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Messages - Big Toe
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176
« on: July 31, 2022, 15:24 »
Do you know what "Nuclear semiotics" is? A field of research to come up with a long-term nuclear waste warning message, the attempt to warn humankind in the far future of the danger of location of nuclear waste without the assumption that they speak any language known to us.
A reasonable number of people today can still read texts that are more than 2000 years old in languages like Sanskrit, Hebrew, Ancient Greek or Latin. Specialists can read even older texts in languages like Hittite or Sumerian. I have no doubt that mankind will still be able to decipher English texts in 10,000 years, and probably a number of other languages spoken and written today, like Chinese, Hindi, Japanese, Arabic, Spanish, German, Russian or French, as there is so much literature and other written stuff availble in these languages and it is very unlikely that this will all be lost. Unless something really desastrous happens that destroys our civilasation, like when the earth is hit by gigantic meteorite. In that case, some nuclear waste will be the least of our problems.
177
« on: July 31, 2022, 15:11 »
...
You can install all the solar panels on all the buildings you want (if you find the people to install them), you will still have next to no electricity at noon in winter and none at all after 3 or 4 PM.
solar panels still work on cloudy days
They only yield a fraction of what they do at sunshine, though, and they certainly don't work after sunset. batteries are available, but expensive - some areas have a way to feed the grid when excess power is generated
Yes, of course the solar panels feed the power not locally needed into the grid. The problem is that everybody does that at noon on a sunny summer day, while not much power from solar panels is available in winter and none at all after 3 or 4 PM in winter. At least in Germany, it may be different further south. The power from wind mills cannot compensate for that and they do not always provide the same yield either.
178
« on: July 31, 2022, 07:42 »
Not really. The Germany government spends around 37 BILLION subsidizing the coal industry each year. Where did you get this number from? This would be about 17% of the Federal Budget. Seems exceedingly high. In 2021 they only spent around 13 billion for the development of renewable energies.
This seems to be about the amount collected with the EEG surcharge (EEG-Umlage). Germany spent more money for the energy transition, though, like subsidies for electric cars or for low energy houses. And there was plenty of time. Only that for the past 20 years the governmet wasted all the time. Compared to the support of other industries, they basically did close to nothing for renewable energy industries. Then why did nobody else have more success? Again, with the exception of countries with large ressources of hydropower. Also not really. We could store much more energy if the government had spend more money on building strorage facilities, instead of supporting the coal industry. The technology is there. We just don't spend enough money on it. And right now we don't produce enough renewable energy to have any kind of storage problem.
Also, we could produce a lot more energy through renewable recources that don't need to be stored, but could be used right away. Put a solar panel on every single building. A solar panel on a roof can cover around 40% of the electricity needed for a residential building. That's 40% less energy you need from other recources. But for that, a law that would require solar pannels on roofs of newly build buildings should have been passed 20 years ago. Didn't happen till today.
You can install all the solar panels on all the buildings you want (if you find the people to install them), you will still have next to no electricity at noon in winter and none at all after 3 or 4 PM. And again, why did nobody else have more success storing electric energy from wind or solar? Seems like there is no easy solution after all, or somebody would have used it by now, even if the technology is there, in theory.
179
« on: July 31, 2022, 06:58 »
Thank you for sharing your experiences, quite interesting.
Regarding your success at Freepik and the notion that sales (or downloads) there do not eat into sales elsewhere:
They do not have a lot of good pictures yet. People like getting stuff for free, though.
So a limited supply meets a large demand. Therefor, it is not so surprising that people uploading good pictures there can see some modest success with it and I can also believe that any individual photographer uploading there may not see a direct negative effect on their own sales elsewhere, as probably only a small minority of buyers will check whether a picture they found at Adobe or Shutterstock may also be available for free elsewhere. After all, currently the chances for that are very small, the prices at Adobe and Shutterstock affordable and time is money. And if you have a subscription somewhere, it does not make any sense to look elsewhere for a picture you like, anyway.
However, even now, people downloading images at Freepik for free do not buy them anywhere else, so unless they would not have used a picture at all if it were not for free, if hurts someones sales elsewhere, even if it is somebody elses.
And the more pictures Freepik will get, the more people will download there instead of buying elsewhere and at the same time, the return for people uploading to Freepik will diminish, because the supply will then outstrip the demand there, too.
So in the end, sales at other agencies will suffer seriously, while the returns on Freepik will dwindle. Does not sound like a good plan to me. At least not for contributors.
180
« on: July 31, 2022, 06:26 »
The big blunder the German government did was do decide to shutdown nuclear power plants and ban fraking, while not pushing renewable energy resources in a way that they could compensate for nuclear power and fracking.
Well, Germany did invest huge amounts of money in renewable energies, but it takes time to rebuild the whole energy generation of an industrial country. I do not think that much more would have been realistic, particularly as we have reached a point were much more electric energy from Wind and Solar does not make a lot of sense without the possibility to store the energy and we did not make any real progress in this area during the last decades and I do not see any country really having more success there, except some countries with large resources of hydropower.
181
« on: July 26, 2022, 16:43 »
Funny Scientific Fact:
In fact, carbon dioxide, which is blamed for climate warming, has only a volume share of 0.04 percent in the atmosphere. And of these 0.04 percent CO2, 95 percent come from natural sources, such as volcanoes or decomposition processes in nature. The human CO2 content in the air is thus only 0.0016 percent.
Is that the best you can do? Just make up some stuff? It's neither funny, nor scientific, nor a fact. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_dioxide_in_Earth%27s_atmosphere
182
« on: July 21, 2022, 16:23 »
I actually do read stuff from world climate scientists.
Is that so? I want to hear YOUR plan for how climate can be changed. There is lots we can do to clean up earth, but it still wont change the climate.
Except that it will. The release of greenhouse gases (mainly CO2, but also some other gases like methane) increase the temperature of a planet. Therefore, reductions in the release of greenhouse gases reduce this increase. There are also some gases that can reduce the temperature, like sulphur dioxide, although the side effects of that gas make it unfeasible to use it to control the climate. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenhouse_gasHave your world climate scientists never mentioned greenhouse gases?
183
« on: July 21, 2022, 14:55 »
Yes, very interesting interview.
Also the Photo Ephemeris tool mentioned seems to be really useful for nature photography, as it tells you from where the sun is shining at any place at any given time, so that you can plan when to be at your desired location and having the sun in the right direction.
184
« on: July 21, 2022, 11:53 »
All this discussion is OK, but there are other matters of much higher importance going on these days.
The global warming debate should not divert our attention from the abomination that is the invasion of Ukraine, for example, or from other reasons causing unnecessary deaths TODAY.
These urgent matters should be on the front page today, not problems that may happen 30 years from now.
This is a problem indeed, but a luxury problem.
Let's get our priorities straight.
The war in the Ukraine may be more urgent now, but that does not mean that we can afford to ignore the climate change: 1. It is already happening. The average temperatures have already increased significantly. 2. We cannot decarbonize our economies in a few years. If we want to have near zero CO2 emissions in 30 years, we have to start in earnest now. And even then it will not be easy to manage it in this time frame. 3. There will always be some other crisis that seems more urgent at the moment. Now it is the war in the Ukraine, before it was Corona and next it may be about Taiwan or some other thing. We have to be able to handle the current crisies and still proceed with the energy transition.
185
« on: July 21, 2022, 03:59 »
in Germany (as well as in the USA) wind energy has a share in energy production twice as high as solar energy.
And energy-stupid Germany has managed to cover 45% of its total energy demand from renewable energy sources in 2020.
That is incorrect. Renewable energy sources cover 45% of the electric power generation, not the total energy demand. The latter is covered by about 20% with renewable energy. It should also be noted that the expansion of renewable energy production has been slowed down during the last years, for a number of reasons. So we still have a very long way to go and it won't be easy and it will take long time. Perhaps this is one of the reasons why per capita CO2 emissions in energy-stupid Germany are only about half of those in the United States - for example.
And then again, France has only a little more than half the per capita CO2 emission than Germany (5 vs. 9.1 t). One of the reasons being their strong reliance on nuclear power. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_carbon_dioxide_emissions_per_capitaLooking back, there can be little doubt that it was a mistake that Germany shut down the nuclear power generation so quickly.
186
« on: July 20, 2022, 05:28 »
US record: 10 July 1913 , 56.7 C
So climate changes didn't even manage to break the records from times way before them.
"For ninety years, a former record that was measured in Libya had been in place, until it was decertified in 2012 based on evidence that it was an erroneous reading. This finding has since raised questions about the legitimacy of the 1913 record measured in Death Valley, with several meteorological experts asserting that there were similar irregularities." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Highest_temperature_recorded_on_EarthApart from that: The climate change does not necessarily mean that it is getting hotter everywhere to the same degree. Generally speaking, the polar regions are expected to see higher increases in temperature than tropical regions. Also places where high temperature readings are the result of extreme micro climate conditions as in the Death Valley may not see an increase in temperature readings to the same degree other places.
187
« on: July 19, 2022, 05:59 »
For each of your vertical videos that's selected by Adobe you will get paid $10 upfront. You will also start earning royalties from downloads after a one year period.
This sounds as if you get nothing, apart from the $10 paid upfront, if your videos are downloaded during the first year.
188
« on: July 15, 2022, 10:39 »
If I search for images of houses on shutterstock, I get a lot of images that do not show any houses in Germany/middle Europe at first glance. It doesn't matter whether I choose the German or the English language for the search. The results are almost identical. So I have to search much longer at shutterstock to find the right images for my region.
Perhaps learn how to use a search bar on any agency. "house' overall does yield houses in America, at least from where I am sitting. "house germany" yields nothing but houses in Germany.
Common sense.
With "house germany" in Sutterstock, I get indeed predominantly typical houses from Germany, mainly single family homes ranging from postwar to modern. It is roughly comparable to what Adobe yields for "Haus". However, if I enter "Haus Deutschland", as a German user would most likely do, I get mostly iconic touristic stuff, like views of Rothenburg ob der Tauber with the town gate and half timbered houses and only a few pictures with more typical modern houses interspersed. This is of course not wrong for the search, but it depends on what you want, whether you will be satisfied with the results. This is a bit different from what Wilm reports, as I get drastically different results depending on the language I search in. If you search for typical German houses, instead of iconic touristic sites, you may have an easier time finding what you are looking for at Adobe, unless for some reason you try to search for German houses in English.
189
« on: July 11, 2022, 05:27 »
I see them on the poll chart.
They are listed as second behind Adobe.
As I wrote yesterday, they were just two votes shy of the threshold. Now they have exactly 50 votes, so two people have voted for them in the meantime.
190
« on: July 10, 2022, 15:35 »
10 days into the month, poll results still don't have any numbers for shutterstock - not to mention the other agencies. Are the numbers for shutterstock in general so bad that nobody posts them anymore?
48 People have voted for Shutterstock so far, so just two more to go. The rating is 21.9 at the moment, so less then half of the rating for AdobeStock. You can see that if you hover with the mouse pointer above the agencies names. Perhaps it would make sense to reduce the number of voters necessary for the rating to be displayed, perhaps to 25 or 30.
191
« on: June 22, 2022, 03:46 »
For what it's worth: The picture with two downloads is also the second image in your port, at least for me.
Intersting. It's not anywhere on the first pages for me (Actually couldn't find it on the first 10 pages, after that I stopped searching), so that confirmes my suspicion that Shutterstock sorts image differently depending on where you are located.
Just did a quick test. Below my port sorted by top images from Germany at the top and with an US proxy below.
Neither of the results contains my bestseller and both are a weird mix of images that actually do sell frequently and images that have only sold like 1-3 times.
Are you sure that you linked the correct images earlier? They seem to belong to a totally different port, which also contains some images of the Philodendron plant, but none of your dressed up dog photos. When I view your port with the dogs, I see a very similar, although not identical sorting then the one in your sreenshot for Germany, where I am also located.
192
« on: June 20, 2022, 16:54 »
But how do you determine how they are selling with that rating? If an image that has sold 5 times is rated the same way as an image that sold 500 times, as it is now, you have absolutely no clue how they are selling.
It gives me only limited information, but is better than nothing. For example, if there are 100 images of a species in the database and the best rating is "rarely used", then it is unlikely that another image of the same species will sell well, unless the existing images are all mediocre or unless the new image has a quality that makes it interesting for people who did no look specifically for that species. On the other hand, if 20 of the images have high usage or are frequently used, there is a good chance that my image will also sell, if it is of sufficient quality. Here are example:
This one sold 4 times: https://www.shutterstock.com/image-photo/tropical-colocasia-esculenta-aloha-garden-houseplant-1772506973 That's not "frequenly used"
And here is one with only 2 sales. TWO!! : https://www.shutterstock.com/image-photo/close-topical-philodendron-verrucosum-houseplant-dark-1961934799
Usage says "High usage" I have no clue whether "high usage " is supposed to be better or worse than "frequently used", because when you hoover over the usage score it says the categories are "often", "commonly", "rarely" and "not used", so high and frequently shouldn't even be part of the rating. That's how messed up this system is. Regardless, no image with only two sales should be labeled as "frequently used" or "high" usage.
"High usage" is supposed to be better than "frequently used", so the image with two sales is rated higher than the one with four sales. One clue for that is that it is dubbed "Superstar", unlike the other and you will probably notice that all of your images that sell really well have the "high usage" rating. At least that is the case for my port. As to why the image with two downloads is rated so high, I can only guess. Is it possible that it sold almost directly after you uploaded it and thus got the high rating for selling twice within a short time and then was just never demoted? For what it's worth: The picture with two downloads is also the second image in your port, at least for me, so the rating for the image regarding the sorting is also yery high, for whatever reason. So your image may be an exception. I think it is not typical for an image to get this rating with two downloads.
193
« on: June 20, 2022, 10:07 »
Not sure what profit customers should have from this random rating generator.
I do not know how valuable it is for customers, but as a contributor, I find it somewhat useful. For example, if I have pictures of a flower, then I can look what kind of pictures of the same species are already online and to some extent, how they are selling. When there are already many images of the species online and none of them has sold much, then I will probably not make processing and uploading my images a priority. I can also see whether my own images that have not been downloaded yet, have at least been watched by some people. In my experience, the rating is not random. All of my images that sell well that I checked, also have a high use rating. And those who never sold, are rated as never used, although they can be higher in the popularity rating, if they have been watched by people. You just have to keep a few things in mind when you interpret the rating: 1. I think it may take some time to update the rating, meaning that when an image is sold for the first time, it can still be rated as "never used" for some days. 2. The use rating is very sensitive, so a relatively small number of sales can get it the highest rating. I think that the time over which the image has sold may also be a factor, though. I have images that have sold more than 5 times and do not have the highest rating. So it is true that you cannot distinguish images that sell reasonably well and real bestsellers with the rating.
194
« on: June 16, 2022, 06:44 »
Fotolia had a lot of exclusives, at least for photos, I am not sure about video. I think most of them were from Europe, certainly a lot from Germany.
When Adobe aquired Fotolia, the exclusive program was phased out and ended at the very latest when Fotolia was closed.
So obviously Adobe is not interested in exclusives, or they would have hold on to the ones they aquired with Fotolia.
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