It's motivated by the ideology of wanting a meritocracy - the idea that if you work hard you can reap rewards. Having some people in society that can sit at home and watch the S&P increase while some have to work 50-hour weeks to make ends meet is seen as problematic.
Germany actually subsidises fossil fuels to the tune of €20bn/year, so in that context €3bn doesn't sound so bad. Some of the latest estimates of the true cost per ton of carbon put it around $1000 USD, so in purely economic terms it's still a win.
Twitter is far from a wasteland. Nothing that matters is exclusively on Bluesky, but a lot of it is on Twitter. The "old media" heavily relies on Twitter, too. Anger is a major driver of engagement on any medium, it's only natural that this shows through on Twitter.
Alternative platforms appear to be more civil because they're islands of echo-chambers. The anger is still there, it's just directed at the more abstract out-group, rather than any individuals that are part of the conversation.
> Alternative platforms appear to be more civil because they're islands of echo-chambers. The anger is still there, it's just directed at the more abstract out-group, rather than any individuals that are part of the conversation.
I'd say there are less bots and Putin-financed "fifth column" groups around on the Twitter alternatives, and that is the key thing. The porn spammers that make up half of the "likes" notifications on Twitter just don't see bsky or the fediverse as juicy targets and Instagram/Threads has far better tooling to yeet them, and the Putin propaganda army knows that the utter majority of people on bsky/fediverse are progressives where their points just don't appeal.
Social media would be way less toxic if the Western world had yeeted Russia off of the Internet after 2014.
To me, the real fifth column are the ones actively destroying all the values that are supposed to define "The Western world" in an attempt to save it, if only in name.
It's a mental shortcut to think that anyone who disagrees must've been influenced by some foreign power. Of course Russia picks up on dissent and attempts to amplify it, but it didn't create that dissent.
I loved it when it was T9 text (sms) to tweet. It was a novel way to share what you were doing say to day. The transformation from personal—to-promotional was their business plan.
When the feed becomes suggested, that’s when shit hit the fan for every social product. They still offer that as annoyware where you have to click over to it, but the nash equilibrium means that even the people you follow are trying to go viral instead of just sharing thoughts.
Reddit targeted the market for thoughtful discussion, and Twitter became the place for one-directional, bumper-sticker, talk radio style politics where nobody actually cares about the truth.
But for those few years between 2006-2010, Twitter was really a cool product.
Bluesky (ATProto) and Mastodon (ActivityPub) are designed differently, federated
I'm partial to ATProto, especially when it comes to user choice for algos, moderation, data hosting, and UI. There have been a few good HN posts lately, and in particular the comments therein
Pffft. X is by far the most important social network for people and things that matter. So not your vacation photos on Facebook or some influencer posting semi-nude pics on Instagram. It has only gotten better since Musk made moderation neutral, as opposed to the previous absurdly one-sided suppression of anything that deviates even slightly from ultra-left Liberal Silicon Valley ideology.
Anything about 2C is extremely risky for civilised society. It’s likely that we’ve already surpassed the tipping point for the West Antarctic ice sheet which over time will lead to meters of sea level rise. Changing weather patterns and simultaneous breadbasket failures will mean food becomes a lot more expensive - if you’re lucky enough to have access to it at all. At 3.5C many places on the planet become uninhabitable. People aren’t able to work outside for much of the year due to wet bulb temperatures. Regular storm surge causes a large percentage of the planets population to migrate. Salination of ground water and water for crop irrigation becomes a serious problem. Mountain glaciers that provide clean drinking water for millions of people dry up. In all, it’s hard to see a situation where we’d be able to maintain a reasonable quality of life under the conditions of >2C of warming.
>At 3.5C many places on the planet become uninhabitable
Which places in particular? Here in the middle east temperatures regularly get up to 45-50 degrees celsius in the summer and people get by okay. Most places have average temperatures much lower than that, so how would a rise of just 3-4 degress make then uninhabitable?
A quick summary of the takeaways of Vecellio et al.'s recent (October 2023) paper (https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2305427120) indicate that at +3.5 °C GMST we should expect high exposure to uncompensable heat stress every year primary around the Indus River Valley (India and surrounding countries) and the highly populated cities in eastern China. In North America, there is some exposure starting at +3°C but until +4 °C those exposures do not become substantial in the typical year.
Another thing noted is that urban features such as green spaces, water features, and increased shade may work where exceedance is typically nonhumid (i.e., North America, Middle East, Australia), these factors may not be as effective or even actively detrimental in more humid environments due to the added humidity.
>temperatures regularly get up to 45-50 degrees celsius in the summer and people get by okay
Largely because the 45-50 degree temperature do not last very long. And partly because AC loss due to prolonged blackouts has not happened during such heat - yet.
A 3-4 degree increase in average temperature means that 45-50 degree temperature periods may go from lasting 1-3 days to 2-3 weeks. And that's a whole new ball game.
Humidity is a big factor in whether heat is bearable or not, and 3.5C is an average over the entire globe. Some places will get much hotter than just 3.5C, some places won't.
There is also humidity. The desert is dry, so you can still perspire and cool down that way; but in a humid place like, say, India it is possible that temperatures will rise high enough that the human body cannot perspire to cool down via evaporation, at which point it would be dangerous to be outside.
The issue isn't all thermometers going up by 3.5 degC. The issue is that it also brings a host of other changes, and it's those things that kill you. They include:
- higher variability of temperatures. So your +3.5 degC actually makes heatwaves of +10/+15 more likely
- changing rainfall patterns, taking rain away from some places that rely on it.
- rising sea level, where the small average temperature changes are sufficient for a significant increase.
I actually think the focus on global average temperature increase is a major failure of public science communication, precisely because everyone mentally adds the increase to their local climate and thinks "meh".
Did you know that tidal energy is actually not renewable? Harvesting tidal energy slightly slows the rotation of the planet over time. Here's a quote from the relevant paper by Liu:
> Based on the average pace of world energy consumption over the last 50 years, if we were to extract the rotational energy just to supply 1% of the world's energy consumption, the rotation of the Earth would lock to the Moon in about 1000 years.
That paper assumes that the worlds energy will keep increasing at the average rate from the last 50 years for 1000 years.
That’s a terrible assumption. First because the rate has been slowing (even before Covid), and second because the end result of that extrapolation is more energy than we could every hope to produce without building Dyson spheres around stars.
If you do similar calculations we’d cause severe problems harvesting that much energy from wind or geothermal as well.
I did not. And find mind boggling that we have the ability to virtually stop earth rotation in such a small timeframe with that little effort. I'll definitely read more about it.
Note that since about 2021 renewables have overtaken fossil-based sources of energy on price. New installations of utility scale wind and solar PV are now cheaper than their alternatives. Not to mention protection from price fluctuations in the cost of fuels needed to power fossil fuel plants.
The backlog of hooking variable load sources to the US electric grid is very long, often requires retrofitting the grid, and cost is borne by the generator.
It's not as simple as having the capacity because power is used the instant it's produced.
IIRC there are actually starting to be wind, solar and pumped hydro sited at former coal mines and plants because they already have transmission capacity. (In the case of pumped hydro, a coal mine can also act as a big hole with an elevation difference to drive a turbine.)
There's lots of exciting progress happening with underground mechanical storage like this. It's so interesting that the U.S. DOE has been studying underground pumped hydro since at least the 1980.(https://www.osti.gov/servlets/purl/6517343)
Today:
- Hydrostor just signed a near $1 Billion contract to build their first underground facility in California using advanced compressed air with water to help efficiency.
See also: Green Gravity, Gravitricity, Terrament, Renewell, RheEnergise, and more.
My comment is less about storage and more about the physics of the Grid (not an expert though so fact check me) It's largely one giant multitenant pool of both capacity and consumption with Voltage being the indicator.
Variable load sources often change transmission requirements on existing lines because there can be power draw increase between A and B where previous there was less generation at A.
Back before the interest rate increases even barely tenable projects were doable. Cost of financing is higher now, so the risk equation changes.
That company is still going ahead with a project in New York, and Jersey has another wind projected lined up from another company.
Wouldn't take this single data point as indicating anything meaningful
Yeah, start-upsnonly fail because of the interest rate hike and not because they are unsustainable businesses. But other sectors requiring serious financing are absolutely not affected... Not.
Ørested isn't a startup, it's a decades-old energy company which built the first off-shore wind turbines. It used to be called DONG, Danish Oil and Natural Gas.
And their projects still need outside funding. Funding which is impacted by inflation and intrest rates, expoaing the project, and hence the company behind it, to financial impacts the same way start-ups are: money all of a sudden isn't free anymore.
Offshore wind is also the most expensive form of wind/solar.
With financing getting more expensive its almost certain that some of the more financially on the edge projects would get cancelled and since offshore wind is easily the most expensive, it’s unsurprising that in renewable energy those are the projects getting cancelled.
That's if you make up some number for fossil fuel externalities and count it as a subsidy. Pollution from fossil fuels is a very real and very big issue but it has been presented in such a way that people think governments are actually giving oil companies trillions of dollars in direct subsidies. No other business has had this kind of math applied to it. The fossil fuel industry is taxed heavily from when the oil comes out of the ground to people pumping gas into their cars, it is a huge tax revenue generator.
I really want to emphasizes the "make up a number" part. Trying to understand the physical part of climate change is already a monstrous task with big uncertainty. From there trying to to estimate economic effects is basically impossible.
Citation needed for that number, I suppose, because the number is absolutely made up. There is no way to determine the cost of the externalities of fossil fuels (if they exist). Even if we were to say that CO2 is causing global warming so we need to remove it from the atmosphere, such technology does not yet exist, so we don't know how much it would cost.
For renewables, most of the cost is up front, then they're cheap to run because they don't need fuel. (High capex, low opex.) Fossil fuel plants have more of a mix of upfront and operating costs. High interest rates make it expensive to borrow the upfront cost of renewables.
Let us say that solar and wind is about 25% more expensive to build. All types have high up front costs, so interest rates will affect nearly equally. However, operations for solar and wind must be way cheaper over 10/20/30 year time frame. To be fair, I never read anything about maintenance costs for solar and wind. It certainly isn't zero, as the wind turbine will need periodic servicing, and the solar panels need to be cleaned.
> To be fair, I never read anything about maintenance costs for solar and wind.
Indeed. Those costs are never counted (e.g. how do you service and repair offshore wind farms in the middle of the North Sea). As the costs of decommissioning and replacements are never counted either. Neither are the costs of overprovisioning required for renewables.
Of course these costs are counted. You do realise these are companies running these North Sea windfarms and selling the electricity to the grid? Do you think they suddenly go, "Oh, we forgot about maintenance costs! We're losing money now!"
They sell to the grid at a price that makes them a profit. How did you think this all worked?
On the other hand fossil fuel costs are risky, and if we plan to steer away from the worst climate disaster using policy tools, the cheap fuel will be gone within a plan't lifetime.
there is another important metric that most of these cost calculations ignore - the cost of reliability. Renewable generators create this problem due the variable and uncertain nature of their fuel. The cost of dealing with this is not paid by them.
there might be privileged financing somewhere i'm not aware of but it's a tough space rn. had breakfast with someone who's been in financing and constructing these for a long time and he's still working on it but much tougher.
if you want a public markets proxy, look at invesco's solar etf; down by around half. sedg is down 75%
existing infrastructure is more maintenance than construction
I have, what you may be missing is current interest rates are linked to high inflation rates which drive up the long term costs of fossil fuels. If inflation drops and interest rates drop you can refinance your renewables.
The calculation depends on how good the specific location is for wind/solar but outside of unusually poor areas, like the UK, solar is easily the cheapest option.
It may not scale, but it's not greenwashing - for it to be green washing, you'd need either claims of lower co2 to be false, or pretend that this solves the issue completely.
Lufthansa, at least - when I checked - made no such claim. I reviewed their compensaid site thoroughly (afraid it's just greenwashing), and their communication seems very honest.
My dictionary defines greenwashing as "misleading or deceptive publicity disseminated by an organization so as to present an environmentally responsible public image".
Here in the US, we have a corn-farming industry that has captured the Agriculture department and can block passage of essential legislation. To be expected: legislation proposed in Congress that all US jet fuel henceforth contain X% bio-product.
> Whereas fossil fuels add to the overall level of CO2 by emitting carbon that had been previously locked away, SAF recycles the CO2 which has been absorbed by the biomass used in the feedstock during the course of its life.
I guess it's reasonable to claim that it's sustainable if it's part of a cycle rather than just being a source of CO2 dug straight out of the ground. We still have a way to go with carbon capture but this feels like an improvement over the current fuels.
“Sustainable” as a marketing word was likely chosen to refer primarily to itself, i.e. the production of the fuel itself is sustainable compared to drilling for a known finite resource (crude oil). However, it is ecologically sustainable in that we are using material already making the rounds as opposed to unsequestering carbon sinks only to immediately burn.
There are other benefits, CO2 is not the only greenhouse gas around, and conventional Jet-A releases non-CO2 emissions into the atmosphere. SAF has stricter requirements as to what sort additives are allowed based on each chemicals specific burn profile.
In theory, its sustainable, because the fuel is being created from CO2 captured from the air by photosynthesis - so burning it doesn't add to the overall atmospheric CO2. Unlike fossil fuels where you are digging up CO2 and adding it to the atmosphere.
> its sustainable, because the fuel is being created from CO2 captured from the air by photosynthesis
An essential detail: the CO2 would have been back in the atmosphere soon, regardless of its use. We need less CO2 in the atmosphere, regardless of who, what, when, or how it got there or how it's removed.
The method of capture doesn't matter. Atmospheric carbon capture devices would be just as good, if they worked efficiently.
If you capture CO2 in a way that would keep it from the atmosphere long-term, then releasing it again is obviously not a good idea.
If you grow corn, you capture CO2. But the corn will soon die and (if I understand correctly) release the CO2 again, so you might as well use the corn for your fuel and release the CO2 that way.
However: If you plant a field with corn for fuel instead of with longer term carbon capture options (e.g., certain types of trees), it seems like a loss. It's better than digging up CO2 that's already stored long term (fossil fuels) and adding it to the atmosphere, but that's not good enough. We need to get CO2 out of the atmosphere.
Climate change isn't a simple product of CO2 emission. It's a result of fossil carbon that was outside of the earth's carbon cycle for millions of years being reintroduced to the system.
Biofuels made from plants are rereleasing carbon that the plants collected. They're more or less carbon neutral, assuming the existence of more plants growing. Biofuels won't help remove the excess carbon from the atmosphere, but they certainly can help mitigate the rapid bleeding by cutting down on fossil fuel use.
This is especially important for aviation, where the usage of batteries is almost certainly impossible for practical use.
Of course, the ideal thing to do is remove carbon from the atmosphere and not use it. But getting to net zero first is necessary.
It’s not - you can switch a small portion of fuel demand in a sustainable manner. The SAF plants are built purely on economics underpinned by tax credits. The larger issue is that once you get past a certain volume number, the marginal feedstock is soybeans (in the US at least) which for a variety of reasons is structurally more expensive than oil - this is never going to be economic and is a taxpayer funded boondoggle, I wish that weren’t the case
You need to ask him what accommodations he needs in order to be effective. Only he can really answer this question.
It could be small things like clearly indicating your intent - avoid sarcasm, figurative language and idioms. In a group chat this could mean adding "/joke" to messages. Autistic people generally like structure. Ensure your task tracker is clean and to-the-point. The benefit of this is it also help non-autistic colleagues.
I've bought my first 4K TV and tried to view my videos. And Plex App constantly stutter and saying that my connection is not enough (seem like TV were not able to decode fast enough).
But Jellyfin showed everything instantly and without stutter.
Deleted Plex - as there is no reason to maintain both.
The only real issue I've seen with Jellyfin has been some stuttering on older clients (specifically, very old and crappy webOS TVs). I'm not sure whether this is a weak hardware problem, a network problem, or something else. Other than that, it's been very smooth.
(Context: I was a Plex user and self-hoster for about 7 years, and switched to self-hosted Jellyfin about 2 years ago.)
Subtitles don't work for the most part though, so a bit of a non-starter here as I sometimes have to be quiet, and my SO has a slight hearing loss making dialog difficult to hear.
This is very much a YMMV situation. They work for me, both in the web UI, the native app, and in the Kodi plugin. I think it may have to do with where your subtitles are coming from and/or how something is configured.
If you have a device that can run it, I find that Kodi is the best frontend for JF. It has a lot of extra features that the normal client doesn't.
I have had that issue from time to time. What I did to solve that was to install plugin to extract the subtitle. Now it works perfectly (on webos tv client at least).
