halcyoncmdr
@halcyoncmdr@lemmy.world
- Comment on Trump Administration Providing Weapons Grade Plutonium to Sam Altman 3 hours ago:
That just means it is purified enough to be usable in a weapon. There’s also lots of different plutonium isotopes, each with various suitability to weapons vs energy.
We need a lot more info to have an informed conversation than a blanket statement like “weapons-grade plutonium”. And I definitely don’t trust any major media outlet journalist at this point to have any idea what the fuck they’re talking about, especially with regards to anything nuclear. They regularly get things wrong or even completely backwards from reality with less complicated topics.
- Comment on Trump Administration Providing Weapons Grade Plutonium to Sam Altman 3 hours ago:
Fossil fuels are only as cheap as they are because of subsidies. We should remove the fossil fuel subsidies from the equation then if we want to talk actual cost.
That’s about $30 Billion each year in the US, $660 Billion or so internationally. And that’s only direct subsidies. Granted, that’s total fossil fuel subsidies not just energy related, it’s much more complicated to split it out, and this is a random Lemmy comment so not worth the time.
And since we don’t really tax carbon pollution at any discernable level, if we actually required that to be included for the environmental damage from fossil fuel energy production, since we do require nuclear plants to plan for their waste production, it wouldn’t be even close to competitive at all.
- Comment on Trump Administration Providing Weapons Grade Plutonium to Sam Altman 4 hours ago:
So what if any of this material slips out?
You don’t want to look up how many orphan nuclear devices exist in the world.
Just to whet your whistle a bit… this is by no means an exhaustive list. en.wikipedia.org/…/List_of_orphan_source_incident…We’re still discovering lost nuclear power devices from the collapse of the Soviet Union. Nuclear accidents have happened from abandoned medical radiotherapy machines, and from radio imaging equipment used in industrial applications. It’s not actually that hard to find nuclear material in the wild you could use in a dirty bomb.
- Comment on Trump Administration Providing Weapons Grade Plutonium to Sam Altman 5 hours ago:
Nuclear isn’t a replacement for other renewable resources and people need to stop thinking of it as such. As soon as I see that comparison, it is apparent that the poster either:
- Has done no actual research on the topic, and are probably just regurgitating random posts they’ve read on social media.
- Posting in bad faith because they’re just anti-nuclear.
- They think that grid-scale battery tech to assist renewables like solar and wind is much more capable than it really is.
That last one is only partially true. Grid-scale battery tech has come a long way. And it works phenomenally well as a sort of capacitor to help smooth out grid power and to provide some capacity during the natural lulls in most renewable options like wind and solar when they can’t generate. However, there is no battery solution currently on this planet that can provide the power necessary for an entire active grid region for the amount of time renewables aren’t generating, like solar overnight, when there’s simply no wind to utilize. There is still a base load level needed to provide power regardless of natural forces.
Nuclear is a replacement for the base power load that is currently handled by fossil fuels like Coal and Natural Gas. Much of the spent fuel can now be recycled for reuse even in the same reactors. Some new experimental reactor designs also use spent nuclear fuel from current, mostly 1970’s era, designs to provide seed fuel for their reactor processes.
Most nuclear waste, is also short to medium half-life waste, and will decay within years or decades, not millennia. The actual long term-nuclear waste is a very small portion of the total “waste” produced. And even then, most regulations still use Liner No Threshold for their storage requirements, despite virtually no actual nuclear physicists or scientists supporting LNT anymore with hundreds of studies since the 1950s proving it has no basis in reality. If LNT was in fact reality, then radiotherapy for cancer wouldn’t work, and we know it does. People in regions like the Colorado Plateau around Denver, receive around 3x the annual radiation dose limit of a nuclear plant worker, simply from the background radiation in the area, yet they have lower than average cancer rates.
Nuclear is the technology we have NOW to be able to remove our reliance on fossil fuels, but the public needs to be educated about reality, not just having the same misinformation spread about constantly online.
- Comment on Trump Administration Providing Weapons Grade Plutonium to Sam Altman 7 hours ago:
New experimental reactor designs, YES.
Sam Altman and anything, NO.
The public’s perception of nuclear energy is ridiculously misinformed. Combined with international policies for things like radiation limits largely being based around Linear No Threshold, which is based on assumptions made in the 1950s almost solely about the bombs dropped on Japan, and ignoring all research since that proves the exact opposite, simply because it’s easy to understand and form policies around.
- Comment on Yo, fire fox what the fuck? 2 days ago:
I feel like a year ago, Windows was much better at not interrupting. There is literally a setting to engage Do No Disturb mode when playing a game. But it definitely seems to have stopped doing that from my experience despite that being a default setting and still enabled on my gaming rig. Something changed, and I doubt it’s every game.
- Comment on 4 days ago:
My absolute favorite bit of social media was this instagram exchange. It just encapsulates so much that’s inherently stupid with it.
- Comment on Ex-PlayStation boss says the games industry is "littered" with Fortnite clones and "people trying to do Overwatch with different skins," but keep dreaming if you're just trying to get "big sacks of money" 4 days ago:
Nearly everything is a derivative of something from before. Occasionally something new comes up though. I don’t remember anything like Getting Over It seems to have created the Foddian game genre for example. And while Balatro uses relatively normal cards for its base, the gameplay itself is unique.
- Comment on Why did Thanos, with the power of all the infinity stones, never think to try doubling the amount of resources in the world? 5 days ago:
First… Not everyone is just hiding being a dick because it’s socially unacceptable. Most people just aren’t dicks and don’t want to be. Just like most people don’t have to be told not to kill others, that’s just not something they’d do. They don’t have to be threatened with prison, or eternal damnation, or anything like that to stop themselves.
Second… Superman is an alien. How do we know what is normal for his species? The only insight we have is the comic universe.
- Comment on Louvre security vs CVS 6 days ago:
Well, they did. That’s why the deodorant is now locked up.
- Comment on Elon Musk says he needs $1 trillion to control Tesla's robot army. Yes, really. 6 days ago:
So how is that fake? I can’t do any of those things you mention in the first paragraph.
You’re not rich enough where banks know you always have stock available to give them. Where there’s virtually no limit to your stock pool that the bank can just liquidate after the fact. You need to be in the top .1% for that. The fact you’re on lemmy means that’s not a possibility in the slightest.
Getting loans based on assets is not at all the same as selling those assets.
It is for the rich. That’s why so many don’t care about their traditional salary. That’s why so many went out of their way to advertise they were taking a $1 salary during the recession, or even today. Because their salary is subject to income tax, but loans are not. You can get the same end result of cash in hand by receiving your pay in stock, then taking loans against that stock.
- Comment on Embark Studios confirm rollout of Denuvo Anti-Cheat for THE FINALS 6 days ago:
Denuvo does anti-cheat? I thought it was anti-pirate?
- Comment on Elon Musk says he needs $1 trillion to control Tesla's robot army. Yes, really. 6 days ago:
I count that in the sold category. Because they just get more loans to pay off the previous ones, or default and the bank just takes the shares and does it again because what the loaned is less than the share value. All the while avoiding income and capital gains taxes.
It’s why boycotts and cancelling subscriptions actually do work when done in large enough numbers. Their money can disappear very quickly if shareholders get spooked.
It’s also why Tesla isn’t being affected as much now despite Elon pulling the mask off and going full Nazi, resulting in massive sales drops. Years and years of short sellers and complicit media trying to tank the brand, largely funded and promoted by things like entrenched oil interests and competing car brands have trained many shareholders to ignore a lot.
- Comment on Elon Musk says he needs $1 trillion to control Tesla's robot army. Yes, really. 6 days ago:
To be fair, all that money is effectively fake until the shares are sold.
- Comment on Appropriate compliance 1 week ago:
I’ll give them full points just for not putting it immediately in front of the door preventing it from being opened, despite the doormat request.
- Comment on Fear their power 1 week ago:
I mean, they are just for different environments. Fins aren’t very useful for terrestrial animals, and legs aren’t as useful for aquatic animals. Both provide similar functions suited to their environment, and are therefore roughly equivalent.
- Comment on Tabletop convection oven 2 weeks ago:
They’re the same thing. A small oven heats up faster than a big oven. It’s only faster because it’s 1/10th the size.
- Comment on Everyday AI looks more like the '08 housing bubble 2 weeks ago:
The way to make a big dent in that is to tax unused housing, with peogressivwly increasing amounts as they continue unoccupied. And limit or outright deny ownership by companies and investment firms.
We have more than enough housing for everyone, but a large portion of it sits unused. In many cases only because no one will/can pay what some of these companies are demanding monthly for them.
- Comment on At 1% 2 weeks ago:
Just need another adapter.
- Comment on 3 weeks ago:
All platforms are notorious for that. Moderation is expensive, and consistent free user moderation is extremely hit or miss, mostly miss.
Unless you have enough admins dedicated to moderating every community regularly, like weekly at a bare minimum, shit will get out of hand in the places they don’t visit.
For places the size of Discord, Facebook, Reddit, Lemmy, YouTube, etc. that’s just not feasible without an army of paid moderators. User submitted reports are only useful if the users aren’t partaking, and that’s the first tier of nearly every online moderation system because few companies could even consider staffing a moderation team even remotely large enough to begin to tackle that problem.
- Comment on Microsoft reportedly estimated that Game Pass led to $300 million in lost sales of Black Ops 6, with 82% of copies sold being on the Game Pass-less PlayStation 5 3 weeks ago:
Not really. They can see how many people play on Game Pass. 100% chance they’re just taking downloads from Game Pass accounts and multiplying it by the retail price though, which isn’t a perfect comparison, but good enough for this type of general estimate.
- Comment on Google Calls ICE Agents a Vulnerable Group, Removes ICE-Spotting App ‘Red Dot’ 3 weeks ago:
Google Maps reports are just for “police”, which is a generic term that ICE would be either way.
- Comment on Rock Band 4 to be delisted on tenth anniversary following the expiration of its licenses 3 weeks ago:
This is one of the weird aspects of games that seems to make no sense because of archaic laws that never entered the 20th century, nevermind the 21st. It seems to be about manufacturing new copies of the already made game, not selling them. So it only affects digital sales, I would assume because of their “creation” on a new sale, every physical game copy was already manufactured and out there, nothing changes there.
- Comment on My (incredibly divisive) dessert choice 3 weeks ago:
There’s a difference between having guests that are politicians, and politically charged monologues.
- Comment on My (incredibly divisive) dessert choice 4 weeks ago:
Latest target, because Trump groups all late night shows together. Despite Fallon avoiding politics as much as possible, and not going after him at all.
- Comment on Does more expensive phones have better reception? 4 weeks ago:
It could, but realistically not much in most cases. Only if you’re on the very edge of losing a signal entirely.
The specific network chip and device antenna design could play a significant part on reception, but realistically there won’t be much of a difference in the real world, lots of research and development has already gone into the technologies we use now.
Higher end phones will often support more frequency bands, and thus support more signals, but no carrier uses all of them. Just make sure the phone you pick supports the bands your carrier uses.
Now when new technologies come out, that’s when you can see real world significant differences between devices because there isn’t as much real world experience with a new technology yet, but everything out now and in the near future has already gone through that phase.
- Comment on Zelenskyy says he knows exact target of Hungarian spy drones in Ukraine 4 weeks ago:
Hungary has been on that side of things for a while. This isn’t exactly new or unexpected really.
- Comment on [Any Austin] Do Red Dead Redemption 2's Power Lines Connect to Anything? 4 weeks ago:
His videos answer the questions I’ve never thought to ask, but desperately want the answer to once it is brought up.
- Comment on Cracker Barrel Outrage Was Almost Certainly Driven by Bots, Researchers Say 4 weeks ago:
Did anyone actually think the IHOP rebranding was real? That looked like a promo trying to force itself viral from the second they announced it.
- Comment on Is Star Trek Discovery that bad? 4 weeks ago:
Discovery is fine. It takes some weird turns, sort of a necessity since they chose to make it a prequel with a unique propulsion system. And it is not like the 90s shows. And there’s a vocal group of fans that hate it just because it’s different, it was the first show coming back from the long show hiatus, and many are simply incapable of admitting that.
Picard’s seasons are all weird in their own way and with their own flaws, totally separate from Disco.
Watch the first season and make your own decision. Star Trek fans are some of the worst for having outsized online hatred of shit that doesn’t matter.
