I mean…you can be pedantic about it, but to me this reads fairly clearly as “If it can’t be removed with a screwdriver, it’s not allowed.”

It’s not an EU project, but there are EU countries involved in the funding, which means EU tender regulations apply.

Wendelstein is cheaper, but according to wikipedia it also went over budget. “[…] while the total cost for the IPP site in Greifswald including investment plus operating costs (personnel and material resources) amounted to €1.06 billion for that 18-year period. This exceeded the original budget estimate, mainly because the initial development phase was longer than expected, doubling the personnel costs.” (The original source is a dead link, but you could probably find something corroborating fairly easily.)

I’m not saying ITER is a bad project, I don’t even think the cost is a problem, I just think that the regulations surrounding the financing of these kinds of projects often do more harm than good.

Honestly, going wildly over budget is pretty much par for the course in any sort of large scale infrastructure project in Europe. With the way tender procedure’s work in the EU, it’s entirely expected that things are going to end up being more expensive and take twice as long. It’s stupid and wasteful, but it’s “public money” and not going to change any time soon.

We’re going to have to actually read official documentation instead of relying on some greybeard’s wisdom on SO 🥲

This looks pretty good, and I wouldn’t mind paying for search, but it seems really pricy. I’ve never counted how many searches I do, but it’s definitely more than 10 a day. $10 a month seems like a lot for just search…

Unrelated to the article, but I’ve never heard of defector before, and I spend the last hour crawling through and reading a couple articles. Seems like a fantastic little site (and apparently worker owned?). I don’t care much about most of the sports articles, but the other stuff is great. Thanks for posting!