Something else: Let's also ignore (or not) that the headline of the submission is waaayyy too grand for what's actually in the article. It's only about meteorological data collection. As important as it may be, there's a lot more science than that.
outside of France and Italy it seems all EU countries that have overseas military bases still have those bases in the EU, furthermore looking at that list you can see that the U.S has significantly more military bases in Europe than the EU countries have military bases outside of EUrope.
on edit: so in conclusion I am sorry about forgetting that there was in total 6 military bases outside of Europe maintained by EU lands (hopefully haven't miscounted here)
But what you're missing is imagine you could pay a flat fee for all your utilities... and that fee is quite low. And imagine a very competitive marketplace where the switching costs are basically zero. What do you think will happen?
There are utilities which offer a uniform-monthly-billing option. PG&E in California does so as "Budget Billing":
Budget Billing is a free program that helps you easily manage your monthly energy costs . We calculate your monthly payment amount based on your average energy costs over the last 12 months and adjust your payment amount each month, so that you don't have big spikes on your bill.
While it's not a savings program, Budget Billing helps you stay in control of your bill by avoiding seasonal bill spikes.
That’s not the same at all. That’s a personalized plan based on your usage but smoothed out over the year for predictable bills, in contrast with Claude/openai’s uniform $20/$200/mo plans. You can’t use as much electricity as you want in that PGE plan. You still pay for what you use.
If everyone’s usage was above the set rate they would include rate limits which is literally a usage limit, which they have proven to do.
So no in fact you do get X tokens for 20 dollars and off your usage is too high they would absolutely put a stop to that. It wouldn’t even surprise me if they have per customer rate limits.
Where is the distinction here, it isn’t an unlimited plan, the limit just isn’t communicated.
PG&E's programme also works with a re-balancing of payments to account for over- or under-utilisation. My understanding of recent changes to the system are that those adjustments themselves are also spread out over a number of months, again to increase overall predictability and avoid surprise billing.
Ahhh, hmmm, fair.
The German approach to surprises is to take the tariff sheet that basically boils down to a flat connection fee + price-per-kWh (the meter counts in kWh), sometimes split over multiple counters for tariff's that distinguish between prime time and off-time consumption, and often coming in two or three variants which are chosen between based on what the counter says (they tend to bump the connection fee and drop the price-per-kWh above a yearly kWh threshold).
Then the consumer goes to look at the meter whenever the consumer wants, calculates via simple delta (subtract baseline value from current counter value) how much has already been used in this measuring period, and compares to for example the previous year around the same time.
Or if usage is sufficiently even across a year, one does some simple linear extrapolation ("x days have passed since the start of this metering period, y_start was the start counter value, y_now is the current counter value, z days long is the current metering period"->"z * (y_now - y_start) / x").
I assume the utility support would explain this way of calculating/predicting/tracking if one asks nicely.
The reasons for not smoothing out further than monthly payment intervals in a yearly measurement interval is AFAIK due to regulatory restrictions on credit/debt, and because this is more due to a metering process efficciency/overhead limitation than because they inherently want to offer these fixed/steady payments: you don't want to send out a meter reader more than about once a year, and doing it that often also conveniently spreads out seasonal variations letting the bill predictions(/estimates used for calculating the monthly payments that are due) work much nicer and easier to understand than some summer/winter split tracking.
Note this information is all about the default/baseline tariffs, which the local electrical energy seller (which is a distinct entity from the local electrical power/grid provider, who is the one that has the natural monopoly) can't refuse due to credit score or the like and which can't have any remotely long term/notice periods. Many tariffs are quite similar in style, though, due to the inherent limitations of yearly-read non-smart energy consumption counters.
Around now seems to be where finally you as a customer can demand upgrade to a smart meter which notably (from my understanding) gains the ability to live-report energy flux for 15 minute quantization/intervals, matching the European super grid's electricity market. A nice side-effect closely related to that market quantization is that these meters allow selling PV production to other units/properties nearby (at least where the connection/current path doesn't actually go through grid operator owned wiring, e.g. units in an apartment building) without having to pay grid fees on that energy sale despite the energy going through the meters instead of being sold through a behind-the-meter bypass feed/line.
That "virtual" metering of the hyper-local PV energy sale makes it just much easier in terms of infrastructure, compared to some actual real-time load-balancing setup that somehow spreads an apartment building's monolithic PV array's power across multiple units's behind-the-meter breakerboxes taking care to not wastefully oversupply any one as backfeed would at best be compensated at about a third of the all-fees-included retail rate (it's about the same as the grid fee part that's payable by non-local buyers of electricity, both around 10ct/kWh) instead of 1:1 compensating the approximately 30ct/kWh buy-rate of some local apartment's meter.
Also, less active infrastructure at a scale that doesn't afford on-site 24/7 staffing for monitoring and customer-side-uptime-enhancing redundancy features is always good. I'm counting a mere meter that only meters and doesn't steer/control electricity as passive infrastructure from the power flow's POV. Especially if it's built to fail in a way where power still flows but the metering/counting is broken, at least where there's more than just yearly reporting from the meter (and thus non-metering would be caught quickly).
Electricity uptime of this grade is something with perhaps underappreciated benefits: pretty much all but critical systems and those that run non-crash-safe software will not require a UPS, as power outages at least in urban areas (except those where local distribution systems drown in climate change flash flooding) happen once every few years, either due to larger-scale blackouts (entire city/metro/state) or from non-redundant local infrastructure dying of old age.
This is such an important point. Not sure about India, which is still very market forces driven, but china can just force its employers to do whatever is of strategic importance. That’s long gone in the US. Market forces here will only ever optimize for short term game, shooting ourselves in the chest.
That’s a long list. Not all research is good research, or shows the effect you’re looking for. Where did this come from?
Do you use red light therapy? For what? How often? Where do you focus it? I did manage to get some red light masks although I find it hard to fit into my routine
It’s not clear to me CFS is really a thing. To me it’s a catch all BS diagnosis that basically says “we don’t know what this is, so we’re calling it CFS”.
It is definitely a thing. It all fits with the mitochondria theory: after physical or mental exhaustion (increased metabolic turnover provided by mitochondria) the recovery time (sleep) for ME/CFS patients is increased to such a degree that normal daily tasks gets them into a energy low they can't recover from anymore.
I don't think that's quite right? There's been a fair amount of evidence pointing at possible issues, but there's no clear answer due to poor (or just different) study design, small sample sizes, different criteria across studies, different sample groups, etc.
> ...it is difficult to establish the role of mitochondria in the pathomechanisms of ME/CFS/SEID due to inconsistencies across the studies. Future well-designed studies using the same ME/CFS/SEID diagnostic criteria and analysis methods are required to determine possible mitochondrial involvement in the pathomechanisms of ME/CFS/SEID. [...] There is consistent genomic research suggesting that ME/CFS/SEID is not a primary mitochondrial disorder, however, mitochondrial decline might occur due to secondary effects of other disrupted pathways. [...] As population samples were small, these results should be interpreted cautiously.
I wouldn't summarise that as "no evidence". It's more like "ME/CFS doesn't seem to be a genetic disorder causing defective mitochondria, and the mitochondria look the same, but they seem to function differently for some reason even if we lack enough data to figure out why yet". Note that, eg, of the 19 studies reviews, 5 tried to check for differences in mitochondrial respiration between ME/CFS patients and healthy controls, and 4 of the 5 found notable differences; one study was able to reliably detect if a cell sample came from a ME/CFS patient or a healthy control based on measuring mitochondrial respiration.
I don't know that's enough to fully reject the null hypothesis just yet, but it's certainly not clear we can accept it either.
>5 tried to check for differences in mitochondrial respiration between ME/CFS patients and healthy controls, and 4 of the 5 found notable differences
But did they look at the same thing? I also don't think that includes all the studies that failed to show mitochondrial differences, and failures to replicate previous studies.
There is the recent Ryback study (currently a preprint) which failed to replicate Fluge and Mella's result, and showed no difference from controls. There is the Tomas study which showed no difference in the ATP profile test from controls. Also, a 2019 Tomas study showed no difference in respiration between patients and controls.
I mean, the S in CFS stands for "syndrome", which is "a set of medical signs and symptoms which are correlated with each others [...] When a syndrome is paired with a definite cause this becomes a disease." (From wikipedia.)
So I mean, yeah, that literally does mean "we don't know what this is, and we don't know what's causing it, so we're dumping everything that looks like it in a bucket while we do more research". But that doesn't mean it's not a real thing; it means that we don't know what it is or what's causing it (and that it may well not be a single thing at all).
That's pretty different than saying "it's not a thing at all".
Mildly interesting of course, but all we’ve learned is that regardless of how high profile you are, you’re still a human embedded within a common taste space… one that was mostly formed in your teenage-to-20s years.
I don’t know who will buy this puff piece of a utopian future brought to you by… Meta? Filled with scandal after negative world changing behaviors that they don’t stop? The ones that want to make money no matter what harms it does? Why would the future with even more powerful technology be any different?
UK/France and I’m sure others have bases all over the world.