Good news! Someone hacked it into existence.

It's done wonders for my addiction to Win 3.x games.

Fraud. I'm talking about fraud.

When I say "destroyed the market for that model" I mean "the short-seller spread misinformation that severely and permanently reduced the value of the vehicles, such as falsifying evidence they were dangerous, from which the brand never recovered."—even if such deception were prosecuted (which, increasingly, under the current administration, it isn't) there is a massive temptation to attempt it, which is amplified by leveraging debt.

That is ideal. Economic growth is not an unqualified net positive for society, and lending is the root cause of most of its ills. With borrowing as it is practised by hegemons today, there are only two endings: either they must close the loop, using the dirty money to architect a revenue-extracting monster that milks non-borrowed money to pay off the debts, or the system collapses under its own weight, like Bernie Madoff's Ponzi scheme in the 2008 financial crisis. Debt creates its own incentives to abuse the commons and impoverish the public.

Of course, not being content with abusing the commons, there are also implications for abuse of single wealthy lenders, too. It would also effectively outlaw short-selling, since that consists of borrowing assets—the items being traded—then destroying the price, and pocketing the difference. If you think about it, this isn't even adding value to the economy; it's just skimming value off the inventory of whomever you're borrowing from.

If anyone tried this with a physical asset the lender would be apoplectic: "You borrowed 50 cars from me, sold them, destroyed the market for that model, and bought them back at a pittance. Now my inventory of 1,000 cars of the same model is worth a thousand pittances! Why would I ever do business with you ever again?!"—it only works as a system if the lender assumes that the assets will recover value over time, but the degenerate gambler doing the borrowing is incentivised to outright ruin the assets they're borrowing beyond any hope of recovery. In a sense they're even less ethical than corporate raiders, since both the company who issued the stock and the lender are being abused.

In theory slippery slopes are a fallacy, but it's really something else when there are people out there actively looking for slanted surfaces and applying experimental lubricants to every single one they can find.

Yes, Polymarket is the most degenerate, nihilistic, accelerationist bullshit imaginable. At best its creators are willfully in denial about this, since they have tried to ban assassination bets, but more likely they are just trying to maintain a facade of plausible deniability.

In a healthy society, the case of Polymarket would be studied as precedent in an ongoing debate about the possibility of criminalizing the very concept of financial speculation, especially placing a bid with borrowed assets.

It is a rather high number. So, high UIDs correlate with cognitive decline. I'll remember that.

At least Britain and France have (had) enrichment plants and separation processes. Which is more efficient ... hard to say from the outside. Classified on the inside - at least the military parts of the programme.

Germany and "Europe" as a whole ... no. Not yet.

An obvious consequence of America's disintegration into civil war will be that the EU *has* to bind it's forces into one group.

Whether they (remember : the UK is no longer politically in the EU) can tolerate having US bases in their territory which are likely to schism into Loyalist (Trump) and Loyalist (Constitutionalist) factions during the civil war (CW-2, CW-3 ... ?) and fight amongst themselves ... that must be subject to vigorous planning at this moment. Removing nuclear weapons from them would be a high priority.

It has been about 6 years since I went to the cinema.

Now, if Hollywood would produce some interesting movies - even those involving Pinewood and Shepperton, or even New Zealand - then that might be a reason to go. But no, there hasn't been anything worth the 3-day's income cost of going to the local fleapit.

None of which produces the "accidental" byproduct of weaponisable nuclear isotopes, which we're going to need to counter the American withdrawal into civil war.

Wouldn't you?

They won't be any use at all.
I work in the physical world, not the digital world.

"Scathing execration" comes to mind as a possible first step on the evolutionary chain from the latter to the former.

The boundary of the area where the uranium concentration is high enough to be worth mining is fairly sharp. Where there is stratigraphical continuity (i.e. not a faulted contact) with the surrounding rocks, the uranium remains confined in a fairly small area. Which is fairly good from a waste containment point of view.

Uranium's behaviour as a sedimentary material in a variable redox environment is complicated.. But since we're talking about proterozoic sediments we know that the effective oxygen contend was well below 1% of current oxygen (so 0.02% absolute equivalent) because it was so long before the Ediacaran-Cambrian, Ordovician and Carboniferous increases in ppOâ ; this was the period when iron was swapping between +2 and +3 oxidation states (and in the process, buffering the redox potential of the planet's surface - the subsurface was probably controlled by the Quartz-Fayalite Magnetite buffer) ; that change in oxidation for iron results in quite drastic changes in solubility (in roughly neutral water) and the same is true for uranium (uranyl, UOâââ) ions in solution. Moving any distance away from relatively well oxygenated surface waters would, as soon as the [Oâ] decreased by microbial activity, result in the uranium salts dropping out of solution.

It was always a complex situation, and I struggle to remember the details. But Oklo isn't a good argument that geological containment of radioactive waste doesn't work. Don't forget, of course, that nuclear waste typically contains 30 or more atomic species of concern, from caesium (an alkali metal) through barium (with one of the most insoluble sulphate salts in the periodic table - a major metamorphic mineral, we had a mine not far up the road) to radon (an "inert" gas, though at the reactive end of that spectrum). That's in addition to the uranium.

but a site where uranium in the ground underwent fission without human intervention seems like the opposite of what people want in nuclear storage.

Uranium will undergo fission without human intervention. That's one of the things it does. Without human intervention. We can change the decay rate of âBe to âLi by a few % (because the near-nuclear electron density is affected by the extra-atomic crystal lattice, but for uranium there are multiple intervening electron shells to considerably reduce the effect.
Amongst other things, the human-uninvolved decay of uranium nuclei by fission is the basis of a number of well-understood systems of radiometric dating. It's a completely natural thing. So obviously nuclear waste management has to consider it.

Uranium didn't "discover" the process of fission when Becquerel put it on a wrapped photographic plate in ... I assume it was Paris, in about 1895. OK, 2 March 1896. It's a completely unavoidable process, so you have to manage it ; you can't avoid it.

I've forgotten the original topic of this thread - wasn't it something about irradiation some nuclear species with a specific wavelength (range) of gamma to change it's half life - well, change it's species - to something shorter and less inconvenient. Which is an idea that occurred to me when I was learngin about nuclear science as a dating tool in the late 1970s. But the problems remain as they were then : there are a lot of different nuclear species, requiring a lot of different wavelengths of gamma rays (stretching into the soft-X) ; and being mostly heavy metals (137-Cs is pretty low on the tree of products)), they're inconveniently radio-dense. Which means the radiation you bathe them in doesn't penetrate well into the core of the lump. but the prospect of making an inconvenient product (say, half-life 10kyr) into a more dangerous but shorter-lived product (say, 100 years) remains appealing.

I tried to work around the problems by envisaging very broad-spectrum GR(X) sources, and dissolving the shit (technical term) into a liquid, so as to expose thin films of the nucleides to the right radiation for that nucleus, and then pump it away for further processing. But the "dissolve into liquid" step just makes it as problematic as standard nuclear waste reprocessing (to produce bombs), and for a broad-band source of GR (and soft-X), really you're looking at the interior of a nuclear reactor ... so you've re-invented the wheel of a waste-fuelled reactor. Which has always been a technical possibility, but politically unpalatable. And not technically simple itself.

On the other hand, Oklo is 1.7 billion years old, and any geological structure at that age is exceptionally quiet from a geological point of view.

Not the case. The deposition of the Oklo deposit in a shallow marine setting has been followed by moderate grade metamorphic recrystallisation of the rocks, several stages of folding and fighting, as well as recent (last few million years) uplift and erosion in it's current setting.

It's not the most active of areas, but it's also not the quietest of areas. It's pretty unremarkable in that respect.

A colleague ,working with me off the coast of Gabon, took a couple of weeks leave after his hitch at work to go walkabout in Central Gabon, including trying to get access to the uranium mines in the area. If I see him again, I'll ask if he actually got to see anything interesting. Got to give him brownie points for trying.

(You're likely going to tell me that I don't know what I'm talking about. My mapping area contained rocks of approximately the same age, but metamorphosed to a considerably higher degree, then overthrust by relatively recent rocks of the Cambrian- Silurian Caledonian orogeny. My rock pile on the other hand, from about 50 miles (crow) to 100 miles (road) north contains stromatolites which are approximately a billion years old - half the age of the Oklo rocks ; and twice the age of the Caledonian faulting. The number of professional geologists in this thread is not less than one.)

Is it showing any signs of dying? I mean, the dumbfuck-in-chief may be setting up for a Porterhouse Blue, but all that means is that we'll see a succession battle between his children and whoever that bearded twat of a regent is. Which will be entertaining - particularly if the kids win, and then set in on a good family-on-family succession battle.

I remember GRRMartin saying that Game of Thrones was largely inspired by the Wars of the Roses. So assuming he's not dead yet, what is he going to be inspired to write ,by living through such warfare?