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Baronash posted:I can only hope that, when I am 70, people aren’t being this insultingly infantilizing about my ability to function. Hey man, I'm just going by the old people I know (and knew) who had trouble with this poo poo. My grandmother and, later, my mother struggled mightily with keeping up with modern tech. Some older people have bad eyesight, bad hearing and trouble with their hands. I'm not trying to loving insult anybody. Quite the opposite in fact. Jesus.
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Oct 18, 2021 23:20
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For reference, just Wendelstein 7-X cost 1.1 billion € so far. Which is surprisingly little considering how gigglingly high-tech it is.
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Oct 18, 2021 23:26
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Volmarias posted:The article had me intrigued until I saw the $100m tagline, along with "yeah it's just another Tokamak reactor lol." The amount the USG spends on Fusion research annually is loving shameful (someone share that Fusion Never graph) but this isn't going to be enough to move the needle.  
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Oct 18, 2021 23:38
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It's also worth noting that if you had a working, net electricity-generating fusion reactor today, you might still have a long way to go to turn it into an economical, practical power plant. This is usually ignored, and people assume that once a working fusion plant exists, energy is instantly solved. A fusion plant will also almost certainly be more expensive than a fission plant. The solution today must be fission, which is actually very good and vastly undervalued. I don't think fusion can be a solution to anything today. I think fusion research is good, and should maybe be pursued a bit more aggressively, so that it can eventually become a viable solution. For what it's worth the one fusion researcher I know shares this view. Elukka fucked around with this message at 23:42 on Oct 18, 2021 |
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Oct 18, 2021 23:39
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RFC2324 posted:has anyone considered that people would like them MORE if they were more likely to go up in a cool explosion?
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Oct 18, 2021 23:45
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Shrecknet posted:this is 100% true. there was an opportunity in the 60s to switch to Thorium, which cannot be enriched into weapons, but ultimately we chose to stick with current fissile materials, because they can. US navy drove this choice for the most part, alongside the Nuclear Weapons program.
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Oct 18, 2021 23:52
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I would like to report that algorithms are raising your r neighbors' kids.
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Oct 19, 2021 00:18
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I have a telehealth appointment this week where I was expecting to have some bloodwork done so I’m excited to see how that goes
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Oct 19, 2021 00:50
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I met a retired General Atomics physicist a few years ago and his attitude was that practical fusion was far harder than originally believed and that more money wasn’t going to solve it.
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Oct 19, 2021 00:57
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TACD posted:I have a telehealth appointment this week where I was expecting to have some bloodwork done so I’m excited to see how that goes you will just be able to go in and drop off some blood whenever. its way better than worrying about getting bled when you have to go to work afterward or whatever
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Oct 19, 2021 00:58
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VideoGameVet posted:I met a retired General Atomics physicist a few years ago and his attitude was that practical fusion was far harder than originally believed and that more money wasn’t going to solve it. More money would solve it, but it would need to be on a spend level equivalent to the Manhattan project plus inflation. And for right now, there's no reason to do that since Fission is perfectly capable of addressing the issue and is already technically feasible.
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Oct 19, 2021 02:01
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TACD posted:I have a telehealth appointment this week where I was expecting to have some bloodwork done so I’m excited to see how that goes You'll get a referral to a lab to draw blood, and a follow up appointment to get the results most likely. At least that's how it worked for me
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Oct 19, 2021 02:23
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Telehealth, aka 'a phone call to your doctor' I've found useful when doing things that don't require physical examinations. Like, it makes sense with GPs where you're mainly looking for referrals and follow-ups. It's something that works for a particular use. Unfortunately the theme of this thread is that poo poo like that becomes pushed as a solution in search of a problem.
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Oct 19, 2021 05:20
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That's a weird graph. Fusion reactors already exist, but nothing I have ever read about fusion makes it sound like '90s tech would've been sufficient to get a reactor that yields more energy than it consumes. Similarly, nothing I've read indicates that more money would solve all the real and nontrivial problems meaningfully faster. It's still at the stage where active research today uncovers new problems nobody thought existed a few years ago, and that's why every prediction of a concrete date when the technology becomes viable commercially has been utterly wrong.
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Oct 19, 2021 11:41
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RFC2324 posted:has anyone considered that people would like them MORE if they were more likely to go up in a cool explosion? "My god, they only want reactors that CANDU catastrophic failure! This explains everything!"
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Oct 19, 2021 12:14
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VideoGameVet posted:I met a retired General Atomics physicist a few years ago and his attitude was that practical fusion was far harder than originally believed and that more money wasn’t going to solve it. Since he is retired, I assume he was around for the time of classified research on ExB drift and so forth. More money will definitely help solve it, assuming a solution exists. At the very least you need to pay people salaries to keep up with Google and the like, and give them a field they think they can make a career out of.
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Oct 19, 2021 15:28
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lordofthefishes posted:"My god, they only want reactors that CANDU catastrophic failure! This explains everything!" Fun fact: because CANDU reactors require heavy water to moderate the reaction, if they were to somehow lose all of their coolant they would just stop working. And the rods aren't in much danger of overheating because the reactors don't use enriched uranium (this is why they need deuterium) like the American design.
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Oct 19, 2021 16:05
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Mister Facetious posted:Fun fact: because CANDU reactors require heavy water to moderate the reaction, if they were to somehow lose all of their coolant they would just stop working. And the rods aren't in much danger of overheating because the reactors don't use enriched uranium (this is why they need deuterium) like the American design. As far as I know, most American reactors were upgraded in the 2000s to use low enriched uranium due to weapons proliferation concerns. There is some interest in using higher grade LEU for new designs, but still under the LEU threshold of 20% enrichment.
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Oct 19, 2021 16:14
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Yeah the CANDU is a fantastic reactor, and hilariously it has a LOT in common with the Soviet RBMKs, minus the graphite, including its layout and having a positive void coefficient. Thankfully the heavy water moderation is the key difference that makes the CANDU perfectly safe.
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Oct 19, 2021 16:14
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lordofthefishes posted:"My god, they only want reactors that CANDU catastrophic failure! This explains everything!" Boo this man
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Oct 19, 2021 16:14
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Antigravitas posted:That's a weird graph. Fusion reactors already exist, but nothing I have ever read about fusion makes it sound like '90s tech would've been sufficient to get a reactor that yields more energy than it consumes. More money let's you get more scientists, more experiments and so on, which let's you uncover these problems earlier. Would the 1980 or smth date be right if fusion research was treated like a Manhattan project? Who knows, I would guess not, but to think it wouldn't accelerate the research significantly is even more naive.
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Oct 19, 2021 16:45
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The Manhattan Project wasn’t even that expensive in contemporary American context. B29 development cost half again as much again as Manhattan. Fusion power for only two‐thirds the cost of the F-22 program? That would be a great deal. In absolute terms, it cost two billion dollars, which is under forty billion after inflation.
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Oct 19, 2021 17:50
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imagine if the money put into the F-35 program was put into  What is it up to now? 1.5 trillion?
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Oct 19, 2021 17:55
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Apparently there are smart basketballs that will set you back $60 (on sale) and pair with a $10/month app subscription. I was expecting built-in accelerometer/gyro/bluetooth for that price but in fact it just seems to be a yellow ball.
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Oct 19, 2021 18:25
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eXXon posted:Apparently there are smart basketballs that will set you back $60 (on sale) and pair with a $10/month app subscription. where's my anti-deflate-gate football!?
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Oct 19, 2021 18:36
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Mister Facetious posted:Fun fact: because CANDU reactors require heavy water to moderate the reaction, if they were to somehow lose all of their coolant they would just stop working. And the rods aren't in much danger of overheating because the reactors don't use enriched uranium (this is why they need deuterium) like the American design.  Leaking coolant? The reaction stops. Coolant boils? The reaction stops. Add water to cool them down?? The reaction stops. They're also unusable for making nuclear weapons! I wonder why they aren't more popular???
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Oct 19, 2021 19:41
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lordofthefishes posted:They're also unusable for making nuclear weapons! Sounds like CANTDU to me
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Oct 19, 2021 20:53
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Volmarias posted:Sounds like CANTDU to me that's the only kind of reactor we can build 
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Oct 19, 2021 20:56
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Mister Facetious posted:where's my anti-deflate-gate football!? yeah I tool was expecting a ball with added hardware. I want to be in the timeline where rich parents ruined their kid's muscle memory with non reg hardware.
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Oct 19, 2021 21:30
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His Divine Shadow posted:I can't believe that, we've had to go on so many bullshit visits ot the hospital and they cost 40 euros per visit per kid (twins with medical issues). Phonecalls instead of visits have been money savers for us and lost money for the hospital since they couldn't charge us the visitation fee. Some countries might not have that particular piece of shittery though, and it was ok here when it was like 10 euros, but it has ballooned in order to keep the rich peoples taxes low. Short disclaimer: Sweden has a public health-care insurance which has very low deductions and an extremely low annual cap (after which all visits are free for the rest of the year). The way healthcare has been privatized here is that private alternatives operate within this system and then get to debit the public purse an equivalent amount to what their public counterparts would have for the care given. This post will make very little sense without that context. Welcome to the hellhole that is Sweden then where telehealth (or more accurately, app-doctors) will, 1. Advertise aggressively in public spaces to encourage getting help from doctors for anything from a pollen allergy to a rash (only recently debited lower than an actual doctors visit) 2. Send almost anyone with an actual problem to the local emergency ward (this is big problem as most do not need emergency help) or their own primary care facility (double debitation) 3. Systematically debit you in another region than either you or they are in to max out the debit fee 4. Overprescribe anti-biotics to the degree that they're reversing our previous strides in decreasing anti-biotic use. And much more. For reference, we have a free national health telehelp-line as of over a decade back where you can get to talk to a qualifed nurse for medical advice at any time of the day. We also have long distance consultation (wherein on the rural countryside you can basically meet with specialists by sitting in a specialized conference call room). The app-doctors (and it's becoming a massive space, there's even public alternatives as of recently) are a separate affair and they are notoriously unethical. EDIT: Here's an AD from the Stockholm subway encouraging you to talk to a doctor if you have a cold (this was before covid)  Here's another one encouraging you to talk to a doctor if you have even the most basic symptoms of pollen allergy 
MiddleOne fucked around with this message at 06:19 on Oct 20, 2021 |
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Oct 20, 2021 06:03
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Goodness, that sounds terrible. Here, have an ad for dick pills.
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Oct 20, 2021 07:18
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lordofthefishes posted:
They really aren't unusable for making nuclear weapons - the standard CANDU design is capable of on-load refueling, which helps if you want to do a low fuel burnup for generating Pu-239 - it's the same overall geometry as the Windscale Piles, which were just for plutonium breeding. You also breed a lot a tritium in the moderator if you want to get spicy with a fusion booster. Now, it'll be very obvious that you are doing this and you need to process the fuel to get the plutonium out which is not an easy task (but easier than enriching uranium) and the usual operation of the reactors is not in this low burnup mode (as you'd expect, it very inefficient from a power generation perspective). CANDU is a great design and should be used more, but it is one that does have a proliferation concern - more than the various PWR designs that can't do on-load refueling.
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Oct 20, 2021 07:58
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https://twitter.com/verge/status/1450646716097736706?s=21 preemptive LOL at whatever Zuck calls the new parent company
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Oct 20, 2021 16:10
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While Google did this with Alphabet. It's not like anyone says 'Alphabets android' they still say Google. So what is this meant to achieve?
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Oct 20, 2021 16:19
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Just like when Blackwater tried to escape their bad reputation too!
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Oct 20, 2021 16:28
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Mega Comrade posted:While Google did this with Alphabet. It's not like anyone says 'Alphabets android' they still say Google. Same thing the alphabet reorg was going for - legally no longer being a single company that can be broken up.
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Oct 20, 2021 16:29
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RFC2324 posted:Same thing the alphabet reorg was going for - legally no longer being a single company that can be broken up. Doesn't that just make Alphabet the monopoly and make it really easy to break up since all the child companies are separate? Or comedy answer - doesn't that just turn Alphabet into a cartel?
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Oct 20, 2021 17:35
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I worked for many failing companies in my career. The first company I managed not to kill was Oracle. I decided by my '30s that any time a company spent time and money on rebranding, they were likely to be doomed. Usually there was something major wrong, and instead they decided that a new logo and naming would solve the problem. One example: Rogue Wave made excellent C++ class libraries. Java showed up with free class libraries. This was a major existential threat. RW went through multiple CEOs, and one of the great inspirations was to add "The . in .com" to all logos. Good news: when a company rebrands, marketing hands out all the old merch for free.
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Oct 20, 2021 18:14
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Solkanar512 posted:Doesn't that just make Alphabet the monopoly and make it really easy to break up since all the child companies are separate? Got it in two
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Oct 20, 2021 18:15
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Arsenic Lupin posted:I worked for many failing companies in my career. The first company I managed not to kill was Oracle. I decided by my '30s that any time a company spent time and money on rebranding, they were likely to be doomed. Usually there was something major wrong, and instead they decided that a new logo and naming would solve the problem. One example: Rogue Wave made excellent C++ class libraries. Java showed up with free class libraries. This was a major existential threat. RW went through multiple CEOs, and one of the great inspirations was to add "The . in .com" to all logos. I started at Activision soon after they rebranded to MEDIAGENIC (i.e. Medium Genitals). Fortunately Bobby changed it back to Activision. Note: we were down to 12 people when we moved to LA in 1992.
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Oct 20, 2021 18:23
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