Cruise ships need a lot of fuel because of their high speed. In general, sea transport is quite fuel-efficient. And battery technology like liquid redox-flow cells is advancing, too.
BTW the same issue about speed is valid for high velocity trains.
Sadly, cars use about as much fuel per person-kilometer as commercial flights. (I am not sure about the relative cost for take-off at short distances).
Trains are the real alternative - followed by buses (which are on long distance surprisingly efficient).
Oh, and we need more electric trolley buses in cities…
I use it for letters too. It is a breeze to use.
LaTeX is by far easier to use than “word processors” if you want consistent formatting.
Arch is often pictured as some Uber hacker magic which it isn’t. It is a useful collection of software packages with great documentation.
Arch is for example useful if you want to program with new Rust versions, tools like jujutsu, cross-compile for your Sailfish phone, and so on.
(By the way, Guix features now a recent Rust/cargo version, too!)
And both Debian and Arch have advantages / disadvantages, so both are useful for different tasks. Learning Arch is really not a big step or costs much time if you know the foundations of Linux.
exactly
The EU has not even fully reacted to the Cambridge Analytica scandal - an organization that was working with Bannon, Mercer, Russian Money, Farage etc to destroy the EU.
Two of their former employees, Christopher Wylie and Britanny Kaiser, have published books with lots of details what was going on. Also, the Journalist Carole Cadwalladr. Her seminal article “The Great British Brexit Robbery” was first published in The Guardian , but is now censored there; you can still find it online.
Honestly, companies like Facebook should be forbidden in the EU. They work against EUs very existence, and with effective means.
>= 33 years
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what I use now and will very, very likely still use in 10 years
EVs already are much safer than ICEs
That’s new to me. Why exactly?
Are the absolute numbers of Teslas not quite small in relation? I mean if they sell 1 in 2025 and 4 in 2026, it’s a 400% rise - but still not much.
One aspect is that Tesla has a surplus of cars, and low prices. Normally, it takes a few months from ordering to getting and registering a car. Which means that the effects of the war with Iran are not yet registering here.
The main driver for the rise of regristrations in March was apparently a change in EV subsidies which had been canceled the year before.
Oh, and in Germany, car dealers and car companies can and do make certain regristrations,so “x cars registered” is not at all the same thing as “x cars sold to people that use them”. There are also many cars that are sold with heave rebates and sold again after one year, because few people want to pay new car prices.
Oh, and then we have this brilliant high-tech invention.
Actually, it was first devised by a German polymath in 1817, when Europe had just experienced a “year without summer” after the explosion of a big volcano in Indonesia, which led to lack of sunlight, bad harvests, a food crisis. and famine in Europe. As the (unconfirmed) legend goes, this was also affecting horses, and he sought for a way to replace them.
I am sure that if ever empathic aliens would visit planet Earth, they would like the story, much more than the pictures of Hiroshima and Vietnam.
Actually, the progress in solar energy since that, based on fundamental research, automation, battery technology, and so on, is a stunning testimony to human cooperation and ingenuity, like the Covid vaccine. Twenty years ago, the opportunity we have now was hardly imaginable, solar panels were prominently used in spacecraft, the technology we have now would have sounded like pure science fiction.
Paul Krugman writes:
The war goes on, and so does the global energy crisis. In fact, I believe that prices of oil futures remain too low given how much spot prices will need to rise to resolve the shortages that will hit once oil supplies that were shipped before the Strait of Hormuz was closed are exhausted.
I think this should be appreciated and realized more. The Street of Hormuz accounted for 20% of global delivery of oil and gas. Even if Saudi Arabia can re-route 5% through pipelines, the shortfall in supply will be 15%.
The thing is that the physical shortfall is only beginning to reach Western Europe and the US, since oil tankers from the Persian Gulf move slow and take four to six weeks to reach these regions. But current prices and oil futures should reflect that predictable scarcity, and they don’t do that fully.
Since this oil is not there, and will not arrive, prices have to rise so high that 15% of oil demand is destructed. We know both from economic theory as well as from experiences like in 2008 that short-term price elasticity for oil is very low. This reduction of demand will probably not happen by just doing a bit less weekend car driving. Applying logic, we are in for a serious crisis. Our economies have to re-structure to require less energy, in order to stay competitive. (Luckily, there are a lot low-handing fruits that can be harvested now. We had (and used) similar opportunities in the past. One well-known example is moving knowledge work to home office. Another is the transformation of drives in the automation industry from pneumatic drives to electrical ones - this is saving a lot of energy.) All of this requires change.
In the West, the shortage is only starting to become noticeable, in areas like aviation, where the price for jet fuel has now risen by 95%.
Disturbingly, markets and most mass media behave, contrary to the known facts, as if the shortfall would be resolved in a few weeks. (It reminds me in the beginning of the Corona crisis in January 2020, when it was clear that “Houston, we have a problem”, but many countries took more than three full months to react to that problem.) But it will take years to repair the oil infrastructure around the Gulf coast. Given that a global revolution in renewable energy is happening, and future power generation is now replaced rapidly by solar, batteries, and wind it might even happen that some of it never comes back, because it is too uncertain that the cost of repairs become profitable.
You could argue, that this is just a comment by Paul Krugman, who is not exactly an oil expert - just an economist, Nobel Laureate, and expert on international trade. But oil experts are warning, too, that prices will become much higher.
The false appearance that this crisis will be over soon is already harming people, it leads to wrong decisions. For example, some people wait to fill up their storage for heating oil, waiting for lower prices.
If I were a cash-strapped house owner with oil heating and an oil tank, I would not wait, but fill the tank up now, to the brim. Oil will not get cheaper in the next few years. Waiting for cheap heating fuel will only help speculators, as is any talk from the US about ending that war soon.
If I were looking to by a new car (assuming I actually needed one), I would look to buy a used electric one. And without waiting, because the used EV market could be empty soon.
If I were changing jobs and moving home, I’d chose a location and commute with the least commuting distance possible. Including public transport, because it might happen to become very strained, too.
If I were worker in an industry with energy-intensive products, like ICE cars, aviation, construction, paper, long-distance tourism, I would look for a more future-proof job now - because these industries will get massive problems.
Similar clear-sighted decisions have to be taken in companies and industry. For example, according to experts we will likely see a severe shortfall on oil and gas by-products and petrochemicals, things like fertilizer, phosphate, urea, helium, sulphur, and consequently products of these, including food, microchips, plastics, copper, aluminium, and so on.
I do not even know what to say about the humanitarian aspects of this. By what I know, this could well mean a severe worldwide food price crisis, like we had in 2007/2008, and again 2022 / 2023 - both triggered by high oil prices and draught.
Europe has a role in this:
Furthermore, we’ve seen rapid progress in all components of the green energy transformation, even though their underlying technologies have little in common. Solar panels, wind turbines, and batteries are very different, yet all have seen revolutionary improvements. This strongly suggests that the whole renewable energy complex is experiencing a virtuous circle: ever-growing use leads to falling costs and falling costs lead to ever-growing use.
If we ask where this virtuous circle is taking place, the answer is, largely in China with an assist from Europe. And the corollary is “not in America.” The United States has allowed itself to be far surpassed by China and is now only a peripheral player in the renewable revolution. Fortunately for the rest of the world, this means that the Trump administration’s hostility to renewable energy, its attempts to sabotage progress, won’t stop that revolution or even noticeably slow its momentum. True, Trump’s anti-green, pro-pollution tilt will serve to leave America further behind, but progress in fighting climate change and reducing the risks of global dependence on oil will continue.
That’s misinformation,. Rob Pike, Co-Author of the first Unix, described in The Practice Of Programming, a book published in 1999, how they were fuzzing these tools.
some more links, partially a lot more direct:
I am using Unix/Linux for over thirty years now, and the older I get, the more I like it simple.
Debian with Arch in a VM, and Guix as extra package manager on top of both for programming projects. I use Debian for stable stuff and Arch for new stuff.
Stumpwm as manual tiling window manager, or i3wm, or Sway if the first is not available. Somtimes GNOME.
Emacs with language server (lsp-mode) for programming. Vim frequently at work for embedded tasks.
Gollum wiki or Zim wiki for knowledge management.
There are also wave power devices like the Pelamis wave energy converter, which have a high potential and make a lot of sense in Eoropean countries with ocean coasts, like France, Portugal, the UK, Ireland and Scotland, and Norway. In the case of the Pelamis Wave Energy Converter, E.ON, a fossil energy company, has killed the project, but apparently the Chinese are continuing to work on it.
We do have a global shortage.