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Cake day: July 1st, 2023

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  • When costs are level per kilowatt over lifetime Nuclear is cheaper thanks to economies of scale, it’s only more expensive when plants are restricted by local authorities in how much they can produce in a given cycle so that other power generators in the energy sector can fill their contracts. When these artificial caps are removed and the plant is allowed to operate as intended and no kneecapped to allow coal and oil plants to operate at their peak effeciency rates, nuclear drops below .10USD. And thats using outdated equipment and maintaining the absurdly high safety standards saddled upon them despite being the safest form of power production bar none.



  • From where I stand you couldn’t be further from the reality of the situation.

    Nuclear has a number of advantages from low carbon output per kilowatt over lifetime as well as being extremely cheap per kilowatt.

    But the real advantage being overlooked is the small foot print and land use compared to other forms power generation. A nuclear reactor is ideal for high density population areas, adding no pollution like fossil fuels and using a fraction of the land that renewables require. And there is room for overlap between renewables and nuclear as well, meaning days where wind or solar would produce more power than usual, its easy to scale back solar production to take advantage of cheaper power, and vice versa for times when renewables aren’t going to generate enough to meet demand nuclear can increase their output relatively quickly and effectively.

    The future of nuclear is however one of the most important. We are eventually going to be spending humans to other planets, and having mature, efficient and compact forms of power generation with long lifetimes and minimal start up power from idle states is going to be important, solar gets less effective the further from the sun we get, you can’t stick a wind turbine on a space craft and expect good results, and you’re out of your mind if you want to burn fossil fuels in an oxygen limited environment.

    Treating nuclear as more than a curiosity but rather as the genuine lifeline and corner stone of our futures and future generations is significantly more important than fossil fuel profits today and all their propaganda.










  • There are several camps here in the negative feedback side. The crux, is that Sony, who published the game, is making Arrowhead, the studio that developed it, to require players to login using a Playstation Network account to continue playing the game at the end of this month.

    Communication about this requirement was murky at best, with Sony never really saying anything on behalf or about Helldivers at all, in a PR way at least, and Arrowhead never said anything about it until the new update on Thursday. This has lots of people pissed off, some for good reasons, some for slightly less.

    Those rightly pissed off, are those who do not live in a country where PSN is not available. The game was sold globably for 3 months, with player data available to the public suggesting as many as people in 140 different countries playing the game somewhat consistently. The bulk of these players are in North America, Europe and Japan of course, but people observing the stats through SteamDB have suggested anywhere from a few thousand people, to 50,000 to potentially 100,000 paying customers will not have access to play a game they rightfully bought, come June 1st. If Sony’s intention was for the PSN requirement to always be firm and realistic, the game should only have been allowed to be sold in the 69 countries PSN is available. Instead they sold it globally for 3 months and only yesterday did they de-list it for sale in the 177 countries who don’t have PSN access. https://steamdb.info/sub/137730/history/?changeid=23416542 Which is pretty sleezy to do without even making some kind of announcement.

    Others, are upset because Sony’s history with being hacked and data protection, is sloppy at best. With 7 major leaks or hacks in the last 14 years, People are not exactly thrilled at the idea to put their info in the hands of a company with a subpar security, especially if some of that info could be linked to a credit card or other personal info that could be used to steal their identity. If you take privacy and personal data security seriously, this is could be a big deal.

    And then there is those, who are mostly just mad Sony is trying to put their service overtop of steam, as the game clearly works without that extra layer and login already, so it’s presence really isn’t needed for anything gameplay wise, and just some method for sony to add people to their internal metrics or potentially use it as a backdoor way to throw more adverts for other sony products onto users who don’t already own a playstation. The late entry of such a service and not even making it a requirement to at least register it to a PSN account even if the login feature wasn’t working as intended at the time could have at least cushioned the blow here.

    Ultimately, this entire thing is a PR nightmare where the publisher basically did nothing and sold in regions they should have known were ineligible for PSN access, made no serious comments on the game or their intentions, and expected a small studio to handle everything on their end with seemingly no support aside from the start up investment in return for the studio pushing out premium warbonds once a month to keep the income flowing.