Did you take physics in high school (or elsewhere) and learn about half lives? Many of the main ingredients in nuclear weapons all have half lives: tritium, plutonium, etc – and most have fairly short half lives. They need to be continuously produced, enriched, refined, etc. to keep the purity high enough to be detonated. Some of them require breeder reactors and other fun thing.

Well, okay, U235 has a half-life of 700 million years, but you still need to enrich uranium to increase to proportions of U235, since U238 cannot sustain a chain reaction.

The original nuclear weapons were U235 weapons. Later bombs added all the harder to make stuff to make them bigger – fusion bombs still usually have a U235 starter to get the reaction going, but rely on things like tritium and plutonium to do the fusion bits. Even the Lithium-6 (which is stable) slowly decays to helium and tritium inside the weapon as neutrons from the other components hit it.

Anyway, enjoy the Wikipedia rabbit hole.

The good news about nukes: they have a shelf life – most soviet-era nukes needed to be replaced every 12 years, as the loss of fissile material to natural radioactive decay would render them dirty bombs after a certain point. Now don’t get me wrong, a dirty bomb still sucks, but it’s no nuke.

So when a collapsing Russia is hypothetically selling nukes, they’re probably selling old depleted nukes or nearly expired nukes. To a terrorist it is almost the same thing, but to nation stations looking at MAD, it really isn’t.

Not in favour of the individual suffering here, but illegal mining is about the worst thing that can happen anywhere.

Furthermore, in most jurisdictions where illegal mining happens, you get these gang run pyramid scheme shenanigans going on where the miners are very nearly enslaved to their handlers. Shutting them down can only be a good thing!

On the larger scale: Environment and safety regulations exist for a reason.

That said, the suckers in the mine starving themselves to avoid arrest might not see it that way.

Probably the money paid for whomever Alex Jones lost lawsuits against – so like Sandy Hook victims.

Generally speaking, I like duck typing for function inputs, but not as much for function outputs (unless the functions are pure mathematics).

Duck typing is the best if fully embraced. But it also means you have to worry just a little bit about clean failures once the project grows a little. I like this better than type checking relentlessly.

It also means that your test suite or doctests or whatever should throw some unexpected types around now and again to check how it handles ducks and chickens and such :)

How did you switch to Azerbaijan?

The ideal result? LLMs are just early versions of much better things that come later.

The unlikely result: we develop a separate human curated internet somewhere, complete with verification that a human wrote every bit. Basically verifiable digital id and signing on everything. Maybe.

The probable result: the internet turns to shit as AIs are trained on content created by AIs.

All this shows is that other countries (China, etc.) will have carte blanche if they have nukes. If they don’t, they’ll get them. Imagine a nuclear armed Venezuela going after their neighbours because conventional intervention is too risky suddenly. Blah.

Mass Effect 1 citadel

The thing is that the party conceding here actually trusts the election process. And Trump most definitely won the electoral college.

Even if he ends up losing the popular vote eventually, it doesn’t really matter. The system is rigged and has always been rigged in favour of land over people.

Canadian observer. Two things, and I think they’re related effects.

Harris is a minority and a woman. The Democrats were convinced they were the party that minorities would automatically vote for. But what they failed to realize was that those same minorities are misogynistic as hell. Like, have you ever been to a Baptist wedding? If you ask them what the role of a woman is…

The US is also the only first world country where the birthrate is above replacement. But if you look at who are having children, you’ll find that it skews conservative. And they’re passing those values along.

California is still counting. Not sure he won the popular vote.

Does it matter if they don’t honour the patents of the rest of the world?

Depending on the carrot, the skin can be significantly more bitter. And sometimes peeling can be quicker than trying to scrub dirt out of particular lumpy carrots.

YMMV

The premise here is that Trump loses but refuses to back down, attempting to forcibly claim victory. If Trump legitimately wins, there is a different path. Then…

Assuming multiple systematic failures occur simultaneously, including any of: actual voter fraud, fraudulent electors, congress refusing to certify, a captured supreme court acting in favour of Trump, or actual insurrection on or before Jan 6th.

I actually expect the US Military to step in. Every member is sworn to uphold the constitution. But if the constitution has been discarded, then I’d expect them to step in to restore it.

Failing that, the US likely fractures and we leave the Republic phase.

1000 km and 5000 seconds. Doesn’t seem very capable of hitting much, unless it flew intentionally a very high arc.

Love the solid rocket exhaust aesthetics though. Too bad it is produced as a weapon.

The US is broken for many reasons.

The Canadian Supreme Court, by comparison (in fact all judges in Canada) are merit based appointments. So far we’ve managed to avoid political appointments, for the most part. Although current conservative rhetoric is starting to target the courts.

Most functioning western world countries do not have partisanship in their courts.

Depends on the city. And who you are. I’m a big white dude with a geophysics degree so the circles I run in tend to be coloured by that.

I lived in Edmonton a decade ago, and it was great as a young professional. However, because the city is full of oil money, you really have to work hard to impress anyone with your career there. They’re all like “yeah, whatever, everyone at this bar is throwing down $100s and you’re just one of them assholes”, so you have to be pretty self-aware to date there. But going to a “drink and draw” event at an art gallery will work wonders ;)

Currently in Winnipeg. The arts scene here is great. Met my long term partner here (online dating during COVID, even – “do you want to go on a socially distant walk in the park together?”). She is more hipster than I so I basically ride her coattails now in the art scene. We went “power couple” for our first two years – two houses because that’s how affordable it is.

I have lived, worked, or studied in seven provinces and three territories now. I joke with my friends from elsewhere that when I moved to Winnipeg, I bought a garage and it came with a free house. My quite decent three bedroom, finished basement, double garage was $286k.

Well, it’s cold in winter and very flat topographically, but whatever – I lived in Yellowknife so this is nothing ;)

Photo just outside Winnipeg on the frozen lake – hiking to find cool ice ridges. Just gotta lean into winter :)

Move to the prairies folks. Vancouver has no place to build new homes. Montreal is an island. Toronto has real and artificial constraints keeping the sprawl contained.

Move to Winnipeg. Regina. Edmonton. Whatever. Own a home like it is 1965. If they’re still too expensive, move to an even smaller city. The jobs are available.