• 0 Posts
  • 19 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
cake
Cake day: June 18th, 2023

help-circle
  • Probably because trains are limited in both weight and volume compared to ships and also less efficient. If you have this short route and know it’ll need this amount of cargo shipped it likely makes sense.

    This single ship can carry more containers than any train could be expected to pull, likely by at least one order of magnitude.

    All in all I’d guess the advantages are roughly:

    • Reduced staff
    • reduced energy use (land based shipping is less efficient almost by default)
    • no need for infrastructure except ports (if you assume there is no train line or this shipping would move existing lines over capacity building this ship is likely cheaper or at least in line with 300km of rail)
    • simpler logistics (loading / unloading)

    Disadvantages:

    • Speed (a train would likely move at 3-5x the speed)

    I would also not expect the risk for catastrophic fires to be all that high. This ship has the batteries be containers. So once you’ve designed a container that is a large battery, you’ve already spent so much that a proper BMS including proper battery fire suppression as well as proper breakers/contractors are things you’ve built into it without even thinking about cost. The separation provided by building containers as the battery is the next line of defence if one container fails spectacularly, it also allows the batteries to be maintained on land, much cheaper than if they were part of the ship.



  • Because they don’t have a perfectly fine business model. They get squeezed hard by both the oligarchs of music publishing UMG, Sony Warner who negotiate the price for the music. And from the other side by the tech giants google and apple who can cross service subsidize their own streaming.There exists essentially no space for them to make any profit in streaming music. So they have to go other places.

    The only reason they’ll probably exist for the foreseeable future is because the rights holders are able to use Spotify to have more negotiating power against Google and apple.









  • Generally internet culture In the Dach region is very active and forward looking, and potentially ideologically aligned with the idea of Fediverse and generally FOSS software and privacy. E.g. for Wikipedia language share German got overtaken by Spanish only within the last 5 years slipping from 2nd to 3rd suggesting some early adopter and internet participation higher than the norm.

    Subjectively a lot of people here have uneasiness with big tech, and are relatively informed about alternatives.DACH on Reddit was also very big, and very ideologically opposed to API changes and general Reddit corpo behaviour. Subjectively again Dach and ich_iel felt like home when I joined, essentially like the Reddit culture I was used to, just with a little more progressive views across the board.

    Also I suspect that German language speakers are fairly active within the English speaking parts of the internet in general, while Spanish and French as well as other non Germanic languages seem to have more disdain for English language content and sites, Germans and Dutch as well as Nordics are very comfortable with English as a common language.


  • I think the fundamental issue left is just that I don’t accept one standard to ever be good enough for all direct message communication, I also hope EU legislation will make the situation better. But I also believe we should know our tech and use it because we have a good reason to.

    In the end of the day making good open standards should probably be easier than it is. More generally I think closed tech (IP) shouldn’t exist, but neither good standards nor open tech exists in the real world unfortunately.

    So as a consequence I just want people to make informed decisions to exploit what already exists in accordance with their own demands, whether I get them there by bullying or teaching or discussing is mostly just semantics to me. And if a group or person uses what seems from my perspective to be a bad tool, it is in my view a disservice to myself and them not to at least try a little to get them to use it.

    Ty for the conversation as well, I had a feeling that you were actually trying to understand what I wanted to get across so I just sorta kept talking…

    Generally I often notice people here are closer to me in position which makes for more interesting discussion, but it can also take quite some time to get to the actual disagreements because the disagreement are so slight.



  • Well if someone is stupid and my bullying gets them a bit out of their stupidity I don’t think it’s too bad. Also this is largely not a problem where I live, my mom asked if we could use signal because she disliked WhatsApp because of privacy, and I just installed signal, my dad still uses WhatsApp, my friends and I use telegram and discord. I’ve actually never had to do any real bullying because in the real world everyone understands the issue enough for us to get somewhere sensible.

    It’s neither rude nor pointless to explain software to users who are less adept with software, sometimes it won’t work but, it also sometimes does just work, especially with chat apps, it’s literally just replacing an icon, because on the UI side they are very similar. And I hate to tell you this but not providing tech support if you are good at it also just doesn’t help, it just makes us collectively stupider. Sure don’t burn yourself out on users who can get nothing right, but like teach your parents colleagues and friends some fundamentals that you seem to understand, if only because it makes your life easier.


  • Yes I can’t do shit about communication systems not being standardized to the degree I’d like and with the features I’d want.

    So what I try to do is try to bully people until they use an app that everyone can be relatively happy with, SMS is essentially the only one I don’t accept because it’s 20 years old and doesn’t behave sensibly for the modern area.

    I can understand that standards help interoperability but realize that for SMS, obviously that has failed because apple has rejected RCS for now and developed a default experience that is better. I don’t control any of that shit. I can just tell people to install chat apps if they want to talk to me. And I can bully them if they don’t.

    The network is a network of communicating software so the standard can be installed by default or after the fact, it doesn’t make a difference if everyone would just install software. Being angry at apple or WhatsApp or whatever for not writing a messenger you like is sorta stupid, they are companies they’ll never do what you want, being a angry at users that refuse to use options freely available to them can at least improve the situation for me because they can install what I, or they want to use.


  • The thing is it’s a specific standard that just hasn’t kept up, you shouldn’t be married to any software, and you should be able to decide yourself what you use, I can’t change what big tech does with their software, but I can call people stupid for not using the ability of their computers to run custom software.

    I despise the trend of people not realizing what they legitimately can do with their hardware, because they were just too scared to install software. I so often stumble upon people who can’t accomplish simple tasks because they are terrified of installing software, and this messaging thing is definitely one of these issues.

    Essentially if you are given a library of software, and you have a problem that is solved by installing software, why would you not install software, it’s mostly free, and requires only the briefest thought about what you want and where you can find it.


  • Because it provides a better experience, weather it’s WhatsApp telegram, Signal threema or even discord or teams, they all provide a significant feature advantage over SMS. This starts with properly handling multimedia, not giving your number up to everyone else, proper groups, your messages living in the cloud for proper multi device functionality, your messages living unencrypted only on your device… There is plenty of real advantages with their associated side effects.

    SMS as a standard is simply too old for modern expectations, this doesn’t make modern expectations stupid just because the standard is not being kept up to date. I have not written a single SMS since 2013 or so, and my life is better for it. Also there is definitely open third party chat apps that provide an open standard that can just be installed as one of a few apps, the problem here is that potentially no one is using them.

    The main advantage of a computer in your pocket against earlier phones is that you can fundamentally install any software you want, not just what the device manufacturer deems acceptable, so why would anyone not take advantage of this for messaging is beyond me.


  • No because assets and their place in capitalist enterprise represent control. I.e. an owner has fundamental rights to use workers according to the owners needs, and the owner also has the option to advertise and otherwise facitate propagand and take part in political process, including lobbying and corruption to affect circumstances outside of their direct control for example customer demand and government regulation, all of this control is proportional to the absolute wealth of that person family or group.

    Obviously this is not to say the owners are in full control of all of their workers and assets individually, it’s just that they decide the system that all workers must use and this has an obvious effect on the things these workers do.

    So the useful metric is certainly not pollution per $/person but one that is proportional in some way to the total wealth.

    Sure this control can be mutually beneficial for the owner and the society at large, but it’s pretty clear now that with fossil enterprise especially, this is not the case, control gained from extracting an unfortunate life necessity from the ground, a resource that is set to destroy life on the planet as we know it, should not be able to be used for anything but to replace itself as quickly as possible, the tactic for the last 50 years from these owners was the opposite.