matlag

So you admit that Israel just carried out a terrorist attack in Lebanon? Or is bombing and killing citizens is terrorism when “they” do it, not when “we” do it?

You wish. Orban controls all the media there now. You can be sure the narrative is “Ukraine is just punishing them unfairly for calling for a ceasefire and negociations” or anothe nice story that will make them look bad.

“Collapse” meaning what, exactly? Do you mean run out of storage from the volume of content, or that processing all the messages is too taxing?

Years back, I setup a Synapse’s server on my personal server (Yunohost). At some point, I joined the “big” Matrix room. Bad idea: RAM and CPU usage went through the roof. I had to kill the server but even that took forever as the system was struggling with the load.

But don’t just take my words for it:

https://github.com/matrix-org/synapse/issues/7339

Last comment is from less than one year ago. I was told things should be better with newer servers (Dendrite, Conduit, etc.), but I’ve not tried these yet. They’re still in development.

How does it scale differently than Matrix?

The Matrix protocol is a replication system: your server will have to process all events in the room one or more users attend(s) to. There is a benefit to this: you can’t shut down a room by shutting down any server: all the other ones are just as “primary” as the original. Drawback: your humble personal server is now on the hook.

XMPP rooms are more conventional: a room is located on one server. That’s an “old” model, but it scales.

https://www.ejabberd.im/benchmark/index.html

That’s for the host. For other attendees, it’s much lower.

I don’t think I atteld any public room out there with 3k users, so I can’t report my first hand experience, this is the best I found. But I never had to check for load issue on a small server (running Metronome and many more services).

Out of curiosity, why do you say this?

I don’t use the Fediverse the way I engage with individual people. If I want a closer relation with someone, I don’t want to be bound to yet-another-messenging system, let alone on multiple accounts

And another reason is I may not want to be bothered by people I don’t know, regardless how much I could appreciate reading and/or exchanging with them in the Fediverse.

Ignoring or declining requests from strangers can leave a lot to interpretation and then frustration. Remove the button and no one is tempted to press it the be disappointed with the outcome. Less drama.

And that’s only considering well intended people.

But these are my humble 2cents.

By the time countries that could have built nuclear power plants would complete them, they will have collectively burnt enough coal and gas to doom humankind.

So: indeed, the world leaders didn’t try seriously.

I think it’s worse than that. We humans are inherently selfish and self-preserving.

People who live far away from any coal mines do not feel threatened by coal, because it will not impact them directly (besides fu**ing up the planet, of course, but that’s another issue humans have with big pictures and long term effect correlation to present small scale actions).

But most people can’t tell where a nuclear plant can be built, so it could be close enough to expose them to a risk of disaster?

Therefore: “Nuclear is more dangerous than coal (for my personal case)”

French here. If you learn in Belgium or Switzerland, they have “septante” and “nonante” for 70 and 90.

It’s for sure more intuitive, but you have to admit that saying “four-twenty-twelve” (non-french speakers: that’s literal translation for 92) is sooooo cool!

What I don’t like with Matrix is the load it puts on the server. It basically copies 100% of a room content to any server having one or more users registered in the room.

So if you’re on a small server, and one user decides to join a 10k+ large room, your server may collapse under the load as it tries to stay in sync with the room’s activity. This is deterrent to self-hosting or family/club/small party servers.

XMPP, on the other hand, has proven to be highly scalable, has E2EE, federation and some bridging services.

The only thing XMPP does NOT have is a single reference multiplatform client with all basic features for 2023 (1:1 chat, chat rooms, voice/video 1:1, and voice/video conference) than anyone can use without wondering if the features-set is the same as the persons you’re talking to.

And while we’re there: I’m not even sure I want a messaging account linked to any of my Fediverse accounts…

10 years from now, you might be in a situation where the grid is unstable and capacity is insufficient in front of demand. You will also be facing potential renewal of existing solar panels, wind farms, batteries storage, etc.

If you lack capacity, any attempt at industry relocation locally will be a pipe-dream.

And at that time, you’ll say either “it’s too late to rely on nuclear now” or “fortunately we’re about to get these new power plants running”. You’re not building any nuclear power plan for immediate needs, you’re building for the next decades.

Meanwhile, one country will be ready to take on “clean production” and be very attractive to industrial projects because it already planned all of that years ago and companies will be able to claim “green manufacturing”. That country is… China!

Sorry to ruin this dream, but not a single developed country (and most likely not a single non-developed either) has a remote chance of being carbon neutral in 10years.

Reason number one is “carbon-neutral” is yet another greenwashing marketing idea involving emissions compensations that are just not there.

We’ve seen now that planting trees will probably not do any good: we already see trees growing failure rate increasing due to excessive heating. They grow slower already, making all compensation calculations wrong, and they’ll burn in wildfires in summer, releasing all the carbon they captured.

The second reason is the insanely high dependency we have to cheap oil. You need to convert haul truck, small trucks, buses, etc. to electric all while you turn the grid to 0 emission.

You need to convert cargo ships to electric otherwise your net neutrality will need to conveniently ignore all importations and exportations.

You need to convert all farm machines to 0 emissions and abandon quite a lot of the chemistry considered for granted today, which means yields will drop.

You need to convert blast furnaces to alternative energies. Today, there is almost nothing done there other than “we’ll get hydrogen” that everybody know cannot be produced in the volume they need, let alone at an acceptable price.

And no energy source whatsoever is carbon neutral!

Solar panels need quite some metal and semicon-based manufacturing techniques. Wind farm need concrete for their anchoring, and use advanced materials to build. They both have a limited lifespan, after which you need to recycle (By the way: noticed that when “recycling” is advertised, no one mentions if it’s rectcling for the same usage and not recycled to lower grade material we can’t use back to produce the same device? That’s because we just can’t get them back with the same purity level…) and make some replacement, that will again have a share of emissions.

Short of producing absolutely everything in the chains of supplies locally, you will import emissions from another country

Any human activity is basically emitting or causing greenhouses emissions.

And while you think all of that can be managed, we already have all signals to red on the natural resources: we can’t extract lithium fast enough, and we may not want to given how dirty the mines are. We may run out of some metals we rely on.

And most of these issues are eluded in the great plans, because it’s too complicated or we simply have no solution and no one wants to say it up and loud.

Now, the good/bad news: all of this will end because we’re also running out of cheap oil.

It’s a good news because that will put a break in humans activities and so greenhouse gas emissions.

But it’s bad because not a single country is preparing for the aftermath, and that means… they will collapse!

No, we had cotton before we had 1billion cows, and it was working fine. We had corn before we had 1 billion cows and we were doing fine.

And other regions in the world have crops and never needed mega-herds of cows to deal with by-products.

We don’t need more cars because of all the oil we extract. If we don’t need oil, we’ll stop extracting oil. That’s not speculation.

Today we burn tons of oil. Say tomorrow we have switched to all electric. Do you think we’ll keep extracting oil and that will create an environmental burden because of that oil sitting around?

That’s the same reasoning.

Today we grow megatons of corn,… for different things, including feeding livestocks.

Tomorrow, if we have less livestock, we’ll adapt the crops mix, just like rest of the world has been or is still doing fine without having mega-herds of cows.

We don’t have too many cows because we had too much crops. We increased the crops to match the herds!

A non-peered review article from a totally unbiased source.

Coming up next, an article demonstrating the benefit of burning oil for the environment by Shell.

There is no solution to capture methane in the air. Its lifespan in air is 12years, so if we stop emitting, it will go away by itself. Until then, it’s quite bad. Capturing it at the source is also challenging (can you hemetically seal a cow’s ass without impacting its health?!).

The best solution is… less farms, less cows but that means less meat!

The main issue is probably less meat itself than the ginormous quantities we consume.

Most livestock farming is intensive, meaning they can’t rely on grazing alone and need extra food sources, typically corn. They emit methane, a greenhousing gas on steroids.

That grain is produced through very intensive agricultural methods because we can’t get enough of it. It consumes ridiculously large amount of water and slowly degrades the soils. Nitrates eventually end up in the sea, causing algea to proliferate while other lifeforms are suffocated. See the dead zone in Mexico’s gulf.

71% of agriculture land in Europe is dedicated to livestock feeding.

The percentage must be similar or higher in America, and don’t count North America alone: without grains from Brazil, we’re dead. Period. So next time you hear the world blaming Brazil for deforestation, keep in mind that a large share of it is to sustain livestocks…

Cattle farming in the USA is heavily subsidized, by allowing farmers to use federal land for grazing for free (I believe something similar is in place in Canada?). The claim they “take care of the land” is absurd: nature has been doing that for millenias without needing any help. First nations have been living in these lands also without supersized cows herds and it was going alright. Farms actually prevent wildlife to take back its place.

But I wouldn’t blame them. People in North America (among others, and I live in Canada, definitely me too) eat indecent and unhealthy quantities of meat, and that has to come from somewhere.

Now, simple math will tell you: if everyone in the world was consuming meat in the same quantities as us, there would’nt be enough suitable land on Earth to grow the corn that needs to go with it.

Another thing is not all meats are equal in terms of pollution. From the worst to the least bad, in equivalent kgCO2 per kg of meat you can actually eat: -Veal: 37 -Chicken (intensive, in cage): 18 -Beef: 34 -Pork: 5–7 -Duck, rabbit, pork: 4–5 -Chicken ("traditonal, free range): 3–4 -Egg (for comparison): <2

You can appreciate the orders of magnitude!

There are only 2 ways out of this:

• reduce meat consumption, and pick it right
• grown meat (meat made without the animal around it, in machines)

One can be done today, starting with your next meal. We don’t need meat every meal, we don’t even need meat every day, but it is true that going full vegetarian force a certain gymnastic to get all the nutriments one need.

The other solution is barely getting there, so there are still unknown (food quality, resources consumption, etc.) and the economics may not help it taking off.

The third (and let’s face it: current approach at national level everywhere on this issue) option is to do nothing and keep going as if the problems didn’t exist. This is guaranteeing a famine in the coming decades. When we’ll fail to feed our livestock, and it will start dying, it will be too late to turn around and get the whole agriculture sector to transition. These things take many years.

We’re trying to reduce our meat consumption at home, or to favor the least impacting ones. We still eat too much meat, but I hope we can gradually improve.

Never seen that one?

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=OJQdM369msk

Just add it to the list: “The ink used to print this warning is toxic”

No, I don’t mean to destroy life in the river. I mean to highlight the difference of impact between going from 90% of your capacity to 0% in one information to reducing from 90% to 80% or even 70%. Shutting down a nuclear reactor is quite a big deal in terms of operations. Restarting it is not like turning back on a switch either. Claiming a reactor was shut down makes it sound like a much bigger deal than what it was.

Looks like it’s happening already. Natural disasters are on the rise, costing billions, insurance companies start bailing out of some area. I was also wondering if international help would come back every year to address a fraction of the wildfire in Canada, Spain, Italy, Greece, and soon pretty much everywhere.

Pretty sure the cost of the disaster is soon going to be unbearable and we’ll start abandoning places and infrastructures instead of rebuilding (not officially, of course, we’ll just “push back until conditions allow to rebuild” and forget about it as more disasters will occur).

It will be a slow death, though.

Theyve had to start shutting down nuclear reactors in summer when water levels get too low,

This is a fake news. Period.

Some reactors had to REDUCE THEIR OUTPUT because otherwise they would exceed the temperature increase they’re allowed to cause in the river, this to preserve life in the river. No reactor was shutdown because of a low water stream.

What happened last year is a systematic defect was found in an external protection layer, and the decision was made to fix all the reactors having the same potential defect at once. The work took longer than expected, and that caused France having very limited capacity for months, causing worries about power outage.

Not to say it could never happen in the future, but it didn’t yet.

So is it better to start a nuclear project and hope it can start reducing coal & NG emissions 10 years from now? Or is it better to add solar and wind capacity constantly and at a fraction of the price per MWh?

It’s better to do both!!

Nuclear is not more expensive than solar and wind. And today’s paradox is solar and wind are cheap because oil is cheap…

Besides, comparing the 2 is totally misleading. One is a controllable source of electricity, the other is by nature an unstable source, therefore you need a backup source. Most of the time, that backup is a gas plant (more fossil fuel…), and some other time it’s mega-batteries projects that need tons of lithium… that we also wanted for our phones, cars, trucks etc. Right now, every sector is accounting lithium resources as if they were the only sector that will use it…

And then you have Germany, that shut down all its nuclear reactor, in favor of burning coal, with a “plan” to replace the coal with gas, but “one day”, they’ll replace that gas with “clean hydrogen” and suddenly have clean energy.

There was a time when nuclear was the right choice, but now it is just not cost effective nor can it be brought online fast enough to make a dent in our problems

So we’ll have very very exactly the same conversation 10 years from now, when we’ll be 100% renewable but we’ll have very frequent power outages. People will say “we don’t have time to build nuclear power plan, we need to do «clean gas/hydrogen/other wishful thing to burn»”. And at that time, someone will mention that we will never produce enough of these clean fuel but … How many times do we want to shoot ourselves in the foot??

I think you’re forgetting that once the waters from a dam break dry up you can rebuild…a nuclear accident has the potential to poison the land for generations

In the years to come, we’re going to lose much more land just because it won’t be suitable for human survival, and that will be on a longer scale than a nuclear disaster. Eliminating fossil fuel should be the sole absolute priority, and nuclear is one tool to achieve it.