CANDU-like or RBMK-like design could work for this purpose, but i have doubts about VVERs that they have

Electoral college is fucking weird

That you disallow prisoners to vote, but a felon can run as a candidate

That you end up in situation where there are hours long lines and you don’t have one station per, say, 1000 people at most

Registering to vote is weird, but that is i understand mostly a consequence of not having countrywide ID standard. In my country you’re automatically registered where you live, and IDs are free of charge and mandatory to have (not driving license or passport. there are fees for these)

Election isn’t on weekend, there’s zero reason why it couldn’t be or it could be made national holiday. There was even free public transit for election day in my city, but that one was paid by the city

That some of people (republicans) seem to be into politics in the same way ultras seem to be into football, it’s still fucked up but i’ve seen it in other places so it’s not that weird by now

ah yes it’s reactionary to checks notes not support the righteous biggest bubble since dotcom era

you okay out there bud?

what neutrons? we’re talking about shielding of spacecraft moving out of earth’s magnetosphere, not a spacecraft travelling through core of active nuclear reactor

the kind of radiation that is relevant are high energy protons (and alphas and electrons, with a sprinkle of heavier nuclei) from sun, mostly. there’s no relevant source of neutrons

(and incidentally water is pretty good at absorbing neutrons too)

water does not expand upon irradiation, what the fuck are you talking about. you can’t reflect high energy protons (what would be important in radiation in interplanetary travel) you can only either absorb them or let them pass, there’s no third option, same for anything above uv and electrons

to a first approximation (rather good one at that) (for gammas) absorption is proportional to how much mass per area unit is used as a barrier. 1 g/cm^2 of water is just as good barrier as 1 g/cm^2 of lead or steel. this means that you can absolutely use completely normal, regular potable water as a radiation shield

Water in its purest form would have to take on mass to “absorb” radiation, expanding a hull and destroying it over time.

i’m not even sure what it’s supposed to mean, unless your understanding of ionizing radiation is uncut nonsense

chemically speaking, it’s completely fine to irradiate water because whatever is formed as a result of radiolysis would just most of the time form water back, with the rest becoming very weak solution of hydrogen peroxide. this is big part of the reason why water is used as a coolant in nuclear reactors

there are also specific nuances to stopping anything that is not gammas, like secondary x-rays, gammas from neutron absorption etc and this actually favours light element shields, like water or liquid hydrogen, for this kind of radiation shielding

i don’t get what you fail to understand, water doesn’t became radioactive or harmful in any other way after irradiation, and irradiation of food is routinely used for extending its shelf life

“remove” what exactly? water is not alive so it’s okay to irradiate it https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Food_irradiation

nvidia executive called saltman a podcasting bro

the problem with that is that training can’t be done “immediately” it takes tons of compute

Copyright and IP concerns disappear with an open dataset.

i don’t think i’d agree with that, doesn’t matter if dataset goes open if content went there without consideration for authors

also even things like thispersondoesnotexist were used to mass-create fake identities and such

i’m not. just because he’s an underdog here means that you’re gonna ignore all the harms of generative ai up to this day? it’s like complaining that big oil stole the idea of adding tetraethyllead to gasoline from you and you got no profits from that as a result

You might be semi-comfortably running linux mint cinnamon on these (assuming 4gb ram) with xfce you’re trading clunkiness and ancient looks for lower memory usage

no idea about the usual suspects, wifi, bt, graphics probably will require tinkering as is tradition

how low we’re talking

xubuntu is fine if your box is a potato or if you’re coming from windows vista

i’m here to remind you that for last 20ish years half of the time chemistry nobel goes to biologists, and now they doubled down on ai wankery with giving it to alphafold

because these end up generating most of electricity. older plants matter less specifically because these are less efficient - operating them means more fuel costs per MWh. normally, you can see new flashy plants generating all the time it’s practical, because these are more efficient, have less maintenance downtime etc and when demand grows, progressively less efficient units start generating coming from spinning reserve. the two exceptions are NPPs which are best operated at constant high power because of their neutron physics and renewables that are literal free energy so everything they do is taken in. the only place where you can improve efficiency of NPPs is in turbine, and that probably is pretty well optimized unless turbine is very old, because increasing steam temperature would mean changed conditions in reactor in way that could happen to be out of spec. we have figured out wind power pretty well, and perovskites aren’t a thing, and won’t be a thing until they become more durable, which they won’t. in all cases, upgrades would have to make sense both economically and/or in emission costs. this includes CHP and laying municipal heating grids, and good luck with that with how dysfunctional american local govts are (where probably biggest emission gains from CHP could be made)

you can redo this for other types of thermal powerplants and come to the same conclusion. if you say that saltman&co and his assemblage of lying machines can outsmart thousands of turbine engineers, you might be a shill for making other people believe that or a moron for believing that yourself

all these private jets

CCGTs have efficiencies in the range of 60%-ish percent. bringing it up to 85% would mean that now these run almost at carnot efficiency taking adiabatic flame temperature of methane burning in air as upper and practical temperatures of heatsink (60C) as lower. this is not happening, because other cycles with lower efficiencies are used in practice

if you want to improve efficiency of power generation, just replace old junk with new kit, or better yet, build nuclear and renewables where efficiency matters less when considering emissions. you know what, damn i do think that lying box burning enough electricity to power a small country (like macedonia) could come up with this

not gonna happen, this would break thermodynamics. he made that up on the spot, he’s full of shit and he knows it

you are part of the problem