Nonsense. Germany closed it's last hard coal mine in 2015 and electricity production from hard coal declined from 127 TWh in 2013 to 83 TWth in 2018. Lignite is still surface-mined and power production is more stable but also on decline (161 TWh in 2015 to 146 TWh in 2018).Source: https://www.ag-energiebilanzen... With this just announced plan, it is clear it is on it's way out.
Agreed. However, there is a modicum of logic to the notion of looking for a possible connection. Free will by definition has to be at least partially non-deterministic
No, I don't think so. Something is free when it is controlled by itself and not restricted from the outside. It is free if it follows its own internal processes which could be deterministic or not. Whether a decision is made by a deterministic algorithm or role of dice simply has no logical relationship to whether it is free or non-free. Yes, I know many people think otherwise, but I think they are wrong.
But the difference only comes from artificially splitting mind, and brain into unrelated parts. But if the mind is an emergent property of the while brain as a system this does not make any sense. The part which makes the decision and the part which becomes aware of are all integrated into a complex system which together produces the mind. So it is not a contradiction that the mind makes the decision and is aware of it and the same time different parts of the brain are involved in this process.
I don't understand. A part of the brain that would make the decision. After the decision is made the brain (maybe other parts) may become aware of it. What does not make sense?
There is no evidence. But there is not even a single good argument (not even to speak of a theory) why the features of quantum mechanics would somehow help to explain free-will. It is just sloppy thinking along the lines: Well, we do not understand how consciousness and free-will works and we also find quantum mechanics a mysterious and fascinating so how about QM explains consciousness. Of course, postulation the connection between two not fully understood things is not an explanation in the sense of science.
I think free-will can exist without consciousness. And yes, I think it makes sense that a decision must exist before we can become aware of it. How could it be different?
Consciousnesses and free-will can exist even with a traditional model of the brain as a machine. I never understood why people see a fundamental problem here and then feel the need to introduce magical "solution" to this problem based on pseudo-science. The contradiction appears if you think about yourself as some ghost sitting elsewhere that controls the body. Then everything which is locally decided (by neurons etc) takes away the freedom of the ghost to control the body. But if you think about consciousness and free-will as an emergent property there is no contradiction. Having an explanation of some process on the level of neurons does not mean it can not be a free decision when described at a higher level. They are both the same so saying one controls (or takes freedom away) from the other does not make any sense.
And the other thing is: Not the funding agency decides that you should have a lot of nature papers to get the grant. The reviewers of your grant decide whether it is good or not. So again, even if you have lazy reviewer who only looks at the nature papers published by the applicant instead of properly reviewing the grant, it is *only* momentum that nature and co. are the prestigious journals and not some other open access journals.
Well, I oversimpified a bit;-) But the main cost requested in most individual grant applications in most fields is certainly for research personnel such as postdocs and Phd students and this is be similar in mathematics. Anyway, I regularly review grant applications and I don't care where something was published.
You are assuming that the revenue stream goes into peer-review and quality control. But this not how the system works: Peer view and quality control is done by volunteers. And there are open access journals which have high standards and are highly regarded. The reason the existing system still persists is *only* due to momentum. Publishing in journals such as nature, science, and many similar is very prestigious and therefor this is what people try to do. But that this is mostly due to momentum can be seen in mathematics: Many editors and complete editorial boards quit in protest to the high cost of Elsevier journals and founded new journals as replacement: Now often these replacement journals took over. Sadly,scientists in other fields are not as smart and organized.
It will go down in the future as it is mainly for old installations whose garantueed feed-in tariff will run out sooner or later while the cost of new wind and solar is much lower now. It is also important to understand that is was an intentional political decision to support renewables by a feed-in tariff which is paid directly from electricity prices. Coal and nuclear also got (and still get) a substantial amount subsidies but those are hidden in general taxes. Still, the high electricity price is a problem because it hits the poor, but one has to keep in mind that German households also consume much less electricity (due to better efficiency) than US households, so the overall energy bill is not as high as one might expect. Also the percentage of households who have trouble paying their electricity bills is still smaller than most of the rest of europe and certainly much smaller than in the US.
You also need backup for nuclear because a plant may go offline because of some fault or because it is too hot outside. The truth is that you always have a lot of reserve power plants in a grid and you have large grids to compensate for local loss of power generation. In fact, France often relies on Germany to provide power because many nuclear plants went offline. Germany with a power mix and 40% renewables never relied on electricity from elsewhere.
The conclusion of the people who did this study is not what you claim is. Instead the strongest statement about renewables is "The noise amplitude tends to increase with the shares of intermittent renewables." But no claim is made that this "compromises grid stability" or even that this is the biggest source of noise in the system. Instead the key finding is that trading has a big impact:
"At first glance, a typical recording of the grid frequency (Fig. 1) reveals that it coincides extremely well with the nominal grid reference frequency, highlighting the efficiency of today’s frequency control. Only rarely do we observe large deviations from the nominal frequency. These large disturbances often occur when a new power dispatch has been settled on by trading (every 15 minutes), introducing jumps and fluctuations of the frequency"
The strongest statement in the scientific paper is "The noise amplitude tends to increase with the shares of intermittent renewables." One of the key findings is that trading causes relatively huge fluctuations which occur every 15 minutes as trading occurs at this interval. So claiming that "renewables compromise grid stability" is very much exaggerated.
Only 23% of the price are surcharge for renewables, it only one of several reasons why the price in Germany is high (and it was relatively high even before the roll-out of renewables). And this was an intentional political decision. Of course, one could also have hidden this in general taxes similar to the subsidies for fossil fuel or nuclear. Finally, this reflects subsidies for renewables installed in the past. And these had the intended effect of creating a market. You might have noticed that price dropped dramatically. Wind power is now competitive and solar is close. These is why there is boom. In contrast, nobody builds nuclear. Guess why? it is not actually competitive.
And it was a very deliberate political decision to not hide it in general taxes but make the price of electricity higher. The idea is to encourage saving which also works. And yes, poorer people are never happy about higher prices but it is still not a major burden. I would rather be poor in Germany with high electricity prices and social subsidies and free healthcare than most anywhere else.
No. Official numbers are here: https://www.ag-energiebilanzen... Germany has net exports of 55 TWh of electricity in 2017. It produced 216 TWh of electricity from renewables which is 33% of total production. Energiewende works fine. It is France which once in a while has to import from Germany because nuclear is not too reliable (e.g. in sommer when it gets to hot) or because they have to shut down a large part of the fleet for maintance.
A psychological puzzle of the modern world are people who think nuclear is a solution to anything although it has repeatedly shown to be an economical failure.
I guess the 216 TWh of electricity generated by renewables produced in Germany in 2017 (33% of all electricity generated) is a placebo effect then. Or somebody here lives in its own alternative reality where renewables don't work.
What do you mean by energy-short Germans? Germany exports a huge amount of electricity. One third of its production is produced by renewables. Why would this not work for France? Population density is much lower than in Germany.
For what it's worth C is especially awful because, in addition to the basic bounds checks every normal language has, so much of its behavior is "undefined", yet developers are actively encouraged to take advantage of its undefined behavior to achieve useful work.
No. "Undefined" nowadays essentially means that it is illegal what you are doing and nobody is encouraged to take advantage of it. It depends on the compiler what happens: Often the compiler assumes that "undefined behaviour" cannot happen and it can use this fact for optimization. But alternatively it could also add a run-time check, e.g. for bounds checking.
Out-of-bounds accesses are undefined behaviour so a C compilers can already add run-time bounds checking. To some degree this is already possible, e.g. use gcc -fsanitize=bounds
Slashdot Mirror
Nonsense. Germany closed it's last hard coal mine in 2015 and electricity production from hard coal declined from 127 TWh in 2013 to 83 TWth in 2018. Lignite is still surface-mined and power production is more stable but also on decline (161 TWh in 2015 to 146 TWh in 2018).Source: https://www.ag-energiebilanzen... With this just announced plan, it is clear it is on it's way out.
Agreed. However, there is a modicum of logic to the notion of looking for a possible connection. Free will by definition has to be at least partially non-deterministic
No, I don't think so. Something is free when it is controlled by itself and not restricted from the outside. It is free if it follows its own internal processes which could be deterministic or not. Whether a decision is made by a deterministic algorithm or role of dice simply has no logical relationship to whether it is free or non-free.
Yes, I know many people think otherwise, but I think they are wrong.
But the difference only comes from artificially splitting mind, and brain into unrelated parts. But if the mind is an emergent property of the while brain as a system this does not make any sense. The part which makes the decision and the part which becomes aware of are all integrated into a complex system which together produces the mind. So it is not a contradiction that the mind makes the decision and is aware of it and the same time different parts of the brain are involved in this process.
I don't understand. A part of the brain that would make the decision. After the decision is made the brain (maybe other parts) may become aware of it. What does not make sense?
There is no evidence. But there is not even a single good argument (not even to speak of a theory) why the features of quantum mechanics would somehow help to explain free-will. It is just sloppy thinking along the lines: Well, we do not understand how consciousness and free-will works and we also find quantum mechanics a mysterious and fascinating so how about QM explains consciousness. Of course, postulation the connection between two not fully understood things is not an explanation in the sense of science.
I think free-will can exist without consciousness. And yes, I think it makes sense that a decision must exist before we can become aware of it. How could it be different?
Consciousnesses and free-will can exist even with a traditional model of the brain as a machine. I never understood why people see a fundamental problem here and then feel the need to introduce magical "solution" to this problem based on pseudo-science. The contradiction appears if you think about yourself as some ghost sitting elsewhere that controls the body. Then everything which is locally decided (by neurons etc) takes away the freedom of the ghost to control the body. But if you think about consciousness and free-will as an emergent property there is no contradiction. Having an explanation of some process on the level of neurons does not mean it can not be a free decision when described at a higher level. They are both the same so saying one controls (or takes freedom away) from the other does not make any sense.
And the other thing is: Not the funding agency decides that you should have a lot of nature papers to get the grant. The reviewers of your grant decide whether it is good or not. So again, even if you have lazy reviewer who only looks at the nature papers published by the applicant instead of properly reviewing the grant, it is *only* momentum that nature and co. are the prestigious journals and not some other open access journals.
Well, I oversimpified a bit ;-) But the main cost requested in most individual grant applications in most fields is certainly for research personnel such as postdocs and Phd students and this is be similar in mathematics. Anyway, I regularly review grant applications and I don't care where something was published.
You are assuming that the revenue stream goes into peer-review and quality control. But this not how the system works: Peer view and quality control is done by volunteers. And there are open access journals which have high standards and are highly regarded. The reason the existing system still persists is *only* due to momentum. Publishing in journals such as nature, science, and many similar is very prestigious and therefor this is what people try to do. But that this is mostly due to momentum can be seen in mathematics: Many editors and complete editorial boards quit in protest to the high cost of Elsevier journals and founded new journals as replacement: Now often these replacement journals took over. Sadly,scientists in other fields are not as smart and organized.
CO2 is on a downward trend in Germany (at a much smaller per capita level than the US):
https://knoema.com/atlas/Germa...
For 2017 to 2018 CO2 emissions decreased by 6%. https://www.ag-energiebilanzen...
Electricity prices also didn't really increase it seems:
https://www.energy-charts.de/t...
Of course, residential electricity price are rather high.
https://www.statista.com/stati...
But the renewable surchagre is onlyl part of this:
https://1-stromvergleich.com/p...
It will go down in the future as it is mainly for old installations whose garantueed feed-in tariff will run out sooner or later while the cost of new wind and solar is much lower now. It is also important to understand that is was an intentional political decision to support renewables by a feed-in tariff which is paid directly from electricity prices. Coal and nuclear also got (and still get) a substantial amount subsidies but those are hidden in general taxes. Still, the high electricity price is a problem because it hits the poor, but one has to keep in mind that German households also consume much less electricity (due to better efficiency) than US households, so the overall energy bill is not as high as one might expect. Also the percentage of households who have trouble paying their electricity bills is still smaller than most of the rest of europe and certainly much smaller than in the US.
Finally, the exit from nuclear power had wide support in the German population:
https://www.unendlich-viel-ene...
Having said all this, shutting down nuclear plants first instead of coal plans was clearly a mistake.
You also need backup for nuclear because a plant may go offline because of some fault or because it is too hot outside. The truth is that you always have a lot of reserve power plants in a grid and you have large grids to compensate for local loss of power generation. In fact, France often relies on Germany to provide power because many nuclear plants went offline. Germany with a power mix and 40% renewables never relied on electricity from elsewhere.
The conclusion of the people who did this study is not what you claim is. Instead the strongest statement about renewables is "The noise amplitude tends to increase with the shares of intermittent renewables." But no claim is made that this "compromises grid stability" or even that this is the biggest source of noise in the system. Instead the key finding is that trading has a big impact:
"At first glance, a typical recording of the grid frequency
(Fig. 1) reveals that it coincides extremely well with the
nominal grid reference frequency, highlighting the efficiency
of today’s frequency control. Only rarely do we observe
large deviations from the nominal frequency. These
large disturbances often occur when a new power dispatch
has been settled on by trading (every 15 minutes),
introducing jumps and fluctuations of the frequency"
The study is here:
https://www.nature.com/article...
The strongest statement in the scientific paper is "The noise amplitude tends to increase with the shares of intermittent renewables." One of the key findings is that trading causes relatively huge fluctuations which occur every 15 minutes as trading occurs at this interval. So claiming that "renewables compromise grid stability" is very much exaggerated.
The actual research your linked article refers to is here:
https://www.nature.com/article...
ArXiv link is here:
https://arxiv.org/abs/1807.084...
https://phys.org/news/2018-01-...
Only 23% of the price are surcharge for renewables, it only one of several reasons why the price in Germany is high (and it was relatively high even before the roll-out of renewables). And this was an intentional political decision. Of course, one could also have hidden this in general taxes similar to the subsidies for fossil fuel or nuclear. Finally, this reflects subsidies for renewables installed in the past. And these had the intended effect of creating a market. You might have noticed that price dropped dramatically. Wind power is now competitive and solar is close. These is why there is boom. In contrast, nobody builds nuclear. Guess why? it is not actually competitive.
Only a small part of the price is from the renewable surcharge, please do not misrepresent this.
It is not three times more. The surcharge for renewables is about 23% of the total price. Here is the decomposition:
https://www.cleanenergywire.or...
And it was a very deliberate political decision to not hide it in general taxes but make the price of electricity higher. The idea is to encourage saving which also works. And yes, poorer people are never happy about higher prices but it is still not a major burden. I would rather be poor in Germany with high electricity prices and social subsidies and free healthcare than most anywhere else.
Solar is pretty cheap now and wind is even more. This is was the primary goal. To me this seems to be quite a success.
No. Official numbers are here: https://www.ag-energiebilanzen...
Germany has net exports of 55 TWh of electricity in 2017. It produced 216 TWh of electricity from renewables which is 33% of total production. Energiewende works fine. It is France which once in a while has to import from Germany because nuclear is not too reliable (e.g. in sommer when it gets to hot) or because they have to shut down a large part of the fleet for maintance.
A psychological puzzle of the modern world are people who think nuclear is a solution to anything although it has repeatedly shown to be an economical failure.
I guess the 216 TWh of electricity generated by renewables produced in Germany in 2017 (33% of all electricity generated) is a placebo effect then. Or somebody here lives in its own alternative reality where renewables don't work.
Not really true. Germany exports almost as much as the US, has similar living standards, and much lower energy use and CO2 emissions per capita.
What do you mean by energy-short Germans? Germany exports a huge amount of electricity. One third of its production is produced by renewables. Why would this not work for France? Population density is much lower than in Germany.
For what it's worth C is especially awful because, in addition to the basic bounds checks every normal language has, so much of its behavior is "undefined", yet developers are actively encouraged to take advantage of its undefined behavior to achieve useful work.
No. "Undefined" nowadays essentially means that it is illegal what you are doing and nobody is encouraged to take advantage of it. It depends on the compiler what happens: Often the compiler assumes that "undefined behaviour" cannot happen and it can use this fact for optimization. But alternatively it could also add a run-time check, e.g. for bounds checking.
Out-of-bounds accesses are undefined behaviour so a C compilers can already add run-time bounds checking. To some degree this is already possible, e.g. use gcc -fsanitize=bounds