Is it really so hard for you people to imagine that MAYBE, there's politicians that see what social media look like these days and think they might want to do something against that?
The fact that all of these companies aren't European certainly doesn't help, but if you think this and GDPR, DMA etc. are purely schemes to milk foreign companies then you've been drinking way too much cynicism juice.
So if I offer my services providing electricity through a bicycle transformer for the cheap cheap price of $1000 per kWh does that mean everyone has to pay that price.
Every 30 mins the UK energy suppliers put in a bid for how much energy they can produce and what price they will do it for. The UK then selects the cheapest N companies to fufill the predicted energy demand. Each company selected is then paid the price of the most expensive supplier chosen which is usually gas.This is a simplification of what the Octopus Energy CEO explains in the link below starts ~1:40.
No. The operative word there is "required". The grid sorts the various providers cheapest to most expensive, then uses all the power from each until they don't need the power anymore, at which point they pay everyone who they did take power from the rate of the highest winning bidder.
If you were offering power at $1000/kWh, you would simply lose the auction.
Imagine the scenario where Alice, Bob, Charlie, and Daniel are each selling power at $1/kWh, $2, $3, and $4 respectively. We need 30 kW of power.
Alice bids 10 kW at $1/kWh. We draw power from her, but we still need 20 kW
Bob bids 15 kW at $2/kWh. We draw power from him, but we still need 5 kW.
Charlie bids 30 kW at $3/kWh. We draw 5 kW from him. We don't need any more power, so Charlie has set the price at $3/kWh
Over the next hour, Alice gets $30, Bob gets $45, and Charlie gets $15. Daniel gets nothing, because he was out bid.
There is a significant fine to be paid by the non delivering supplier. This still happens and that is why there is also an auction for reserve power. Oversupply is fined even higher as that is also bad for grid stability.
Think about this like a market. Suppose yes, there is demand for your power at $1000/kwh.
What is the market pressure here? Suddenly a ton of new capacity in solar, gas, etc, will come online and drive that price down because there will be much more capacity before you reach the point of $1000/kwh purchases.
The alternative is that people get paid at cost of production, which if you think about it is less fair. Why should a gas turbine get paid $67/kwh and a solar cell or battery get paid less? It also means that the market incentivizes more cheaper energy as a rule, because they take profit.
Would you go to the gas station charging $2 above market price just because their costs are higher to produce the gas?
As I understand it (and even if I’m broadly right I’m greatly simplifying) there’s an auction system and if demand is X kilowatts, they line up all the bids to supply in cost order and draw a line at X kilowatts. All successful bidders receive the price bid by the highest successful bidder.
There are rare times in this kind of market where the price does go very high (though not to $1000 per kwh), and those brief periods push average prices up substantially.
In markets where batteries are going gangbusters, they are squashing many of these peaks and thus reducing average prices paid by consumers (though not as much as you’d hope because the majority of retail electricity costs are distribution rather than generation).
Contactless is the convenience provided to get us into some wall garden. Apple pay. Google pay. Samsung pay.
These are not open or interchangeable standard, they aren't interested in that. They want our valuable transactional data, and location when those are made.
QR codes are a standard. It allows any bank to issue funds. It's a wire transfer. Transfer are a standard. Any bank can adopt it. Typically a bank adopts it..it doesn't require a specific device or partnership for merchant, nor the payer.
It also offers the ability to transfer funds remotely. In that sense it is more so contact "less" than the proximity handshake that contactless payments do, which is somewhat proprietary.
You can save a QR code, make a payment later. QR codes also are more intuitive because they represent an identity. An electronic device that can be swapped, tempered with, is unhelpful to help figure out a fraud or who we are actually paying until the handshake happens.
More importantly they don't incur a hidden fee for either the payer or merchant. Because it's a transfer. Not a transfer disguised as card payment.
A QR code scan keep the payer in control. Merchant presents an amount to pay, payer initiates the transactions, approves, and gets a confirmation. Can use bank A, or Y, or even a bank in another country, so long as it supports QR scan and a fast wire so that the merchant can be assured the transfer is well received.
Yeah, but... QR codes are annoying. I live in Thailand and I have to scan them every day. Pretty much every time, I wish it was as seamless as Apple Pay.
It means that it is de-facto compatible with all operating systems.
Also means that the tooling to make collaborative work in this suite possible already exists because it's a common use case on the web and less so on native software (see Microsoft Office vs. Microsoft 365 online).
Sure, "all" operating systems. "All" that is OSes that have a web browser built for it that at least supports [TransformStream](https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/TransformSt...)... And the browser and spec written and maintained mostly by people outside of France. Kinda compromises the point of being "sovereign" doesn't it?
Forking Firefox whenever the rug is pulled seems doable (with elbow grease), and in the meantime Europeans can invest on problems that don't have an already mature fully open-source solution.
Managing documents on the back end can be very sensible, depending on your work context. Not having to deal with installations is also a real advantage in a heterogeneous environment with a mix of US-controlled operating systems and unencumbered OSes. It also makes migration between them easier, since you only need a common browser to be supported.
There are definitely some benefits! Installation and updates become trivial. Also, collaboration is generally easier, because all you have to do is send a link.
These are the same reasons Google Docs took off, and they are real advantages.
This is an alley in Coimbra, Portugal. A couple years ago I stayed at a hotel in this very street and took a cab from the train station. The driver could have stopped in the praça below and told me to walk 15m up. Instead the guy went all the way up then curved through 5-10 alleys like that to drop me off right right in front of my place. At a significant speed as well. It was one of the craziest car rides I've ever experienced.
Definitely agree on your last point, "consumer" is by far the most passive of the terms, and wholly represents the current idea that companies can simply shovel out anything, because "consumers" will simply consume either way. Of course this isn't magic, a single person won't change just because you call them a user or a consumer, but it reflects your view of them, and will inform your actions towards them.
"customer" represents a two-sided relationship, and I do feel that "user" is kind of one-sided, but gives agency, a user will use a product for their own purposes, presumably to help them achieve some kind of goal. A "consumer" is completely passive, their main goal is to do what the company tells them to do. A customer can walk out of the relationship, a user might complain about problems they have with your product, but the consumer will simply continue consuming whatever you want them to consume.
The worst part though, they seem to be mostly correct in their assessment.
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