-generation so it’s highly dependent on amount of rain, in a country which the Global Warming models say it’s going to turn into pretty much a desert except in the coastal areas.

This is why just a year ago only 45% of electricity came from Renewables since, after 2 years of draught, most dams were pretty much empty, whilst right now the country has had so much rain in the last couple of months that dams are full to the brim and even have had to release excess water, and there are even floods around most major rivers.

Given the way things are going, Portugal needs to invest more in Solar since the very high capacity in terms of hidro-generation (a policy that dates all the way back to Fascist days, possibly the only good thing those types ever did for the country) will turn far less usefull with Global Warming.

Let me put things this way:

• Hands up anybody who doesn’t believe that, if they can, Health Insurance companies won’t mine the shit out of your purchase data and Car Insurance mine the shit out of your driving data to try and fine tune your risk group in their models and find out any change if your conditions that impact their bottom line (and dump you if they can if you switch to a high risk group)

Even if one’s relaxed about data mining of private data for the purpose of serving you custom adverts, there are plenty of other use cases which can actually cost you money, not to mention the risk when the Authorities start running crime-predictive models sold to them by slimy Tech Investors with high enough rates of false positive that you run the risk of being tagged a “Terrorism” for some stupid shit like buying more bleech than the average person.

Even you think you’re above board on everything and about as boring and uninteresting a person as possible, there are plenty of ways in which others known everything about you might come around and bit you in the ass in very concrete ways.

I’m pretty sure plenty if not most of people here pay most of their shopping with a card rather than cash, even though that shit at minimum goes into a database for ever and ever, probably shared with the authorities and in some countries just outright sold for pennies to anybody willing to pay for it.

And don’t get me started with just how many Techies jumped into Tesla’s “surveillance nightmare on wheels” - I mean, Techies were very much a large block of early adopters of Tesla cars and this was already well after the Snowden Revelations.

Further, how many people are in the habit of accessing the Internet behind a VPN?

(Personally, living in Britain - maybe the worst offender - at the time, the Snowden Revelations were what prompted me to start using a VPN regularly)

Whilst lots of people here have an actual “lets keep my digital footprint” mindset and praxis, I get the impression that most do not, and even those who bitch and moan about “surveillance” trade convenience (or, even worse, the Techie desire for “shinny new thing” thus getting shit like Alexa) for high digital visibility.

So yeah, maybe not “Yall”, but probably “Most of you”.

What “global backlash”?

If there had been such a thing European citizens and companies would have not have spent the next decade putting their data in America’s hands and now be scrambling to decouple as American goes from Hard Neoliberal At Home Fascist Abroad to Full-on Fascist Everywhere.

For people paying attention back then it was painfully obvious back then that one could not trust one’s data in the hands of American companies or in fact any companies from a 4-eyes (meanwhile expanded to 7-eyes) country and yet the rush for putting personal and corporate data in American cloud systems were insane (not helped by the EU approving the US as a “safe haven” for data, something so outrageous after the the Snowden Revelations that I bet a lot of people involved were either customers of Epstein’s “services” or corrupt as fuck).

In fact, that massive surveillance cooperative operation expanding from 4 countries to 7 is also a pretty good indication that there wasn’t really a “global backlash”, otherwise countries like New Zeeland would be wary of joining it as it would get them cut out of international data networks and agreements.

Only countries like China seem to have taken the whole thing seriously and setup their own local stack of consumer and corporate data sharing and storing, and that seems to have been driven at least partly by wanting to do exactly the same as the 4-eyes countries were doing.

The US can change their laws to not have a global wiretap and secret backdoor warrant program, then this would be possible.

Even if they did, they can change them right back whenever they want and the thing with data is that, once it’s out there somewhere, there’s no way of knowing for sure it hasn’t been copied and archived.

Not just from recent events but from the Snowden Revelations and the decades of 4-eyes operations even before that, we’re well beyond the point of it being possible to trust US-based and US-registered companies with the data of Europeans, and ditto for those of any other of what are now the 7-eyes countries.

Germany has a massive ongoing problem of the use of ethnicity to classify people and the practice of ethnic-Descrimination being normalized in German society, especially Politics and the Press, all of which adds up to Extreme Racism (it’s the only country in Europe were a head of state has justified sending weapons and ammo to a Genocidal state whilst they were mass murdering children, with the need to support the dominant ethnicity of the aggressor state).

This shit is definitely not Humanist Values - were people’s treatment depends only on their actions and their need, not at all their ethnicity - but rather an older way of looking at other people and the World which, curiously, is very much the same as the NAZIs, though not quite yet taken to the same extreme in terms of action inside of Europe (though the same can’t be said for how extreme its practice has been Palestine).

The revelation of Modern Day Germany being so profoundly Racist that even Genocide committed along ethnic lines is something that the country will support as long as the ethnicity of the genociders is one deemed “good” (Jewish) and the victims one deemed “bad” or “lesser” (Muslims), should be scary for all of us Europeans as you never know when Germany will whilst walking such path come to the point of seeing other European ethnicities too as “lesser” one which can be eliminated to take their land just like Israel is doing to Palestinians.

I was thinking Germany.

Given that due to First Past The Post the current government has a Parliamentary Majority with only 34% of the votes cast, in a country without a written Constitution and thus were a simple Parliamentare majority is enough to change any Law.

The whole idea that there was much in the way of Democracy in Britain to begin with is a bit iffy: having a vote which only lets you choose between two carefully selected options isn’t actually a Free and Fair choice.

Also the idea that Starmer is in any way shape or form left of center - by global standards of Leftwing, rather than by “pick the middle between the Tory Party and the Labour Party and call it center” - is hilarious.

I lived in Britain for over a decade from 2006 until Brexit and the only Leftwing party there during that period was the Greenparty, as by the time I arrived in 2006, Labour Party politics were already purelly those of Thatcher’s Greatest Achievement.

By broader European standards Britain has long been very right wing, which explains why even the Brexiter Tories with their anti-immigration rightwing populism weren’t rightwing enough for the 10% or so of people who voted Reform.

I just want to remind people that of the three countries whose elites more rabidly support Israel and which have been using the most autoritarian measures against their own citizens to silence dissent against it, two of them - the UK and the US - have the highest number of people involved with Epstein.

For me such a letter is like somebody who has wipped you across your back your whole life offering you some bandages.

Not only is it profound hypocrisy that the people fucking up young people’s lives are passing themselves as good guys, it’s also an attempt at offsetting the side effects for those very people of their own nasty behavior towards others with a self-serving “solution” for the behavior changes all that nastiness causes on others, to avoid the real solution which is to stop that nasty behavior.

“You’ll keep on fleecing you but here’s a way reduce the side effects for us by letting you keep on having kids for us to fleece”.

If one looks at it from a grander strategical point of view, this shit is profoundly insulting.

People can’t have kids earlier because living costs are so high relative to salaries, so to afford merelly the 2-bedroom appartment for a 1-child (much less the 2-3 needed to maintain population levels) family even a couple of two university-educated full-time workers has to work years.

Even if people stay in schooling for longer now and start working older, even somebody with a degree finishes studying at the age of 20 or 21.

Further and for women specifically, the lack of availability of quality and cheap kindergartens often means that childbirth will totally torpedoe a woman’s career because often and due to local cultural expectations the woman is the one who ends up staying home for a couple of years to raise a child and that has been show to majorly delay career progression in a way that is seldom possible to later recover from.

Both of these things can be address with appropriate government policies to make housing and kindergartens cheap, but successive neoliberal governments actually do the opposite (insane house prices are great for realestate investors and you can’t have cheap public kindergarten provision competing with private businesses) and instead push forward solutions like this so that couples can have children later, something which should not have been necessary in the first place.

The problem is far more upstream and these “solutions” from the very people who are guilty for the root causes of the problem are just political theatre and hypocrisy.

If France is anything like my native Portugal, people aren’t having kids mainly because housing is so stupidly expensive - how exactly do you expect people to have the 2.something average number of kids needed to maintain population levels when they can’t leave their parents home until their mid 30s and even just going from a 1-bedroom to a 2-bedroom to have a room for one child costs many years’ worth of a couple’s after-tax income?

Meawhile salaries in real terms have stagnated for a decade.

Even with the best of intentions, even in the middle class people are entering their 40s by the time they can afford to have a second child so most stick to 1 or even don’t have any children.

What’s required is not flashy bullshit letters like this one which very pointedly ignore the housing bubble and the politicians’ blame in pumping it up, but instead measures to make housing affordable, such as building lots of public housing to increase the Supply side of the Market and limits on multiple house ownership and non-resident ownership to stop (local and foreign) investor speculation in Housing and thus weaken the Demand-side price pressure.

Of course, what the Neolibs in power have done instead is increase immigration claiming that “we have a lack manpower” (after decades of making it unaffordable for people to have children and give them a good life, what else was to be expected?!) and then the Neolibs’ Fascist mates can use that to claim that it’s really all the fault of immigrants (rather than fatcats and the corrupt politicians in their pockets) that life is getting worse.

Sure mate, some “ethnicities” are special and different from other people hence none of the rich people of those etnicities are Fascists.

Also your expectation that they’re different from the rest of mankind and couldn’t possibly have Fascists in their midst hence anybody that claims they do must be against their race, ain’t at all you revealing yourself as Prejudiced and Racist.

Yeah, I believe so based on what I saw from affar, but I’m more intimatelly familiar with Britain - especially the more subtle elements of politics and policy - since I lived there from before the Crash until Brexit.