It took 40 years to have solar energy and batteries up to the task, and we are not there yet. Yes, it could have been a choice to more massively invest in R&D in these fields, but you still need electricity while you shut down nuclear plants. Don’t do it unless you are ready to replace them with something else than coal. We are not there yet. Germany relies on France’s nuclear capabilities to import electricity at night.
Yes, it is not a problem for the power plants, it is a problem for the fauna and it only impacts reactors without cooling towers (which I repeat, can actually cool down rivers). And I may add, this is a problem for the fauna caused in big part by the global warming which nuclear plants help prevent.
From the (translated article)
The measures were intended to protect the ecosystem of the Aare River and comply with strict environmental regulations.
…
According to EDF, throttling or shutting down nuclear power plants during heat waves has led to an average reduction in annual electricity production of 0.3 percent since 2000.
Its a type of energy that gets more expensive
We choose to make it so. Constantly adding security features and not financing research. It could have gone down as well if we had pushed for small reactors, helped the EPR more, not shut down the research into plutonium as a fuel…
Trash is not solved
It is inert and a lot of it has the potential to be a future fuel. “Put it in a hole below the water table” is pretty close to a solution.
A minor error can have a huge environmental impact, especially in densly populated areas like Europe
It will be hard to be as impactful as coal or thermal engines, which are considered to be responsible for about 48 000 premature deaths yearly here in France. If nuclear energy allowed a country to decarbonate, it could “afford” a Chernobyl per year and still save lives.
Plants need cooling, most use rivers and that does not mix well with rising temperatures, and have to be shut down in summer
That’s simply not true. Every year journalists fall for it but here is a breakdown:
As long as there are liquid rivers, plants will be able to cool down. We will have much more serious problems before this becomes an issue.
Nuclear plants are not flexible and can’t react to energy availability
It can. As I am writing that, it is 1pm here, we are at 33GW of nuclear production, mostly because there is a lot of solar power and Germany is flooding us with electricity with negative price. At 4am, we were at 42GW of nuclear.
Most fuel is produced by less reliable states.
Minerals are fungible, therefore consumers go for the cheapest. It usually means countries where semi-slavery is the norm and environmental regulations are not a thing. They do tend to be shitty countries yes. Non-fossil mineral resources however are found pretty uniformly over the globe (having mountains helps). There are uranium mines in France that we shut down because of labor cost.
No public backing
That’s the main problem. The above lies have been repeated ad nauseam and local opposition means that opening new nuclear plants is basically impossible. This is a policy and opinion problem mostly.
I am bitter about it. The sane plan was to go full nuclear in the 90s, double the electricity production, get rid of coal and thermal vehicles that way and slowly transition over 40 years into solar as we either get batteries costs down or develop space based solar power.
Now we are getting the transition but it was oil-fueled instead of nuclear-fueled and this choice was made by people misled into believing they defended the environment by fighting nuclear power.
Yes, wind/solar + batteries is the future (though I don’t think these are cost competitive with nuclear yet. Solar alone is, batteries not) but opting out of nuclear was a very costly option for the climate.
Yeah, that kind of stuff. Any you’d recommend?
A bit dated but Cousteau’s documentaries, while it mentions environmental problems, do that from a discovery point of view.
0.7 on the Kardashev scale. En route to 1.0!
The amount of psychopaths in higher management equal the amount in prisons: https://psychology.org.au/news/media_releases/13september2016/brooks
And according to someone I know who went into the highest echelon of a big international company, at some level, it is much more prevalent than that.
I am too deeply disturbed by the malleability of psychological definitions. Especially as they describe an important phenomenon that we can observe. We need to have clearer definitions, and I don’t really have an answer here, but this is one of the many important subjects to discuss in that domain!
One thing I am pretty sure of is that the “narcissistic personality disorder” does not capture the whole extent of the problem.
high management and middle management have different profile. I feel the Gervais principle captures their dynamics well.
Thing is that there are tons of intuitions and experiences about that phenomenon, and an existing but scarce scientific literature, and very little serious debate. It touches politics, work place, personal relationships, parenting (I mean, the support subreddit /r/raisedbynarcissists has 1M subscribers)
Adam Smith described an already existing system he observed and whom emergent properties he appreciated.
Believing a third or even half of the population has narcissist tendencies seems odd to me
It is actually just a matter of putting your threshold somewhere. Like every dimension of psychometrics, tests exists and will measure a spectrum. They will put people left or right of the average level of narcissism, so like in any other metrics, you can call half of the population “more narcissist than average”. You can also split the spectrum in 3 equal part: selfless, normal, narcissist and you have a third of the population, or you can use the DSM definition of pathological narcissism disorder which only considers cases acute enough that they cause distress in the subject and prevent them to hold any job durably, which are the typical criteria for disorders, and with that they consider 6% of the US population has it.
It makes sense however to note that narcissists cause damage before reaching the pathology threshold and calling it a disorder. Toxic politicians, CEOs, conspiracy theorists pushers, have (approximately) functional lives and do not report suffering from their traits, it causes pain to others before it does to them. The matter of where the threshold is, is a worthy matter of debate and one could argue that this specific disorder makes the “subjective feeling of distress” criterion invalid.
Yes, these people exist and often thrive in capitalist societies, but they are not the main cause
In most toxic management, in most companies with terrible ethics, you will find a narcissist at the root of the problem.
I am less sure than OP that capitalism is purely a narcissist system, but at the very least, it seems clear that a lof of the negative aspects of capitalism are caused by that psychological profile and it seems like it rewards them.
Autists and ADHD do not harm society (usually it is society that harms them). Helping them integrate better do require some adaptation but it won’t come at a huge price for non-autists or non-ADHD.
Narcissists damage society and usually integrate already very well with it. They don’t want to change, either themselves or society, to lower the amount of damage.
They enrich uranium up to 60%. It is very costly and there is no civilian need for that. No one believes it is a civilian program.
I am very critical of Israel on Gaza, but on the Iranian nuclear program, there has been decades of procrastination, ambivalence and, since the last Trump episode, downright idiocy, in the handling of the diplomatic discussion. I kinda believe it when they say we were at the point where strikes were the only option to avoid a nuclear Iran.
Then again, the world pretends that Israel has no nukes whereas it is an open secret. All the other nuclear nations, including Pakistan and India, consider that the only way to be safe in such a situation is the MAD doctrine. Yet we expect Iran to stop its nuclear program and pretend its main enemy has none. I am not sure how idiotic we thought they are but even to religious fanatics it was pretty obvious that the only way for them was to have their own secret program.
This is a complex clusterfuck where you can’t easily split the actors as good guys/bad guys. There are lots of rational decisions and lots of totally idiotic religion-fueled ethnic hatred.
It is also non-coercitive.
I would argue that when you have 1000+ people, you will necessarily have subgroups, teams, you wont have 1000 on 1000 communication. There will be subtasks, people a bit more specialized at organization and communication. Topologically, you will have a graph of people passing through specialized communication nodes. I think it is unavoidable.
There is no reason however for seeing these nodes as “above” the others. It is out of habit that we organize things as a pyramid, but the fact is if a dev or a maintainer disagree, they have no way to force each other. Resolution comes from overall consensus, and the reason why Linus Torvalds is often the arbiter of these cases is because he is very respected by the rest of the community, but whole forks have existed (and have been reintegrated).
Open source politics is quite different from what people are used to. The ability to fork a whole project gives a mean of resistance that no other organization has.
The linux development team
I would be on board with that, but given our past conversations it wont surprise you.
I have some experience of moderation, I used to be one of the many moderator of /r/france the main french-speaking subreddit.
We’ll arguably be advocating for discrimination against narcissists
I think that sentence will trigger understandable reactions. The thing to realize is, most people are often already discriminating against narcissists when they fight against toxic behaviors, cultism, doxxing, trolling, etc. Safe spaces especially triggers them.
We often use labels like bigots or fascists for them, but it is becoming increasingly clear that it is not connected to a specific ideology but to a specific psychology (that tends to be attracted by some ideologies)
Anything I should know coming from a Discord moderation background?
People will call you too soft and too harsh and both will deeply feel you are on the side of their opponents (there is literally one subreddit about far-right people thinking /r/france is a communist cult and one with far-left people thinking it is a nazi den). It takes a toll on your mental health, take breaks.
Yes, it changes the criterion from “uptime of a server” to “uptime of a service” and that’s why I mention that the fediverse and even the old discussions on slrpnk.net kept being accessible.
But if we went to let go of the old world, we can’t have the back thought of “you know, worst case I’ll host that on a google drive, I know that one will be up”. We need to get to this last mile.
Really this is just a general remark, not something specially related to slrpnk.net and you are doing an awesome job, that I am grateful I don’t have to do. Please don’t see it in any form as a criticism of this server!
I am just saying that we should not embrace downtimes as an unavoidable thing or a problem we need to live in order to have a sustainable world. Resilience is also an important aspect of solarpunk.
I love the lemonaut.
Also, there is an advice I love, that can be applied to any genre: Do not write with the genre X in mind. Write what you want, pour your love in it, and let others label it. Maybe ‘solarpunk’ will end up not existing and will instead be dwarfed by a similar but different style, tidal romance, alt-earth utopians, skyships lesbian pirate slashfiction, whatever. Do not try too hard to shoehorn the themes of sustainability, it can simply be a background for the things you love.
Gibson hated the term “cyberpunk”: he said he was just writing the science fiction that made sense to him.
If you are attracted to solarpunk, you have some thoughts and hope about the future but you are probably also into other things that you love. Make it about that.
First of all, I love you, slrpnk admins.
First, yes, <3 to all.
Then:
Meh, I consider that resilience is not opposed to sustainability.
We don’t have to prioritize it right now, and I will always be grateful of volunteers who do the best they can with what they have.
And to me the lesson was that several communities (french-speaking jlai.lu) still worked and I just used an alt there to continue the conversations I had, and that I could still access through them the past conversations in slrpnk.net. This is a testament to the resilience of the fediverse architecture.
I just disagree with the sentiment that we should somehow romanticize power outages. Some people need a reliable power sources to survive, and it is a totally preventable thing. We can route around them in a radically different way though.
But thinking “this could be down for a week with no warning” also implies that I need to keep a fallback mechanism if I am using it to organize any sort of event with people.
I’ll give another factoid:
In a sunny day, around noon, many EU countries have below-zero prices for electricity exports:
It comes with a different set of issues, but this is not prospective or a hypothetical: this is the world we are living in, with the operator of the French grid warning that we are currently at solar saturation.
Now we need the other part of the puzzle: energy storage. On a HUGE scale.