derriz

For me the root of the problem is politics rather than money. Or to be clear, the reasons for procrastinating are not economic. We have the technology to de-carbonize energy and in most cases it's cheaper and better than fossil-based energy production. On the consumption side, the move to electrification is also compelling and in most cases economical - EVs, induction cooking, heat pumps, etc.

But in terms of politics we have Trump paying companies to abandon half-built offshore wind farms and various European countries offering subsidies for fossil-fuel consumption 'to help with affordability' to shield consumers from their dependence on a volatile source of energy.

And that is ignoring the huge and persistent subsidies dished out by governments (estimated at about $800 billion globally - which ignores the externalities like pollution and global warming).

“Back on”? When did it stop?

As a foreigner, “Pouletschenkel und Pommes” makes me smile. A German word sandwiched between two French words - one pronounced the French way (“poolay”) and the other nativized (“pommez”).

This is subjective of course but for me Kotlin is certainly not minimal - I'd put it closer to C# than Java in terms of features. Typescript and Java feel like far smaller languages. Of course, C++ is in a class of its own in terms of anti-minimalism.

Wolves generally don't attack people, though, do they?

There are no recent (last half century) documented cases of wolves killing people in Europe as far as I know. The few times people have been bitten by wolves they've been feeding them or doing other stupid stuff.

How about some detail like the time, place or name of the conference, the name of the speaker or the title of the talk?

It’s the API that gave me the push to leave Pandas. 10 or more years of occasional Pandas use and I still had to google for any non-trivial queries.

In that regard, I’m still waiting for a credible jq replacement…

> How do you know they targeted them?

I'm not sure how those killed in Bucha were _not_ targeted?

I'm also not sure how the execution of POWs could be accidental (with the evidence used in various reports provided by videos taken by Russians themselves) or the documented systematic torture (HRW report: https://www.hrw.org/news/2025/12/11/russias-systematic-tortu...)

Or the kidnap of children (documented by UN) or the findings of the UN human rights commission:

> The Commission found that Russian authorities committed a wide range of war crimes, and the corresponding human rights violations, including willful killings, attacks on civilians, unlawful confinement, torture, rape and other sexual violence, as well as unlawful transfers and deportations of children.

Or the findings of HRW (Human Rights Watch) of indiscriminate and disproportionate attacks on populated areas, including homes, hospitals and schools.

Reading about this stuff - by credible sources like the UNHRC, Amnesty International, HRW, endless media and independent journalists' - and forming an opinion does not make me "lazy and racist".

Sometimes, one side are simply the bad guys and in this particular case, it's the Russian regime.

Because I was responding directly (I even quoted the line) to the claim that Russian’s actions could be understood as being part of a “clear objective of draining Ukraine's budget”.

Your attempt to deflect is very odd. We’re discussing an aspect of Russia’s behavior and strategy with respect to the invasion of Ukraine. If you want me to comment on the behavior of a different belligerent in a different conflict then feel free to start such a discussion concerning that conflict - then I may (or may not) respond to claims about the behavior of some country that isn’t Russia.

These attacks have been too well documented for your "propaganda" attack to appeal to anyone but the brainwashed or those acting in bad faith. Outside of Western media, multiple UN reports have presented direct photographic and have found physical evidence for these attacks.

https://ukraine.ohchr.org/en/Sustained-large-scale-attacks-b... - documents and presents the irrefutable evidence for, among other attacks, the double ballistic missile strike on the historic centre of Sumy on Palm Sunday. The second exploded above a public area, killing at least 31 civilians and injuring 80. The UN describes civilians traveling to church, going to the market, working at a coffee stand, etc.

https://www.ohchr.org/sites/default/files/documents/hrbodies... - this is a formal UN commission report on a series of Russian attacks in Kherson which struck a number of supermarkets, a gas station, railway station and residential buildings.

https://www.ohchr.org/sites/default/files/documents/hrbodies... - another UN Commission report that found that a Russian Kh-101 cruise missile struck a civilian apartment building, killing 24 civilians. There was no military or economic target there and so the UN concluded that Russian forces had conducted an indiscriminate attack on a residential building

https://ukraine.ohchr.org/en/Russian-attack-strikes-shopping... - found that a Russian long-range drone struck an operational shopping centre full of civilians, then another drone struck it about 30 minutes later. At least 16 civilians were killed and 128 injured. Investigators found no military presence, activity or equipment at the site.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bucha_massacre - the Bucha massacre of civilians

Or read any of the Amnesty International reports (who have also been critical of some of Ukraine's actions so can hardly be accused of purveying Ukrainian propaganda), such as:

https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2022/03/ukraine-belea... - attacks on residential houses, schools, kindergartens, medical facilities and food stores in Izium

https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2024/07/ukraine-major... - attack on Ohmatdyt children's hospital in Kyiv

https://www.amnesty.org/en/documents/eur50/7508/2023/en/ - a long list of attacks on childrens' schools

I could go on and on with such reports but I suspect, from the tone and implication of your response, I'm not going to change your mind with evidence.

> Russia is not doing some ephemeral "inflict pain", it's pursuing a clear objective of draining Ukraine's budget.

This is not true - they’ve regularly targeted and hit kindergartens, supermarkets, gas stations, town squares/markets, residential buildings, etc. None of these targets are “budget draining” but instead are intended to terrify and hurt civilians. Russia isn’t calculating or being strategic at the level you suggest - instead its actions are often simply cruel, inhumane and vindictive even at the cost of its own strategic interests.

Capacity factor of orbital solar PV panel: 97%

Capacity factor of terrestrial solar panel: 23%

Retail cost per watt for terrestrial panel: under 45c

Manufacturing cost per watt of space grade solar panel: up to $450

Annual performance degradation of terrestrial solar panel: under 0.5%

That of space-grade solar panel: up to 2%

Life span of terrestrial panel: about 2x that of space panel.

Total difference in cost per watt feeding a DC load in space vs on land: about x400

And that's ignoring launch costs. It makes absolutely zero sense. And given the scale of production and investment in manufacturing, terrestrial is likely to stretch even further ahead in the cost stakes.

> It was nationalized to force it build new reactors despite demand not growing enough

It was nationalized because it had suffered record losses in the previous year and was struggling with a ballooning debt mountain of 65B euro. The French government didn’t need to nationalize it to control its strategic direction - it already owned 84% of it. That was the press release claim in order to present the bailout as “strategic”.

And the point was to address the gp’s claim that nuclear was profitable. Profitable enterprises don’t lose 18B a year or suffer financial instability due to a debt mountain on their balance sheets.

> You didn't understand the electric cap in France.

I don’t see how you drew that conclusion - the reactor needs to earn €138 per MWh (that’s the middle estimate not the worst case which is €180 per MWh). But the most it can earn is €70/MWh due to The cap? You’re just restating what I said. This reactor will be deeply unprofitable for its entire life.

Why then was EDF nationalized in 2023? A year after making an €18B loss? Why was EDF forced to buy the massively loss-making Areva/Framatome in 2017? How will Flamanville 3 - the latest reactor - at a cost of €24B to deliver 1.6GW ever be profitable, given it will need to earn €138 per MWh over 60 years just to break even? This is over 2.5 times the average wholesale price of the market it will be selling into and twice the €70/MWh state mandated nuclear electricity price cap.

- https://www.powermag.com/flamanville-3-europes-hard-won-nucl...

- https://www.techniques-ingenieur.fr/actualite/articles/epr-d...

I didn’t cite sources. You’re confusing me with someone else.

Could you recommend a book or reading material that reflects recent developments in PIE research? I have a few books but they’re quite old.

Is supporting a racist, science-denying, authoritarian and xenophobic party which views Germany's European neighbors and allies as threats to its prosperity going to do so? When has strident ethno-nationalism delivered more livable lives to Germans?

I'm just not convinced with this "no alternative" narrative for supporting political movements which leverage hate and conspiracies. Be honest with yourself and own your opinions and views instead of claiming victimhood and blaming the political landscape for not offering you alternatives and forcing you to passively adopt a bunch of ugly views and positions.

> have been left almost no-where else to go

I’m pretty sure that there are political alternatives to afd’s ethno-nationalism, climate change denialism and Putin-worship

Match in what way? The equivalent number for the EU is about 125 tons I believe.

Yes consumption varies by month but that's not why nuclear output fell by 30%.

There was wide scale unscheduled reduction in nuclear generation this Summer: in Hungary (Paks - reduced to 10% output), Romania (full shutdown of Cernavodă), France (5 plants fully shutdown, 2 curtailed) and Switzerland (Beznau operating at 50% then shutdown). All due to weather (lack of water for cooling).

I clearly distinguished scheduled from unscheduled downtime and am talking purely about nuclear intermittency caused by unscheduled downtime. And even if I didn't/wasn't, your original claim:

> Nuclear works 24x7 on its own.

simply does not stand up to any scrutiny.

Nuclear is also intermittent - ask Europeans.

During January this year, nuclear contributed about 62TWh of the electricity generated in the EU while in June this had fallen to 43.7TWh - about a 30% decrease. The deficit was largely filled by a surge of solar generation as well as burning more gas.

The drop was due to both scheduled and unscheduled downtime. There is no such thing as a non-intermittent source - even without unscheduled outages, a typical nuclear plant spends over 4 weeks offline a year. You need to be able to handle that also - i.e. with redundancy and backup.

Also because nuclear (like coal - the other thermal steam generation tech) requires huge scale to be profitable, it requires huge transmission investment. Contrast this with solar, for example, which is economic to scale down and can deployed in a more distributed pattern.

> Nuclear power plants are expensive, but that's because they are big. For the amount of electricity they generate, they are cheap.

Not according to the standard statistic for electricity generation cost - LCOE which amortizes capital costs.

> They are also quite cheap to run. As far as I know, there is no cheaper source of electricity than a nuclear power plant that has paid off its construction costs.

The are not cheap to run. Indian Point closed ahead of end-of-life because it couldn't support its operational costs - about $31 per MWh - about $500m per annum. Average wholesale prices at the time were around $28/MWh.

I don’t agree. The technical device we use for creating clear boundaries, useful abstractions and managing dependencies in monolithic code is the function/method/procedure call.

The history of distributed software is littered with the corpses of attempts to make the RPC look like a function/method call (I worked for a CORBA vendor decades ago). But these two techniques are so different on a fundamental level they are not substitutable except in the most trivial cases. The compute and elapsed time RPC overhead which makes perfectly good local abstractions completely impractical across a network. And then there are the differences in terms of failure modes, concurrency and synchronicity.

So even a beautifully designed and layered piece of “monolithic” software with a code base costing of coherent and clean abstractions will not be easy to port to a microservices/distributed architecture.

Examples? Maybe it’s true but I’d be surprised. Like I said from experience of living under a number of jurisdictions, none will charge a person with murder in those circumstances. Everywhere I’ve lived, if your life is directly threatened like that, you are absolutely allowed to defend yourself with violence commensurate with the threat.

They may have been confusing or deliberately conflating things with the fact that in most western jurisdictions, you are not allowed to kill, for example, a fleeing trespasser or burglar. This is viewed as an entirely different situation from one where you are being threatened directly with immediate physical violence.

> Somebody kicks in your door with a pump action and starts shooting- There are _some_ jurisdictions that require you to try and flee. You kill them and they werent bodily blocking your car in? Murder charge.

Which jurisdictions? Is this in the US? I’ve lived in a bunch of European countries and in none would you be charged with murder in that situation.

I’ve had the same reaction. We’ve seen this play out in other language eco-systems (Java - JAXP, javax.validation, JPA, etc all ended up with a de facto single implementation) and the idea of pluggable implementations sounds appealing but rarely pays off. The price that Rust paid for this abstraction - which in fact ended up not being useful as tokio is the only reasonable choice - was high in terms of requiring ugly (to my eyes) changes to its type system.

Nuclear in this millennium is not competing with nuclear or other tech from the 1970s - it’s competing with newer technologies (solar, wind, batteries and gas turbines) which do not require 5 to 10 year huge civil engineering works. All these alternative technologies benefit from mass production in factories. While civil engineering does not get cheaper over time - not just for nuclear plant but all large infrastructure construction.

And that’s just capex - even if a nuclear plant could be built for free, the cost of operation (huge head count, fuel and waste handling), means it cannot compete with newer technologies. Indian Point shutdown years before end-of-life because it was too expensive to operate.

Nuclear plants are large and complex and expensive to build and run. I’m not sure why it should be surprising that electricity generation technology has advanced sine the development of the PWR - it’s been more than half a century. The world has moved on from electricity generation using a huge steam engine attached to an alternator with a fiddly and complex firebox.

It’s economics and newer technologies that have made nuclear power obsolete - not public opinion.

Large scale civil engineering projects will always cost more than simply installing stuff that comes almost fully assembled from a factory (solar, wind, battery or small/medium gas turbines). Opex will always be much higher for a generation facility which requires 850 FTE specialist employees to operate (US average per plant) compared to the minimal requirements for on-site employees for utility scale solar or wind facilities. Generation tech which requires no fuel or hazardous waste handling and storage also has an obvious cost advantage. None of these factors have anything to do with “need to believe”.

Looks like there's contact between the outer diameter of the sun-gear and a surface close to the center of the planet-gear? The link arm is pulling them together and this contact keeps them apart I guess. The rotation speeds are different so you'd need a bearing? I dunno tbh - I'm not sure what the colors represent and I'm not even sure if I'm using the correct words to describe what I see.

Prices would increase making the alternatives more attractive.

Oil and gas production is relatively in elastic taking years to expand.

The extra installed solar and wind generation - as a reaction to increased fossil fuel costs and supply disruption - permanently displaces fossil fuel consumption. No matter what fossil fuel prices do subsequently. Like the massive growth in nuclear generation immediately after the 1970s oil crisis.

Championing the continuing extraction of fossil fuels to be sold for combustion given what we know they do to the planet is not balanced in terms of morality by you driving an EV sorry. We have to abandon fossil fuels for energy asap and we practically can - the tech is available and affordable. The current reliance on fossil fuels - outside of some niches - is a political choice backed by inertia and established and powerful financial interests.