Around the turn of the century that was a stronger argument–it’s one of the reasons why I backed nuclear then–but now we have cheaper renewables which can be online decades sooner so the choice isn’t nuclear vs. coal but vs. solar & wind which have orders of magnitude less pollution. Even if we’re talking natural gas, which has killed coal economically, there’s still far more pollution and direct health risk avoided by picking renewables.
If we’re talking risk aversion, we can address both the major certain risk of climate change and the lesser but still valid risks of nuclear while saving a ton of money and probably getting results quickly. The reason so much fossil fuel money goes into pushing nuclear power is that it guarantees fossil fuel usage continues unchecked for decades before possibly going down, and we don’t have decades any more.
Solar and wind haven’t yet solved the two major issues: producing power 24/7/365 even when it isn’t sunny or windy (or when it’s too windy).
Batteries are one solution, but the power storage requirements far surpass the world’s capacity for battery production, and come with the same caveats: rare earth metals, which need mining. Mining is a huge source of air pollution, as mining equipment is usually diesel powered, and far worse for the environment due to pollution of natural surface and ground water reservoirs.
Uranium mines have the same issues for sure, the scale is just very different.
First, it’s rare to have protected periods where the entire grid has no wind, solar, hydro, etc. That can happen regionally, but it’s not a secret and grid operators prepare for it just as they do the impact of heatwaves shutting down nuclear or fossil plants getting iced up.
Second, power is so cheap with renewables that storage of over-production makes sense. Some of that can be things like pumped water systems but batteries are coming online by the hundreds of gigawatt-hour now and sodium isn’t exactly a rare earth mineral so that’s going to accelerate even more following market forces:
Again, this is so much cheaper that it makes nuclear even less competitive and it’s online so much faster that you’re basically weighing the gamble that storage which is already competitive won’t get substantially cheaper over multiple decades.
Most batteries do not use rare earth metals.
Even if they did and it was an issue, we would find alternatives if that was necessary, just like rare earth free motors were developed to avoid all the downsides of that come with those.
Have a look at CATL’s sodium-ion batteries, they do not use anything expensive, rare, or particularly damaging to extract from the environment.
Uranium mines will become a problem if every country tries to make 25% of electricity with nuclear. Electrification of primary energy might even need more nuclear according to some pro nuclear people.
Many forget that while there is plenty of uranium on Earth, most of it occurs in very low concentrations. The lower the concentration, the higher the CO₂ emissions for the entire uranium chain from the mine to the fuel rod.
Meanwhile, renewable energies receive free fuel from the sun. They are already recyclable today and, with intelligent local and intercontinental grids, will also require fewer batteries for storage.
That doesn't get rid of the important perverse incentives. They still "want" DDoS all over from a monetary perspective. Kicking off the web page of the attackers will have a slight impact but not a whole lot.
Perhaps, but not accepting money from criminals is always a good idea and it would cause problems for those guys as their competitors push them off-line. Just because they wouldn’t go away doesn’t justify helping them.
That to me is a pretty clear reason to question the accuracy of those two claims. Insiders are saying that even people who were performing well in very profitable groups are being cut, which is hard to square with the stated motivations.
You don't need them. Maven has deterministic dependency resolution (unless you use version ranges, but don't do that), so you just write your dependencies. (The flipside is you may want to get in the habit of doing something like versions:use-latest-releases as a regular housekeeping task so that you pick up any security updates, but that tends to be less of an issue in Java-land for other reasons)
Why don’t I need them? I can’t make every third-party package do exact version pins and it’d be miserable if I could because then I couldn’t patch a transitive dependency faster than the upstream even if there’s a drop-in patch release which is 100% compatible.
Even if that worked, I’d also want hashes to avoid file modification, although that’s less of a concern for anything on Maven Central where the releases are immutable.
> I can’t make every third-party package do exact version pins
Every third-party package already uses exact version dependencies, you don't need to do anything.
> then I couldn’t patch a transitive dependency faster than the upstream even if there’s a drop-in patch release which is 100% compatible.
You can always override the transitive dependency version if you want to.
> I’d also want hashes to avoid file modification, although that’s less of a concern for anything on Maven Central where the releases are immutable.
It's not just Maven Central, there's a strong norm of releases being immutable everywhere. If you're worried about attacks, there's a plugin you can enable to check the GPG signatures.
No country provides a lot of support. Some countries provide more but inevitably if you poll people they’ll mention that they mention significant financial deterrents, not to mention things like climate change, all of which are valid. People only need one of them to be true to decide to have fewer children, while society needs to help address all of them.
For example, if your government provides housing and childcare support—and say that’s the unicorn where those are consistently available, high quality, and cover the full cost—but still culturally tends to mommy-track careers into dead ends, despite doing those other things well you are going to have a lot of women decide not to risk multiple decades of lifetime earnings.
Yes, support does not have to be financial. If you read the entire article you posted note the experts quoted made the same point: opportunity cost is real. Career impact is real. The shift to getting educated and established in a career is real.
Societies have to address many different sources of no because the only reason rates used to be higher in the past was women not having a choice.
Archivists and librarians have to think in terms of practicality: if many tools exist to read something and it’s a mainstream software product, the odds are good that they’ll be unable to use those files 50 years from now. Not certain, but good, and that matters with limited budget and ability to tell the rest of the world what format to provide things in.
This can require nuance: for example, PDF has profiles because the core format is widely supported but you could do things like embed plugin content from now-defunct vendors and they would only want the former for long-term preservation.
Think about how you’d have felt if a scientist you respected had joined the RJ Reynolds tobacco research institute. Would their prior achievements overshadow a gross ethical failure?
This administration is worse, both because of the wholesale gutting of the American scientific research establishment and all of the various corruption issues on display. As General Morrison put it, “The standard you walk past, is the standard you accept.” Anyone who signed up knew who they’d be working for and has to accept that will be a major part of their reputation.
There’s always a tension in democratic societies, however, where civilian oversight is important. Claiming the war is going really well until asking for $200,000,000,0000 because it isn’t has little military benefit compared to the political ramifications of preventing public oversight.
We learned from WikiLeaks that the US government classified (hid) significant information that was not relevant to national security, simply to conceal information about the war effort that would likely have turned public opinion against the war.
That is a clear abuse of power, which like most of the abuses revealed by Wikileaks, Snowden, etc., get solid bipartisan support.
If we’re talking risk aversion, we can address both the major certain risk of climate change and the lesser but still valid risks of nuclear while saving a ton of money and probably getting results quickly. The reason so much fossil fuel money goes into pushing nuclear power is that it guarantees fossil fuel usage continues unchecked for decades before possibly going down, and we don’t have decades any more.
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