Ænima
Moving from lemmy.world.
Thorium is abundant and a byproduct of rare earth mining. It’s also what the moon is mostly made up of, so our energy requirements on the moon could use locally mined sources for power generation making moon bases much cheaper to operate.
A Liquid Fluoride Thorium Reactor, or LFTR, not only can’t melt down, it can be smaller and require less staff to manage, requires no external cooling so it can be built anywhere, and cannot be used to make bombs. It’s also not radioactive by itself.
In the 1940s, both uranium and thorium were looked at as potential fuels for nuclear energy, but you can’t make bombs with thorium, so the US went with uranium. LFTRs create no nuclear waste, can be used to burn existing nuclear waste created by other nuclear energy processes, extracting more energy from our giant stockpile of unusable nuclear waste, and if the plant loses power, which is only needed to keep a frozen plug frozen, excess fuel melts and the empties into a reserve tank. Most rare earth mining companies don’t even know what to do with the thorium they mine, so they store/stockpile it in hopes of future uses.
It simply baffles my mind that this isn’t even on the table for potential, near limitless energy generation in addition to, or in replacement of, wind and solar green energy. The nuclear fearmongering has tainted the idea of safe nuclear power generation to the point that I suspect many of you have never heard of it. We literally have the answer to energy needs for the entire world, using greener production, but since it’s new and would require billions to fund and start, it hasn’t been considered until recently.
If billionaires really wanted to help humanity, rather than simply saying so for PR and launching their cars into space or creating flamethrowers, this is an investment that, while not as quick to return gains, would be lucrative, forward thinking, and beneficial enough to help all of humanity and this planet. And they could have started in the 50s when the government played around with a test reactor for proof of concept and proved it worked. Imagine a timeline where capitalism and greed weren’t a thing and climate change wasn’t even an utterance outside of explaining why Venus is so fucking hot!
Ya know, I’ve seen a lot of posts regarding Elon Musk spam in this community, and calls to “ban” them, yet every week we get gloom and doom posts like this when some new subset of the world starts seeing this shit. I’d really like to see a pinned message about the fix, which is…
- Install Firefox or a derivative, and add the uBlock Origin extension.
If you visit YouTube and see the pop-up, the page isn’t loading the video content, or it just seems to be acting strange, do the following:
- Click on the uBlock Origin brown shield in your extensions.
- Click the three little gears icon to enter the settings.
- Make sure you’re in the Filter lists section from the top and click the Purge all caches button below it.
- Click the Update now button.
- Wait until the filter update completes.
- Refresh the tab(s) that YouTube is in.
- Press play.
I literally have no other installed add-ons for ad blocking, anymore. Only uBlock Origin. Any time I see the message or YouTube starts acting up, I just repeat those 7 steps above for any YouTube tab that was already open, and viola, the video plays. It has simplified so many issues for me and reduced the number of adblock extensions I need to run.
I definitely plan on donating this holiday season to their team, probably the biggest share of the pie between the FOSS apps I enjoy and appreciate. Should uBlock Origin ever fail, I’ll just stop going to YouTube.
As long as it can’t blink, cause that was the first disappointment I’m both the book and movie. Snakes don’t have eyelids.
Discourse evaporated when the rightwing and Faux “News” declared “compromise” as blasphemy. That’s why so many moderate Republicans will still vote along party lines, despite knowing the candidate is batshit crazy. To vote Democrat is to commit suicide to those people.
Edit: was trying to get this comment done before kid woke up from nap and barely made it. Fixed the faux pa.
Old enough to remember the Ambrosia Software game, Escape Velocity? That game had a shareware setup involving a really powerful ship that would message you several times in a game and eventually get so annoying it was almost impossible to play. If you accidentally shot him, he’s ruin you. Oh, gone are the days of true “try before you buy.”
I work as a sysadmin and had a user in my building call us about one of these emails. I didn’t say it out loud but, if it wasn’t true, why would he even feel the need to ask if it was real or possible?
Begun, the AI Wars have.
No one despises the Democrats more than those of us who saw Bernie get steamrolled by them when he stated drawing crowds and winning primaries. But many of us older millennials also see the writing on the wall: We can’t change a fucking thing about the current system voting GOP, green, or abstaining.
Being progressive, to me, means voting for the candidate that moves the needle toward the world I want to see. We cannot ever change the voting method and fundamental structure of our capitalistic hellscape by holding out for the perfect candidate. They do not exist.
They want us fighting like this, convincing others to not vote, or attacking a system that cannot and will not change by choice. We cannot effect change from a prison cell. Anything other than a vote for Biden will end all other hopeful prospects any progressive voter would have. The GOP literally has a manifesto, like a fucking school shooter would plan out, to turn the US into a Christian Iran.
The path to abolishing the electoral college and going to anything else will only happen when enough states push for the change at the local level. It’s why there’s such strong attacks at the state level to ban the use of ranked-choice voting. It’s why the GOP is ignoring successful, or outright restricting, ballot initiatives to prevent the people from pushing for their own change.
Bottom line, Congress will never change the voting method in this country because those with the power to change it stand to lose the most by doing so. It’s only by voting in the best candidates available at the time, within the confines of the system as it stands, that we can hope to enact any meaningful change.
Normally, I’d never tell someone how to vote, but after 4 years of both men, we know how they govern. Now, moreso than in 2016, is not the time to protest vote or refuse to vote on a single issue. We cannot afford, as a country or world, to let the orange menace have another term.