Ironically, that's what I decided to spend my time on instead. I was trying to decide whether to do a PhD with said technical project/idea or to do one focusing on non-programming technical skills + history for early education precisely because I think improving the education level of the general public is also a good way to improve things.
And can we talk about how stupid and actively malicious it is to use the Fukushima accident as a reason for shutting down nuclear plants in Germany?
Fukushima: nuclear plant in a seismically very active region in very close proximity to the ocean where tsunamis are not really a rarity
vs.
German nuclear plants: not very seismically active (if at all), no tsunamis i've ever heard of, not counting floods as those are
1. easier to foresee and manage and
2. very much less intense than a sudden wall of water razing everything in its path.
Also in Japan you kinda have to build near the coast since its surrounded by ocean on all sides while being stretched out long and not that wide with mountains as a backbone in the middle. Germany on the other hand only has the North and Baltic Sea at its northern end then progressively gets higher above sea level the more south you go, ultimately ending at the northern end of the Alps.
This decision and especially this reasoning didn't make sense then and still doesn't nowadays. It was just a kneejerk reaction to retain voter support by exploiting the fear of the uneducated and the anti-nuclear crowd.
Your reasoning why nuclear accidents couldn't happen in Germany is moving the goalpost though. First the narrative was that they couldn't happen, then it was that they couldn't happen in western style reactors.
The reality is that nuclear reactors can lead to big events in unforeseen situations, like also Fukushima was. It's impossible to foresee what the cause for the next big event will be.
The Fukushima reactors and a lot of the german ones were built by the same company. They overlooked the flood risk on the japanese coast (which has huge tsunamis every few decades). What did they overlook elsewhere? After Chernobyl, politicians promised that western reactors could not possibly explode. Fukushima proved them wrong.
The Soviet power plan released radioactivity in the air, make an entire area inhabitable and killed a few dozen a people.
Fukushima did nothing of this, everything stayed inside the structure, no radioactivity went out.
As Fukushima had no recovery generators available (no fuel in them), it is a great proof that a totally out of control modern power plant is not deadly.
The Fukushima disaster cleanup cost a trillion dollars. Over a hundred thousand people were (at least temporarily) displaced. I would call this a pretty darn big failure.
The trillion dollar figure is a bit of a stretch and includes a lot of stuff that didn't need to happen or was double counted.
Less motivated reasoning gives about $300bn which would still be enough to easily replace every coal and oil plant in the country with renewables (as well as half of the gas).
Comparing Fukushima to Chernobyl is not really justified
Chernobyl: Core meltdown and catastrophic explosion of entire reactor. Caused by gross negligence when safety system disabled.
Direct deaths: <100
Estimated indirect deaths: 4 to 16 thousand
Fukushima: Caused by 4th largest earthquake in history. No core explosion. Hydrogen explosion destroyed non structural part of building (this was by design). Core meltdown but largely contained. Contamination of air/water from venting to atmosphere.
Direct deaths: 1 employee died of cancer
Estimated indirect deaths: 300-2000
Minority parties can make the governing parties do things. UKIP wasn't in government but they made the Conservative party promise a referendum, which the eurosceptic side won -- and that was in a FPTP system! The Greens weren't in government but they had a lot of influence in the Bundestag and in the various Länder. The anti-nuclear cause has been around for decades, they creep in everywhere like a fungus.
Merkel adopted the anti-nuclear stance to take votes from the Greens, and her administration accelerated the shutdown of Germany's nuclear power plants after Fukushima. Don't blame the Greens, although I do think they are a dogmatic single-issue party and don't see the forest for the trees.
Hi I'm the author of Linen.dev. I can elaborate a bit on this. There are a ton of free tools that offer some form or another of this service. About half of the communities that are using Linen have built something similar themselves.
We offer a bunch of little things that you might not build but are very helpful:
* We support real time message sync in addition to historic uploads
* We support sitemaps for large communities since our largest community has over 50k members and almost a million messages and it makes it easier for google to find the conversations
* We support emoji and image attachments
* We offer anonymization for your community members so it hides display name as well as profile pictures.
We charge a higher price for premium account because we are 2 full time engineers working on this and want to hit profitability so we can be around for the long run. We are still experimenting with the pricing model so if pricing is an issue let me know.
oh that looks great! I didn't find it when I was looking for Slack export tools, but looks a bit more polished. Not sure if it's fully static though? Seems a bit slower to me, so that might be one key difference.
yea its fully static and also offers a paid plan with CNAME and so on.
It works fairly well for me but there is still room for improvement.
Was only a matter of time until some competition appeared, do you already have an idea how your paid plan will look like?
Another key differentiator could be a selfhosting option as mentioned above.
will definitely follow this projects progress
I would definitely offer a lower price for custom domain -- 99/month seems excessive, but no I haven't thought too much about pricing yet - would love to hear your thoughts on what you would be happy to pay for what features!
How many Einsteins perished in the fields or trenches? How much innovation and genius is stifled through lack of access to food, water or education?
I think that would be an area where improvements would be more impactful than trying to prevent copycats.