The only reason nuclear is more expensive than any alternative are absurd regulations, reporting duties, the practice of financing these projects on borrowed money with high interests and that many of the companies running these projects are career parking spots and accelerators for the social circles around politicians and the bureaucratic aristocracy.
Complexity-wise they're about halfway between gas and coal.
The plant and equipment required to maintain a stable nuclear reaction and extract its heat is far more complex than that required to control a coal or natural gas firebox.
This is reflected in the fact that to run 1GW of nuclear generation, on average (in the US) requires about 700 FTE to operate. The average for coal generation is about a third of that number. And the average for a combined cycle gas plant is about 60 FTE.
And nuclear fission produces low-grade heat - around 320°C - compared to coal (around 550°C) or natural gas (over 1300°C). Thus are less thermally efficient and require huge cooling towers and much larger turbines to extract the thermal energy. Which, of course, are more expensive and complex to build and maintain.
Kind of my fault, I specifically thought only about the powerplant + fuel part.
Of course nuclear is much more complex as a whole, because it comes with at least two, sometimes three different business sections attached by default: Production and sale of rare isotopes, on-site laboratories and research and recycling of spent fuel.
It's hard to beat gas. The small double digit MW plant in my town literally has only one on-site full-time employee. My guess the only reason the FTE hits even 60 (didn't check) is because there are so many small installations.
Coal has a lot of fuel processing on-site just for its own demand, the mostly very sensible environmental regulations add a lot of complexity to processing the flue gasses and this adds A LOT of moving parts.
Nuclear can be built simple enough that people are literally thinking about dropping it down a mile deep hole, barely the width of a US-standard human. On the "hands off" scale it can't beat gas, barely anything but solar, geothermal and nuclear thermal electric can, but it could beat coal and hydro and possibly even wind via scale. Just how often should one have to send a report to some oversight body on the number of functional overhead lights and whether the change in microclimate didn't displace any rare insect species before one can say: "You didn't read the last 20, you're not getting another one."
> Of course nuclear is much more complex as a whole, because it comes with at least two, sometimes three different business sections attached by default: Production and sale of rare isotopes, on-site laboratories and research and recycling of spent fuel.
That misses my point. Managing fuel and waste is more complex for nuclear. Producing heat using a nuclear reactor is more complex than producing it with coal and gas. And extracting useful energy from the heat is also more complex (given the low-grade heat that reactors provide).
At every step of the way you have more complexity in engineering and operations.
These engineering realities are independent of the regulatory environment or other activities occurring around the plant.
The only reason? Solar constantly getting cheaper is not also part of the reason? Is there any price that solar could decline you to where you would begin to credit solar's low price as being part of the reason?
The rules were updated on Oct6 to allow media outlets to report using any information even if classified and unapproved for release, as long as they didn't solicit it or were given it with the premise that it won't be released.
So if they were to be approached by a whistleblower or happened to hear the right conversation or find the right documents, it'd be fair game.
I experimented with Cuckoo tables a lot, but sadly never managed to beat quadratic probing. It's honestly quite depressing just how hard beating "having your data right next to each other" is.
The one thing Cuckoo tables can do much better than anything else I've tried is load factor. Insertions get slow well above 90%, but as long as your buckets are large enough or you got enough inner tables, it'll do fast lookups even at a perfect 100%.
But you'll have a hard time beating getting all the data you'll need for 99% of your lookups within a single cache line.
Why would the malware industry benefit from digital message privacy?
If you're the victim, just hand over the relevant chats yourself. Otherwise, just follow the money. And if the attackers are sitting in a country whose banks you can't get to cooperate, intercepting chat messages from within that country won't do you any good either.
Also, if someone has malicious intent and is part of a criminal network, the people within that network would hardly feel burdened by all digital messages on all popular apps being listened in on by the government. These people will just use their own private applications. Making one is like 30min of work or starting at $50 on fiverr.
”Follow the money”. Yes, let’s decide that no bank is to have anything to do with crypto from next year. And not do business with other banks that accepts crypto. That would help stop fraud much more effective than
Chat Control.
For the vast majority of crypto currencies tracing the transactions is trivial. And even currencies like XMR are hardly as anonymous as people think.
The challenging regulations around technically anonymous crypto currencies require you to actively make trackable arrangements with your financial service providers. VERY few people will ever do this, and therefore if anything suspicious were to occur, all you've achieved is putting yourself on the suspect list preemptively.
Sure, if you want to read the messages, but the whole point is that that's rarely necessary and the price isn't worth the minimal gain.
Of the serious criminals, the only ones you'll be catching are those with low technical knowledge (everyone else will just be using their own applications) and the Venn diagram of those with little tech knowledge and those whose digital privacy practices could deceive law enforcement resembles AA cups against a pane of glass.
Regarding Encrochat, it is no surprise that an (unintentional?) watering hole gathered up a bunch of tech-illiterate, the fallacy is that those people wouldn't have been caught if they weren't allowed to flock to a single platform for some time.
Would some people have not been caught until much later or even not at all? Sure, but if LE would do its job (and not ignoring, or even covering up, well known problem areas and organizations for years to decades), only those of low priority.
Is that little gain worth creating a tool to allow Iran or similar countries to check every families' messages if they suspect some family member might be gay?
Hard nope.
> Or just downvoting me.
Don't worry, I rarely do that and that's not just because I can't...
With very few exceptions, politicians do know perfectly fine what they are doing.
Each of them has a large budget to hire several staffers presenting every issue to them in ways they understand best, each government has a huge apparatus of various departments with domain experts analyzing every situation from every reasonable perspective and if all of that fails, barely and university or institute would fail to respond to a request for input from an elected official.
Any and all ignorance of any significant politician is by choice. You can't push the oppression a decision causes to the maximum you'll get away with at that point in time without understanding the issue first.
No offense, but an org-mode user's opinion about Latex is about equivalent to a Masochist's opinion on letting your child play with Lego in the living room.
The technical aspects of the software aren't the problem. Convincing enough people to adopt your app before you're getting a great deal on a 20sqft studio apartment is.
This is a response to a hypothetical where every single existing (or possibly just US) chat provider leaves the EU, and I'm saying the claim that this will cause any degree of pain whatsoever to the EU population is ridiculous because the replacements are far too trivial to not immediately replace the US apps.
I fully support your argument and can't understand why people in this thread assume the EU doesn't have millions of programmers who can bash out a chat app, one of which would rise above the others and get a critical mass of users.
Sometimes I think it would be good for Meta, X, Google etc. to lose market share in the EU and UK. It's ridiculous that we're beholden to one country for so much software, and they're all being actively enshitified anyway.
I always find it very ironic people apply the "don't attribute to malice what can be explained by incompetence" principle to politicians, who are part of the government.
Have you ever had a really great mentor or teacher who was excellent at explaining things to you? Good news, you've now got a budget to hire several of them in full-time exclusively for yourself.
Unsure about something? Just ask and a huge apparatus of several departments, featuring dozens of expert panels with hundreds of domain specific experts each will sift through huge databases, many of them not available to anyone else but the government, of state-of-the-art research, current events, historic events, standards, whatever ..., they will analyze your problem from every possible perspective and make the result of these efforts available to you, together with several recommendations of actions according to the guidelines you provided.
I highly doubt that there are more than a hundred people on this planet who could be incompetent under these conditions. What we're observing is not incompetence, but a conflict of interests, between what they want and how often they need to throw you a little bone to keep you obedient.
You assume everyone is interested in the facts. Many, perhaps the majority are more interested in swaying opinion, loyal coworkers and possibly a grift or two on the side. In no particular order.
Compare it to the 2022 Ukraine war. For more than a year almost all the fighting happened in densely populated areas, with many such shorter phases before and since.
And Soviet-stock bombs just aren't as precise and unguided rocket artillery even more so.
Yet after more than 3 years the number of civilian deaths and injured COMBINED just barely surpassed 50k recently.
Ukraine goes out of its way to evacuate civilians, who can flee to safer parts of their vast country, or to other countries which have collectively accepted something like 7 million Ukrainian refugees.
Gazans have none of that - they’re trapped in a tiny territory, no states are taking significant numbers of Gazan refugees, and Hamas isn’t doing anything for civilian safety.
Any differences in Israeli vs Russian military tactics are rather secondary to these fundamental differences in civilian exposure.
13,883 civilians died in Ukraine as a result of Russian invasion between 24 Feb. 2022 and 31 July 2025 according to United Nations. It's really easy to Google it.
The very same UN stresses that these numbers severely undercount due to lack of access to occupied territories and mostly reflect deaths in free Ukraine. The figures from the areas where most of the fighting has taken place remain unknown. Realistic estimates go far beyond the death toll in Gaza; people illegally conscripted from the occupied territories into the Russian armed forces alone add several tens of thousands more deaths.
On 11 April, Mariupol Mayor Vadym Boychenko stated that over 10,000 civilians had died in the Russian siege of Mariupol.[323] On 12 April, city officials reported that up to 20,000 civilians had been killed.[323] (this is 1 month into siege) On the same day, the Mayor of the city reported that about 21,000 civilians had been killed.[324] An updated Ukrainian death toll the following month put the number of civilians killed at at least 22,000.[325]
On August 29, President of Mariupol Television, volunteer and civil activist Mykola Osychenko said to Dnipro TV that, according to the insider information, 87,000 deaths have been currently documented in morgues in Mariupol. Besides, 26,750 bodies are buried in mass graves, and many more are buried in the yards of the apartment blocks and private houses, or still under the rubble.[326]
In early November, Ukraine stated that at least 25,000 civilians had been killed in Mariupol.[46][47] In late December, based on the discovery of 10,300 new mass graves, the Associated Press estimated that the true death toll may be up to three times that figure.[327] The Uppsala Conflict Data Program estimates of the total death toll resulting from the siege range from 27,000 to 88,000 fatalities, most of them civilians.[49]
just to put things into perspective, this siege lasted less than 3 months
If you had quoted but one more sentence by accident, you might have included the study that counted individual graves in and around Mariupol:
"According to a 2023 study by Human Rights Watch and two other organizations, there were at least 8,034 excess deaths in Mariupol between March 2022 and February 2023."
Complexity-wise they're about halfway between gas and coal.