LaMarseillaise

How do you know?

If I were studying a primitive species, I would be no more interested in their war fighting than any other aspect of their society. Maybe that is just me.

If they are concerned about our militaries more than other things, why would they not always be perfectly concealed?

So China has put a probe on the Moon, launched a space station, and landed a rover on Mars, just in the last few months? Asteroid sample return is the next logical step. Looks like the second Space Age is in full swing.

> How do you divert a river and put it back on demand, with not even medieval technology?

Now I am wondering how Kurus handled this situation after he took Babylon.

A fast neutron is more likely to cause fission, but much, much less likely to interact with a fissile nucleus in the first place.

Current US electricity. To decarbonize transportation and industry, we will need 200-300% more. That drops rooftops to 10%, and that does not account for night and winter (overbuilding and storage).

> Nuclear makes little sense for climate targets.

I do not care only about the climate - I care about the environment. The entire planet should not be covered with solar panels and wind turbines. Whether or not it is more expensive, I support nuclear because it is the right thing to do.

> They are fairly different industries

Funding for each may actually benefit the others. For example, FLiBe salt is being considered as a coolant in some Gen IV fission, as well as compact fusion and concentrated solar. Production will increase if there is a definite market for it, making it easier to obtain.

Imagine that Apple charges a 0% fee. They could still undercut the pricing of Spotify, using their vast resources, and accomplish the same.

No doubt fraud is an issue everywhere. The question is whether it incurs cost on the fraudster. You mentioned people who took the money for construction and disappeared - why were they not sued or prosecuted?

> Financing (credit cards, furniture rentals, payday loans, diversity business loans) has not made poor people in rich countries rich.

Predatory loans are not the whole picture. Stock markets and business loans have made many poor people rich. I know some of them.

> No amount of loans will teach people how to mix concrete or organize an effective workforce.

Student loans can help here.

> I oppose ensnaring third world nations in debt.

The developed world does not have a monopoly on finance. Credit unions and microcredit are possible anywhere, but nevertheless depend on trust and stability.

> Africa needs more factories, more mills, more kilns, more technical know how.

Building capital requires financing. Financing depends on trust and stability. From your description, it seems like the issue is an ineffective legal system that allows widespread fraud.

> Now they have an unfair advantage since Spotify must pay 30% to apple while apple music "pays" 0%.

I think this does not account for the opportunity cost. If Apple Music competes with Spotify, then Apple Music implicitly pays the 30% fee of the next best alternative. If Spotify operates at a loss with the fee, and Apple Music is otherwise an identical business, then Apple should prefer Spotify - it makes more money this way. The fee is basically irrelevant.

A helicopter... on Mars. That is not much? Also, over one hundred space shuttle flights, a space station, a space telescope, GPS, and public satellite photos.

Unfortunately, I think the numerous tangential and unsubstantiated comments in this very thread suggest that the strategy has been highly successful. While I imagine Dominion could win against Giuliani, he is only one person and this disinformation has been spread through many channels. I expect we will see it again.

Edit: grammar.

You’re right: Parler’s negligence led to user data being taken. Parler should be punished for this.

So you would rather gamble human civilization on the chance that it might not be true, with a psychopath that has shown he is willing to do anything to stay in office?

> and then stood around.

They did not just stand around [1]. This was extremely violent, and they intended to murder people. Deterrence meant nothing to them. They were only stopped because the Capitol Police and Secret Service shot one of them. Different measures would absolutely have made a difference and saved lives.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lhjRXO72v1s

Except it is not just a name: standard time is supposed to indicate that the sun is at its zenith at noon somewhere in a timezone. If we do not care about that, why not abolish all timezones while we are at it?

I keep seeing and hearing this sentiment, but I think it is a false dichotomy. There have been places that responded effectively to the crisis without lockdowns (Iceland, for example). The choices are not strict, widespread, extended lockdowns or no response at all, with nothing in between. We may yet find that those who undertook either of those strategies have both poor economic and health outcomes.

> a profession that has some limitation to demand

This is the lump of labor fallacy. No profession is so fundamentally limited in the long term and no skills are set in stone.

The article explains the national labor market effects (lower marginal cost, higher marginal benefit), but we are still not done. Resources are allocated more efficiently in the international labor market with permissive schemes, as each individual seeks the greatest marginal benefit for their labor (their comparative advantage).

> The H1B scheme

H1B is a restrictive immigration scheme. The recent policy change is even more restrictive. Everyone is worse off relative to having been completely permissive all along.

To switch immediately to a permissive scheme would likely cause short-term unemployment in certain fields. But over the long term, people's skills can be changed or applied more efficiently, and new entrants will choose to develop skills that maximize utility.

> Have you ever lived near a Ppwer Plant?

Yes.

> In the case of a melt down, as San Onofre is both on the Pacific coast line as well as along the San Andreas fault line so it was just a matter of time, we would all die. Some slower than others, but death was the most likely outcome due to radiation exposure as an evacuation plan would fail.

This is disinformation and has absolutely no basis in fact or reality.

San Onofre Nuclear Generating Station (SONGS) shut down in 2012 and was replaced (partially) by a natural gas power plant in Carlsbad. There is no possibility of meltdown. Even if there were, the impact would not even approach what you are describing.

> football fields worth of solar farms

Football fields would be tiny in comparison to the immense amount of land that would be required to replace Diablo Canyon with solar panels. Solar Star generates one eleventh the power of Diablo Canyon over the course of a year and occupies almost four times the space. Solar Star produces only about 42% as much energy in December as it does in June, while Diablo Canyon operates consistently pretty much year-round.

A single plant powers 9% of California with near-zero carbon emissions.

Genuinely curious: do you have sources showing this?

And that is why Adams, not Jefferson, should be on the $2 bill.

This has already killed many times the number of people that Chernobyl did.

I can understand this sentiment, but I am now imagining criminals deliberately destroying body cameras.

> soviet arctic light-houses

I had heard these used Strontium(/Yttrium)-90 (β), but I might have been misinformed. Do you know where I can find more information about this subject?

I believe dfox is referring to this incident: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SL-1#Accident_and_response

lovemenot is correct. I do not think drones are evil.

I think it must be mentioned that in addition to fission and fusion (ITER) work, General Atomics is the creator of the MQ-9 Reaper, which is commonly used for drone strikes. A software job at this company may involve work on these aircraft.

Thank you for your honest reply.

I have heard of efforts in India and China to develop and build out nuclear fission plants, though I do not know the scale of these plans. However, even ITER (the largest fusion project right now) has a budget of only $10-20 billion. I have high hopes for ITER, but even that has been protested by anti-nuclear organizations such as Greenpeace. I worry that fusion, despite its many advantages, may be stalled or stopped in the same way fission has been. If we cannot solve this issue with a currently-available zero-emission power source, I just cannot see how a new one based on the same principles can succeed.