Do you have steam running in the background in desktop mode or did you shut that down?

Never did. Doesn’t change the fact that a lot of forums are now deserted and have a pinned post that points to a fucking discord.

I don’t think there are many applications that I hate with more passion than discord and anybody who willingly chooses that garbage piece of software to further hide what used to be searchable forum content behind login walls and proprietary apis should be forced to search for a solution for a simple problem of their most beloved hobby all over hundreds of stupid discord channels for all eternity.

How can you be so dense?

Using a calculator for math is cheating unless it has been explicitly allowed. Which it isn’t until higher grades because before that, people are supposed to do math without a calculator. Which they should do to get a proper understanding about the subject.

The same holds for literally any tool. If the goal is to get the students to be able to convincingly communicate their thoughts or to see if they understood a topic by making them explain it, having them use chatgpt accomplished nothing and just wastes everybody’s time. If the goal is to see if they can produce enough bullshit to satisfy an average public administration, then letting them use llms might be valid. Just like any other tool, it’s legitimate to allow llms or not, based on whatever is supposed to end up in a student’s head. But using it without it being allowed is cheating, simple as that.

Fair enough.

• i actually think that if pickups had lower hoods, they would be more moral, yes, because they would be less dangerous. (see above)

Fair point. I agree.

I always assumed that the bonnet height was one of the reasons why you couldn’t really drive one of those in Europe anyway. But if that’s not the case then yes, adjusting that should be done.

(Also I drive a van and I think it’s cool since obviously I’m cool and so my car kinda has to be, too, so I’m not sure if I agree with your first point.)

But isn’t that already part of regulations 78/2009 and 2019/2144?

I mean, I’m all for it, but if it’s just that it seems the goal is to get more detailed regulations for the bonnet then that’s great, but I fail to see how that would get rid of SUVs or other larger cars.

Also don’t misunderstand me there… Reducing bonnet height to protect pedestrians on impact is a good thing and should be done. I just don’t think it’d reduce car weight or size, so if that’s the goal then it won’t help.

We’ve had station wagons for a very long time now. A big Ford Mondeo we had was a relatively low car, without an enormous bonnet.

Cars continue to get wider, longer and higher off the ground (there’s this Kia that looks like you’re driving around in a fridge), whilst the stuff we move within them isn’t exactly increasing. it’s just bigger for the sake of being bigger, and that’s causing issues in the streets.

You are missing my point. To turn this into a law, there need to be clear rules of what is or isn’t allowed.

The Kia you’re talking about is this one I guess? The EV5?

Unfortunately, the size comparison site I used doesn’t have that, but it is apparently similar to their “Sportage” SUV, so I took the long wheel base version of that one to compare it against your old Mondeo…

… which is longer than the SUV…

… and only 5cm less wide …

whilst the stuff we move within them isn’t exactly increasing

… and has much less cargo volume.

So, what kind of rules do you come up with to get rid of the one but not the other? Height? Then what about the vans? And how is height making a car more or less unethical?

So far, the 3.5 ton weight limit seems to have worked well for keeping the most ridiculous American cars off European streets. But it seems that’s not enough, so what other rules could be used to define which cars shouldn’t be allowed to drive around? It’s obviously not weight because we already have that. It’s apparently not the size because despite most arguments, SUVs aren’t always much bigger than other cars that are usually perceived as fine. So what is it??

Hm. Don’t know.

This one?

Yeah, can be banned.

But this one?

Don’t know. While it’s a fair bit shorter than an f150, it’s still a big-ass car. But is it an unethical car? It fits a lot of stuff or a lot of people or a fair amount of both, but I guess the same thing is true for the f150. Visibility is much better I guess, but would pick ups be more moral if they had a lower hood?

Like, yeah, I hate pick ups, too, but what’s their defining aspect? What’s the law that gets rid of large SUVs but keeps station wagons? Or is the law just going to get rid of all larger cars?

I’m not trying to argue against the idea of banning dick comparison cars, this is a genuine question.

I don’t want slimmer, I want smaller! Give me back my 4.5" screen 😩

What does “outgovern” mean?

It’s always the same story… Essentially those people say that all you need to do is govern better than them. Which is a stupid take because for that to work, they’d have to be in power first - vs you don’t want fascists to get power just to prove your point of them not doing it well. You’re not going to get that power back.

What’s so bad about not engaging with the AfD politically?

One thing doesn’t have anything to do with the other. There are laws in Germany that make it very clear where you’re allowed to be on the political spectrum. If you’re outside of that range, your party is supposed to be dissolved, end of story. Imho, they are way beyond what is allowed, so the constitutional court should decide if they should be allowed to keep working. It’s just not a political question, it’s a legal question. So it should be answered in courts, not in the parliament.

On another note, I even think that engaging with them politically won’t lead anywhere except more publicity for them. And that’s not because they’re so good at debating but because they’re always acting in bad faith. Their goal isn’t to fix the system but to destroy it, so every time you give them airtime they’ll use that to lure more frustrated people into their hands, just to start using the channels the party owns to get more information, opening themselves up misinformation and lies. It’s not an accident that that party uses social media and their own channels to spread their point of view while ignoring or oppressing established media wherever they can. This whole premise turns engagement with them into an argument you can’t win, though. If you’re defending any part of this system, you’re their enemy and they won’t use a debate to engage with you but simply to use you as a means to communicate their own goal of tearing it all down. They are not interested in compromise, so unless you agree with their idea of destroying this system as we know it, there’s no good outcome in any engagement with them.

God, I missed your “not”… I fucking wrote that on mobile. 😞

So, like, one person paid for over two years?

So you’re spewing irrelevant nonsense just to ridicule people who call you out on your irrelevant nonsense by telling them you know it’s irrelevant nonsense?

Your point is purely anecdotal. I see lots of Teslas where I live, so there’s that. I also see more BEVs than PHEVs, which is also in line with sales figures.

So, to be blunt, I think your perception is skewed or wrong.

I have no idea how you get the idea that oil spills aren’t covered by insurance. In fact, denying insurance is the easiest way to keep vessels out of your waters because they just won’t go where they aren’t covered. If something isn’t cleaned up properly it’s certainly not because of the lack of insurance.

Your next example was the Beirut explosion. First, I’m pretty sure there was somebody there who was liable. The issue is, though, that if that event wasn’t covered by insurance (which I guess it wasn’t, just because it was a shitty country where you maybe didn’t have to have insurance) I’m pretty sure it serves as a good example that that was an idea that was dumb as fuck as this single event essentially tanked the country’s economy for years or decades. I’m not sure what exactly your point is in this case except showing that there are some underdeveloped countries where you don’t have to make sure your shit gets cleaned up after you and if it really hits the fan you take down the whole shithole with you. I’m not sure if that’s how you want industries to operate where you live and I’m also not sure of that’s your idea how nuclear plants should be operated. But, and that’s my point, that’s how they fucking are. Every single one of them.

The derailed train I don’t get at all. There’s a whole chapter on that page that deals with how they spent hundreds of millions on the cleanup and settlements. I’m sure a lot of it is covered by insurance companies. What makes you assume something else?

Your last counter example is sewage being fed into rivers covertly and possibly illegally. Like… Yeah, so? If you’re willing to break the law I guess you don’t care about insurance either. Still not how companies should be run.

Go read yourself:

A 2020 study found that lost nuclear electricity production has been replaced primarily by coal-fired production and net electricity imports. The social cost of this shift from nuclear to coal is approximately €3 to €8 billion annually, mostly from the eleven hundred additional deaths associated with exposure to the local air pollution emitted when burning fossil fuels.

And remember that the pollution which kills people just because breathing smoke and ash is bad, it’s also radioactive.

Now that really got me curious. Seriously. It’s the first time I ever heard about that, so thanks for the input. However, I couldn’t really confirm it. First of all, just a look at the graphs of how energy sources developed…

It’s just not there! Even more curiously, Wikipedia writes it differently on another page:

As they shut down nuclear power, Germany made heavy investments in renewable energy, but those same investments could have “cut much deeper into fossil fuel energy” if the nuclear generation had still been online.

So, that’s already much less drastic on its wording and more in line with the data above and my prior understanding of the situation. Still, that makes it weird… So I looked at the source your Wikipedia page cites.

Our novel machine learning approach combines hourly data on observed power plant operations between 2010-2017 with a wide range of related information, including electricity demand, local weather conditions, electricity prices, fuel prices and various plant characteristics. Using these data, we first simply document that production from nuclear sources declined precipitously after March 2011. This lost nuclear production was replaced by electricity production from coal- and gas-fired sources in Germany as well as electricity imports from surrounding countries

Emphasis mine. But fucking hell…

Did you take a look at that paper? I mean apart from the fact that they put all their figures into the appendix, which makes it extremely annoying to read… Instead of looking at the data how power was actually produced, they just say their data doesn’t have that info but they just came up with an algorithm that pulls the information out of its random for-ass and says it was probably coal. Subsequently, they use their made-up data as if those hallucinated junk tables were given facts:

The largest increases, both in absolute and percentage terms, are from hard coal and gas-fired production. Specifically, annual average production from hard coal increased by 28.5 TWh (32%) while gas-fired production increased by 8.3 TWh (26%). Finally, the phase-out caused net imports to increase by 10.2 TWh (37%) per year on average.

Just look at the graphs that trace the actual production further up in this post… One third more hard coal? It’s just not there! So, no, that source doesn’t hold up and I really wonder who’d think that such a source should be used in the Wikipedia.

We just don’t have the alternatives ready to go for that just yet

I disagree. Look at the gross electricity production graph. Just install more capacity than required and be done with it. As renewables produce electricity that’s cheap as fuck, you can just install three times the capacity you need. Subsidise home and large scale batteries to even out energy usage and install large scale batteries and gas plants to hop in if required. Use the excess energy from your overcapacity to produce hydrogen. Push people and industries into hourly updated tariffs so they have a reason to not use electricity if it’s scarce (and thus expensive). There are lot of methods. In Germany, an industry-heavy country, renewables are already delivering more than 60 percent of the electricity, up from essentially nothing thirty years ago, and I haven’t heard a good argument why this couldn’t be increased further. We have the alternatives and they are right here, right now, and they work.

There’s a ton of stuff going on all the time which no amunt of insurance will cover.

And what exactly would that be? Essentially everything has insurance.

Fukushima is a bit different

Yeah. And what’s stopping other stuff to be “a bit different”?

And even there the environmental impact was somewhat limited.

Japan got damn lucky the wind blew everything seawards. If the fallout had hit Tokyo, this would have been a very different story.

replacing their energy output with coal

And who did that? Nobody. There were no new coal plants to replace anything. That statement is straight up misleading. The old plants were kept running, yes, and they kept emitting, yes. And that’s always the thing that’s being brought up, “they could have taken the coal plants offline sooner had they just kept the nuke plants running a little longer”. But that’s an entirely different thing than “they replaced nuclear with coal”. Nobody did that. Had they not tanked the German market for renewables, the coal plants would have been taken offline earlier, too, but for some reason that’s never the sob story. Instead, people keep bringing up nuke plants time and time again, which is just weird. Yeah, coal and nuclear both destroy the planet. Let’s not see which one’s marginally worse but instead maybe just push something that’s actually good for the planet?

Well, if that’s so rare and can essentially be ignored, I’m sure you’ll easily find insurance for nuclear plants that will cover the cost of a potential disaster. I mean, after all, it evens out over all the nuke plants, right? The market handles it, right?

How exactly does nuclear decouple you from global dependencies if there are less than 20 countries with more than 100k tonnes of uranium reserves, with only one of them being in the EU?

it will become cheaper

Lol, sure. Says who?

France started building nuclear in the 1970s to begin with

Good example… The country that has to heavily subsidise power so people can still afford it.

Emphasis is misleading. If you think that an “assumption” is called an assumption because there’s no evidence, you don’t know how words are used in science. Also, it’s supposed to be the other way round… If radiation damages cells (which I guess you don’t seriously doubt) there needs to be evidence for a threshold, not for there not being one. Also:

Many expert scientific panels have been convened on the risks of ionizing radiation. Most explicitly support the LNT model and none have concluded that evidence exists for a threshold, with the exception of the French Academy of Sciences in a 2005 report.

The “controversy” chapter on that page is worth a read, but the point there is still pretty clear: most scientists do not see any indication for the existence of a threshold.

/edit

Also notice which country the scientists are from that don’t agree on the lnt model… The one country that went all in on nuclear power. No shit, Sherlock.

the idea that there’s no safe amount of radiation is ridiculous

Except that’s literally the current model used by scientific organisations: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linear_no-threshold_model