Personally I had lost all hope on those fuckers as soon as I saw how they went after Corbyn.

Then again I was just an EU immigrant in the UK and left after the Leave Referendum because that was the drop and I lost all hope for the UK as a country (I kept up following UK subjects for a while, hence actually caring about the whole Corbyn thing, but that slowly tailed of after a few years)

In the years since periodically some news or other comes out of the UK that just confirms my decision to leave Britain as one of the best in my life.

PS: Also, full disclosure, I was a Greenparty member back in Britain, so I was always significantly left of New Labour and didn’t have a good opinion of them. Mind you, they still exceeded my expectations … on the downside.

The politicians who wrestled back control of the Labour party through a campaign of smears with the help of Israeli-linked Jewish groups and who, immediately after that started at purge of any with dissenting opinions from that party, had more than demonstrated their love for Machiavelism, even before rising to Government purely on the back of the First Past The Post system and Reform splitting the far-right vote thus costing the Tories lots of seats.

Also, as others pointed out, this faction of Labour has long had an autoritarian strain, both in terms of the insane civil surveillance infrastructure they built last time they were in Government (as exposed by the Snowden Revelations) and their relentless weakening of privacy and even pretty basic legal rights.

This is really not surprising: the goose stepping into Fascism in the UK has started a while ago, it’s just that it’s a posh kind of Fascism wrapped in layers of deceit and disguised as “Rule Of Law”, unlike in places like for example Hungary were it was closer to the more traditional “strong-man with and iron-fist” Fascist image.

Judging by what has come out regarding UK personalities and the Epstein files, they’re looking for whistleblowers who would denounce the pedos they have amongst their elites.

Same here.

Whilst I don’t necessarily think Steam are doing it because of being good guys (I just think it makes good business sense for them to move gamers away from Windows), that doesn’t mater for the outcomes for gamers, what maters is that what they’re doing helps us all out to escape the ever tightening clutches of Microsoft which nowadays is basically an Evil Tech Corp.

Religious gamers should be praying really hard to their Deity/Pantheon for Gabe not to have a traffic accident and exercise a lot and eat healthy food so as not to have a heart attack, because after he dies many if not most of the games you “licensed” from Steam via a button in their app which says “Buy” might simply disappear from your account with some shitty excuse and you’ll have no effective recourse unless you have a couple of millions of dollars to sue them for it in whatever court their EULA says you have to sue them on.

I think that more in general, from the change in the image of Elon Musk over the last 5 to 10 years the younger generations of Techies should’ve learned the vast chasm that is possible between perception and reality when it comes to those people who manage/own the companies making the Technology we love.

Maybe Gabe is a good guy, maybe he’s neither good nor bad, maybe he’s a bad guy - if you don’t know the guy personally and well as a person, all you have to go by is the tightly managed public image you see, and as Musk so painfully demonstrated not that long ago, you can wrap an Nazi in a “nice techie pushing the world forward” managed public image which for decades the overwhelming majority of Techies (especially young ones) believes is real.

So, yeah, going back to your original post, its safer “not to worship companies” or the people who lead them.

As I wrote elsewhere, their support for Windows-Linux adapter technologies and even their games machines with Linux, are things which make total business sense as part of a strategy to try and move gamers away from Windows to manage the risk that Microsoft might use their control of Windows and ability to remotely update pretty much all consumer Window machines, to squeeze Steam as a games store for Windows games, for example via enforcing a requirement for Microsoft-signed applications and even a for usage of a Microsoft-store (no doubt justified as a consumer protection measure) like Apple does with iOS.

Steam isn’t doing this because they’re “nice guys”, they’re doing this because they’re managed by competent managers with an outlook which is much longer term than the typical “next quarter” of publicly traded company and if you’re looking at a 5 or 10 years period Microsoft doing this kind of thing is a real risk.

This doesn’t mean that they’re bad guys, it just means that from their support for gaming in Linux alone we cannot deduce that they’re good guys since being managed by competent people who are trying to manage the risk of Microsoft turning Windows into what iOS is for Apple is an equally good explanation (probably an even better explanation, since “good guy” actions in business is a rare exception) for their support for Linux.

I would go further and say that all that they’ve done are “”“merely”“” sound elements in a strategy to avoid that in the era of always-online remote updateable software, Microsoft successfully uses their position as the provider (and, more importantly, controller of some of what runs in pretty much all consumer instances) of Windows to squeeze out Steam as a games store.

Microsoft slowly transforming for Windows applications into the equivalent of Apple for iOS applications (and their move towards signed applications could be part of that) would be a nightmare scenario for Steam and it’s a realistic possibility, especially if you notice that Microsoft is moving towards “everything must be cryptographically signed by Microsoft” to run in Windows.

So it totally makes strategical sense for Steam to invest into getting as many gamers as possible away from the Windows ecosystem, and one path is to get more games to as easily as possible run in the already existing and established alternative to Windows - Linux - the easiest way being to invest in an ever improved Windows-Linux adaptor layer (i.e. Wine/Proton) backed by a Steam store in Linux which just seamlessly uses that layer when needed, whilst another path is to sell their own game machines which do not run Windows and there again using Linux makes sense as the OS, both because it already exists and is mature and because using it on their machines has synergies with their investment in the “make games targeting Windows seamlessly run on Linux without needing changes”.

This isn’t Valve and Steam being nice guys doing nice things because they love their customers who use Linux, it’s just good long term business planning and management of maybe their greatest external risk - Microsoft.

I mean, “Yay for choosing Linux!” and “Respect for their business sense”, but lets not deceive ourselves into thinking they’re good guys because of doing what just makes sense strategically to manage Microsoft as a risk.

It’s pretty much a required upgrade to be able to protect yourself from dropped or balistic nukes.

Depends on the salt used.

If you check here on table 5 you’ll see that common table salt (NaCl) melts at 801º C.

As for what’s used, in Chapter 2 of that paper they say “Molten salts consist of alkali metal or alkali metal halides and oxygen-containing salts”, so it’s not actually table salt that’s used in Generation 2 of those kind of power generators.

In all fairness, you need to install a magnet at the far end and keep constantly pluging and unplugging it to generate power…

Actually it does change, from what I read mainly in terms of what substance is used to capture the heat of the sunlight, which in turn has other implications downstream: for example, if you melt salt and the molten salt is used to generate steam (so a generation 2 system), rather than directly heating water with sunlight to generate the steam (generation 1), not only does the efficiency go up but you can keep on generating power during the night as long as there’s enough heat left in the salt, and whilst the basic principle is the same a lot of the engineering of the system changes because you’re circulating melted salt rather than steam, you want to store some of the heated salte for the nighttime and you need to concentrate more sunlight to reach higher temperatures so the area of mirrors is larger.

Here is a paper I found about this stuff.

I think that’s what they called a First Generation generator.

The ones in use now will actually use sunlight to melt salt (than then is used to generate steam) rather than directly generating the steam which has way more capacity to store heat, so they have a solar conversion efficiency of between 38% and 44%, plus the molten salt can keep on being used to generate steam during the night until it cools down enough.

There are literally some kinds of solar panel to generate heated water for things like home use.

They’re just boxes painted in black with a pipe with water also painted in black zigzagging inside of it, rather than being photovoltaic panels.

Were I live now - Portugal - something like that works fine even in Winter to generate hot water for things like showering.

That said even during the Summer something like that won’t generate steam (or at least, not with enough steam pressure to drive a turbine), unlike what the meme shows, though there are solar power concentrators that use sunlight to melt salt which then boils water to generate steam for a steam turbine, but those use a ton of mirrors to concentrate sunlight into a central tower were the salt is being melted. (For example).

There is actually a Solar Power Generation system were a solar collector uses sunlight to melt salt which then circulates through pipes to a place were it heats up water to boiling and that steam then goes through a turbine thus generating electricity.

However to reach those temperatures a simple panel isn’t enough so what you have is a ton of mirrors over a large area all focusing the sunlight on a central tower were the salt-melting happens.

Here is an example.

By the way, this stuff actually has benefits over solar such as the ability to generate power at night (basically you don’t extract all the heat from the molten salt during the day and just keep using it to boil water to feed the steam turbine during the night), plus it’s a bit more efficient than solar panels and like solar panels it’s also improving, throught things like using different salts.

That’s very much the typical modern mainstream politician in Western Democracies.

I would say that somebody with at least a modicum of capability outside Presentation and Talkie-talkie, such as Merkel, has been more the exception than the rule in the last 2 decades at least.

Whilst the era of such politicians might seem to be coming to an end, IMHO what we’re seing is just a style change of the Presentation + Talkie-talkie specialists from slick technocrat to loudmouth raging populist - seemingly different posture and discourse but their actual expertise is still in exactly the same domain and their ineptitude outside that is just as bad, maybe even a bit worse.

Pax Americana wasn’t exactly peaceful outside of Europe and North America.

If it’s not in your hands in an open format it’s not yours.

Not even cats are safe from cats.

Finally some worthy storage for memes!

Eat your heart out Ea-nāṣir.