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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 12th, 2023

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  • More than 500 people were sent to hospital after the incident … 423 people have been discharged from hospital … 25 in serious condition

    What is stupid is the headline, why not “500+ injured in subway crash” instead of using the number of one kind of injury. As stupid as writing “two people lost a tooth in subway crash”. Still one of the seriously injured could die, but of course I wish everyone a speedy recovery, from injuries but also from the shock of the accident.


  • I think it is about this currently happening:

    https://www-wiwo-de.translate.goog/technologie/wirtschaft-von-oben/wirtschaft-von-oben-212-britische-atomkraft-hier-manifestieren-sich-die-spannungen-zwischen-china-und-dem-westen-in-der-britischen-kernenergie/29183042.html?_x_tr_sl=de&_x_tr_tl=en&_x_tr_hl=de&_x_tr_pto=wapp German website translated with google.

    The French state-owned company EDF and the state-owned China General Nuclear Power Group (CGN) are responsible for the construction and future operation of Hinkley Point C. .

    On the one hand, EDF had to postpone the opening originally planned for 2025 several times, most recently to 2027. The energy company justified the delay with the Covid pandemic. EDF also had to adjust the costs of the project several times: While initially talk of 18 billion pounds, the construction of the power plant is currently expected to cost more than 32 billion pounds - a cost increase of 80 percent.

    This could cost EDF dearly. When the contract was signed in 2016, the Chinese partner CGN only agreed to cover 33.5 percent of the then estimated 18 billion pounds in costs. In return he received a 33.5 percent share in the project. Given the recent squabbles between the governments in London and Beijing, it would be no surprise if CGN sat out the next round of financing.

    Basically if the Chinese don’t pay the UK won’t pay either. This is terrible because EDF had already to pay a huge fine for a Finnish nuclear plant that finished (haha) 12 years too late and the French government is also running out of money building their own nuclear plants with EDF, while having to keep their old plants from breaking down. They had to raise the price of nuclear power for 60 % this year and decided to build additionally offshore wind plants, because they finally had to realize new nuclear power plants will arrive way too late. It’s a huge mess.


  • Not so funny when it actually happens to you:

    Because of really bad experiences with alcoholics as a child, I am afraid of people who drink. My psychologist and my doctor wrote that down.

    When I became seriously ill and could no longer work in my old job, I had to retrain. To do this, you have to go to the German employment office and get an assessment of your strengths and weaknesses, including what your doctor and therapist have to say.

    They read the paper from my doctor and my psychologist, but just skimmed over the words and decided that because the word “alcoholic” was there, I must be the alcoholic. They told me that I could get paid retraining and benefits, but only if I attended a therapy group for alcoholics once a week - me, who is afraid of alcoholics because of the abuse I suffered as a child. … I immediately started crying and swore that I had no problem with alcohol, only with alcoholics!

    It took 6 months to get someone at the job centre to actually read the papers word for word to find out that me saying “I’m not an alcoholic” was not me being an alcoholic in denial. I got a half-assed apology and my retraining 6 months after I could have started it because of this. Not to mention that every time I refused to go to AA meetings they threatened to take away my benefits and I was in such a bad mental state that I probably would have killed myself without the help of my family. Oh, and my family who tried to intervene were labelled as co-alcoholics, holding me back.






  • A large dyke is being constructed to divert potential lava flows around the plant

    Lava, like water, prefers to go the easy route. You do not build a wall to stop it face to face, but offer a more easy route right and left of your “wall”, so the force of the lava is halved AND it will likely take the more easy routes and not bother to try and crawl over your construct.

    A wall directly in its path only makes sense when you are already somewhat far away from the volcano, so the lava is very slow and not as hot as in the beginning anymore and then it is rather a pile of earth piled against a smaller part of the stream of lava for days again and again and not a real static wall. A video for that: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xWbQOqaOxjg The scale of this … kudos to people who can live near a volcano, I am way to scared for that.



  • Whether you are a current player … or maybe you jumped off the WoW train a few expansions ago, now is the time to come home

    Sorry, but I left this abusive relationship years ago for a reason. Not coming back. I am also not sure if multiple expansions in a short time frame will be what the users want that are fine with going back every 2-3 years for a new expansion for three month and quit, if there is not enough time inbetween to forget why they stopped playing. Just saying.

    And for the story side of things, they have messed up everything to the point that I do not even want to read about the story anymore. I am just done with the world and the lore and the graphics. There are so many interesting worlds and ideas out there, so many great games. I have fond memories of the friends I made ingame, but I also regret the massive amount of time I spent in one single game. It wasn’t healthy for me.




  • … and they can get robbed or kicked, their sensors sprayed shut… and repair costs a fortune. I don’t think delivery without a human makes much sense, maybe except for a drone that delivers to the Australian outback or a small island at the German coast.

    They want desperately to cut delivery cost by taking out the human they have to pay for it to do the work. To do so they spent billions they could have used to pay these people a decent wage and hire more of them. It is dumb.


  • Oh you mean like the old plants in France that are out for maintainance so much, that France has to buy electric power from Germany? https://www.euronews.com/next/2023/01/05/germany-power-trade

    France whose best idea this year was to make a law that now allows new built power plants to be built besides old ones, so “THEY CAN USE THE SAME PARKING LOT” because that was the ONLY idea they had to “speed up” the planning and building phase of power plants that in case of Finland took 13 years longer than expected, which was costly for the French power plant builder because they had to pay late fees?

    The repeated delays led to bitter compensation disputes between the Finnish operator TVO and Areva (seated in France), with the latter ultimately agreeing in March 2018 to pay TVO financial compensation of €450 million.

    When France finally will have a new power plant it will just replace the old ones and add nothing to the grid.

    Holding France’s old power plants up und building new ones, despite no one in the private sector wanting to invest into it, costs so much money that they have to use funds that were meant to build social housing to keep them up and start building. In the UK investors are so unwilling to invest, because of high risks of building costs exploding and projects finishing 12+ years late, that the government considers to give them “upfront money” to even think about investing into Sizewell C.

    https://www.ft.com/content/7311cbdd-f245-43ff-92a3-9b763959a2db

    France aims to start construction work on the first pair of reactors by 2027 and to be completed by 2035. The last reactor that Paris commissioned, however, is more than a decade behind schedule.

    Thats realistically 2045, when it is only 10 years late and that means the old power plants of France that were build in the 80s and 90s, having huge problems with maintenance and stress corrosion NOW, will have even more problems 12 - 22 years from now. I doubt they will make it for so long at all.

    France is a mess and it will cost the whole EU billions to finally free them from their dead end. Not to mention that their unrealistic dreams of nuclear power also lead to them not having the money or the will to invest in insulation and heating/cooling that is not depending solely on electricity, which they desperately need to do and Germany does for years now.

    I hate that the nuclear power chills have made the jump from Reddit to the Fediverse.





  • From the article: “The act has been welcomed by child safety advocates.”

    Same beeing tried for the EU.

    The proposed regulation is excessively “influenced by companies pretending to be NGOs but acting more like tech companies”, said Arda Gerkens, former director of Europe’s oldest hotline for reporting online CSAM.

    “Groups like Thorn use everything they can to put this legislation forward, not just because they feel that this is the way forward to combat child sexual abuse, but also because they have a commercial interest in doing so.”

    If the regulation undermines encryption, it risks introducing new vulnerabilities, critics argue. “Who will benefit from the legislation?” Gerkens asked. “Not the children.”

    “So it’s very clear that whatever their incorporation status is, that they are self-interested in promoting child exploitation as a problem that happens “online,” and then proposing quick (and profitable) technical solutions as a remedy to what is in reality a deep social and cultural problem. (…) I don’t think governments understand just how expensive and fallible these systems are, that we’re not looking at a one-time cost. We’re looking at hundreds of millions of dollars indefinitely due to the scale that this is being proposed at.”

    https://balkaninsight.com/2023/09/25/who-benefits-inside-the-eus-fight-over-scanning-for-child-sex-content/

    This whole article is worth reading despite its length. This is a mess and the UK is only the start, they are aiming for this being implemented world wide.