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Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: June 20th, 2023

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  • It would be quite rich for Greenpeace to position themselves as “enlightened centrists” willing to sell & promote fossil fuels on the VERY flawed assumption that biofuels are a) feasible and b) a meaningful improvement, while on the other hand being uncompromisingly hardline anti-nuclear and being at the heart of the plan to shut down existing power plants based on nothing more than their dogmatic beliefs.

    If a rando energy provider sells fossil fuels, I don’t care. They’re just playing by the byzantine economic incentives set by the EU in an amoral capitalistic way. When Greenpeace does it, it is inherently a political statement and so deeply hypocritical that the only rational explanation is that they are deeply corrupt and/or profoundly stupid. Which would not matter if they weren’t, ideologically and politically, strongly influential on European environmentalist activism and policy.


  • Biogas and hydrogen are both greenwashing products. Neither is better than electric alternatives where they are being sold. They have major major flaws that the fossil fuel industry (y’know, the one selling both of those products) won’t advertise to you:

    • Biogas is derived from agricultural products. All the agricultural waste we produce can’t cover a meaningful part of even just our heating needs. This inevitably leads to a major misincentive to grow crops just to turn into methane, like we are doing with bioethanol, which has catastrophic land-use and environmental impacts.
    • Hydrogen is very inefficient to produce. Most often produced with gas (lol), but even if produced through electrolysis it’s less efficient to have a double conversion than just use the electricity directly. It is also very hard to store/transport safely and efficiently.
    • Regardless of any of the above, heat pumps have a COP of 3-5. A boiler has a COP of 1. I don’t care how clean your fuel is, it will always be more efficient to burn it in a regular power plant to power a heat pump than to burn it in a boiler.

    And even if the above wasn’t true and biogas was awesome (it’s awful), the simple fact that they are selling trace amounts in order to promote fossil gas as their main product is an obvious act of greenwashing unto itself.

    Greenpeace knows all of the above very well. I can’t say for sure that they are corrupt and bought out by the fossil fuel industry. All I can say is that I don’t have a better explanation for their stupidity.


  • Greenpeace Energy sells fossil fuels while fighting nuclear power. After it became a scandal, Greenpeace officially divested and changed the name but they still share the same office building in Hamburg so I think it’s more than fair to say they are strongly ideologically aligned.

    I’m sure on paper they would rather renewable than fossil, but they clearly are willing to compromise with them, unlike with nuclear. When they combine forces with the openly pro-fossil fuel lobby right wing, you get the exact mess Germany is in: inexcusably high reliance on gas and a consistently worst-in-class CO2 footprint per kWh for Western Europe.

    Yes, I’m extremely bitter about this. The environmentalist political class being unyielding on nuclear but soft on gas set us back more than a decade with the green transition.



  • Literally none of the institutions which start at a fixed time (6-9 am) will offset their schedule by one hour. These things are literally written in stone. They don’t give a single fuck where the sun is, school starts at 08:30 and work starts at 09:00, from now until the end of western civilization, because doing otherwise would be a logistical inconvenience and sleep disorders are not their problem.

    Permanent ST = 1 hour less sunlight after school/work. It’s unavoidable unless you have the luxury of making your own schedule, at which point timezone does not matter to you so why are you crusading for the working man to be forever cursed to only see the sun from a cubicle? (I could live with permanent DST but that doesn’t seem like the road we’ll be going down)


  • I’ve been dailying the exact same arch installation since 2014 without reinstalling it a single time.

    Now to be fair I did have it non-bootable at several points. Worst of which was a PAM update which broke it completely because the new config was in a .pacnew file and the old one was not compatible anymore. But since it was a edge-case there was no forum post about it. Still recovered it just fine after an hour or so of troubleshooting.

    It’s all open-source and usually decently documented. The only reason anyone should have to reinstall a Linux desktop is lack of experience, but I would always advise to persevere because troubleshooting my system is how I gained much of my expertise. If that’s not what you want, stick to Debian.



  • There are ways to do good, approachable, clickable science communication without resorting to lies, ommission, or exaggeration which is futurism.com’s whole schtick. There’s so much happening in science that doesn’t get covered by these low-quality sensationalist outlets because a misleading headline about petri dish cancer or mouse Alzheimer’s gets more clicks and requires far less research than an article about whatever interesting advancements actually happened in science this week.



  • Love the technosolutionist mindset, but the parties trying to made that happen lost BIG TIME in the 2024 elections and neither you nor I are in charge of the energy policy. Feel free to found a startup to explore all your big ideas but our problem is neither a lack of ways to decarbonize our energy nor a lack of reasons to go off of fossil fuels.

    What I’m not hearing is a solution to the problem that the European far-right is now directly funded and supported by Putin, Musk, Thiel, Zuck, that the parties currently in power have no interest in curbing this obvious foreign interference, and all that is all but guaranteeing that the far right will take full control of the region within the next few years in exchange for a few favors like – among other things – handing out to the oil barrons a blank check. That’s not a technical issue to be engineered out, that’s a political landmine the size of a continent that we’re barreling towards. Well, if we don’t get dragged into WW3 before that, at any rate.



  • No-one “needs” anyone but economics aren’t a zero-sum game and both the EU and the US benefited enormously from our economic and military ties, and cutting those ties will be painful and the faster it happens the more painful it will be.

    If we employ the economic nukes against the US right now, we will lose most digital payment systems for a few weeks as countries and bunks rush to implement Wero and the digital Euro, and we will face strong gas shortages as we currently rely on the US to make up for Russia’s. Europe and NA would immediately enter into a deep recession.

    The payment systems are a hugely understated threat but are being worked on actively. The fossil fuels aren’t understated but we also lack short-term solutions as electrification takes time (but also we aren’t doing nearly enough).

    However it is true that the EU is profoundly neoliberal and that ideology is very ill-equipped to deal with a fragmented world order in which free trade is no longer the default. Those assumptions are being challenged, however the far-right seems primed to bring about the populist “solution” of turning Europe into a bunch of mini-Russias.


  • Are we already forgetting that trump invaded Venezuela for oil, then the oil companies said “excuse me but we can’t profitably exploit their notoriously shitty oil”?

    Part of being a literal Nazi is that the o.g. Nazis got themselves stuck in an increasing number of military quagmires not because they had to but because they refused to do consider the obvious peaceful solutions for their problems. The war machine had to be fed even at the cost of their own self-destruction.

    Except this time they have a nuclear arsenal capable of wiping all civilization and somehow people aren’t freaking out nearly enough about that.





  • 1 kg of radioactive isotopes blasted into the atmosphere as a byproduct of coal combustion: i sleep

    1 ton of PTFEs blasted into the water table as a byproduct of making slick cooking pans: i sleep

    untold tons of carcinogens dumped out the exhaust of automobiles within our cities: i sleep

    1 kg of nuclear waste safely sealed in a bright yellow barrel: i scream and kick and seethe

    If you think nuclear waste is the biggest challenge we face as a species regarding waste management, your stance is profoundly misinformed and inconsistent. The only reason we’re talking about it is that it has “nuclear” in the name and it is highly visible because we capture it all, which is ironically the one thing that makes it safer than all the other pollutants out there.


  • Netanyahu did not show up at the border unannounced saying “let me through or else”. He got permission ahead of time. Had he not gotten permission, he would have had to find another country who did or gone around. Especially for Greece and Italy which don’t really stand in his way, the Mediterranean is right there!

    Even assuming that Netanyahu calls the bluff and flies through, there are a lot of options ahead of all-out war. For instance sending jets to “intercept” his plane and escort him out saying “he refused to follow orders to land and we did not deem it worth it to escalate the situation”. It’s not like his airliner is armed or anything. But it would send a very different diplomatic message.

    For France in particular, this is far from the first time he flies over its territory unimpeded. This is not a matter of military concerns, this is pro-Israel Macron taking a stance to show support for his ally. He’s not been very outspoken on Gaza because the domestic political situation is very delicate and anything he says can only weaken his support further, but his personal stance is hardly a secret and the military interceptors are under his full control.