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Sandford Fleming (the guy who invented time zones) actually made it easier.

Before timezones, every town had their own clock that defined the time for their town and was loosely set such that “noon is when the sun is at its highest point in the sky.” Which couldn’t be measured all that accurately.

If it wasn’t for Fleming, we’d be dealing with every city or town having a separate time zone.

I respect you for doing your own research. People need to understand the scope of the problem if there’s going to be meaningful action.

The reason I’m passionate about nuclear in particular is that only about a quarter of all fossil fuel consumption is from electricity generation.

Most of the rest is burned in transportation, buildings, commercial and residential applications. We have the tech already to switch most of these things to electricity, and eliminate their direct emissions, but that’s not much of a win if we’re burning fossil fuels generate that electricity. Which is what happens today when electricity demand is increased, we can’t just turn up the output of a solar/wind farm in periods of high demand, but we can burn more natural gas.

Switching to electric everything (Car, trucks, ships, heat pumps, furnaces, etc) will increase electricity demand by 2-3x.

Even if renewables growth is held to the exponential-ish curve it’s been so far (doubtful) we still need 15+ years just to get to the point of replacing current global fossil fuel electricity production in the most optimistic case, never mind enough to handle 2-3x demand.

Massive quantities of new carbon free electricity generation is needed to “unlock” the electrification technologies we need to deploy if we going to avoid the worst of the disaster. If we wait until renewables alone get us there it’ll be too late.

The more carbon free energy we can build in the next 20-30 years, the more options we have. Even if we can reach a place of excess capacity, there are a lot of things like DAC and CCS, that we could use it for that today result in more emissions from electricity generation than they sequester.

Don’t take my word for it. Look up the numbers for yourself and do the math.

Search for “National GHG inventory {your country}”.

You find a report listing (among a bunch of other things) the amount of electricity generated each year by each method, and the emissions from each. Look up the total TWh of electricity produced by fossil fuels.

Then look at the total TWh from renewables, and rate it has been growing Y-o-Y and extrapolate until it reaches the number needed to eliminate fossil fuels.

You’ll find it will take decades to build enough renewable capacity to replace fossil fuel based electricity generation.

And that’s before you realize that only about 25% of fossil fuel combustion goes to electricity generation. As we start switching cars, homes, industries to electric we’re going to need 2x-3x more electricity generation.

Yes it takes a long time to bring on a new nuclear plant, roughly 7-9 years. If it was remotely realistic that we could build enough renewable power generation in that time to replace all fossil fuel generation then I’d agree we don’t need nuclear. But we’re not anywhere close to that.

It’s also helpful to note too just how much power a nuclear reactor generates. I live in Canada, our second smallest nuclear power plant in Pickering, generates almost 5 times more electricity annually than all of Canada’s solar farms combined. It will take 1000s or solar and wind farms covering and area larger than all of our major cities combined to replace fossil fuels…

…or about 7 nuclear power stations the same size as Pickering.

Yes and no. Renewables are now cheaper than other forms of energy but cost isn’t the only issue.

There are practical limits on how many renewables projects we can build and integrate at a time. We’re not even remotely close to building them fast enough to save anything. We can’t even build them fast enough to keep up with the ever increasing demand energy.

Nuclear is expensive as fuck but we need to be building more of it as well as renewables because we can’t build enough renewables fast enough to avert the catastrophe, and that’s about the only other tech we have that can generate energy in the massive quantities needed without significant greenhouse gas emissions.

We’re both correct.

LCOE is based on total operating costs of new electric power generation station over a 20+ year operation life. There are obviously a lot of assumptions in these sorts of analyses but Nat Gas is projected to become cheaper than Coal over the life of a new project, which some of that is expected to be due to carbon taxes.

LCOE has some flaws as a comparable number when comparing wind and solar to fossil fuels, but is good for understanding what will be cheapest to build of fuel based generation.

For current existing power stations, coal is cheapest of the fuels. The EIA numbers are here and here’s Statista research here on the historical cost of nat gas vs coal specifically which is frustratingly why coal phase outs have been so slow. Keeping existing coal plants operating is cheaper than building new almost anything.

And you are correct, price is specific to geography and availability of each. My blanket statement of “coal being the cheapest fuel” is over generalized and not universally correct.

It’s expensive and dirty fuel.

It’s definitely the dirtiest fuel by a good margin. But coal is actually the cheapest fuel. Which is the main reason it still gets used.

Uranium used to be cheaper than coal, but now that we all but stopped building nuclear power plants it’s gone up significantly.

Wind and solar are now cheaper than coal for electricity generation, if we can limit growth in energy demand to a rate lower than the growth in renewables, economics will eventually push all electricity generation off of coal.

I thought the Quran made no mention of FGM, and that the practice was discouraged (or outright forbidden) by Islamic fatwas / religious scholars.

That could get really awkward if some of the neopronouns become common.

“… tell him or her or zim or xyr or thon that he or she or ze or xe or thon can leave a message… “

Because Spez is a greedy little pig boy.

Ask a stupid question…

There’s a problem with the “if it’s medically necessary” part.

All the states that have banned abortions have some sort of exemption for if it’s necessary to save the mom’s life but patients are still dying because doctors risk prison time if they make that decision and the state disagrees on if it was necessary. So patients clearly needing medically necessary abortions aren’t getting them early when they’re low risk, they’re getting them when they’re close to death and the surgery is high risk.

You’re right that circumcisions usually aren’t necessary. But there are medical benefits to the procedure and it is a valid treatment for some medical conditions like phimosis which can lead to serious infections.

Reducing medically unnecessary circumstances is a problem to fix with education not legislation.

We need to let parents and doctors still make informed medical decisions without the state interfering.

If a website using home realm discovery adds anything more than one extra press of the enter key or mouse click of an ‘ok’ button, get a better password manager.

If you’re annoyed by that one extra click that’s fair. Click counts matter.

It’s called home realm discovery. It’s common in business apps though it’s usually used with email & password logins not username & password logins.

It’s done that way to support federated logins. Larger companies will often used a single sign on solution like Okta or Azure AD. Once the user’s email address is entered it checks the domain against a list of sign on providers for each domain and redirects the user to their company’s federated login if it finds it there instead of prompting for a password.

This has several benefits:

1. The user doesn’t have mutiple passwords to remember for different apps. Which is know to result in users either reusing passwords or writing down passwords somewhere.

2. When an employee quits or is terminated the company only needs to disable their account in their company directory and not go into potential dozens of separate web apps to disable accounts.

3. The software vendor never receives the password, if the vendor’s system is compromised they don’t even have password hashes to leak. (Let alone plain text or reversibly encrypted passwords)

Websites that work that way are (usually) doing it right. If that doesn’t work with your password manager, you should (probably) blame the password manager not the website.

This is great to see.

80% of carbon offsets are creative accounting at best and bold-faced lies at worst.

If you don’t agree I’ve got a ~a bridge~ I mean some Carbon Offsets for sale.

Exactly.

Your choice is “Guilty” or “Not Guilty” not “Guilty” or “Innocent”.

(And for the pedantic out there yes, there are more things you can plead than just guilty or not guilty)

“Not guilty” doesn’t mean innocent, it just means you take the stance that prosecutors are unable to prove their version of events beyond reasonable doubt.

Spez is such a lying sack of 💩

Third party apps weren’t some collateral damage from monetizing LLM usage. Reddit set the prices. There’s no reason why there couldn’t be one price for third party apps like Apollo and RIF that are largely used to add to the community and build Reddit’s value, and a separate price for throws just using it to mine the data.

It wasn’t about opportunity costs of lost ad revenue either. By all estimates, if they gave the third party apps a grace period to rework their business models to be able to pay the api fees. The average third party app user would generate several times more revenue for Reddit than the revenue they get from ads by forcing them to use Reddit’s shitty app

So why Reddit would force people to use their free shitty app if the revenue is less? Either Spez and the leadership at Reddit are idiots or the Reddit it’s giving them something else of value they can sell that they don’t get for the third party apps. Something besides just eyeballs on ads.

I’m pretty sure Reddit killed third party apps so they can harvest more of your data and sell you out.

I will absolutely give you that transitioning an established mature product to the subscription model is usually a terrible idea. Plenty of examples of that going horribly wrong.

As for subscriptions being a “blatant money grab” that definitely happens sometimes… notably when there’s a mature product with a dominating market share. The company already captured most of the market share, so they can’t get much more revenue from new customers, existing customers are satisfied with the version they have so they’re not buying any updates. Sales go down and someone comes along say just make it a subscription and keep milking the cash cow forever…. Yep, I admit it, that totally happens. The enshitification ensues.

But none of that’s the fault of the subscription model per se.

The same subscription model that becomes the incumbent’s downfall, is what creates a market opportunity for a new competitor.

A new competitor can coming in with a new product that was built with a subscription model from the start. The competitors product is cheap to try for a month, cheap to switch to with no big upfront costs. The newcomers can generally react much faster to customers needs than the incumbent. (Not because of the model, they can because they’re smaller)

Established software companies doing blatant money grabs happen all the time. Hell most of us are here using Lemmy because Spez attempted a blatant money grab on Reddit. Had nothing to do with the model.

Subscription model gets a lot of hate because greedy companies tried to use it as a blatant money grab exactly as you described. But it doesn’t have to be that way.

Subscription models make it easier for newcomers entering a space, which is good for consumers. It’s more compatible with agile development methodologies because you don’t need wait until you’ve bundled enough features together to market it as a new version worth upgrading to. It’s in your best interest to ship new features immediately as they’re developed.

It’s totally fair of you don’t like the model.

But the model itself isn’t the problem.

Shitty companies being greedy will always happen.

Totally fair if you don’t like the subscription model.

But I am genuinely curious what you think I’m making assumptions about.

Data on a HDD that’s been overwritten with zeros or random data is unrecoverable with all known current technology.

In theory it might be possible to recover something with some future tech that hasn’t been invented yet, which is why the DOD standard requires erasing with multiple passes, but there isn’t currently a (publicly known) way of doing it.

SSDs are a bit tricky because of wear levelling, but usually two full overwrites of a SSD makes it just as unrecoverable.

Wow… lots of people in here bashing the subscription model, but let me point out it’s maybe not as bad as you think…

If you sell a product under a perpetual license model (I.e the one-time purchase model). Once you’ve sold the product, the manufacturer has almost no incentive to offering any support or updates to the product. At best it’s a marketing ploy, you offer support only to get word of mouth advertising of your product which is generally a losing proposition.

Since there’s little incentive to improve the experience for existing customers. Your main income comes from if you can increase your market share which generally means making products bloated often leading to a worse experience for everyone.

If the customer wants support, you need to sell them a support contract. If they want updates you have to make a new version and hope the customer sees enough additional value to be worth upgrading. Either way we’re back to a subscription model with more steps, more risk, and less upside than market expansion so it takes a backseat.

If you want to make a great product without some variation on a subscription. You need to invest heavily upfront in development (which most companies don’t have the capital to do, and investors generally won’t invest in unproven software)

From a product perspective, you don’t know if you’ve hit the mark until people start using your product. The first versions of anything but the most trivial of products is usually terrible, because no matter how good you are, half to three quarters of the ideas you build are going to be crap and not going to be what the customers need.

Perpetual licensing works for a small single purpose application with no expectation of support or updates.

It works for applications with broad market needs like office software.

For most niche applications, subscription models offer a better experience for both the customer and the manufacturer.

The customer isn’t facing a large transition cost to switch to a competitor’s product like they would if they had to buy a perpetual license of it, so you have a lot more incentive to support and improve your product. You also don’t see significant revenue if the customer that drops your service a couple months in… even more reason to focus on improving the product for existing customers.

People ought hate the idea of paying small reoccurring fees for software instead of a few big upfront costs. But from a business model perspective, businesses are way more incentivized to focus on making their products better for you under that model.