@kravietz@agora.echelon.pl
@kravietz@agora.echelon.pl avatar

kravietz

@kravietz@agora.echelon.pl

I run an information security consulting company in the UK and EU. Long ago I studied chemical engineering, still interested in science and engineering (pro-nuclear and pro-renewables) and politics of EU and Eastern Europe. I mostly post in English, occasionally in Polish, which is my native language, sometimes also in Russian and Ukrainian. I've been to Russia and Ukraine a lot over the last ~20 years, actively supporting Ukraine's defense effort since 2014. I almost always follow back. I prefer to discuss any views as long as they are supported by arguments and evidence, I do ban for insults and hate speech. Once 2:486/23 on #Fidonet

#fedi23 #fedi22 #linux #freebsd #ukraine #poland #nuclear #renewables #infosec #russia #speleo #caving

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kravietz, to random
@kravietz@agora.echelon.pl avatar

Cheddar

kravietz, to random
@kravietz@agora.echelon.pl avatar

My new record — 49 km 😲 From hills around Wells to Cardiff. In general, this area is very busy with Meshtastic nodes so great opportunity to have a casual chat with radio geeks!

bperruche, to random
@bperruche@mstdn.social avatar

Co się stanęło się z relacjami Kijów, Warszawa? Było dobrze, a teraz nic nie słychać? Separacja jak w małżeństwie?

Dratewka wiesz coś? @kravietz

kravietz,
@kravietz@agora.echelon.pl avatar

@bperruche

Nie, jest OK. Blokady się skończyły i relacje są poprawne. Polska jest dla Ukrainy potężnym hubem logistycznym i w tym zakresie wszystko działa. Tyle, że po cichu bo to są dość wrażliwe operacje. Temat ziarna też się udało jakoś uregulować.

kravietz,
@kravietz@agora.echelon.pl avatar

@bperruche A to jest inna sprawa. W pierwszych miesiącach wojny to była miłość i przytulasy, ale to była raczej anomalia z dyplomatycznego punktu widzenia. Ale może to było też potrzebne na tamtym etapie, i Polakom i Ukraińcom. Teraz jest… normalnie.

kravietz, to Russia
@kravietz@agora.echelon.pl avatar

In the legal reality of , “Donetsk People’s Republic” is a subject of Russian Federation, just like neighbouring Rostov Oblast’ or Moscow Oblast’. Nonetheless, the “DPR” enacted a new law establishing a 5 km restricted border zone with Rostov Oblast’, and another 100 m border zone where any presence requires FSB permit. In addition to that, crossing between Rostov Oblast’ and the “DPR” is only allowed on a limited number of checkpoints.

Source: https://www.moscowtimes.ru/2024/05/23/anneksirovannie-regioni-donbassa-reshili-otdelit-otrossii-pogranichnoi-polosoi-a131663

which is also formally part of Russian Federation has been operating its mobile networks in foreign roaming mode for the last 10 years.

Nothing screams “we know we’re illegitimate” than these small daily legal annoyances 🤷

kravietz, to latvia
@kravietz@agora.echelon.pl avatar

Dangerous liaisons: New details of Latvian MEP Tatjana Ždanoka’s espionage for Russia

Tatjana Ždanoka, an MEP from Latvia, was one of the delegates sent to Kyiv. But she did not report her findings to other legislators from the European Parliament. Instead, she sent a confidential report to her FSB handler Sergey Beltyukov, stating her view that anti-Yanukovych demonstrators, already two months in, were unlikely to disband in the near future. Three days before the trip to Kyiv, Ždanoka traveled to St. Petersburg and met Beltyukov, who had waited for her at the airport.

https://theins.press/en/politics/271808

kravietz, to random Polish
@kravietz@agora.echelon.pl avatar

Szanowni polscy emigranci, pamiętajcie, że jest możliwość rejestracji na wybory do Parlamentu Europejskiego za granicą - ja się właśnie zarejestrowałem w UK

https://ewybory.msz.gov.pl

kravietz, to Russia
@kravietz@agora.echelon.pl avatar

As news agencies are hyping the news that “Putin wants negotiations on the current front line”, please note this not any news. Really - if you search the phrase “признать реалии на земле” (recognize the realities on the ground), you will see it goes well back into 2023 in Kremlin statements and repeated nearly every month since. This is the phrase that uses when they refer to negotiations where is expected to recognize Russia’s territorial conquests.

Please, do not blindly follow the media induced amnesia where any old news can be recycled into a “exclusive news” clickbait…

kravietz, to Russia
@kravietz@agora.echelon.pl avatar

On @ufd today we reported rocket attacks on military bases in in occupied but partial reports paint a much richer picture - Dzhankoi, Sevastopol, Bakhchisarai, Yalta, Gvaridyske, Evpatoria were reportedly all hit by rockets.

kravietz, to Russia
@kravietz@agora.echelon.pl avatar

Since the start of the war has been targeting culture especially fiercely - it has ruined dozens of museums, now it moved to targeting book warehouses and printing works. In today’s attack in Russian rockets have killed 7 book warehouse workers (5 women and 2 men).

Another angle on the warehouse with piles of partially burned books
A damaged printing press
Relatively undamaged part of the printing press with yet uncut newspaper stream hanging between two parts of the press

kravietz, to Russia
@kravietz@agora.echelon.pl avatar

embassy in Poland boasts of ‘rebuilding Mariupol’. Only it omits a minor detail - the Russians are not rebuilding in the sense of renovating or rebuilding existing buildings for their existing residents.

What they do is demolishing existing buildings and raising new multi-family houses in their place, offered on the open market, which are unaffordable for existing residents…. because no one will give a mortgage to a person whose flat has been demolished! Residents rendered homeless by the Russian army are thus left in the lurch, as can be seen from the many desperate appeals they publish on Telegram.

The Mariupol authorities also officially run a housing restitution programme but, in typical Russian government fashion, they use many tricks to make it a sham - for example, the new buildings have a slightly different address and plot number and the allocation is no longer ‘due’! Or it turns out that the person in question still has a (also ruined) allotment garden, so as a ‘holder of two properties’ the return of the flat is also ‘not due’!

Such ‘reconstruction of Mariupol’ thus has the character of a exploitative colonisation of the city by the new owners rather than a real reconstruction of the city, and on top of that it only concerns attractive plots of land near the sea and in the centre. Hundreds of blocks of flats in popular bedroom neighbourhoods have remained without water, electricity, without windows and with holes in the roofs for two years.

P.S. I can provide numerous appeals from Mariupol residents on request

kravietz, to random Polish
@kravietz@agora.echelon.pl avatar

Rosyjska ambasada w Polsce chwali się ”odbudową Mariupola”. Tylko pomija drobny szczegół - Rosjanie nie odbudowują Mariupola w sensie remontu lub odbudowy istniejących budynków dla ich dotychczasowych mieszkańców.

Rosjanie prowadzą rozbiórkę istniejących budynków i na ich miejscu budują nowe domy wielorodzinne, oferowane na wolnym rynku, które dla dotychczasowych mieszkańców są niedostępne… bo nikt nie da kredytu hipotecznego osobie, której mieszkanie zburzono. Mieszkańcy pozbawieni domów przez rosyjską armię zostają więc na lodzie, o czym można się dowiedzieć z wielu rozpaczliwych apeli, które publikują na Telegramie

Władze Mariupola oficjalnie prowadzą też program zwrotu mieszkań ale w typowy dla władz rosyjskich sposób stosują wiele sztuczek, które powodują, że jest on fikcją - na przykład, nowe budynki mają nieco inny adres i numer działki i przydział już się “nie należy”! Albo okazuje się, że dana osoba ma jeszcze (też zrujnowany) ogródek działkowy, więc jako “posiadaczowi dwóch nieruchomości” zwrot mieszkania też się “nie należy”!

Taka “odbudowa Mariupola” ma więc charakter rabunkowej kolonizacji miasta przez nowych właścicieli a nie faktycznej jego odbudowy, a do tego dotyczy tylko atrakcyjnych działek przy morzu i w centrum. Setki bloków w popularnych dzielnicach-sypialniach od dwóch lat pozostają bez wody, prądu, bez okien i z dziurami w dachach.

tara, to DuckDuckGo
@tara@hachyderm.io avatar

For the users, also search engine seems down.

Time to go back to man pages, the good ol' documentation and ... perhaps some real-life activities.

P.S. No, I'm not going to use Google or Bing. 👩‍💻

kravietz,
@kravietz@agora.echelon.pl avatar
kravietz, to Russia
@kravietz@agora.echelon.pl avatar

How understands Western ? Margarita Simonyan’s husband Tigran Keosayan explains to his colleagues:

Everything we wanted to know about NATO is now quite clear: we can start a war with any NATO country, almost any, and US will not intervene. As long as US doesn’t intervene, they are just a bunch of paper tigers.

Tigran speaking in a online chat with other Russian pro-war activists

kravietz,
@kravietz@agora.echelon.pl avatar

@tivasyk

Unfortunately, he’s 100% right.

kravietz,
@kravietz@agora.echelon.pl avatar

@JoeStewart

It’s an excerpt from Izolenta Live program published on Rutube, a Russian-only clone of YouTube

https://rutube.ru/u/IzolentaLive/videos/

kravietz, to Russia
@kravietz@agora.echelon.pl avatar

war correspondent Romanov doesn’t hide the fact he’s personally engaging in fighting, quite the opposite - he proudly publishes videos of himself firing a mortar. What ICRC says about journalists protection at war time?

Journalists and their equipment enjoy immunity, the former as civilians, the latter as a result of the general protection that international humanitarian law grants to civilian objects. However, this immunity is not absolute. Journalists are protected only as long as they do not take a direct part in the hostilities. News media, even when used for propaganda purposes, enjoy immunity from attacks, except when they are used for military purposes or to incite war crimes, genocide or acts of violence.

Source: https://casebook.icrc.org/case-study/protection-journalists

Romanov wearing a samurai-like combination of several body armours loads a projectile into a mortar and fires it twice

agr, to searxng
@agr@pleroma.envs.net avatar

While Bing is down, time to (re)visit @Seirdy excellent post:

**A look at search engines with their own indexes

https://seirdy.one/posts/2021/03/10/search-engines-with-own-indexes/

Including Mojeek (own index) and SearxNG a metasearch engine (list of public instances here: https://searx.space/)

kravietz,
@kravietz@agora.echelon.pl avatar
kravietz, to random Polish
@kravietz@agora.echelon.pl avatar

Polscy dziennikarze uruchomili nowy projekt https://postpravda.info poświęcony dezinformacji rosyjskiej skierowanej przeciwko Polsce i Ukrainie.

kravietz, to iran
@kravietz@agora.echelon.pl avatar

Some media apparently reported that the Iranian presidential helicopter that crashed had one passenger onboard, by name of Kruchev. Neither Russian nor mainstream Iranian media mentioned that, but it is also reported that Kruchev might have been involved in Iran’s covert nuclear program.

Source: https://t.me/zloyodessit/21746

kravietz, to Russia
@kravietz@agora.echelon.pl avatar

has declared an intention to unilaterally extend its territorial waters on sea in a way that collides with territorial waters of and . Russian Ministry of Defense (!) proposed to cancel the 1985 decision of demarcation of the sea borders and redraw them according to “new geographical references”, and then declare them “internal waters”.

Obviously, this looks very much like a poorly disguised attempt to create an strategic dilemma for by unilaterally opening a territorial dispute with two NATO members without really invading anyone yet. In case of NATO inaction the next step will be Russian actually enforcing their “new territorial waters” by threatening or sinking ships sailing to Finland and Lithuania. And if the inaction continues, the next step will be likely establishing “new geographical references” on one of the land borders of NATO countries.

Source: https://www.moscowtimes.ru/2024/05/21/rossiya-reshila-vodnostoronnem-poryadke-sdvinut-granitsu-slitvoi-ifinlyandiei-ibaltiiskom-more-a131403 (in Russian)

kravietz,
@kravietz@agora.echelon.pl avatar

@notsoloud

Unfortunately I haven’t seen any but this is a new topic so soon someone will surely make a more detailed analysis.

kravietz,
@kravietz@agora.echelon.pl avatar

@belladonaa

Can you be more specific about what “NATO agreements with Russia” you’re talking about?

kravietz, (edited ) to nuclear
@kravietz@agora.echelon.pl avatar

Second of the three European EPR ( Evolutionary Power Reactor) projects - - will be shortly connected to the grid. The projects caused many controversies due to long delays… but they are getting completed:

  • 🇫🇮 Olkiluoto 3 ✅ connected in 2023
  • 🇫🇷 Flamanville ✔️ finished, will be connected by end of 2024 : 🇬🇧 Hinkley Point C 🕓 will be completed by 2027

The moment these projects get connected, they start delivering gigawatt-hours of low-carbon electricity to the grid, which is desperately needed for prevention and mitigation.

Each of these has been criticised for delays (which is factually true but unfair) and “huge cost” (which is unfair and untrue).

Talking about the total investment cost in case of clean electricity sources that may live up to a century is a popular manipulation but what matters is LCOE.

It’s the cost of investment and operations divided by value of electricity produced over its life time. In case of nuclear power LCOE is quite low, in the range of $60/MWh because the relatively big initial costs is divided by decades of delivery of huge amounts of power. This is exactly the same case with very costly off-shore wind farms (e.g. the Doggerbank project) or huge solar farms (e.g. Ouarzazate in Morocco).

The reasons for delays are… complex. This article[1] by Joris van Dorp is probably the best explainer to why exactly Hinkley Point C was delayed so much. It’s a mix of reasons, starting from “first of kind” scale of the project to prohibitive and often absurd safety requirements lobbied after Fukushima by countries who saw an opportunity in replacing EU nuclear by Russian fossil gas. And they were absurd, for example because you don’t get earthquakes and tsunamis on the La Manche Channel.

And the reasons are complex, for example due to general UK attitude to funding infrastructure projects - they exclusively opt for private funding, which means the investors need to get a direct financial profit. Most people see the absurdity of private ownership of UK water utilities (which leads to no investments in the network and dumping of sewage into rivers by underregulated companies) but nobody sees the same absurdity in funding the electricity grid (which is in turn overregulated).

kravietz,
@kravietz@agora.echelon.pl avatar

@DE8AH

You’re now evading the discussion on funding and changing topics, but I’m OK with that. I have explained several times that the above arguments for using social discount rate apply equally towards large renewables, nuclear and hydro power projects.

Now, by singling out nuclear you are making the mistake of comparing projects of incompatible size and pretending they’re equal. Of course, it’s much easier to build one 10 MW(p) wind turbine than a 1 GW nuclear power plant. The difference is that the former will deliver 100x less power for 30% of the time during a year on average, so it will ultimately produce ~25 GWh. The latter will output 100x more power 90% of the time, so it will deliver ~7 TWh of electricity.

But if you start comparing equivalent projects you will very soon get very similar numbers in terms of project schedules. For example:

  • UK Sizewell C nuclear power plant - 3 GW installed power - planned completion 2032
  • Denmark off-shore wind hub - 3 GW installed power - planned completion 2033

Looks similar, doesn’t it? It does, as soon as you look at installed power only. Because in terms of actually delivered electricity they are very different:

  • UK Sizewell C annual output 23 TWh
  • Denmark off-shore wind hub annual output 11.8 TWh

And that’s not all, because a nuclear power plant operates at ~90% capacity factor and is dispatchable (it produces when you want), while wind farm produces when wind blows. Therefore, to get 24/7 electricity supply you need to somehow compensate the variability of wind.

This is the only reason why Germany is now building 10 GW fossil gas (500 gCO2eq/kWh) power plants - to get 24/7 supply while having a large share of renewables. So you can’t just look at the LCOE of wind alone, because it will not supply you power alone - you need to look at the cost of both wind and cost of balancing (gas, nuclear, batteries, hydro etc).

This is why in grids with large share of renewables they started using LFSCOE (levelized full system cost of electricity), which is incorporates all these costs. Selected Bank of America LFSCOE estimates for Germany:

  • Nuclear $106/MWh
  • Wind $504/MWh
  • Solar $1548/MWh

Source: https://advisoranalyst.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/05/bofa-the-ric-report-the-nuclear-necessity-20230509.pdf

kravietz,
@kravietz@agora.echelon.pl avatar

@DE8AH

Did you believe Germans when they said they complete DESERTEC in a decade?

kravietz,
@kravietz@agora.echelon.pl avatar

@DE8AH

Hmmm weird, because now you seem to very much believe in the current decarbonisation plan involving further increase in renewables and fossil gas which may be in unspecified future replaced by hydrogen?

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