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Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: January 13th, 2022

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  • Well, with that proxying feature, I mostly meant that they’re not doing it for the privacy, but rather for those other benefits.
    Much like with 8.8.8.8 for DNS and AMP for the server-side, this feature locks down the client-side, ensuring that internet traffic goes over their infrastructure.

    Yes, user privacy is short-term somewhat improved, because their competitors can’t track you quite as easily anymore, but if they truly cared about improving privacy/security, there would be so many much lower hanging fruits they could pick, like end-to-end-encryption for Chrome Sync by default. They don’t pick those, because it would impact their own ability to invade user privacy.


  • Yeah, it annoys me to no end. First, they tried to convince the industry that users don’t want privacy, they want security, because somehow privacy would not be just one discipline underneath security.
    And now that privacy has won, that even lawmakers have understood that it’s something that users need and should be able to demand, now they’re completely flipping their messaging on its head. Suddenly, they’re all about privacy. Except, of course, that they’re fucking lying.


  • Hmm, interesting. Here in Germany, power companies are partially privatized and I always thought, whomever came up with that nonsense took inspiration from the turbo-capitalism in the USA. Apparently not.

    Do they need to be profitable, though, in your model? It mostly sounds like a traditional public service, where the government could just tell them to use the money for solar…








  • As far as I understand the description at the top of the image, no, storage is not included. But if production costs are insanely low, that of course does leave plenty room for storage or redundancy. In particular, personally I believe the costs will continue on a logarithmic drop and we’re at the steep part of that, so even if it really is not the case today, I do expect solar production + storage to become cheaper in a not too distant future.

    Also, as another graphic from the source article illustrates, battery costs are rapidly dropping, too:


  • Hi, I’m a human being, not an “anti nuke propagandist”. I just checked, if there’s newer data, and well, there is, but no one seems to have formatted that in a way yet, which you or me would be willing to digest.

    Personally, my impression has been that the solar industry was one of the industries that was pretty much completely unaffected by COVID, so I felt this graph was still perfectly relevant.
    But even if it were strongly affected, I do not see why our technological progress in manufacturing, that we had in 2019, should evaporate with COVID.
    There is inflation and a rise in natural catastrophes, but I feel like those would affect nuclear and others roughly proportional.


  • I was considering whether this is just a shitpost, but your other comments suggest that you’re completely serious. It does not go away. Radioactive decay causes multiple transitions between radioactive elements until it ends up as lead, which does not decay further.

    Of course, it should also be said that it’s better to have no waste than waste that eventually turns into lead.
    And that it’s still better to have waste than waste which also happens to be toxic.


  • The source article actually talks about this and measured data suggests nuclear cost actually went up, despite more capacity being built.

    This is the first time, I’ve read this anywhere. More sources/studies would be really important. And there is lots of interpretations to be had on the why, but assuming the article isn’t completely off the mark, that’s cold, hard data suggesting that your (perfectly reasonable) assumption is actually wrong, after all.


  • There is this vision for the future, where people can use the battery in their electric car (or a separately bought battery) to store power, either produced by their own cheap solar or from the grid during over-production. And then some software could sell that energy back into the grid at night or during high demand.

    If that becomes a reality, we might have it at least so that if a chunk of the grid gets cut off for a bit, it can actually tide that over.


  • Yeah, there may be situations/regions where even the cheapest solar isn’t good enough. But at some point, the cost difference does become an oppressive argument. Even at that price in 2019 already, you can use around 75% of your money to build storage or redundancy in multiple regions / with alternative renewables.

    And this trend of cost reduction for solar will very likely continue, even if it might start levelling off at some point.