Podcast: Play in new window
Subscribe: Apple Podcasts | RSS | More
Denis Duff, author of the website Better Environment with Nuclear Energy. He’s also a mechanical engineer with 30 years experience in ESB power generation, and is now an independent engineering consultant in Ireland and abroad.
I mentioned projections of how long global uranium deposits – known and unknown – are likely to last, at the current rate of consumption, in which nuclear provides 4 per cent of global energy.
Death rates in energy production show that by that measure, nuclear energy produces by a huge margin the lowest number of deaths per unit of electricity produced, however as I pointed out, this does not include the deaths that may happen in the future that are attributable to nuclear power use now or in the past; Denis pointed out that the figures for fossil fuels don’t include any deaths arising from climate change.
*****
If, when I say TikTok, your mind goes to a clock, then you are not in the demographic for TikTok, but if you’ve heard that music in the background, screeching out of mobile phones in your house, then somebody close to you probably is.
TikTok is a video-sharing app, with a very young demographic. It’s got something approaching a billion users, and that’s not counting the users of a parallel app in China called Douyin, which is basically identical, except firewalled off, to comply with Chinese censorship laws.
To put that in context, Facebook took almost eight years to get to a billion users. TikTok won’t be three years old until September.
The videos are limited to 15 seconds in duration, and as you might expect they normally center on music and youth culture. If you want to feel old, download it and swipe through a few videos. Users who get more than 1,000 followers unlock a feature that allows you to do live streams to all of those followers, and broadcast live video to them. So far, so standard social media.
But the other aspect of TikTok is the ability to send virtual gifts. Basically users can send digital gifts to each other. In case you don’t know what that is, it just means that a cute little symbol pops up on the user’s screen. Obviously they don’t have any value, except when they do.
Gifts have cute names like Panda, Rainbow Puke, Sun Cream and Drama Queen. But to send them, users must pay for them, and the prices range from a few cents for the panda to almost €50 for the Drama Queen. Remember that there is nothing of value here, apart from the fact that young users seem to be willing to pay to send them.
And they are sending them to TikTok stars, those people with more than a thousand followers – or in some cases millions of followers. Bytedance, the company that owns TikTok and its Chinese equivalent Douyin seems to have hit on a formula that encourages young people to hand over their money in return for very insubstantial benefits, like having their favourite tiktok star call out their name on a live stream.
And it can be very young people – pre-teens, and it can be a lot of money, some kids have sent hundreds of euro worth of gifts. There is nothing in the software to check their age or limit how much they send. It seems that half of this money goes to the recipient and half to Bytedance, propelling it to a valuation of $75b.
I’m not saying all of this to go off on a moral panic or do a Maude Flanders saying ‘somebody think of the children’; there certainly are exploitative aspects to this, but the point I’m interested in is, firstly, that these social networks can mushroom from nothing to apparent global dominance within a couple years, and that they can melt away just as fast. Remember Vine? It was the previous video sharing phenomenon. It was bought by Twitter for only – ha, only – $30m, six months after it launched. It lasted four years in total.
And remember Keek and Mixbit? No, me neither, but they were both at one stage the next big video sharing platforms, but they are gone now too.
I think it shows that many areas of the internet are still a wild west, we have some way to go before it takes on the characteristics of a mature business platform. If I were TikTok, I’d take those billions and run. The same probably goes Facebook and Twitter.
