crote

Heck, it was still exporting 2.4GW from the area facing a power shortage! A wakeup call for sure, but nowhere near a blackout.

East-west transmission wouldn't have helped here. France is less than an hour ahead, so the solar curve is going to look virtually identical. What really helped is that France had spare hydro capacity able to quickly compensate for the shortage. If anything, the UK's limited north-south transmission capacity making the use of Scotland's spare capacity impossible should be a bigger priority.

With the grid increasingly relying on decentralized solar and short-term battery storage, you just cannot operate it like you would with a bunch of on-demand essentially-unlimited fossil fuel plants. It is going to need a huge mentality shift from an operational perspective, and a large overhaul of the power trading market in general.

It actually works perfectly fine with many tiny networks, as we have been seeing with IPv4 blocks being carved up into increasingly smaller pieces. You might not be able to get a /12, but with enough cash you can for sure scrape together 2^12 discontinuous /24s, and it'll Just Work.

The tax percentage is irrelevant without the context of what it pays for.

If you live in a country where you pay $400 in taxes but all healthcare is paid for by the government, you are better off than someone living in a country where they have to pay only $300 in taxes - but an additional $200 for private health insurance just to cover what you get for "free".

You also pay taxes on your phone bill, and on stamps, and on the paper you use to write letters.

Easy: it isn't down, it is just "experiencing degraded performance" which impacts "a limited set of customers". It only counts as downtime when nobody can access any part of it!

GitHub CI is a very weird product. My team pays a decent bit of money for it, and we are nowhere near hitting the minutes limit, but at the same time we easily run into the storage limits, and the runner is incredibly slow?

On top of that the tooling is just... not good. The more I use it, the more I get annoyed at weird UX decisions, strange missing features, and the whole thing just being a giant bowl of spaghetti in general. You can easily spend days trying to make your workflows not suck just to realize halfway through that you could've been done already if you had just handwritten the damn thing in Bash.

We now live in the insane world where I am glad our tickets are still in the nightmare called Jira, because every day I get closer to asking management to switch to a forge which is actually functional - and with only CI and Git the transition would not be very difficult...

It would've been a huge liability for Mozilla. An employer is not allowed to discriminate on sexuality. Fire any LGBTQ employee, and there's now a decent chance that Mozilla will now have to prove in court that it didn't have anything to do with the CEO openly hating gay people and creating a hostile work environment.

One of them is a worker drone with very little power, the other is the company's founder and CEO who is openly telling people that he believes a decent chunk of his employees don't deserve basic human rights. Quite a difference there, don't you think?

It can be done, but it would requires additional equipment. Batteries are traditionally grid-following, so they'll just follow whatever frequency the grid is already running on. The frequency itself is then provided by the rotational inertia of "spinning metal" power plants.

But there's no reason that has to be your frequency source. Any single battery installation on its own is perfectly capable of making up some frequency, which is why home power banks with island-mode AC output are a thing - or even just a traditional UPS. Doing the same with thousands of individual battery installations across the grid? You'll need some way to get everyone to agree exactly on frequency and phase, which in practice is probably going to mean getting them to agree on time to within a few microseconds, which could be done (albeit not very sabotage-proof) using GPS.

Yup! Some breaker trips, and a 500MW plant goes offline. How much battery storage do you need to compensate? 500MW. The fact that it stores 500MWh and therefore only lasts an hour comes afterwards, that is plenty of time to ask all the other fossil power plants to scale up a bit.

Trust but verify. You wouldn't drive your car into a lake just because your satnav tells you to, would you?

As we also know from the aviation industry, controllers are human and therefore will make mistakes. A controller shouldn't issue a wrong order, but a driver also shouldn't accept an order they aren't certain about, and there should be technical systems backing both sides of that up.

It doesn't "fall" on the driver, but it doesn't "fall" solely on the controller either. It's a systemic issue, and many pieces have to fail for a disaster to happen.

Whose negligence, though? "The system" isn't just the LZB equipment - the train dispatcher is just another cog inside the same system, and should be expected to occasionally fail just like every mechanical part.

This isn't a game of Hot Potato where the last person touching it goes to jail for gross negligence. You have to look at it through a Swiss Cheese model: every individual safety layer can and will have holes, but a disaster can only occur when all of those holes align.

Why did the LZB system fail? Why did the train dispatcher use the wrong backup procedure? Why did a backup procedure with zero safety checks even exist? Why did the train operator accept this backup procedure? Why did the train allow high-speed driving under those unsafe conditions?

It does indeed seem like the train dispatcher made a big mistake, but that was far from the only thing that went wrong, and it would be myopic to use him as the scapegoat for a far larger systemic issue.

> When union negotiations fail

You don't want trains to collide because sick people are forced to work when they shouldn't and realistically can't.

> when it's too cold

You don't want trains to derail due to rails breaking.

> when it's too hot

You don't want trains to derail due to rails buckling.

> when it snows

You don't want trains to go the wrong way (including into another train) due to switches freezing shut.

> when nature drops a leaf on the railroad tracks

You don't want trains to collide as slippery rails made braking impossible.

> or whenever they come up with a new excuse.

Usually it's a reason, not an excuse. Train people like nothing more than seeing the trains ride past, they don't cancel them unless they absolutely have to. Just because you don't personally understand the reasoning behind it, doesn't mean there isn't one.

And what are you going to do, pull the emergency brake "because an app told me to"?

US rail is an embarrassment.

Giant chunks of it lack basic safety features like crossing gates; there are 4.6 derailments per day; it is considered normal to have trains slow down to near walking pace due to poor track maintenance; electrification is a rounding error; trains routinely sit idling in sidings for huge chunks of the day; railroads are unable to comply with the legally-mandated requirement to let on-time scheduled passenger trains have priority; and high-speed rail basically doesn't exist despite several corridors being the perfect scenario for it.

By any metric except $/ton/mile, US rail is a giant failure. The only reason it still exists is because the US got screwed over by geography and can't make use of waterways for over half the country. Want to ship grain out of Montana, or coal out of Wyoming? You have to use a train, no other option.