u/azertyfun

As a European software developer I would love to see that.

Unfortunately I'm afraid those most likely to cry foul aren't Americans, but the majority of European tech businesses who are either reselling MSFT bullshit or completely locked in AWS/Azure/GCP. Open-source/sovereign software services are the exception, not the rule.

With what money? NPPs only get built on public funds, private equity cannot make the economics viable due to the multi-decade amortization. It's fine on public debt but breaks down if you have to pay shareholders for billions of euros of loans over 20 years which amounts to so much money the cost is uncompetitive with fossil fuels + renewables. Private equity has been trying to make private nuclear power for 20 years now, mostly with SMRs, with little success and nothing to show for it up to now.

If Belgium ever builds a new NPP, it will be because the government voted on a multi-decade funding plan, which is not guaranteed to happen when the left wants no nuclear and the right wants fiscal austerity. Until then there's nothing that Engie can do but wait.

TBF work was done to keep it sound until 2025 and it was possible to extend the operational life further (basically you can just keep throwing hundreds of millions at them every 10 years for a long time to come).

What's fucked up is that in the last few years a bunch of maintenance wasn't done because the government said "no for real though super pinky promise we're not extending the contract again they will *definitely* be shut down in 2025 it's the law".

So now Electrabel/Engie is rightfully super pissed because this flip-flopping is going to cost us billions just to keep the existing reactors running. And they have zero guarantee the greens won't come back into a government coalition in 2029 and fuck the schedule up again.

This is terrifying. Americans are running headfirst into the Greatest Depression, except this time they are the Nazis and they have enough nukes to eradicate life on Earth.

And their political discourse oscillates between "serves us right" and "yes daddy". Republicans are complicit and literally everyone else will refuse to resort to political violence or disobedience even as Trump orders nukes to be fired at whoever he's mad at that week.

I just thought of a reason why trying to explain the downsides of solar power generation always goes so poorly for me.

*Where I live, solar=good is a given. No amount of oil lobbying can overcome the simple fact that thanks to historically heavy subsidies, PV is free money and therefore anti-solar sentiment is fringe because everyone loves free money.*

(Which is its own can of worms because ungoverned PV has externalities which the owners may not be bearing or only partially, while people who can't install PV are essentially using up some of their own taxes to give a tax break to the bourgeois down the street with a solar mansion, and sure that's more solar which is environmentally good but it's also another indirect tax on the poor which is socially deleterious).

Anyway my point is that in a country where nearly everyone has PV or wishes they did, I don't see any issue with plainly stating "PV is causing major headaches to grid operators". Because pragmatically we *need* to justify solutions like dynamic pricing, solar taxes, and the phaseout net metering which are predictably unpopular policies with PV owners who were promised endless riches.

But I suppose from a North American perspective where "renewable energy is good" is somehow the fringe opinion and PV deployment is pathetic, then it makes sense to push back against such messaging.

You're more likely to win the euromillion than to successfully shift norms away from the 8:30-18:00 working hours. This shit is baked into *every* employment contract out there. I work an office job where it doesn't matter so much, but anyone who works shifts or a time-sensitive job is stuck there basically forever regardless of the time zone.

Kind of the whole point of nuclear dissuasion is that we are not, in fact, going to ever do that. And ignoring the existence of nukes (lol), attacking the US on their hometurf is such a monumentally stupid idea people still wonder what went through the Japanese High Command's mind 80 years ago.

Stop asking Europe for help, because you're not getting it. You've alienated your allies and broken your democracy beyond repair. Either use that 2nd amendment of yours to the fullest extent of its spirit or STFU with the "pwease stop him we're scawed :(((" rhetoric. We have way more reasons to be scared because *we* don't live next door to white cishet male Americans to shield us from his madness. Stop with the victim blaming. Either you stop this child or he starts a war with *your* assent.

I push for FOSS everywhere I can at work, but then we acquire a company and they casually drop "oh yeah we've built $solution on Azure Containers using Azure SDN with Azure API Gateway and Azure LoadBalancer and Azure Firewall and Azure Backups and Azure Georedundancy and we use Azure SAST and Azure pipelines (replace with microsoft marketing lingo as applicable - I don't care to learn it). Aside from that we're vendor-agnostic".

It's astonishing how "we can use Azure/AWS but let's not lock ourselves into proprietary solutions for which FOSS alternatives are readily available" is somehow a controversial statement in some software outfits. Ignoring the sovereignty concerns for a minute, from a business perspective you're essentially putting all your eggs in one basket and hoping really hard that Microsoft or Amazon don't pull a Broadcom and bankrupt you one day by hiking prices a few hundred percent.

It boggles the mind how *existentially reliant* most of the digital world is on the whims of like, three unchecked billionaires.

Very hard disagree. Hearts and minds.

Dafuq else do you expect a random French opposition member to do? Sit there quietly and look pretty? That seems to be the leading strategy for the US Dems and also an irredeemable dereliction of duty. If you are forced into the opposition, *be performative*. Be loud. Be ungovernable, if necessary.

It's nice to wish for a world where a fascist regime doesn't have full control of the USA, but unfortunately we don't live in that world so please don't denigrate the work of politicians who at least are doing the bare minimum of saying something about it.