Well I don't really know what they do, but what I know is that Visa transactions costs are 0,22 € out of a payment of 1 €, Mastercard's is 0,23 €, and the French CB network is 0,17 €.
All of them do the same : ensure I get the money from the customer. Of course it's a larger project to run this in the whole world, but shouldn't it scale to less along with the number of billions of customers instead of the other way round ?
This is an insane amount of money. They killed micro-transactions, they killed the business model of the Web in favor of ads, the only popular way to do microtransactions right now.
> Visa transactions costs are 0,22 € out of a payment of 1 €, Mastercard's is 0,23 €, and the French CB network is 0,17 €.
Are you sure of these values? Because that's different from what I was told, which was that CB was cheaper for transactions of more than 10 €, because their fees were fixed, not rates like Visa and Mastercard.
From what I've just read (not counting the possible extra tax by the bank of the seller):
CB: 0.20% + 0.00117 € ⇒ 0.00317 € for 1 €, 0.20117 for 100 €
Visa: 0.20% + (0.01% to 0.014%) ⇒ up to 0.00214 € for 1 €, 0.214 € for 100 €
Mastercard: 0.20% + (0.15 to 0.17%)
The 0.20% is for the "interchange" described in the article. So it applies only when the seller and the buyer do not have the same bank. The maximal rate is fixed by the UE, and AFAIK everyone use the max value.
Yes perfectly sure, just checked. I'm not saying these are visa fees vs CB fees. Lots of actors in the chain. But that's what I'm paying for each card type.
Sure, but I don't think the two ideas are really in conflict. A low-carbon grid should absolutely be the end goal, but even a mostly clean grid has hours that are cleaner than others
These approaches always measure the wrong thing though - the average carbon cost of electricity.
What you need to know is the marginal carbon cost, which will be much less variable as almost all dispatchable generation is fossil.
So yes, you should avoiding adding load when there is a severe supply crunch and the marginal power is generated by gas peaker plants (often gas turbine based), and use power when renewable generation is otherwise being curtailed, but most of the time the grid is firmly in the middle regime with a fairly average marginal cost.
They are in conflict, because you can spend the same Euro only once. You could build a lot of batteries, solar panels and wind turbines for the cost of one nuclear plant
French nuclear supply chain atrophied quite lot in the last 30 years. Don't forget that even in France, president Hollande promised in 2014 to the voters to slash nuclear's contribution of power generation by 2025.
It was only when Russia started invasion in 2022, that the politicians in France started to change their opinion.
If you want build a nuclear power plant you go to nuclear supplier with uninterrupted experience in building nuclear power plants, like South Korea, China or Russia.
The South Koreans build Barakah nuclear power plant 5600 MWe for $32bn.
> French nuclear supply chain atrophied quite lot in the last 30 years.
Because today it makes no economic sense. Supply chain for horse carts is also very atrophied.
>The South Koreans build Barakah nuclear power plant 5600 MWe for $32bn.
Still very expensive. Flamanville is an extreme when things go really bad, but 175 MWe for 1 bn is also very high. 1 bn buys ~1 GW of solar, ~1 GW of onshore wind, or ~3 GW of battery capacity. You should only build new nuclear either to get a better mix in the grid (up to 5% is the nuclear lobby recommendation), or because you have no sun and no wind.
What would you need to replace a 1 GW nuclear power plant with 98% capacity factor?
Probably 1 GW solar power plant, together with 1 GW onshore wind and 1 GW of gas power plant. Then you have to also pay the natural gas to compensate for times of low solar + wind production. You can build battery storage to decrease the natural gas consumption, but how much battery storage do you have to build and how much can you reduce the natural gas consumption strongly depends latitude and local weather patterns.
Not really. Nuclear power requires massive subsidies. In Germany, the "De Height" wind farm was completed in August. Sixty-four 15-MW turbines generate about 4 TWh of electricity annually, which is sold entirely on the open market without any EEG funding.
The market for baseload electricity has disappeared in Germany, as renewables push the residual load to zero or below for almost the entire year:
Yes, but then when the wind doesn't blow, you miss upto 960MW of capacity, you can choose how to fill that; solar, coal, gas, waterpower, diesel, nuclear.
And the question is, are those wind turbines without subsidy?
Here in the Netherlands some big energy users like Aldel already have stopped, those big users are also good in up and down scaling energy usage on demand, and also those products have to come from somewhere else now, so in the end the question is about energy and availability.
A single wind turbine or a single PV module obviously provides only variable amounts of electricity. However, this is not the case for many PV modules and wind turbines spread across the entire continent. Wind and PV complement each other very well in Europe because of regular weather fronts; when there is little wind, there is more sunshine.
In Europe, the average weekly electricity generation in 2025 was 14.0 TWh, and no week fell below 10.2 TWh.
In 2026, the average output was about 15.5 TWh, and so far, no week has fallen below 12.5 TWh.
Of course, batteries are needed for short-term storage, but with the creation of excess capacity in wind and solar power, the troughs below the load curve become narrower and shallower, drastically reducing the need for storage.
Or they could get with the times and build a ton of battery like California. Down to 25% fossil in 2026 due to the massive success of shifting solar into the night with batteries.
the answers exist, euro states just can’t get out of their own way and actually build things
It is not even an "idea". Is the consequence of nuclear power being so difficult to modulate to consumption. You give it for free by night, hoping that at least some people consumes, because the country is sleeping.
Solar energy aligns so much better, peaking its production when the consumption is high, going to zero when the consumption gets low, except for the diner time. In Spain we get really low prices (sometimes near 0) in the middle of the day, you don't have to plan or incentivize night consumption.
Germany is currently operating the world biggest permanent storage for dangerous waste UTD Herfa-Neurode. Contains at least 690,000 tons of waste containing dioxins and furans, 220,000 tons of waste containing mercury, 127,000 tons of waste containing cyanide, and 83,000 tons of toxic waste containing arsenic. Nuclear waste is currently excluded, but I think it would not make a difference, especially because after about 400 years most dangerous fission products (Caesium-137, Strontium-90, and Iodine-131) decay away and only Plutonium and minor actinides stays. Mercury, arsenic, dioxins and furans stay forever.
We learned quite lot about underground migration of plutonium over millennia because we studied the remnants of the natural nuclear fission reactor which nature run about approximately 1.7 billion years ago in Oklo, Gabon.
"Plutonium has moved less than ten feet from where it was formed almost two billion years ago contained in the sedimentary rocks that kept them from being dissolved or spread by groundwater."
If only PWA were not made invisible by Apple. The install button has been moved voluntarily to the share menu.
The UE should make it mandatory to permit PWA install popups on all platforms.
Such problems wouldn't arise, because this app could be installable as a cached Web app. A native mobile application could be installed only for specific functionalities.
PWAs are not much more than webpages, basically just a separate launcher icon and less browser chrome making it look and feel more native. It's in the user's best interest to use these, since they get the good parts of using an app while avoiding full-featured-app junk like persistent background services that constantly monitor you.
I'm well aware of what bsky.app is, and for others, there is a "Help" link at least, except it's not super clear. But on mu.social, how can I learn about what it actually is? It's missing a "What is mu.social?" link or something. Ironically, they have a "Donate" link/button, but no "About".
Ah, they've done the "app on root domain, information on sub-domain" move rather than the classic "information on root domain, app on sub-domain", a brave choice indeed :)
useless advice - Prague firemen are not on bsky, Prague public transport company is not on bsky, Czech state police is not on bsky (though at least this one seems to be unofficially on mastodon), literally no institution here use bsky
Starter packs can help bootstrap it. Perhaps this? [0]
A lot of the biggest boosters of AI are aligned with the politics of Musk, and so they're just going to stay on X. This means the AI discourse is far less on bsky.
Note that there are lots of OSM editors, but sadly not a single one as simple as Google Maps for end-users.
I'm working on cartes.app, we've designed a very simple opening hours editor, but we're missing lots of other edition features.
We should also mention Everydoor or of course osm.org, the main one.
In the end, you can modify way more things yourself on OSM than Google Maps, but through a complexe ecosystem that you have to understand first, and most are missing place reviews and simple image uploading.
Both cartes.app and mapcomplete enable these, through two different databases. Mapcomplete enable Mangrove reviews and Panoramax image uploads.
Cartes enables ATProto place reviews, with pictures, and soon Panoramax upload too.
Once upon a time I used Twitter's API to scan for tweets that were talking about a particular Wikipedia page.
Doing semantic analysis, I did insert the tweets in the right place of the page. I did it as a student, using the free API.
Twitter was the open, technically respected network with a great engineering blog.
Now it's a political project to elect the extreme-right in Europe.
"The world's town square", where everyone could gather and see what was going on.
And, for more than a decade, it appeared to work pretty well. Governments, media outlets, public-facing services of all kinds came to rely on it as their main way to talk to the public.
But now it's impossible to use without a login, most of that value has been lost.
The best thing to do is to learn from what happened, and not allow a proprietary platform to become so central again.
I always cringed at that framing anyway, for two reasons. First, it was obvious to me that it was a private, centralized, closed-source, piece of software whose owner(s) could always manipulate or take away from people they didn't like. Second, it's genuinely depressing to think that the modern marketplace of ideas was supposed to take place in 180 (or whatever the hell it is now) characters or fewer. Yeah, sure- let's hash out the complexities and nuances of life and society in single-sentence messages. And we wonder why everything has become "polarized" and rage-bait-y. When all you have room to write is "This thing is bad", what the hell else are you supposed to do?
What a stupid platform. I can't believe it's still so popular.
You say completely locked out, but be fair, that's a choice you're making. I don't particularly like Facebook but there are a few things I can only keep up with there, so I have a minimal account for that purpose.
In what world should a citizen be required to provide their details to a foreign, for-profit company in order to view the updates provided by their government?
I don't understand why they are so dead set on this anti-user short term profit seeking design. During the acquisition wasn't the general sentiment that "I understand this won't be super profitable but I'm doing it on principle"? Trying to chase this boyish fantasy of creating the "everything app" is incompatible with "worlds town square". Those are two different problems with different solutions.
Yeah, exactly. I feel like there must have been a better way to make the town square thing work.
I heard that ads on Twitter used to be much less profitable than on other platforms because the lack of a login wall meant they weren't able to track their viewers so precisely. Fine. But, at the same time, they hosted so much valuable content that contextual advertising might well have made up much of the difference. But Twitter's support for that was apparently very basic, with only very simple keyword targetting available.
It might not have been enough once they were loaded up with debt by Elon, but before that they would only have needed a relatively small uptick in income to make them more consistently profitable. And that could have made the town square version of Twitter a sustainable business for the foreseeable future.
And now we all have to deal with the rotting corpse of X, making it much harder for whoever or whatever wants to build any new form of public realm in that area. So more than just an opportunity wasted, it's acting as deterrent to trying again.
That's what Elon said, but it's clearly not what he was thinking, which was more along the lines of "this would make a brilliant propaganda megaphone."
This was around the time when he started to be openly post-truth (talking about how twitter was overrun with bots and he was going to save it and shortly afterwards feigning surprise at the same when he wanted an excuse to wiggle out after the market moved against him, continuing to push the "government censored twitter" narrative when the Twitter Files revealed the truth to be almost the polar opposite, talking about building an un-biased Grok and then getting caught with an "Elon Musk would beat Mike Tyson in a fight" size thumb on the scale, etc). When someone starts being openly post-truth like this, they stop deserving the benefit of the doubt. This wasn't a boyish fantasy, he knew exactly what he was doing, and it was saying one thing while thinking another.
> Now it's a political project to elect the extreme-right in Europe.
You people are completely out of touch with reality. You cannot accept that the reason of why we’re voting for the “far” right is because we experienced a whole decade of uncontrolled immigration policies that permanently reshaped the way of living of previously homogeneous countries.
Already succeeded in the US. Now it’s a project of whether it can be used to maintain power. Right wing populist movements ebb and flow quite readily:
- ebb: people realize that promises of change are empty and only enrich the few elite
- flow: people have forgotten that the promises were empty last time
Hopefully I’m correctly sensing the shifting of the winds.
Meta platforms are more responsible for atrocities in other parts of the world, e.g. Myanmar.
> Now it's a political project to elect the extreme-right in Europe.
Certainly the policy of the opposition has nothing to do with the backlash. No definitely not. It's certainly just dumb people being tricked by the bad guys.
If these people could just get properly educated and shielded from the bad ideas surely they'd see the light.
So you're saying that the current management of Twitter does not favor politically-right messaging? Otherwise, your message is a non-sequitur.
The comment you replied to made no statement about the effectiveness of the project. It's like saying that George Soros is engaged in trying to elect left-wing leadership; nobody denies that.
I'm saying the right wing push and it's attractiveness doesn't come from the top down.
Media is a bottom up industry, successful media is the media people want to consume. If right wing media is popular, it's because right wing messages are popular.
Acting like the media are the tastemakers is a convenient way for people to avoid looking in the mirror and doing any kind of self reflection.
The right wing is making a push in Europe because Elon Musk has a trillion dollars, not because the parties in power have done anything wrong. Their ideas are only unpopular because the bad man is lying to them. If it wasn't for all this fake news, everyone would see that I am obviously correct and we'd have 100% support.
X and it's right wing lean isn't the problem. People are attracted to right wing politics because they don't like what they currently have. The problems isn't that an alternative exists, the problem is the people don't like them.
As opposed to the Jack Dorsey days of twitter where you would be banned for mildly right wing opinions, even if they were factually correct. That wasn't a political project?
The correct answer is, "Of course he did not; free expression and free speech only exist for people who subscribe to doublethink. All other opinions are thoughtcrime."
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