notapantsday @ notapantsday @feddit.de

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2 yr. ago

I just remember a sandwich covered in melted cheese with an egg on top and some kind of sauce. And a lot of delicious fried food. Both usually with fries as a side dish. Never any salad unless I specifically ordered it. I'm sure I could have gone to lots of restaurants where they would have had lighter meals, but I was on holiday so greasy was perfect.

When you play the game of thrones, you win or you die.

In my example, 'Rotterdam' is supposed to be the ultimate destination, so it would be equivalent to 'carbon neutrality'. Changing the destination to 'Africa' would be the equivalent to just building nuclear power plants for the sake of it, regardless of whether they help us reach carbon neutrality.

Your second paragraph could be summed up as: we chose the destination years ago, so there’s no point changing course.

Which makes perfect sense when you consider that there's a deadline, we've gone a very long way in one direction and going all the way back to take another route would guarantee missing that deadline.

It's like you're taking your ship from China to Rotterdam, you're past the Suez canal, in the Mediterranean and now you decide to turn around and go around Africa after all. It really would be idiotic.

That's not how renewables work. They don't produce electricity on demand (at least not solar and wind), their energy output is dependent on the weather. If there's no wind and no sun, they won't cover any demand spikes. Which is why baseload power like nuclear is pretty much useless in combination with renewables.

What is actually needed is flexible power that can be quickly adapted to the varying output from solar and wind. This is currently mostly done with natural gas, which we're trying to get away from. In the future, biomass, water and storage will cover that part, while demand response strategies will help reduce demand peaks during times of low energy production.

I had high hopes for the current government, but I never imagined the FDP would be able to do so much damage with so few votes. The way it is now, I'm pretty disappointed. A lot of great ideas that were just shut down in their infancy.

I hope so...

cork oaks

Portugal! What a wonderful country full of wonderful people. We do care about you and your delicious but slightly greasy food.

That is just blatant misinformation. Name one single coal plant that has been restarted since nuclear power was phased out.

That is just misinformation. First of all, nuclear power never contributed that much anyway. If all nuclear power plants ever built in Germany were running at full load 24/7 for 365 days of the year, they would produce 231 TWh, which is less than 10% of our total energy demand. So there was never that big of a hole to fill in the first place. Especially in the last ten years, when only a handful of power plants were still in service.

In reality, renewables have managed to replace both nuclear power and a large chunk of fossil fuels (source). Last year we had to export enormous amounts of energy to France, because their nuclear plants had proven so unreliable (source). This has admittedly led to an increased use of fossil fuels, which we could have avoided by building more renewables here (or in France).

We are trying to get more heat pumps installed, but people are still proud of getting a new gas furnace installed in 2023, thus avoiding a potential ban and betting on guaranteed dirt-cheap natural gas for another 20 years.

But either way, nuclear power is history in Germany and it makes absolutely no sense to bring it back. We never had a lot of nuclear power to begin with and the few power plants that could maybe be reactivated with a ton of money and labor are just a drop in the bucket. Building new reactors takes decades from initial planning to going live and nuclear construction projects are notorious for immense cost overruns. Plus, there are only a few construction companies in the world that have the capabilities to build a nuclear reactor and they're already tied up in other projects. We would need dozens of new reactors built simultaneously and they would still be finished too late to contribute anything meaningful to a carbon-free electrical grid.

At the same time, wind energy is a dirt cheap, proven technology that is much more easily deployed, scales really well, is decentralized and reliable. Yes, it can be intermittent but it's predictable (weather forecasts exist). And if we had invested a fraction of the R&D budget for nuclear fission and fusion into energy storage technology, it would be a complete non-issue. We have some work to do in that regard, but sodium ion batteries are pretty far in development and should be much cheaper. Iron redox flow and liquid metal batteries also have potential, maybe hydrogen. Demand response will also be a big factor. With flexible pricing during the day, both households and businesses can save a lot of money by using more energy whenever there's a lot of it and less when it's scarce.

There are lots of lithium battery types that do not contain any cobalt, such as LFP that is used more and more for electric cars.

Ever heard of wind power?

Yes, this is what made me switch. I had heard about the fediverse, but it seemed too complicated and I didn't want to do the research and find out how it works. Then someone on reddit said "just sign up to lemmy.world lol", I tried it and that was it.

After a while, I decided to go with a local instance, but just having somewhere to start was what pushed me over the edge.

I only know the situation in Germany, but it's likely similar. Consent is not the bottleneck. The number of organs that cannot be donated because consent is either unclear or not given at all is pretty small, even though a lot of people aren't registered organ donors. Usually the next of kin are asked what the donor might have wanted and in the majority of cases, they agree with a donation.

Making donations mandatory would have a very minor effect.

The true bottleneck is that a very specific condition is needed in order to make organ donation possible. The donor has to be dead because you can't take vital organs from a living person. But at the same time, their heart still has to be beating in order to keep the organs supplied with oxygen until they can be removed.

The only way this is possible is when the brain is dead but the heart and other organs still function with medical assistance. A person without a working brain is considered dead by law. This only happens with very serious brain injury, major strokes or similar incidents. And with improving treatment options, a lot of people who would have ended up brain dead a few decades ago, can now survive with varying neurological outcomes.

If you want a lot more organ donors, ban helmets. Otherwise, there are no simple solutions.

I don't know. The way it's going down, it really makes him look like an idiot. He could have just flipped the switch and turned it off as a massive demonstration of power.

Instead he's making one mindboggingly stupid decision after another, showing the whole world how utterly incompetent he is.

The most logical explanation for me is the easiest one: if he's making stupid and incompetent decisions, maybe he's just stupid and incompetent.

There are no more safe places. Here in Germany, we're also starting to get major wildfires and we're completely unprepared. We have a total of zero firefighting planes, mostly using police and military helicopters. Our firefighters are doing training in countries like Greece or Portugal because we have no experience here. And still, most people think it's just a bad year or bad decade and it will all magically go away very soon.

I mean... it's pretty much impossible to know how many undiscovered murders there are. Yes, you can do autopsies on everyone who's declared dead and then figure out how many of them were killed, but there are a lot of ways to kill a person that won't show up in an autopsy, especially in a hospital setting.

In some aspects, cameras have even become worse. They started optimizing their software for the wrong metrics, which leaves you with heavily over-processed images that always look a little off. This can make otherwise boring images seem a bit more interesting, but if you're actually trying to take good pictures, it can seriously ruin your shots.

I think Sony is one of the few manufacturers that allows you to choose less aggressive processing.

I once came across a reddit thread where physical violence against children was seen as a normal and necessary means of parenting. And it was a mature thread in a mainstream subreddit with thousands of responses. This was the consensus and anyone disagreeing was downvoted into oblivion.