The Economist was recently citing hydrogen as "deep tech" [1] (meaning long R&D cycles, sometimes unproven techniology no short term profitability, heavy investment, industry-wide transformative power).
Most of your sources have plans focused on hydrogen production, but I'd be interested to see specific targets or plans regarding specific uses like fertilizers. There are some in the Hydrogen Roadmap Europe, but it seems focused on transportation [2].
> I'd be interested to see specific targets or plans regarding specific uses like fertilizers
It's primarily in Asia and North Africa. For example, India has begun building a 7GW green hydrogen project specifically for urea production [0] and as a technical demonstration. An Egypt-Germany-Norway JV is also expected to be completed by 2027 explicitly for this usecase [1]
Federation can feel like "just a feature" but the E2E encryption (also in group chats) is a reason for Matrix to exist and a big reason why it's so slow.
"Slow" in what sense? Development? Because I self host a Conduit server and I don't ever notice messages being slow. It would be hard to notice anyway, as in a group chat people usually take some time to type in their responses.
The sync between large groups used to be slow because of amount of data, but Element X and "sliding windows" were rolled out to help with it.
AFAIK, the public Matrix server used to be slow because of a heavy load (I think), but on my self-hosted instance that's not a problem at all.
The experience of using Matrix involves a lot of sluggishness at various points in the client - waiting to decrypt messages or properly sync keys, waiting to join a room or for room search to load - these are the things that have been salient to me using multiple matrix clients with a freshly-spun-up server within the past month.
I more mindfully played a bit with my Element (web UI), and Element X (Android), and while there might something to it, and I suspect the e2e encrypted data model will always lead to some extra work required. Element seems a bit sluggish. However Element X on my Android seems butter smooth.
And event the slower Element seems far better than Discord that I'm forced to use, where I can't even scroll history without the whole thing stuttering.
Well there's always Matterbridge. If you don't have complicated workflows to replicate (and even then) you can just replicate to XMPP, Nextcloud or whatever.
I travel mostly by high speed train over very long distances and I fail to see it making more economical sense than air travel, even with taxed kerosene.
The costs of a high speed line are on the scale of 30 millions euros per km, with maintenance of 300,000 €/km/year. A TGV with 740 seats costs around 25 millions euros and has maintenance too. Most of the operating costs are per trip, a TGV typically does 2 to 3 500km trips per day.
A mid-range plane like the A320neo costs around 100 millions euros for 190 passengers and typical operating costs of 5 millions for a 2 flights per day average. A lot of these costs are hourly costs (fuel and maintenance) and airport costs. Fuel is 10%.
In France, trains and especially high-speed trains are heavily subsidised with a lot of tickets paid under various incentivized and subsidized schemes. SNCF (trains and railways) receives between 10 and 20 billions euros per year from various government entities (depending on what you include), i.e. 20% to 35% of revenue. There are also indirect subsidies through corporate tax schemes like commuting exemptions. Finally, long haul buses have long been forbidden and considered a threat to the train monopoly, and after a short golden age of EU-led monopoly breaking, they have been again heavily regulated so they can hardly compete. Similarly, short-haul flights have been almost banned.
The train is more practical but when I hear it is on par with air travel economically and more environment friendly I fail to make sense of the numbers.
My allusion was to environmental sustainability, not to the human construct of economic efficiency.
However counter-intuitive it may be, air travel is indeed far more energy-intensive, and therefore destructive, than train travel. Mainly due to the exponential increase of wind resistance with speed. On a planet of 9 billion people, airplanes will simply not be a sustainably form of transport by any metric.
The EU law applies, but companies get out of it by:
- encouraging you to take multiple tickets (so you can't claim compensation on the whole trip and becaise of missed transfers).
- saying it's not their doing (DB specialty).
- in some cases accepting an "alternate schedule" (typically by changing your ticket at the company's suggestion) will void any claims.
In some cases you have better chances hiring a taxi for 2000km and forcing the company to pay.
On the opposite, on (very expensive) French TGVs you get compensation starting at 30 minutes delay (connections counted) whatever the reason and SNCF will do their utmost to bring you to destination or ensure you get accomodation.
Same, I was luckily just above the 1500 km threshold and got 400€, 3 hotel nights reimbursed (3 stars but 4 stars might have been ok), restaurants bills paid (beer included), a free replacement ticket , made new friends and visited museums. Lovely!
My boss and colleagues weren't delighted though...
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