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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 17th, 2023

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  • This is one of the biggest frustrations with nuclear power. The first power plants had issues (mostly due to them being bomb factory designs). We learnt from that, and designed better ones. They never got built. They were swamped in red tape and delays until they died.

    Decades later, China comes in and just asks nicely. The designs work fine. China now leads the way, built on research we left to rot.

    It’s also worth noting that there is a big difference between a fusion power plant and a fission one. China is doing active research on it, as is the west. There’s quite a friendly rivalry going on. We have also basically cracked fusion now. We just need to scale it up. The only big problem left is the tokamakite issue. The neutron radiation put off by the reaction transmutes the walls. Using radioactive materials as a buffer is an idea I’ve not heard of. I’m curious about the end products. A big selling point of fusion is the lack of long term waste. Putting a fission reaction in there too might lose that benefit.


  • While they are massively more common than in other fields, they are still a tiny minority.

    It’s also worth noting that the toupee effect may be involved. A lot of trans people can pass, in a work environment, as their preferred gender. I know a few trans people that I would never have clocked as trans, except the info came out in discussions.




  • Home assistant has been on a push to be more user friendly. It’s gotten quite good, over the last few years. It’s not quite to mass deployment levels yet, but it’s managed to wrap all the evil parts in easy to use interfaces.

    The best bet, to play with it, would be a raspberry pi. There are premade images of home assistant available to install. Stick one on as SD card, and follow the prompts. You’ll be amazed at what it can just find on your home network.












  • That’s how most EU regulations are created. They take the best parts of the legislation of various members and combine them.

    As for weapons, harmonisation is a thing. However, the exact use cases will vary for different countries. A tank that’s optimal for Spain isn’t necessarily the best for Germany. Neither country wants suboptimal equipment. What is easier to harmonise is ammo, a fact that NATO have been exploiting for a long while.

    There are also the implications. Before now, military has been done on a per country basis. If they want to move as a block, they need individual countries to step up. It also allows countries to act independently if desired. A unified army is seen as a threat to the sovereignty of individual countries.



  • The dys effectively means disorder of. Lexic reading and writing ability. It’s a disorder of reading.

    In the same family you have some others. Dyscalcula is a disorder of maths ability. Dyspraxia is a disorder of motor control.

    Science likes Latin based words. Because it’s a dead language, the meanings don’t change/drift. Most scientific language can be deconstructed this way.