868 karma · joined June 21, 2024
Imho: You don't have to like that person yelling that stuff. You don't have to like what they are yelling. But you have to accept that it has to be their legal right to yell that stuff. Because otherwise, any opinion will one day be a criminal thing to say, just takes one election...
Censorship doesn't work for stuff that is currently illegal. See pirated movies.
No, things have changed in CCC as well. Back in the day, free speech (in the US definition) and a firm opposition to any censorship were consensus on CCC. Nowadays, censorship is totally OK if it targets the right. And any kind of remotely right-wing opinion is declared "not free speech, not an opinion, thus not protected". This is also evidenced by quite a few talks on the topic, and cooperation with far-left activist groups like "Zentrum fuer politische Schönheit" sabotaging right-wing speech on several occasions.
> Some people just like to complain that they have to take a shower and can't harass women like they used to like they could when congress was at the BCC and that kind of nonsense didn't immediately get you thrown out like today.
You could never do that. A few years ago, some activists tried to make a fuzz with stuff like creeper cards, intervention teams and codes of conduct. But those were never needed in the first place, almost nothing ever happened at CCC that would have warranted those things. But "those white male hackers are certainly sexist raping pigs" is a firmly entrenched stereotype in certain circles.
The one thing you cannot ever do is go to CCC and express any idea that isn't very far left. That is a very certain way to get thrown out. Your talk won't ever be on the Fahrplan if the topic isn't "hooray, more refugees", "hooray, more EU dictatorship" or "hooray, down with everything right of Rosa Luxemburg".
And x86 isn't that nice to begin with, if you do something incompatible, you might as well start from scratch and create a new, homogenous, well-designed and modern ISA.
German article, but some translation tool might help: https://www.tagesschau.de/wirtschaft/verbraucher/waermepumpe...
Even Germany had Uranium mines in the Erzgebirge. They just were closed due to environmental concerns and the iron curtain falling, which is also why there are no more "official" reserves. There was no exploration done after 1990, so known exploitable reserves in Germany are low. But that's just because nobody went looking.
Uranium isn't rare and it isn't really expensive. We just need so little of it that there are not a lot of running mines.
But especially with old houses, with any "not insignificant change" to your electrical setup, you have to bring everything up to modern standards.
Also, and connected with that, metering is weird in Germany. If your consumption rises above a certain amount (I think 10MWh for a single-family home) you are required to get a "smart meter", meaning a digital meter which includes the possibility (just the possibility, not actually the real thing) of online reporting and minute-by-minute pricing. In the rest of the world, that would just be swapping the meter or slapping some Wifi-to-IR-interface on it, but not so in Germany. You need to install a new metering cabinet that provides space for at least one digital meter (but better provide more than one...), one remote control receiver (for old-style night/day tariff switches, obsoleted by smart meters but still required nonetheless) and a smart meter gateway. That new metering cabinet needs to conform to standards set by your local electricity supplier (which can be as small as a city), so there is no nation-wide standards, more like 50 of them. And the metering cabinet is huge, not someting like the 30x40cm thing you see on sidewalks in spain or something, no. More like 200x140cm in the smallest(!) version. So those are really expensive just because the market is tiny and the requirements are completely crazy: Even though most smart meter gateways are wireless nowadays (UMTS or GSM) and usually such a gateway won't be installed anyways (because just the possibility of installing one is required), you also need to provide for cabled internet uplink to the metering cabinet. That uplink is a Cat6 cable to the gateway, but it crosses through the electrical uplink part of the cabinet. So the insulation of that cable has to be certified for at least 10kV insulation voltage, at least 80A current on the shielding and more stuff like that. So e.g. just that one stupid half-meter Cat6 cable will set you back 50Eur. Installation isn't any less crazy. You definitely cannot do anything yourself. Even your licensed electrician can only do the menial preparations. When your licensed electrician is done with the prep, you request an appointment with the local supplier's meter installer, who, after a typical wait time of 2 months, will install and seal the meter in the presence of your licensed electrician (who is there to receive complaints about incorrect prep, followed by another 2 months wait time for another appointment...).
That's why it's 4kEur...
And if you want your power to be a few cents cheaper (28ct/kWh instead of the usual 35ct/kWh), you need an extra meter for your heat pump. Have solar? Another extra meter. Want to charge your electrical car? You guessed right. And you cannot bring your own. Each of those "smart" meters has to be rented from your local supplier at around 20 to 120Eur/year.
That would imply that the client actually would like to be contacted every time Ofcom found a leak in the geoblock. Not a good idea imho.
The only further question would be if the country is friendly enough with the UK to extradite.
My point is that "fast" in those kinds of workarounds wouldn't be a problem for visitors of a site because all the browser gets is just native MathML.
You are arguing for testing everyone there. If you cannot detect them by other means, you need to test for them this way. And do it for everyone. You have already set up the unrealistic wargaming scenario. You picked pancreatic cancer as your example where you do have to test every 6 months at least, because if you do it more rarely, the disease progression is so fast that testing is useless. There are no specific risk groups for pancreatic cancer beyond a slight risk increase by "the usual all-cancer risk factors". Nothing to pick a test group by.
And a 99% overall false positive rate is easy to achieve, lot's of tests that are in use have this property if you just test everyone very frequently. Each instance of testing has an inherent risk of being a false positive, and if you repeat that for each person, their personal false-positive risk of course goes up with it. All tests that are used frequently have an asymptotic 100% false positive rate.
Take those 99% false positives. If you just remove the pancreas from everyone, you remove 20 years of lifetime through severe diabetes. In terms of lost life expectancy, you killed up to 25 people. Surgery complications might kill one more. In all, totally not worth it, because even if you manage to save everyone of those 1% true positives, you still killed more than 20 (statistical) people.
And the detection rate might be increased by more testing. But it needs to be a whole lot more, and it won't help. Usually pancreatic cancer is detected in stage 3 or 4, when it becomes symptomatic, 5 year survival rate below 10% (let's make it 5% for easier maths). The progression from stage 1 to stage 3 takes less than a year if untreated. So you would need to test everyone every 6 months to get detections into the stage 1 and stage 2 cases, that are more treatable. Let's assume you get everyone down to stage 1, with a survival rate of roughly 50% at 5 years, 15% at 10 years. We get a miracle cure developed after 10 years where everyone who is treated survives. So basically we get those 15% 10-year-survivors all to survive to their normal life expectancy (minus 20 because no more pancreas). Averaging they get an extra 10 years each.
Pancreatic cancer is diagnosed in 0.025% of the population each year. In the US at 300Mio., thats 750k in 10 years. With our theoretical miracle cure after 10 years for 15%, that is a gain of 1.125Mio years lifetime. A 1 hour time needed for testing per each of 300Mio people twice a year for 10 years already wastes 685k years of lifetime, so half the gain already. That calculation is already in "not worth it" territory if the waiting time for the blood-draw appointment is increased. That calculation is already off if you calculate the additional strain on the healthcare system, and the additional deaths that will cause.
Let's say you do have a positive test for pancreatic cancer. Overall 5 year survival rate 12%, but other than with other cancers, people continue to die after that. Basically, it is almost a death sentence if it is a true positive. Early detection will increase your odds a bit, and prolong your remaining expected lifetime, but even stage 1 pancreatic cancer, only 17% survive to 10 years. Let's say you are one of the 99% of false positives, because everyone gets tested in this hypothetical scenario. Let's say imaging and biopsy looks clean. No symptoms (which you typically don't have until stage 3 with pancreatic cancer, where it is far too late anyways). With the aforementioned odds, what would you do?
Panic? Certainly, given that if it is a real positive, you might as well order your headstone.
Panic more? Maybe people with those news will change their behaviour and engage in risky activities, get depressed, or attempt suicide (https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamanetworkopen/fullarticle... ). All of which will kill some of those people.
Get surgery to remove your pancreas? Well, just the anesthesia as a 0.1% chance of killing you, the surgery might kill 0.3% in total. No pancreas means you will instantly have diabetes, which cuts your life expectancy by 20 years.
Start chemotherapy? Chemo is very dangerous, and there is no chemo mixture known to be effective against pancreatic cancer, usually you just go with the aggressive stuff. It is hard to come by numbers as to how many healthy people a round of chemo would kill, but in cancer patients, it seems that at least 2% and up to a quarter die in the 4 weeks following chemotherapy (https://www.nature.com/articles/s41408-023-00956-x ). And chemotherapy itself has a risk of causing cancers later on.
Start radiation therapy? Well, you don't have a solid tumor to irradiate, so that is not an option anyways. But if done, it would increase your cancer risk as well as damage the irradiated organ (in that case probably your pancreas).
So in all, from 100 positive tests you have 99 false positives in this scenario. If just one of those 99 false positives dies of any of the aforementioned causes, the test has already killed more people than the cancer ever would have. Even if no doctor would do surgery, chemotherapy or radiation treatment on those hypothetical false positives, the psychological effects are still there and maybe already too deadly.
So it is a very complex calculation to decide whether a test is harmful or good. Especially in extreme types of cancer.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linear_no-threshold_model
Edit: For comparison, a chest X-ray is around 0.1mSv, a chest CT at 6.1mSv, so a factor of 61 between (https://www.radiologyinfo.org/en/info/safety-xray ). Compared to natural exposure (usually 1 to 3mSv/a) however, a chest CT isn't that bad at 2 to 3 years natural dose, 2 polar flights or 1 year of living at higher altitude or Ramsar (https://aerb.gov.in/images/PDF/image/34086353.pdf ). Acute one-time dose damage has been shown above 100mSv, below that there is no damage shown, only statistical extrapolations.
So I'd say that the risk of using a CT right away should be lower than the risk of overlooking a bleed or a clot in an emergency, where time is of the essence and the dance of "let's do an X-ray first..." might kill more patients than the cancers caused by those CTs.
Oh, but it does. For example, if there is a suspected hamster population, you need at least one year of data gathering to assess local population state. And then you need a resettlement plan for the hamsters. This alone takes at least a year because of the data gathering, and of course you need an expensive and busy hamster expert to do the gathering and writing.
German only, but I guess a translation tool can get across the most absurd points ;) https://artenschutz.naturschutzinformationen.nrw.de/artensch...
Oh, and btw, that's just for permitting. After you get your permit, you have to have those hamsters professionally resettled, observed and documented.
You are right that it is theoretically still possible to get stuff done. Prime example is Elon Musks Gigafactory in Brandenburg, where there was enough political and economic pressure to get it done. But that is a rare thing to happen, and lots of those steps you have to do are out of your control and up to some bureaucrat who is of course "very busy" and "cannot at this time give an estimate as to when the permit might be completed". It is just hard to convey how bad it really is...
The whole culture is poisoned by regulations imho.
Germany had plans (before the Schroeder government laid the foundation for the whole nuclear shutdown) to build new and more nuclear reactors. After the initial buildup phase from 1970 to the late 1980s (latest in operation was Neckarwestheim 2 in 1989 not counting test reactors, only 9 years before Schroeder, not really a "long time"), most good sites had a reactor or maybe 2 or 3. The plan then was to plan for replacing the oldest ones and add a few more to existing sites, starting in the late 1990s when the first reactors start to approach an age of 30, to be replaced by their finished replacement reactor on the same site at 40 before 2010. Those plans included pebble bed reactors (https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kernkraftwerk_THTR-300 unsuccessful due to technical problems), fast breeder reactors (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SNR-300 unsucessful due to green opposition) and improved PWRs (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EPR_(nuclear_reactor) co-developed with France, nowadays a few have come online).
The reason why nobody wanted to build them was green opposition. This started before Chernobyl, for example in opposing the Wackersdorf reprocessing plant https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wackersdorf_reprocessing_plant and blocking the refueling operations of existing plants. The green party never got past 10%, but mostly because the parties in government accepted their demands out of fear of strengthening them, because they needed them for a coalition, or because after Chernobyl saying anything positive about nuclear became political suicide. Misinformation was rampant, any German PWR was equated to a Chernobyl in waiting. Experts disagreed and were ignored by media and politicians, shouted down by the greens as industry minions wanting to poison us all.
The reactors shut down under Schroeder were quite profitable, but getting old enough that they would have been switched off soon anyways. Nuclear reactors become more and more profitable over time, because most of the cost is in the initial construction and the financing. After the building is paid off, running cost is quite low, fuel cost is negligible compared to personnel for example. But at some point, repairs, downtime and necessary improvements make it too costly after all. That's when the originally intended replacement should have started, but this was stopped by the Schroeder goverment and the Greens.
And while I don't know whether the Russian influence on and financing of green movements is true or not, it is logical. Russia never had any chance to export its nuclear technology to western countries. Western nuclear power plants were, at least since the 80s, safer and better. The only thing the west could have bought (and actually does still buy) from Russia is uranium. But that is by far a smaller export for Russia than oil and gas. And there are uranium reserves in many western countries, Canada, Australia, the US, Germany and the Czech republic do have large deposits that are only partially exploited, and many other (third-world) countries do have uranium mines and do export (which is why the west is buying there, it's just cheaper). So uranium isn't really a reliable or big business for Russia. Oil and Gas, however, are. And since oil and gas are high-volume goods, imports are far less flexible than uranium imports. Basically, if you want it cheap, you need a pipeline, which is the perfect leash for the Russians to hold. And lo and behold, Schroeder, while making plans to shut down all German nuclear power plants over time, planned to increase gas imports from Russia, which was upheld during the later Merkel years. Schroeder was, after his term, rewarded for this with a position at Russia's state gas producer Gazprom. So it would be in Russia's interest to reduce nuclear power use in Europe and get Europe dependent on their gas.
Btw. the meaning of "green" has changed. Back in the Schroeder days and before, green was largely pro-environment and anti-nuke. But CO₂ emissions and global warming weren't a huge topic. Open-pit coal mining and coal plants were opposed on grounds of landscape destruction, resettlement and pollution. But CO₂ was never the big topic that it is nowadays. Therefore, back in those days, even for the Greens, "clean" gas power plants were a viable replacement.
The big problem imho is that due to greed and technical incompetence (especially regarding electronics and software), quality and value have gone down. The high prices are no longer justified, and customers are drawing the logical conclusion.
Nowadays quality has become an issue, where you could, back in the day, drive your Mercedes for 500.000km over a 30years lifetime, nowadays you are lucky to make it past the factory warranty. Along with quality, repairability, tuneability and parts availability and prices have worsened significantly. So German cars are no longer a safe bet on longevity and low lifetime cost, which is what drives away export customers as well as German private customers.
The only thing that has so far kept the German car industry afloat is tax subsidies towards German corporate customers: If your employer offers you a car as part of your salary, you only pay monthly taxes on a flat 1% of the sales price of the car, and for that, the employer can freely give you the car, maintenance, fuel for private and company use, all included. While the employer pays cheap company leasing rates and discounted gross fuel prices, and can offset all that whole spending against the company tax bill. So overall a good deal for employer and employee, and a huge boon to the German car industry (because practically all company vehicles have to be some German brand for prestige).
However, nowadays, the full tax deduction is only available for plug-in-hybrid and electric cars, ICE vehicles only get half the deduction. And the plug-in-hybrids will soon be classed down to ICE status. All the while German car makers struggle to offer proper electric cars at acceptable prices. All the while their plug-in-hybrids suffer from poor quality and life expectancy, expensive repairs and therefore expensive insurance and low resale value.
This means that German car makers will continue to lose their last reliable customer base.
It is quite the opposite of a liberal agenda. German policy is very illiberal in that it is heavy on bureaucracy, strict on regulations, and nowadays firmly stuck in a green-at-any-cost course. All that leads to high energy prices, sky-high barriers for industrial development and entrepreneurship and therefore high prices of german-produced goods.
Calibration will also be drifting off for dirt accumulation and evaporation. Different fill states of each bucket lead to different evaporation in each bucket (smaller will evaporate faster, deviating towards even smaller amounts), and different resting times lead to more dust and algae settling in the bigger bucket, making it even heavier.
Yes, tipping buckets are less exact than tipping spoons, especially in low-rain season. The bucket is never perfectly symmetrical and the mounting is never perfectly level, so one side of the bucket will hold more water than the other before tipping, leading to asymmetric tips.
Therefore for comparable, calibrated data for real meteorological use, there are standards (unfortunately national, so there might be differences in some places) for all the above. The sensor housing has to be white, provide shade and total rain protection, but well-ventilated by grills on all sides. It has to be mounted above a patch of lawn of at least 10x10m, no shade, no significant nearby wind barriers, at a height of 1.2m. All sensors have to be at least 10cm from the internal walls of the housing.
If you don't care about strictly calibrated scientific data to use in your weather model, of course a simpler device will do. Also, nowadays, it is possible to account for deviations of certain stations due to the aforementioned factors.
Another factor is also serviceability. A cramped tiny housing that is hard to open and inspect isn't ideal when you have people touring the country servicing weather stations all year.