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Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: October 24th, 2023

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  • Especially because the tax cuts will be pocketed by petrol corporations at least in part instead of making gas guzzling cheaper. Who doesn’t want to increase big petrol profits at the expense of the community (because eventually the people need to pay for the tax cuts one way or another…).
    Short-term your proposal makes sense - and a lot more than what seems to be done in Germany.
    Long-term the only available and viable solution is making electric vehicles more attractive (by subsidizing them, the electricity to operate them and/or punishing the purchase of ICE cars).

    When looking at new cars it’s easy to make a case for EV.
    When buying used it’s a different thing, especially if the car is more than a few years old.
    A few year old combustion engine cars are lot cheaper than comparable electric ones.
    And a lot of years old EVs often have batteries with serious degradation, because battery (thermal) management was way less advanced when they were produced.
    We are in trying times, but the prospect is getting better and better for EVs.



  • The cost of installing solar has gone down fro quite a while (https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/solar-pv-prices) and depending on your region you can harvest around 1 kWh annually per 1 Watt peak power.
    With the price per Watt being a fraction (2024: $0.26) of a Dollar and the life span of solar modules being in the decades, it really is a no-brainer whether you want to install them or not.

    While they degrade over the years, they still retain close to 90% of their original power after 20 years and above 80% after 30 years.
    They’re basically free from maintenance.
    The inverters may not last that long, but even for quite big installations at home in the range of double-digit kilowatt peak with annual electric energy procution in the double-digit MWh range, they cost only a few hundred bucks.

    The biggest part (by mass) of solar panels is glass, which you are aware can be recylced until the cows come home.
    Another big part is aluminum. Recylcing wise the same as glass.

    And if you really want to replace them after decades, the amount of material that can’t be recycled is quite small and not hazardous. Put it in the landfill.
    Wind turbines are in part different as the blades typically can’t be recycled afaik. At least they’re in the category of non-hazardous waste as well and just like solar panels wind turbines last a very long time plus the towsers and the generators can very well be recylced/reused.
    Alas they require more maintenance than solar.

    The bigger challenge than finding cheap and not dangerous sources of electric energy at the moment appears to be the storage.
    With more and more electric vehicles being on the street and each of them with capable batteries this can be a part of the storage solution alongside of grid-storage.

    I choose renewables over fossil and nuclear any time of the day.


  • The amount of highly dangerous waste (e.g. fuel rods) may be small, but, well, it’s highly dangerous and not only because of the immediate danger from radiation, but because it can be weaponized.

    I agree and understand that converting mass to energy makes absurd amounts of energy available.

    Aren’t especially the fuel rods more dangerous than the uranium, that has been dug from the earth, because it’s a mix of radionuclides with in parts complex decay chains?
    Doesn’t almost all uranium that has been dug up (according to wikipedia 99.3%) have a half-life of 4.463×109 years (before being used as fuel rod)?
    Which made the level of radiation smaller than for radionuclides with shorter half-life that are in the used fuel rods, right?

    The propaganda from fossil against the dangers of radiation doesn’t work well as long as especially coal plants emit vast amounts of dangerous radionuclides through their chimneys.

    To be fair I could stomach continuing to use nuclear plants for some more time until the transformation to way more renawables and storage for electric energy has come a longer way.
    After all it’s no big difference, if you add some more nuclear waste to the already quite big pile.
    I’d be adamant if we were talking about starting the first nuclear reactor ever, though.
    Building new nuclear reactors now seems like the wrong way given how dirt-cheap solar has become.


  • SailfishOS seems to run quite nicely, but has the limitations listed by you.
    PostmarketOS seems to run a tad worse, but is fully open source.
    Wouldn’t it make sense to support both, because otherwise there’s some danger of a chicken and egg situation:
    people don’t use PostmarketOS, because it doesn’t work well enough. People don’t support PostmarketOS, because they don’t use it.
    SailfishOS could pave the way for people using Linux phones and developing the need for completely open source ones after they realize the limitations of SailfishOS.
    I can see that happening to me at least, because I ordered a Jolla phone with SailfishOS, which will hopefully be delivered in a few months (batch #3). I chose SailfishOS over PostmarketOS because of their Android app compatibility layer being fully aware this part isn’t open source and that I will eventually trying to get rid of that situation.
    The demand for having a Linux phone soon that may be able to become my daily driver was more pressing than facing the risk of getting frustrated by PostmarketOS.