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Cake day: July 1st, 2023

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  • More than anything else I’ve heard, this Trump action scares me the most.

    Military generals recognize the president as commander in chief. They’re generally going to follow the chain of command in situations where the US is attacking a strategic target, regardless of the ‘ethics’ of the situation.

    If Trump wants to level the Gaza Strip or the West Bank or even parts of the Ukraine. They’ll likely follow orders because there’s a strategic value in those targets militarily. They might not agree with the strategy, but they’re primarily loyal to the office of the president regardless of who’s sitting in it.

    But when generals would push back, is any scenario where following orders was a risk to the country with no strategic gain. Like attacking US citizens, using nuclear weapons, attacking strategic allies or starting World War III for no other reason than because Trump wanted to flex his ego.

    The scenarios where these roles needed to be replaced by a Trump loyalist willing to do anything are… nightmarish.



  • dgmib@lemmy.worldtoMemes@lemmy.mlI hate the rich
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    2 months ago

    It depends on the jurisdiction, but in most cases if you have a salaried position with say 3 weeks of PTO but you only take 2 weeks of it. The employer is usually required to pay you over and above your salary for working during your “vacation time”.

    If there’s an unlimited PTO policy, they don’t have an obligation to pay you extra for working during vacation time.


  • dgmib@lemmy.worldtoMemes@lemmy.mlI hate the rich
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    2 months ago

    It’s a lie.

    By making it “unlimited” they don’t need to pay you out of you don’t use all of PTO days.

    If you use it more than they think you’ve earned you get terminated.

    Employees end up afraid of taking their PTO days and typically end up taking even less time off than if they knew there was a expectation of 3 weeks or whatever.




  • Money isn’t the limiting factor though.

    There’s plenty of money waiting to be spent on green electricity projects that’s bottlenecked by grid connections, permitting, panel and turbine manufacturing, rare element supply chains and host of other factors slowing down how quickly we can build new renewable capacity.

    Also the typical LCOE cost comparison approach doesn’t factor in the cost of grid connections, which is lower for a nuclear power plant than it is for an equivalent capacity of renewables. Nuclear is still more expensive on average, but the difference isn’t as clear cut and there a cases where nuclear might be cheaper in the long run.

    Everytime nuclear comes up on Reddit/Lemmy we always seem to argue whether nuclear or renewables is better choice like it’s a choice between the two. Both nuclear and renewables are slam dunk choices compared to fossil fuels on every metric if you factor in even an overly optimistic case analyisis of the financial impacts of climate change. (Nevermind giving considerations of the humanatarian impact.)

    80+% of our planet’s energy still comes from burning fossil fuels. Renewables have been smashing growth records year over year for a long time now and yet we haven’t even reached the point where we’re adding new renewables capacitiy faster than energy demand is increasing. We’re still setting new records annually for total fossil fuel consumed. Hell we haven’t even gotten to the point where we stopped building new Coal-fired power stations yet.

    The people who argue that “we don’t need nuclear, renewabes are cheaper and faster” you’re missing the reality of sheer quantity of energy needed. We can’t build enough new renewables fast enough to save us regardless of how much money is invested. There aren’t enough sources of the raw materials needed to make that happen quickly enough, we can’t connect them to the grid quickly enough, we cant build new factories for solar panels and wind turbines fast enough. Yes, we will undoubetly continure to accelerate our new renewables projects at a record setting paces each year but it’s not enough, it’s not even close. Even our most optimistic , accelerated projections don’t put us anywhere close to displacing fossil fuel consumption in the next 10-20 years.

    We need to stop arguing over which is better. We need to do it all.


  • Not sure where you’re getting 250kwh/m2/year from. If it was one contiguous solid panel maybe you could achieve that and then you’d be correct it would be about 560,000 km2. Or roughly the size of France.

    But you need to leave space between the panels in a solar farm for them to be at the optimal angle without casting shadows on each other. Real world solar farms have much lower density than that.

    The density can vary significantly, our hypothetical solar island could be anywhere from the 6th to the 50th largest country but regardless we’re still talking about something in the area of a trillion individual solar panels.

    Assuming money isn’t the limiting factor (which it isn’t in most countries) we don’t have anywhere close to the ability to manufacture and deploy that many panels by 2030 or 2035.

    Assuming we maintain exponential growth of both wind and solar (doubtful) we’re still a least two decades away from eliminating fossil fuel electricity generation never mind meeting the 2-3x generation capacity needed to transition transportation and other consumers of fossil fuels over to electricity.

    Renewables growth has shattered estimates before, you never know, but the transition is not happening any where near as fast as people seem to think.



  • No.

    MW is the maximum capacity not the average.

    A nuclear reactor runs at close to its maximum output pretty much 24/7/365.

    A solar farm only operates during the day, and even then it only operates at maximum output in the middle of a clear sunny day.

    The overall average output of a nuclear plant is typically around 90% of its capacity.

    The overall average output of solar farm is 20-25%.

    This massive farm will still only output a bit more electricity than what a single nuclear reactor outputs.

    A nuclear power station typically has more than one reactor, so compared to a typical nuclear power station this isn’t even close to the average nuclear plant.

    Though it does beat a few of the smallest nuclear plants that only have a single reactor.

    Nuclear outputs a fuck-ton of electricity for its size.


  • 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.



  • Yes you’re correct. I will qualify my previous statement as hydrogen powered road vehicles don’t make sense for now.

    The problem at the moment is that electricity generation is not carbon free and in most countries not even close.

    Unfortunately the transition to a carbon free electric grid is being significantly retarded by policymakers that are, as you say, myopic. As a result it will be at least two more decades before hydrogen makes sense.

    The carbon footprint of lithium battery manufacturing, is small compared to the carbon footprint of electricity generation. Until that changes significantly lithium batteries will continue to be a better choice than hydrogen fuel cell.

    Hydrogen may make sense in a future where we’ve eliminated all fossil fuel electricity generation and there’s an abundance of carbon free electricity that can be used to create green hydrogen as a form of energy storage. Though by the time that point comes, we may have developed battery technology or some other energy storage technology that doesn’t carry the same carbon footprint that lithium ion does today.


  • Hydrogen doesn’t make sense and never did as a strategy to reduce greenhouse gas emissions in vehicles.

    Most hydrogen is made from fossil fuels, and has a lot of emissions during manufacturing. But even green hydrogen, which is made by using carbon free generated electricity to split water into hydrogen and oxygen doesn’t make sense.

    If you’ve build new renewable power it’s more efficient to use it to charge batteries than to use it to generate hydrogen.

    There might be a case for compressed hydrogen, In vehicles where batteries are too heavy like aircraft.

    But for road vehicles, batteries are more effective at reducing emission.

    If you’re building any new renewable power, you’ll reduce more emissions by using it to displace coal power, the to generate green hydrogen.

    Some day when we’ve eliminated fossil fuel based electricity generation, Green hydrogen might start to make sense. But anybody trying to do it right now is not being as helpful as they could be.



  • I question the methodology here. The same site lists Linux desktop share at 2% in my country specifically. It feels like if it was that high you’d see it on people’s laptops more in coffee shops and what not… but I’ve yet to see a single other person using Linux on the desktop.

    I know most of that 4% is in India… but still feels like it should be more ubiquitous if the number is that high.



  • 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.


  • Reddit never expected the new api pricing to be a fountain or money. This was never about LLMs or the lack of ad revenue.

    If it was just about LLMs they could have made one price for api users that were primarily harvesting data and a different price for api users that contributed significant content or moderation. Which would make good business sense to do so as content contributors are what bring the eyeballs (and therefore the value) to the platform.

    It wasn’t about ad revenue either, by all estimates the revenue from a third-party app user would have been many times more than the opportunity cost from the ad revenue they were missing out on from 3rd party app users. If they wanted to profit from the api pricing, they only needed to give the community more time to transition business models. They didn’t even need to give everyone more time, just a dozen or so major third party apps.

    This was always about killing off the third party apps. The ones they let survive had low user counts to begin with and went even lower.

    I don’t know their real motivations here but so far there’s only two possibilities that i can think of.

    A) Reddit’s leadership and board of directors are beyond incompetent

    B) They collect significantly more data from the first party app than they were able to from the third party apps, and they’re selling that data for a significant sum of money beyond just their own ad ecosystem.


  • dgmib@lemmy.worldtoMemes@lemmy.ml6÷2(1+2)
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    11 months ago

    Will you accept wolfram alpha as credible source?

    https://mathworld.wolfram.com/Solidus.html

    Special care is needed when interpreting the meaning of a solidus in in-line math because of the notational ambiguity in expressions such as a/bc. Whereas in many textbooks, “a/bc” is intended to denote a/(bc), taken literally or evaluated in a symbolic mathematics languages such as the Wolfram Language, it means (a/b)×c. For clarity, parentheses should therefore always be used when delineating compound denominators.