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Comment Re:Maintenance? (Score 0) 113

That's because the project's value is political, not economic. Yes, generating power by digging a mile-deep hole, filling it with water, and running nuclear reactor at the bottom of it is likely to be crazy expensive and have all kinds of environmental challenges.

But what you have to understand is that the American political system is a zero-sum game and Democrats put their chips on solar, wind, and other renewables. Republicans put theirs on coal, oil, natural gas, and nuclear.

Solar and Wind have proved to be the winning bet over petro-products and that has happened fast enough that a lot of voters remember Republican opposition to those power sources. No political movement tolerates being unambiguously wrong about something so the American right is desperate for an argument on the energy front that allows them to validate the arguments they've been making over the past 50 years.

Nuclear is that argument. But to do nuclear you've gotta be able to convince people that they don't need to be afraid of a nuclear plant in their community. That's a heavy lift and what this technology really provides is a new argument beyond getting the general public to trust a bunch of nuclear and civil engineers when they say it's perfectly safe. Your average voter may not understand how a modern nuclear containment unit works. But "it's buried under a mile of rock" has a simple elegance to it.

Comment Ok, but WHY? (Score 2) 11

Is the idea here that high frequency trading and self-dealing can be used to pump-and-dump a given proposition?

So, I find some low-traffic topic suggesting that Pigs Will Fly by the end of 2025 which has "yes" shares trading at $0.01. I buy a bunch of "yes" shares and then buy/sell a small chunk of them back and forth with myself, driving the price up to $0.50. Now I sit back and sell off my "yes" shares for something between $0.50 and $0.40 to anyone who shows up looking to get in on the rapidly-rising "Pigs Will Fly" proposition until a whole bunch of people have bought up the $0.01 shares for 40 times their actual value.

Or is there some other scam at play here?

Comment Re:This benefits Russia and China (Score 1) 207

Russia is testing nuclear delivery systems like their new "Skyfall" missile. But they're not testing warheads. Now, in fairness, Trump is very old, quite possible senile, and not terribly bright so it's entirely possible that he doesn't understand the difference between Russia testing a missile and Russia testing a bomb. But his order is making news because, as written, it's calling on the United States to resume the live-fire testing of nuclear weapons and we stopped doing that in (off the top of my head) 1992.

If Trump is trying to go tit-for-tat with a rival over nuclear weapons testing it's basically North Korea. China hasn't shot one off since 1996, Russia stopped before us in 1990.

Both China and Russia are suspected of having run clandestine tests in the 2000s but if US intelligence has more than a suspicion they're playing it close to the vest.

Comment This benefits Russia and China (Score 5, Insightful) 207

Testing of nuclear weapons among the major nuclear powers tapered off with the end of the Cold War and the international norm against testing creates a real disincentive to test, even in well contained, underground scenarios.

Back when testing wasn't so taboo the United States had a HUGE advantage in terms of the measurement and recording of test data. That advantage stemmed from computing advantages which have since ebbed. Normalizing live testing gives Russia and China an opportunity to catch up with that data and modeling advantage consequence free. "The US is testing, so we should too."

Trump isn't leaning into testing because Russia or China told him too -- he's just a vainglorious blowhard who likes the idea of setting off nuclear weapons -- but this nevertheless benefits American adversaries a great deal more than it benefits the United States.

Comment But that is everything (Score 2) 92

as long as the topic is not controversial and political.

The problem is that the Wiki mods are VERY VERY biased. Not just a little. I have run into this personally just trying to make very simple edits. They would not accept simple facts that I had backup sources for.

This was just for movie credits for an actress that at some point had turned conservative...

So for anything political, Wikipide will be factually wrong, sometimes (or often) egregiously so.

But that's ok if it's only for political content right???

But there's the trouble you see. It affects what is political TO THEM in ways you cannot comprehend, so ANY page might be touched by the corruption of the Wikipedia moderator biases. I wouldn't think a simply actress filmography would be affected yet it was. No visitor other than that page would ever know it was inaccurate or incomplete.

So you can trust absolutely nothing from Wikipedia without extensive checking of what facts they refuse to list. Which makes the entire body of work garbage - I have not used it for years now.

Comment Re:Kids (Score 3, Interesting) 165

They do. And they always have. I don't know how to describe this phenomena to you in a way that communicates what this is like. For disclosure, I have three kids. Two are of high-school age and are largely too old for this particular meme. The third is in elementary school and that's where this seems to hit the hardest.

Those two numbers together is enough to get better than 90% of a group of elementary school students to reflexively shout "SIIIIIIIIX-SEEEEEVEEEEEN." You can punish them. You can deny them recess. You can tell them they get extra homework. They don't care.

Part of the reason they don't care is that educational philosophy doesn't allow particularly hard-nosed punishments for little kids. I'm not saying that's a bad thing. When I was a kid the principal was allowed to literally beat kids with a wooden bat which seems like maybe not the best idea.

But the other reason they don't care is that the meme is almost universally reinforced by people they like and care about: influencers and video content creators. That group is fairly rarified and the meme is extremely wide-spread so, while they're all engaged with personalized content, nearly all of it carries the meme. The people pushing against it are teachers and parents but part of the appeal of the meme is that it is absurdest (kids don't know what that means but they appreciate it anyway) and irritates parents/teachers/etc.

It's like the "jingle bells batman smells" song when we were kids, but not seasonal, linked to two integers, and ABSOLUTELY EVERYWHERE in media pitched to elementary aged kids.

And so it's really, really easy for it to cause teachers to lose control of a classroom. It's not that the content of the stupid shit that kids say is unique or different here, but that the level of disruption and the ubiquity of the issue is notable.

Comment https://github.com/linuxserver/docker-wps-office (Score 1) 146

Not sure why this is problematic.
Governments of the world ought to use open source software - they should also fund its development, perhaps even employ developers to maintain it.
Using proprietary software that costs money excludes some users and is not auditable. Neither of those things are good for tax payers.

The only people that take issue with this are microsoft and its zealots.

Comment More serious issues with Ofcom. (Score 2) 127

For a start they failed to prosecute broadcasters who fail to observe purdah during elections including the BBC, thus proving its motivation is in perserving the status quo.

Ofcom generally fails to prosecute news broadcasters that fail to observe impartiality rules.

BBC runs a program called "Question Time" which presents a false public narrative even stretching to hiring actors to pose as members of the public to support its falsehoods. It has never been prosecuted by Ofcom for doing this.

Ofcom failed to revoke Sky/BSkyB licences despite the News International phone-hacking scandal .

BBC / BBC Scotland broadcasts of Sturgeon’s coronavirus / Covid-19 daily briefings gave undue platform, breached impartiality or “platformed” SNP views without sufficient opposition response . Ofcom never prosecuted.

BBC misrepresented certain rulings or statements in relation to the International Court of Justice, and continued to do so even following corrections. Some complainants allege misleading framing. Ofcome never prosecuted.

Ofcom failed to investigate or sanction Panorama for its ‘Is Labour Antisemitic’ programme featuring distortions / zooming / face distorting of Corbyn”

In the BBC documentary Gaza: How to Survive a Warzone, critics noted that the narrator was the son of a Hamas official and argued that this conflict of interest / relation should have been disclosed; further, that viewers were misled by omission. Ofcom stated it would investigate , but the investigation did not surface.

With regards to websites such as 4chan - there have been NO high-profile prosecutions of UK-registered sites - instead it pursues content originating abroad.

MailOnline a website full of clickbait / false headlines: dozens of press regulator (IPSO) rulings, Ofcom has not acted on its “harmful content” policy.

The Telegraph & Express online purveyed misinformation during elections & health crises resulting in numerous complaints on social media, but Ofcom once again failed to act.

Ofcom should get its own house in order before pursuing websites that are funded and run in other countries - regardless of its perceived crimes.

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