The EU stopped using increasing amounts of power around 2010 despite continued economic growth (yes, even if you account for imported goods).

Not that consumerism and the exploitation of the global south aren’t existential tragedies for our species, I’m just pointing out that while capitalism does require never-ending growth, it is interesting to note that it empirically doesn’t require ever-increasing power to do so.

Fascism is a byproduct of capitalism but unrelated to energy prices. Doesn’t matter if gas is 1€/L or 2€/L when Musk, Murdoch, or Bernard Arnault decide what gets voted, printed and shown on TV.

Also English is an odd germanic-romance bastard child that Western Europeans tend to like because it has a decent number of cognates for everyone and a simple grammar IF you’re only aiming for simple conversational English. The barrier to entry is quite low, especially if you don’t give a shit about having a thick accent and straight up mispronouncing tricky words (as anyone knows who had a conversation in English with a non-fluent Italian/Spanish/French person).

OTOH German used to be relatively widely spoken in Eastern Europe, and Slavic languages also use declensions AFAIK, and also even post WWII German held quite a bit of momentum in academic circles.
So if the Soviet block had gone the Chinese route and become an economic behemoth instead of withering and dying at the dawn of the Information Age, German being the lingua franca (or at least giving English a run for its money) would have been a distinct possibility IMO.

Grids work on economies of scale. The bigger the better. Ask anyone who lives on an isolated island for their power bill. That’s why it was such a big deal when the Baltics switched from the Russian grid to the EU one.

Bigger grid = more intertia&redundancy = less likelihood of failure, more options, lower costs.

Electricity isn’t like chicken eggs. Transporting it is for all intents and purposes free. The network is expensive, but whether your house is pulling 1 A or 5 A is a non-difference to your utility. So to think local generation is “better” is a complete fallacy. Unless your house is fully disconnected from the network (not “net zero”, disconnected) then it’s not helping to generate power locally. Like someone else said, it’s actually way more expensive per kWh than grid-scale solar.

Now this would all be a “you” problem, except the big problem with microgeneration is that current tech is “dumb”. It’s either pushing power on the network, or sometimes tripping if the voltage goes above 250V or so. Which actually happens in rich neighborhoods on very sunny days where everyone is pushing power.
What this means for the operators is that on very sunny days, they cannot do anything but account for the extra residential solar power. Which might mean they have to very quickly spin up or down alternative power generators which were not meant for this. Or they might be dealing with complex issues with current flowing the other way than designed and large voltage fluctuations on specific parts of the network that don’t have the necessary infrastructure to “dump” that extra solar somewhere else.

The end result is that, counter-intuitively, microgeneration is one of the many failures of the neoliberal electricity market. It’s more expensive and more disruptive for society than if those solar cells had been put to use in grid-scale solar production. They only end up where they are through political mismanagement and misaligned incentives (e.g. net metering which does not account for negative externalities).

What? I’m not privy to RedHat/IBM/Google’s internal processes but they are all massive FOSS contributors at least some of which I assume are using Agile internally. The Linux kernel is mostly corpo-backed nowadays.

The development cycle of FOSS is highly compatible with Agile processes, especially as you tend towards the Linux Kernel style of contributing where every patch is expected to be small and atomic. A scrum team can 100% set as a Sprint Goal “implement and submit patches for XYZ in kernel”.

Also agile ≠ scrum. If you’re managing a small github project by sorting issues by votes and working on the top result, then congratulations, you’re following an ad-hoc agile process.

I think what you’re actually mad at is corporate structures. They systematically breed misaligned incentives proportional to the structure’s size, and the top-down hierarchy means you can’t just fork a project when disagreements lead to dead ends. This will be true whether you’re doing waterfall or scrum.