I'd certainly say it has merit - large companies have separate teams maintaining the Kubernetes/Git/CI/AWS/emailing/auth/etc cloud setup that's used by individual product teams, and what else is that if not "platform engineering"? They don't have anything to do with development, we have in-team DevOps guys for that kind of work - configuring the provided K8s for our particular services, making use of the cloud services the platform team has made available to us, writing the Dockerfiles, etc.
If your company is just one product or one team, it might be used as a buzzword. Not when there's tens of products, hundreds of dev teams and thousands of microservices - maintaining this kind of platform is a very distinct discipline from DevOps.
In practically any country with socialized healthcare you will be strongly encouraged to terminate a child that might turn out unhealthy, and in a lot of them you will lose "benefits" (on which you depend because you were forced to pay mandatory social insurance before, taking away your ability to save/invest by yourself) if you don't listen/go to the doctors as "you are supposed to because that's the system". Where I live in Central Europe, going to the gynecologist and listening to their recommendations is a requirement to get full parental social benefits - and the policy most certainly is also based on what's economical for the state/"the system", and only parents that were previously working can get the benefits.
Additionally, you will have to pay the full price for any treatment that's outside their recommendations, this often turns out higher in absolute prices than in any US hospital - even though the people are much poorer.
Then once an unhealthy child is born they often don't get the full benefits of socialized healthcare as they should according to the constitutions, the administration will say "the system works in a different way and you went outside it, so you need to take care of it yourself" and the parents are forced to pay for treatments and medical equipment by themselves because what "the system recommends" is not nearly enough (we are talking about US$ millions of additional out-of-pocket expenses in some real world cases that I follow locally). That could be interpreted as a form of tax too, especially since you are forced to pay mandatory health insurance in most of these countries.
I see what you're saying, and appreciate you sharing that perspective.
We could say that before conception, everyone agrees there is no child, and at birth, everyone agrees there is a child, so there is maybe a "spectrum" between "idea of a child" and "an actual he/she".
Your use of the wording "much more" sort of supports this "probability distribution function" idea of what a child is, and it seems like a helpful philosophical framing of this difficult and important question.
What I would say, though, is that if society is going to pick a point along that spectrum to base policy decisions on, then there is an imbalance between the risks of placing that point too early versus too late.
Too early means that some women's decisions will be unreasonably restricted, whereas too late means that some human being's lives will be unreasonably terminated.
The philosophically humble thing to do under such uncertainty would therefore be to err on the side of an earlier point, and in fact the earliest point possible, lest future generations look back on us like the slave owners or eugenicists of previous centuries.
These are real issues. Saying nuclear is too hard/too dangerous/too expensive/takes too long is the real FUD, simply because it's a wide range of significantly different technologies each with vastly different properties (whereas solar panels are all pretty similar and the problems are not with one particular kind but external - caused by how the solar panels are used). We need both/all.
Are they though?
A big fraction of those panels are made in countries other than China.
The panels generally generate still more than 70% of their original power after 20 or 30 years.
They're hardend against hail, can be insured and do definitely not require a lot of copper wiring.
I wouldn't buy any stock related to mini nuclear reactors. It doesn't seem like a promising solution, since none of them have been actually deployed at all, they cannot be sold to less rich countries since they prefer solar in general, and the dangers to nuclear accidents, proliferation as well as the inevitable dismantling after their lifetimes.
We're good with solar, wind and hydrogen storage.
I'm not a nuclear engineer, but I wish there was more news about it.
Just yesterday my state (in Central EU) has incorporated a company that is going to deploy several SMRs here. One of the US ones got certified just few months ago (they are buying that one too) and we also have our local designs ready to certify and then build - this country is extremely pro-nuclear (over 80% support) and has significant nuclear engineering industry and world-class nuclear regulation authority. I really don't think you're right it's not happening.
And talking about nuclear in general, we are building several standard big reactors too (expanding older power plants), with no sign of insurmountable problems - ever since we stopped letting the greens affect the projects with their FUD and fake "studies" it's going more than well enough, unfortunately they backtracked us for a decade before we were able to change the law otherwise we would have the new reactors running today (the local Green party went from 30% to literally 0 over this, lol).
The nukes will all be mothballed by 2040, as they find it impossible to compete.
That is, provided global society does not collapse first. If it does, they will be mothballed as unmaintainable, instead, if they don't blow up for the same reason.
Right, it is significant that the only places shelling out for SMR are the US and Romania. Only the latter is actually planning to deploy them. (The US hands over tax money to people making them, but US utility operators don't want any.) Corruption suffices to account for both.
Renewables+storage is just too obviously a better place to invest, if you care about investing wisely.
If you have so much free space as US or Romania, maybe. There are much smaller states without enough sunshine though, and people hate having wind turbines visible near their houses (also, if you care about ecology then the blades are a big problem). Both wouldn't be nearly enough to replace fossil fuels anyways - only nuclear allows us to ditch natural gas and benzin/diesel entirely.
Romania by itself has the land area for 3.5 TW of electricity average over a year, even assuming 15% efficient PV and a 10% capacity factor; the actual capacity factor given Romanian climate would be more like 5.5 TW; current global electricity use is only 2.7 TW.
Cyprus (the island) has a better climate, so despite its small size, it could produce 137% of the entire EU's current annual demand from PV.
Land use just isn't close to being a limiting factor, so even though PV does indeed need more land than some other things, it just doesn't matter.
You're talking about electricity, I am talking about replacing the entire energetic demand. That means fuel for ICE vehicles, ships, etc in addition to all the fossil fuels used purely for heating.
What Cyprus, Romania and other states do internally is not so interesting - every state is selling electricity for outrageous prices internationally, so it's not really something we'd want to rely on.
My point remains valid even if you want to replace all energy and not just what is already electrified, and also boost global energy use to the per-capita rate of Qatar (I think the highest in the world at about 2.5 times the average of the USA), and also boost world population to 10 billion, and also the PV is placed slightly worse than if it was randomly scattered.
Simultaneously. And by a large margin.
There's a lot of land on this planet of ours.
(The reason I chose Cyprus as an example is because of how small it is, and yet could supply so much if it wanted to. Any single one of Bavaria, Lombardy, Brussels, Lubusz, Aragón, Île-de-France could individually supply the entire EU just from PV, not merely meet their own needs, but again this is just to give a sense of scale — the correct placement of PV is seldom "all in one place").
Land use, even if, would not matter, because solar coexists with existing uses. Float solar on reservoirs and canals, post it in fence-rows on pasture and cropland, lay it out on industrial and warehouse roofing.
I don't know what you're talking about, we're building and the reactors we built previously work cheaper than any renewable/gas/coal/whatever, the only problem is that we don't have enough, but we will have more soon. You're the one wishing for renewables - and indeed, wishing won't make it happen.
The Greens slowed us down for two election intervals but they're gone and the building is resumed. Don't let Greens decide your policy and you can build too - and when you take them out of the equation it suddenly becomes cheap. We will happily build for you if your nuclear industry is not up to it, all it takes is ask.
If you're comparing only solar panels, then maybe. I'm comparing the whole system - batteries, transmission, gas usage when it's not enough sunshine for a third of the year here, etc. Our electricity got more expensive mostly thanks to renewables, not cheaper. Now we're building reactors to have it cheap again.
Your electricity got more expensive because of an artificial NG shortage. Failing to build out solar will leave you buying from neighboring countries that didn't, at prices less than it costs to operate your reactors.
I am not talking about the current situation, I am talking about the times when gas was cheapest ever around 10 years ago. People were building resistive electric heating because it still came out cheaper than using gas.
Currently our state is net-exporter and probably always will be since the states around us are refusing nuclear altogether. And Germany nor Austria has never ever offered electricity cheaper than our own.
I guess it's more about intuition - they see when they damage someone immediately and stop doing that (e.g. wrong choice of prescription pills). With nutrition, they don't see the effect and/or don't attribute it to their advice because it takes decades to take effect, so they keep repeating the old advice. Practically all doctors I ever visited acted primarily on their intuition - "I have experience this works so use it".
> Voxer's rights to features such as "find friends"
You mean like any random phpBB forum or the thousands of web dating sites that appeared between the 90s and today?
They don't say in the article what "live" features they are talking about but I guess it's just as ridiculous as this claim.
My Sony Ericsson had a push-to-talk as well as video call features in 2006 and there were internet video streaming apps for J2ME in 2008. Remember ICQ? Same thing.
Did Voxer invent WebRTC (or whatever they use - I bet they didn't even write their own code but used a lib) or any of the underlying internet protocols? Did they invent the concept of live video stream? I really don't think so.
The BTC core team was highly concerned with the legality of the network due to previous failed currency's (eCash, B-money, Bit Gold, and Hashcash) that ended up driving certain decisions in architecture.
The original btc had a networked pokergame along with the wallet, but was taken out for a couple of reasons, including regulatory issues.
I'm not saying parent is right, or wrong but to dismiss it and to speak for the core team out of hand is folly.
Please share your reasoning - as the sibling comment mentions, there was a series of high profile online cash cases at the time, KYC being the biggest problem. It'd be weird if they didn't think hard about avoiding the same fate and perhaps this was they way they've chosen.
You do realize that these topics arw differwnt? Also a nice stab at supressed women standing up for their rights in very repressive country, doing so takes a lot of courage. Don't diminish that.
I didn't diminish a thing. If anything, it was a stab at the dumb religion the damned government is basing it on. I lived through communism in Europe and was present during the local revolution, I know very well how much courage is required, I was staring inside the gun of a Russian tank there. And no I don't think these topics are too different - everybody knows unfree people need secure communication first and foremost, it's only your take that the iPhone is merely a fashion accessory, but in practice it's also the most secure phone on the market and now it's getting sattelite comms too.
New iPhones. It's very common to buy secondhand in these markets. The satellite-able ones will need some time to "trickle down" but it's going to happen - especially if it offers this feature.
Tmobile is actually the one that will be partnering with Starlink. Apple is partnering with GlobalStar which actually really sucks (currently) and will have pretty much the worst satellite network for at least a few years. If they really got their shit together and started launching satellites ASAP they could probably improve a lot in a year or two.
Also GlobalStar only covers the continental US and a little farther......
Depending on how strict they are you might be able to smuggle in a Garmin inReach and connect to Iridium now (or an actual Iridium or Inmarsat satellite phone or modem)
