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Cake day: July 24th, 2023

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  • I don’t think that’s true at all.

    When the UK was in the EU, UKIP was their largest party. For France, Le Pen’s National Front party was the largest. And they aren’t alone. There’s a number of right wing EU parties.

    And it’s due to get worse, if we bring data into it. Many countries in the EU are swinging to the right. Polling is indicating right wing parties will have a solid majority in the EU parliament this year.



  • Tbf if you actually look into Mozilla’s “AI” plans, it’s for stuff like better offline translation, better screen reader and image description functionality for disabled users, finding alternate sources for articles, and so on.

    It all runs locally, is trained on open source models with ethically sourced training data, and doesn’t send your personal information to Mozilla.

    I don’t think it should be treated in the same way as Google or Microsoft’s AI implementations. People should actually look into things before they assume they know everything.




  • That green party estimate is so laughable I’m not even going to comment on it further.

    The WHO states it could be up to 4,000 in the long term, but may be substantially lower. The UN Committee on the Effects of Atomic Radiation concluded that even this figure is far too high.

    Harvard university says that 8.7 million people die from greenhouse gas emissions each year. And that doesn’t even account for direct accidents from generation and coal/gas extraction. Having a nuclear base load would save millions of lives, and do a huge amount to curb fossil fuel emissions. But “greens” want us to keep burning fossil fuels.


  • Wind and solar cannot provide all our energy. Nuclear does not replace wind and solar, it complements it. The sun doesn’t always shine, and the wind doesn’t always blow.

    Yes it costs more than burning gas or coal, but that doesn’t take into account the environmental cost or the cost on the health of living things.

    And yeah we do know how to store nuclear waste for *hundreds of years. We do so already. I don’t know where you’re getting the “hundreds of thousands of years” from. Even old reactors althat don’t recycle waste didn’t have half-lives anywhere near that long.


  • Nuclear plants are designed to withstand a passenger jet flying into them, as well as minor direct missile barrages.

    And with modern reactors, they can’t really have Chernobyl-style meltdowns — if the cooling system fails, the fission stops by itself with no active involvement required.

    I.e. you have to actively keep modern fission reactors going otherwise it stops on its own, as opposed to actively keep it cooled and safe, like the reactors of the 60s/70s.

    Nuclear energy has, by a staggering margin, the lowest death toll of any form of energy generation per kW produced. And almost all of these come from Chernobyl, where 31 people died due to the explosion, then a further 46 died due to radiation poisoning from the cleanup.

    By far the biggest issue with modern nuclear is the cost and them taking 7-12 years to deploy, as opposed to safety. SMRs are supposed to help with that aspect, but not enough have been rolled out to get a very good picture of that.

    Really we have two choices, because renewables can’t provide 100% of our energy mix yet:

    • build out nuclear as a base energy load and massively decrease fossil fuels in the short term

    • ignore nuclear and temporarily build out more fossil fuel plants, hoping that planet-scale energy storage will become cheap and extremely ubiquitous in a very short timeframe.