Uranium 🟩

I believe Australia has mandatory voting and achieves a ~95% participation of registered voters basically every election, though they do enforce it with either a day in court or a fine.

I do wonder if you fined people, or wasted a day of theirs with court, whether it would have an impact in Greece after a couple of elections?

Very true, I don’t disagree there

I have no disagreement with your assertion, aside from the neglected aspect of in terms of energy in Vs energy out; the research is likely to help inform nuclear weapons design, yet if they are able to achieve more energy out than in (3mj out Vs 2mj in (though of course they required 300mj to run the lasers to produce this reaction)) then they are providing important data that may help inform different future designs of power generating fusion reactors, this is something that current other designs don’t appear to have achieved afaik.

I doubt they will ever really use this style as a functional form of power generation, but if what they learn from the research allows eventually for a longer functioning fusion reaction that has an overall positive energy output, then it may be rather valuable.

Thermonuclear bombs are a mixture of fission AND fusion, the amount of energy required to achieve fusion requires fission to provide said energy.

Lasers igniting fusion is a bit of a more of a stretch to create a weapon from (the lasers require 300 mega joules of energy which in turn is 2mj of energy into the reaction and 3mj energy out); it may provide context and more information for fusion as a whole but that information is relevant to both weapons and energy research, not one or the other.

Researching this doesn’t prevent renewables being researched or rolled out? I think the nuclear scientists developing this might be better researching this as opposed to researching fission reactors or researching renewables as this is likely their area of expertise.

Fusion is a long shot but if it was achieved it would be world changing (hopefully for the better)

Outta curiosity, how is fusion viable for bomb research? (Ignoring the fact that the world’s current nuclear arsenal is already incredibly powerful, and that 100mega ton bombs have been designed and 50Mton bombs have been tested)

Edit: thank you to all for providing additional context, I see your point regarding more research is valuable for both weapons and energy research, though to say definitively that it is used for weapons research is neither here nor there.

I find it interesting how it appeared clear in 2016 US election that Reddit for example was being a target of Russian interference, (alongside other places like Facebook and Britain during Brexit), even with Russia in a weakened state China appears to have seen what was being done as valuable and taken up the task

The playbook always seems to be to stoke wedge issues, including funding groups on both sides of the political isle; funding the NRA and BLM seems to be two of the most common examples. The reality being that the amount of disruption and destabilisation that is achieved, it must be that these governments must see it as good value for their money.

I read through the link, both the details on the air forces vehicle plans and the ‘encounter’ later.

This one is odd but I do still wonder what the feasible explanations of this may be.

The smell of sulphur can be cause by many things, including burning vulcanised rubber or geological activety. The radiation might be explainable, but I have no indication of what the readings were (background and of the area/objects/burns), which makes it more hard to make any suggestions. Though his injuries did immediately make me think radiation exposure…

Lastly, the molten metal recovered from the site.

What is the composition of the metal? And if they say they pried it from a crack in the rock, the shape that it has taken is too perfect… The angle on each bend is near identical, and the length of each straight is once again identical (something screams not pulled from a natural crack in rock to me).

Nothing concrete can be explained by this, but it is intriguing…

But storage without inpacting available energy requires an excess, and the current shortfall of renewables is that there isn’t enough energy produced for a significant excess (same goes for nuclear). Either way I was addressing the literal aspect of energy generation being 24/7 with nuclear.

Not to mention I could see viable uses for nuclear still, especially in processes that are effectively 24/7 hot water production via heat exchangers for providing heating to literal cities, energy production for large arc furnaces.

And don’t mistake my view of nuclear as not seeing the benefits of renewable, my father lived on a boat where the heating and appliances were all run via solar panels and forklift batteries for more than 10 years of his life.

I mean you can vary it pretty significantly depending on the reactor type, but even if you couldn’t you can still put the energy to work in alternative ways, such as pumping water up into reservoirs/damns to generate energy at other points, or using the excess energy to split water. There are many ways to use excess energy.

How about you fuck off with your spam advertising?

I kind of agree with other person who said it’s basically just antidepressants… though I’ve shyed away from the one that made me deeply content (yet somewhat dysfunctional) in exchange for one that leaves me more functional in exchange for a bit more (healthy) strife.

I’d be quite curious of a world where everyone is on universally functioning antidepressants.

Is this society a functioning dystopia or a dysfunctional utopia?

Also OP have you ever played the video game ‘We Happy Few’, a key feature of the world is that everyone takes a mild psychedelic called Joy to stop them from remembering the past.

Another story that I seem to recall using a similar plot point is Brave New World and their drug Soma (IIRC)

Seeing that you mentioned MS365 imma just have my mini vent here, my mum is over 60 and her work has just started using MS365, so far run into a bunch of minor frustrations, but two big ones that she wasn’t able to figure out herself, and damn near stumped me:

First was trying to create an email group, so it’s easier for her to mass email her different classes, go to create the group, realise there’s a bunch of other junk like chats and shared files as part of the group thing which isn’t needed (and can’t be used by non ms emails anyway, over half of them) but whatever, get most of the way through it then realise that two people aren’t included in any group… ok that’s odd, just says they can’t be added to the group, turns out that they’ve likely had some permission set regarding not being able to be added to groups.

45 minutes in at this point and they cannot be added at all, decide to go back and manage to find the option to create a bog standard email group (list?) hidden away under a drop-down menu, this is what I wanted to and thought I was making in the first place, then realise I cannot import or move over the already existing groups to the simpler email lists, so have to start again…

Finally get all of that done and my mum starts to send her zoom links out except nothing is hyperlinking automatically, try to search links, hyper links, linking, etc via the help and nothing of relevance comes up, turns out outlook Web doesn’t support that, only the desktop app does but nothing mentions that. Manage to track down some random forum post that states that automatic linking only works if the email is set to plaintext format, not html…

Absolutely ridiculous

This is one that seriously gets me as to why we don’t do this more, it would make so much sense. Obvious benefits are power generation, but also when you consider, it would significantly reduce how scorching hot large carparks get in the sun, depending on the style of the solar canopy being built it could also massively reduce the amount of water flow onto the ground reducing some wear on the tarmac in addition to some hazards.

Also for places like the UK where we typically don’t have huge amounts/extended periods of snow, as long as the canopy is sufficiently designed for the additional weight, you could ameliorate the need to salt the car parks, once again increasing the life of the tarmac.

It would also keep people’s cars much cooler, in the sun, and make things generally a lot cooler below the canopy.

Ahh, if so that is a rather awful design choice

If you left them with their batteries empty then the batteries are likely actually dead.

If you’re going to leave a device untouched for an extended period, make sure the battery is atleast 50% or more full before doing so.

I spoke to a partner of a friend whose working on hydrogen cells and “low temp” (600c, though earlier versions were 800-1000c) cerium or Cesium yttrium catalyst electrolysers. The point of the electrolysis pathway is that you’re able to use excess energy from green sources (solar/hydro/nuclear) that we currently don’t have the infrastructure to store, to produce hydrogen for use in hydrogen cells or to be used as an alternative to fossil fuel derived hydrogen in metallurgical processes (steel making etc)

Or using any legacy hardware such as the playstation eyetoy camera, a usb keyboard with a built in piano keyboard, some old random TV tuner card

Then there’s the hardware which windows only ever had 32bit drivers for, meaning even if you find the drivers on some obscure dodgy site they’ll never work.

Then there’s the whole bs of windows not allowing unsigned drivers.

None of these issues on Linux

I’m sure you know this, but that’s exactly how a town got turned in to a EPA superfund site due to Dioxin contamination, because of a fuck up over chain of command for waste oil from the creation of napalm or pesticides(IIRC?). The guy running the spraying business didn’t know, which I can believe, but the company that paid for him to dispose of it should’ve informed him.

Pro tip, if the joints on them are starting to not hold together of their own accord and you don’t want them to fall apart: use zip ties on the edges/corners to reinforce them.