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Politics, politics, politics (so long and thanks for all the fish)

Kompakted said:
With social media the interesting debate around regulation is that regulation is *generally* driven by states or supranationional entities. Going back to the point about Meta stopping fact checking on FB, states have kind of washed their hands of it to an extent and told social media platforms that they need to regulate their own platforms. What you're seeing is a bit of a battle of wills now where Musk and others are saying f**k off, that's not our job.
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Absolutely agree..........interesting topic though, you always add some very crucial angles. Pleasure sir
 
Rorschach said:
The anti-nuclear stance is quite muted among climate folk now, for the most part. Most if not all experts are for retaining existing nuclear power. New nuclear power makes zero financial sense though, considering the quicker cheaper and cleaner options.
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In the UK renewables are actually more expensive than nuclear and as it stands there's still no solution to when the wind stops or there's little sun. There's no storage solution available that's proven at the scale required yet. You can see here in the past week renewables drops off massively on some days with wind providing as little as 5% https://x.com/myGridGB. Just this week the UK spent £12m on 2 power stations for 3 hours https://www.theguardian.com/busines...-more-than-12m-for-three-hours-of-electricity

I'm all for more renewables but they can't yet provide cheap consistent power at the scale required not only for residential but also for industry who need greater certainty on costs. Look at Germany now who shut down all their nuclear power and now import heavily from others and have seen industry decline (obviously some of that is due to Russia as well).
 
Kompakted said:
With social media the interesting debate around regulation is that regulation is *generally* driven by states or supranationional entities. Going back to the point about Meta stopping fact checking on FB, states have kind of washed their hands of it to an extent and told social media platforms that they need to regulate their own platforms. What you're seeing is a bit of a battle of wills now where Musk and others are saying f**k off, that's not our job.
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There's an easy solution: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c5y3rnl5qv3o
 
Grays_1890 said:
I don't want us to be North Korea but there has to be stronger regulation around social media and that includes the age in which kids get access to certain platforms
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The EU will move the needle on this or no one will. There was EU legislation rolled out about a year ago (the name escapes me now) designed to regulate content on social media sites, including how their algorithms juice up misinformation etc. Early days yet but we'll see if they start getting serious about this. The fines are considerable I believe - 6% of worldwide turnover - but any case brought will be long drawn out technical affairs no doubt.
 
Gutter Boy said:
I never realised how bad the issue was until Twitter started occasionally toggling the 'following' feed back to 'for you'.

What an absolute bin fire of fascism and misogyny it force-feeds people who might lack critical capacity.
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Also there is no way of not seeing Musk, I blocked the whelk and he pops up all the time........
 
P.D. said:
In the UK renewables are actually more expensive than nuclear and as it stands there's still no solution to when the wind stops or there's little sun. There's no storage solution available that's proven at the scale required yet. You can see here in the past week renewables drops off massively on some days with wind providing as little as 5% https://x.com/myGridGB. Just this week the UK spent £12m on 2 power stations for 3 hours https://www.theguardian.com/busines...-more-than-12m-for-three-hours-of-electricity

I'm all for more renewables but they can't yet provide cheap consistent power at the scale required not only for residential but also for industry who need greater certainty on costs. Look at Germany now who shut down all their nuclear power and now import heavily from others and have seen industry decline (obviously some of that is due to Russia as well).
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New nuclear is considerably more expensive than renewables. If that is not the case in the UK then I'll be more than a little surprised. Where are you getting your figures for this?

Germany made a mistake in shutting down their plants early. Relying on Russian energy was an even bigger mistake. The flip side of this is that they have had to invest heavily into the renewables space and this accounted for over half their power consumption in 2024. It imported 2% of its electricity in 2023 google tells me, so not that bad either.
 
Rorschach said:
New nuclear is considerably more expensive than renewables. If that is not the case in the UK then I'll be more than a little surprised. Where are you getting your figures for this?

Germany made a mistake in shutting down their plants early. Relying on Russian energy was an even bigger mistake. The flip side of this is that they have had to invest heavily into the renewables space and this accounted for over half their power consumption in 2024. It imported 2% of its electricity in 2023 google tells me, so not that bad either.
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@Lost Mango has provided some costs. There isn't one in that table but a slight premium would be justified due to a consistent supply. You also haven't said how you'd address what happens when it's not windy or sunny? The share of wind varies from almost nothing to 25% depending on the weather, you can't run a country on that.
 
P.D. said:
@Lost Mango has provided some costs. There isn't one in that table but a slight premium would be justified due to a consistent supply. You also haven't said how you'd address what happens when it's not windy or sunny? The share of wind varies from almost nothing to 25% depending on the weather, you can't run a country on that.
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The data quoted in that chart is very old (from a 2011 report). It is not clear if it is referring to the deployment of new nuclear but I would say it is not based on the numbers. New nuclear is about 2-4 times the price of renewables (more for SMRs) and only heading in one direction. Also, renewables can be deployed in a fraction of the time it takes to get a nuclear plant up and running, and time is of the essence for the climate now. Anything being built now won't stand a chance in the market by the time it comes online.

Just on the windy/sunny thing (a meme in climate circles). Yes those that design and balance the grid do understand this variance. The UK will need peaker plants of one technology or another until enough renewables are deployed and storage catches up. And it will.

You might not be aware that nuclear plants are also shut down regularly for a variety of reasons. Half of France's nuclear power plants were offline for one reason or another in 22. They are not as reliable as often imagined, and can only be used as base load. And those plants built beside the sea or rivers (all of them ) will have their own problems as the climate changes, with sea level rise and droughts. There is also a different problem with cheap renewable power in the market compared to more expensive base-load nuclear power, the flip side of the coin, but that is a whole other discussion which I won't get into.

Anyway in short, existing nuclear I'm down with but new stuff doesn't make sense is where I land.
 
Baleforce said:
Education is the magic bullet, it’s not that social media is full of brick, it’s that we stopped teaching kids how to recognise it.
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The biggest problem with social media, or online media (news) in general is that in order to be helpful, most socials, news sites and search engines have AI algorithms that look at your past history and present things to you that you might want to look at. It accentuates the echo chamber. If you believe in a certain thing and read stuff by people that also believe that thing, if you happen to Google "is this thing really correct?" Googke will (based on your history) present you with the search results it thinks you want to read (i.e. all the articles by people that think that the thing you believe in is correct). Its also doing the opposite to someone who doesn't believe in the thing you believe in and presenting them with top search results by people that believe that thing to be a load of cobblers.

It has helped make politics more decisive and dehumanised and delegitimised "other opinions"
 
P.D. said:
Labour really need some fresh innovative ideas to kick things off, feels like they just want to wait for endless reports and commissions, whether that's because they don't want to make decisions or know the money isn't there (likely both) I'm not sure.

I'm not sure if they're really viable yet but Rolls Royce (and others) are designing SMRs, this is an area we could take the lead in and generate cheap regular power and export the technology elsewhere. High end engineering is definitely something we should focus on, lots of opportunity there.

https://twitter.com/x/status/1873667975112438228
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We can and should but we won't.

Mainly because Milibland has tied his dingdong to the wind flagpole
 
Gutter Boy said:
How is the waste safely disposed of? Its chucked down old mines, then leaks into the sea.

We're having to try and invent universal languages to warn successor species in hundreds of thousands of years not to mess with the catrosophically deadly tombs we're creating everywhere
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Shoot it into space. Or put it in brick holes like Saudi Sportswashing Machine.
 
Kompakted said:
You can't fix it. I'm not sure you really understand what I'm getting at, yeah, they can increase beds a bit but beds and monitoring equipment and everything else that goes with them are expensive. And then you have to have the staff to monitor them and use them.

There are competing priorities. If you buy enough beds and equipment to comfortably get through January, that investment is on stuff that won't get touched for 10 months a year.

Similarly if you fund the recruitment and training of enough doctors and nurses to deal comfortably with January demand, there will be fully qualified doctors and nurses sat there for weeks on end in the summer with literally nothing to do. And job satisfaction and engagement will fall out it's a**e.

There's a point above which resource for the NHS becomes inefficient and unfortunately I think people being stuck on trolleys in ward corridors and things are just going to be a fact of life for the health service in mid-winter. These stories always surface at this time of year and by the middle of February they've all gone...
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It's a smaller problem in countries that are more successful with their preventative approach to healthcare.

Let's say you have a really good screening program for bowel and colon cancer. You can then organise any intrusive work/surgery/scans to take place outside of the pinch point.

In a reactive system like ours, if someone turns up bricking blood in January, you can't schedule an appointment for them in March.

An insurance based system would reduce this issue significantly.
 
Grays_1890 said:
What a great speech this is, and I would say that because it mirrors my own fears for my sons and many young peoples futures in that I think social media and how it is used is one of the biggest threats to society:

https://twitter.com/x/status/1877283081872183567
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Is that the conspiracy theory mental that ended up having to shell out about £1.5m (plus her own costs) for making brick up in that very talk?
 
scaramanga said:
Is that the conspiracy theory mental that ended up having to shell out about £1.5m (plus her own costs) for making brick up in that very talk?
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She got done for comments made about Banks and ties to Russia or something along those lines. If memory serves

As I say and explained after, the reason the speech resonated is because the theme about social media is spot on IMO........its a cesspit the majority of the time
 
Grays_1890 said:
She got done for comments made about Banks and ties to Russia or something along those lines. If memory serves

As I say and explained after, the reason the speech resonated is because the theme about social media is spot on IMO........its a cesspit the majority of the time
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There's a beautiful irony though in the way she disseminates false information in an old school medium complaining about how newer mediums can be used to disseminate false information.
 
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