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Oh good. Then Google will be "clean", while countless homes will be getting their power from coal or whatever instead of this nuclear plant.

The plant may be closed without this Google's order. The cost to keep it running is substantial. I guess that's what you prefer?

"The Finland deal will ensure that the Loviisa plant keeps operating beyond 2030, the companies said in a statement. Keeping it running until 2050 will require about €1 billion of investments over the years"

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-09-09/google-gi...


Lol, it certainly wouldn't have been decommissioned in any case. For that to happen electricity consumption would need to be going down instead of up and Finland would need to have abundance of steady power to replace it.

First of all, are you willing to wait to find out?

Second of all, if it is not Google, it'd be either other businesses, or from tax money. Why should tax money be used to bail out a failed business?


No public money needed, it is easily profitable to do without.

And to answer your question: yes I and everyone else in Finland were willkng to wait and find out, it was and is not feasible option to shut it down in few years. If it actually was a realistic option this would have been big news for years now with the highly variable electricity prices we've had after the Russia attack on Ukraine.


> No public money needed, it is easily profitable to do without.

According to whom? Show the number, don't just be hand wavy. If it is struggling now to extend beyond 2030 then how can it easily be profitable? Think about your logic.

> Yes I and everyone else in Finland were willkng to wait and find out

Not the plant operator apparently, who has the stakes in it. Do you pay them enough to run the plant?


If it costs only €1 billion to extend the lifespan by 20 years, then nothing else can compete with it. The capacity is 1 GW.

There are two completely different businesses.

OL3 will generate ~745 TWh over his life, from a total investment of ~€11bn.

Loviisa life extension will generate ~170 TWH, from an investment of ~€1bn.

Considering the capacity factor, we are comparing 6€/MWh for Loviisa against ~15€/MWh for OL3.

So, it is worth mentioning that extending the life of an existing power plant can be a really good investment.

Main difference is in initial setup/concrete installment!!

You can review all the maths using data from OL3 here: https://reactoratlas.com/en?y=2026&s=finland-olkiluoto-nucle...


Finland doesn't get the rest of its power from coal, they're one of the greenest energy markets on the planet.

But they export a substantial amount to Estonia, who do

Coal usage is rapidly declining in Estonia too: https://www.enerdata.net/estore/energy-market/estonia/

It's a market. Why can't someone buy it?

Why does it matter that homes "aren't clean" while Google is? That's silly. There's going to be the same level of demand no matter what - the same mix of coal and nuclear inputs will happen regardless of where the outflows are. It's fungible.

More demand will in time result in an increase in supply. That's a good thing. We'll be building a lot more, and it's long overdue.


Google is buying the output because they are increasing demand by half a nuclear power plant's worth of power. I actually think it's pretty reasonable to pass a law demanding they build an entire nuclear power plant here.

"The agreement with Fortum provides long-term financial certainty for the Loviisa plant, which currently generates about 10% of Finland's electricity.

Fortum said Google's commitment would support an investment programme aimed at extending the life of the nuclear station and increasing its generating capacity."

Long-term PPAs are what you usually want because they are bankable and give you solid demand on which to expand. Which is literally what they're talking about doing.


If I build a house and the demand goes up I don't have to build the solar panels (and everything else involved) to cover it, I pay the utility company to build that based on how much I'm needing to use. Well, normally I pay for whatever they think will make them the most money to deliver that much electricity - Google is specifically paying to make sure the utility company sees it as increased demand and revenue for more nuclear.

You'd get denied getting connected or expanding your business or adding a car charger, as is reality in parts of Scandinavia, if it was an issue.

I think government regulations to put a cap on utility profits is a better long term move. Force excess to be directed into green energy expansion.

> government regulations to put a cap on utility profits

I don't know about Finland specifically, but isn't this already the case practically everywhere?


Governments are extremely bad at calculating how much something "should" cost. Profits are revenue minus expenses. "Expenses" are revenue to someone else. Whenever you try to cap "profit" of some entity that isn't actually subject to competitive pressure, the next thing that happens is that the people running it start colluding or taking kickbacks from any of the people whose revenue constitutes their expenses.

Because then the utility company's expenses go up, which they would normally not want because it reduces their profit, except that then they can say that their profit isn't over the threshold and use that to increase revenue (i.e. raise prices) and still make the same profit but now also get the kickbacks under the table or help out their cronies by overpaying them.

It also in general deprives them of the incentive to improve efficiency, because reducing waste lowers expenses, which in a normal system you have the incentive to do because it means you make more money, but not if profit is a fixed amount defined by the law regardless of what you do.

Which is to say, it's much better to find a way to narrow the utility monopoly as much as possible and subject them to competitive pressure as much as possible, than to try to pretend that you can limit the profit of an entire monopoly supply chain by declaring that a single entity in it can only have a specific amount.


Do those problems exist as much if the excess was forced into them investing into a certain type of power generation? It seems less "heavy handed", since it's a proper investment for them.

I enjoy a particularly nasty utility monopoly where I am, in a dark blue state, where there is exactly zero political interest in breaking any monopolies. Any competition would probably have to be forced at a federal level. I think less bribing of politicians would happen if you tried to make them do something they were basically already going to do.

[1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/energyinnovation/2026/03/22/uti...


> Do those problems exist as much if the excess was forced into them investing into a certain type of power generation?

The premise of "excess" already has the problem baked into it.

Suppose an efficient company could provide service for $100 with a $10 profit, but regulators have no practical way of establishing this. The incumbent is instead providing service for $200 with a $10 profit, but then receiving $30 in kickbacks under the table or something of equivalent value not being accounted for in the official books from whoever is now getting $190 instead of $90.

Whereas getting them to invest in a particular type of generation was never hard because you can just give them a financial incentive to do it. If they have to pay a carbon tax out of their profits, which generation types are they going to add?


> If they have to pay a carbon tax out of their profits, which generation types are they going to add?

I see. Thanks for understand! How do you motivate them to actually add capacity? With a monopoly, it seems that adding supply for something people have to use could just reduce rates/profits.


At this point with all the free-market-hand waving going around, it feels like someone telling me that it's not urin raining down on me, just sparkling trickle down economics.

You now have a PhD in your pocket.

Is that not the miracle of the free market?

King Richard II would have killed for an iPhone, PS5, air conditioning, and Uber Eats. He'd swap places with you, and he was king. You don't realize how awesome you have it.

Just a hundred years ago your ancestors were (probably) eating rotten meat and drinking unclean water.


> King Richard II would have killed for an iPhone, PS5, air conditioning, and Uber Eats. He'd swap places with you, and he was king.

I don't for a moment believe that, but apparently arguments that cannot possibly be proven are in vogue nowadays.


Would you switch positions with King Richard II, then? That's a hypothesis we can test since you're here.

Are you sure King Richard would do that? I don’t think he would do that at all. Being king is good because you’re above everybody else.

King Richard II would look at those devices you're offering and have you flayed for heresy

You’re assuming a large enough supply that can absorb demand. This is true in China but not generally in the West.

If supply was just in time constructed so you maybe have only like 10-30% extra vs peak, the 50% of a nuclear power plant shifts the preexisting non-Google demand onto the non-nuclear sources as the plant can no longer meet its non-Google demand. It’s generally no different than if Google acquired that electricity from the available mix rather than the plant directly.

The thing it gives them is the ability to meet their individual net-0 targets (and thus government incentives) - a local optimization at the cost of a global net negative (at least as far as carbon electricity sources goes)


This is a case where the supply was about to be gone and Google provided funds to keep it operating (the original nuclear reactor began operation in 1977 and it now needed EUR 700M to extend the service life). And one can probably guess that this supply just wasn’t cost competitive in the first place, but Google increased the demand so much that it now becomes cost competitive.

Source? The provider had requested to extend the lifetime of that particular reactor to 2050 2 years ago (something they’d started considering 8 years ago). Now maybe they did this contingent on expecting this Google deal to materialize, but it’s not clear to me these Google funds are strictly the only reason they’d keep operating the plant.

From https://world-nuclear-news.org/articles/google-signs-up-for-...

> Currently, about 80% of the projects required to extend the service life and investments of EUR700 million still lack an investment decision. Fortum said the PPA with Google will generate a predictable revenue stream, enabling it to complete the life extension investments at Loviisa.

I think they requested the operating license extension before the actual decision to extend was made.


Yes let's shame corporations for spending money on and supporting things that need more support. /s

Somehow folks want this little problem of climate change to go away without any change in their own behaviors. Somehow corporations who sell them goods will just magically "be green" while flying around the world and drinking out of plastic bottles and subscribing to the latest fast-fashion website. But then when the corporations say "yes we should be green" that's a problem too. You just can't please some people, they're just here to complain, not actually see anything positive in the world.

Don't forget that they buy countless things from China, who is by a very large margin the largest polluter in the world.

I dont know why people bring this up. China has nowhere near the highest per capita pollution levels.

Per-capita can be bad and so can overall scale. It wouldn't matter if Norway was the highest per-capita because like 5 people live there.

Per capita is worse by definition, unless your arguing that people with higher per capita emissions are somehow more valuable to society than those with lower.

The other aspect is that China provides a large industrial base for the West, which is arguably the West just externalizing/offshoring their emissions anyway.


> Per capita is worse by definition, unless your arguing that people with higher per capita emissions are somehow more valuable to society than those with lower.

By what definition? If Norway has a 100x higher per-capital admissions rate and 5 people live there it’s inconsequential.

> The other aspect is that China provides a large industrial base for the West, which is arguably the West just externalizing/offshoring their emissions anyway.

I think that is a bad argument because China prefers to have that capacity and specifically courted it as part of their national strategy. Emissions they create are theirs to blame too. Ask China - would you rather have these factories or have lower emissions? The answer is 100% have the factories (and jobs).

When you write things like China is arguably the recipient of western emissions offshoring, despite western countries taking actions to decarbonize or add environmental efficiencies, you deprive China and Chinese people of agency and responsible for their decisions.


> When you write things like China is arguably the recipient of western emissions offshoring, despite western countries taking actions to decarbonize or add environmental efficiencies, you deprive China and Chinese people of agency and responsible for their decisions.

Not only that, it's a misdirect to try to blame countries that have more stringent emissions rules for the results in a country that doesn't.

Suppose that every country banned coal. Obviously then the location of the factories or customers wouldn't affect the amount of coal being burned because the number would be zero either way.

Suppose no country regulated emissions at all. Again the amount of coal being burned doesn't depend on the location of the factories because companies would be able to burn as much as they like regardless of where they are.

But suppose that some countries have emissions rules and others don't. As a result, the companies that want to burn coal move to the countries where they're allowed to do it. Now the amount of emissions does depend on where the factories are. But if the country where they are had the same emissions rules then they would be less competitive -- and so they choose to attract a disproportionate share of the manufacturing to a place that uses dirty power. That's definitely a choice -- compare it to the outcome where every country stops burning coal.


Do you know how South Australia solved a problem of the Whyalla Steelworks when transitioning to 100% renewable electricity? They excluded on-site generation of the plant from the statistics. "Solarization" of the plant hadn't worked out economically. Continuous manufacturing processes have big problems with intermittent energy sources.

China is building tens of nuclear power plants though.


> Continuous manufacturing processes have big problems with intermittent energy sources.

Intermittent energy sources are predictable in aggregate. A fairly modest amount of storage to smooth things out and you can pretty reasonably get above 50% solar and wind. Make up a large chunk of the balance with nuclear and hydro and you're pretty close to 100%.

The last 10% is obviously the hardest, but what's the excuse for countries still doing majority fossil fuels?

> China is building tens of nuclear power plants though.

Trouble being they're still operating ~1200 coal power plants.


Predictability will not get a plant through the night by itself. BTW, it's about 7 units of wind energy to 1 unit of solar energy plus significant overcapacity plus increase of the grid transmission capacity plus additional measures for grid stabilization (like synchronous condensers) to get to a "fairly modest amount of storage."

> Trouble being they're still operating ~1200 coal power plants.

Yeah, it's because of the above points.


> BTW, it's about 7 units of wind energy to 1 unit of solar energy plus significant overcapacity plus increase of the grid transmission capacity plus additional measures for grid stabilization (like synchronous condensers) to get to a "fairly modest amount of storage."

No it doesn't. You install 12 hours worth of batteries at the factory and "there is no solar at night" is solved, and doing that is already cost competitive with coal on the majority of days.

The problem comes when generation is low not because it's night but because it's cloudy for an extended period of time. But that only happens a small minority of the time, and doesn't require you to burn fossil fuels the other 90% of the time.

You also don't need things like synchronous condensers when you're using a non-trivial amount of nuclear or hydro, neither of which is coal.

> Yeah, it's because of the above points.

Then how do so many other industrialized countries do it without that amount of coal?

Canada and Spain are each only ~22% fossil fuels. France is <5%. The UK is 31% and only 0.1% of that is coal.


> You install 12 hours worth of batteries at the factory

I literally laughed out loud, sorry. Providing baseload with BESS alone? That's rich. Literally. Extremely expensive. In addition to impractical amount of batteries it requires impractical overcapacity to compensate for seasonal variation.

> Then why is no other country burning that amount of coal?

China does about 30% of the world's industrial production and 40% of metal production, while having around 50% of world's coal power plants. They are working on it though. Many of their new coal plants are peaker plants.


> Extremely expensive.

Battery storage has a levelized cost of ~$0.20/kWh. Solar is ~$0.04/kWh. If you're using the batteries for 50% of kWh you end up at an average of ~$0.14/kWh, which is in the same range as coal.

> it requires impractical overcapacity to compensate for seasonal variation.

Only if you're trying to do 100% of generation from one source. Solar generates more power in the summer, wind generates more power in the winter. Meanwhile you don't have to use overcapacity at all when your target isn't fully 100%. You have enough solar to not need fossil fuels in the warmer months at all, enough wind to only need them 20% of the time in cooler months, and then only 10% of your kWh come from fossil fuels.

> China does about 30% of the world's industrial production and 40% of metal production, while having around 50% of world's coal power plants.

Those are unwelcome numbers even proportional to the amount of manufacturing.

> Many of their new coal plants are peaker plants.

"New coal plants" is rather the problem in itself. The number we need to be going down is instead going up.


1 tonne of steel requires around 5MWh of energy at 50,000 tonnes per day it's around 250GWh of batteries at 50% usage. The largest planned BESS is 19GWh. As I said solar+BESS is impractical.

Wind is more expensive. Onshore wind turbines have higher variability. Offshore ones are limited to coastal areas. Overall, there's a lot of practical problems. It's all doable, but building infrastructure takes time.

China's onshore wind potential is 12.6 PWh/year[1]. China's 2024 energy consumption is 9.85 PWh[2]. It's not much of overcapacity potential. Huh. I though it's higher.

[1] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S13640... [2] https://english.www.gov.cn/archive/statistics/202501/20/cont...


Nah, it’s coz they were almost all built in an era before renewables became cheaper than coal in the last few years.

It’s unclear. It helps Google with their marketing that they’re a net zero carbon company. But if what’s happening is they’re displacing previous nuclear power users onto dirtier, that’s not really reducing carbon and it’s making it seem like Google isn’t the problem when it actually is - without them that community might otherwise be 100% nuclear and it would be no different from a macro level from Google adding that consumption to dirty sources.

> they’re displacing previous nuclear power users onto dirtier

They are not. The plant may not survive beyond 2030 without this order.


Where did you read this? What I read is that Fortum was considering extending to 2050 as early as 2018 and finalized those plans 2 years ago. I read nothing that indicates the survival of this plant is dependent on this Google deal.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loviisa_Nuclear_Power_Plant



> Those decisions would otherwise have been made year by year, but the long-term deal with Google ensures Loviisa will keep running through the end of its operating license

It's important to be able to read through PR in planted pieces. There's no indication that Loviisa was actually going to struggle. It's a guaranteed revenue stream which removes some risk for them, but Finland has seen a boom in data centers and such which is why Fortum went after the 2050 extension in the first place. They even wanted to build a third reactor which the government declined to authorize. That doesn't speak to them wondering if there's enough demand to keep the plant alive. It's highly unlikely Loviisa was going to close down even without the Google deal.


> It's important to be able to read through PR in planted pieces

Planted pieces? how about directly from the operator:

Without the lifetime extension investment program, the plant – which currently employs approximately 580 people and provides 10% of Finland’s electricity – could not continue operations beyond 2030. - [0]

That is not just year over year discussion. Of course it's PR, but do you happen to have insider information that contradict that?

More details:

Fortum has an ongoing, approximately EUR 1 billion investment programme in Loviisa with the aim of extending the lifetime of the power plant until 2050. To date, approximately 80% of the projects and EUR 700 million of the capital expenditure required to keep the power plant operational through 2050 are still pending investment decisions.

The PPA with Google will provide the revenue certainty to continue the investments associated with 100% of the lifetime extension of Loviisa. Furthermore, the agreement is expected to enable a new 10 MW power increase of the plant, in addition to the already planned 38 MW uprate which is expected to be live in 2028.

> That doesn't speak to them wondering if there's enough demand to keep the plant alive. It's highly unlikely Loviisa was going to close down even without the Google deal.

You know that because?

[0] - https://www.fortum.com/media/2026/09/inside-information-fort...


> But if what’s happening is they’re displacing previous nuclear power users onto dirtier, that’s not really reducing carbon

That's not the case, because in EU (and thus Finland) electric production is under cap-and-trade. There is just no way to increase dirty electricity production in EU. Apart from political pressure to change rules, which for example Italy is doing because Italy built their grid on gas...


If I consume all the clean energy your country can produce with my data center, explain how cap and trade blocks a country from using other sources - I don’t think anyone will like news stories of people freezing to death in the winter.

That's the CAP part. The annual co2 emissions of electricity production and industries is capped to X gigatons per year. If a datacenter buys all clean electric production of the country, electric companies will have to either have to make up the gap by building more new clean energy or tell other customers "sorry all sold out".

Of course, would the latter happen, political actions would be done before people freeze. It will be unpredictable what the would be - allow fossil fuels "temporarily" or order datacenters to shut down during dunkelflaute? Interesting times (I would prefer less interesting times).

Generally speaking cap and trade is the most sure way to reduce emissions (emissions drop exactly at the pace the CAP drop annually) and the most cost-effective way also - the TRADE part ensures emissions are cut first by those who it easiest, while hard-to-decarbonize sectors have most time to sort their plan.

The only problem is "carbon leakage" where co2 emissions simply move to asshole countries like USA and China that do not utilize cap-and-trade. That should be dealt with hefty carbon tariffs. Oh wait, even china is building their own cap-and-trade system. Well, anyways, tariffs against the climate assholes.


The EU has a large problem with carbon leakage from electricity generation to oil and gas use.

For example, gas heating is exempt from the EU carbon trade, so people are encouraged to use that rather than electric heating. In countries like Germany, gas heating is popular largely for tax reasons.


Gas heating is a pre-existing issue in Germany. While there is handful on anecdotes of someone switching back to gas, the big trend is opposite. Majority of heating refurbishments are gas/oil -> heat pumps, and almost every new build is heat pumps.

carbon leakage is mostly industrial and data centers (why do so many europeans run code at us-east-1 ?)


If you study the heat pump adoption in various European countries, you will quickly notice that it's connected to the price ratio between electricity and gas.

The EU has a carbon tax on electricity but not gas. This pushes people towards gas heating. Germany has much higher taxes on electricity, although it does at least have a carbon tax on gas.

If a carbon tax on electricity makes people use gas heating, that's carbon leakage.


It's a good thing that green energy isn't a fixed quantity and more can be built if there's demand, which is exactly what Google is doing.

It's great for marketing and, you're right, that's why they are doing it but the reason it's good for marketing is that their customers care about the environment. This is the exact invisible hand mechanism in action. It's their preferences changing the behavior of one of the biggest corporations in the world and all they can do is act like it doesn't count because they don't actually care


Nuclear power plants have a huge lead time and require government approval, something the Finnish government declined to approve (Fortum had requested to build a third reactor). Solar and wind are fine but they’re not usable as a replacement for nuclear without huge battery installations which make the cost worse than nuclear. Also large installations still take time - from regulatory approvals to actually building the thing to connecting it to the grid. To give you a sense of scale, of the 53GW of planned wind projects, only 0.9GW are under active construction.

Also, unlike solar and wind, nuclear is a very important anchor source to prevent fossil fuel use in the grid. Solar and wind only absorb growth but so far have never managed to actually compete on baseload power requirements.


Then why is California down to 25% fossil generation from 60% a few years ago? And still dropping fast as more and more batteries and renewables come on line. Tell me again how baseload generation is still a relevant concept

What do you think batteries are if not baseload generation? Batteries + renewables compete with nuclear for baseload. They take up substantially more land mass for the same amount of power though.

is is often repeated in these threads, baseload generation is an obsolete term. Base load itself is real - the minimum demand on the grid, usually in the early am. Base load generation was a term given to a class of generators (mainly coal) that were cheap but inflexible, so you built them to match the base load and had more expensive variable output generation on top. That economic setup no longer exists, variable generation exists 24x7. So base load exists, base load generators do not. And yeah, thats why nukes are no longer economical, their base load generation role is economically obsolete.

Note that when Fortum was declined it was because two others were given approval. Lack of new nuclear in Finland isn't because no permits, but because Olkiluoto 3 exposed the real costs so Olkiluoto 4 was cancelled. Russia was the partner in the other one so that went to hell with the attack to Ukraine.

Why didn't you tell me about this years ago?

Because it's not as conventient or functional as cloud and they don't pay me to talk it up.


Thanks for the reminder that ContentProvider is the Android term I couldn't remember when I wrote my other comment here.

And the reminder that I should have added this to my list:

3. A ContentProvider app for OSM map data, so that apps can share the same offline map data.


Two things I would love to see in the FLOSS mapping ecosystem:

1. A POI/favorites app that maintains a local database with an API for other apps to access it. Apps could then store markers there instead of in their own private db, so that points added on one map app can be instantly available in other apps.

2. A shared traffic data service. Any OSM map app could contribute to the same data, helping reduce Google's advantage in live traffic data.

Obviously, both of these would need privacy protections and be subject to user choice. And there should also be some requirement that both reading and writing be supported, to ensure apps reading POI data don't lock in new data, and to prevent apps reading traffic data from freeloading.


A huge usabilitiy step would be the operating systems (and apps) just supporting geo links.

Geo links are from a RFC and are plain simple: geo:52.512974,13.420131

Clicking this link should open your chosen local map app at this position.

But it does not, actively sabotaged by big map app players who want only links to their app.


I wish we had a system where companies are incentivized to enable interoperability


On Android an application can register a custom URL scheme. And the OS has a way for you to select which app should work with a clicked custom URL if several of them registered to e.g. "geo:"

There's an app for that!

I use GeoShare, and configured Android to open links to Google Maps, Waze, etc. in GeoShare, and it translates them into geo: links that I can open in CoMaps


for 2: https://opentrafficmap.org/

it works by collecting C-ITS (Cooperative Intelligent Transport System) data, which many vehicles now send out.

https://wiki.opentrafficmap.org/en:c-its:start

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intelligent_transportation_sys...


So it is in principle similar to the many maps that show data from ADS-B (beacons the planes send). Or to aprs.fi that display beacons ham radio enthusiasts send.

Unfortunately, the vehicles sending C-ITS send them not from very high (like planes) or with considerable transmit power (like ham radio operations). And also in challenging areas. So an C-ITS receiver (e.g. based on a ESP32-C5) has a rather short receiving range.

So for a truly open traffic map we'd need millions of receivers!


I would also like to see manageable amounts of update traffic. In the old days I had De Lorme street maps of the whole US. It was sold on a CD-ROM so the whole dataset was at most 700MB. It didn't have updates. I also have paper maps (Thomas Guide) of my local region in my car, from the 1990s, and they're still perfectly good in most places. Roads don't move around THAT often. But I have Organic Maps (predecessor of Comaps, maybe I should switch) for just some parts of California and that by itself is more than 1GB of updates EVERY MONTH.

Really seriously, if I go to someplace out of my area I might download that place's map of 500MB or whatever, but then I probably want to just leave it on my phone in case I go there again, no updates needed. I'd like an install for the entire US to be no bigger than say 100GB (my phone "only" has 256GB of storage), and maybe I want monthly updates for my local region of 200MB/month, then perhaps annual updates for everything else unless marked as being of special interest. Plus manual update on demand for wherever if I think I might travel there.


Well, California is 423'970 km². And Germany is 357' 684 km². I only use OsmAnd, not CoMaps. So almost the same size. The street card of Germany is 2848 MB, so even larger than the number you gave.

We also have cards for the places we live, e.g. I have the "full" map (not just streets) of Hessen, one of the 16 federal states. And that is only 485 MB. If that would be too much for me, I could also only download the governmental areas of Darmstadt, Gießen or Kassel (roughtly southern Hessen, middle Hessen, northern Hessen). But that is, in the OsmAnd case, also the case for California. You can download all of it, or or several of 16 parts.

Also: you can't compare OpenStreetMap with the detail of this old CD-ROM or printed maps. It contains WAY more data. Are you old enough to know the times where you bought a city plan if you visited some city? Well, this OsmAnd/CoMaps data set has a very details city map of all cities. And of all villages. And of about any dwelling. In OsmAnd, you cans search for almost everything, even esoteric things. Example: if you search for "Kneipp treading pool" you find them. And usually they are nice picknick areas, too. Try that with a printed map.

I personally experience you "EVERY MONTH" issue. My map of "Hessen" was last downloaded half a year ago --- I do this manually, and only every so often. OsmAnd allows that.

And if I would experience it ... I'd rather care. We have high speed DSL and glass fiber with 1000 MB/s in Germany, so 2 MB is almost nothing these days.

Still I would not recommend OsmAnd to everyone, e.g. not to "Aunt Mary". It has a clunkier, more techy UI. It isn't for everyone.


Waze got hugely popular by gaming their maps; people would install it just to get a high score. I wish the FLOSS mapping ecosystem would do similar.


The problem with gamification is it implies tracking and moderation so it's often a thin "fun" veneer over pervasive corporate tracking/surveillance


StreetComplete has a but of gamification. Only internal, for you. But still.

It works by giving you points and achievements. And as you progress, the achievement give you popups with links to interesing OSM-data-using size. Or to add one more category to the things you can complete.


> 1. A POI/favorites app that maintains a local database with an API for other apps to access it. Apps could then store markers there instead of in their own private db, so that points added on one map app can be instantly available in other apps.

Would an AT Protocol app or extension meet this need and requirements? By being stored in a PDS, the data can be permissioned, owned by the user, and easily migrated and/or shared.

https://atproto.com/blog/atproto-spaces-alpha

ATProto spaces: A new extension to ATProto that enables non-public data - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49379732 - August 2026


No, it should be local-first. Private and offline by default. There could certainly be sync integrations using AT, Dropbox, iCloud, etc. Those could even be separate apps, using the same API to access the data. But that sort of thing should be secondary and optional.


OsmAnd already can store an unlimited amount of POIs locally. With text, icon, color, coordinates of corse.

Do you have any thoughts on data structure for local storage?


We already do local bookmark backup, and use KML natively I think. It just doesn't sync, resolving sync conflicts is hard.


Not really. I imagine a sqlite db, but I haven't thought about any particular schema.


As technologists I think we should all be wary of "when all you have is a hammer" fallacy a little bit more.


I certainly support local first, but if it is trivial to enable sharing of map favorites and POIs on open social rails, your risk is limited to "personal to you" locations being shared. JSON or Sqlite is fine for local storage of course. It is after all most likely simply a list of POI UUIDs/GUIDs identifiers and/or latitude/longitude coordinates with attribute fields. Foursquare and other social geo checkins long predate this, but I would agree good opsec should be the default, while still enabling open sharing with your data prevented from being captured and held hostage by Big Tech, imho.

I have many custom Google Maps lists I would love to share publicly on AT Protocol (mostly from collecting places in locations I've traveled to others would want to visit), for example, but would want some labels of places to remain private (homes of friends).

Export Google Maps List to CSV, KML and GPX - https://www.takeout-tools.com/blog/export-google-maps-list-c...

How to Turn Any List Into Google My Maps - https://www.lekoarts.de/how-to-turn-any-list-into-google-my-...

Google Maps Create a list of places - https://support.google.com/maps/answer/7280933

Example list:

   Title,Address,Notes,Latitude,Longitude
   "Golden Gate Bridge","San Francisco, CA","",37.8199,-122.4783
   "Fisherman's Wharf","San Francisco, CA","Best chowder",37.8080,-122.4177


Yeah, there are all kinds of interesting things that can be done with shared data like this. But the first step is to have some standard ContentProvider to let apps share the data locally on a single device, similar to how other user data is handled. Because I'm tired of having several map apps installed for various reasons that all have separate favorites.

Once that is in place, people can create apps that build on it in lots of different ways.


Related your point 1:

I even want local notes. Once I walked around with SCEE or Streetcomplete ... and I added a note. And then the note was public on OpenStreetMap. I meant it as a note to me, so that I later could fix the thing at my desktop computer with JOSM --- which is, for some things, way better than doing it on-the-walk with a smartphone, no mouse, no real keyboard.

Also workaround for 1: In OsmAND you can define your POIs, they are then stored in on the devices. And then you can use things like SyncThing to share them.


#1 is a common request and possible future improvement, #2 is coming soon with TraffXML (taking in live traffic, not necessarily contributing it back)


Nice to learn about Traffxml, but that allows taking in traffic data from where? Seems like there would need to be some service consolidating traffic reports from users of various map apps.


You know what's a bigger source of drag than mirrors? Open wheel wells.

If the Tesla door handles were really because they care that much about aerodynamics, their cars would look more like the 1st Gen Honda Insight.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Honda_Insight#/media/File:Hond...


"You can open a rear door manually (if equipped) in the unlikely situation in which Model Y has no power:

Note: Not all Model Y vehicles are equipped with a manual release for the rear doors.

1. Remove the mat from the bottom of the rear door pocket.

2. Press the red tab to remove the access door.

3. Pull the mechanical release cable forward."

https://www.tesla.com/ownersmanual/2020_2024_modely/en_us/GU...


I love this. There are books I've read that I never really had a good mental image of where the locations were.

Just a note that despite the title these are not all fiction. Which is great! I can think of a couple books i'd love to add.


"...adopt a replacement tire efficiency program “designed to ensure that replacement tires sold in the state are at least as energy efficient, on average, as tires sold in the state as original equipment on new passenger cars and light-duty trucks.” Replacement tires are those purchased by drivers to replace existing tires."

Tires are not car-specific. This sounds like you couldn't just go out and buy some random tires, you could only buy tires that are designated for your specific vehicle. And that owners of two vehicles with the same size tires would have different allowed tire choices, depending on what their OEM tires were.

Put another way, is this saying you can't buy wider than OEM tires, and that you can't buy all-terrain tires for something that came with street tires?


It's "on average", so no, you still can.

And what are they gonna do if you just go to the tire store and say I want X tires? So of course none of this will be enforced. It's just to provide the little leaf indicator.


This kind of "average" nonsense in the form of CAFE[1] standards is why we have endless SUVs and crossovers on the road now. I expect that this will lead to similar unintended consequences.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corporate_average_fuel_economy

> A complicated 2011 mathematical formula was replaced starting in 2012 with a simpler inverse-linear formula with cutoff values.[10] CAFE footprint requirements are set up such that a vehicle with a larger footprint has a lower fuel economy requirement than a vehicle with a smaller footprint.


It is already difficult to get most aftermarket parts in california- especially things in the combustion path. Can't even buy them off ebay.


Yes, but for tires, they explicitly make exceptions for summer tires etc here.


At least in that case the card reader probably came configured that way, and why bother turning it off and refuse free money?

The most egregious I've seen was in the check out flow of a web store. Someone actually went to the effort to implement a tip nag at the end of check out, to ask for more money for a no-humans-present transaction.


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