Em Adespoton

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  • 274 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 4th, 2023

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  • I don’t get it. Current nuclear power solutions take longer to set up, have an effectively permanently harmful byproduct, have the (relatively small) potential to catastrophically fail, almost always depend on an abundant supply of fresh water, and are really expensive to build, maintain and decommission.

    If someone ever comes up with a functional fusion reactor, I could see the allure; in all other cases, a mix of wind, wave, geothermal, hydro and solar, alongside energy storage solutions, will continually outperform fission.

    I suspect that the reason some countries like nuclear energy is that it also puts them in a position of nuclear power on the political stage.



  • As someone who pre-dates the public Internet and spent a lot of time dialling in to BBSes when most people thought personal computers were for nerds…

    The Internet will fracture, but not break down. What would happen is balkanization of the Internet, with physical areas running their own networks, and a bunch of poor “dark” areas. Some of those networks would likely have low bandwidth interconnections, such that digest data could still spread, much like the early days of usenet and fidonet.

    Local culture and tribalism would increase, and information would skyrocket in value. The rich would still have access to, and control, the information. The poor would be left out completely.


  • Agreed; after using various running and other gloves, I settled on a set of work gloves that are thin nylon weave on the back and dipped in nitrile on the front, similar to gardening gloves.

    They let the steam out while keeping my hands from getting too cold in -10 weather, AND I can use my phone with them on (although I don’t recommend doing that below freezing).

    I do 3 hour trail runs through the winter and they’ve worked better than my running gloves or my merino wool cutoffs. And they’re $3 a pair.



  • One part of this is history.

    Canada and the US were British colonies; Mexico was a Spanish colony.

    When some of the British colonies declared independence, they still had to trade with the colonies that hadn’t. People had relatives on both sides, the postal systems were integrated, indigenous people were mistreated in the same manner, and the list goes on. Culturally, the two remained very similar while the political systems differed.

    Stuff coming from England often ended up in Toronto or New York; both of these cities became hubs of publication.

    This is the way the relationship stayed pretty much up until NAFTA in the 1990s; books had already had over a century of being published in Toronto and New York for distribution across English North America.

    Mexico had a different history, and a different relationship with California, Arizona, New Mexico and Texas. Instead of Mexico being a route for culture and European goods to enter the US, it was a source of cheap labor once slavery was abolished.

    Unlike Canada where the most influential Canadians lived right along the border, in Mexico the influential Mexicans lived further south, with itinerant workers living along the border.

    NAFTA changed the balance of trade somewhat, but it didn’t change the already established cultural norms or the places people lived.









  • While true to a point, don’t paint Russia as being any better. They chose the war of aggression against Ukraine and are choosing not to stop it.

    They were also in Afghanistan before the US, and destroyed it even more than the US has, between the two of them leaving the Taliban as the best local option remaining.

    I sure don’t know what the solution is, as everything the world has tried so far has eventually failed, concentrating power in the hands of a few to abuse it.

    BRICS could have a potential to control Russia while redistributing power, except that it includes Russia and China and India, all of which have a strong track record of concentrating power into the hands of the few, rejecting the voice of the people while putting on a western facade of being for the people.

    Throw into this mix the upcoming results of global warming and neither bloc is going to make things better for the majority of humanity.