208 karma · joined September 10, 2021
I have people close to me with actual diagnosed schizoid personality disorder, this disorder is nothing like this person describes it, to the point of being offensive. No wonder why the actual professionals they are talking to so outright dismiss them.
Essentially super().__init__() will resolve to a statically unknowable class at run-time because super() refers to the next class in the MRO. Knowing what class you will call is essentially unknowable as soon as you accept that either your provider class hierarchy may change or you have consumers you do not control. And probably even worse, you aren't even guaranteed that the class calling your constructor will be one of your subclasses.
Which is why for example super().__init__() is pretty much mandatory to have as soon as you expect that your class will be inherited from. That applies even if your class inherits only from object, which has an __init__() that is guaranteed to be a nop. Because you may not even be calling object.__init__() but rather some sibling.
So the easiest way to solve this is: Declare everything you need as keyword argument, but then only give **kwargs in your function signature to allow your __init__() to handle any set of arguments your children or siblings may throw at you. Then remove all of "your" arguments via kwargs.pop('argname') before calling super().__init__() in case your parent or uncle does not use this kwargs trick and would complain about unknown arguments. Only then pass on the cleaned kwargs to your MRO foster parent.
So while using **kwargs seems kind of lazy, there is good arguments, why you cannot completely avoid it in all codebases without major rework to pre-existing class hierarchies.
For the obvious question "Why on earth?" These semantics allow us to resolve diamond dependencies without forcing the user to use interfaces or traits or throwing runtime errors as soon as something does not resolve cleanly (which would all not fit well into the Python typing philosophy.)
Just enjoy the first part cinematically. Explore the ship and unlock the scenes. Absorb the atmosphere from the scenes, and enjoy the music. Try to figure out the disjointed narrative, and don't focus on your puzzle book. (One of the flaws is that the forced waiting sequence should IMO lock you out of accessing the puzzle book completely. I often forgot, and got annoyed because I could not enter the cause of death before the page got unlocked after the scene...) You will not be able to solve a lot in the first pass anyways. The game throws you some freebies, yes, but that's just to let you get used to handling the book.
For context, once I had unlocked all scenes, I had not even one quarter of the book solved, and despite what I recommend in the first paragraphs, it was not for lack of trying. This is when you notice that you have everything you need, and a sort of panic sets in. You realize that it will not get easier than this. This intrigued me a lot, and this was when the real puzzle game starts. Now you revisit all the scenes analyzing every nook and cranny of the dioramas like some nautical Sherlock Holmes. But it's never stupid "hunt the pixel" like one would assume from that description, no. I have never seen the attention for detail in any game before, and the dev really thought of everything.
If you ever find yourself thinking "Oh wow, I can deduce something here from the position of that piece of scenery, but there is no way this was intended", then the answer is always "Oh yes, it totally was". Then you enter the suspicion into the book, and suddenly the game validates you by copying your notes into print with that cheerful music jingle. After a while the screen turning black and the first notes starting will give you a dopamine rush already.
The game captures perfectly what for example escape rooms or detective stories are about. The only real downside of the game is that the replay value is 0 by its very concept. I envy you for still being able to play it blind.
I can say from my own experience at least at my university, that "Altherrenhumor" ("old gentleman humor") like this is still very common in German engineering lectures even today, or at least well into the 2010s.
I would even call such a re-ordering of the genders in the greeting very tame. If you are a woman, you better come to your lectures on time. If you enter the hall half a minute late, the entire hall would whistle at you and cat-call you. Sometimes with support of the lecturer, who would consider it appropriate hazing for "disturbing" the lecture by being late.
At least there started to be at least some sort of push-back by the administration during the years in which I studied, and the really bad stuff only seemed to happen in classes dominated by the mechanical engineers.
I come from a country that is generally considered very open-minded about nudity, and having a communal shower with your colleagues after your shift (gender-separated, mind you) is considered absolutely normal in jobs that get you dirty.
And even if you are a prude, I really wonder why no-one has considered sharing a shower or sponge-bath with a colleague or two in swim-shorts. It's more unhygienic than showering naked, yes, but I would still consider this miles better than taking no shower at all for days at a time.
Or maybe the showers described are indeed communal, and they just noticed that squeezing two people below one spout is just not a efficient way to shower and does not actually save that much water...
In the fourth task "Add the angles BAC and EDF on the given line GH", I drew the circles DF and EF in, then connected E and F with a line segment, and it told me that I solved the problem without touching the points GH at all...
Edit: In fact, simply drawing the line from E to F is already enough.
Edit 2: Similar when doing the "Perpendicular to line in a point not on a line": Drawing any perpendicular is enough, even if it is not going through that point.
It explains why currently, even though gas is so prohibitively expensive, we still run gas powered plants at the moment, and also why even with relatively low transmission capacity between countries there is still big impact on energy prices.
The tl;dr is: Energy prices are determined by taking the most expensive auction price that is required to cover the load at any given moment. Everyone who offered a cheaper rate may sell the energy, but receives the highest price that was accepted. This means that prices are highly non-linear and susceptible to supply shocks. Even though the changes from import to export with respect to France are small, a rather small reduction in cheap nuclear power immediately makes it a lot more profitable to produce energy, also making coal and gas viable again.
Also note that this model explains the cheap price of nuclear and solar: You "only" need to ROI your initial capital eventually to turn a profit. When push comes to shove you would rather sell at any price above 0 (or at least a very low bottom) rather than turning off your plant and getting no income at all. You cannot do that when you still have significant operational expenses for fuel (coal, gas, stored water).
On electricitymap you can see this behaviour in action as well. Even with something like 50% solar production, prices remain high, when suddenly, the prices collapse below zero after a certain threshold was reached. Also note that in these cases, the prices in France and Germany decouple. Customers on the German energy exchange might get paid to use energy while in France spot price still is upward of 10-20 ct/kWh.
Also:
> Under European market law, you are obliged to buy renewable energy if it is available.
Do you have a source for that? I think that guarantee only applies to Germany. And then it only says that the suppliers always get paid for the energy they could produce, wind and solar can and will still get turned off physically.
And from what I have written above it pretty much follows that renewables will always be bought if possible, because they have no fuel costs and letting them run is during positive prices always more profitable than shutting them off. Note though that many renewables are not even sold on the energy exchange and rather influence the market indirectly as most energy utilities have fixed delivery contracts with the producers and only buy/sell the excess on the spot market.
Migrating away from (black) coal (used mostly in the steel industry) has caused big issues in the Ruhr area ("Strukturwandel", structural shift, meaning migration of significant parts of the workforce from coal to other sectors) in the past, which also means that the population is very wary of phasing out lignite as well. Pretty much everyone knows somebody who lost their job in a mine. Some cities like Gelsenkirchen are still structurally weak, like a lite version of Detroit. This means that politicians mow give expensive political gifts to the coal industry to provide retraining opportunities or early pensions, just so they can claim that they do not "forget" the workers this time.
While in fact, there is maybe 30k people or so in all of Germany employed by coal and its dependent industries. And nobody cares that the wind and solar industry lost 100k or so workers over the last decade due to avoidable regulatory issues and the resulting low project volume.
Anyways, you should not underestimate the amount of respect the coal workers always had in the Ruhr area. Digging coal in a below-ground mine is still the essential definition of "honest work" and sacrifice here. It's probably somewhat comparable to how military service is treated in the US, including the occasional "thank you for your service" and all. There are shrines dedicated to St. Barbara, the patron saint of mining, sprinkled everywhere, because people regularily prayed for their husbands, fathers, brothers, sons and friends to come home safely each day. Children learn the Steigerlied in school and sing it before football games. It's even worse than a lobby, the population mostly supports special treatment for the coal workers, as the mining and steel industry is still part of the cultural DNA.
This means that the water table needs to be drained to keep the mine dry. The pumps in many cases directly feed the excess water into the power plant.
An example is the plant Neurath, which is the second biggest coal power plant in Europe, delivering 4 gigawatts of power without use of surface water.
Remember, we are still talking about the claim that renovation of the building stock takes approximately 100 years.
It does not matter whether we are building more because people need more space, or because houses are actually replaced. All that matters is that the percentage of the building stock built under modern energetic regulations rises sufficiently fast.
This is why this discussion is so frustrating for me. It's all about semantics that don't matter, when my point was actually just disproving a point I thought to be ridiculous (which with the new research I did for my rebuttals was actually sort of disproved, as Germany seems to be really good at renovating the building stock compared to e.g. Eastern Europe), which is also why this will probably be my last post in this thread.
> You are misinterpreting them. They don't literally say "houses are worseless on average after a 100 years". They say "houses are worseless on average after a 100 years without doing anything to increase their value". And this is certaily more or less accurate.
You seem really hung up on the topic of depreciation accounting (AfA) and don't seem to get my point. Depreciation is regulated and does not exist in a vacuum.
Depreciation is a legal fiction to model the reduction in value of assets in such a way that it is easy to calculate, but also close to the actual value that would be fetched on the market due to the depreciation.
You are essentially claiming several things with your argument: 1. depreciation is not correlated with actual value loss, and therefore 2. the economic lifetime model used to calculate depreciation does not correlate with actual use lifetime.
The first is correct: Renovation expenses can be used to raise the book value of the asset making them balance-neutral. The second is not and especially does not follow from the first for the reason that I told you, the lifetime model used in depreciation calculation is based on the observed lifetimes in reality. There is also feedback in the other direction as engineering decisions are taken based on the best practices in economic lifetimes, which is why I cited the relevant DIN norm for cost calculation for builders in my first post.
> That solution is what I would try in your situation.
Thanks for your advice. But I already tried that. And it's pretty funny that you literally try to explain the mentality of my grandma to me. But what do I know it's only my grandma.
Let's just let the topic rest, I do not really care about this discussion anymore.
Le me just try to give a definition, "lasting" for me means that you only do maintenance and rework that you would still consider the building year to remain the same after you are finished.
Also the semantics of the term "lasting" were not the issue, the issue is that you do not my sources because you find the term economic lifetime and its definition unacceptable.
> Are you referring to https://www.bauprofessor.de/wirtschaftliche-nutzungsdauer-ge... ?
No I mean my number that approximately half of housing buildings are younger than 1977, so approximately 50 years.
This refers to a survey by the government, see box on bottom: https://www.bundesregierung.de/breg-de/themen/klimaschutz/kl...
Someone else in this thread posted a similar source from ourworldindata which has a bit older data but also shows the same trend.
The latter source also has a more detailed breakdown of building years. But even the former source mentions 1977 as its index year which already alleviates the external effects of WW2, people did not just live without houses for 30 years, the lost housing of WW2 was mostly rebuilt in the 50s.
Also, I do think that your claim is not valid. I do understand that the source I gave for economic lifetime, and also the norm I quoted is acting with fictions required for taxes and accounting reasons. The thing is: These fictions are intended to reflect reality. So I don't get why you are so hung up on where these calculation models originate, as they are specifically designed to reflect reality. If they were outlandish, especially when lifetimes on average are longer, these calculation models would absolutely be changed because then the state earns more money due to lower depreciation. If it was the other way around, the calculation model would be challenged in court.
Of course there is no natural law that a house collapses after 100 years. But not only in architecture, in all of engineering, it usually does not make sense to design for an infinite lifetime. If you double the lifetime of anything, it will cost a lot more money. Why would you spend more money today to build a house with better materials, when you don't even live to see the rewards in the form of lower maintenance and renovation costs in a 100 years. By extension this applies for the amount of money you want to spend in maintenance, at least for natural persons. In many situation it makes sense to simply use up the bound capital.
Now this leads to the following:
> It's easy to call someone irrational - but why do you think they don't want this work to be performed. How comes? I doubt that you assume they want the planet to die, so what do you think are their reasons?
As an anecdote for illustration, my grandparents still heat with oil, but the heater soon needs to be replaced. My grandparents are absolutely stubborn in that they want to replace it with a completely new oil-based heater. The literally only reason is: They are old and don't want to try out something new, even if it is functionally exactly the same (like a wood pellet heater). I literally offered them to pay 100% of the new heating system (reversible heat-pump because heat is one of the primary killers of elderly people and I would like my grand-parents to be around a bit longer...) after they bought heating oil on the ATH this spring and they still disagree. There is literally no economic incentive of looking the gift horse in the mouth, and they are unable to offer any other rational explanation.
You may also skimp on maintenance because you think "I am going to die soon anyways". Or people are planning to be living in a large 200 square-meter mansion with 3 stories until they are 90 when in reality they sell the house at 60 and suffer the loss of value when re-selling due to insufficient maintenance.
And some people just want to live in their house and don't give any thought to it until there is an emergency. Then people will have expensive repairs and still won't think twice about changing their behavior.
Some small house owners skimp on maintenance because they bought their houses as an "investment", and they are dependent on rent income to reliably subsidize their life. Even when the income could be higher in the future with some investments and quickly ROI, they won't accept saving up for it and taking on the economic risk.
Even for institutional housing owners it makes sense to tear down units eventually, even if it is just to get rid of the long-term tenants who make larger renovations annoying to impossible.
There is a lot of small house-owners and in general, most people are just really bad at basic accounting. This is also a big reason why the housing market in general is such a pain in the ass.
Now you are literally redefining the terms I use and then quoting them back to me to argue your new semantics, are you serious?
On average, a house is considered to last 100 years in Germany. Call it economic lifetime or whatever else you want. I still stand by that claim, as it is common knowledge. I quoted specific numbers on the housing stock which are consistent with that claim (though no proof of causation, as there are plenty of reasons why we have a lot of new stock, for example in general rising number of buildings.)
And of course the insulation is not "for free", but the additional costs are usually worth it. I also mentioned that many people decide irrationally because they do not want the work associated with planning and ordering the maintenance to be performed.
None of this matters to show that the above mentioned claim how long renovation of the current housing stock will take is completely out of the world.
Note that I am by no means a civil engineer or architect, but following the discussion and researching the topics associated with the Energiewende in the different sectors for over a decade now. I may still well be wrong in this instance. But you won't convince me of that if you try to prove me wrong on semantics and just asserting that I were intellectually unable to understand your arguments. So please also state some relevant facts and sources to support your claims if you want to try further to convince me, otherwise continuing this discussion is probably a waste of time for me as we both will probably not learn anything new. Thanks.
You will do major work on roof or facades every 50 years or so. This is exactly the opportunity where you pretty much get insulation for free.
After 100 years the house will have been all but structurally rebuilt once, just for upkeep reasons. You perform energetic renovations together with the upkeep tasks.
And when the house is old enough, the monument protection agency will even force you to do it by that time.
The constitution would allow these laws, even to the point of expropriation. But as long as the laws do not exist there is no legal basis to act on.
In case of conflict, there are some court rulings already, for example the highest court recently ruled that you may infringe on the neighbors property, if you need to insulate your walls in such a way that the thicker walls would then be on the neighbours property.
Assuming an economic lifetime of 70 to 100 years for new buildings is industry practice based on standards like DIN 276. You can find those numbers (with some variation) on pretty much every web page dealing with economics of building, for example here: https://www.bauprofessor.de/wirtschaftliche-nutzungsdauer-ge...
You can also approximately extrapolate that number from the source I have given you. (Which is based on a survey by the federal government of Germany) If approximately 50-60% of houses are older than 50 years, then assuming a approximately linear to progressive attrition curve you will get a number around 100 for the average lifetime.
Of course a long tail exists, but 1. I was talking about economic costs, people might just like their houses and renovate even though it is financially not worth it, and 2. after 100 years the historical protection (Denkmalschutz) gets more and more relevant and is a whole different set of regulations.
For example, in Super Mario Brothers non-TAS runs, the rules are based around the controller and execution environment. You are not allowed to modify the controller or tilt the cartridge, but that's it.
Having the rules only limit the tools required, just like in sports, is quite elegant. If somebody figured a way to play faster with their teeth, it would be allowed, and rolling the controller is just something like that.
On the other hand, people found out that you can perform certain feats in SMB by pressing the left and right button at the same time. This is considered impossible with the standard D-Pad (without e.g. cutting it in the middle), so that is banned. At least until somebody figures out a way how to do it with the standard D-Pad.
Also you need to learn the difference between Capex and Opex.
The expected economic lifetime of a building in Germany is approximately 100 years. Which means that on average, the house will be torn down and rebuilt after at most 100 years, because additional upkeep would not make economic sense.
This means that if you do not change policy except mandating modern standards for new buildings (which is already done) and do literally jack-shit, the normal economic activity will have the problem sorted out in that timespan.
For reference: Of 22 million buildings in Germany, "only" 12.5 million are built before 1977.
The German government aims at having pretty much all buildings energetically renovated in 2050.
The biggest problem is that 1. there are many house-owners who literally do not give a shit even if they can save lots of money by an investment. Not everyone is economically minded and there is no political will (or legal basis) to force these people for their own good. And 2. for bigger apartment buildings etc. it is hard to do an invasive renovation while the units are occupied, limiting the scope of renovations to something that can be done in-place or one unit at a time or without affecting tenants.
I also wonder the same. In my layman opinion, the most sensible approach would be moving some of the new nuclear projects to Germany. This would then free up resources in France to invest in renewable power. This could help solve the current problems in Germany (high CO2 output) as well as France (inflexible grid)
This has the following advantages:
* Renewable energy from wind and solar, are the cheapest forms of energy right now, full stop. Decarbonizing our economy is currently constrained by capital expense. So any other form of energy production needs a really good technical reason to get preferred over the cheap forms of energy.
* Corollary from that: Please note that everybody who claims that renewables destabilize the grid by introducing peaks is mostly full of shit. It is absolutely trivial to turn both wind turbines and solar alternators off almost immediately. Why do we try to avoid that? Because having all that bound capital standing around doing nothing lowers ROI (and for example Germany guarantees that the operators will get their lost revenue replaced.) This is literally the only reason. Everyone who claims that renewables at the current stage of the transition will threaten black-outs due to overproduction is spreading misinformation. When we get over ~80% of renewable production, we need new solutions, e.g. to provide fine-grained synchronization for the grid, which is currently done en passant via the rotational inertia of the turbines in thermal plants.
* France has a good position to support renewables very cost-efficiently. Lots of valuable Atlantic coast with wind, both on-shore and with a huge economic zone offshire, a neighbour (Spain/Portugal) with high amounts of wind and solar even in winter months, which is just waiting to be piped into central Europe. But there is no political will because nuclear is so comfortable and you don't have to fight NIMBYs thousands of times for each wind turbine or solar park
* As articles like this one show, France has already hit a constraint with nuclear plants: Cooling water. This constraint is quite scary, as access to surface cooling water will only get worse as climate change progesses. Scaling up nuclear even more would require spreading the load over more shoulders, e.g. by using rivers in Germany. Note that the lignite plants in Germany are cooled using ground water which is collected by pumping ground water to keep the associated open-pit mines free of flooding (with high ecological impact, still maybe a solution for France?)
* Contrary to what nuclear proponents on HN mostly claim, nuclear power is inflexible, and already putting a strain on the French grid. Electricity generation (spot) prices since April are almost always equal or higher in France than in Germany due to lack of transmission capacity between these countries (to verify this, use services like Electricity Maps or Energy Charts which graph the cost of electricity in real time over the last 24h, data is available via ENTSOE-E). Building more renewables would alleviate these problems, but is actually not so easy or economically feasible with the current mostly nuclear grid.
* Contrary to what nuclear opponents on HN mostly claim, base load is still useful to some degree, which is why Germany still burns coal and has biofuel reactors specifically to provide base load. Moving nuclear generation capacities to Germany would reduce carbon output during nights, especially summer nights low on wind, and free up biogas to be used for peaker operation.
Why doesn't France reduce its dependence on nuclear power, allowing economic incentives for cheaper solar and wind power? Mostly politics. Shutting down the nuclear power plants is even more expensive than letting them run until their EOL, which is a tough sell. Also NIMBYs hate wind turbines a lot, and by the decentralized nature of wind, fighting them is harder than the NIMBYs against nuclear plants.
Why doesn't Germany build more nuclear power? Mostly politics and history. Also building a nuclear power plant is not easy from a planning standpoint and might take upwards of 10 years even if society completely commits, alleviating no current problems. Any solution involving nuclear that still makes sense would be a long-term decision, probably pan-European. For now without support e.g. by France, the most economic and climatically sensible path for Germany is to press on 100% with electrification and removing barriers for additional investments into wind and solar.
Unfortunately, there is not enough (economically extractable) Lithium to go around. Experts estimate a Lithium "hole" of up to 300.000 tons of missing yearly production by 2030.
There is nothing we can do about it, only prospecting for more Lithium, reducing red tape for Lithium mining (with all the negative environmental impacts), or further increasing efficiency of Lithium use in batteries. As you said, Lithium battery technology is mature, so we have hit diminishing returns here.
This is why the feasibility of sodium batteries that was announced a year or so ago was such a big deal. Getting Sodium (e.g. from table salt, mined as excess in potassium mines, with a price of around zero) is easy and cheap.
Without the climate crisis, doing this R&D only once the technology becomes required and therefore economically feasible would be fine. But with the current decarbonization targets, you cannot just build renewables until you hit a threshold, and only then start testing out storage methods while putting the green energy infrastructure industry into hibernation for 20 years. We pretty much need to do everything, right now, at the same time.
This is also why there is a big economic advantage of hydrogen storage. Decarbonizing steel and ammonia production with blue hydrogen (i.e. electrolysis using electricity created with the current fossil fuel heavy generation mix) is already a big potential market which is already kind of feasible, reducing the need for government subsidies to get the tech off the ground.
Once the R&D, production and sales pipelines for blue hydrogen are up-and-running, you just scale up with increasingly mature technology. Then transition the energy input from carbon-intensive to carbon-neutral. This should happen automatically, as green electricity is the cheapest form of energy, and the hydrogen production acts as an energy-sink for any surplus production, mitigating those adverse market pressures acting on renewables after you reach a certain percentage threshold on renewable energy generation. Only then you eventually ramp up the use as energy storage via normal market mechanisms.
Unfortunately the media always seems to put the cart before the horse. Energy storage is not the first step, but should be the last.
Even Reddit, which is notoriously bad with its moderator policies, at least has a process how to raise disputes with moderator behaviour, and escalate them to actual company employees. Google does not even care.
From a technical standpoint it was pretty obvious what happened. The image was overlaid with a grid of white lines. As the images were likely downsampled to reduce the required computing power, when the image was cropped right, the ML algorithm only saw a plain white image.
The only way to appeal this was a Google Support Forum where people posted screenshots and some "Gold Member Community Moderators" or whatever they were called, dismissed all complaints. They claimed that every ad was checked, porn getting through was impossible, and the people should factory-reset their phones as the only explanation was that viruses on their phone were injecting these ads...
Just today you can see the following patterns.
First, at night, energy prices in France and Germany are in lock-step and equal to the cent. Then during day time, when the sun is shining, two things happen:
* Energy prices fall sharply in Germany, while they stay on approximately the same plateau in France.
* The output of the nuclear reactors in France actually gets reduced, even though prices are still sky-high.
This shows the problem of the excess base-load due to nuclear power in France. The nuclear power plants are already hindering renewable energy production by putting strain on the grid, which is the opposite what all nuclear proponents claim.
The problems of nuclear power become pretty evident if you just look at the data once per day or so. The first effect of decoupled prices in Germany and France due to lack of transmission capacity has already been going on pretty much every day since about April.
The second effect that France actually reduced reactor output during the day, with the prices still high, is new, at least I have not seen it yet.
The author looks at primary energy and despairs as the needle only moved by 3 percentage points to renewables. Also the author tells us that energy-saving gains are of no use.
Those two statements are absolutely contradictory. In general, the public does not seem to understand primary energy well enough to make informed decisions.
If you just transition to renewable (or nuclear) electricity production and ignore everything else, you cut primary energy use of electricity generation by 30-60% just by the way that primary energy use is calculated. A thermal power plant wastes at least 30% of its energy as waste heat, about 60% if you don't do residential heating.
A solar panel by definition converts all its primary energy input to electricity. Even with nuclear energy, you take the heat output of the nuclear process as primary energy, inflating the primary energy by about 200%
With combustion car engines it is the same. If you electrify those cars, the primary energy use drops as gasoline combustion engines waste 60% of the energy in the oil as heat. Losses in your batteries and power generation also add up, but at 60% losses as benchmark, you can even break even with current fossil electricity generation.
Look at houses: If you build a modern passive home, the heat output of the human body (approx 100W) becomes significant for calculations. Ambient solar irradiation (i.e. light that shines through your windows and gets trapped) delivers most of the heat. Both these energy sources will not appear in any primary energy statistics.
You can put this even more over the top and include sunlight trapped by photosynthesis as well as natural heating delivered by the sun in the energy used by agriculture. But then all of human energy consumption will become a rounding error. But psychologically it might sound nicer if you think that we only have to transition away from the 0.01% or something of human fossil energy use. This sounds ridiculous, but this is essentially the same argument the author makes.
All of these examples show that the imperative to curb our fossil energy use should be (regardless of whether you advocate for nuclear or not) should indeed be "energy efficiency". But energy efficiency does not mean cutting your TV energy consumption by ten percent or something. Energy efficiency means reducing our "balance sheet" by electrification, avoiding energy conversion losses, and reducing energy use for heat by using ambient energy.
You also get paid for "normal" blood donations, even though the payment is technically only a "compensation" for your time and trouble. The donation services like German Red Cross usually still make a profit, which is why some people make a point to donate directly to hospitals if possible.
There are plenty of corporations in Germany that chug along since generation with essentially no profits on their balance sheets.
As long as salaries are paid, you provide a living for your employees, as long as customers are happy, you provide value to the economy. When you have your established niche you do not need growth.
He found it when he was investigating a customer complaint about corrupted log file downloads.
There is still in-depth high-value engineering happening, even if you don't work for the flashy silicon valley VC unicorns.
In fact, such a basic support request would probably have been closed as "could not reproduce" in a highly competitive environment.
In my experience with government organizations, the argument that public tax money should be used for public/free re-usable software instead of funding proprietary development (essentially subsidizing R&D of foreign corporations), really strikes a nerve on all administrative levels.