ZeroGravitas

> The EU recycled an average of 246 kg per person in 2023. This means that 48.0% of the total amount of municipal waste generated was recycled, compared with 37.2% in 2013 (199 kg per person).

https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/web/products-eurostat-news/w/d...

Also, Starbucks apparently introduced a different compostible cup in the EU just as new rules took effect after promising for 20 years to introduce them

https://packagingeurope.com/news/starbucks-to-roll-out-home-...

They also have stronger regulations about making claims like "widely recyclable" without evidence.

https://environment.ec.europa.eu/topics/circular-economy-top...

Maybe the magical technology is the regulations we made along the way.

Corporations aren't recycling the stuff they say they are recycling.

World except America: I'm going to legally mandate what they do.

Americans: I'm going to get mad at the abstract concept of recycling.

Though specifically they would have welcomed sorted recyclables, but for whatever reason the US seemed entirely unable to correctly label the goods being shipped and were just shipping mixed trash and claiming it was something else.

"Oh also, there's a 25% chance it will end all human life, and we keep telling you this as if it's a selling point for some reason".

Google has now fully automated the building of messaging apps. That should be interesting. Will they now release more or less of them as a result?

China has revised down its nuclear build targets and repeatedly had cost and time overruns on nuclear builds, over decades, with different designs. The data just isn't as public.

They've done better recently by building standardised designs repeatedly.

But done even better on wind and solar.

Other replies think you're taking about baseload fallacy.

I think you are talking about the reduction in total electricity generation.

This (and similar stats) get tied to the "environmentalists are killing industry/civilization" arguments.

Except, since the nuclear phase out started in 2000 the electricity generation has only dropped about 70TWh. And about 50 TWh of that was exported. And it's not clear if those numbers include the 12TWh of German behind-the-meter solar, which would leave electricity use flat at a time when LED lighting was reducing demand, similar to many Western nations.

They became a net electricity importer (once again the sign of total civilizational collapse to some) and then returned to being a net exporter this year.

But even when importing they had gas and coal capacity they could have used, they just got cleaner energy cheap from other countries to meet their demand.

So why is cheaper energy than gas or coal a problem?

A real problem they have is that their current elected leader hates wind power. If you want to be angry at Germans protesting cheap, clean energy I'd start there.

>> Takes decades to build/ projects run over time and budget

> As much as any large scale energy project.

We have data on this. Nuclear is not only the energy source most likely to overrun time and cost, it's one of the worst big projects period.

Right up there with big IT and Defence projects, "Nuclear waste storage sites" and "the Olympics".

Germany uses less coal now than at the peak of their nuclear output.

They both trend down at a similar rate over the last two decades, coal slightly faster.

https://ember-energy.org/data/electricity-data-explorer/?ent...

You could make the argument that they could have phased coal out even faster if they'd kept nuclear and did the massive renewables rollout at the same time but generally people advocating strongly for nuclear while attacking environmental groups or left wing political groups are wildly divergent from reality and so don't bother.

Apparently they restarted nuclear stuff because of the US supported Iran-Iraq war, so they never got the option to choose "nukes or punching bag", rather they were forced to choose nukes because they were already a punching bag.

We have reporting on this leaked by people who were in the meeting.

Netanyahu told Trump they wouldn't block the strait. The US military said they would. Trump went with Netanyahu.

> For most African countries, and some in Asia, the total capacity of privately owned diesel generator sets exceeds the installed grid power capacity. These are now being swapped for solar plus batteries.

In theory those diesel gensets could run more efficiently if combine with the battery and solar.

I'm not sure how often this happens in practice though.

That market doesn't look very useful. Seems to resolve only a few days before at the time that weather forecasts would be available.

It can be seen as a way to undermine illegal lotteries.

That rationale gets undermined if the state lottery is widely advertised in a predatory manner though.

The Detectorists might fill this same niche.

> The converted unsafe rust segfaulted at the same place the C code did

Isn't that exactly what you want from that kind of tool? Otherwise it means it's changing how stuff works and in this specific case that would be good but in most cases unwanted.

There's a few competitors.

The market shrank because standard panels and their mounting techniques got more aesthetically pleasing and cheaper.

It hard to get exact numbers because the rollout is fast in both places but it looks like they have strikingly similar targets for 2030 and 2040 in terms of GW but California both started earlier so is still ahead in GW deployed and their regulations mean that 4 hour is more common so they're actually about 2x on storage duration in California.

Both doing well, but UK would need much more of a handicap for GDP than I thought to claim a win. Solar and batteries do generally pair better than wind.

This rollout occured in the last 10 years.

Some legislation in 2010 set small targets for 2020 and it grew rapidly from there.

The net storage graph clearly shows they aren't drained empty after 3 hours. They keep their remaining charge for the more expensive morning peak rather than compete with cheap imports overnight (there's a graph showing the cost over the time range too).

This series of graphs shows grid batteries quickly displacing peaker gas plants in Queensland over 24 months / two years.

This isn't the most advanced grid in the country, but it's just good business to displace the most expensive and dirtiest gas plants even if you still use gas for other tasks on the grid.

https://reneweconomy.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/open-...

In general, imports are cheaper than the alternative, because if you have local gas plants that aren't maxed out, then you'd use those rather than pay more to import.

Some quick googling suggests this holds in California too.

UK is up there in the world rankings for batteries.

I think they have slightly more grid batteries installed than California. UK have more people, but less money and less electricity used so I'd say they're doing better than California on battery deployment.

Paying for wildfires is a big part of it.

Another less obvious thing is that Californians don't use much electricity due to mild climate and efficiency programs.

Fixed costs therefore get spread across fewer units.

This is a topic in some nations where electrification is seen as a way of driving down per unit electricity costs even as you use more for heating or transport.

One of the three techniques discussed in the book "Rhetoric of reaction" is futility.

Reactionaries are often arguing against good things, which makes it difficult for them to directly attack them.

So they develop consistent techniques to attack them from oblique angles:

> Hirschman describes the reactionary theses thus:

> According to the Perversity Thesis, any purposive action to improve some feature of the political, social, or economic status quo only serves, perversely, to exacerbate the very condition one wishes to remedy (compare: Unintended consequences).[4]

> The Futility Thesis holds that attempts at social transformation will be unavailing, that they will fail to "make a dent" in the problem, and the motives of those who keep attempting futile reforms are suspect.[5][6]

> The Jeopardy Thesis states that the risk of the proposed change is too great as it imperils some previous, precious accomplishment.[6][7]

> He characterizes these theses as "rhetorics of intransigence" that do not further constructive debate.[8] Moreover, he says they turn optimism about social advancement into pessimism.[9]

The futility (and perversity) ones are what I think of when people are angry about straws on the internet.

I just don't understand how complaining endlessly about leads to solving any of the bigger problems. Each of which could be dismissed in the same way.

What's the logic of dissing paper straws in a comment raging against war and AI as threats to the environment?

I see it a lot and assumed it was concern trolling from plastic manufacturers or libertarians funded by them but you seem genuine.

Have you just fallen for that concern trolling? Grown so cynical that nothing matters anymore? I don't understand the intention if you have a genuine desire to improve society.

What would we be doing differently in a world where we were still using plastic straws? Would that have freed up enough mental energy for a revolution? Would people be blowing up private jets while sipping their diet coke?

There's an entertainer I follow sometimes on social media who argues that America is a hellhole due to all the crime and corruption. Really just going to ruin, in economic, business, cultural dimensions. So maybe it's not all good.

He seems quite popular, even in America so I feel like I can trust his opinions. He did win nearly half the popular vote after all.

They're trying to avoid a Boy Who Cried Wolf situation.

If they get swamped with 100 bugs that turned out, after they investigate them to be hallucinations then it's likely they will ignore or lose in the noise a real bug.

A llm generated bug that pretends it was a human created bug would be trying to abuse that presumption of validity, and therefore considered a dick move.

From the mentions of slop and docker in the title I assumed that this was some other tech project that coincidentally had the same name as the "guitar hero but with real guitars" game Rocksmith, so was pleasantly surprised when it was a version of exactly that.

He spent most of that effort undermining proven solutions and propping up his own investments which have a poor record so this is not out of character.