• 0 Posts
  • 120 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
cake
Cake day: June 24th, 2023

help-circle






  • While I agree that the cost of operation and yield are a valid concern, the same argument could have been used against renewable energies like wind and solar only 30 to 40 years ago.

    The price of these energy sources has come down a lot since, for a large part thanks to the modern day widespread use. We have a lot of experience generating power this way which drives down cost, and increases yield.

    Novel techniques like the one described in the article don’t yet benefit from that experience and scale. And if we don’t try new things every now and then they never will.

    That is not to say all novel techniques will be equally fruitful, but if you don’t occasionally try new things you will never learn.

    Edit: Misspelled “energy” as “energie”




  • Citizen’s Initiatives are great, but I’m not sure they are the right mechanism in this case.

    They are meant to make parliament address a concern, and not to inform legislators how you feel about a law proposal that is already on the table. All a Citizen’s Initiative does is force the European parliament to address a concern if a certain threshold of signatures is met. They will be doing that anyway when the law proposal is being voted on.

    And on top of that, the time frame for a Citizen’s Initiative is too long (over a year) to be a meaningful shield against Chat Control.

    Contacting your representatives to the European Parliament is probably the best way forward at this point.


  • I’m not sure how contacting my representatives in the European Parliament over something that I am concerned about, would be spam.

    I don’t care what party they are from, or what part of the country they are from. They are still my representatives.
    They sit there to represent the concerns of their constituents in parliament, and they cannot effectively do that if they do not know the concerns of their constituents.

    If you have good ideas for collective action I’d love to hear them, but until then shooting an email can never hurt.

    Edit: Just so there is no confusion, I don’t think signing a four year old change.org petition is any more effective than directly contacting your MEPs



  • The EU is a democracy.

    While it’s not perfect (no system is), each of the bodies that make up the EU legislature are democratic:

    • The European Parliament is directly elected in European elections every five years
    • The European Commission is made up of commissioners from each country, which are in turn appointed by their democratically elected governments
    • The European Council consists of the heads of state or governance, which are also democratically elected in the respective countries.
    • The Council of the European Union is made up of government ministers, which are appointed by the democratically elected governments.

    Not every body is directly voted on, but each body comes forth from a democratic election

    Edit: The message I responded to originally made the claim that the “EU is no democracy.”







  • I wish there was a good alternative to YouTube. I’ve been meaning to host a Peertube instance but that process is really not as straightforward as it should be if they want the platform to gain widespread adoption

    Google Maps has pretty decent alternatives though:

    • For simply browsing the map I use OpenStreetMaps on desktop, and Organic Maps on mobile.
    • For navigation (by car) I used to use Waze (which is also owned by Google), but I’ve switched back to good ol’ TomTom

    As for iPhone… personally I have a Google Pixel which I’m going to keep using till I can’t anymore. After that I’m probably switching to Fairphone. They’re a European company and their phones are right up my alley