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Cake day: June 21st, 2023

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  • To this day, it’s been very hard to find out, if at all any people have even died to Fukushima radiation (ans not other sources such as tsunami/earthquake/etc.)

    Truly no offense, but this is sort of burying the lede on Nuclear Power risks. Mathmatically coal releases more radiation - no question. It’s also hard to pin down how many died due to Fukushima for ver good reasons: Correlation might be easy, but determining cause is ultra tough and no right-minded scientist would say it without overwhelming evidence (like they had something “hot” that fell on their roof and didn’t know it for a long time). Also? They aren’t dead yet. So we look to statistical life span models crossing multiple factors (proximity, time of exposure, contaminated environments and try to pin down cancer clusters attributable, and people can live for decades, etc…

    The problem is that people rightly are concerned that in both Fukushima and Chernobyl (and 3 Mile for that matter) unforseen circumstances could have been catastrophically worse. You blow up a coal plant? You expose a region locally to it and it’s probably “meh”. You blow up a nuclear plant, and you get melt down corium hitting ground water or sea water with direct exposure to fissioning material and all the sudden you have entire nations at risk for subsequent spewing of hot material that will contaminate food supplies, water resevoirs, and linger on surfaces and be pulled into our lungs once it’s in the dirt. Radioactive matieral is FAR more dangerous inside the body when you eat plants and animals that are exposed and pull it from the ground. Even cleaning down every surface, eventually you’ll get some of it airborn to be breathed into our lungs again with wind storms, flooding and other natural erosion. The consequences are exponentially higher with Nuclear accidents and ignoring that is whitewashing. And that’s not even getting into contamination from fuel enrichment, cooling ponds/pools leaking water, or the fact that it will take 30-40 years to clean up Fukushima (and they aren’t sure how exactly that will happen and there could be another tsunami). Probably hundreds to try to clean up and contain Chernobyl - and given the current state of affairs we may find out even worse.

    BTW, I’m pro-nuclear. Thorium salts seem a good way to go and we probably would already have these if not for the nuclear arms race making nations hungry for plutonium. Please don’t short sell everyone’s intelligence because you can claim “only” a handful of people died due to Fukushima. Direct death is only one facet. Lives were disrupted (and displaced) and for a while there, the impacts spread to the US across the Pacific and there were discussions of evacuating like 1/3 of Japan’s population outside an exclusion zone. You can be pro nuclear while still acknowledging that some fears are real and well founded, and unfortunately the industry has proven gaps in safety that make it harder and harder to argue when we have Solar and Wind and rapidly ramping power storage. Nuclear is likely to simply be outcompeted over time (just like Coal and NG).






  • Well, the alternative is competing based on what you are actually selling in this model: Support for this product. If I can clone your distro and do better at supporting it than YOU do or at least good enough to sell my support, then you have a situation of possibilities:

    • Your support sucks
    • You’re charging too much or don’t have the right market / price options available
    • Your support in general is not really necessary, and thus your business model is weak in the first place. Another way of saying this one is that you aren’t offering anying particularly unique for new features on top of what’s already freely available to sweeten the deal beyond selling support.
    • You’ve done other things to your customers to weaken your relationships, and thus income flow

    Locking out those “second run” vendors who are riding your coat tails is going to be a self-defeating path, however you slice it. Oracle has deep pockets - they are unlikely to sit back on this one as an example problem. The bigger problem is violation of the spirit of the GPL which alienates devs. You’re correct that they may only be inconvenienced, but inconveniencing any developer is a first class ticket to them working around your shenanigans or just opting out of supporting your platform in general. I already know 2 vendors in my small world who are subtly indicating support for RHEL and CentOS is being considered with some pushes on their customers to consider other distros. That’s in the last few days!

    Anyway, they are throwing out the good will they have left with the bathwater of trying to short circuit low-bar competitors because they want to squeeze profit. You may not be wrong to stand by them, but I’m taking my support (and business) elsewhere as a result of their stance. A recent post looks like they are doubling down on the message.


  • My understanding is that if you redistribute the source they provide (whether Paywalled or free dev account) that they can and plan to 1) revoke your payed support access or 2) revoke your free dev account.

    That means that people are inevitably going to share out RH source from free dev accounts right off the bat, and just cycle through new dev accounts. That’s an escalating war where they watermark/fingerprint their source so they know who’s redistributing, and any model or distro built on this won’t last or carry considerable risk. Enterprise customers are unlikely to take this risk, though. So this sets up a pretty stupid game and generally goes against the spirit of FOSS if not the letter.

    I’d like to address one statement you made above: CentOS Stream is NOT RHEL source. It’s effectively the beta branch. Which means it’s not bug-for-bug which is quite frankly critical to any dev, enterprise or otherwise, and the key reason they moved it upstream of RHEL - because it screws over what they consider to be freeloaders on purpose. They may be targeting other distros, but it affects all developers who just want to test their applications. Now that dev has to explore options for a dev account, be careful not to redistribute or lose that access, etc.

    Jeff does an excellent job of explaining it and whether or not RHEL contributes to the kernel or other source, stating it the way you do is akin to giving them an excuse. Oracle contributes. Users contribute (by testing, submitting bugs, providing guidance and configuration templates or advice), Countless Devs contribute. All of that should not excuse IBM Red Hat’s behavior because they want to squeeze more profit out of a model that’s not setup well. The fact that their SNAP is essentially “trust me bro” now and with this move, I’m done with anything dependent upon RH. That may not mean much in my home lab setup with maybe a dozen boxes, but at work, I am in a position to influence thousands upon thousands of instances and I’m just one person paying attention to this. RH is focusing on short term profits over long term health and without disclosing anything, I’m confident will swiftly bite them in the ass. And it will be their own doing.



  • Haven’t deleted either of both of my 14 yr accounts yet, but I haven’t been on Reddit since the blackout and have plans to nuke it all after I navigate new subscriptions and think it through.

    FWIW, I find the experience a refreshing re-start, just like when Digg and Slashdot fucked up and I’m already seeing shit posting, memes, and fresh content galore on Lemmy in just the last week. I doubt I’ll go back to Reddit except for some esoteric solutions that I find in searches.