What Refugees Bring When They Run for Their Lives - <AUTHOR> http://www.carryology.com/bags/whats-in-my-bag-what-refugees-bring-when-they-run-for-their-lives/ <comment><USER2> On a personal note, I'm more likely to investigate anti-refugee arguments because I feel like they're underrated. I agree with the sentiment that we should understand that we're dealing with humans here, not numbers; but just like statistics has its weakness in that it can cause us to over-generalize, picking out the stories of individuals can allow a narrative to be crafted that is overfitted away from the whole.

Big picture: most refugees going across the Mediterranean are Syrian, male (like 72% male!), young, and poor.[0] Like unless they have families that they're hoping to have evacuated (why didn't they bring them over in the first place?), we're talking about a recipe for complete stupidity. Language barriers exist, education barriers exist; I don't know how the Europeans intend to get all of these refugee adults up to economic snuff at the same grade of Europeans who were trained in the ways of the West from birth.

This is going to be a demographic shock to countries with more balanced gender ratios, and in the case of Europe, upside-down aging pyramids. Men without solid economic recourse and lack of cultural integration are going to resort to crime. They will upset the local sex market through strong male competition for women (rape town!). Politics in Europe will never be the same as the majority of the young do not carry any of the previous generation's values.

I'm really open to being proved wrong, I really am. But I'm not counting on it.

[0] [http://data.unhcr.org/mediterranean/regional.php](http://data.unhcr.org/mediterranean/regional.php)

<comment><USER3> I saw the data you linked, but I don't see the "poor".

From what I see, they make up a range of demographics and educational levels.

As to why they did not bring their families over in the first place? That is usually because they want to make sure they have somewhere to stay before bringing their families over.

Bigger picture. The population of Europe as a whole is 740 million or so. Even if the entire population of Syrian pitched up in Europe (20 million or so), it would be under 5% of the population. The actual numbers of refugees is around 5 million, so less than 1%. You are trying to suggest that 1% of the population is a "demographic shock"?

The problem arises when the refugees are concentrated in a few countries, and then other nations use the crowding and chaos there as an excuse not to take any.

"Men without solid economic recourse", as per my previous point, these individuals span the entire socio-economic range, and have a wide range of skills. If they are able to gain employment (Many countries do not allow refugees to work) then I do not see why they would not have solid economic recourse.

<comment><USER4> Why don't you mention the predominant religion of the migrants and culture shock? Islam is a way of life not just a religion. Literally following the Koran is not compatible with life in the West as indeed with the Christian Bible. You soon get arrested in the UK for proclaiming statements from the Bible (on homosexuality for instance). Interestingly, not so if the text is the Koran. But that's another matter.

<comment><USER5> Following the Christian Bible is not all that compatible with life in Europe, either.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I'm from Austria. We have thousands of refugees crossing our border from Hungary daily right now, since they are being treated like animals there. [0]

Civil society responded quickly: here in Vienna there are thousands of volunteers providing food, shelter and medicine, even going into the camps in hungary and rescuing people out from there, bringing them (probably illegally, the situation isn't clear) across the border into our country. People who drive there to bring them medicine risk being beaten and arrested by hungarian police.

Or picking them up from the road. The kids have bloody feet from walking and many parents almost breaking down from carrying them and the exhaustion.

Libanon is currently receiving most of the refugees: about 2 Million in a country of 6 million. Imagine that. If a society is capable of this, surely it's possible to distribute another 2 million into 25 EU-states.

In Austria, we have a population of around 8 million. In 1992 we took about 90.000 refugees. Since WW2 we apparently had 2 million refugees, 700.000 stayed here. [1]

We are one of the richest countries in the world. It works.

[0] [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JoKpuXA9myw](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JoKpuXA9myw) [1] [http://www.unhcr.at/english/asylum-country-with- tradition.ht...](http://www.unhcr.at/english/asylum-country-with- tradition.html)

<comment><USER7> Yeah and then this happens because they don't want to integrate into European counties because most of those immigrants still think west is evil and they laugh at our values: [http://shoebat.com/2015/03/02/austria-makes-new-law- muslims-...](http://shoebat.com/2015/03/02/austria-makes-new-law-muslims-can- no-longer-speak-arabic-all-muslims-must-now-speak-german/)

<comment><USER6> That law basically states that muslim preachers in hospitals or who are teaching at schools or universities have to BE ABLE to speak german, so that the german-only speaking muslims, who exist as well, can understand them. The concept is called "official language of a country".

Right-Wing parties in Turkey are criticizing the law. The muslim organisations inside Austria are supporting it.

The law has nothing to do with the refugee-crisis.

EDITED: the muslim youth-organization in Austria oppose the law. The official organisation isn't happy with some points, for example that the law forbids financing their religious organisations with foreign money, but they state that "It's a compromise, which seems to come close to both sides."

The law definitely isn't perfect, but it's a different topic.

<comment><USER8> I don't have a strong opinion on the that law, but it's just not true that most muslim organisations in Austria support it. Their official representatives, the IGGÖ are rather critical[1], the muslim youth of Austria strongly opposed it[2]. Both links are in german, sorry.

But you are, of course, right that this law has nothing to do with war refugees entering austria.

[1]: [http://www.derislam.at/?f=news&shownews=1960](http://www.derislam.at/?f=news&shownews=1960) [2]: [http://www.mjoe.at/articles/article/regierung-beschliesst- an...](http://www.mjoe.at/articles/article/regierung-beschliesst-anti- islamgesetz/)

<comment><USER6> You are right, I made an Edit.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Thanks for having shared this. I live in Italy, and in the last years we have get accustomed to news like "four hundred refugees reached Sicily last night", "50 Syrians died yesterday when their boat sank near the coast", etc. Reading this helps in preventing me from thinking of these people as just numbers.

<comment><USER10> I agree.

I think it's a shame that governments (ours in Australia especially) play on xenophobia for political point scoring rather than encouraging the population to welcome new arrivals. We focus on differences like clothing, language and religion more than we emphasise common ground such as support for our children, love of food, sport, etc.

There's a food/cooking show in Australia called Food Safari in which each episode focuses on a different cuisine. It's a great insight into the food traditions each culture has brought with them. I often wish it was compulsory viewing or at least broadcast on a more mainstream channel as cooking and eating together is something we can all identify with.

I think we only increase the chances of ghettoes and other issues when we react negatively rather than welcoming people. We push people to wall themselves in, harden their cultural lines, we make it harder for them to get jobs, etc.

<comment><USER2> "Play on X for a political point" carries no information as anything can be construable as a political point. One is just as liable to hear pro-refugee stances be used as a "political-point" for the sake of votes as anti-refugee stances.

All such policy decisions should be dissolved away from a political party's frame of reference, and what should remain are guesses as to what the consequences of a policy might be and whether or not it's good for the nation.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Two ids (passport and driver's licence), some cash and two debit cards from two different countries, because the world is already globalized and modern, you like it or not. At least this is what I took intuitively when the 25th April earthquake struck my room in Kathmandu. All other my possessions were of least importance.

<comment><USER12> What followed? Did you have family who were affected alongside you?

I've been spending a lot of time lately reflecting on all the things I've taken for granted through my life, and the lack or loss of a safe and secure home is one of the things I would never wish upon anyone.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> I'm risking getting downvoted to oblivion here, but as an EU citizen I strongly believe that the core reason we have this crisis in the first place (as opposed to something controlled) is nonexistent border protection from southern countries like Italy, Greece. Never have I heard of them employing border patrols to veer off illegal boats.

I am by no means denying the need for help for actual war victims, if I could say that, but current situation not only allows for, but actually encourages everyone seeking "better life" (and having financial means to do that) to come over. We call those [economic] immigrants and have rules. Now its wild west. And in the news reports I usually see people toying with iPhone 5/6 and wearing [designer] jeans/jackets. These may not even be the majority and quite probably a lot of those people are with a pair of shoes, some clothing and a mobile phone and food for a week is not included in the list of possessions.

I am all for growing a pair and actually declaring what is a war zone. Working with UN/NATO to establish a peace there. We (EU first, UN later) can and should establish "refugee camps" and _TEMPORARILY_ accept people fleeing from previously declared war zones. After the conflict has been resolved, the very same refugees should be helped to get back to their homes. For everyone else we have rather clear rules on how immigration works. Because unless we do that fast we are sending the signal that EU is accepting everyone, giving homes and income. And in several years the crisis will be unmanageable. Oh, and do not think that USA is the other end of the world - you are already struggling with illegal immigrants from the south. Now just imagine the effect if whole countries decided it was worth a shot at least attempting to "find better life"?

<comment><USER14> > And in the news reports I usually see people toying with iPhone 5/6 and > wearing [designer] jeans/jackets.

Do luxury products somehow protect you from bullets, bombs and murderous barbarians?

<comment><USER15> The point is, however, that a phone is not a luxury item. This article[1], in Dutch, explains that in order to get anywhere a phone is a necessity. Maps, GPS and communication. And not just texts (SMS), but photos and WhatsApp- groups to organize shelter, food. Translation-device.

It is NOT a luxury device.

[1] [http://www.trouw.nl/tr/nl/4324/Nieuws/article/detail/4130918...](http://www.trouw.nl/tr/nl/4324/Nieuws/article/detail/4130918/2015/08/28/De- mobiele-telefoon-is-een-basisbehoefte-voor-een-vluchteling.dhtml)

<comment><USER16> A smartphone, maybe. An iPhone? Never. That is - whether you like it or not - a luxury device, priced as such. If it is phone, GPS, maps and translation you want you can just get whatever Android is on sale - for a sixth to a tenth of the price of the luxury iPhone.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> The bit that disturbs me is how the police in many of these "first landing" countries have no qualms about knifing a rubber boat filled with people including small children that can't swim. That's murder. This kind of thing is going on all over the world. Refugees from Burma for example are also getting the same treatment but the Thai's.

We in the west are niaeve. We think we can incite revolutions and civil wars to overthrow the regimes that don't conform to our expectations of democracy, without appreciating that those actions have long term and negative effects upon ourselves. We have reeped what we sowed. Now we need to take responsibility for our actions.

The real refugees should be given the opportunity to integrate properly. We do not need cultural enclaves in our own cities. They lead to isolation and foster extremism in those immigrants that only feel hatred from their begrudging host countries' native populations. They need training and education, especially so that they can speak the language of their host country. For refugees moving to Germany that will be a challenge in itself. The language is hard. I've been here as an internal EU immigrant for nearly ten years and I still struggle with it.

The economic migrants, like those from Western Balkans, the near East and African countries that are peaceful need to weeded out and sent back.

<comment><USER18> What? I've never heard before of police deliberately sinking boats. Do you have any source at all?

<comment><USER17> Sources were Turkish, so they are no doubt biased, but this was what I was thinking of:

[http://www.euronews.com/2015/08/14/turkish-fisherman- claims-...](http://www.euronews.com/2015/08/14/turkish-fisherman-claims-greek- officials-intentionally-sank-migrant-boat/)

[http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3225321/Pirate- rogue...](http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3225321/Pirate-rogue- element-Greek-coastguard-ROBBING-migrants-gunpoint-puncturing-dinghies- Mediterranean.html)

Here's a Thai accusation: [http://www.theguardian.com/world/2009/jan/23/thai- army-attac...](http://www.theguardian.com/world/2009/jan/23/thai-army-attacks- boat-people)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> "humanizing" in a weird way. Which is good.

I strongly believe most refugees should get help where they come from but making sure they are treated like humans when they arrive can only help I think.

</comment><comment><USER20> Just people from Syria are in the photos. I guess the authors spend really hard time to find the ones from Syria, as the number of those is very very small comparing to those illegal migrants from Pakistan, Iran, etc... Please stop using word refugees. It has real meaning which in this situation 99 times of 100 does not apply.

</comment><comment><USER21> Europe is a continent of diasporas[1], that should make it much easier to accept refugees but sadly people don't seem to think much about it. Also, most people in Europe will know someone or someone's family member who had to leave the country due to wars and persecutions. For example, my grandfather was tortured by it's own country's state police back in the 60s. Most people in Europe know stories like his.

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_diaspora#Contemporary...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_diaspora#Contemporary_European_diasporas)

</comment><comment><USER22> Looks like almost everyone took a phone, plus sim cards.

<comment><USER15> Phone? No. GPS device, translation device for every language in the western world, detailed maps of every country, camera? Yes.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> I'm surprised to not see any food or water at all. While most food is heavy to carry and it is easily restockable in most places, i imagine that you many times would have to cross into remote areas to avoid border patrols, just having some snacks to last a day takes you a long way. Maybe it was all eaten already.

</comment><comment><USER24> It looks like most people took pills with them, while the pharmacist did not. I'm a pharmacist and I would not take any. Maybe the sample size is too small for me to say this, but it seems that laymen overestimate the power of medicine.

<comment><USER25> The pharmacist's bag was very small, and n size=1 here is very irrelevant. Medicines such as antibiotics can make the difference between life and death if you get an infection.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> How many people are there still left in Syria?

</comment><comment><USER27> United States, Canada, Germany, Denmark, Britain, France and most vassal European Countries should shoulder most refugees since the "American led coalition" supports the head-cutting terrorists. See what happened in Libya with the US supported Arab Spring(what a joke!).

By the way, most refugees are male at a very young age. If there are from Syria, why don't they stay and fight for their country? The article did not mention that most refugees have latest technology smart phones and they take selfies when they cross the borders? Is this what a refugee is like?

Most refugees are going to work for peanuts so the capitalists will get richer. Say goodbye to worker rights since someone who needs money to live and is given government dough will never think to unionize.

TO AMERICANS AND WHITE EUROPEANS: Stop supporting the terrorists!! Stop f#$king up this world! There would not be any refugees if the United States and its vassal states did not bomb the countries!!

<comment><USER28> There would not have been any refugees if some of the Arab states (e.g. Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Egypt) would have intervened in Syria either.

It's not just "the west": no country made a serious effort to prevent the escalation there. You could argue that any attempt at a serious effort was thwarted at the UN level by the apathetic attitude of Russia and China, but in that case your complaint against Americans and white Europeans is misdirected.</comment></comment>


The Secret Republicans of Silicon Valley - <AUTHOR> http://www.nationaljournal.com/politics/gop-silicon-valley-20150408

<comment><USER2> >"I've had people tell me, 'If I found out that this person's a Republican, their resume's off the list.'"

But of course, nobody's going to hue-and-cry or place travel bans to California until they pass legislation to prevent political discrimination. Tim Cook isn't about to issue a statement condemning this discriminatory practice that affects _livelihoods_ rather than just purchasing options.

Because what's euphemized as "tolerance" these days is really just "picking the right targets."

</comment><comment><USER3> Its probably not a good practice but I assume every tech-minded 20-something male is a libertarian until told otherwise. Especially if they are working in SV.</comment>


Epiphany, a RESTful micro PHP framework I wrote/use for my startups - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/jmathai/epiphany

<comment><AUTHOR> I wrote this framework 4 years ago and have been using and iterating it since. In an effort to polish it off I decided to document it and ask others to use it as well.

I'm not a fan of large frameworks that do all sorts of voodoo on my behalf. This framework is less than 1300 lines of code and includes

       * a RESTful routing module that supports regular expressions
       * a templating module
       * a session module that supports native, APC and Memcached
       * a caching module that supports APC and Memcached
       * a config module that supports overloading of multiple config files
       * a database module that supports PDO MySql and prepared statements

I've used it on publicitweet.com (sold), textbookrevolt.com and thescholarapp.com. It's got some good usage but I'd like to iron out bugs I haven't come across and let others use it if they'd like.

<comment><USER2> That was a lot of work!

I went down much the same route (though by the looks of it you've done a better job) and recently have decided to scrap the whole thing in favor of Yii, which I really hope is a good long term decision (always dicey).

What are your long term plans, is this a fire-and-forget thing or are you going to continue to maintain it and accept patches and so on ?

Is there a roadmap where you want to go with this ?

<comment><USER3> You won't regret going the Yii route. I'm amazed that people are still coding the basics from the ground up when there are already top-notch frameworks out there.

<comment><USER4> Yii's approach of "create db first, then we create heaps of code for you" doesn't appeal to me at all...

<comment><USER3> Out of curiousity (and not snarky at all), what other approaches are there in the PHP world?

<comment><AUTHOR> I guess I've never been interested in a framework building out classes based on my database tables so I'm not sure what the alternative approaches are. Is that what you meant?

If you prefer than then I do think the larger frameworks are a good fit. What I'm saying is that I don't prefer that :).

<comment><USER3> I've got you, but I'm wondering what your approach is? I'm stuck in a mindset where I work from creating a database to CRUD to functional code.

<comment><AUTHOR> I write the CRUD statements but only as I need them. For a lot of my tables I never intend on deleting records so a delete method never gets written.

If I need to do a SELECT on a specific field(s) then I write that statement. It's usually a 4 line function in a class that deals primarily with that table (but not necessarily as it may make sense in a different class).

I use static functions for that as well.

       class User {
          public static function getByEmail($email) {
             return getDatabase()->one('SELECT * FROM user WHERE email=:email',
               array(':email' => $email));
          }
       }

I don't typically end up with so many of those that it's unmanageable and writing it takes about 30 seconds.

That's my approach. What's your thought on that coming from the mindset that a lot of that is taken care of by the framework? I'm curious since that's not a mindset I've had yet.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> On man's voodoo is another man's bread and butter.

Not to downplay your work, but pretty much all frameworks are written to reduce future work and standardize things. Just like you've done.

I've definitely had that 'too much magic' feeling with frameworks, but that goes away as I learn more about how they work.

<comment><AUTHOR> It may just be my style of coding or thinking but I can't imagine being more productive with larger frameworks (we use symfony at work).

I just want the bare essentials taken care of and I have a well established coding style that hasn't been dictated by any framework - for some reason I like that :).

This is definitely not meant to lure people away from larger frameworks but for someone like me who wants something that does less on my behalf.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> I've been using nicedog for my micro-framework needs.

After looking over it, this is a really framework. There really isn't too much that I would throw out to make it smaller, except maybe the curl wrapping class.

A couple of things that would be nice are:

1) if your Controller classes had some state forcing them to be static like you do means that there could be a lot of duplicated code between similar actions

2) if you had a 'layout' template that could be set that would wrap the results of the actions. Maybe this already exists, I just couldn't find it.

Its very clear that you intend to not do any kinds of magic, so I can see why you left a lot of things out that a lot of other frameworks have. Maybe that is why you don't have a layout wrapper template.

<comment><AUTHOR> You're right about the curl wrapper. It's actually got it's own repository <https://github.com/jmathai/php-multi-curl> so I should remove it from here (it's an artifact really).

1) I'm not sure exactly what you mean. I handle most of the code duplication in libraries so my static controller methods are usually really small (<15 lines). Let me know if I misunderstood your point.

2) You're right about the layout wrapper being a bit "heavy" for this framework. You can nest layouts to your heart's desire but the views are 100% decoupled from the actions. You can, in fact, use the the template module without using the route module. Not that you'd want to :).

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I'm getting this error in my apache logs after installing it locally, although I have mod_rewrite turned on:

[error] [client 127.0.0.1] File does not exist: C:/Users/Peter/Documents/My Websites/epiphany/database, referer: <http://epiphany.peter/examples/>

Seems to be some mod_rewrite problem?

(ps: the main page at <http://epiphany.peter/examples/> loads fine)

Suggestions anyone?

<comment><AUTHOR> Feel free to open an issue in Github and I'll help get things sorted. I can't reach ephiphany.peter since that looks like a locally resolvable hostname.

First item to check is to make sure you have a .htaccess in all your examples subdirectories. It should be part of the repository.

<comment><USER4> Thanks. It seems to be looking for the "/database" file, instead of for the "/database/index.php" file, which makes me think it's a rewrite problem...

<comment><USER4> Here goes: <https://github.com/jmathai/epiphany/issues/issue/28>

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Wondering, are there bits you've been wanting to add to it? And similarly, what are the bits that you like most?

<comment><AUTHOR> At the moment I've added what I need so far. But the point of documenting it is so others can use it and provide input on what's missing.

The next task in my mind is to have good unit test coverage.

<comment><USER4> Documentation is really nice by the way. I also like the simplicity a lot. It feels like there's little to learn after reading through the docs quickly. Good stuff. (ps: for me personally, I don't use unit tests (yea I know, horrid), so not really needed).

<comment><AUTHOR> Glad the docs were easy to follow. The main purpose I see for unit tests is to make sure that future changes don't change/break existing functionality.

They're a lot of work to write/maintain so I only write them when the added value exceeds the cost :).</comment></comment></comment></comment>


More evidence that Voyager has exited the solar system - <AUTHOR> http://blog.chron.com/sciguy/2012/10/more-evidence-that-voyager-has-exited-the-solar-system/ <comment><USER3> All these articles are a bit meaningless to someone, such as me, that don't even know what the definition of the solar system is (and no article seems to care about it).

To me, the solar system is just a heap of planets orbiting the sun. With that definition once you pass the orbit of the last planet your have exited the solar system (although since the orbits aren't circular and they all are in the ~same plane there sure is still some room for debate about the exact border of the solar system) - and consequently when pluto was excluded the size of the solar system shrank.

I don't imagine that my simple view of the matter is in any way accurate, but considering that noone seems to know where och what is supposed to happen when you leave the solar system, what are we then waiting for?

That something odd is happening and then, aha! That must be it! This is from now on the definition of the end of the solar system?

Sure, there might be a border where cosmic rays from outside of the solar system greatly increase etc. but does that have to coincide with the definition of the solar system?

<comment><USER4> There is no clear definition for the edge of the solar system[1]. The Voyager spacecraft are helping to define it.

The heliopause is a pretty reasonable way to define the edge of the solar system. A stated goal of the Voyager mission is to search for the heliopause boundary[2]:

 _Both Voyagers are headed towards the outer boundary of the solar system in search of the heliopause, the region where the Sun's influence wanes and the beginning of interstellar space can be sensed. The heliopause has never been reached by any spacecraft; the Voyagers may be the first to pass through this region, which is thought to exist somewhere from 8 to 14 billion miles from the Sun. This is where the million-mile-per-hour solar winds slows to about 250,000 miles per hour—the first indication that the wind is nearing the heliopause. The Voyagers should cross the heliopause 10 to 20 years after reaching the termination shock._

That having been said, this is a poor title. The news is not that the spacecraft has simply crossed a boundary. The news is that the boundary, until now unknown, was discovered (potentially).

The difference is "Ship successfully crosses Atlantic Ocean" vs "Columbus discovers New World". Perhaps a better title would be "More evidence that Voyager 1 has found the heliopause, considered to be the edge of the solar system".

\----

[1] <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_System#Farthest_regions>

[2] <http://voyager.jpl.nasa.gov/mission/interstellar.html>

<comment><USER5>
      There is no clear definition for the edge of the solar system[1].
      The Voyager spacecraft are helping to define it.

I think this is a very important observation. Thanks!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Could anyone explain to me why there's such a dramatic change in the incidence of extra-solar high energy cosmic rays or the incidence of solar particles? Without reading this article, I would have guessed that those graphs should've tailed off "smoothly" as distance from the sun increases, but what we're seeing instead is more of a "phase change". What about the underlying physics at a certain distance causes this very discontinuos behavior, and why this distance specifically? I imagine this cutoff distance must be a function of properties of our sun like luminosity, magnetic field strength, etc.

<comment><USER7> Well the data looks close enough to these theories <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heliosphere>

<comment><USER8> It is curious that the wiki mentions Voyager I data for some claims and we use those to verify Voyager I data?

<comment><USER9> 1) When you have a hypothesis, you conduct an experiment.

2) When your experiment yields results that match your hypothesis, you consider that evidence.

3) When you have sufficient evidence, you upgrade your hypothesis to a theorem.

According to the Wikipedia article, we've got at least two probes that are producing results in line with our hypotheses. The bar for wikipedia is "sourced", not proven theorem with scientific rigor. In this case, we're in some nebulous area between 2 and 3. I think that meets the bar for an encyclopedia, which is intended to serve as a summary for these types of things.

Hit the sources and the transitive closure of references for more details.

<comment><USER10> > 3) When you have sufficient evidence, you upgrade your hypothesis to a > theorem.

A theorem is a mathematical result: something proved logically from (possibly physical) assumptions.

<comment><USER11> Such as the four colour theorem? en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_colour_theorem

<comment><USER12> _Especially_ the four colour theorem - the first mathematical theorem to be proved with software. That said, I believe this discussion pertains to the hypothesis -> theory "upgrade", not to theorems.

<comment><USER11> The point I was hinting at was that some theorems can be proven by a sufficient body of evidence rather than requiring logical deduction - the four colour theorem being a good example as it was proven by 'brute force' rather than analytically.

<comment><USER13> Doesn't a logical proof count as evidence? To my mind, these two methods are demonstrating the same thing: considering all the possible inputs, we can show [using logic|by testing them all] that the output meets our criteria.

To my mind, in this context, the difference between maths and physics is that maths is exhaustive while in physics we don't usually have exhaustive evidence so we have to work with what we've got.

<comment><USER11> Interesting question - to me, the distinction is that 'evidence' of the validity of something is expected output(s) given known input(s), whereas 'proof' (at least in the mathematical sense) is a logical transformation that is applied to make it obvious that the theorem must be true. I'm not sure you could call a proof 'evidence' because it's not an output of the theorem - <USER2> _is_ the theorem.

I'm less certain than I was before I read your post, though - so I stand to be corrected :-)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> yo-mf Considering that it has enough power to continue data communications with Earth till 2025, it should be well into the heliosphere. If it keeps going at its current speed of 17km/s, it should reach the nearest star by the year 75,787.

<comment><USER14> Non sequitur much? Only two of those sentences have anything to do with each other, and one factoid argues against the interestingness of another.

<comment><USER15> >Only two of those sentences have anything to do with each other

Err.. I only see two sentences in total. Where is the non sequitur?

<comment><USER14> Yeah, I meant clauses. Translation error.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I imagine that our descendants will have a certain kind empathetic pity on us for not knowing this for certain in the same way we look back on people not knowing what atoms were.

<comment><USER17> I love this -- it's always fun to think about what aspects of our modern science people will one day scoff at.

Some I always consider:

\- Cures for disease

\- Our understanding of space

\- Transportation

<comment><USER18> Your assuming our descendants aren't living in a post apocalyptic dystopia where civilized society is little more than a fairytale. We may seem like gods to them. And it may be much closer than people expect, perhaps hundreds not thousands of years.

<comment><USER19> or like 10 years

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> I'm personally getting a little tired of this. It seems to me that every 2 months for the last few years I've seen a new article titled "voyager has left the solar system". Perhaps I'm just ignorant but I can't help but think to myself "what... Again? " each time I hear it.

<comment><USER21> You should try reading the article.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22>
        Will she ever return? No, she'll never return.
        What knowledge we will learn!
        She'll voyage forever in the inky blackness.
        She's the probe who'll never return.

To the tune of "Charlie on the M.T.A.":

<http://www.mit.edu/~jdreed/t/charlie.html></comment>


Google Photos – Can I get out? - <AUTHOR> https://rocketeer.be/blog/2015/05/google-photos/ <comment><USER4> Actually, there is a setting in Google Photos (at least the web interface) which lets you choose between "High quality" and "Original" (Menu -> Settings).

"High quality" recompresses large files, but gives you unlimited storage space for these recompressed files.

"Original" doesn't recompress or alter the files at all, at the expense of using your Google Drive/Email/Storage space.

I'm not necessarily on board with auto photo backup (I don't completely trust it - some photos should just remain private), but I like that they give you this choice.

What I really ( _really_ ) hate is that they've moved the delete button. It's no longer a button on the toolbar at the bottom (on the Android app), it's in the menu and labelled "Delete local copy". I take a lot of throwaways while trying to get the right shot - deleting photos is an every-day part of my workflow (I delete more than I keep). This has now gone from one quick tap to three (there's a confirmation dialog when you finally click the delete button). This is a very frustrating change.

<comment><AUTHOR> Author here: Note that I did select Original and it still seemed to compress the RAW file in Google Drive view. Single downloads do yield the original.

<comment><USER5> Thanks for the article. I work on the photos team.

I will file bugs for the drive-sync issue and the issue with the large downloads failing and try to get some answers.

<comment><AUTHOR> Nothing but love otherwise! In case it wasn't clear: Photos looks fantastic. Add an API and it's perfect.

<comment><USER6> Given that it doesn't have an API, I don't understand why it was announced at Google I/O. What is supposed to be a conference for developers has somehow turned into a place for Google to demo a ton of random new end-user product features.

<comment><USER7> In your opinion, only those products with API's available _today_ should be announced? That sounds overly restrictive. By the same logic - <USER2> Jacquard and Vault shouldn't have been announced either.

I think it's fair to announce products so devs can be ready when the API becomes available.

<comment><USER6> First of all, "there were a couple things tacked on to the presentation that maybe could one day be used by a developer" is a pretty desperate argument, given that the keynote was three hours long and focussed on a ton of things that don't have any API at all, like Photos, and did not mention a single implication for a developer even for the things which had APIs, such as Now on Tap (which means that developers had no reason to bother going to the sessions on that feature, as it was clearly something designed for end users only; apparently it actually has a couple APIs).

However, sure: I'll bite. No: announcing random stuff that we can't play with and that they won't talk to us about is totally useless for developer. This entire event was just about causing people to go "wow, they are smart". I am a developer quite interested in 3D video, and so despite seeing Project Jump and going "ugh, another end-user product announcement", I figure I might as well talk to the engineers about it: only, they aren't willing to say anything about what might be available or how it works or essentially anything about their plans... so good luck "getting ready".

Regardless, the next thing you really need to defend, as this is what we are talking about: what are you, as a developer, doing to get ready for Photos? Google I/O has become less and less developer-focussed ever since it started (I have gone every year), and has turned into more and more of just a showcase of their end-user products. This year as the epitome, and all of the developers that I know who attended were quite disappointed; even the ones who still liked last year's somehow were now also saying "this event seems to have lost its purpose and is no longer useful".

<comment><USER7> I think a keynote should be more of 10,000 foot view

> Regardless, the next thing you really need to defend, as this is what we are > talking about: what are you, as a developer, doing to get ready for Photos?

You can't imagine how unlimited storage of images and videos have no implications to devs and how we view curation of photos? Thats one less limitation to worry about.

I 100% agree that I/O is becoming less and less developer focused. Lots of non-developers want to attend (I blame the freebies they gave - looks like that has stopped so it might get better). I/O (or any other 'developer' conference) goes beyond the technical. There is a lot of self-promotion, PR, recruitment (in the HR sense, and recruitment into the 'developer ecosystem')

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Google's old desktop app "Picasa" is still my go-to for organizing photos. I make a file system folder for each "album". Everything stays local on the fs and there is no doubt about where the originals are (compared to iPhoto/Photos.app, etc etc). OSX' built-in Time Machine to an USB drive + rsync to a NAS takes care of multiple backups. I can easily drag&drop files into apps and upload forms with no doubt that I'm working on the best possible copy (original).

Too bad the app appears to have been going unmaintained for some time now. It doesn't even support retina displays on OSX (in a _photo_ app!)

<comment><USER9> Me too! I don't like it when programs insist on storing my photos in their own, non-human-readable directory structures and file names. Otherwise it becomes a nightmare trying to use them in other programs. Even iPhoto->Photos managed to break my library.

I just wish that Google would bring back the simple online photo sharing that they used to have with Picasa. The Google+ merge ruined all that.

<comment><USER10> If you're willing to keep your photos in Dropbox and have the space for it, take a look at Carousel.

Carousel respects whatever folder naming convention you have. All photos in your dropbox show up in Carousel's photo list.

Pictures on Carousel are always saved to the "Carousel" folder in your dropbox, but you can move them around to respect your preferred folder structure without damaging anything.

<comment><USER11> Do you know if there is a way to edit the metadata of a photo in Carousel? I couldn't figure out how to add tags to the photos.

<comment><USER10> Not sure. My intuition is that photos are completely read-only; I don't think it will ever change them, so tags might be stored in some other opaque storage.

I do know that Carousel uses the DateTimeOriginal EXIF tag to set the date. You can use this command to re-tag photos, for example:

        exiftool -DateTimeOriginal="2009:01:01 00:00:06" DSCF0038.JPG

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Like with all other Google services you should be able to get your data out using the takeout service.

<comment><USER13> [https://google.com/takeout](https://google.com/takeout) \- Yep, still has photos capabilities

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> And do not even try to edit your local desktop photos (desktop uploader will not recognize at all) or try to delete local photos. Google photos only works OK if you ONLY use your mobile phone for taking photos. If you have an normal camera like e.g. a DSLR and want to sync that with Google photos: Forget it. You will only have a lot of more management work with Google photos. Google photos is again a dead end for your data. What we need is a good two way sync for the desktop and more management possibilities in Google photos (because there are NO management features). If you look at Lightroom and their cloud sync (if you have an Adobe Cloud subscription): Adobe is lightyears ahead in syncing. Google clearly does not care at all about the desktop.

<comment><USER15> 99% of people don't subsequently edit photos in photoshop; Google's tools are adequate. You're in the 1% who are power users, and so might find the mainstream solution inadequate. For that reason, software like Lightroom exists.

<comment><USER16> Google used to be known for not aiming for the lowest common denominator. They've gotten so large and crafty though that apparently "works good enough to capture the majority" has replaced "make something great for everyone".

<comment><USER17> I think targeting a smaller community is always easier and works better but all the investors would like to see is plan for world domination, aka "make something great for everyone".

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> >There's no way Google will know that "Trip to Thailand" should actually be labeled "Honeymoon"

i wonder how much longer this will be true.

<comment><USER19> The only place I can see it getting info like this is a social network, and that means G+...

In all seriousness, could they cross-reference dates in G+ posts and photos to see that you mentioned being on your honeymoon when it was taken? Seems like something they'd do if G+ was actually a thing people used.

<comment><USER20> There's the Google Search looking for good place to stay on a honeymoon, the email or hangout message sent to the SO mentioning it, the calendar event, etc.

Even just seeing that you're on an irregular stay in Thailand (which it got from your Android) right after your marriage can be telling.

<comment><USER19> Completely forgot email, calendar etc.

D'oh.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> I've never really treated my photos like special data that require an interface beyond my OS. I keep them in an encrypted folder on my backup drive, on my laptop and on my cloud service.

Maybe it's different if you have kids or something... but my folks only have about 60 photos of my entire youth and that's 40 too many.

<comment><USER22> Yes, it's different when you have kids. I don't give 1 shit about any photo my kid isn't in, but all photos he is in, regardless of quality, must be preserved FOR ALL ETERNITY!! I suspect that feeling is common among parents. That's why your parents have those 40 other pictures :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> I'm surprised the main timeline is a flat list. I have 30,000+ photos and sometimes have 300 photos of the same event. It's impossible to browse the overall contents with every photo shown.

I created a prototype[1] 5 years ago of a hierarchical timeline using timestamps. It had it's own problems, but I would have thought by now someone would have figured out a solution. Machine learn a hierarchy where each coarser level has a subset which reasonably summarizes the next more detailed level.

[1] - <USER3> [http://pixtimeline.com/view/#105946173008403248796/553914066...](http://pixtimeline.com/view/#105946173008403248796/5539140669398690945)

</comment><comment><USER22> After just a day of playing with it, I love the Google Photos service for what it is, but I was pretty sure it wouldn't be a viable backup solution. If a service offers anything more than strictly "file backup", it's a sure thing you will lose quality and/or won't be able to get at it easily. I already have a good backup system utilizing my free $50/month Azure benefits that come with my MSDN subscription so I'm not really concerned about it. I personally don't care much about sharing features but if Google can actually make this a good backup + sharing system then they will win. For me "good" means my original files are kept as-is and that upload/download is relatively quick. I'm fine with days, not weeks. Azure (CloudBerry) took less than 5 hours for my 100GB library over 35Mbs upload FiOS, but Google Photos isn't even 1/10th of the way done after a day.

I love how it has mashed-up my photos into categories, stories, animations and collages. Literally love it, it IS great. But backup system, it is not.

<comment><USER24> Can you comment on your Azure based backup system? I have similar Azure credits.

<comment><USER22> It's not super automatic but CloudBerry Explorer for Azure [1] is free and has a pretty good folder sync feature. I basically just keep all my photos and videos in single a folder on my desktop. Whenever I copy my families phones or tablets to my PC I just run the saved sync, it's usually pretty quick. I have over 90 GB of stuff so it actually took a long time for CloudBerry to analyse the folder for the first time, after that it figures out what's new and needs to sync pretty fast.

[1] [http://www.cloudberrylab.com/free-microsoft-azure- explorer.a...](http://www.cloudberrylab.com/free-microsoft-azure- explorer.aspx)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> So if you use Original, does it still use up your storage, even if the photo is under 16MP, or video under 1080P?

From what I have read, they compress the files when 'High Quality' is chosen, so I'm guessing if you select original, it all counts towards your storage?

</comment><comment><USER26> Been playing with Google Photos this morning and marveling how it is able to categorize beer, bridges, kangaroos, koalas, etc. But of course it gets some wrong. Anyone know how to change a categorization?

<comment><USER26> I just realized that this post makes me sound like an Aussie! I guess I should have thrown in that it also automatically recognizes bars, beaches, sunsets and sharks!

<comment><USER27> still sounds like an Aussie.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> when I saw "unlimited free storage" I had to try :)

my interest was more on the video than the photo, when you click the option "High quality (free unlimited storage)" the help mention it goes as far as 1080P for videos which is fair game for something free.

So I uploaded a couple of 720P videos, and redownloaded them to compare if they were the same, what formats was supported, etc.

The good: it works kind of like a private Youtube, it does process the video so when you watch it online you end up having it to auto 360P, which sucks a little. But if when you redownload the video you get the original one (not recompressed).

The bad: the UI and file naming is a joke.

I understand they wanted to make it simple to use and organise a lot of photos and videos, but not being able to see the filename to quickly select a bunch of files and put them in a group (or collection) is beyond me.

But let focus on something even simpler: select an item and no file name ? I mean com'on google, am I not suppose to find/search easily trough my stuff ?

No regex in file name search either ...

My guess is the photo part was the main goal and the video part been added quickly without much of a thinking about it, I do hope it would get better.

So far disappointing, if I was to upload all my videos there, I could not organise them easily and worst I could not find them, it would be useless.

<comment><USER29> > No regex in file name search either ...

I mean, come on, did you really expect this? Most consumer-oriented search systems I know of don't have this feature.

<comment><USER30> He probably meant something like "*.jpg" which is common and works fine on Microsoft Windows and Apple OSX. And probably not the full Regex syntax as known from grep or Perl/PHP.

<comment><USER29> A wildcard search, then. Sure, that's more common (although sometimes hilariously broken), I can give you that.

I'd expect wildcard searches too, but only because Google is a search company. When I see a search box, I'm usually happy if it does a contains search instead of an exact match, that's how low my expectations have become.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> I have my cellphone automatically back up pictures to both OneDrive and Google photos. Handy enough.

But, I like the OneDrive (or Dropbox if you don't mind the politics of Dropbox) model: keep all photos and videos in chronological order, edit file names, if desired, to add description after the file stamp, and generate one off share URI links for friends to share pictures.

That said I appreciate having the extra backups, even if lower resolution, on Google photos.

</comment><comment><USER32> Unfortunately, the "high quality" option is really low quality in reality. Images that are crisp and sharp becomes very blurry on Photos. Some 12Mpx pictures that I have got downscaled to 0.3Mpx on photos. However it does not happen to all photos... Some of them deserve the "high quality compression" badge. It just seems to be aleatory. Please fix this issue!

</comment><comment><USER17> I have been using this for a while and one day I realized it is skipping some pictures when backing up. I went through all of my pictures and noticed ~5% is missing. This was the last day when I trusted Google with picture backups. On the other hand Flickr offers similar solution that actually does what it is supposed to.

<comment><USER5> Is this happening with the new app that launched this week?

If you have concrete examples I could investigate.

<comment><USER33> I have an example from before the new version of the Photos app came out. This might have changed since then.

If I take a bunch of photos and then send some of them through Hangouts before I get home to my WiFi those photos doesn't get backed up. I'm guessing it's because Hangouts uses G+ albums for the photos, so technically the photos are on Google's servers, but they're not where I expect them to be (in Auto backup).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> The one thing that screwed me over is that the Upload by default compresses the files to lower res. I lost some high-res photos this way.. this should not be a default setting.

</comment><comment><USER35> > Update: not quite, see below

Did I miss the update? All that's mentioned below is that Google drive offers different files. There's nothing more about the download link.

<comment><USER36> I'd guess that this is a reference to either

1) you have to do it one by one (or in very small batches), because the zip export is broken

2) you get a different view via Google Drive

(I don't use those service, cannot even begin to imagine why one would upload pictures to Google or use Google Drive, but - that's my take away from the article and my own interpretation)

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> It's sad when you have to backup things from the cloud and not to the cloud, it's sad when the cloud isn't straight forward about your files.

</comment><comment><USER38> _" Once the (download) selection is large enough, it silently fails."_

"Mwahaha! Those sucker users will try a download and think they can get all their photos back. But they can't! They're ours now! Ours!"

Hey, it worked for Instagram.[1]

[1] [http://www.cnet.com/news/instagram-says-it-now-has-the- right...](http://www.cnet.com/news/instagram-says-it-now-has-the-right-to- sell-your-photos/)

<comment><USER35> Did you bookmark that and post it without actually reading it? The update at the top, very first paragraph, makes it pretty clear it didn't work.

</comment></comment><comment><USER39> Did anybody think of steganography, yet? Or will the compression brake it anyways?

</comment><comment><USER40> the cloud only exists because storage is cheap.

it should actually kill the cloud because storage is cheap. but all cloud providers go out of their way to make their platform painful to use without their cloud.

Apple makes backing up photos with iphoto annoying. Google makes backing up photos via an app much easier than via usb or rsync on your home network... etc

<comment><USER41> Storage in terms of raw bytes really is dirt cheap, but storage in terms of erasure encoded, encrypted, multi-homed, highly-available file systems isn't. Just buying a hard drive isn't going to get you very far. The durability of a file on a cloud service is going to far outstrip that of your local hard drive or even a fancy NAS.

<comment><USER42> Cloud services outliving my (not so fancy) NAS. So, where's my Webshots account? (since we're talking photos, let's take a photos example. It shouldn't be hard to find an example of a dead web service for any other kind of data, either)

_My_ datastore still exists and proudly provides those files from my redundantly stored, checksummed, auto-repairing local filesystem. No, I don't have an off-site backup. But neither had Webshots once they decided to shut down.

<comment><USER41> Since I've never heard of "Webshots" that seems like a bit of cherry picking. Flickr and Smugmug have both been hosting photos continuously for over a decade.

<comment><USER42> As per Wikipedia ([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Webshots](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Webshots)):

"By 2004, Webshots was grossing $15M/year, had more than 200,000 paid subscribers, and was the #1 photo sharing site and top 50 media property per ComScore. In the same year, Alexa ranked Webshots the second largest English language privately held Web media property (behind weather.com)."

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER43> I don't understand all the outrage about Google compressing photos. They're offering a free service; they can do whatever they want to save space. If you don't want them to be compressed, use the fill size option and pay your share of storage.

<comment><AUTHOR> Note that all testing was done with the paid "Original" option.

I happily pay for things, but when I do I like to verify that it does what it says on the box.

</comment></comment><comment><USER44> The answer, as the author points out, is yes. You can get them out via Google Drive. The author also thinks that Google is doing something bad by compressing a large uncompressed RAW file to 2mb, but that's the tradeoff you get for asking for unlimited storage from the service.

Google clearly states that photos synced to Google Photos with unlimited storage get compressed a lot. On the other hand, if you pay Google for more Google Drive space and use Photos to sync your images there instead, there is no compression.

<comment><USER45> I think he means bad in the sense of "8:1 compression means poor quality photos which shouldn't happen for a photo site" rather than bad in the sense of "google is doing something wrong, immoral or illegal".

<comment><USER46> It's hard _not_ to get 8:1 compression when we're starting from a RAW file

<comment><USER47> Raw already is compressed. My 40D takes raw files around 12 to 15 MiB. They vary in size, so that's a first clue. Also, if you do the math, 14 bits per channel on those images comes out around 65 MiB.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER48> I uninstalled Photos right after I installed it. Why? Because as soon as you install it and you open it, it starts to _indiscriminately upload all of your photos_ to Google's servers.

Now, I get that this is supposed to be a "cloud service" and whatnot. But I'd prefer if it was very clear when I choose to upload them to the cloud, and I'd also prefer to pick and choose which photos go into the cloud _by default_. If people want to upload _everything_ by default to Google's server, that should be an opt-in feature.

<comment><USER49> > _it starts to indiscriminately upload all of your photos_

It only uploads your photos if you check the "Back up & sync" checkbox when you first start the app. If you uncheck that box, it won't upload anything. Don't spread FUD.

<comment><USER50> And it's still illegal in many countries to upload and process private data without explicit permission.

And, as previous cases showed, permissions granted through default-checked boxes, or permissions granted through fine print hidden in the ToS are legally not binding, meaning the uploading is considered a computer crime.

Thilo Weichert, data protection officer of the state of Schleswig-Holstein, Germany, did several law cases based on this against Facebook, and almost all of them.

<comment><USER51> What? Google Photos (just like before) gives you a FULL SCREEN question asking if you want to backup before it even lets you run it.

So, again, what are you talking about?

<comment><USER52> Don't try. There is no way to protect yourself from our absurd German privacy laws. (Except if you are the government, then nothing matters.) Even the local residents' registration offices simply sell your private data for next to nothing to cheap ad companies.

..but if you are an US company, we hate you for the votes.

<comment><USER50> Don't worry, Weichert is suing the government, too ;)

And the parliament of SH relies on the fact that mass surveillance will have to be cancelled, too, as it violates several data protection laws.

The constitutional court struck down the mass surveillance laws already two times, they'll do it again.

And yes, I was one of the people protesting on the street against the new laws regarding Melderegisterzugriff</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


One corner of U.S. oil market has already seen negative prices - <AUTHOR> https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-03-27/one-corner-of-u-s-oil-market-has-already-seen-negative-prices <comment><USER2> Just to put this in perspective, we're talking about one bid for basically land-locked asphalt in a period of essentially zero demand. I don't know what the size/liquidity of the trading market is, but I'd suspect very small. The market price is currently around $2.

This is not oil for energy; reading too much into this is like seeing the price for firewood skyrocket and expecting people to freeze to death this winter.

<comment><USER3> People freeze to death every winter because they can't afford fuel. I have no idea what your analogy is supposed to mean.

<comment><USER4> Where?

<comment><USER5> In the UK around 3,000 people die per year because they can't afford fuel costs.

[https://www.independent.co.uk/news/business/news/cold- weathe...](https://www.independent.co.uk/news/business/news/cold-weather-uk- winter-deaths-europe-polar-vortex-a8224276.html)

<comment><USER4> How? The cost to heat a home is a tiny fraction of the cost of owning a home.

<comment><USER3> Because percentages don't matter when you're poor. And, of course, a poor person will probably be renting, not owning, a home.

If you've only got $30 left to cover food and electricity (and your heating is all electric), you basically choose between food or heating.

Google seems determined to give me UK stats, instead of US ones. Perhaps in the US you become homeless before you have to make that choice?

<comment><USER4> How did you pay your mortgage or rent if you only have $30 left for heat?

<comment><USER3> Imagine you get paid 250 a week. Your rent is 200 a week. You have 20 you need to pay for travel. That leaves you 30. If you don't pay rent you become homeless and then you will lose your job.

Do you understand?

<comment><USER4> So you are saying you only have to increase your income about 5% to have enough money for heat?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Tar sands oil is now trading at $6.6/barrel.

This is going to be a disaster for the Canadian petro-provinces. While much of this price collapse has been driven by OPEC, the COVID-depressed gasoline demand is here to stay for at least a few months.

<comment><USER7> Alberta was already in bad shape before this, with huge sections of Calgary downtown empty, 20% unemployment in rural areas. Now add an oil price collapse and coronavirus shutdown of large parts of the service sector. Very hard times for Alberta ahead.

In the oil bust in the first half of the 1980's people would sell their homes for a dollar just to get away from the mortgage because it was completely underwater. I fear we may see those days again in Calgary. I was born there during those days, which I don't remember, but I do recall the stories people told of it while I was growing up.

<comment><USER6> With the economics of the tar sands, the entire province has been doing the equivalent of margin trading, to make ends meet, for the past two decades. Tiny swings in price either bring a moderate windfall, or utter ruin.

It's not a great way to run your economy.

<comment><USER8> >the entire province has been doing the equivalent of margin trading, to make ends meet, for the past two decades. Tiny swings in price either bring a big windfall, or utter ruin.

>It's not a great way to run your economy.

Sure, but what other way do they have to run their economy? Without monumental government effort to keep prices stable grain (and grain derived products) isn't much better.

<comment><USER6> Alberta used to be a cattle province[1][2], before the petro-firms trampled all over farmer rights, and imported a million people to work the tar sands/support the people who worked the tar sands.

Just because you've destroyed the ring, you can't really go back to the Shire, but Alberta's choices in the 21st century are either a return to agriculture, and mass emigration, or a transition to exporting professional services.

[1] Ironically, while the price of oil plummets, the spot price for beef is up 20% since the start of this crisis... Although, the price of beef futures is dropping a bit.

[2] Edit: I'm aware that agriculture employs a small number of people (1.5-2% of the population, but so does oil extraction - only 0.3% of the population directly works in the tar sands - everyone else supports them.) Like any other industry, it has a large supporting industry of suppliers, truckers, etc. It's not nearly as lucrative as oil, but it's a living.

<comment><USER7> Agriculture employs about 1.5% of the population of Canada according to the world bank. It's heavily automated and while crucial, it will never be able to employ a large fraction of the population. You can't wind the clock back to the 1900s without undoing all the gains made in the last century.

Alberta needs to look to Norway and Dubai for how you diversify away from oil in earnest.

<comment><USER9> While it's not realistic, I guarantee that if you initiated the homestead act again in the US, people would do it. Free land and basically full autonomy? I'm 100% certain there is a sizeable chunk of those types in the US and Canada that would make that trade. The reason the homestead act died was cause businesses lobbied the government to get rid of it so as not to give lower income types a choice. They had to work in their factories to survive.

<comment><USER7> Most of the land you could do that with is agriculturally unproductive. Which is why it's federal land to begin with. Some of it is natural parks, and I don't want to see that turned to agriculture. I really don't think it's that simple at all.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> What we should be doing is any time OPEC does this kind of price war, we expand the Strategic Petroleum Reserve. "Keep it in the ground" while also building an increasingly secure rainy day energy stockpile.

<comment><USER11> It appears that purchasing oil right now for the SPR was portrayed as a "bailout for big oil" so it was left out of the recent legislation.

<comment><USER12> The defense department has plenty of money. Maybe they should reallocate some of that budget to purchasing oil for storage. Having plenty of oil is definitely part of national defense.

<comment><USER11> In fairness, now that I check Wikipedia, it appears that the SPR is 80% full, and furthermore the average price paid was about $28/barrel.

Right now WTI is $25ish and Brent is almost $28, so adding more to it probably isn't particularly vital at this moment, either in terms of increasing energy independence or in taking advantage of cheap prices.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> What's the volume being traded at that price? I'll bid -$10 to buy your house, doesn't mean that's what your house is worth.

<comment><USER14> If someone accepts your -$10 bid the house will totally be worth that by definition. Remember the $1 houses from Detroit a decade ago. They weren't even worth $1 due to the tax liability that came with them, and they didn't sell for that reason.

<comment><USER12> My grandfather bought a $1,000 house years ago, not in the Detroit area, but a similarly blighted area.

Immediately after purchasing it, the city started fining and hounding him to get it cleaned up and up to code.

He went in to court at one point and asked the judge why he was getting all these notices when it was already the nicest house on the block.

The judge's answer was something to the effect of "oh, well they can't afford to fix it up."

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> [https://archive.md/tfWyx](https://archive.md/tfWyx)

</comment><comment><USER16> It's funny that we're technically cheering on a cartel (OPEC) to artificially raise prices for a commodity that the world depends on.

Ok maybe not so funny, but it's a conversation worth having, isn't it? Doesn't it imply something severe about free market innefficiencies?

<comment><USER17> On of the classic ways that oligopoly and monopoly power can be abused is by engaging in temporary price wars to drive any smaller competitors so that prices can later be jacked up and monopoly profits reeled in.

That's what's happening here.

<comment><USER10> If we ignore the regressive effects of (eventual) high energy prices (which are significant! a LOT of people are helped by low gas prices. Popular protest understandably occur when governments eliminate deep fuel subsidies)...

...then the long-term monopoly rents being much higher in terms of total revenue is actually good for the environment and maybe good for humanity _in absence of something more rational like a carbon tax_.

It can act like a Carbon Tax, but with the revenue going to Saudi Arabia or Russia (etc). In other words, non-ideal... But does maybe help electric cars in the very long-term (ignoring the near-term damage to existing electric car makers, and assuming we wouldn't be instituting a carbon tax anyway).

Much better would be a local carbon tax with revenues redistributed to counteract any regressive impact while also funding transition to alternatives.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Let the peak oil hysteria from the 80s and 90s be a reminder to everyone here how fallible common beliefs are among the population.

<comment><USER7> Peak oil theory is sound economics. We now have sufficient proven and suspected reserves that we expect that demand will tail off before supply does, so we expect that we won't have a supply crunch. But it could have possibly gone that way if the Earth had fewer extractable reserves or if humans had been less innovative in finding new methods of extraction. It really just comes down to whether demand or supply tails off first.

<comment><USER19> > Peak oil theory is sound economics.

Why is oil special? Why not peak iron, aluminum, concrete, NaCl, or any or the myriad other things we consume? All of them are in finite quantities, not only oil. Earth has a finite mass after all.

<comment><USER20> Iron, aluminum, and salt are _extremely_ common and very much renewable. Concrete is looking like it might be sand limited, and of limited renewability; there's already concern over our long-term ability to make concrete. _Oil_ , on the other hand, we literally burn & convert into C02, and other fun stuff. Once we use it, it's pretty much gone.

<comment><USER21> > Once we use it, it's pretty much gone.

Oil is as renewable as any other renewable resource. It's made from plants.

We're only at risk of running out of cheap crude mined from the earth with a positive net energy return at a low price. We aren't ever at risk of not being able to have oil.

It's an open question whether our access to cheap fossil fuel will outlast our demand for it.

<comment><USER22> Yes, the problem is the energy that could be used to produce oil would be much more efficiently used by applying it directly to what the oil was going to be used for.

<comment><USER21> Not always. Oil has many uses outside of energy production.

It's also important to distinguish between energy production and energy transfer. Petrol products are very useful for energy transfer even if they aren't energy producing.

Batteries and fuel cells are other examples of useful net-negative energy transfer systems.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Article is stuck behind paywall for me

<comment><USER23> So if you want to read it, perhaps it's time to consider paying?

(Alternatively, private browsing mode might work.)

<comment><USER24> Paying providers directly either means micropayments or committing to reading enough of that specific news source to get a non-micropayment-sized amount of value from it. No one has really cracked micropayments in a way that has caught on, yet, and the model of depending on a single source for a majority of news has gone the way of print newspapers.

Bloomberg, NYT, WashPo, the Economist, and other such places need to figure out how to provide value commensurate with the money they charge, or else figure out how to exist in a world where one of "their" readers still visits dozens or hundreds of other such outlets a month.

> Try 3 months for -$105- $6. Cancel anytime.

The 105 is just a joke, and even $2 a month is very high, considering there'd be similar payments to 20+ other such outlets.

<comment><USER13> exactly. The subscription model only makes sense for loyal readers- which I am not.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> The US has an oil industry that is completely unreasonable. The whole idea of US oil production is that the price needs to be high enough to support the costs of shale extraction. But their own existence forces the prices down by oversupply. It is an economic time bomb.

<comment><USER26> Its insurance against OPEC raising prices. Without the shale oil industry, OPEC will just raise prices. With the shale oil industry, OPEC lowers prices to try to wring them out of business.

Gotta think big picture and geo-political issues. In isolation, its a negative (especially with such low prices right now). But in the great scheme of oil- independence from OPEC / other oil producing companies, there's a benefit.

<comment><USER25> There is no benefit when prices crash and the US has to bail out these companies. It would be much smarter to reduce dependence on oil with investments in clean energy, instead of making the economy dependent on that same polluting industry.

<comment><USER26> > There is no benefit when prices crash

Prices are crashing because OPEC wants to harm the shale oil industry.

Look, we can either make oil or rely upon foreign oil. Those are the two choices (or some combination of the two).

The more oil the US makes, the more we are harmed by low prices. The less oil the US makes, the more we are harmed by high prices. Obviously balance is the key, but notice that opponent (OPEC) is intelligent and has a large degree of choice in the matter. Whatever the US does, OPEC will adapt and push our weak point.

And yes, I recognize that moving off of oil entirely is a 3rd, independent solution. But that can be done independently of our production of oil. For now, we're a grossly oil-consuming nation, so we have to make due with the present reality of our country.

<comment><USER25> > But that can be done independently of our production of oil.

If you are an oil producer, and a large part of your economy depends on oil production, there is little incentive for cuts on oil usage. This is exactly the pattern we see in the modern US economy.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


The big little lie of the TV kitchen island - <AUTHOR> https://www.curbed.com/2019/8/1/20747174/big-little-lies-houses-set-design <comment><USER2> "Over the decades, as versions of this housewife's setup have eliminated dining rooms, pass-throughs, and farmhouse tables, the open-concept kitchen, centered around an island visible from all sides, has become not a labor- saving device but a stage on which (mostly) women are forced to perform."

I gave up here. This is so stupid that I'm not sure what is the premise that I should critique.

Also Im a guy who cooks in a kitchen with an island and I love it.

<comment><USER3> There's an excellent book about the history of domestic technology called "More work for mother." It details how the more domestic tech we created, the more work shifted from the man of the house to the lady of the house and standards were raised

Three hundred years ago, full-time wives did about 60 hours/week of housework. Today, with all our modern appliances, they still do about 60 hours/week of housework.

In most families, as women begin working outside the home, they still do 40 hours/week of housework. The men mostly have not picked up the difference.

I'm a former homemaker. I got divorced and got a corporate job. My adult special needs sons continued to live with me.

Co-workers would express pity anout how I worked full-time and _also had to go home and cook dinner._ They were flabbergasted to learn my oldest son did the cooking.

Given that I was working at a Fortune 200 company, these were presumably some of the most privileged "ordinary" women on the planet. Even the highest ranking woman in my department whose husband moved to let her accept the promotion was not comfortable learning about my arrangement at home because she apparently still did most of the _women 's work_ at home while having a VIP job.

<comment><USER4> 60 hours a week? You think housewives are doing 8½ hours of solid house work every single day? Yeah, no.

<comment><USER5> I guess you have some solid data to support that statement?

I unfortunately only have anecdotal evidence that 60h is not implausible.

Me and my wife have two kids and share most of the household work, it's not an even split (she does more). I would say that on average we both work from the time we get back home from work until the kids sleep, ~4hrs later. In addition to that, one of us probably spends some 30 mins each morning getting the kids ready for school. Saturdays and Sundays typically involve two cooked meals per day plus any bigger household work that the weekdays won't fit. So I guess we spend some 60h/week on chores.

<comment><USER6> Are we counting all time spent with children as a chore?

Don't get me wrong, I'm a father of two. Like you, our work is not split evenly, though I like to think I take on a higher share than most similarly situated men. There are times when my time with my sons can be trying, and I can get behind counting some fraction of that time as work.

On the other hand, just today my son and I spent three hours going to and from a playdate with a friend of his. I'm also friends with the dad. It was a pleasant time for all involved, and we got some sun and some exercise. This is not an atypical way for us to spend a Sunday afternoon. If this is accounted for as "work" then I would say the statistic is a bit misleading, as that is not something most people I know would consider labor.

<comment><USER7> And I also had a 3 hour meeting today with co-workers that I enjoy working with, solving a problem we all care about. That was work.

I'll be commuting home for an hour. That is work.

Tonight I'll be putting the kids to bed, then tidying up the kitchen. That is also work.

I think it is fair to say, that as an adult with kids, much of your time that you aren't doing something just for you, will to a degree be work. And that is OK. As long as you and your partner are happy with the split you have, then that is OK too.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I read through this a couple of times, and I still can't figure out its point beyond the idea that the author doesn't like kitchen islands/open floor plans, and even that I'm not sure of?

I've found to really like open floor plans and an open kitchen. When I visit my family, we tend to congregate in the kitchen as someone is cooking (or several of us are cooking) and we don't want them to feel left out. An open floor plan allows this.

When we go to someone's house that doesn't allow it, it tends to either a) divide people who are cooking and people in the living room, or b) have everyone in a small kitchen for socializing.

<comment><USER2> This article is a preference about interior design masquerading as a social critique.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> I'd love to have a kitchen island. Our house has a tiny kitchen, and everybody congregates there, so it's impossible to do anything without people constantly bumping into one another. I could say, "get out of the kitchen," but then I'm separated from the conversation. Then, somebody wants a drink, or a snack, or whatever, and they're all back in the kitchen again.

The island lets people socialize in the kitchen, which is where they want to be, without getting in the way of the cook.

I don't care about being able to hide the mess. The rest of the house is a mess.

</comment><comment><USER10> "Over the decades, as versions of this housewife's setup have eliminated dining rooms, pass-throughs, and farmhouse tables, the open-concept kitchen, centered around an island visible from all sides, has become not a labor- saving device but a stage on which (mostly) women are forced to perform."

Or...it's a convenient place to assemble ingredients away from the stove/oven area.

This is such an incredibly absurd reach I don't know where to begin. Yet another example of trying to garner clicks and views with provocative journalism.

</comment><comment><USER11> This article is about a TV soap opera, and it might have been more obvious (and saved me a click) had the submitter not pointlessly altered the capitalization of the headline.

<comment><USER12> I read through the first quarter of it three times before I figured out that it's a confusing advertisement for a TV show rather than a discussion on the history of kitchen islands. I honestly couldn't find any useful information. It reads like it was written by a plausibly seeded neural net.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> > As a portrait of modern family life, it is more than a little bleak—just > like the show. The kitchen island is the new hearth, as the kitchen long ago > replaced the living room as the center of the home.

Modern? Many families have elevated the kitchen to main room status for generations.

</comment><comment><USER14> Sitcom actors are always more attractive than normal people, and the sets they act in are usually way up there in terms of what it would cost to actually buy a house like that. It's because TV is aspiration with a little (a lot) of consumerist guilt mixed in.

<comment><USER15> I think it has less to do with anting to be aspirational and a lot more to do with how sets are decorated. Take an interior designer and give them an unlimited budget with the only requirement being it has to look good on camera and you'll get amazing results every time. My house has bare walls because we don't have a professional decorator. And everything else is slapdashed together because that is how real homes work.

Now logistics: you need space for cameras lighting and crew to move in. No way in hell is a multi camera show going to be shot in a real New York apartment kitchen. Walking through a real living room would have the camera operator bumping into all sorts of things. So homes and sets are huge. They aren't filming bathroom confessionals.

<comment><USER16> In this case it is probably both. The show is about people with seemingly perfect lives which (spoiler!) has dark secrets which threaten to disrupt their lives. That kind of story just works better with beautiful perfect homes etc. since that makes the contrast and threat stronger.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Kitchen islands can reach epic proportions. I had to drop off a check to my realtor at another home where she was doing a open-house. The island in it had to have been 200 square feet of dark granite.

You would need a rail network to pass the salt. Even if it housed every labor saving device known to modern kitchen science, there still would have been room left over inside.

<comment><USER18> _You would need a rail network to pass the salt._

So... I'd need a train set in the kitchen? This is not a downside.

<comment><USER19> All you need now is to get a lazy choochoo to replace the lazy susan in a show on HBO, and all the homemaker spouses will want one!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Hey everyone, before you comment: This article is a reviews of the HBO TV-show Big Little Lies. If you don't know or care about the show, the article will probably be of little interest to you.

HN seems to be interpreting the article as a general critique of open-plan kitchens. Apparently HN cares a lot more about kitchen islands than about mainstream TV-shows!

<comment><USER20> > Hey everyone, before you comment: This article is a reviews of the HBO TV- > show Big Little Lies.

Thank you. This was rather odd without context.

> Apparently HN cares a lot more about kitchen islands than about mainstream > TV-shows!

HBO is mainstream, now? I thought it was premium. Super-duper-premium, maybe.

Ah well. I suppose in a land where Netflix can make its own movies, HBO is positively _dowdy_.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> That's a lot of words written about not a lot.

</comment><comment><USER22> A century ago most housewives were farm housewives. The housewife on a pre- electric, pre-running water farm could not have spent 60 hours/week on what is now "housework", since considerable time had to be devoted to caring for the chickens; collecting and packing eggs; planting, weeding, harvesting the garden; canning vegetables and fruits; helping with the milking; helping with butchering chickens, pigs, and steers; etc.

On the other hand, multi-generational households were common, maiden-aunts came to stay and help, and neighborhood girls could be hired when needed. Neighboring housewives helped out when the threshing crew arrived and a dozen hungry men had to be fed a good meal.

Baths were Saturday night and clothes were washed Mondays for the simple reason that greater frequency was impractical, since water had to be carried from the well and heated on the wood stove.

<comment><USER18> _A century ago most housewives were farm housewives._

You believe that in 1919, at the end of the first world war, and just 10 years before the Wall Street crash, most housewives lived on farms that didn't have electricity or running water? The population of New York city in 1919 was a little over _5.5 million people_.

<comment><USER23> 1919 is right on the cusp of when the US became majority urban.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Urbanization_in_the_United_Sta...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Urbanization_in_the_United_States#Historical_statistics)

And those people living outside the cities were unlikely to have electricity still

"by the 1920s electricity was not delivered by power companies to rural areas because of the general belief that the infrastructure costs would not be recouped"

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rural_electrification#The_Unit...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rural_electrification#The_United_States_of_America)

I assume they did have some sort of running water in that they would have a well.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> I hate open kitches and I really hate large islands that are sort of intended to be used for eating at. They are not nearly as comfortable to eat at as a table.

</comment><comment><USER25> When the author mentioned the "messy kitchen" I thought it was a joke. Now I realise, as a European, that American house design is just absurd form over function. If you need a second, practical kitchen to deal with your main kitchen not being usable for its ostensible purpose then something is horribly wrong.

<comment><USER16> The idea of a "messy kitchen" certainly exist in Europe, see Scullery: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scullery](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scullery) It is not a new invention.

<comment><USER26> In NL we've got the "bijkeuken". Modern homes rarely have them, but old farm houses almost always do.

Our new house incidentally does have one, which is indeed messy, and mostly used to store kitchen equipment we rarely use, as well as all the kitchen machinery, including the water kettle and coffee maker, that we don't want in plain sight. Apart from making tea and coffee, we don't do any actual work there, though. The real kitchen is still messy, because that's where the real cooking happens.</comment></comment></comment>


The coal mine that ate Hambacher forest - <AUTHOR> https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/stories-48931062 <comment><USER2> > To add insult to injury, the coal that is extracted here is brown coal, also > known as lignite, which emits particularly high levels of carbon dioxide.

This surprised me, because surely you get one molecule of CO2 per atom of carbon in the coal, regardless of the kind of coal. But it seems there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in my stoichiometry - lignite has a higher moisture content than other coals, so more of the energy liberated goes into boiling that water, so there is less energy produced per unit of carbon, which means more CO2 per unit of energy:

[https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/B978008100...](https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/B9780081008959000036)

<comment><USER3> I had a power company as a client once, years ago. They had a plant that burned lignite. I was new to the industry and asked what that was.

The response they gave me was "it's like burning dirt." Man, lignite is nasty stuff.

Burning freaking dirt. Can't wait for this stuff to be outlawed.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> The scale of the scars on the earth here is pretty staggering: [https://email@example.com...](https://email@example.com,6.1530726,74969m/data=!3m1!1e3!4m5!3m4!1s0x47bf5c94fc8fe1af:0x34d898611d7c9285!8m2!3d50.9!4d6.4333333)

<comment><USER4> Impressive, aren't they? The industrial muscle keeping people warm and happy.

I assume Germany has a modern program of mine rehabilitation, so you're only able to see the parts that are currently part of the active mine. The historic mine footprint of an old mine is probably twice or thrice what is visible; much larger but invisible from satellite because it has been rehabilitated.

Eg, the area just north-west of Tagebau Hambach is probably mine rehab; you can tell because it is a deeper green than the surrounding farmland and if you look closely the massive contours of the waste emplacement areas might be visible.

<comment><USER5> That's correct (I live nearby). What you also don't see was what was in the way of the mine before it got there. It was populated space, all the towns got cleared out. Normally when someone blows up thousand-year-old cultural monuments we call it terrorism, but not when it's RWE (the mine operator) doing it. The compensation people get is nowhere near proportional to the damage - they get paid based on a fictional estimate of the value of their home. And they don't get to choose whether they get evicted or not.

RWE recently bulldozed a centuries-old church and surrounding town. They get away with it because of a fuckup by local politicians a while back. RWE was supposed to pay for the right to exploit that land, and local councils agreed to an offer to pay them in shares instead of in money. Now local council budgets are dependent on RWE dividends and therefore although technically they co-own RWE, in practice RWE owns them. The saddest thing is that lignite mining is not even commercially viable anymore - so these mines only continue to operate because of state subsidies (federal subsidies, which then partially end up in local councils via said dividends). The terrorists operating the mines claim that it's critical to keep them running because of the jobs that would be lost, but a couple years worth of the subsidy would be sufficient to pay the entire workforce (around 20k people nationwide work in that industry) their salaries for life. Meanwhile solar subsidies got cut for being "too expensive", shrinking that sector by 4x as many jobs. The fuckers now want to accelerate the pace of extraction because they have to shut down by 2038.

<comment><USER6> The jobs at risk are not only those in the coal industry but also the jobs powered by the coal. You can't run a business without electricity. So if coal makes up about a third of the power then about a third of the jobs in Germany could be lost.

Of course coal can and should be replaced by something better but thats gonna take a while and Germany has chosen to phase out nuclear before coal so this is a consequence of that decision.

<comment><USER7> Last year Germany exported about 9% of its electricity. So the country could reduce their use of lignite (~ 24% of total energy produced) by at least this amount.

And I think the math is off there - if Germany cuts 24% of its energy production over a couple of years, energy may become more expensive, driving away the factories using extreme amounts of electricity[1]. It would not result in losing a lot of jobs, and may even force some industries to become much more efficient (thus generating an advantage over competitors).

[1] eg, Aurubis in Hamburg using 1 billion kw/h per year with less than 7000 employees to refine copper

<comment><USER6> Sure but then power lines needs to be built from where the power is produced to where it is used. This is also part of Energiewende but it is not that easy to just put up high voltage lines through a densely populated democracy. It could take years or even decades to build a new grid.

Their competitors are also becoming more efficient over time and if you have no capacity at all in a region no new factories can be built there. High paying jobs could be replaced by low paying jobs.

Not saying it shouldn't be done but I understand it's a political balancing act. Ideally a global carbon tax, making it the same for everyone, would help but i've given up hope on that.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> For someone who has been to Germany the scale and number of windturbines is amazing. It seems odd that they only account for 14% of their electricity production. By comparison I can't remember seeing any solar power infrastructure and yet that accounts for 7%.

<comment><USER9> I don't know where you got your numbers from. Wind power generated 20% of electricity in 2018 and 26% in the first half of 2019.

<comment><USER10> AG Energiebilanzen says its 17.3% for 2019.

Source: [https://www.cleanenergywire.org/factsheets/germanys- energy-c...](https://www.cleanenergywire.org/factsheets/germanys-energy- consumption-and-power-mix-charts)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Democracy Now! also covered the protests at the end of 2017 [1].

[1] [https://www.democracynow.org/2017/11/15/special_report_from_...](https://www.democracynow.org/2017/11/15/special_report_from_the_occupied_forest)

</comment><comment><USER12> OT but the picture of the gigantic machine is a bagger 288. An engineering marvel.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bagger_288?wprov=sfla1](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bagger_288?wprov=sfla1)

</comment><comment><USER13> If interested in some footage from protests and the site in general - [https://twitter.com/JoanieLemercier](https://twitter.com/JoanieLemercier)

</comment><comment><USER14> Capitalism will destroy this planet

<comment><USER15> In case of Germany, it's anti-science anti-nuclear "environmentalists" that are destroying it. Energy is needed regardless of the economic structure of society. Now which kind of energy will it be? Germany chose coal and now they're reaping the consequences.

<comment><USER16> Nuclear was always less than 15% of Germany's primary power consumption. Renewables something like 5%. We need to get to 100% carbon neutral. Whether we have to replace 80 or 100% with wind and solar shouldn't make that much of a difference.

<comment><USER17> Nuclear fission is the only non-carbon technology that could realistically get to 100% supply. Ending its generation in Germany was a mistake.

<comment><USER16> I agree that it was a mistake, but there are several studies showing how Germany can switch to ~100% wind+solar.

<comment><USER17> What do they propose to deal with massive swings in generation and demand? Hydroelectric pumping? Batteries?

<comment><USER16> Build enough batteries and hydro to last for a few hours to a few days and use power-to-gas for longer periods of low generation (e.g. winter and no wind). There is already infrastructure in place for strategic gas reserves. We just need to build additional gas plants to meet demand when wind and solar are at production minimums.

<comment><USER17> But batteries and hydro are extremely expensive at grid-scale. How economically uncompetitive are you willing to make Germany in exchange for not using nuclear?

<comment><USER16> Nuclear is also extremely expensive. Personally I see opportunities in being an early adopter of technologies that have to become quite popular over the next few years if we want to prevent catastrophic climate change, but I'm not enough of an economist to have a strong opinion.

I would also be okay with building some nuclear, put nuclear and renewables don't go very well together, and I believe it's much harder to build enough nuclear plants quickly enough to replace all fossil energy consumption than it is to build enough wind turbines.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> > "It's heavy to see how your home just gets destroyed," says Omo. "The > treehouse that you built and where you lived and where you spent so much > time. And then you see hundreds and hundreds of cops running through your > home. It's a heavy thing to see."

I'm astonished by this hypocrisy. Not only have they squatted on someone else's property, they did it not just to live in a forest, they did it as activists: with the exact purpose of creating the image of police brutality to create public backlash and affect the parties involved.

Even if their cause was completely just and good (which is a different conversation that I'm not prepared to have), they're getting at it by manipulating the media and purposefully creating the coverage they planned. This exact destruction was the main purpose of them building these houses, in this spot, to begin with.

<comment><USER19> Actually squatting is legal within its limit. One might also bring the counterargument that RWE legally squatted other people's properties and evicted them - while creating immense cost for the tax payers. [1] Not everybody was so comfortable with moving away.

'The old Immerath is ... demolished for the Garzweiler II opencast mine. Since 2006, the former residents have been partially relocated to the newly formed village. ... "When I was at the construction site, everything was in ruins. That was a shock. A man from outside approached me and said why we gave up the village without a fight. We resisted for years. People should not think wrong. "' [2]

[1] [https://translate.google.com/translate?hl=en&sl=auto&tl=en&u...](https://translate.google.com/translate?hl=en&sl=auto&tl=en&u=https%3A%2F%2Frp- online.de%2Fwirtschaft%2Frwe-und-vattenfall-braunkohle- kostet-15-milliarden_aid-19710147)

[2] [https://translate.google.com/translate?hl=en&sl=auto&tl=en&u...](https://translate.google.com/translate?hl=en&sl=auto&tl=en&u=https%3A%2F%2Ftaz.de%2FDorf- Umsiedlung-fuer-Braunkohletagebau%2F%215494693%2F)</comment></comment>


Prob best thing I ever coded: See Webpack build progress in your Mac Touchbar - <AUTHOR> https://swizec.com/blog/livecoding-recap-47-webpack-build-progress-indicator-mac-touchbar/swizec/7808 <comment><USER2> This should probably be Show HN instead of "Prob best thing I ever coded"

<comment><AUTHOR> Yep I forgot that HN actually handles those differently.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> so many modals on that page...</comment>