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Comment Re:Spending $250 million on Trump's campaign (Score 1) 41

Timeline hopper here, just through the gate from funny laugh lady land. Believe it or not in that line Musk is still the richest man ever over there - richer even - but he's a woke social librul because he knows which side of his bread has butter on it.

Notably, President Harris also prefers rockets that will launch to rockets that will not for some reason.

But don't eat the fish. Just in case.

Comment Excitement guaranteed (Score 2) 61

Watching was a thrill ride from beginning to end. Still issues with Booster landing but they will sort it out. The re-entry tiles did great. The satellites did great. Ship did so well they will try for a catch next time, if there's nothing counter in the flight data.

Hardware rich development proves itself again. The next one is built and being fitted out for a launch just a couple months away. Behind it, the factory has begun several more.

It's hard to believe they started building this on a beach in tents, with a flying water tower.

Submission + - Promising process for nuclear fuel re-use and disposal (autonocion.com)

Submitted by kwelch007
kwelch007 writes: A Canadian lab just ran a chemical process on real spent nuclear fuel and pulled out 90% of the long-lived danger in 24 hours, the part that forces a burial site to last 100,000 years, with the leftovers meant to fuel a reactor

The standard plan for spent nuclear fuel is to wait it out. You pull the used bundles from a reactor, sit them in a pool of water for seven to ten years while the heat and radiation come down, seal them in concrete casks, and look for somewhere deep and geologically dull to leave them for the next hundred thousand years. Canada has been hunting for that burial site since the 1980s and still doesn’t have one in the ground.

A company in Saint John, New Brunswick thinks most of what makes that waste dangerous never needed to go in the ground at all.

Moltex Energy Canada says a chemical process it calls WATSS can strip 90 percent of the long-lived material out of used CANDU fuel in 24 hours, and that the concentrated leftovers become fuel for a reactor it wants to build on the same site. The recovery step isn’t a slide in a pitch deck anymore. In 2025, World Nuclear News reported that Canadian Nuclear Laboratories ran the process on real used fuel from a commercial Canadian reactor and confirmed the 90 percent figure.

None of it is generating power yet. What exists is a validated chemical step and a reactor design waiting in line at a regulator. The rest is a 2030s problem.

Submission + - Your Cookware Got Worse On Purpose (worseonpurpose.com)

Submitted by hwstar
hwstar writes: Six companies, eighty-one brands own most of the cookware Americans can purchase. These brands are: Centre Lane Partners, a private equity firm, owns Pyrex, Corelle, CorningWare, Snapware, Visions, Chicago Cutlery, Instant Pot, Anchor Hocking, Lenox, Oneida, and Reed & Barton. That is almost all of the surviving legacy American tabletop industry under one roof.

All Clad

A couple of years ago, the small All-Clad pan I fry eggs in cut me as I was pulling it out of the dishwasher. A clean slice on my index finger off the rim. I patched it up. Didn’t think much else of it. I discovered what actually happened while researching this essay, sitting in a settlement archive three years too late to file a claim.

All-Clad had been selling its American-made stainless pans as dishwasher safe. In the dishwasher, the bonded rims corroded until the exposed edge got sharp enough to easily slice through skin. The company settled in 2023, capped at $4 million for a class covering seven and a half years of national sales, a rounding error for its French owner.

What never got fixed was the pan. Nothing was re-engineered to survive a dishwasher; the words "dishwasher safe" just came off the box, and the product pages recommend handwashing now. The claims window closed in April 2023 with most of the class, me included, never knowing it existed. Nobody mailed a postcard about the metallurgy.

Pyrex

Pyrex was materials science before it was a brand. Corning invented it in 1915: borosilicate glass that shrugged off thermal shock. It is the reason three generations learned to take a dish from the freezer to the oven without a second thought.

The American Pyrex on shelves today is tempered soda-lime glass, a different material with a thermal safety margin an American Ceramic Society analysis described as borderline, roughly 55C of headroom against 183C for borosilicate. Consumer Reports collected 163 shattering incident reports, 42 of them involving injuries. European Pyrex, made by an unrelated company, is still borosilicate. The switch happened under Corning itself, decades before the buyouts. That is exactly what made the brand such a perfect acquisition: the glass had already been downgraded, the reputation had not.

In 1998 Corning sold the consumer business to an affiliate of Borden, then a KKR portfolio company, in a deal worth about $603 million. The new company borrowed $471.6 million on day one and paid Corning a $472.6 million dividend, which means it was born owing more than it had. It renamed itself World Kitchen, bought more brands with more debt, and went bankrupt by 2002. To dig out, it sold the one thing in the portfolio still growing, OXO, for $273 million.

Cornell Capital, a private equity firm founded by a former Goldman Sachs vice chairman, bought the company in 2017 and renamed it Corelle Brands. In 2019 it merged with the Canadian company behind the Instant Pot, valuing the combination at $615 million. What it actually bought is disputed to this day. More than 98 percent of the price was booked as goodwill and intangibles, and within days of closing a Cornell partner on the new board emailed the CEO to ask, "Is there fraud going on???"

The suspicion, later spelled out in court filings, was that Instant Pot's sales had been pumped up with discounts and channel stuffing before the sale. The CEO's own verdict was that he was running "the most poorly operated 'successful' business on the planet."

Cornell held on to the asset anyway, and two years later, it got its money out. On April 12, 2021, Instant Brands borrowed $450 million. On April 21, it paid a $345 million dividend, roughly $200 million of that to Cornell Capital and its co-investors. The solvency memo blessing the payout assumed new product sales would grow more than 900 percent. In the end, actual sales missed that year's projections by $157 million. In June 2023 the company filed for Chapter 11, and the lenders that were collectively owed $391 million recovered between seven and nine cents on the dollar.

The bankruptcy is how we know all of this. The court appointed a litigation trustee to claw money back for the people left holding the bag. In November 2024 he sued Cornell Capital and its founder for more than $400 million, laying out the fraud email, the solvency memo, and the dividend math in an 88-page complaint. Cornell calls the suit baseless, and the case is grinding through a New York bankruptcy court right now.

Centre Lane bought the wreckage out of the bankruptcy and folded it into Anchor Hocking, the Ohio glassmaker it already owned. Two names matter from here. Anchor Hocking is the glassmaker: the plant in Lancaster, the name on the bakeware. Centre Lane is the owner: the New York firm that decides what happens to it.

Within six months of the purchase, Anchor Hocking announced that Pyrex production would leave Charleroi, Pennsylvania, the plant that had made it since 1893, and consolidate in Lancaster. Roughly 300 people worked at Charleroi.

Comment Re:Power infrastructure (Score 2) 200

by symbolset (#66222976) Attached to: 842,000 American Households Lost Power Today During a Heatwave

It makes no sense to spend more to tiptoe through costly incremental steps of infrastructure buildout buying stuff you crave to be rid of when you can hop right to the conclusion. Fuel is bad. You use it and then you need more fuel. That's a vulnerability to the fuel supplier, the logistics, the free market for fuel, changing government meddling. Fix it right once without fuel and be done with it for 30 years. It's not like there won't be another problem to solve the next day.

Comment Re:Power infrastructure (Score 2) 200

by symbolset (#66222872) Attached to: 842,000 American Households Lost Power Today During a Heatwave

>as they are not allowed to use oil or coal

Or natural gas. No carbon. Carbon fuels amplify the already obscene thermal output by at least 2.5.

Also, none of them is dumb enough to go fission. The time to power is an order of magnitude greater than their expiration date if they don't have it. And their server and power costs are bad enough. They don't need to compound those expenses with the costliest source of energy available.

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