matlag
@matlag@sh.itjust.works
- Comment on Germany hits 62.7% renewables in 2024 energy mix, with solar contributing 14% 6 hours ago:
They do. But you need to reduce the generation to make sure you don’t heat up too much the water for the ecosystem that lives in. Less water means the temperature difference before and after the plant is higher. That’s the constrain.
- Comment on Germany hits 62.7% renewables in 2024 energy mix, with solar contributing 14% 7 hours ago:
Prices capped have nothing to do with nuclear energy and everything to do with stupid EU price policy.
France used to have a monopoly by a state owned company on electrIcity: EDF. But everyone knows that’s terrible, and private market is the way to go. At the time, electricity in France was the cheapest across Europe, but it’s still terrible because… well that HAD to change!
In order to introduce some competition, generation, network and “distribution” (billing…) activities were separated.
Then private distributors (again: billing companies with 0 generation capabilites and 0 grid network) were allocated some quota of electricity from the nuclear electricity generated by EDF at low cost.
In addition, and that’s the European policy: electricity price on the market would be set at the cost of the most expensive generator at a given time. Example: 100% nuclear today: cost is set at cost of nuclear. 95% of electricity from nuclear, 5% from gas: 100% of the electricity that day is billed at cost of gas! 80% nuclear, 15% gas, 5% coal: 100% of the electricity billed at cost of coal!
Why? So that the priate newcomer would get huge benefits and be able to invest in electricity generation. But: there was 0 constrain in doing so, so they just rack up benefits at the expense of EDF and clients! Even better: since they get such low prices from their quota, they’re cheaper than the EDF split distributor company. So at some point, their quota was insufficient for their client’s demand. Time to invest… hahaha! No I’m kidding: time to ask for a bigger quota, of course granted by Macron and his team.
Then came Ukraine invasion. Uh oooh! Gas price exploses, even the “distributors” start to feel the pain. What to do? Well, kick out their clients! Refure to renew contracts, or ask for such a ridicuously high price to make sure they just go! EDF’s hisorical distribution company is legally obligated to take them back. And that’s where the 2nd joke kicks in: EDF gave s much quota of nuclear electricity that they no longer have enough for these clients they have to take. No worries: the “distributors” sold back the electricity quota… at market price, ie mostly gas price!
With the price of gas multiplied n times determining the cost of the whole production, it became unbearable for clients. That’s where genius Macron and Lemaire (Minister of Economy) set a “shield” (cap) on the bills. It’s no shield nor cap. It’s actually the state of France paying the difference in the bills between the actual bill and the cap they set. That’s public money!
And again, that money didn’t go to resources. It went straight to “distributors” (rather call them parasites).
For sure, the heavy maintenance work on the nuclear power plant done at the time didn’t help. They decided to do it on all plants at once (another bad call) and it lasted longer than planned.
But the price issue has nothing to do with nuclear and everything to do with stupid policies.
And now, lesson learned (not): Spain and Portugal got out of that absurd elecricity market. Germany and France (and many other countries) made a few changes and keep going. Because competition with multiple private actors in electricity is good. Can’t you see it??
- Comment on The Irony of 'You Wouldn't Download a Car' Making a Comeback in AI Debates 3 months ago:
Yep, that’s textbook big tech strategy: -Build up the hype -Get the product out there, make sure as many orgs and people start using it as possible. Make it free or sell at loss if necessary -Oh yes, we broke a few laws for this. If we don’t get a waiver, we’ll have to close the service for everyone, do you realize the impact?
That’s Facebook on privacy, Uber on workers rights, etc. Now N+1th: OpenAI on copyright.
- Comment on A YouTuber let the Cybertruck close on his finger to test the new sensor update. It didn't go well. 7 months ago:
That’s why you get “don’t put living animals in the microwave oven” in the instructions.
If Tesla didn’t explicitely wrote “don’t put your f***ing finger in the way on purpose after multiple attempts to close it!” he may have a chance.
He will plead a trauma from the loss of trust in his beloved car brand and the credibility damage on his Youtube channel and ask for M$.
- Comment on I'm 99% sure it's not real 11 months ago:
Half of the job is to fix issues with existing suff, the other half is to make working stuff more complicated and problematic (aka “upgrade”), so that we’re still paid to do the first half.
- Comment on NASA has some explaining to do 1 year ago:
I kind of hope it’s real. Down that path at some point they’ll decide the whole Internet and all modern technologies are satanist and leave Internet for good. They can embrace the Amish lifestyle, it’s a win for the rest of us.
- Comment on First planned small nuclear reactor plant in the US has been canceled 1 year ago:
Nuclear plants consist mainly of a shitton of concrete (and only the best sort is good enough). The production of that concrete causes a terrible amount of carbon emissions upfront.
Actually, if you compare them to solar or wind at equivalent service, it’s not that straightforward:
Renewables installed capacity is nowhere close to their actual production, nuclear can produce its nominal capacity in a very steady way.
Wind turbines also need a lot of concrete, and much more metal for equivalent output. Solar panels need a lot of metals.
Renewables need a backup source to manage their intermittency. It’s most often batteries and fossil plants these days. I don’t think I need to comment on fossil plants, but batteries production also has a very significant carbon emission budget, and is most often not included in comparisons. Besides, you need to charge the batteries, that’s even more capacity required to get on par with the nuclear plant.
With all of these in consideration, IPCC includes nuclear power along with solar and wind as a way to reduce energy emissions.
- Comment on Samsung joins Google in RCS shaming Apple 1 year ago:
Not going to happen. They charge such an insanely high premium vs real cost for a very primitive messaging system, they’re not letting that go!
- Comment on Streaming TV costs now higher than cable, as 'crash' finally hits 1 year ago:
Could we define a trade-off system? Classic broadcasting can take way too long to send out a large catalog. Streaming is, as you say, a heavy resources consuming system.
So how about a combo of a box or a software that can follow a broadcast N times faster than human, and broadcast N movies/series episodes a day? The application let you pick what you’d like to get on your box/app, and then it’s like classic video recording, but on steroids.
It would be like live-streaming, but at 2, 3, 10 times the normal speed. No human needs to follow that.
Of course, you still have the issue of glitches, communication interruption, but we’ve dealt with those for years, and there are certainly ways to indeed stream the missing parts, or use rediffusion.
You read it first here. I’m off to file for a patent and make billions (or not…)
- Comment on Today 10 years ago I got a Firefox OS phone 1 year ago:
I really wish they had opened all of the system.
I mean: what is it they can still lose? I’m pretty sure a few licenses are not making them break even. Do they fear some third parties would copy the OS and release phones with it? Would that not be a sign that other companies trust in the OS and help them land bigger contracts?
/e/ managed to get a business off with a full opensource stack, without building the phones themselves. What prevents Jolla to try the same approach?
They could have been the main developers of the true Linux opensource phone OS. Instead, they’re going to get passed by Plasma Mobile, and then they’ll have nothing left to offer.
- Comment on Today 10 years ago I got a Firefox OS phone 1 year ago:
The N9 was killed by Stephen Elop, the new CEO coming straight from Microsoft with a mission: get Nokia bought off by MS.
Right from the start, he ran an explicit counter-advertisement campaign against the N9 and Meego. Whatever commercial success it would be, this would be the first and last device running MeeGo from Nokia, and there would be no support for MeeGo.
Nokia was to embrace Windows mobile OS, that turned out to be a total disaster. But indeed, after he tanked Nokia, it became cheap enough to bought by MS, as Nokia got both cheap and undsirable by any other big player due to its binding to MS bad mobile OS, and Elop got his VP status back there.
This is a shame in the history of mobile phones and OS!
Later, some former Nokia would start their own phone company reusing part of MeeGo. Jolla was born.
- Comment on Reddit is taking control of large subreddits that are still protesting its API changes 1 year ago:
For many “lurkers” of reddit, the protest brought some attention to the issue and reddit’s disdain for the moderators.
I think it helps with the migration if the communities are not taken by surprise when a mod declares a migration.