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Cake day: August 6th, 2023

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  • At my modest scale, I was banned from reddit/worldnews for pointing out that the title of the stickied thread “Iran attacks Israel” was not suited anymore to the events in gaza, and that this thread’s very low upvote count was a show that its content was not so consensual.

    There are lots of efforts by Likud extremists to reshape the narrative and suppress dissent.

    But I’m optimistic that their efforts won’t work: the students protests are strong enough, alternative communities like r/internationalnews are developing, so that a more balanced perspective emerges, that doesn’t downplay Israeli crimes against humanity.


  • Usually, an impact study is made before such type of laws are made:

    • if this law is enacted, how much will it cost to the manufacturers to update their factory settings?
    • how will this be impacted on the device cost in the UK compared to other markets?
    • how many users will get stuck when losing the unique ID of the device, what are the recovery procedures, how costly is it to end users?
    • how many users will be protected by the measure and what cost for society does it represent?
    • how many users will set a dumb password anyhow and what is the cost for society?

    I’d be curious to see the impact study, as many of those are actually botched.





  • You wildly overestimate the danger nuclear waste represents.

    First, transportation is done in small amounts at a time, completely encased in concrete and steel, and is of no risk of exploding: the only danger would be spillovers, which would call for expensive cleaning operations.

    Next, storage. The whole waste produced by 60 years of nuclear waste in France amounts to only a few swimming pools of dangerous material. If this material was actually fully useless, we could ditch it in geological layers underground where it would become soon unreachable and dispersed, posing no discernable danger for the upcoming few billion years.

    Furthermore, the only reason we don’t ditch this nuclear waste right now is that this material can still be useful for plenty of uses that are not yet economically viable, but could be in the long term, such as energy generation with low-yield reactors.