domain:asteriskmag.com
pbmonster
13hr ago
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.
[Uranium/plutonium fission] 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
That is, the short answer is that existing fission reactors just don't produce enough neutrons that have enough energy to convert mercury isotopes
Makes perfect sense, thank's for writing it all out!
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
14hr ago
The problem isn’t birthrates, it’s excess deaths and emigration. The population is much lower because people who didn’t flee are being killed in the war. And keep in mind that win or lose, the population will not be enough to weather another invasion later on.
functor
14hr ago
I have never understood why green parties are woke. Their ideology is naturally anti woke.
Remove fossil fuels from society and you are going to have a society that reflects that material basis. A society without fossil fuels doing most of the work is reliant on male physical strength. If agriculture is going to be entirely organic and sustainable people are going to be skinny. Much of feminism builds on people leaning on the state or insurance companies for their old age and care instead of family. Social structures are seen as oppressive by the left if people can recieve a pension and be cared for by the state. A large state that takes care of people requires industrial civilization. Without a huge state people need families, children, and social structures for support.
orthoxerox
If you can read this, you're using a custom theme
14hr ago
However, Russia also has plenty of militarily eminently sensible moves that it has not taken yet, presumably because of Western sensibilities
Yep, the number of bridges across the Dnieper is quite limited, and yet they haven't been taken out, nor have the railroad hubs in Western Ukraine been covered with petal landmines.
Being monolingual isn't a stable situation either! Languages change and evolve, and morph into new ones. I resist the urge to make sweeping pronouncements or value judgements here.
The Romans learned Greek for centuries even after their own uncontested dominance. Latin was a mark of class and a scholarly language for tens of generations after it had died out in common use.
Surely you have some good experience with this process as an Indian who writes long internet articles in English?
India has almost as many languages as gods. Very few of them have died for good, and those that did were closer to tiny dialects with a few hundreds or thousands of speakers. I don't think any language that had a million speakers or more in living memory has died out, even if there's been a trend of consolidation with English and Hindi. A lot of people speak their native tongue as usual, but write it using Latin characters. There's no clear trend of one particular language sweeping everything else away.
I'm not sure what we're arguing about, this conversation has veered far away from what I criticized as flaws in the grandparent comment. I have no objection to the claim that people who learn multiple languages tend to be better at a few and only passable at others. That's obviously true.
The question is why. The comment far above claims that it's because languages are mutually exclusive, learning one necessarily takes away from the others.
I say this isn't true. If you take math and history lessons, learning more history won't make you worse at math, but you will obviously not learn as much math as someone who hyperfocused on it.
SubstantialFrivolity
I'm not even supposed to be here today
14hr ago
I agree that good games (even great games) are still to be found, especially from indie devs. My observation is just that there has been a decrease over time in the rate of getting those great games. Early on (like in the 80s), devs were strongly limited by technology, but in the 90s they started to be unshackled from those limitations and were putting out incredible games that blew everything before them away. Doom, Fallout, the various Infinity Engine games, FF6, FF7, Deus Ex, Starcraft, Alpha Centauri, etc etc. And that torrent of classics kept up for a good long while. But at some point it slowed down - around 2010 is where the inflection point seemed to me to be. Not that we don't get classics any more (we do, some of my favorite games are from after the golden age), but that something changed and now (to make up some numbers) 20% of the games are classic instead of 60%. We can still get a lot of great games while it also being true that we get fewer than before
I suspect that the primary driver here is because AAA game development has become way too expensive and time-consuming. When it takes 5-10 years and a team of 200 people to make the game, there's always going to be pressure to play it safe so as to recoup the investment. Not to mention that long dev times hurt because games (like other software) benefit a lot from iteration. If you make a game in a year or two, you can test out your ideas and learn from your mistakes so much faster than at the current pace of AAA dev. And I bet that this is why so many of the great games in recent memory have been indie games. Free of the constraints their AAA colleagues face, they can focus more on quality for their intended audience than safe broad appeal. They can iterate faster and dial in what makes the best games. But even though the indie devs still knock it out of the park a lot, time was that all the devs were doing that! It really does strike me as a golden age that we aren't quite experiencing any more.
The US has been the Great Satan from Day 1.
Day 1 of the revolution to oust a CIA backed dictator that was installed to thwart the nationalization of the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company by a democratically elected Prime Minister, that is.
The Persians have plenty of legitimate historical grievance against Anglo-Americans, let's not pretend otherwise. But they could probably let it all go if their main regional rival didn't have such strong military ties with the US.
TowardsPanna
14hr ago
Wait what? I never heard about Lovelace being in Civ before now. A mathematician and "the first computer programmer". They have no business making her a leader of a nation. Or several nations across history, as is the case in 7.
But on the note of how to label these 'woke practices', I have started thinking it's more about female chauvinism/favoring women than about merely increasing diversity.
Pasha
Defend Kebab
14hr ago
Being multilingual is not a stable situation. Languages exist in a hierarchy wrt each other and their relative strength changes over generations often drastically. In the modern world without some heavy nationalist pressure all but the highest prestige language(s) typically dies out. Surely you have some good experience with this process as an Indian who writes long internet articles in English?
StJohnOfPatmos
14hr ago
What's funny is that this exact series of events (male founding figure of a Green party focused on environmental policy becomes ostracised and removed from power by the next generation of overwhelmingly female party apparatchiks who want the party to revolve mainly around woke identitarian politics) is now turning into a recurring trope across Western democracies, virtually always following the same beats.
The Austrian Greens sabotaged Peter Pilz, a founding figure of the party and a star investigative journalist who uncovered (and to this day still keeps uncovering) some of the biggest political scandals in modern Austrian history. After he was denied a safe seat for an upcoming election, despite being a senior leadership figure, he left the party to found his own movement, after which the vengeful Green party leaked years-old internal party protocols that revealed he had once called his secretary "Schatzi" (essentially the German form of calling someone "honey"), she had complained, and they had resolved the issue internally without further problem. This complete nothing-story was of course blown up to the scale of serial predation (this happened in MeToo years) and Pilz was pressured to resign all political functions and retire from politics.
An almost identical scandal happened in Germany in the run-up for this years election, Stefan Gelbhaar - an established, handsome, charming, popular male Green partisan - was slated to receive a safe seat for the Greens until one of the fattest, ugliest women in the Greens party structure started spreading anonymous false accusations against him that collapsed the second anyone tried to verify their legitimacy - but by then it was too late, as the Greens had already decided to remove Gelbhaar from his seat without even sharing the nature of the allegations with him. As the head of the Young Greens said, regarding the matter - "the presumption of innocence exists in the courts, not in the Green party".
I think there's a similar story within the French Greens, but I'm not that knowledgeable about them since they're a largely irrelevant presence in French politics.
TowardsPanna
14hr ago
You have a dangerous line of thought. You're almost downplaying the problem of police brutality and similar abuses of power.
Predators seek out vulnerability in the victim and the opportunity to get away with the crime. Finding particularly guilty people to punish does not really enter into the equation except coincidentally.
SubstantialFrivolity
I'm not even supposed to be here today
15hr ago
Yeah, I agree that those sounded good in principle. That's why I was excited for Humankind when it came out, because I thought the idea of growing your civilization over time could be a really fresh take on the genre. In practice it didn't turn out so well (at least to me, and it sounds like to you) because the lack of identity just made civs feel soulless and disconnected from any historical flavor.
Accordingly I was already skeptical with the direction for Civ 7, because they were building on ideas that I already knew I didn't like when they were in another game. And unfortunately it seems like they too have gotten things completely wrong flavor wise (seriously, why does Firaxis think that the leader is what we players care about??). Not to mention the harsh age resets, which seriously undermine the core thing people like about Civ (building stuff up over time).
I find it especially galling because according to Firaxis, this all was in service of trying to get people to finish more games of Civ, since stats show most people don't finish the game. But I do! I find the entire arc of a game of Civ fun, and while the late game isn't quite as good as the early game, it's still really fun to me. So with Civ 7 they are trying to solve a problem I don't agree that the game has, by using methods that I don't like (and which go against the core identity of the series). It's very frustrating.
ResoluteRaven
15hr ago
The fertility crisis isn't going to be solved in or by Ukraine. If a solution is found, then Ukrainian wartime casualty counts will be irrelevant assuming they stay within 20th century (i.e. WWI level or less) norms, but could make the difference between Ukraine existing or not as a sovereign state in the future. Presumably the soldiers fighting are motivated by nationalism and care about such things. If a solution isn't found, then we go extinct and this discussion is moot.
It was a conscious decision to leave it subtextual, particularly through the edit. On the one hand, the event where this was filmed was full of Motte posters, many of whom are now in various positions of authority. On the other, I felt that insights into the sort of dynamics we see here, though a particularly intense example of the sort of online spaces we spend much of the interview discussing, are generalisable. Ultimately, I didn't want an audience unfamiliar with this space to feel unable to engage with the ideas.
Pasha
Defend Kebab
15hr ago
You are spot on with the difficulty of b1->c2 and Anglos seemingly thinking they know a language at about a2 level. Passport bro Spanish might as we’ll be a new creole at this point.
But I don’t agree at all that language is just a tool. Obviously it can be wielded like one when necessary, but for most people the significance of the languages they speak and teach their children is that your language determines your group identity much better than any other marker. You literally cannot be part of a society if you cannot speak its languages to the desired degrees (in modern nation states this is often a single language spoken to native level, but historically it can be multiple languages spoken at different levels like my example of the Ottoman Greek). Any shift in culture and identity must go hand in hand with language shifts. If your children don’t speak the same languages as you you can bet they will find your culture foreign.
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
15hr ago
Sorry, I misunderstood the contents of these warnings, but can you blame me for liking my version better?
ResoluteRaven
15hr ago
Without fixing its manufacturing base, the US will lose any conflict with China that isn't decided in the first few days regardless of whether we're talking about 2022 or 2025 level weapon stockpiles. The fact that running out of 155 mm shells, drones, and missiles in trying to supply Ukraine has led to military and civilian leaders realizing this is a problem and working to solve it is the best thing that could have happened for American military preparedness short of not having outsourced all of those industries in the first place, even if there is a temporary shortage as a result.
FistfullOfCrows
15hr ago
one Nigerian woman appealed her deportation eight times before deliberately joining a Nigerian terrorist organization
Honestly, in such cases I would want these people to be jailed locally for life instead, with no possibility for being released inside the US. If they've been good little chain gang workers maybe give them the option to be deported to a country of their choosing.
FistfullOfCrows
15hr ago
Maryland wife beater might have been a violation of procedure ( idk if it even was ) but was not a violation of the spirit.
ResoluteRaven
15hr ago
Ukrainians are by any measure I can think of more different from Russians than Taiwanese are from Chinese or South Koreans from North Koreans. Kiev began diverging from Moscow at the time of the Mongol invasions in the 13th century.
FistfullOfCrows
15hr ago
I'm pretty sure those who embrace this conclusion are making a major strategic mistake that will come back to haunt them. By thinking they can jettison the concept of shame, they are storing it up to be brought down on their asses in much larger quantities later. Shame is not a force humans can, ultimately, live without.
Team blue has been mashing defect so hard for so long all the while moralizing about "decent human beings" that at this point there is literally no shame to be had. I could post a certain Sam Hyde quote here, but i will not, just know the mood on the right/alt-right is decidedly tinged in vengeance, and all of the left-blob's client identitarian groups will suffer for it.
Fruck
Lacks all conviction
15hr ago
San Andreas and Chinatown wars play pretty well on mobile, at least the stand alone versions did and they controlled surprisingly well (maybe even preposterously well - I got up to Las Venturas before I got distracted by something else, and if you had ever heard me bitch about touch controls for phones and tablets you'd be very impressed. Although based on the reviews it sounds like Netflix did something to tank the performance - no doubt adding some data mining shit. Considering GTASA ran perfectly well on my pixel 3 there is no reason it shouldn't run well on pretty much anything available today.
FistfullOfCrows
16hr ago
I am convinced it was kabuki by the very fact the White Helmets were involved.
FistfullOfCrows
16hr ago
Town of Pokrovsk (~70k before war) whose supply lines have been interdicted for months now & ofc town itself has been under constant attrition is getting ever more cut off.
I don't get this. Supplying water to a town without electric power/pumping stations infrastructure is impossible, are the Russians going out of their way NOT to starve the town into oblivion in 7 days?
My impression based on left-leaning friends & acquaintances (of which I have very, very many) is twofold:
The first is a general aesthetic. When people draw images for the green future, it's just a really nice-looking, organic neighbourhood, farms with happy animals, it's clean, people still live in modern-style housing right next to a beautiful forest. On the other side, when climate change and fossil fuels are shown, it's dirty, it's ugly same-looking cities with large heavy industry, animals in pain from ugly, pustulous wounds, people in cramped apartments far away from any green (which probably is dead anyway). On that level, it really is just the good ol' politics of in-favor-of-everything-good-against-everything-bad; If given the choice, absolutely everyone would take the former over the latter, if there are no other ramifications (which at least aren't shown nor talked about). Woke is mostly the same; It generally sells itself first and foremost on extremely benign-sounding slogans and tries to just ignore, talk away and suppress the mention of any and all problems. Of course trans is just about letting a small minority live as they please, of course women's rights are only about not being taken advantage of by evil men, of course anti-racism/colonialism is just about giving formerly oppressed groups their freedom back, etc. And the - primarily - women who make up the bulk of the support really aren't unpleasant for the most part, often the opposite, they just want everyone to get along, everyone to work towards the obvious, common good and to exclude the minority of evil men. If you just avoid calling their politics into question - which in daily life will be 99% irrelevant anyway - they are usually exceptionally helpful and pro-social. But, of course, they have a massive, noble-lie shaped hole (and also, they can be irritating busybodies, but that's more manageable).
The second is a general distrust of the profit motive. Several of my (mostly male) friends who are much more successful than me (managing-your-own-company or high-tier BigCorp middle-manager successful) have had more than enough personal experience of engaging in what they perceive as anti-social behaviour just to keep their company/section afloat (stuff like cutting out a newly emerging competitor with legally grey tactics, deliberately hiring badly-paid interns with the promise of a permanent position over and over, actively managing a funnel into addictive behaviour for your freemium game, etc.). They genuinely feel bad about this and want to restructure society so that this isn't done anymore in the future. They're rarely communists and are aware of its failure modes, they want markets, but their experience makes them believe that a many of the arguments against renewables are as bullshit as the old pro-smoking arguments; If you put up just the right limits on the market, we will have a great, green future!
Tbh the latter isn't even that far from my own position; It's just that I'm much more suspicious of government intervention blocking progress and protecting old, wasteful structures in an unholy BigState BigCorp marriage (also frequently called the cathedral).
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