Formerly /u/Zagorath on the alien site.

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  • 241 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 15th, 2023

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  • The fantastic thing about renewables is how much they lend themselves to a less centralised model. Solar collector? Sure, why not‽ Rooftop solar on people’s houses? You bet! Geothermal? If local conditions are favourable to it, absolutely!

    Instead of a small number of massive power plants that only governments or really large corporations can operate individuals can generate the power for themselves, or companies can offset their costs by generating a little power, or cities can operate a smaller plant to power what operations in their city aren’t handled by other means. It’s not a one-size-fits-all approach.

    This contrasts with nuclear. SMRs could theoretically do the same thing, but haven’t yet proven viable. And traditional plants just put out way too much power. They’re one-size-fits-all by definition, and only have the ability to operate alongside other modes with the other modes filling in a small amount around the edges.



  • You can’t cut the red tape. The red tape is why we’re able to say nuclear is safe.

    the weird part is most people do think nuclear fusion plants are a good thing and can solve stuff. But they have almost all of the downsides nuclear fission plants have in terms of red tape, complexity and cost

    Huh? Nuclear fusion doesn’t have any downsides or upsides. Because it doesn’t exist. We’ve never been able to generate net power with fusion. (No, not even that story from a couple of years ago, which only counted as ‘input’ a small fraction of the total energy used overall. It was a good development, but just one small step on the long journey to it being practical.)

    Being anti-nuclear was a poor stance to have 20, 30 years ago. At that time, renewables weren’t cost effective enough to be a big portion of our energy generation mix, and we should have been building alternatives to fossil fuels since back then if not earlier. But today, all the analysis tells us that renewables are far cheaper and more effective than nuclear. Today, being pro-nuclear is the wrong stance to take. It’s the anti-science stance, which is why it has seen a recent rise among right-wing political parties and media organisations.


  • First, no, that’s not what I said. If you’re only going to be arguing in bad faith like that this will be the last time I engage with you.

    Second, baseload power is in fact a myth. And it becomes even worse when you consider the fact that nuclear doesn’t scale up and down in response to demand very well. In places with large amounts of rooftop solar and other distributed renewables, nuclear is especially bad, because you can’t just tell everyone who has their own generation to stop doing that, but you also don’t want to be generating more than is used.

    Third, even if you did consider it necessary to have baseload “until we have adequate storage”, the extremely long timelines it takes to get from today to using renewables in places that don’t already have it, spending money designing and building nuclear would just delay the building of that storage, and it would still end up coming online too late.

    I used to be a fan of nuclear. In 2010 I’d have said yeah, we should do it. But every time I’ve looked into it over the last 10 years especially, I’ve had to reckon with the simple fact that all the data tells us we shouldn’t be building nuclear; it’s just an inferior option to renewables.


  • Safe, sure. Efficient? Not even close.

    It’s far, far more expensive than renewable energy. It also takes far, far longer to build a plant. Too long to meet 2030 targets even if you started building today. And in most western democracies you wouldn’t even be able to get anything done by 2040 if you also add in political processes, consultation, and design of the plant.

    There’s a reason the current biggest proponents of nuclear energy are people and parties who previously were open climate change deniers. Deciding to go to nuclear will give fossil fuel companies maximum time to keep doing their thing. Companies which made their existence on the back of fossil fuels, like mining companies and plant operators also love it, because it doesn’t require much of a change from their current business model.



  • In Australia I don’t think teachers are underpaid, but schools are absolutely underfunded. Which can often mean teachers end up spending personal money on school resources, which means their actual effective pay isn’t as good as it looks from the outside.

    They also work way longer hours than is reflected in their contract.





  • Yeah I agree. Age of Empires is one of my favourite gaming franchises, but I’ve never really been able to get into RTS games outside of it, although I’ve tried. I had a bit of fun with Warcraft 3, but it never really clicked with me properly, and others I’ve tried I didn’t really even enjoy.

    Well that’s not quite true. I also loved Battle for Middle Earth 2. But I’ve never played it online at all, and obviously it’s completely unavailable in any legal form today, so it’s hard to really count it.

    But still yeah, absolutely love the Age games. The DEs have been handled so brilliantly, and I am enormously excited for Age of Mythology: Retold, since AoM was my favourite part of the franchise.






  • Zagorath@aussie.zonetoMemes@lemmy.mlMath
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    15 days ago

    Idk what middle school really is because it’s not been a thing at any of the schools I’ve been to, but it’s definitely something you do a lot earlier than calculus. If calculus comes in in your last three or four years of high school, quadratics are what you’re doing for at least two years before that.


  • Zagorath@aussie.zonetoMemes@lemmy.mlGoogle be like
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    15 days ago

    None of the Chromium forks are hard ones

    For now. If Firefox became a Chromium fork, ideally it would stay that way. But if Google did make things too hard in the way you describe, then I would suggest Firefox, Brave, Vivaldi, etc. should share a sort of medium-hard fork of Chromium. Keep their own track with features they need, but keep it close enough that the basic rendering engine can still be merged in from work Google does.

    We need diversity in web browsers

    That’s an ideological position. I don’t agree that there’s any inherent value in the underlying browser engine being diverse. If anything, I think it’s useful for it to be consistent and predictable.

    As I write this, I’m talking myself into a slightly different position. Maybe they don’t need to fork Chromium, but it would be valuable to dump Gecko in favour of Blink. I don’t actually know what Chromium gets you besides Blink (and V8, which I lump together with Blink because for the same reasons, I think it would make sense to unify around). Stick with Blink & V8 to let Google to the work on the rendering side (while still being able to contribute back yourself where necessary), while maintaining your own browser and extension ecosystem. So web developers get a single platform to develop against, users get the full experience of any site they visit regardless of their browser, and Mozilla can maximally utilise their development resources in building and maintaining features that differentiate them.