There can't be a blanket consent. You cannot consent to contracts you've never seen. You can't waive your rights away. Browsers could only implement a blanket deny, but that wouldn't stop websites from showing cookie banners, because they want you to click Accept All.
It’s not just whataboutism when the comparison points to a broader systemic process of eroding rights and worsening conditions. It is also an observation of this next stage in that process and how it departs from the last.
Ultimately, I think it’s self-serving/pointless Daily Show “gotcha” finger-waving trying to face down a steamroller of hate, but it’s more than whataboutism.
There was de facto no investment into nuclear energy across all countries since the early 80s and it's beyond tiring to see online commenters adamantly trying to blame that on a scheming cabal of Green politicians, when Green parties never got beyond 10% of the vote in the elections. Yes, Germany prohibited the ban of new reactors in the earyl 2000s, but the truth is no one wanted to build them anyway and hadn't for a long time. Under the Schröder government, only two or three reactors were shut down and they were the oldest, had a meager output and weren't even profitable anymore. And the only way Russia influenced that was by mishandling Chernobyl. It's laughable to claim a country whose only high-technology export is nuclear technology is pushing others to abandon it.
Wrong. Wrong. Wrong. I'm tired of hearing this age-old propaganda tune over and over again.
Germany had plans (before the Schroeder government laid the foundation for the whole nuclear shutdown) to build new and more nuclear reactors. After the initial buildup phase from 1970 to the late 1980s (latest in operation was Neckarwestheim 2 in 1989 not counting test reactors, only 9 years before Schroeder, not really a "long time"), most good sites had a reactor or maybe 2 or 3. The plan then was to plan for replacing the oldest ones and add a few more to existing sites, starting in the late 1990s when the first reactors start to approach an age of 30, to be replaced by their finished replacement reactor on the same site at 40 before 2010. Those plans included pebble bed reactors (https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kernkraftwerk_THTR-300 unsuccessful due to technical problems), fast breeder reactors (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SNR-300 unsucessful due to green opposition) and improved PWRs (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EPR_(nuclear_reactor) co-developed with France, nowadays a few have come online).
The reason why nobody wanted to build them was green opposition. This started before Chernobyl, for example in opposing the Wackersdorf reprocessing plant https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wackersdorf_reprocessing_plant and blocking the refueling operations of existing plants. The green party never got past 10%, but mostly because the parties in government accepted their demands out of fear of strengthening them, because they needed them for a coalition, or because after Chernobyl saying anything positive about nuclear became political suicide. Misinformation was rampant, any German PWR was equated to a Chernobyl in waiting. Experts disagreed and were ignored by media and politicians, shouted down by the greens as industry minions wanting to poison us all.
The reactors shut down under Schroeder were quite profitable, but getting old enough that they would have been switched off soon anyways. Nuclear reactors become more and more profitable over time, because most of the cost is in the initial construction and the financing. After the building is paid off, running cost is quite low, fuel cost is negligible compared to personnel for example. But at some point, repairs, downtime and necessary improvements make it too costly after all. That's when the originally intended replacement should have started, but this was stopped by the Schroeder goverment and the Greens.
And while I don't know whether the Russian influence on and financing of green movements is true or not, it is logical. Russia never had any chance to export its nuclear technology to western countries. Western nuclear power plants were, at least since the 80s, safer and better. The only thing the west could have bought (and actually does still buy) from Russia is uranium. But that is by far a smaller export for Russia than oil and gas. And there are uranium reserves in many western countries, Canada, Australia, the US, Germany and the Czech republic do have large deposits that are only partially exploited, and many other (third-world) countries do have uranium mines and do export (which is why the west is buying there, it's just cheaper). So uranium isn't really a reliable or big business for Russia. Oil and Gas, however, are. And since oil and gas are high-volume goods, imports are far less flexible than uranium imports. Basically, if you want it cheap, you need a pipeline, which is the perfect leash for the Russians to hold. And lo and behold, Schroeder, while making plans to shut down all German nuclear power plants over time, planned to increase gas imports from Russia, which was upheld during the later Merkel years. Schroeder was, after his term, rewarded for this with a position at Russia's state gas producer Gazprom. So it would be in Russia's interest to reduce nuclear power use in Europe and get Europe dependent on their gas.
Btw. the meaning of "green" has changed. Back in the Schroeder days and before, green was largely pro-environment and anti-nuke. But CO₂ emissions and global warming weren't a huge topic. Open-pit coal mining and coal plants were opposed on grounds of landscape destruction, resettlement and pollution. But CO₂ was never the big topic that it is nowadays. Therefore, back in those days, even for the Greens, "clean" gas power plants were a viable replacement.
> They were guessing it contained upwards of 20,000 volumes. By comparison, Ernest Hemingway, considered a voracious book collector, left behind a personal library of 9,000.
Reminds me: I once read a listicle about famous people with large personal libraries. Most were writers and had collections in the lower thousands, a few reached into the tens of thousands. The person with by far the most books was Karl Lagerfeld, who owned 300,000 books.
Among the famous writers that I know through their writings, I'd expect Jorge Luis Borges and Umberto Eco to have read many thousands of books, because that wide culture was a major element of their fictions. The later did have 50,000 books at home, but the former became blind and probably didn't own many books.
With simple math, reading 2 books each week leads to at most 7,000 over a lifetime. If Denny McCarthy's guess is right (read 85% of 20k), his older brother read about 4 to 5 books a week, every week, from teenager to his old age.
Funny that you bring up Borges and Eco. Eco when commenting on his library, I can't remember if in an essay or lecture, referred to it as an 'anti-library', pointing out that one of the most important skills a reader can possess is to be able to talk about books one hasn't read. As in Borges Library of Babel most people will be doomed to only read very little of what is in existence.
He thought his huge library should be taken as a research tool and sign of 'conscious ignorance' of the vast things you don't know, rather than taking a consumer mindset to it, which you see a lot of people do when they brag about how many books they've read.
The way I see it: If you live where your ancestors lived for thousands of years and if you make sure your skin gets gradually attuned to the sun each year, you probably get more health benefits. But beware if you're of Northern European ancestry living in Southern USA or Australia or if you work an office job and only seek the summer sun with pale skin.
I have no reliable and in-depth data on how many of my ancestors died of skin cancer, or how many hours they exposed themselves to sunlight, and what kind of sunlight, or what clothes they wore over those thousands of years.
Using this line of thinking is at best an attempt at rationalizing what lifestyle you wanted to live anyway.
Melanin helps protect from DNA damage by absorbing much of the UV radiation. As you get more exposure to sunlight, your skin produces more melanin resulting in more protection.
A sunburn is what you want to avoid and it's easier to get when you stayed indoors the whole year and only go outside when the sun is out full blast. I personally think this modern lifestyle is one of the reasons people get more skin cancer despite being outside less. There are studies that show that chronic sun exposure isn't that bad.
I have no horse in the AI race or in the US-China rivalry, but at the time the hype felt weird. There was so much gloating that rubbed me the wrong way, and frankly, I notice that in plenty of China-related discussions. I always wonder: Why would Westerners, whom I suspect frequent the sites I visit the most, frolic so much that China is #1? Last time I was befuddled was during the India-Pakistan scramble. The comments were only focusing on how a Chinese jet downed a French jet and I thought to myself: There are two nuclear powers going at it and all they talk about is China? The French, too, later claimed that this was a concerted effort by bots.
Go was a breath of fresh air and pretty usable right from the start. It felt like a neat little language with - finally - a modern standard library. Fifteen years ago, that was a welcome change. I think it's no surprise that Go and Node.js both got started and took off around the same time. People were looking something modern, lightweight, and simple and both projects delivered that.
Good things for the Internet? I stop visiting sites that nag me with their verification friction. They are the only reason I replaced Stack Exchange with LLMs.
It's surreal and dismaying to see such a bogus comment at the top, especially since the BBC video about the North Korean phone is free of judgement, while they (and many other Western news) do report on Western surveillance critically, e.g. they called the Microsoft screenshots a "privacy nightmare" right in the headline...
