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Comment Re:Your tax dollars hard at work (Score 1) 72

1. You have a point. Current reactors are around 30% efficient because they have to have liquid water to cool the reactor, and there are limits to that even with very high pressures. Thus carnot cycle limitations apply. It basically means that a nuclear reactor has to produce 3GW thermal (GWt), to produce 1GWe, so it has to exhaust 2 GWt as waste. Increase the temperature to the point you get 50%, and suddenly you only need to generate 2GWt to produce 1GWe, cutting waste heat in half. A much easier problem to solve at that point.
2. As you identify, there's a limit to what you can dump into the Earth. It just transfers heat too slowly to be practical in most situations. It's actually a problem I ran into when looking at geothermal heat pumps up north, like North Dakota and Alaska. You can actually end up cooling the earth so much as to lose efficiency or effectiveness over time. You might actually want to run some solar thermal panels and pump heat into the system during the summer. Between it being one of the more expensive options and actually less effective than air cooling, it isn't on my standard list.
3. Salt vats would still be a form of air cooling. Better options might be to list waste heat scavenging for zone heating or other industrial purposes. For example, it could be used to help dry new lumber, paper, fabrics, and food (dehydration). Laundries could use it for hot water for washing. Greenhouse heating, and aquaculture.
4. Micro-reactors still require cooling as per the above, and aren't actually in production right now, sadly.
To be clear, I'm not fixated upon large WCRs. I was just looking at the water-cooling restraint many fixate upon.

Comment Re:wow! That's terrible (Score 1) 227

I posted this over two years ago. it's still true today: K12 Does not teach kids to think. It teaches kids to react

Basically, kids today can't do math because they were taught to react to math from a game on an iPad while using a Ti-83 calculator to pass standardized tests.

So imagine giving a 7 year old Frog Fractions on an iPad that he plays between his Screaming Minecraft vtuber and AI Chinese generated Spiderman / Super Mario Bros. YouTube watching sessions and then wondering why he can't do fractional math and sounds like someone from Idiocracy.

Comment Re:What is the number of processes... (Score 1) 79

Again, you're being willfully obtuse by taking a "very loose definition" of what (or, rather, does not) "probably" constitute "ultra processed" and attacking on the details. Everything on your list (again, other than coffee and tea, along with some spices) has been "produced at home" for millennia, and the things on your list that haven't don't have anything to do with whether they could be, but only the geography of where they could be. Just like your follow up "but I don't have land" bullshit.

"Milk" is not an ultra processed food (or, rather, it doesn't have to be). Something containing "red dye #5" is. You need a factory and a complicated supply chain for the red dye #5, but not for the milk. See how easy that was?

With regard to your follow up WRT cheese, come the fuck on. Cheese is nothing more than a way of preserving milk. You can make some in your home today, and the knowledge required to do so can be obtained by watching a five minute Youtube video. Really, five minutes. That's all. Will you have Le Grand Gruyere? No, you'll have farmer's cheese, or ricotta, or mozerella, or maybe a nice gouda if you're feeling frisky and want to wait a bit.

Comment Re:working (Score 1) 24

I do consider taxation theft, there is no purpose to it except for controlling the population. The fact that people accept different *levels* of theft depending on how much money they make just proves how much of theft it is, because they more money someone makes, the fewer people there are in that category of people, given that, it is easier to structure theft in such a way as to convince the majority that they don't suffer as much as the other people, who are hit with a much bigger crime.

Comment Re:Your tax dollars hard at work (Score 1) 72

That's still fixable. Just like how most computers are air cooled and not water cooled. They could build a very large air cooling tower and not need water at all.

Cooling from cheap to expensive:
1. Take in water, return water some amount hotter. Requires the most water to limit temperature rise.
2. Take in water, evaporate some of the water in a cooling tower. Results in less water, but also takes less water and controls temperature rise better
3. Dry cooling.

Most systems are actually something of a hybrid of the three.

Comment Re:iPhone Unavailable - try again in 1 minute (Score 2) 97

If you are a programmer and you are given clear instructions on what is expected, then yes. If you are a programmer and you are not given clear instructions, then no. However if you are technical lead/architect then you really should be responsible for it.

OTOH if you are a programmer and you raise these concerns then you are on your way to become a technical lead/architect.

In my systems I insist we keep a database table of various common passwords (tens of thousands of these) and we do not allow people using them as well.

Comment Re:You're fired! (Score 2) 66

Much as I agree with you from a moral standpoint, from a legal standpoint it is not as cut and dried as you make it out to be.

If you want to make the argument that "data about you" is "your data" that's fine, but the presumption here is that it's the airline's data, and it is offering it freely (as in speech, not as in beer) to the government. Where is the fourth amendment implication? It is not your "house, person, papers, or effects," it is the airline's and they're happy to let the government sort through it.

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