They're often from the families of the privileged or elites under the old, america friendly regime.

Indeed, the entitlement complex is probably why so many of them (in the iranian diaspora) were happy to rally behind an actual monarch.

This is not a normal thing to do for somebody who has supposedly adopted western values.

This is what a lot of diaspora are like when a country has had a western friendly puppet regime overthrown.

The people who left tend were often in a privileged position under the previous regime and the bitterness at having their privilege revoked often echoes through the generations.

They might feign concern for human rights when the regime they hate is violating them (i saw a lot of that when the alleged killing of tens of thousands of protestors) but it's the bitterness of lost privilege which truly drives them.

Ive seen it with Cubans, Venezuelans, Angolans, even the odd Russian.

I just tried it too and it basically just flagged a handful of 1500+ line files which probably ought to be broken up eventually but arent causing any serious problems.

If it's (like in my case) dependency management, localization or config files, breaking them up will likely only cause more issues. Make sure that it's an actual improvement before breaking things up.

It really shows that nobody cares about uptime at github or the jankiness of claude.

I wouldnt say that customers are indifferent, but it wouldnt be the first time that investor expectations are prioritized far above customer satisfaction.

AIs struggle with tech debt as much if not more than humans.

Ive noticed that theyre often quite bad at refactoring, also.

Tell me you didnt read the article without telling me.

>We can get far without worrying about the last 5-10%. The solutions for the last 5-10% could be fossil fuels in the short-term, long-duration storage as it matures, or easily storeable e-biofuels.

I think a lot of people truly dont get this.

Those days when the wind isnt blowing, the sun isnt shining and the batteries and pumped storage are depleted can be easily handled with, e.g. power2gas.

It's pretty expensive (per kwh almost as much as nuclear power) but with enough spare solar and wind capacity and a carbon tax on natural gas it becomes a no brainer to swap natural gas for that.

Nonetheless this wont stop people saying "but what about that last 5-10%?" as if it's a gotcha for a 100% green grid. It isnt. It never was.

The article ignores hydropower. The numbers/prices look a lot better with solar + wind + hydro + battery.

Norway runs almost entirely on hydropower. Sweden has a lot.

Iceland runs on hydropower and geothermal.

I’m happy to be wrong about this globally, but in my neck of the woods the readily exploited hydro resources are already exploited to 90% of their capacity and have been for 100 years. Hydro is in many ways the ultimate renewable energy, but that’s been true since electrification and we’ve been using it as part of the energy mix since then. I’d love to be wrong but my understanding is that there isn’t a huge amount of untapped new hydro capacity available without having severe impacts on ecosystems

Hydro in Norway goes very well with windmills in Denmark.

Very simplified:

Wind blows mostly in Denmark during the day, so Norway stops hydro during the day and imports electricity from Denmark's windmills.

During night the wind is mostly still in Denmark so windmills don't produce much and Denmark imports from Norway's hydro.

In this way you can stretch the capacity from hydro using windmills even though Norway isn't a good place for windmills.

Also what is probably used in your country is Pumped-storage hydroelectricity . During the day you pump water into the reservoir using wind/solar energy and discharge e.g at night .

Elsewhere in the country yes but lol not so much in the very flat part of Western Canada. I pulled out some topographic maps a few years ago and was quite dismayed at the lack of elevation change suitable for pumped hydro.

In the last decade or so hydro generation has grown about as much as solar and wind (they all basically grow about the same amount as global nuclear generation, hydro doubling and wind and solar growing exponentially from basically zero).

So it's not going to take off like solar but it's a big chunk of relatively clean electricity production and it's often basically a byproduct of managing water supplies. It also pairs really well with renewables as even without pumps it has a degree of flex and storage.

This is even more true with international grid connections. Europe in a cold spell? Solar countries import, wind & hydro export. Europe in a heat wave? Flip the switches the opposite direction.

Hydroelectric capacity is largely built out, so you can look at current generation mix to see how much it is likely to contribute.

In the US capacity is likely to go down (dams are expensive and many time old dams are removed instead of being rebuilt).

No, you couldnt. Nuclear power is not dispatchable.

> Nuclear power is not dispatchable.

I mean it is, its just slower.

but if you have batteries, then you can divert the power to the batteries to keep them topped up.

While technically possible, given that the vast majority of the cost is capex and not fuel and given that it is already five times the cost of solar and wind when producing at 100% 24/7, setting literal piles of cash on fire might be more economic than using it to dispatch electricity.

If you're using it to charge batteries it's just five times more expensive than equivalent solar or wind.

French nuclear stations are roughly as fast as combined cycle gas (to turn off at least)

The point is, with enough battery, you don't need fast despatch for things like water/gas/nuclear, because the battery does that for you. In the UK the 11gwhr we have (about 1/2-1/3 of one hours consumption) is more than capable to do the balancing.

No, because most of that nuclear generation would be during times it wasn't needed. The residual 5-10% in the renewable + batteries world is highly nonuniform, utterly unsuited to being covered by nuclear.

It's more that in the past widespread surveillance required a lot of people, many of whom will have a conscience which will end up disrupting your surveillance.

The movie Das Lieben der Anderen makes this point very cogently.

Nowadays you can run a huge surveillance program with far fewer people, all of whom can be conscience free.

Im not sure how the next stasi will crumble but it'll be a lot harder to wrest them from power with the tools they have at their fingertips.

I worked for one company that used it. Everybody on the ground hated it but the costs of migrating away were enormous because every system they relied upon was tightly coupled to every other system. It would have been a multiyear project to get off it.

Their software wasn't just more expensive than using open source equivalents it was worse, too. It's just very, very sticky.

At the same time the sales team wine and dine key decision makers and try to strike the fear of god in to them so they don't rock the boat.

We heard you're planning to migrate away from Oracle. We understand, but unfortunately, that means we have to get rid of the 75% discount we gave you, so we'll make a decade of revenue in the two years it'll take you to get rid of us. Still planning to migrate away?

Reality of course is the other way around: the US defense industry gets to build gold toilets (for the White House ballroom built on the ruins of the East Wing), while the Ukranians absolutely must build stuff that works and is cheap or they get a missile on their heads.

The US survived spending a trillion dollars to achieve very little in Iraq and Afghanistan. I'm sure they'll survive spending another trillion over a decade to achieve nothing in Iran other than hundreds of thousands dead.

The reality is that most of the Ukrainian leadership is like Timur Mindich - furiously stashing away cash for the day when they inevitably have to flee to the west like he did. For now they are generally safe in Ukraine as Russia avoids bombing leadership centers for strategic reasons.

The west tolerates nearly all of the corruption in Ukraine but keeps tight control of two political organs in Ukraine - NABU and SAPO.

These "anti corruption agencies" will mostly hear and see no evil until a politican in Ukraine deviates from western foreign policy goals. Then they "discover" how corrupt this one individual turned out to be and crack down on them until everybody is once again on the same page.

Twice they have threatened Zelensky (once when he tried to bring the agencies under his direct control) and twice he has backed down.

Leaders being corrupt is not a great reason to let a country get steamrolled by the russian war machine

It's not about steamrolling, never was. The whole point of the exercise was to install a puppet government. In Ukraine, the TV actor installed by the Biden administration is currently the acting president. The moment funding runs out - so will he.

> inviting the gold toilet brigade from Ukraine to come and build our weapons

Ukraine is a massive weapons manufacturer. It's a small country holding Russia's entire military-industrial complex at bay. We have a lot to learn from them, even if it's just tactics and industrial organisation. And those lessons don't only apply to fighting pisspot dictatorships like Putin's.