bayesian_horse

Doesn't matter the source of the energy if you have to store it anyway. With nuclear power the "good weather" is the actual problem.

That's not fast enough. Also, running nuclear plants at much below peak capacity is hardly efficient, increasing the cost.

Again: This is a problem no country experienced so far, because even France doesn't have that much capacity.

Past history is a bad indicator for future risk when the costs are so high.

And the reason why there were so few fatalities was because huge chunks of land have been evacuated every time and costly cleanup operations have been undertaken. The risk is not just lives lost, but rather the impact on those countries' economy.

You ignore fat-tail risks. The incident in Fukushima is already hugely expensive and the expense keeps growing.

Relying on past frequencies for future risk assessment is dangerous, especially when there is this high of a cost. Especially on the organization level of the decision makers: Maybe on average the risk for the global population is acceptable, but if a country like Germany loses part of its territory to a nuclear accident, that would be huge tragedy for the country and its economy. Germany is NOT replacing nuclear with lignite 1:1, much less in the long term. Anyone who says so is lying. And even those plants MAY have more risk, but that risk is hugely more predictable!

Bullshit. There was no "decision" in the refugee crisis, we had to take in the refugees because of our constitution and frankly because we (constitutionally and fortunately) don't have the means to get rid of them even if we wanted to.

So far everything works well for Germany. Relying on Russian gas meant cheaper power for quite some time. Hard to tell if alternatives would have fared better. Hindsight is always 20/20. Putin's invasion of Ukraine is irrational from any standpoint and not expecting him and his country shooting themselves in their feet that way wasn't illogical.

Nuclear power projects are always finished late and way over budget.

There's definitely a pattern there.

It's not the replacement. The argument that "lignite" plants replaced nuclear power is mostly wrong. Especially not long term. But this argument is highly convenient for people who are delusional over the benefits of nuclear power.

Just wait until the summer. Also exports from Germany to France did indeed decline due to the transition.

Ever questioned if maybe experts and politicians who deal with these issues daily are less delusional than you?

"Ecologists" weren't the ones who nuked nuclear. Popular opinion did. Impossible accidents happening a couple times too often didn't help.

Because electricity demand fluctuates. It's uneconomical to build enough nuclear capacity to satisfy peak demand. So even if you were to go to 100% nuclear, you'd have to store the excess power to satisfy the peaks.

It's not baseload if it's not on all the time. The point of the article is that what was previously supplied by "baseload" is now generated from a flexible mix, with hardly anything generating 100% of the time.

Nuclear power has high upfront investments, always. And pretty much all nuclear projects are finished behind schedule and wayyy above budget. After a couple of decades of this, reasonable people may come to the conclusion that these investments and risks are quite "inherent".

Your comparison is meaningless, because the 150 billion € investment is not comparable to a single nuclear plant.

And realizing ten times the current building capacity for nuclear plants with the same (or stricter) regulation and standards? That is almost delusionally optimistic.

I actually meant the author. She is taking Musk too seriously. There may be people in the general public, who are unrelated to SpaceX or anything space related, who are crazy about Mars. But my point is that even SpaceX has plenty to do besides going to Mars, and nobody in government or private industry is pushing for Mars colonization with any kind of religious fervor.

Ambitions are a good thing. I do believe it is a good idea to have a permanent settlement on Mars, mostly for scientific reasons. But there's no "race" toward this goal, not even a forceful push. Progress is slow but steady now.

I hardly think any of that is going to be binding.

By the time we CAN send Human beings on missions leaving the solar system, the definition of "Human being" will have changed beyond recognition.

I don't think the conditions on Mars will kill the first few people going there. The transportation, including the landing, is much more dangerous. And those people won't even stay there. A couple of years at most for any one person. Then with time the stays will be extended.

Starship is immensely useful, even much closer to home. Financially, going to Mars is not the justification for Starship (no matter how often Musk says).

Starship will enable us to bring much more mass into orbit. Communication satellites mostly. The JWST would have been easier and cheaper to construct with the payload diameter of Starship. You could even launch much larger telescopes. Commercial space stations aren't really viable yet, and there's not that much to do for Humans in LEO. That's going to change. On top of all that, there are ideas to use Starship as a point-to-point transportation system for destinations on Earth.

What race to Mars? At best three entities are even aiming to send people to Mars, and all of them at a quite leisurely pace: NASA, ESA and SpaceX. And by all accounts, they are cooperating more rather than competing.

Some people take Elon Musk too seriously. His timelines are always overambitious. Starship will not be going to Mars (even unmanned) any time soon. Even though Musk says it's necessary for interplanetary travel, at least the first dozen or "Starships" or so will have much less ambitious tasks: Launching Starlink satellites, maybe other commercial payloads and of course going to the moon. All of those missions require multiple prototypes. I'd be surprised if any Starship makes its way to Mars in the next five years. More like ten years, even for the first unmanned mission.

Yes, let's be clear: I'm not saying it's the worst animal cruelty there is, just that animal welfare has to be seen on a spectrum.

Our avian medicine professor said that budgies will get frustrated from trying to socialize with plastic birds or people. How bad you think this is is up to you. I'd compare it with an immigrant in a country with extremely different culture and language. And it's worse because birds can't relearn certain innate things.

Browsers are now so essential, that there is little incentive for Google to drop out and very much incentive for everyone else to continue or increase their involvement.

With Firefox there is even a viable alternative that isn't controlled by Google in any form. I'd agree on many projects that would be the case. For Chrome, no.

Those comparisons are meaningless, because this bird is living in Human care through Human decisions (at some point...).

What is less meaningless is the idea that animals should be able to fulfill the full spectrum of their natural behavior. For parrots that means conspecific company. People don't talk like parrots and don't act like parrots. That is consensus among experts, by the way.

I'm not saying these birds can't be happy. Some certainly aren't resocializeable, and there's nothing wrong with keeping them as happy as possible regardless.

One of the most objective criterion for animal welfare is how much of their natural behavior they can fulfill. People don't talk like birds, don't act like birds. Only parrots of pretty much the same species can fulfill some things. I'm not even talking about mating and all the behavior around that, more like everything else.

The preference of people over birds is not a good sign. Usually means he wasn't well socialized or even misimprinted. Breeders do that intentionally because people want people-focused parrots. But it's not good for them.

Sometimes that damage can be undone with very careful training and resocializing...

I don't think interaction with people is bad for parrots, but it shouldn't be their only means of scratching their social itches.

Budgies will try to socialize (in vane) with extremely unrealistic plastic budgies. Parrots actually recognize each other by voice, the colors of the feather doesn't matter hardly at all (maybe for mating...), we know that because certain species do have different colors in different breeds.

I think RGB displays are fine for this particular purpose.

First question in my mind was: How did they stop the parrots from destroying the devices? But the species they used is quite small, so...

When you want to hire them, you'll have to compete (especially in salary) with employers who need them for something Rust is actually very well suited for.

Both Python and Javascript are eating Rust's lunch in terms of popularity. And Typescript is just a typechecker, it's still a very dynamically typed language/runtime underneath.

Especially with Rust you have to think way more about banalities of the data model you normally really don't care about in web development.

Rust engineers coming from a different niche than frontend development will just LOVE web development.

My point was that there is a better access for the immune system in the brain. Not that you'd want any infection regardless.

Electrodes would usually be mounted on the surface of the brain, outside the blood-brain barrier of course. That's plenty close enough for most purposes.