Yet the market still thinks differently. Lots of countries still keep subsidizing EV despite them already being mature technology for such a long time.
We didn't have to subsidize the smart phone to make it successful, we shouldn't have to subsidize electric cars either.
Maybe if we had smartphones that emitted greenhouse and toxic gases by using a mini ICE engine that were so cheap nobody would buy anything else, we would subsidize the electric ones. We may even ban the gas phones.
I am not comparing BEV with ICE. That would be stupid. ICE is not and will never be a solution to the fact that we are burning oil and destroying the environment. But EV has to compete with ICE and many people don't like the fact that they might be a small inconvenience. The environment is just not part of the calculation so to make BEVs even slightly competitive the price has to be lowered.
H2 doesn't compete with ICE. It competes with BEV. That and in that comparison I do think it is much simpler. I'd be open to be enlightened why the killer feature of H2 is that makes it even worth considering with all these downsides.
> we shouldn't have to subsidize electric cars either.
Smart phones were subsidised, just less obviously. Much of the fundamental research into the radio systems was done by government labs, for example.
Not to mention that governments provide maaaaasssive subsidies to the entire fossil fuel industry, including multi-trillion dollar wars in the middle east to control the oil!
Look at it from the perspective of pollution control in cities. China just invested tens of billions - maybe hundreds — into clearing out the smog they were notorious for. Electric vehicles are a part of the solution.
The alternative is everyone living a decade less because… the market forces will it.
According to the Wikipedia article, it is still significantly worse than Just Using the Electricity (~21 to 48% efficiency just on the hydrogen production part, not counting distribution and consumption).
> As always with Zig posts, here come the haters. I really wonder why you even care about it.
It's another language stack that would need to be maintained within Linux distributions for years to come (security support, architecture support etc).
Upstream developers always seem to assume that there is no cost associated to introducing new software stacks. But in the end, someone has to maintain it. And they keep forgetting the purpose of software is to serve users, not developers.
And I'm not sure what's so revolutionary about Zig that couldn't have been solved by improving other languages.
For Zig in particular, the language isn't even stable enough that you can compile packages like Ghostty with any recent version of the Zig compiler. It has to be a very specific version of the compiler.
No. If you don't want to maintain it, don't package it, or for that matter programs written in it. Yes, there are valid reasons not to use zig from a stability perspective, but just ignore it if it isn't good enough for your standards.
Personally I'm glad that there are more people trying to break out of the C tar pit. Even if I'd never chose to use the language.
> And they keep forgetting the purpose of software is to serve users, not developers.
I don't have any horse in the game, but I do think Zig is interesting. This remark is funny to me because it's literally one of the tenets the Zig devs make decisions by!
Yeah, people forget the degree to which sysvinit was hated at the time - "why are you forcing me to deal with an impenetrable forest of symlinks rather than simply hand-edit a couple of basic rc scripts?!?".
If the intention is to create a system that users can reason about, then sysvinit offers the worst of all possible worlds.
> why are you forcing me to deal with an impenetrable forest of symlinks rather than simply hand-edit a couple of basic rc scripts?
Run levels. That's it, sysvinit is about run levels. Each run level starts or kills off its own specific list of runnable things like applications, daemons, capabilities, etc.
Run levels were a desirable feature back in the day amongst System V Unix vendors, so each run level required its own kill and start scripts for each item. Run levels, for example, could take a running system from single user (root admin) mode to multi-user, multi-login, NFS sharing, full X11 mode in one command immediately as the scripts ran. This allowed rapid reconfiguration of a system, such as from a GIS workstation to a headless file server, etc. etc. as needed. Each system could be configured to boot to a specific run level. Rather than duplicate some or all such scripts across some or all run levels, symlinks were the solution.
For example, Solaris had run levels 0 through 6. Zero was a blunt force system halt; 1 was single root user admin mode; 2 was multi-user headless mode with NFS; 3 was multi-user X11 windows mode with NFS; 4 was unspecified and therefore kept for purely local configuration as desired; 5 was a planned, orderly system shutdown; and 6 was a planned, orderly system reboot. The root user could implement their choice of run level directly with the init command.
Each run level had its own run control directory (rc.d) under /etc/rc.d for its appropriate kill and start scripts, which were run in order of their K or S number, so dependencies had to be kept in mind when numbering, and curing a dependency failure was as simple as changing a script's number to rearrange the list. So, why copy S04blahblah from rc2.d to rc3.d when a symlink is far better?
Its not hard to understand when you get the big picture, and it wasn't hard to administer if you had the proper overview of it all. Admittedly, admins coming in cold would have to sort through it all, which is partly why it gained a reputation for murkiness when not properly documented by/for local admins. Keep in mind it was the era of administering sendmail macros and NIS tables by hand and you get the picture.
I'm with you on this. SysVinit is better than systemd, but far from perfect. I don't enjoy tediously maintaining all of those symlinks, and prefer the BSD approach myself.
One project on my distro is a new init that will be much, much simpler than SysV, more like BSD and without all the years of cruft.
Ahh yes. France’s investment in replacing carbon free nuclear with… carbon free intermittents. Fortunately that hype-driven waste is not stopping France from building out new EPR2 reactors.
Not all australia is moving g at the same speed. Check south Australia, and it is a massive success. The difference is that the government invested in renewewals, along with solar in rooftops. As SA is smaller they did not had pressure from lobbies. Now, are almost 100% renewal energy all year long.
There is a very funny nuclear power plant in France which is located in such a way to be surrounded on 3 sides by Belgium instead of by France. (EDF Nuclear Power Plant Chooz)
»US electricity demand jumped by 135 terawatt-hours (TWh) in 2025, a 3.1% increase, the fourth‑largest annual rise of the past decade. Over that same period, solar generation grew by a record 83 TWh – a 27% increase from 2024 and the biggest absolute gain of any power source. That single jump in solar output covered 61% of all new electricity demand nationwide.«
This article equates generation with consumption which is a fallacy.
Lots of solar and wind generation is actually produced without meeting demand meaning that the generated electricity often has to be wasted.
There are alternatives, like "pay as bid", which heavily incentives the best price guesser instead of the cheapest producers. And is a system more fragile against collusions in concentrated markets (i.e. a handful of big producers that agree on high bids).
Yet the market still thinks differently. Lots of countries still keep subsidizing EV despite them already being mature technology for such a long time.
We didn't have to subsidize the smart phone to make it successful, we shouldn't have to subsidize electric cars either.