App? What app?

I browse lemmy desktop on my phone. Fuck apps.

The key difference on the materials is that you can use the materials endlessly with solar. With fossil fuels or even with fission, you have to constantly burn fuel. Sure, the actual fuel rods used in a reactor has a small volume. But those are made from enriched uranium, made from uranium oxide, made from uranium ore. The volume of waste generated is far larger than just the volume of the reactor core itself. But with solar? You only ever have to extract the materials once. Sure, the panels degrade over time. But after they degrade beyond usefulness, the material is still there. It’s like a lead-acid battery. They wear out after awhile, but they can be recycled. You eventually reach a point where you no longer have to mine any new materials to make new panels, or you only mine new materials as you want your electricity supply to grow. With any fuel-based power source, including fission, you have to keep extracting those fuels forever.

And don’t ignore the huge material requirement to build a reactor. You have to build a giant concrete dome around the damn things. Those domes are one of the few structures on Earth actually designed to survive a 9/11-style terrorist attack. They’re built to resist the impact of large jet aircraft. Plus the vast labyrinth of piping, heat exchangers, turbines, etc. All of this is of immense material cost. All-in, it wouldn’t surprise me at all if the mass of a GW of nuclear power plant is a lot more than the mass of a GW of solar plant. Nuclear power plants are hulking leviathans.

The US can provide for far more than its total electricity usage, with just the land area we currently use to grow corn for ethanol. You can put solar panels on parking lots, over roads, on train tracks, on rooftops, etc. You can even use the same land for both solar panels and growing certain crops. It’s called agrivoltaics. And that’s before you even get into panels in deserts, floating on water, etc.

There simply isn’t a shortage of land for solar. Unless you’re talking about tiny city-states, there just is no shortage of land needed for electric purposes. Land usage just isn’t a significant factor. Yes, land footprint is an advantage nuclear has, but it’s an advantage that really doesn’t matter much in the real world.

We’re honestly almost past that at this point. Solar is devouring the world. Total global electricity production capacity is about 10 TW. China is currently producing 1 TW of panels annually. And the panels are still getting better and the prices are still dropping. We will quickly reach the point where the vast majority of global electricity production is solar, and everything else is a rounding error.

There just isn’t going to be any reason to build fusion plants. Maybe in the distant future colonies in the outer solar system and beyond will use them. But for anything inward of Mars, solar is the way to go. Solar+batteries is already, in 2026, the cheapest form of baseload power available. Material limitations are not a problem with modern battery chemistries. Daily swings in power demand will be solved by batteries. And we simply won’t have to worry about seasonal power swings. We’ll build enough solar panels to meet all our winter needs. We’ll build enough to power our cities during the coldest, cloudiest months. And then the rest of they year we’ll have super-abundant dirt cheap power.

The future is one of vast energy abundance. We’re going to find all sorts of ways to use energy that we’ve never even dreamed of before - mostly to take advantage of the abundance of dirt cheap energy we’ll have during all but the coldest months.

The days the steam engine are numbered. With the exception of remote polar outposts, everything’s going solar. It’s simply the cheapest most abundant form of energy we’ve ever discovered. Nothing can match it.

Let the world know that in my great humility, I’m also agreeing to decline any nomination for the Nobel Peace Prize.

I wonder how much flexibility is possible with Congressional districts? Does a district even have to correlate to a geographic area? Could a state separate its districts, say, by age?

Imagine what that would look like. Each state gets the same number of districts it does otherwise. If a state has five representatives, its population pyramid would be divided into five equal-area chunks. People in each of those chunks would then vote together. So the youngest 20% vote for one representative, the next 20% vote for another, etc. The boundaries would shift automatically. There would be no possibility of an unfair district, as you’re basically just lining up your entire state’s population in a line sorted by age, dividing the line into equal chunks, and asking people in each of those groups to pick a representative. It would cancel out a lot of the effects of differing voting rates by age.

Don’t watch the first few episodes of The Walking Dead while actually in the hospital under heavy opioid medication. That’s how you end up with extremely terrifying and vivid dreams of a zombie apocalypse in the very hospital you’re currently in! Ask me how I know!

Every scale has certain limitations on accuracy. A bathroom scale is just no where near the cost of a scale that can precisely measure to five significant figures.

This is one of my pet peeves - fraudulent scales. There’s no way in Hell that bathroom scale is that accurately measuring your weight. Yet it just displays it anyway to make the item feel more luxurious or high end than it really is.

Schumer is going to personally enlist as an ICE agent, announcing he’s going to “change it from the inside.”

Dude. The heads of both parties are all over the Epstein files. They all hang out in the same social circles. It’s a big club, and you’re not in it.

Don’t forget to vote for the Washington Generals every election!

Whoosh.

Would it have been better if there was violence, but only one side was violent?

Peace happens when both sides have a motive to achieve peace. You cannot have a peace treaty when only one side is willing to use force.

At the end of the day, the die hard MAGA folks are a quarter of the country. The stuff they’re doing is wildly unpopular. At some point you have to fight for democracy. It is worth dying for. It is worth killing for. If we have to go through a troubles, so be it. Frankly, this probably isn’t going to end until we start seeing a whole lot of dead Evangelical Christians. The Christian nationalists are so used to being able to violently oppress and persecute everyone else. They don’t realize that their own lives and freedoms can be just as easily destroyed.

We already are in a civil war. One portion of the population has declared war on everyone else, hell bent on forcing their evil beliefs on everyone else. They do so in the confidence that they themselves will never face persecution, the loss of their rights, or a threat of violence. White Evangelical Christians are way too fucking comfortable.

Honestly, a troubles might be the best thing to knock some sense into these fuckers. Once the retaliatory killings start and their churches start getting torched, maybe it will finally get through their thick skulls that if you want to live in a democracy, you have to be willing to respect other people’s choices and let them live their own fucking lives.

The troubles ended because both sides felt threatened. No one felt safe. This encouraged everyone to come to the table. Right now one side feels invincible. They believe they can act with complete impunity against the rest of the population. So far, we’re all just holding our punches and trying not to escalate things, but these fuckers just keep pushing. Something will have to give.

Mutual bloody violence is a superior option to one-sided bloody violence, which is the situation we have now.

The other kind of divorce is no-fault divorce. You don’t have to give a reason there, you silly goose!

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As a voter and a taxpayer, I’m waiting on some important concessions before I can support this. Were Trump, for example, hoisted in front of the arch by a crane and dropped from the top into an inflatable kiddie pool filled with cottage cheese, this could become an important and beautiful landmark for D.C.

You know what? I can get behind a tyrannical triumphal arch in DC. If a president ever turns tyrant, we can hang them from it, Mussolini-style.

One further benefit is that it allows you to optimize what little toilet paper you do buy towards strength. Normally there’s a tradeoff. Softer and less abrasive toilet paper is nicer on the bum, but it comes apart more easily. It can leave bits of toilet paper dust around and even tear at the most inopportune time. But if you’re only using a little to dry off, you can buy the strongest stuff you can find, regardless of how harsh it might be to use as regular dry wiping paper. Who cares if it feels like sandpaper if you’re just using it to pat yourself dry?

I hope he sent them a forged receipt.