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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 31st, 2023

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  • Your comment doesn’t stand up. It seems you’ve got something against fusion energy for some reason.
    On cost: it’s a best guess, since we don’t yet have a working fusion reactor. The error bars on the cost estimates are huge, so while it is possible fusion will be more expensive, with current data you absolutely cannot guarantee it. Add to that the decreasing costs as the technology matures, like we’ve seen in wind and especially solar over recent decades.
    On nuclear physics PhDs: that’s no different to any energy generation, you need dozens of experts to build and run any installation.
    On waste: where are you getting this info on the blanket? The old beryllium blanket design has been replaced with tungsten and no longer needs to be replaced. The next step is to test a lithium blanket which will actually generate nuclear fuel as the reaction processes.
    This is the important fact that you have omitted, for some reason.

    Nuclear fusion reactors produce no high activity, long-lived nuclear waste. The activation of components in a fusion reactor is low enough for the materials to be recycled or reused within 100 years

    And that is why it’s so important this technology is developed. It’s incredibly clean and, yes, limitless.

    As for your advice, there was a time not long ago when we didn’t understand how to build fission plants either, and it cost a lot of time and money to learn how. I wonder if people back then were saying we should just stick to burning coal because we know how that works.



  • I googled your comment and found the game Monikers which I’d never heard of. I honestly think the DIY version must be better, since there’s always someone who’s responsible for the name. That makes it so much better as a bonding experience! It’s also good across cultures because the people from culture a will know the answers from culture a and the same for culture b, c etc. and it then becomes a natural exchange


  • Times up!

    Needs at least 4 people, a pen and paper and a bowl/hat. And a stopwatch.
    Tear the paper so you have about 25-35 pieces of similar size, then give these out to the players. Everyone writes down a famou name on each of their pieces of paper. Shuffle them up in the bowl. Divide into teams. Set stopwatch for 1 minute.
    Round 1: one member of the first team describes the name on the paper without using any of the words written on the paper. The team gets to keep the paper if it’s correctly guessed. After a minute, play passes to the next team with a reduced number of papers in the bowl. This continues until all babes have been guessed. Count the number of pieces of paper kept by each team and make a note. Return the papers to the bowl.
    Round 2: same as round one, but the describer can now only use one word. No miming, no eye signals, one. Word.
    Round 3: same as the previous rounds but the describer must stay absolutely silent and can only mime. The team that scored the most over 3 rounds wins.

    I’ve played this with strangers and with friends and family alike and it’s always fun.











  • I don’t actually think economic migrants are a drain on our economy. Are you paid what you are worth? Nobody is, because then the company would be losing money on you. If the boss pays the expat 40 quid an hour, then he’s making 60 quid an hour off them, otherwise it wouldn’t be profitable. The boss is the winner, all the way up to the top of the company. Even if these expats are all working cash in hand and avoiding taxes (I don’t think that’s true: the vast majority of expats are decent and hardworking according to the government figures) they are stimulating the economy by doing the jobs nobody else wants to do, and making their companies/bosses rich in the process.

    I’m going to have to disagree on the conditions in other countries as well. France, for example, has a much more socialist approach to refugees. It takes more refugees than we do, and it shelters and supports them better. The main reason people choose to pass through France, which offers a better life for refugees than the UK, is because either they speak English (often because they are coming from a country we colonised) or they have family or friends who are settled here already. I mean, put yourself in their shoes for a second. What would be more important to you if you were fleeing your country, or even if you were just sick of it and wanted a new life somewhere. Would you go somewhere you didn’t know anyone and didn’t speak the language to be totally alone and lost, even if there was an extra 100 quid a month in it for you? Or would you go to the country where you have an existing support network and the ability to communicate and negotiate without the need for a translator. It doesn’t make sense, and it’s not borne out by any of the studies we’ve seen.

    Totally agree on the legal routes. It needs to be sorted NOW though, because while there are no legal routes, people are dying in the channel and there’s nothing we can do that will stop that.