I'd have thought there are many tech angles. For example, in a possible Greenland invasion, what are the implications of the US having control of dominant platforms such as Windows, Android and Apple? Not to mention all the dominant cloud platforms.
I must confess, the Python driver pg8000 which I maintain doesn't support pipeline mode. I didn't realise it existed until now, and nobody has ever asked for it. I've created an issue for it https://codeberg.org/tlocke/pg8000/issues/174
Public transport in London is world class. Most people don’t even drive into London, let alone inside the congestion zone. And this was true even long before the congestion zone was created.
There's also the approach to funding that looks at things from another angle, and says we should have a basic income, or negative income tax, for everyone.
If a sufficiently large number of participants, with sufficient resources participate, then any open source project with sufficient utilization and value will receive funding.
I work on Chellow, an open source Web app for checking and reporting on UK electricity and gas bills for large organisations https://github.com/WessexWater/chellow . It's a mature project that's used by two organisations. Please get in touch if this is something you're interested in.
Comparing electricity costs between countries probably says more about government subsidies than the underlying cost of generation. Nuclear fission is an expensive source of electricity (see the high subsidies for Hinckley C) and so I suspect France's nuclear power is heavily subsidised.
> Nuclear fission is an expensive source of electricity (see the high subsidies for Hinckley C) and so I suspect France's nuclear power is heavily subsidised.
There are no subsidies in Ontario, Canada, and nuclear is the second cheapest (CA$ 0.101/kHw) after hydro-electric (6.2¢/kWh); see Table 2:
For nuclear, the subsidies are often in insurance and decommissioning and long-term storage of waste.
So looking at insurance, it's impossible to fully insure a nuclear power station, and so the state effectively insures it.
With long term storage of waste, the material has to be securely stored for about 10,000 years. As far as I know, only Finland is doing this so far.
With decommissioning, it always costs more than is set aside, and so the taxpayer gets left to pick up the pieces eventually.
With your example of Ontario I don't know how these costs I've outlined will be handled, but if it's anything like the UK the costs will be pushed onto the taxpayer.
> With long term storage of waste, the material has to be securely stored for about 10,000 years. As far as I know, only Finland is doing this so far.
It has to be stored for 6-10 years for cooling after it is taken out of the reactor. Then after 200-300 years the only way it is dangerous is if you (a) eat it, or (b) grind it up and snort it like cocaine.
The '10,000 year stuff' is not very 'hot' and any radiation given off can be blocked by aluminium foil. The dangers over thousands of years is overblown:
> With your example of Ontario I don't know how these costs I've outlined will be handled, but if it's anything like the UK the costs will be pushed onto the taxpayer.
The generation companies will be handling nuclear waste in Canada:
> The Act required Canadian electricity generating companies which produce used nuclear fuel to establish a waste management organization to provide recommendations to the Government of Canada on the long-term management of used nuclear fuel. The legislation also required the waste owners to establish segregated trust funds to finance the long-term management of the used fuel.
You are right, but the same holds true for other sources: many externalize costs (e.g. CO2 emissions and thereby climate change, or glass fiber composite in windmills being notoriously hard to recycle).
It still may be an acceptable price, externalizing certain known or unknown costs to the state, but when it comes down to it, no source really does this well. That being hard to price is a good reason.
The Android app StreetComplete is an excellent start for updating OSM I found. There soon become occasions when you have to bring out the big guns and edit it using the web editor at https://www.openstreetmap.org/ , which is possible to do on a mobile phone if it has a big enough screen, but much easier on a laptop.
I used it as an interview question many years ago. I wasn't very rigorous about it, basically any plausible answer was good enough for me. Answers fell into two categories, the theorists (it's an infinite series that doesn't converge) and the pragmatists (you couldn't physically do it).
As anyone who's played light switch disco will know, the light bulb will blow long before you reach the theoretical limit of the series. :D
(Actually thinking about it, that's probably not true because the switching accelerates so fast... the limiting factor is probably actually friction from moving the switch, and/or the tensile strength of the switch housing. I wonder if it would just disintegrate or if it would build up enough heat to properly explode...?)
I think the limiting factor will be the inductance of the wire and lightbulb filament, which sustains a current even when the switch attempts to break the circuit!
Ooh good point! Whatever kind of light bulb it is, it will (through inductance, thermal mass or fluorescence) continue to glow (which I’m counting as being “on”) for at least 1/60th of a second after losing AC power. So I’d say it will be glowing quite a lot at the 2 minute mark even if the switch components are forming their own singularity right nearby.
I'll give you a good in between. The problem is underspecified because the universe in question is underspecified. You can get pretty much any result you want out of such a strange thing by specifying a more fully-fleshed out universe in which that is the answer. You can create one in which the answer is half-on, half-off, even though you initially specified your cells as only containing integers and not realized that your axioms entailed additional values, which themselves could be limited to rationals with the right axioms, or the computables, or the reals, or several other things.
In this, your universe may admit of a natural "averaging" operation, where you take a "half on" thing and a "quarter on thing" and produce a "three quarters on thing" in some natural manner. Playing around in my head, I find you need to be careful about your definition of "fully on" and "fully off" here; you may or may not want to permit an "infinite sequence" that contains zero changes in it. But you'll get a weirder number system if full-on and full-off are not permitted, where you can arbitrarily close to them but not quite achieve them.
Or you may find your axioms force you to admit a new "undefined" value that, again, you didn't realize when you started that you were adding but it turns out you were. Or you could create a scenario where this actually freezes your entire universe because there simply is no way to proceed past the singularity, because your "take next step" function simply stops working and you get the mathematical equivalent of a crashed or hung program. (Just because something is "mathematical" does not imply totality; there's many, many, many cases where the answer is just "That function doesn't work there". Sometimes that leads to an exploration of "well what if we force it anyhow", e.g., "square root of negative numbers", but sometimes it really is just "this function stops here".)
An intriguing exercise for those who may want to experience this sort of "I didn't realize these axioms did that!" first hand is to look up the "surreal numbers" if you've never heard of them before. Read the definition of surreal and try to guess what numbers will emerge from it. Then watch as your mind is blown about what you admit when you admit those axioms. Unfortunately, I could not find a presentation of surreal numbers that started with the bare definition; for obvious reasons everyone leads with where you're going because who reads unmotivated mathematical definitions for fun, right? Still, try to imagine what you would have expected such axioms to produce, what someone might have "intended" them to produce, versus what the actually do.
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