People often underestimate the amount of storage you need for renewables. Depending on the geographic location you might be looking at tens of TWh. The cost for renewables then suddenly becomes much higher.
I recommend everyone who is using the cost argument to actually do the math on this first. It might be an eye opening experience. It certainly was for me.
Could you share your numbers as well? According to [1], the UK currently needs about 300TWh per year. Lets say we go entirely solar+wind+battery(whatever that means) and assume that battery has to bridge a gap of at most 7 days (meaning no wind and no solar at all during this time, which is at most a few days at a time). This adds up to 300/365*7= 5,8TWh of max capacity. Lets take it safe, round up and say we need 10TWh (which is already not "tens of TWH", but "ten"). [2] Says that grid-scale batteries come at around 350$ per kWh right now. kWh -> TWh is factor 1 billion (10^9), meaning if we want to build 10TWh of storage, it will cost 3,5 Trillion Dollars. Impressive number indeed. But there are multiple asterisks here.
1. This calculation takes into account that there is no exchange with mainland europe and no gas power plants or other sources of power (e.g. hydro or hydro storage). This sharply reduces the need for batteries.
2. Battery costs will fall in the next decades, compared to nuclear, which will take a long time (if ever) until costs will fall.
The problem is that the math is often done using faulty assumptions, such as expecting to rely solely on batteries to store enough energy to last several months.
In practice there are never long periods with and zero wind and zero solar and zero import capacity. Place the right price on electricity during peak demand, and suddenly the market is more than happy to install an overcapacity of wind & solar. Gigawatt-capacity cables to neighboring countries? Already being built!
A country like the UK needs an average electricity input of 45GW. It is totally fine to serve that with 60GW of wind operating at 25% capacity, 60GW of solar operating at 25% capacity, and 15GW of import operating at 100% capacity.
Reminds me of why I left the Civil Service after 18 years. The volume of stupidity seems to increase exponentially, the higher you climb through the ranks.
It has a huge impact if you need to run the exact same container as in production. This kills Macs in those shops. And there are more than you might think.
And everyone can guess who was president when France was very eager to move against him. The UN mandate was just for securing the air space. But France and Britain successfully went in for the kill instead, making sure Sarkozy never had to pay back that money.
I used to recommend KDE-Connect left and right but stopped doing so because it went from rock solid and dependable to a complete disaster in a couple of years.
Linux, Android, iOS, macOS all worked in harmony. Now not even two Android phones using the same software version can see each other, file transfers keep failing after a brief while. And all with the same devices that worked before, across various networks.
Not to say anything about connectivity between Linux and Android or iOS.
I'm curious, could you be more specific as to what exactly you mean by "schlock"? The ads? Product recommendations? Political content? Opinions?
For something that has a massive amount of videos added to it every minute, it's a surprisingly sanitised place.
They could introduce a kids friendly subdomain that would make it easier to filter at a proxy level. But then parents all over the world will be pulling their hair out about what is deemed to be kids friendly. The staunchly atheist might balk at content that is open towards Religion, the religious extremists will balk at content that is open to things like homosexuality, and the dietary extremists will complain about endorsements of the wrong choice of food. Humans like to make up lists of purity rules. But those lists rarely match.
I'm guessing they left right around the time of Elsagate. Youtube Kids (a separate "kid friendly" version of YouTube) was almost entirely bizarre permutations of software-assembled videos. I hear it still is, but most of my friends banned unsupervised youtube for their young kids around this time.
Android is losing a unique selling point. This will have an impact on what a techie may recommend to a non-techie in the future, because everything is beige now.
I have the feeling Google has given up on using nerds as beachheads. The market is saturated enough and they don't need us anymore to do grass roots spreading of their products. It's the same with Youtube. As long as there were enough people who were unencumbered by ads because of their ad block and kept spreading links, the importance of Youtube was growing. After market saturation that vehicle isn't necessary anymore and they can squeeze them out.
The lack of antitrust enforcement is a clown show.
We have no choice in the most important computing category in the world. It's a duopoly and they have everyone in straightjackets - consumers, companies, competitors, governments, ...
A huge percentage of the world's thoughts and economy flow through mobile. And two companies own it.
Breaking up Google will not help in this particular case. The problem is entirely within the Android unit; and would still be present even if Android were to be split off into it's own company.
It certainly seems like there is problematic behavior in the restrictions Google puts on OEMs that want to use Android (or, more specifically, play services) on their devices. However, I think it would take a different enforcement mechanism to address that.
Then why does Google make so few anti-consumer decisions? I mean, compare Google with Facebook. Surely we can agree Google is the better behaved of those two.
Apple only allows software on their macbooks and mac mini, and every release of MacOS it's more locked down. Everything else, from iPhone to the watch, is 100% locked down. Likewise, every version of Windows tries, again and again and again, to lock down programs that can be run. People absolutely don't accept it, but they do try (remember when they tried to bury the ability to run unverified apps behind a price hike?)
I'd at least give it a shot to simply appeal to Google on the justification they give. After all, the blogpost ... It is very strange for Google to do what they do in that blogpost, don't you think?
"In Brazil, the Brazilian Federation of Banks (FEBRABAN) sees ..."
"Indonesia's Ministry of Communications and Digital Affairs praising it for providing a “balanced approach” that ..."
"Thailand’s Ministry of Digital Economy and Society sees it as a “positive and proactive measure” that aligns ..."
"Developer’s Alliance have called this a “critical step” for ..."
And it's easy to come up with other government requirements, like the DMA (yes, ironically) and ChatControl that require vendors are able to disable apps.
Clearly there is more than a little government pressure on Google to do this, including US and EU lobby groups (Developer's Alliance). Clearly Google is unwilling or unable to resist government pressure to allow governments to control which apps get to run ... Has anyone even asked these groups why they push for this?
> I mean, compare Google with Facebook. Surely we can agree Google is the better behaved of those two.
I'm not sure I agree, particularly with respect to their core businesses. Like Google basically own all parts of the ad stack and use that dominance to compete unfairly against basically everyone else, causing them to appear to be a better service. There was even an anti-trust case about it (up for sentencing at the moment, here's hoping for a breakup).
Facebook have certainly done a bunch of nefarious stuff, but Google is just a more useful product to the people who come here (and I agree with this), so they get more of a pass.
I have no doubt that there are strong external forces that are pressuring Google to do this. The fact that Google also benefits from it makes it less likely for them to put up much of fight, don't you think?
That's a defeatist attitude. You could just as well say the opposite that Google fundamentally is a multinational company. That means to some extent it has to fight governments to create a flat market they can operate in, just by nature of what they are.
To say nothing of the fact that many governments would extend control over Google's services until nothing allowed is worth doing anymore (for example Pakistan has demonstrated many times they'd love to kill Youtube, as apparently French children's movies insult some sort of prophet, which apparently justifies blocking the whole thing)
And third many governments are adversarial towards one another. Which means Google just can't comply. India probably tries to threaten Google into stopping services in Pakistan. But while the India-Pakistan relationship regularly results in killings, nearly all governments are adversarial to some extent and will try to threaten any multinational into attacking other countries.
At best Google can give in to government pressure very slowly, because when that control gets strong enough governments would certainly use it to kill off Google.
A smartphone is essential to operate in the modern world. Facebook is not necessary at all.
Google and Apple are holding the entire world hostage.
I can't even order food at half the restaurants I visit any more without a Google or Apple device. They're all using smart phone QR code menus. It's absurd.
Imagine what happens when they're the only way to pay. When they're the only form of government ID.
Do we really want these devices to be locked down and not owned by us? This much responsibility should be a business liability imposed by the governments of the world, not unlimited permission to tax and coerce without impunity.
Imagine if your government was as free as your smartphone. We wouldn't have elections. We'd have no freedom, no peace of mind, forever renters. Bad choices would be imposed upon us as defaults. The government would make us more dependent upon them. If we had a business, we'd be taxed 30%, told we couldn't have a relationship with the customer, made to jump through frequent hoops, deal with constant friction, have to pay protection racket money to avoid ads, have everything we do monitored and controlled, be subject to takedown whenever and for whatever reason, not be allowed to issue updates or use our own technology, have the government themselves compete with us and look at our data...
> Do we really want these devices to be locked down and not owned by us?
Locked down: no. But Google does not want them locked down. That has never been how Google operated (even now switching search engines, moving away from Google's core business, is trivial on any device, including Android)
Not "owned by us"? Yes. For the simple reason that "owned by us" means government phones, and governments have demonstrated what devices they'll build (ie. none), as well as how locked down they want these phones to be.
I believe this is an important puzzle piece for understanding the rapid shifts that are currently taking place. Thank you for laying it out so clearly.
"Too big to fail" usually refers to companies such as banks that are such integral parts of the financial infrastructure that governments must bail them out when they screw up. In Google's case I would rather call it "too big to care", because every fine they get is basically a rounding error.
It would be great if open source could some how solve this better. Like it's a shame UX / UI seems to be difficult for open source people to master, because I would really love a great open source phone without android on it.
> [...] the cops can't keep up with robberies and theft, turn a blind eye to drugs and illegal immigrants, and don't even bother with murders and rapes in some places.
Not a boomer, so I don't have first hand experience, but I think you aptly described large US cities in the 70s. Ever watch Taxi Driver? The boomers are the ones who saw places go from 50s/60s petticoats to exactly what you described.
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