Hacker Newsnew | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submit | while_true_'s commentslogin

As one dabbling in Mandarin, this french e, è, é, ê, ë thing makes me chuckle. Mā mà mǎ ma? (Is Mom scolding the horse?)

In 2026 utilities will install 86 GW of new generation, of which only 6 GW will be natural gas. The other 80 GW will all be solar, wind and battery storage. Utilities are doing this because of economics. Environment is secondary. Even oil and gas rich Texas has been aggressively adding solar, wind and battery.

Wind and solar are consistently the cheapest forms of new energy generation. Pouyanné knows that. He is being a politician here, saying what he knows will play well with the current administration. When in Rome...

NY Times phrases it as a reimbursement to TotalEnergies for relinquishing wind leases that they paid for. The US made the reimbursement contingent on them investing in fossil fuel projects. "The deal is an extraordinary transfer of taxpayer dollars to a foreign company for the purposes of boosting the production of fossil fuels."

Total waste of $1 Bil of taxpayer dollars. If the oil and gas industry want to shut down wind projects let them pay for it.


Why would they do that when they already paid for a corrupt new regime to do it for them?

Slight tangent:

The US is a net oil exporter. If fossil fuel companies were so influential, wouldn't we expect them to be in favour of less fossil fuel production elsewhere?

Instead the what seems to be influential is the average Joe who's complaining about the price at the pump.


US fossil fuel companies also make money from projects outside US. They explore, build the infrastructure, and operate oil fields for other countries.

Indeed.

All the blather about Canadian "trade surplus" is actually oil.

US companies owning that infra sell that oil under market price, to their US corp divisions. The CEO, upper execs are usually American, and so their large salaries, and all corporate profits all flow to the US parent corp.

Canada of course sees some taxes per barrel of oil, and local employment, but when you remove all this, Canada has a massive trade deficit with the US

Of course for this US calls Canada trade unfair.

It's all smoke and mirrors.


Maybe. But it's not obvious that they would benefit from cheap petrol.

In that case, we should definitely reserve judgement on the weird payment stipulations then. The oil industry probably hates that the government is doing this, and we shouldn't cast aspersions on them.

Not maybe, they do. And noone wants their product so expensive that people starts looking for alternatives.

At a guess, they're probably happy to encourage continued reliance on petroleum, whilst the rest of the world is switching over to renewable energy.

> in favour of less fossil fuel production elsewhere?

Another slight tangent: the street of Hormuz being closed has them covered nicely there currently.


Yes, that _would_ be evidence in favour of oil interests having influence in the government.

But that's also an unusual situation; and the US administration is also lifting sanctions on Russian oil at the same time.


So TotalEnergies agreed to invest 1 billion is offshore wind during thr last Administration. The current Administration doesn't want any investment in renewables so they attempted to block it. A judge said the attempted block was unlawful. So then immediately the admin said something new and that instead there were "national security concerns" with building wind plants - (Which doesn't pass the smell test to me at all) and the project would be held up while untangling those.

My assumption is the company started getting upset at being toyed around and having their 1 billion investment completely stalled for so long. So the admin said we'll kill the wind if you do our fossil fuels instead. So shift your investment away from wind (we kill it and pay you back for what you investws) if you instead do fossil fuels. And that's what's being done.

So previously the company was spending 1billion on wind and getting some subsidies. Now they spend 2 billion, and get paid 1 billion from the tax payer. For them it's at best a wash, though likely a loss since I haven't heard they get subsidies with the fossil fules. And the tax payer instead of paying for tax credits or low interest loans or other subsidies that were part of wind power portion of the Inflation Reduction Act instead pay a full 1 billion dollars to the company.

> The Trump administration will pay $1 billion to a French company to walk away from two U.S. offshore wind leases as the administration ramps up its campaign against offshore wind and other renewable energy.

1. https://apnews.com/article/trump-offshore-wind-energy-climat...


This seems plausible. Though I find "pay a full 1 billion dollars to the company" to be a very confusing way to frame this if this just returning a deposit the company put down in the first place. Would be more accurate to say the company spent 1 billion, canceled that and were refunded the 1 billion, then spent that billion on a different U.S. project instead.

Though it's still a significant impact to the tax payer if the new thing they're spending 1B on is private industry and not a government-owned lease.


[flagged]


Sweden has been blocking offshore farms on the east side of country, where they would be fighting Russia. West side farms are fine.

USA hardly has the same problem, and the current admin are frankly a bunch of low-brow vicious thugs, who in my view wouldn't know a genuine security problem from a large hole in the ground.


Could you give some sources for this? I can't seem to find anything with a cursory search, but I'd be interested in reading.

https://www.regeringen.se/pressmeddelanden/2024/11/avslag-pa...

The Swedish government is not blocking all offshore wind, but it is blocking a lot of it, specifically wind parks in areas of the Baltic Sea that could cause trouble for trying to detect Russian military activities.

I don't know what the situation looks like for Finland.


> Firms struggle to cope with Finnish military's wind turbine ban

> More than 200 wind energy projects have been canned in south-east Finland due to concerns that they could disrupt military radar.

https://yle.fi/a/3-10374540

Since then the military has just become stricter.


There's a big difference between

a) Finland needing fast & accurate RADAR tracking across their 50km gulf and restricting activity in the gulf as a result. Not just wind farms, other commercial activities are restricted in the Gulf of Finland including shipping.

b) USA restricting wind farms on it's east coast (NC and NY/NJ) where the nearest land is thousands of km away and no other commercial activities are meaningfully restricted.

(If the US can't field a RADAR for early warning off the east coast that can handle wind farms on the coast, we have other problems)


Offshore wind farms have been stopped by the Finnish and Swedish military in many parts of the Baltic sea which aren't the gulf of Finland.

If wind farms are a problem for radars in the US, then it's quite a small price to pay to block them offshore. Especially since the country is gigantic and has plenty of room inland.

Any attack on the US will be through sea or space. Both are voids and very difficult or impossible to surveil. There's a historical example in Pearl Harbor.

So why you are bringing up nearest land I have no clue? The point is that the US is exposed to the oceans.


> Baltic sea

Still don’t see a problem making this comparing?

Atlantic ocean: thousands of miles to the nearest land from the NE coast; unrestricted commercial activity

Baltic sea: Belligerent nation on the coast (Kaliningrad Oblast) ~100 miles away; heavily patrolled and monitored commercial activity

> If wind farms are a problem for radars in the US

I’m asserting they are not because they magically weren’t 2 years ago and the airspace on the NE coast of the US has some of the largest and most aggressive ADIZ in the world since 2001. If wind farms were a problem for RADAR/early warning systems we would have heard about it in the last 25 years.

> So why you are bringing up nearest land I have no clue? The point is that the US is exposed to the oceans.

Er yes... I’m sure the military groups responsible for early warning didn’t just realise that in 2025. 10 years after offshore wind farms in the area were fully operational.

Edit: I want to say that learnings from recent conflicts (especially around drones) would be a compelling argument for why we only just realised these issues, but no one has articulated that or why it’s an issue on the Atlantic coast.


If the radars that the USA uses are so great, then why don't Finland and Sweden purchase these systems instead of blocking almost all offshore wind farms? These are two countries that have very strong political agendas in favour of wind power.

Maybe there are new threats that neither you or I are aware of or understand? Secrecy is how the military operates. New and emerging threats is the exact reason which has been given by the US Department of Interior.

As for drones, at least in Finland they are investigating if land based wind power mills can be equipped with drone warning systems.

I don't buy into the hacker double think, where everything is great and glorious and rational when Europeans do it, but it's the opposite if America under Trump does it.


> If the radars that the USA uses are so great, then why don't Finland and Sweden purchase these systems instead of blocking almost all offshore wind farms?

Are you deliberately not trying to see the difference?

Early warning systems need all the help they can get when you only have 100km to your threats (ie. the baltic sea); when you have the entire Atlantic you don’t need that.

US early warning systems are great because they have 1000s of kilometers of space.

As other commenters have already pointed out to you, the Nordic countries do allow wind farms in:

    - Gulf of Bothnia (Sweden + Finland)
    - Kattegat (Sweden)
    - Noregian sea (Norway)

And they don't allow wind farms where they are exposed to the open baltic.

What does those three seas you mentioned have in common? They have Nordic coastline on both sides. Meaning that nobody can hide in radar shadow, because they'll be seen from the other coast.

> US early warning systems are great because they have 1000s of kilometers of space.

Not if there is a disturbance in the way. You know how signals work. Everything behind the disturbance will be in shadow, stretching for as far as you please. The ocean is a giant dark void, and your enemy can be anywhere and go anywhere.

The Swedish defense minister has specified the threat to be cruise missiles in their decision to ban and block offshore wind farms. I wouldn't be surprised if the US has the same reason for their national security concerns. With a cruise missile you have to get close before launching, as compared to ICBMs which have no limits in range.

And just out of curiosity: Why don't they build these wind parks inland in the great plains? Too much energy loss from distance to consumers?


> What does those three seas you mentioned have in common? They have Nordic coastline on both sides.

You should check out the Norwegian Sea?

> And just out of curiosity: Why don't they build these wind parks inland in the great plains? Too much energy loss from distance to consumers?

Don't worry, this administration has been canceling those projects too: https://news.bloomberglaw.com/environment-and-energy/trump-c...

(This is why my stance is "bad faith" on the "national security" claim, if that wasn't clear; I know plenty on how RADARs work and it doesn't pass the sniff test)


Read some real news

Read official decisions from the defence forces of Finland and/or Sweden. Huge offshore wind projects have been stopped recently.

Or be a reality denying hacker if you prefer.


I can’t make heads or tails of your point.

Are you saying that because Sweden has to worry about Russia invading from the east, the US shouldn’t build any wind farms anywhere? That can’t be right. What do you really mean?


They don't want another surprise attack from the sea like pearl harbor.

You're saying offshore wind farms would prevent the US from detecting an intercontinental attack crossing the ocean?

Ph'nglui mglw'nafh Cthulhu R'lyeh wgah'nagl fhtagn

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R%27lyeh


From where else would an enemy be able to attack? There's two options: ocean or space.

And you think a Pearl Harbor sized attack force could cross oceans undetected and hide behind wind farms?

Please tell me you’re just yanking our chains and don’t really believe that?


Much larger attack forces are currently cruising the Atlantic and Pacific oceans, and have been doing so for decades. The oceans are international waters, giant voids where it's hard to know where your enemy is.

They can be a thousand miles away from your coast and launch cruise missiles with more fire power than that of Pearl Harbour. If there is a radar/signal disturbance on your coast which can help them, they will take advantage of it.


We're not the ones arguing the absurd position that the concerns two small countries with extreme closeness to Russia (and a history of prior invasions) more than a thousand miles away, with completely different geography, apply to a vastly different country in a completely different area of the world.

GOP capitalism at its worst: take public money and give it to private interests, without any thoughts of what makes sense.

"Trump asked oil and gas executives in 2024 to raise $1 billion for his campaign and told them he’d grant their policy wish list if he won. The investment, he said, would be a “deal” given the taxes and regulation they would avoid under his presidency. He also offered to help fast-track fossil fuel industry mergers and acquisitions if he won."

https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/analysis-opinion/foss...


Cough Cough Big Bank bailout..... this is corpocracy with two branding every few year interval.

You should probably look up when the TARP bailiut program was passed and initiated, because it wasn't when Obama was president. The Great Financial Crisis brewed and exploded under Bush.

Obama pushed for the 2010 Dodd Frank reforms to rein in big banks after that.

Corporate bailouts, huge deficit spending, mega tax cuts for the mega rich, and bottomless pit defense spending have been Republican policy for the last 50 years.


... while all the time blaming Democrats for everything they do themselves, at a much larger scale.

Hypocrisy works, if you have an electorate that can't think critically and are addicted to "news" sources that confirm their biases.


Left (foot), right (foot).

The companies don't give a rats ass what kind of energy project it is as long as it is profitable. Wind energy, gas, cow farts, it's all the same to them. Your framing makes no sense.

The majority of tax payers voted for this to happen

And the majority of tax payers voted for the previous admin too, which started this offshore wind project in the first place.

Ok? And?

The majority voted to move in one direction then the majority wanted to reverse it.


Plurality, not majority. (Not that I’m excusing the dumb dumbs who decided not voting was a viable course of action when they decided that “both sides” were running bad candidates).

"Both sides"

Both candidates weren't equally bad. That is always the situation and you must choose the least worse or best candidate.


With Trump getting a little bit less than half the vote and a 65% turnout, "did not vote" was the plurality.

Which is functionally a vote for the status quo. Someone who can't bother to vote isn't going to bother e.g. protesting or otherwise affirming their rights.

Or defeatism. Discouragement campaigns go a long way: “both sides are bad so don’t vote!”

Not voting is a choice and the same as voting for the winner

So, in this case, "plurality" means "third place".

> Not that I’m excusing the dumb dumbs who decided not voting was a viable course of action when they decided that “both sides” were running bad candidates

Sounds like both candidates were terrible enough that quite a few didn't bother?


1.They weren't equally bad.

2. Not voting still results in one being elected. This isn't the same as being offered two foods you don't like and declining to eat either.

3. The judgment on the quality of the candidates is likely mostly based on misinformation and manipulation by others.


I didn't see this particular policy on the ballot. I hope you use this logic uniformly when deciding if it is valid to care about a particular policy.

Many taxpayers are non-citizens or convicted felons and cannot vote. Turnout of citizens who were eligible to vote last election was 65%. Of those, 49.8% voted for Trump. Some portion of them likely did not vote with this specific policy in mind.

>Some portion of them likely did not vote with this specific policy in mind.

Their fault. The Republican party has been quite open about being a against environmentalism and related policies.


Voted for what? More pollution, more expensive gas, more expensive electricity??

> Voted for what? More pollution, more expensive gas, more expensive electricity??

Yes, but the hope is that the downside happens to the people you don't like, and you somehow only get the upside.


Well, yes. The GOP's disdain for renewables is well-known and not recent.

>> The west coast is the only part that relies on middle eastern oil. And a spike in prices will just get them in line and connected to the rest of the shale powered system.<<

Californian here. There is no discussion or any desire to build an oil pipeline from TX/LA across NM and AZ to deliver oil to refineries here. Ha, if you think the Keystone XL pipeline was controversial... it'll never happen.

Calif produces about 20% from its own but tired wells. Some oil is imported from the Middle East but larger volumes come by ship from South America and Alaska.


"Plasma" is an awkward name for a television app. First image that comes to mind is the old plasma 50-inch I used to have. Damn thing weighed nearly 100 pounds and was really power-hungry.


“Plasma” isn’t the name of the television app. It’s “Big Screen”.

“Plasma” just refers to the desktop environment: https://kde.org/plasma-desktop/

So this is a “Big Screen” UI for KDE Plasma.


Plasma was also a stupid name for the DE, especially when it already had a better name that everyone knows.

I loved my Plasma TV.

Bought it as an intern dirt cheap off of some dude at my company who posted it in a email group. He upgraded to the latest and greatest and just wanted it hauled out. Picture quality (for the time) was incredible!

It also doubled as the worlds best space heater. My god it was power hungry.


Yes! I still use my Panasonic 50" plasma as my daily driver. I still love it, it's an amazing TV :D


Top philanthropists include Jamsetji Tata (donated $102.4 billion), Bill and Melinda Gates ($75.8 billion), Warren Buffett (is pledging to donate 99% of his wealth). Andrew Carnegie gave away 85% of his wealth -- including construction of over 2,500 public libraries.


Gates took more than he gave, for example:

https://www.folklore.org/MacBasic.html


Carnegie did that to white wash his public opinion while he worked his workers non stop and to mutilation or death. When are you going to the library when you work 996 or more?


Bill Gates is not a great example given the recent revelations surrounding him and the nature of his divorce in the latest batch of the Epstein files.


Yes. Colors his philanthropy.

While I hope Warren Buffet isn't cut from the same cloth, the odds are looking quite bad. It would be nice to know there are some out there who can just be smart, get rich, and then NOT damn your immortal soul. But it's looking grim.


Experience would point to extreme wealth changing almost everyone who gains it, for the worse.


Only one billionaire has ever given away enough money while he was alive to not be a billionaire. Ever. Pledges don't count. Also Warren Buffet giving away 99% of his wealth still keeps him a billionaire.


Chouinard?


Chuck Feeney

Also I stand corrected, Chouinard is the other instance.


Still very rare


About half of Missouri's electrical power comes from coal. The national trend is utilities ramping up on solar, wind and battery storage while relying less on coal, causing some coal plants to shut down. I wouldn't be surprised if this legislation to stop new solar is being pushed by the coal industry.


Still using X11, so no Noctia for me. Patiently waiting for somebody/someone to get remote desktop on Wayland. https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=481912


You probably know this already, but the problem isn't remote desktop into a logged-in session (krdp supports this) but rather logging in remotely into a headless server without a local session running. This is slightly more complicated because the login manager has to get involved and present its UI remotely. This is what that bug is tracking.

If you're happy to use Gnome with GDM as the login manager, remote headless sessions are supported already with gnome-remote-desktop: https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gnome-remote-desktop#headless....


Personally, I am fine with starting sessions via ssh, don't need extra remote login.


Depends on everybody needs obviously, but say you have your dev machine that is remote, and you want to connect to it from a laptop (for real-estate reason or just for working from everywhere you want), maybe you want everything on the same (remote) machine like browser, db, IDE, etc and access to it as a remote "desktop" not just an ssh session.

Of course cli tools would be enough for somebody who likes a full TUI dev environment (and for my own use cases that would be enough) but for some people I understand the need, and I feel it is a regression for them to not have it.


I'm not familiar with the space, but wouldnt something that streams the whole screen like a video (WebRTC or Moonlight and VNC works like this ) work here too as well, and would be universal? Wayland already supports screen capture (into a texture, at interactive framerates) fairly well.


I'd say the problematic part is not capturing the desktop but injecting controls into it. Proper universal support for simulated input is still missing.


I have not used Wayland specifically, but did do this for X11, Windows, Qt, too much stuff to count... It usually takes the form of an api call like

DispatchEvent(&MouseEvent{MOUSE_L, 1345, 3432});

It's almost literally always this


This is something implemented by the compositor, so with KDE this may be addressed by the new Plasma Login Manager. GNOME already supports this.


[dead]


This is not a window manager, so thanks for stating the obvious. You might not like wayland and that's fine with me, but if you decide to hate on it, you should at least know what you are hating on. There are good reasons to prefer a wayland compositor over X11. If you don't care about these reasons, that doesn't mean nobody should.


> This is not a window manager, so thanks for stating the obvious.

So what exactly is a "shell" ?


My attempt at a definition of a desktop shell would be: The collection of all the software that aids a compositor (or a window manager on X11) in providing a more complete desktop experience. Now that's kind of vague and probably also not quite correct, so a more concrete explanation would be: A program or collection of programs that gives you desktop notifications, a taskbar (with a system tray), volume controls and more stuff like that, maybe even a neat menu to configure most of this. Usually for standalone compositors/window managers you'd usually use a collection of tools like dunst, polybar, and the like, but with newer tools like quickshell, which was used here, it's reasonably easy to build a single tool which handles most of that. And that's what we're looking at here ^^


Wayland got rid of screen tearing, an issue that plagued every machine I had used with X since I started using Linux in 2003/2004. That alone was enough for me to switch to sway in 2016, and I've never looked back. Xorg was nothing but headaches. Let's not even mention its security model.


[dead]


You can minimize tearing with double buffering so it's pretty rare but you can't completely eliminate it. Xorg by design cannot guarantee perfect frames. Tearing is something you'll notice every time it happens, whereas latency is not something that's necessarily an issue, and modern compositors have substantially reduced this latency.

I'm not really sure why Wayland gets all the hate it does, you'd think desktop Linux was perfect before Wayland came along and made everything totally unusable. As for myself, it's been a much better experience than Xorg ever was, pretty much since day one -- I've never had a torn frame, I've never had any issues with input lag, and I've never had to fuss with video settings. Not once. I'm sure some people have, but across a dozen machines I've had exactly zero problems in...a few months shy of a decade.

Let's not forget Xorg's own devs have put it on life support and recommend Wayland, which was created by Xorg devs, going forward. Nobody wants to maintain 35-year old spaghetti code of a fundamentally flawed design.


> latency is not something that's necessarily an issue

Of course it is not. Especially when GUI elements are black, waiting for the next, or other, frame. (hello Microsoft).


Out of curiosity, are you using nvidia? Which drivers are you using? I've never experienced this issue with an Intel or AMD graphics, even on a budget laptop.


[dead]


It's own devs have put it on life support because fixing the problems inherent to its design is not doable without breaking everything that works with it. I don't know what more justification you could want.

Go work on Xorg if you like, but that ship has sailed.


why do you care that much that other people "reinvent the wheel"?


I prefer X11 as well, but it has some security issues. Notably, all applications can read your input at any time. It's really hard to sandbox.

Wayland brought some irritations, including increased latency, and an architecture that requires rethinking all window managers. A rewrite is not enough. Very annoying.


I will never understand why "the computer can tell what input it is receiving" has turned into an accepted threat model.

I understand that we have built a computer where our primary interface depends on running untrusted code from random remote locations, but it is absolutely incredible to me that the response to that is to fundamentally cripple basic functionality instead of fixing the actual problem.

We have chosen to live in a world where the software we run cannot be trusted to run on our computers, and we'd rather break our computers than make another choice. Absolutely baffling state of affairs.


Defense in depth. One compromised application may do a lot of harm if it has access to your keyboard inputs. Supply chain attacks are not that uncommon. While you can trust software developers, you cannot completely trust their builds.


[dead]


I agree. I think fixing the keylogging issue should be possible without dumping the entire architecture. Perhaps the new X11 fork https://x11libre.net will achieve that? At least, it's encouraging to hear it's getting maintained.

Regarding (recent) supply chain attacks, Linux needs to take supply integrity and sandboxing more seriously. The tools to do so are there (e.g. Nix and firejail/bwrap) and, unlike Wayland, they play well with existing software.


I have doors between rooms in my house, despite its being inhabited by members of the same family who trust each other.


And when someone violates that trust, do you then tear the house down and build one with only external doors, requiring inhabitants to circle in the yard to move between rooms? The point of the Wayland security model is that the inhabitants of the house do not trust each other, and the architecture of the house must change to accommodate that.

I'm not impressed with the analogy. I am not confused about the goals of Wayland's security model. I am dismayed at the poor judgment elsewhere in computing that has led to its necessity.


Suggestion: in addition to the microphone input, allow the user to upload an audio file.


Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: