domain:acoup.blog
AnonymousActuary
9hr ago
Yeah this is what I've emphasized - you will improve at this if you work at it, but doing so will result in a lot of losing along the way. We went to a chess club event recently and I prefaced it with "everyone here is going to be much better than you, but you will learn some things". She had a very good attitude, and I thought played some very solid moves that even I hadn't seen. She said she wanted to go again, so I think for now I keep nurturing it. Hopefully can find some people more her level for her to play soon.
The_Nybbler
In the game of roller derby, women aren't just the opposing team; they're the ball.
9hr ago
Languages are hard, and they probably lived in some refugee community.
Grant_us_eyes
9hr ago
No, you stumbled into a weird little internet site that cleaves more closely with old-style forums, with old-style rules that aren't explicitly defined, and the expectation that you at least lurk quietly to adapt to the overall local culture before making yourself known.
If you've been exposed to nothing but reddit and/or twitter for most of your online life, of course this place is going to look weird. You came in expecting an industrial rave and instead got an English Gentlemen's Club.
Stay around a bit. You'll be fine.
@Lizzardspawn for visibility
I think there is a 'basic' answer here, just in terms of energetics.
Looking at a single atom version of the reaction they're talking about to create gold, the idea is that you have an atom of mercury-1981, and you hit it with a neutron. If all goes well, the end result is one atom of mercury-1972 and two neutrons coming out. You can just compute the energetics of this reaction just from mass/energy conservation. This is, indeed, one of the first things I computed when going through the paper. The answer is that the reaction is endothermic, which is similar to what you might have seen in chemistry - the reaction requires you to put energy in in order for it to happen. The way you typically put energy in is to have a fast-moving neutron that is flying in to hit the mercury-198 atom. When you do the calculation, the required energy in for the neutron is just under 8.5MeV. You must have a neutron flying at least this fast into a mercury-198 atom to accomplish the desired reaction.
Common uranium-235 fission reactors do produce neutrons flying around; that's necessary for them to keep the chain reaction going. But the energy of those neutrons is low in comparison. It does produce a spectrum of neutron energies, but the peak of that spectrum (the most number of neutrons produced) is around 0.7MeV, the average being about 1.9MeV (it's a bit skewed)3. You can find that the spectrum does continue to tail off toward the higher energies, but eyeballing the chart, you have about a two-and-a-half order of magnitude reduction in the production of neutrons that are at the sufficient >8.5MeV range than you have at the lower energies. If I actually integrated the curve, the number of sufficiently energetic neutrons produced would surely be <<1% of the total neutrons produced, and the question really is about the number of zeros I should put after the decimal point before we get something non-zero.
Now, fast breeder reactors. They do also split plutonium, which does produce a slightly faster neutron spectrum... but it's not much. The curves are quite close to U235. The 'fast' part of the name is just that they use the (primarily ~1-2MeV) neutrons they have directly (when they're "fast", where "fast" means >1MeV) rather than slowing them wayyyy down with a moderator like they do in traditional reactors.
That is, the short answer is that existing fission reactors just don't produce enough neutrons that have enough energy to convert mercury isotopes (see footnote 2 again). Whereas with deuterium-tritium fusion reactors, the primary reaction is just H2+H3=>He4+neutron. If you do the energetics here, assuming worst case scenario with no kinetic energy coming from the input hydrogen atoms, you still get neutrons coming out with just over 14MeV. That's plenty of energy to hit some mercury and get what you want. If, of course, you can design your reactor right (and there are a bunch of other considerations that I won't get into here; just this basic consideration of energetics should be sufficient for the instant question).
1 - Mercury-198 is a 'relatively' abundant natural isotope, about ten percent of all the naturally-existing mercury in the world. In gathering it up, you'll likely be digging it out of the ground. Then, you take that ore and process it until it's the kind of stuff you want. Generally, people use chemical/physical means to get rid of other stuff and 'isolate' the 'good stuff'. This is the 'enrichment' bit.
2 - Thereafter, Mercury-197 naturally decays to gold with a half-life of like 20-70 hours (I didn't go back and look up the exact numbers for this comment).
3 - A weirdness that requires getting into looking at cross-sections is that they actually prefer even slower neutrons for further U235 fission. This is why they have 'moderators' in reactors - to slow neutrons down to a speed that is best for further fission events. There's fun back story here in the history of the development of ideas for the possibility of sustained fission; it took some work to figure out which isotopes of uranium would split with different energies of incoming neutrons; it turned out to be important that U235 would do fine with slower neutrons (which it could, itself, readily produce), whereas U238 required faster neutrons and couldn't sustain itself with its own production of neutrons.
netstack
Texas is freedom land
9hr ago
I’m not seeing the problem with Francophone. Vicky 3 starts in 1830, right? They’ve been doing business in French for longer than the U.S. has existed.
Speaking of which—how likely is it that a pro/anti-slavery culture which has triggered a civil war actually would enact the relevant policy? I would expect it to be near 100%, which is presumably why Paradox hardcoded it. And are there other hardcoded war->policies?
Most of your other mods either look reasonable or are beyond my understanding of the mechanics. You’re going to have to explain what “incorporation” is supposed to represent if you want commentary on those :)
Crowstep
9hr ago
But we should probably demand better
The optimal amount of crime is not zero.
I would love a system that deports 100% of illegal immigrants and never mistakenly deports a legal immigrant, but such a system cannot exist outside of fiction. The world is messy and complicated and people make mistakes and lie and misremember and enforcement of any law is expensive and difficult.
The developed world has been experimenting with the 'better system' and it has been abused to such an extent that it has lead to fully fledged volkerwanderungen and ethnic replacement of a native people in a single generation.
The idea that the West should be more lenient to illegal immigrants because of a few sob stories seems laughable when one considers the scale of the thing.
A_Wee_Hearts_Toll
9hr ago
This doesn't make sense in context. There are constant offer of peace talks, constant public praise and hit pieces, years of rumor around Zaluzhny's political future etc. Seymour Hersh is a joke with negative alpha.
self_made_human
Grippy socks, grippy box
10hr ago
You have me sold. More novels need alcoholic monkeys, Daoist or not.
stuckinbathroom
10hr ago
Unironically, this might be indicative of the single biggest difference between WEIRD and non-WEIRD societies: the expectation that people naturally will—and should!—leverage social ties, especially family/kinship ties, to get preferential treatment when dealing with large, impersonal bureaucracies like the government. The Chinese call it guanxi, but of course it has a million names besides, in basically every part of the world except Northern Europe and the Anglosphere. Hell, even in the Anglosphere, we have the old saw “it’s not what you know, it’s who you know”, which gestures at the same thing.
There’s not enough evidence to say whether this situation in particular is a case of such behavior, but it being Latin America, I wouldn’t be terribly surprised. Then again, it is Chile, which I vaguely intuit is WEIRD-er than par for the Hispanophone course.
oats_son
10hr ago
This is a good point and, I think, a big reason why the mods are now levying permanent ban warnings against WhiningCoil. Every time he goes as far as he did last time, he causes a wave of discontent and many people have a hard time reacting to him civilly. The more inflammatory he gets, the more it's unreasonable to turn a blind eye to him but not to the people responding to him. I do not envy the moderators on decisions like this, because he's posted many a good post.
Turniper
10hr ago
I write https://www.royalroad.com/fiction/104317/between-beast-and-buddha-a-drunken-monkeys-journey , a vaguely JttW inspired xianxia story about an alcoholic monkey daoist.
OracleOutlook
Fiat justitia ruat caelum
10hr ago
I've actually seen some on the Right express dismay with how the government is going about things. Yes, deport millions! But it's still The Government doing it, so it's bound to be done backasswards.
Recently saw someone with a 12-point proposal to send to senators asking them to make sure deportees are treated humanely, detention is short, religious services are not withheld, and that if the issue is an honest paperwork error that it does not prejudice them against entry in the future. This form letter was created by a Floridan who is as anti-illegal immigration as any other conservative.
Just because the interests of the United States should be served first and foremost by our immigration system does not mean that detention and deportation must be an elongated or humiliating event. Processing should be swift, efficient, dignified, and safe and detentions, when necessary, should be brief and at the expense of the State rather than an opportunity for vendors to mine aliens for cash. We need to put our best foot forward as a country and give foreigners the opportunity to behave and be treated like ladies and gentlemen while reserving the right to reasonably and forcefully protect ourselves and our nation’s representatives from harm. No system operated by the government is ever going to be perfect, but that is no excuse to settle for mediocrity or ratify substandard frontline practices.
Unfortunately, X is not full of such moderates.
PutAHelmetOn
Recovering Quokka
10hr ago
People got mad at WC for 1 sentence. His sin was failing to flatter our sacred sensibilities about race. That sentence was NOT saying "outsiders [to White society] are bad" it was saying "outsiders [to the family] are bad." The traditional deference to race is to triple-proofread your post to ensure it can't be misinterpreted in a bad way.
AT and (to a lesser extent) BC write paragraphs of emotion-slop that shouts the vibe on a neon sign. As far as I know, nobody is misinterpreting what they say though. Indeed, with AT and BC often time the vibe is the point.
cjet79
10hr ago
Glad you enjoyed it!
Try Timberborn next if you want to mess around with water
self_made_human
Grippy socks, grippy box
10hr ago
One of his wives? That's taken me aback more than the cancer has.
On the plus side, he has wives to spare. Smart man.
KMC
10hr ago
What I'm demanding is the undoing of the unchecked demographic replacement of my people in my homeland. That's what I've chosen. I don't particularly care about these other things, since that care tends to be weaponized against me, and seldom reciprocated.
Plus, I don't think Pinochet is any threat to this man any more. Good news, he no longer has to be a refugee.
ABigGuy4U
10hr ago
Elections in Ukraine are cancelled indefinitely with US State Department approval, so barring a military coup Zaluzhny can’t force anything through. The State Department might be changing its tune though. The war is going very badly for Ukraine. Budanov was supposed to be the hard-headed butcher that would fight to the last Ukrainian, so if he wants to tap out that means the situation must be very dire. A catastrophic, total Ukrainian collapse would make NATO a lot harder to defend because the Russians would be sitting right on the Polish border. The Balkans would also be at much higher risk. It would be better for NATO to force Ukraine to give up everything east of the Dneiper and freeze the conflict for another ten years. That at least gives Europe time to rearm.
Joyful
10hr ago
I'd rather have a system that occasionally unjustly deports a tiny number of people to one which deports almost nobody.
Especially when it is a system that deals with hundreds of thousands of people, most of which have an incentive and thus proclivity to lie.
iprayiam3
10hr ago
this is all fair, I think. But it's aside my point that BC and AT weren't banned for leftism. They both come from a particular EHC right pov.
iprayiam3
10hr ago
I think you misunderstand me. I was somewhat flippant because I didn't follow that one super closely, and don't remember the upset user in question. My point is more generally that the Motte's moderation philosophy is against 'moral monsters, end of story' framing. this framing was associated more with the left for the past decade, thus why places like the motte exist, and don't exist on Reddit, pre-Musk twitter etc.
But when Turok and Count jumped in, they didn't do it from the left, and the pattern matching of 'the Motte bans leftists' is incorrect.
Fuck bigots, fuck white people, and fuck low human capital, all get banned for a reason other than political association.
I will concede that 'fuck HBD deniers' seems to get a special pass on this space as some kind of legacy protection
anon_
10hr ago
Could probably start with a single appeal, in front of an Art II appointed official (not an Art III judge) scheduled for a reasonable time in the future (say 10 business days).
Tiber727
10hr ago
Contra Whinning Coil: somebody flaming out because Whinning Coil was allowed to express racist views.
On this, it's not always just the racism element, more that what the mods appear to be selecting for is having a line of how much contempt you are allowed to give off when expressing a view. This seems mostly with the goal of preventing the forum from becoming trading insults back and forth.
Some positions inherently come with animus. There's a reason I scroll past the HBD discussions. But there are times I feel that users get away with a little more spice against groups that aren't typically here than if those groups were here, such as when feminism comes up.
I don't think this is a WEIRD vs not situation. I'd expect anyone in a Western society, faced with a blank bureaucracy and a dire situation, to reach out to someone who might know someone who might know something about the situation.
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