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Cake day: June 17th, 2023

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  • Solar is ahead of biomass and while solar and wind is growing, biomass is not. You’re also misreading the graph. Nuclear was never such a huge part of Germany’s energy production and killing nuclear was a 25 year long process, Germany let most of the plants run and just did not build new ones

    While I agree that getting rid of coal first would have been the better strategy, I don’t get this nuclear power fetish and constant bashing of Germany on this while most countries are doing worse than Germany. Nuclear power is extremely expensive, we have as of now no storage solution for nuclear waste in Germany and Germany has no source of nuclear material itself. There are quite a few drawbacks





  • Oh my god, I fought the urge to stop reading when I read Blockchain and read further and it kept getting worse.

    Uber takes over some tasks that a distributed system cannot easily do:

    • Handle disputes between driver and customer
    • Vetting drivers
    • Monitoring cars so that if a driver abducts you authorities can find you
    • Taking over development and maintenance of the system
    • Marketing

    The article shows no practical solution for any of these problems. Many of the so-called solutions are down-right comical. For example:

    As soon as the driver adds the basic information, the legal authorities are notified through smart contracts to perform background checks on the created profile.

    So vetting shall be done by the state instead of a company. So instead of customers, tax payers should pay for it. I’m sure governments will be lining up to take on the responsibility and for me as a tax payer: hell no! I want my taxes to go into public transport and not into this bullshit.

    Also, let’s be gracious and assume that blockchains and smart contracts in general solve a problem that actually exists, you would need smart contracts in case there is no neutral third party that can verify the validity of something. Why would you need that for a process where legal authorities are already involved? If you have an actual authority involved there’s an easier and faster solution: a database. Doesn’t sound as sexy does it?

    Similarly, the legal authorities would conduct the same due diligence checks for the riders to ensure the safety of drivers as well.

    Lol, sure they will.

    When the rider reaches the desired destination, the ride will end automatically. The payment from the rider’s wallet will be deducted automatically through smart contracts and transferred to the driver’s wallet.

    GPS locations can be forged easily. How would such a system reliably without a third party authority determine whether the ride ended? Scams in this system from both parties would be rampant.

    And from a customer perspective: why would I need a crypto wallet for this shit? I want to use my credit card! So I need a third party to handle the payment and I sure as hell am not trusting a random driver with no oversight with my credit card information.

    So to sum it up: that system solves actually none of the problems. You still need third parties involved such as payment providers and authorities, stuff Uber handles for you. You still need a third party handling disputes, which is unsolved in this article and you still need massive investment in R&D (more than a classical system) and marketing but now without a business model as an incentive for anyone to actually do this. Then you get even more problems because now you need to get government authorities involved. As you have no company with resources backing this, there is nobody capable of negotiating with these governments. Not to mention tech support to actually set up the system.