Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46204179

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Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40934495

Points: 347

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This is an article about the Northvolt news by a German journalist specialized on battery technology (in German): https://www.golem.de/news/akkutechnik-northvolt-und-altris-e...

He says that 160 Wh/kg is in the ballpark of LFP batteries from five years ago. It is, however, about the same as the sodium batteries announced by CATL in 2021.

Not true for FFP2s, N95s, and the likes. Which are more common in Germany than in most other places.

Moving into winter, the general situation can change and many people are expecting more strict regulations.

And then there’s the question of community and personal assessments. C3 is an event run by a community that tends to be note cautious with respect to risks. And, as the announcement says, "[w]hat might be possible would not be a Congress".

While I like the idea of shared co-working, the reality is that my current job works best in a room on my own. And it doesn't even involve more than 10 % meetings plus some ad-hoc calls with coworkers.

But you cannot do that while the non-immune part of the population is large enough to overwhelm the healthcare system if they get infected rapidly. Hence the focus on getting as many people vaccinated as possible, and keeping more or less non-pharmaceutical interventions in place.

Over the last months, removing non-pharmaceutical interventions has worked relatively well for some Western societies like Denmark (high vaccination rate) or the UK (lower vaccination rate + many previously infected), but not so well for others like Germany.

Variants change the game, but don't completely reset us to square one: Vaccines still provide some protection, but factors like higher transmissibility may work against that. mRNA vaccines can be adjusted relatively quickly.

We're seeing some congruence in the mutations acquired by different variants and most experts I listen to don't expect the virus to keep mutating forever. There is a limited number of options and population immunity will only become more broad.

On the other hand, the variants seen so far have surprised us quite a bit. Given that, it remains difficult to map out a clear path on the scope of years.

Are they still gonna be high enough after a few months? Good question. Afaict, nobody knows yet.

(And this of course leaves aside the whole matter of T-cell immunity still providing protection against severe disease.)

Being used to Kayak‘s comma syntax, I did not find this intuitive at first. But in fact, it is pretty convenient and powerful.

Still, the rest of the EU (or at least Germany) is quite unhappy with the enforcement of these laws in Ireland. It is absurd that the Irish Data Protection Commissioner is supposed to control the privacy of most larger tech corporations for the whole EU. A few years ago, they only had 22 employees and their only office was literally co-located with a supermarket in the suburbs [1]. They got a second office since then and apparently are now at around 100 employees [2], but that is still quite small if you have to control giants like Google, Facebook and more.

So, from the outside it looks like Ireland's "strange relationships" also include privacy matters.

[1] https://www.gutjahr.biz/2012/07/facebook-eu-datenschutz/ [2] https://www.dataprotection.ie/en/news-media/press-releases/d...