You may be as outraged as you want. I just pointed out that Mullvad didn’t do anything (to their detriment, at this point) like the title of the post suggested. That’s misrepresenting the facts. If you feel like that distinction (a company endorsement vs. a private donation) doesn’t make a difference, that’s fine. I get that. I left Proton when their CEO was praising the regime of 47 for tech regulation. I just believe we should be mad for the right reasons. Facts are good.

It’s been pointed out here in the thread that the majority of the donation to the horseshoe loonie party may in fact have come from other income streams, as Mullvad doesn’t pay an awful lot. I don’t know if that’s true but that would put another spin on the story as well.

There is no shortage of c@>=s in the author community either. Let’s not mention her name again. She’s probably a lot richer and therefore a lot more impactful with her magic money than this mad meatball. In my estimation, a dollar spent in the famous magician universe will have a lot more negative impact on the trans community than a comparable amount of kronor at Mullvad for immigrants to Sweden. The bigger threat there are probably the Sweden Democrats and they’re already in parliament as the second largest fraction.

This isn’t good. It’s also not entirely correct. Mullvad isn’t financing this party directly. One of the owners took his money he made from the company and donated it to the loonies. He could’ve bought crypto with it, spent it in blow maybe, but he didn’t. “Mullvad is financing this party” is not correct. “Your Mullvad fees may have ended up indirectly financing this party” is correct and an ongoing concern. So is their tepid response to the story breaking. I would still advise caution, hammer them with public outrage pressure on the socials, and hope they get rid of the loonie party donor before you bankrupt an otherwise serviceable VPN provider. If that guy is still there in a couple of months, by all means leave.

There is no shortage of c@<%s in the tech sector.

Yahoo!tech digging deep for a story there.

I’m not sure I understand the issue with fortifying the edges

Imagine a stack of papers on your desk. Clumsy you knocks over your coffee cup. Coffee hits all the papers, gets between them, everything is ruined. Now imagine it’s got spine binding. The coffee will not get into all the pages. Now imagine, somewhat unrealistically, attached under the spine binding is a little halfpipe sunken in the desk. Most of the coffee now flows away on the pipe. The drainage acts a bit like an anchor keeping stuff in place on the side.

I recognize that this is perhaps the motivation of the tech’s peddlers right now. It’s not a foregone conclusion that this is what’s going to happen.

Just from an economic angle, they need somebody to pay for all of this. It isn’t self sustaining. If we have no more jobs, no more artists, and all live broke, hand to mouth, who is going to pay for all this processing hardware they bought on credit, let alone the services they try to push on us that don’t work? Until they can plug us in like in the Matrix there’s still hope.

So we need to find a perfect site, of which there aren’t many, with some miraculously unbothered or even welcoming citizens and then built a facility to reinforce the natural defenses and keep our fingers crossed that nothing unforeseen happens? Got it.

Germany decided to phase out nuclear power plants and still hasn’t found a final resting place for all the waste. Because nobody wants it in their backyard. I think it’s not a easy as you think.

Fukushima Dai-ichi is next to the ocean and still couldn’t keep the cooling chain up. They said 30m waves wouldn’t happen. They thought they thought of everything. These risk assessments are too hubristic and the consequences when they’re wrong too catastrophic. Climate change will bring more torrential rain on arid soil. More landslides. Droughts bring more fires. What we thought was a given in the past may very quickly turn out to be ephemeral. This river won’t stop and then somebody upstream builds a dam. Or a surprise lahar happens. Couldn’t happen like that 30m tsunami, right? We thought a big sarcophagus around a blown up reactor would give us peace of mind and then some asshole started a war or attrition in the area. You. Cannot. Plan. For. Everything.

Stop gap means you can still use it. I’m not in favor but I’ve repeatedly admitted it’s better than fossil energy generation. I’d just rather we get out of it as fast as possible. Why don’t we take the time and energy of finding these new, fabled, riskless disposal site with the kind people who dgaf, built out extra defenses, label it in such a way that future inhabitants don’t unearth it and get sick, and just cover everything in solar panels? Until we have better batteries you’re still allowed to split atoms to fill gaps renewables leave because god forbid we tolerate a brownout to slow this climate crisis! I’m not in favor of building new gas power plants like they’re doing to fuel this so-called-AI psychosis. Split the atom if you cannot do something better. But really, do better.

If you want to shoot back one more time, I’ll read it but probably won’t reply;)

People would run into the oncoming traffic on the other side more often if the lanes are slanted inwards. And you have a single point out failure for the drain in the middle (e.g. blockage). Leaves will travel. I’m not an engineer but I play one on Lemmy: you don’t want your road to get washed away in a storm. If the edges aren’t fortified with a predetermined escape for water away from the road’s foundation, you run a higher risk of erosion.

Not this again. For the love of God.

I am in Japan where they have just discovered a cartel of ice cream manufacturers pushing up prices. Supply and demand. This is capitalism, baby!

This is a lawsuit, right? It’ll go through a few judges’ hands on appeals and what not and by the time the companies get their slap on the wrist in 2-5 years they will have made so much money it doesn’t matter.

It’s well worth it if you ask me. The school children can sit in the dark and hot/cold (delete as appropriate) so Bob in Idaho can generate a 30 second video of Yoda dancing to Wannabe in the style of Studio Ghibli, which he will look at once and then never again.

A fair warning up top: my mind is very much made up about this. The risks of nuclear power generation from feeding the grid until the radiation mess has half-lived itself into harmlessness are too great in my opinion. And that’s what this is. My opinion. I suspect yours differs. If you keep reading, you’ll probably get the feeling that there isn’t anything you can point out that gets through to me. Because, truthfully, it doesn’t.

It’s a very small amount that can be contained in secure casks and concentrated in a particular secure location in the middle of nowhere …

In my opinion, this is the waving away bit I referred to earlier. Europe doesn’t have a “middle of nowhere.” There is no such thing as a “secure location.” There is at best one with slightly reduced risks. There are people spread out everywhere, you’re going to end up in somebody’s backyard who doesn’t want it there. You need to be very careful that this stuff doesn’t escape its container and seep into groundwater. And this needs not to happen for a minimum of a century. You’re not breathing in the fumes constantly, sure. That’s why it’s better than a coal plant. You’re risking radiation leakages over a very long time for future generations, should we survive this as a species. It’s human hubris to say we can engineer around this threat on a scale of centuries.

A significant number of inland plants are built close to rivers for the perceived ease of getting the water. We just need one of them to fail unexpectedly to have a big problem. I’m not sure using groundwater for cooling is a great idea for much the same reasons as it isn’t for data centers. We need to manage our water resources, especially drinking water, as Europe heats up. We need to plan for a time when there is no “surplus water.” And damming up rivers is expensive and the benefits of that to the environment are limited. If we go to these lengths to preserve a nuclear fission plant we might as well built a solar farm and a wind farm.

I understand that emissions-wise nuclear fission is a great way to avoid those and it thus beats burning fossils. It’s still more of a “the plague or cholera?” kind of choice between them. If everything around nuclear power plants is that great and nothing to worry about, why Three Mile, Chernobyl, and Fukushima? It’s the hubris of we’ve got forces much more powerful than us under control. Until we don’t. We’ve thought of everything! Until we find out we didn’t. You put all of this together and that’s why I think fission is a stop gap technology we should phase out completely - drastically, at the very least.

Current? Maybe. Since the 1750s? Nope.

Nuclear power is also a stop gap solution if you ask me. It isn’t clean. It creates highly toxic waste products that nobody wants to keep stored for centuries in their backyard, just not a lot of CO2. That gets waved away a lot like it isn’t an issue. It’s better than burning gas, oil, or coal. It’s not better than renewables in my opinion. And nuclear needs a reliable cooling chain for its survival and all the people unfortunate enough to live close by. That’s normally done with water that happens to flow by the plant. If the increasing heat dries out these rivers, you’ll get a slightly more stretched out version of Fukushima.

The problem is batteries. If we could have batteries that store the sun and wind energy for when sun and wind are on a break, we’d be set. We don’t have that. The tech isn’t there yet. And we’d probably empoverish all the countries who are unfortunate enough to have the necessary rare earths in the ground in the process. We’re fucked in more ways than one.

It’s a tantalizing idea simply to blame the US for the deteriorating climate in Europe. But that seems both pointless and unjustified. Industrialization and excessive emissions started in Europe. We have gone into debt far enough ourselves in a manner of speaking, we can’t blame the yanks although their government currently is … well, you know.

Europeans are going to buy air conditioners and they will probably outfit cooling facilities that people can seek refuge from the heat in as a stop gap measure. That’s definitely causing more nuclear waste in France where atom splitting reigns supreme. Although nuclear power generation will suffer when rivers needed for cooling become mere trickles. And for the rest of the continent one can only hope they don’t burn shit to turn turbines to make more power. But it wouldn’t surprise me if they did.

There is no way to prevent these heatwaves; the damage is already done. If we stopped burning stuff today everywhere, we could prevent them from getting worse. That’s just a very sensible pipe dream unfortunately.

Language is imprecise. That’s where the ambiguity needs tolerance. A child can be a grown person and a person growing up, depending on context. There is no orphanage for people in their 40s. The original argument seems to hinge on the word child being basically equal in meaning to human being in all contexts. Which isn’t the case all the time. And it isn’t in the context of orphans.

You need to work on your ambiguity tolerance.

Would you say that’s relevant then to this discussion?

Scots a full brother. And where in Europe do they speak Guyanese?

The Dutch have the highest concentration of Frisian speakers. But there are other people along the cost as well, thinning out towards the North. Hence, a minority language.

That’s not a great statistic. Future diplomats will have college degrees. They will have pre-existing language knowledge. That’s too narrow a sample if you ask me.

And they wouldn’t teach them Frisian anyway because it’s a minority language spoken on the mainland North Sea coast from The Netherlands to Denmark.

Normalerweise bin ich gegen die Todesstrafe. Für den Ersteller dieses Aufklebers erwäge ich, meine Meinung zu ändern.