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Cake day: July 1st, 2023

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  • 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??







  • In theory, yes, you could make a mess, and any firmware is supposed to be certified to allow the device to be used.

    In practice, this has been a convenient excuse to keep a whole chip with a separate OS in every smartphone, and it is very difficult to isolate from the rest of the system (see Graphene OS efforts).

    I say all firmware should be opensource. Whether you’re allowed to change them or not is a separate question… for now.




  • 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.




  • What I don’t like with Matrix is the load it puts on the server. It basically copies 100% of a room content to any server having one or more users registered in the room.

    So if you’re on a small server, and one user decides to join a 10k+ large room, your server may collapse under the load as it tries to stay in sync with the room’s activity. This is deterrent to self-hosting or family/club/small party servers.

    XMPP, on the other hand, has proven to be highly scalable, has E2EE, federation and some bridging services.

    The only thing XMPP does NOT have is a single reference multiplatform client with all basic features for 2023 (1:1 chat, chat rooms, voice/video 1:1, and voice/video conference) than anyone can use without wondering if the features-set is the same as the persons you’re talking to.

    And while we’re there: I’m not even sure I want a messaging account linked to any of my Fediverse accounts…


  • matlag@sh.itjust.workstoMemes@lemmy.mlEnjoy it while it lasts.
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    2 years ago

    Sorry to ruin this dream, but not a single developed country (and most likely not a single non-developed either) has a remote chance of being carbon neutral in 10years.

    Reason number one is “carbon-neutral” is yet another greenwashing marketing idea involving emissions compensations that are just not there.

    We’ve seen now that planting trees will probably not do any good: we already see trees growing failure rate increasing due to excessive heating. They grow slower already, making all compensation calculations wrong, and they’ll burn in wildfires in summer, releasing all the carbon they captured.

    The second reason is the insanely high dependency we have to cheap oil. You need to convert haul truck, small trucks, buses, etc. to electric all while you turn the grid to 0 emission.

    You need to convert cargo ships to electric otherwise your net neutrality will need to conveniently ignore all importations and exportations.

    You need to convert all farm machines to 0 emissions and abandon quite a lot of the chemistry considered for granted today, which means yields will drop.

    You need to convert blast furnaces to alternative energies. Today, there is almost nothing done there other than “we’ll get hydrogen” that everybody know cannot be produced in the volume they need, let alone at an acceptable price.

    And no energy source whatsoever is carbon neutral!

    Solar panels need quite some metal and semicon-based manufacturing techniques. Wind farm need concrete for their anchoring, and use advanced materials to build. They both have a limited lifespan, after which you need to recycle (By the way: noticed that when “recycling” is advertised, no one mentions if it’s rectcling for the same usage and not recycled to lower grade material we can’t use back to produce the same device? That’s because we just can’t get them back with the same purity level…) and make some replacement, that will again have a share of emissions.

    Short of producing absolutely everything in the chains of supplies locally, you will import emissions from another country

    Any human activity is basically emitting or causing greenhouses emissions.

    And while you think all of that can be managed, we already have all signals to red on the natural resources: we can’t extract lithium fast enough, and we may not want to given how dirty the mines are. We may run out of some metals we rely on.

    And most of these issues are eluded in the great plans, because it’s too complicated or we simply have no solution and no one wants to say it up and loud.

    Now, the good/bad news: all of this will end because we’re also running out of cheap oil.

    It’s a good news because that will put a break in humans activities and so greenhouse gas emissions.

    But it’s bad because not a single country is preparing for the aftermath, and that means… they will collapse!


  • All bills targeting your freedom are labelled “child porn” or “terrorism”.

    After terrorists attack in France, state of emergency was declared, special powers to restrainesuspicious powers at home. We MUST protect people frometerrorists, right? If you’re against that, which side are you on? Very first usage of the power: restrain non-violent eco-activists to their home so that they don’t disturb the COP.

    That pattern repeats over and over. They’re counting on you being sensitive to “child porn”, I bet you the initial list will include “eco-terrorists” sites (label used on anyone attending a climate protest they tried to prevent), political activists sites (you try to be anonymous on Internet? That’s SO suspicious!).

    I’m sorry for what happened to you, but ri seriously doubt this bill is really intended to prevent that.