Assume the communication with the app it through Internet. The car must have a 4G chip (too early to see 5G in cars, I think?). So no matter what you pay, it won’t work when 4G is retired. With marketing pushing to get new standards always faster, 4G may not last another 20years.
Anyway, bear in mind that once you subscribe, they will most likely collect detailed data about how you use the features and sell that as well…
In theory, yes, you could make a mess, and any firmware is supposed to be certified to allow the device to be used.
In practice, this has been a convenient excuse to keep a whole chip with a separate OS in every smartphone, and it is very difficult to isolate from the rest of the system (see Graphene OS efforts).
I say all firmware should be opensource. Whether you’re allowed to change them or not is a separate question… for now.
This might be an unpopular post but so’ll be it: Mastodon is the existing proof that Meta could kill Mastodon any time.
Mastodon was using a protocol compatible with GNU Social: OStatus, but some features were quickly added without consideration for other implementations.
So when per-post privacy were introduced, for example, they were very public on GNU Social, because their devs had no idea this was coming. And GNU Social was blamed for it.
Instead of having more users, GNU Social is now (almost?) dead. Of course it’s not just because of the above. But it wouldn’t have been set back so much without Mastodon.
Now, Mastodon is opensource, has more features and some compatible implementations. I run Pleroma myself. But why would one think Meta could not cripple them both?
Nuclear plants consist mainly of a shitton of concrete (and only the best sort is good enough). The production of that concrete causes a terrible amount of carbon emissions upfront.
Actually, if you compare them to solar or wind at equivalent service, it’s not that straightforward:
Renewables installed capacity is nowhere close to their actual production, nuclear can produce its nominal capacity in a very steady way.
Wind turbines also need a lot of concrete, and much more metal for equivalent output. Solar panels need a lot of metals.
Renewables need a backup source to manage their intermittency. It’s most often batteries and fossil plants these days. I don’t think I need to comment on fossil plants, but batteries production also has a very significant carbon emission budget, and is most often not included in comparisons. Besides, you need to charge the batteries, that’s even more capacity required to get on par with the nuclear plant.
With all of these in consideration, IPCC includes nuclear power along with solar and wind as a way to reduce energy emissions.
Don’t know if that covers your need, but at least their angle is privacy:
Not going to happen. They charge such an insanely high premium vs real cost for a very primitive messaging system, they’re not letting that go!
All bills targeting your freedom are labelled “child porn” or “terrorism”.
After terrorists attack in France, state of emergency was declared, special powers to restrainesuspicious powers at home. We MUST protect people frometerrorists, right? If you’re against that, which side are you on? Very first usage of the power: restrain non-violent eco-activists to their home so that they don’t disturb the COP.
That pattern repeats over and over. They’re counting on you being sensitive to “child porn”, I bet you the initial list will include “eco-terrorists” sites (label used on anyone attending a climate protest they tried to prevent), political activists sites (you try to be anonymous on Internet? That’s SO suspicious!).
I’m sorry for what happened to you, but ri seriously doubt this bill is really intended to prevent that.
I wouldn’t set expectations too high though: for the retirement bill, there were many protests, millions of people in the streets, all surveys showing a very strong reject by the people, and the reaction was basically: “I got elected, I do whatever the f**k I want!”.
Short of a revolution, nothing can change their mind. I’d rather push other parties to include this in their program for the next elections: repel this absurdity.
Besides panicking a few regional managers, this can only be a bad news for Meta if other countries, or even better, the EU follows them.
100kUSD/day for a 5.4M inhabitants country, that scales to 8.3M$/day for the total 450M inhabitants EU has (yes: I know that’s not how it works, I’m doing a very gross approximation here).
That’s would be 3B$/year. Now we’re talking!
Could we define a trade-off system? Classic broadcasting can take way too long to send out a large catalog. Streaming is, as you say, a heavy resources consuming system.
So how about a combo of a box or a software that can follow a broadcast N times faster than human, and broadcast N movies/series episodes a day? The application let you pick what you’d like to get on your box/app, and then it’s like classic video recording, but on steroids.
It would be like live-streaming, but at 2, 3, 10 times the normal speed. No human needs to follow that.
Of course, you still have the issue of glitches, communication interruption, but we’ve dealt with those for years, and there are certainly ways to indeed stream the missing parts, or use rediffusion.
You read it first here. I’m off to file for a patent and make billions (or not…)
Exactly! And if you don’t like the idea of having a state-owned telco, we could leave the infrastructure only to the state-owned company, and open access to all incumbents, same rate for everyone. While we’re there, we should just have the same with broadband: a state owned company deploys fiber. All ISP access it at the same rate.
No more complaining they need to make hundreds of % of margin otherwise they can’t invest, and even then they can’t invest if the government doesn’t heavily subsidize the network.
I was in Spain last June. Took a pre-paid SIM for the duration of the stay:
-50GB of data. I shared the connection all the time with 2 other devices, no issue, no warning. -Unlimited calls through all of Europe -30mins calls international (inc. back to Canada} -15€ tax included, that’s ~21CAD -valid 1month -10€ to top up or extend, since I already had the SIM
We’re getting milked here!!
Good Post overall, no need to attack my sanity though :-)
I was not targeting you, rather the idea itself. But it came out terrible and there are definitely better way to express an opinion. So my apologies for that one!
Any sources on any of that? That’s a lot of „you just know that“ information, and I do consider myself well informed. I am not from France though.
Hmm… sources, yes. In something that’s not in French is a tad more difficult, but I found these:
https://www.enerdata.net/publications/daily-energy-news/france-mandates-edf-sell-100-twh-power-under-arenh-scheme-2023.html https://www.reuters.com/article/france-electricity-regulator-idUSL8N1PR6H5
I found that one about EDF regaining customers, losing money in 2022. It includes an addendum: the quota it has to sell was set back to 100TWh. But sorry, you’ll have to use a translation service… https://www.leprogres.fr/economie/2022/10/27/pourquoi-edf-gagne-des-abonnes-mais-perd-des-milliards
neither of those points addresses the costs of energy production I quoted above. Those are, to the best of my knowledge, approximately correct. It may very well have been that nuclear was competitive in the past, it isn’t anymore.
I am all but convinced any of this will last. Pressure on solar panel has increased, it is deeply connected to the semiconductor’s industry. In the coming decades, it will raise questions on water usage, minerals, etc.
Wind farms occupy very large surfaces, and they already compete with other usage of the land. Dismantling them is problematic too: a large body of concrete is left behind in the ground.
getting scammed by some middle man seems to be a fate that all modern democracies share, though who the middle man is varies country by country :-)
Unfortunately, can’t but agree, though it’s infuriating every time.
I consider the marginal cost thing to be one of the best acts from the EU. Maybe not in France, but overall it rewards the most efficient energy producer massively, which currently is solar. Those companies can use the excess money to reinvest.
They don’t reinvest (in France, I mean). They just cash the money. Keeping EDF as a state-owned monopoly has been working great for France for decades. The same model works great in Québec. There was no need to change it. EDF being state-owned, you can require it to invest in whatever you want: give it target on renewables, etc. What we have here instead is parasitic companies. Crushing majority of the production investment still comes from EDF, and their investment capacity is fading as their finances are gutted in the name of an “open market” ideology.
I don’t know who, in his sane mind, can claim there will never be periods of time with no sun and no wind at the same time. https://notrickszone.com/2022/12/07/plunging-towards-darkness-germany-sees-week-long-wind-sun-lull-as-energy-supply-dwindles/
You need a pilotable generator matching renewables. You can’t do without it. The only question is how much of it you need to plan. Existing approaches are storage: batteries, hydro where it’s possible (you pump the water up a dam to store back energy) and backup generators: coal, gas, and in some future plans, hydrogen.
None of these is a perfect solution (well, nothing is a perfect solution).
It is not completely true that nuclear needs to run at fixed level. Depending on their design, some plants are pilotable and some are not. But I don’t think (I’ll be happily corrected if needed) any had the flexibility you need to be used with renewable (quick large variations).
So the ideal mix is, IMHO, a baseline provided by nuclear, and a mix of renewable and complements to produce the difference.
Bonus: there is a “method” promoted by some (ignorant) politics they call “proliferation” (“foisonnement”, not sure I’m translating that the best). This is utter BS…
The idea is there will always be sun or wind somewhere in a super-grid spreading through Europe. If you think about it for 1 minute, that means that small part of Europe where there is wind will power, for a more or less short time, a large portion of the whole Europe?? Not only is that totally insane from the capacity point of view, but it also completely neglects the grid’s stability and electricity transportation issue. It is very difficult to transport electricity over very large distances without disturbing the grid. Ask Germany, they spend massively on infrastructures right now without counting on proliferation. That would raise the requirements further…
Ok, so obviously, you’re not well aware of how the new European open market works, and why France ended up paying part of consumer’s bills.
France uses to have a state-owned company, EDF, producing and distributing electricity in France. EDF had a monopole. France had the cheapest electricity of Europe, and EDF was profitable. Sink that in, when you say nuclear is expensive:
EDF was delivering the cheapest electricity of Europe and was profitable.
A decision from the European Union was taken to force all members to switch to an open market. French government at the time was conservative, so they happily went along with it. Everyone “knows” that private sector always does better than whatever has “public” or “state” in its description.
But how would you introduce competition when virtually no one else produces any electricity? How to kickstart it? That’s where bright people went very very creative.
Production and distribution of electricity was split as separate activities. EDF spinned off the distribution part of its work. In parallel, a quota of nuclear production was allocated to new companies, “electricity suppliers”, so that they got something to sell at an affordable price.
That’s where it starts to be interesting: to guarantee a margin to electricity suppliers, so that they would make enough money to invest in production, the daily price of electricity on the market is set to the marginal cost of the most expensive power plant that’s turned on. Do you follow me? If today, 99% of electricity is coming from a nuclear power plant, but you need to start a coal power plant to provide the last 1%, all 100% of the electricity that day is billed at the cost of the coal power plant! I am not kidding, I am not making that shit up!
Why prices exploded since last year? Well, you’ve heard about gas prices, right? Every day a gas power plan is turned on with gas prices through the roof, 100% of the electricity that day is billed at the cost of the gas power plant. That’s why France started subsidizing the consumers bills, because most of them could not afford a x6, 7, 10 on their electricity bills.
But at least, we do have competition now, don’t we? Well… not on the production side…
No condition on investment was given to the electricity supplier. Read that again. Guess what happened. Electricity suppliers were buying most of their electricity at a cheap regulated cost from EDF and selling it with a big profit to consumers, all while producing nothing themselves. Why would they?? Money is trickling down to them for free!
Even better: as they were more competitive than EDF, thanks to having 0 maintenance and 0 investment to make, and cheap electricity to resell, their customers base grew. Then they found out that they were not getting enough cheap electricity, and they faced a dilemma: buy a larger share of electricity from other real producers, that would have increased their cost, or cap their customers base (or of course, invest in production, but who wants to do that, right?).
They did neither of these. They pleaded to the current government to get MORE cheap electricity from EDF. And the government did that: forced EDF to allocate more of its cheap nuclear electricity to them, increasing the quota. Needless to say that if EDF needed more electricity for their own customers, they were answered that they could buy the more expensive electricity from outside, or invest in more capacity. Makes sense, right? The exact opposite of what the system was supposed to do.
Now, the very best part: when gas price exploded, even the small fraction of electricity bought by the electricity suppliers impacted their cost. It was unacceptable to them. So they raised their rate to be above EDF, or even outright cancelled contracts with their customers, so that customers would go back to EDF (EDF cannot refuse contracts, and is not allowed to adjust its own rates). But… electricity suppliers do not have to give up on their quota from EDF… so…
EDF had to buy back the electricity EDF produces, to companies producing nothing, at the rate of the market, of course, not the rate at which EDF is forced to sell that electricity to these companies. So it’s even better now. EDF sells them electricity (which is a virtual sale, electricity still goes from EDF plants to households like it did before). These companies sell it back to EDF with a big margin. Dream business, isn’t it?
So France does not subsidize bills because nuclear is too expensive.
France literally subsidizes a scam scheme, in which most of the money going to parasitic companies producing nothing.
Actually, in a nuclear power plan, except the tank itself (not sure I’m translating “cuve” properly, every part can be upgraded.
“Lifetime exceeded” in a nuclear reactor is a misleading statement. The truth is we don’t know how long they can last. We know some minimum lifetimes only, by being cautious.
Example: you build the first plants, and you “slap” them with a 40 years lifetime. Why 40 years? Because we have enough records and historical data to back the structure and materials with enough confidence they will last 40 years at least. Beyond 40 years, we start venturing in uncertainty. That doesn’t mean we even trust the 40 years. Every 10 years, a power plant is getting fully audited to get an authorization to run for the next 10 years (and there are less deep regular audits as well).
Later, with more data, and more reference, you can establish that the structure and material have proven to have an even longer lifetime, and you can extend it (50, 60 years). It may come with extra-conditions, though. But there is a certain confidence that with the proper funding, France could keep its plants up and running for a lot longer than the initial 40 years.
Ironically, France shutdown the oldest reactors that just had received the very latest upgrade, making it also the most modern reactors in service.
This is a complex issue, not just because storing radioactive material is complex, but because the “waste” are not a uniform single material. Some have a decaying process of 300 years (90% of the waste, actually), some have a much longer one.
In the beginning of the nuclear era, some wastes were… dumped in the ocean (it’s as bad as it sounds). This is fortunately no longer the normal practice. Some dedicated storage sites are used to store them depending on their lifetime.
The latest solution is geologic storage (some caves were found with waste from naturally occurring fission, eons ago, radioactivity never escaped, so let’s just… do that?). A site was identified in Finland with a hope it can store them for 100,000 years (of course, we don’t have any reference that would last that long…). And the good thing is the storage is “reversible” for the first 100 years (if we change our mind/find better, we can still retrieve the waste during the first 100 years).
Finally, and that will resonate with @Waryle@lemmy.world comment: France had a 4th generation prototype reactor called SuperPhenix. Particularity of a 4th gen reactor is it can use some wastes to produce more energy. SuperPhenix being a prototype, it suffered from many issues through its lifetime. But at the end, it had a 90% uptime, and though it wasn’t generating a lot of power (that was never the goal, remember: development…), some reports were recommending to keep it up so that it could have processed part of the existing nuclear waste.
To appeal to the ecologists party allied to the socialist Prime Minister at that time, SuperPhenix was definitely shutdown in 1997. And now, the same ecologists use the nuclear wastes issue as a big reason to push back any plan on nuclear power.
I resent him slightly less than the idiots who appointed him CEO. To be appointed, you need to come with a plan you present to the board. Who the hell thought “let’s destroy everything that made Nokia successful so far and become a Nth Windows Phone maker!” was a good strategy??
https://seekingalpha.com/article/916271-how-stephen-elop-destroyed-nokia
Symbian OS still had a very large user base and some support from large customers. The N9 and MeeGo was getting better reviews and customer satisfaction reports than Samsung and Apple’s phones! The obvious strategy was to navigate a transition between the legacy Symbian and a rising and promising MeeGo. But since his mandate was not to make Nokia successful but rather to have bought by MS, he could trash the business at will: made it cheaper for his real employer, MS.
Seriously, that guy should have been jailed!!
What’s interesting here is they no longer need to hack and crack devices through loopholes and backdoors schemes.
All the data they need are already collected by private corporations with the pro-active collaboratron of the users themselves (“Click here to agree to the terms and conditions”).