belorn

> There are millions of adult citizens without valid government issues photo ID acceptable and who cannot reasonably afford to get it. Before you say that states offer free ID, it is not the cost of the ID itself that is the issue. It is the cost of getting supporting documents.

To use Sweden as an example, there is no need for supporting documents. When a person here want a passport or national ID, and they don't already have a valid id, all they need is someone else with an valid ID to sign the paper. It can be a coworker, a teacher, a relative, or basically anyone with some form of relation to the person. The same apply for voting, so someone can go and vote as long they have a second person with an ID willing to sign that they are who they claim to be. Not a single paper required and all they need to do is say their name and date of birth.

No birth recipient, no electrical bill, no tax receipt, no money, nor any other paper which is honestly a less secure system that simply having already identified person signing a legally binding paper.

What I read from the last wave is that supermarket changes how cold freezers will run depending on how much customers they expect that will open and close the doors. Just having the freezers adapt based on the temperature of every single moment cost too much electricity or can result in unsafe temperatures.

> handwritten papers und excel, sharepoint and dozens other locations like ancient proprietary software

This area is one which AI has shown to be pretty good (as long as some error rate is acceptable). Character recognition, voice transcribing, converting documents from one standard to an other. I can see an argument that if people spent most time doing those things, AI will speed it up (with a bit of added errors).

I am reminded however that in translations and AI generated subtitles, there is still a lot to be desired compared to the human touch. Handwritten papers in a different language, using local short hand and assumptions, may result in some odd and error prone AI transcription.

The harm from deforestation comes from multiple sources. It increase the harmful effect of storms, flooding, and perhaps counter intuitively also forest fires.

Modern plantation forest involve draining of water, and that causes green house gases to be released. After logging, the area also release more green house gases during the first 20 years then they pick up. Logging also changes the level of ground water, and how much of the ground water get filtered, which in turn reduces quality of the water downstream. Logging also increase erosion, which has it own set of risk to humans.

> I don't recall suggesting powering a nation - just pointing out that there's an acceptable attrition rate for forests.

The article is about nuclear power plants, in the context of the UK green party. In order for wood to be an alternative it would need to be able to provide energy in a green, sustainable, and national independent way. Power plants that burn wood pellets do exist, but how green and how sustainable they are is debatable. It also questionable if they will just use wood, or if they mix it in with other even less green and less sustainable fuels, but sells the energy as green energy produced on waste products.

Burning wood waste is primarily a green washing method. True tree waste is very minimal today in quantity, and most wood "waste" is actually used for a lot of products like paper and ply wood, and what is left to burn when everything is used are not enough to power a nation for any duration. In term of pollution it reduces air quality, and in term of sustainability there aren't enough forests around to use wood as the main fuel for all the power needs we have when renewables can't deliver.

Burning wood has at best similar environmental impact as beef. In theory it can be produced using just "waste", but we have to extend the word "waste" beyond recognition when production is scaled up and the profit-maximizing locusts become part of the picture. The world is suffering from deforestation.

We are not talking about using garden waste to burn a log in a open fire place, but rather grid sized power plants and central heating plants. I should however mention that there are air quality reports that points to issues with individual homes burning wood inside cities. Open air fireplaces do not scale well with dense population areas.

If we look at mining companies, we kind of know that society will carry most of the risk and negative externalities, so regulations must exist to limit how and to what degree companies can operate.

If a mining company extract lead and silver from the ground, we kind of know that they won't be around to safeguard waste for all eternity, nor will they be able to restore the environment when the company eventually goes bankrupt. If society want to allow such commercial operations then it need to also strike a balance so that society don't have to bear too much of the negative externalities.

In Sweden, the goverment here owns the energy company that operate the nuclear power plants and the mining company.

Such anti-nuclear has some validity, but only if we can agree that burning fuel for energy and heat should not continue. Constructing new power plants and central heating systems that rely on burning fuel should be imminently stopped, and all existing plants should have their remaining life time determined and then sunset when they reach it. Any argument of external factors for nuclear are dwarfed by the external factors from burning fuel for energy and heat, double so for profit-maximizing locusts and warmongering oligarchs.

The biggest reason the world is seeing more active was is that we are dependent on a few unstable countries for our energy needs. Solar and wind power can produce very cheap energy when the weather is optimal, but suboptimal weather can equally produce extremely expensive prices to the point where social and economical stability start to break down. We are giving money to warmongering oligarchs because of the fear of what happens if prices goes up to high, which would not happen if energy and heating infrastructure was secure and geopolitical independent.

Sure, there are third parties. It just that people associate that with wasted votes.

The way Sweden taxes stocks is to give people a choice between two options. They can either tax the total change in ownership value between each year (profit vs loss), or to pay a fixed (lower) tax on the total value regardless of profit or loss.

The first option guaranties that you don't pay more in taxes than you earn on the stocks, and the later has higher risk vs reward. For some reasons, the later seems to be the most popular choice, despite the risk that the owner need to cover the cost of taxes regardless of what happens in the stock market.

Please become political and get party platforms to invest into massive sodium-ion batteries farms for northern Europe like Denmark, Germany, Poland, Sweden, Finland and so on. There are no political party that has that as a strategy, and those that reject nuclear are instead promoting thermal power plants as the solution to the problem of variability in energy production from renewables. Even the green party, or to be precise the strategy that they pioneered and others on the left adapted, is to build thermal power plants today that burn natural gas and bio fuels, and then wait for green hydrogen. There is no political interests to change that strategy to sodium-ion batteries farms. To make just one such example, south of Sweden strated construction this spring for a fresh new thermal power plant and CCS, owned by local government that is run by a coalition of left and green. Instead of putting millions into emission producing thermal power plants they could build that cheaper and better sodium-ion batteries.

I know multiple people who would have voted for the green party, but decided to not do that because of their investments and political drive towards thermal power plants. The only political alternative to parties pushing for thermal power plants is those that want nuclear power.

The historical narrative is fairly straight forward. In the early 2000 the green party created a strategy to address climate change, and the main part of that was green hydrogen created from renewable energy. The idea was to replace existing oil and coal in the power grid with gas power plants, and in transportation it would replace diesel and gasoline.

From that two transition strategies was formed together with political alliances. The far left has opposed nuclear energy since the 60s, and hydrogen was a superior fuel without any of the drawbacks of nuclear, and so the green and the far left could join on this strategy. The center left and center right was also happy to build cheap natural gas power plants, reducing energy and heating costs for the working class, and provide new jobs. The natural gas power plants could be converted to hydrogen, which was the basis for declaring natural gas as "green" in EU, pushed by this coalition of political parties.

The strategy did not work out and green hydrogen never became economical viable, but despite this it is still the primary strategy for the green party. With climate change advocates in Germany being generally associated with the green party, the strategy being pushed end up being anti-nuclear and pro-natural gas. Abandoning this strategy would mean loosing the political alliances with the far left and center, and thus they are stuck with a failing strategy.

If those religious groups has views that undermining the constitutional order, then Germany could prosecute them. That is the underlying legal argument. The basic law give every German the right to any belief or non-belief, but then it also limit that freedom in case it undermines the law itself. Does the religion opposes human dignity, do it support democracy, and do it support the rule of law in Germany. Teaching that say that same-sex marriage is wrong could be seen as opposing human dignity, thus not allowed under the basic law.

Do we have any example of a "good" country that has banned political parties for holding the wrong political views? The most recent example I can remember is Russia when they prevented a anti-war party for participating in the election, but I doubt that is example that people want Germany to follow.

The German constitution allow the legal system to limit the fundamental rights of individuals who are found to be undermining the constitutional order. It can punish people as well as preventing people to form political parties. If the political views are so bad that they are seen as undermining the constitutional order, allowing people to hold those views and express them but not to form parties seems odd and counter-intuitive. If the views are that bad they should not be expressed regardless if its done with or without a party hat.

Why banning a political party and not the political views? It seems easier to punishing people based on what they say and write and throw them into prison, rather than trying to keep the same people from assembling together as a group and having people vote for them.

Make it illegal to hold and express the view that people should not be allowed to wearing the burqa. If someone is express that they are against same-sex marriage or against circumcision for non-medical reasons, let them sit in jail for a few years. Why allow people to legally hold those view and express them but then forbid them from being political about it?

Culture is as mutable as borders of nations. Culture and nations are often seen as synonymous, to the point where one often get defined by the other.

Valuing a nations culture, values in society, borders, and maintain coherence within society are not far right idea. All political platforms strive more or less for those things, through they do differ on what values they want to focus on and deploy different strategies.

In this email leak, it is all emails from members of the party, not just elected officials. It is also emails sent from the outside to party members. Is that going too far if it would be scaled to all political parties, or should becoming a political member be enough that waiving privacy rights is a fair expectation? In term of transparency, allowing the public to see everything that happens and communicate within a political party would give some insight in what kind of people a party is made from.

Sweden is fairly well know for its public access to official records, and any email sent to an official position in government is part of the public accessible record. Politicians however all have private emails and are users of instance messages services that are not part of the public record. Public access is also only for the public role in government, not for example the role of being the party leader.

Would it be a good thing or bad thing if this was scaled up so email servers and instance messages services was all public if the message involved a member of a political party, without allowing any back channel or ways to avoid the public record?

To give people a bit of insight into the domain registry industry, when a registrar increase domain prices there are generally four reason why they do it.

1) The registrar want to increase its margins.

2) The registry upstream increased their price. For .com, Verisign agreement with ICANN allow Verisign to increase the price by 7% in each of the final four years of every six-year cycle. As such they increased it in 2024 and will do so again on November 1, 2026.

3) The registrar is not a direct registrar and uses a middle man, and the middle man want to increase its margins.

4) The buyer or the registrar is operating on a different currency than the registry, and the registrar is compensating for changes in the currency valuation.

The study is not showing what you think it do:

> system costs are comprised by overcapacity of the technology itself, electrolysers and hydrogen storage, back-up power, influence on spinning reserve and transmission systems cost.

Green hydrogen storage solution has shown to be much more expensive than what earlier studies predicted, and are still not economical competitive to be used in industries that need the hydrogen itself rather than burning it for electricity.

> Thus, the simulation of, e.g., nuclear power involves back-up-power and peak-load power in order to cover all hourly electricity demands in a least-cost manner

This is an assumption that they don't explore.

> It should be emphasized that all the alternatives have exactly the same use of biomass and they all contribute with carbon for CCU, CCS and biochar to achieve a fully climate neutral society in all sectors including agriculture, industrial processes and LULUCF.

Again, they explicitly claim that all their solutions must burn fuel for electricity.

> The “LC mix biomass restricted” alternative is still comprised by a least-cost combination of offshore wind power (84%), solar PV (13%) and CCGT (3%)

> CCGT and therefore also the least-cost mix either use natural gas or biomethane

CCGT, as is thermal power plants, which is what is exactly what Sweden is constructing and what I linked above. A combination of wind, solar, and burning fuel for power. The difference between LC mix biomass restricted and least cost mix is how much fuel that grid is expected to burn.

Their model of just 3% CCGT do fly a bit against what Denmark is doing. They have over 100% wind capacity, and yet need to import almost 50% of the energy demand. Reducing that imports to 3% seems a bit like wishful thinking.

If the intent was disprove the need for thermal power plants by linking to that study, then the study itself disproves that in no unclear terms. The result of the study is that combining wind, solar and gas is the cheapest strategy to generate electricity.

It also need to be done without carbon rich fuel that releases green house emissions.

You need to realign what you think is reality and what reality actually is. Look at the studies again and you will see that building new renewables is cheaper in terms of increasing the total amount of exported electricity and for expanding total amount of electricity produced over the year, not to fill in during periods of high demand and low supply. Producing electricity regardless of demand is a different question that producing electricity when there is demand for it. There is also a very significant price difference between electricity bought at the cheapest possible point vs the most expensive. Producing the cheapest energy, but only during periods when the price of energy is cheapest, does not make for the cheapest energy overall.

And if you want to believe a different reality, please convince the political parties in Sweden, Denmark, Finland and so on to replace existing thermal power plants with renewable energy, and to stop construction of new ones! The green party in Sweden went into the election that we had just a few weeks ago on a energy platform that said: Thermal power plants are essential to enable renewable energy and keep prices low. Not even they believe that you can replace thermal power plants with only renewable energy and storage. Their local branch in south of Sweden is part of the coalition that approved and support the current construction of the new thermal power plant, together with the carbon capture plan.

Not that people read sources, but here is the reality check (all naturally in Swedish):

https://www.energinyheter.se/20251021/33900/nytt-varmekraftv... - The construction of the new thermal power plant

https://www.energinyheter.se/20261002/35404/oresundskraft-in... - The addition of carbon capture and storage (CCS)

https://www.mp.se/politik/energi/ and https://www.di.se/debatt/sank-priserna-satsa-pa-fjarr-och-kr... - The Swedish Green Party and their view of thermal power plants

In this kind of debates people often forget how far north Sweden just happens to be. Solar farms has their average production output down to single digit percent during the worst months. At the same time, those months also see an increase to around double consumption of electricity demand compared to the warmest months. Solar production has a negative correlation to electricity demand in Sweden.

Wind has a slight positive correlation to demand, but the storage requirement for wind can be calculated as weeks/months compared to hours for solar.

Sweden also has a free market for electricity without any price roofs. That mean prices can be zero for long periods during the summer when solar is overproducing, but it can also reach over €1 per kw/h during periods of supply shortage. Have the record price for 5 days and have the remaining 360 days free of charge, and you would still end up paying more than if you paid the average cost for a full year (to be fair, in the cheapest of the 4 energy regions).

To add some more aspect for the Swedish energy grid, currently the south of Sweden that is connected to the Danish and German grid are suffering from significant supply shortage. The main power plant to address this is an old Oil power plant that was supposed to exist only as reserve energy, but have since a few years now been running every day throughout the year.

There is construction of more new thermal power plants. The two main strategy to solve the shortage, split along the two political lines, is either nuclear or to combine wind power with power plants burning bio fuel and then carbon capture the emissions (both being technologies with absolutely zero controversies). The later is what is being constructed right now, while nuclear might see construction in the future.

IP address space and the domain name system are centralized with defined roots, and IANA/RIPE could have removed russia from the internet a long time ago. A primary reason why they have not done this is what happen after the war is over, at which point the west would have Internet with root A, and Russia would have Internet with root B, and recombining A and B would be a very difficult and likely to last longer than transitioning completely from IPv4 to IPv6.

If there is a central and core theme with the Internet and all the organizations that manage the core infrastructure is the effort to avoid splitting the root.

We have had viruses leaked by other countries in the past, with US and Germany coming to mind. If I remember right it was around 2005-2010 when democratic nations officially started to state that they had a right to use malware against criminals and military targets, and from that on it has just kept going. As I recall, Bruce Schneier and FSF made a bit of articles and talks where they tried to get people to understand that once democratic nations starts to use malware offensively they also generally stop protecting their citizens from those security holes.

That we don't hear about it more often seems to me that nations that develop this stuff seem to have gotten better in making malware more precise in what they target and less leaky to the general population, but it could also be that media just don't report about it as much. When a gangs anonymous chat get hacked, or a tor hidden service website get taken down, news seems more interested in talking about the crime than what security vulnerability that the police used.

People warned about this 20 years ago when Facebook had started to gain world wide popularity. The basis for the claim that privacy is required for democracy is grounded on the idea that giving up the control of information to a selected few are incompatible with freedom of thought, freedom of assembly, and freedom of expression, and all of it is required for the basic functions of a democracy. A fair election, a fair legal system, and a fair press, all of it require that people have some direct control over their own information flows.

"Beware of he who would deny you access to information, for in his heart he dreams himself your master". In the first decade of the 20th century we kind of know it was true but didn't really act on it. During the second decade, popularity of fake news drove some to reject the idea, arguing that some masters are actually a good thing since that prevent the masses to get the wrong information, believing that platforms should act as the police to prevent people with megaphones. Now during the third decade we are starting to see what happen when such masters are giving free range to use their power, including working with or against governments depending on their own interests and with zero regards for society.

We had a very public case in south of Sweden where a woman asked chat-gpt last year about how a failed rape attempt would look like and where in the local park there would be spots without any cameras, a full day before she reported to have been followed and attacked in that park. Quite recently the court found her guilt of filling a false police report, citing among other things the chat log (the police spent over 400 work hours on the initial report).

It is the first case I seen in the news of LLM logs being used as evidence.

The green party in Sweden went into the election we had a few weeks ago on a energy platform that said: thermal power plants are a necessary to enable renewable energy and keep prices low.

Solar in Sweden produce on average single digit percent during the worst months, while energy consumption doubles. This is the background why they define thermal power plant as necessary to enable renewable energy.

If the strategy is to build thermal power plants to enable renewables, then nuclear seems like a better option. If it does not need thermal power plants, then renewables and batteries are cheaper, safer, and better in basically every way. The "Fossil fuel people disguised as" can surely be both advocates for renewable and nuclear, but one of the most clear example we have was when Germany forced through EU regulations that defined natural gas as green. It does not get more clean cut than that, except maybe when the Swedish green party leader defended an oil power plant during a political debate and called it a "natural part" of the Swedish energy strategy.

There is a new thermal power plant being built in south of Sweden, built with support from local government which the green is part of, and guess what technology they are combining it with? CCS! The carbon they capture will then be sent to Norwegian oil wells, and they have said they will try really hard to use electric trucks for it.

Taste is very individual. I personally can't stand the taste of dry beans, to the point where I have a strong aversion just to the texture itself. Fresh green beans can be fine (usually has a sweet or acidic taste), and beans used in Asian food like glass noodles or soy source don't taste like beans at all to me.

When people talk about eating more beans, or when people talk about using it as an ingredient, it usually only mean dry beans.

Sweden accept multiple citizenship even in cases where the other country do not, so the "stricter" country do not win out automatically. The Swedish government position is that it do not care what the other country think, and that it is the individual person responsibility to manage any complication that multiple citizenship might have.

Multiple citizenship is handled with quite a bit variance over the globe, including those we call democracies. - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiple_citizenship

Citizenship obligations for multiple citizenship is quite interesting from a legal perspective. Some citizenship require taxation regardless of where one live, which makes it possible to have a requirement to pay taxation to multiple countries. Military service is also an other interesting aspect. Giving people with multiple citizenship more rights than people with single citizenship would naturally cause problems, and yet you don't want citizens with different rights as that would indeed create different classes of citizenship.

A person can also end up with one citizenship in a country that allows multiple citizenship, and one which does not, and the citizenship of the person then depend on which country is being asked.