Look at those smiling eyes!

Did you take physics in high school (or elsewhere) and learn about half lives? Many of the main ingredients in nuclear weapons all have half lives: tritium, plutonium, etc – and most have fairly short half lives. They need to be continuously produced, enriched, refined, etc. to keep the purity high enough to be detonated. Some of them require breeder reactors and other fun thing.

Well, okay, U235 has a half-life of 700 million years, but you still need to enrich uranium to increase to proportions of U235, since U238 cannot sustain a chain reaction.

The original nuclear weapons were U235 weapons. Later bombs added all the harder to make stuff to make them bigger – fusion bombs still usually have a U235 starter to get the reaction going, but rely on things like tritium and plutonium to do the fusion bits. Even the Lithium-6 (which is stable) slowly decays to helium and tritium inside the weapon as neutrons from the other components hit it.

Anyway, enjoy the Wikipedia rabbit hole.

The good news about nukes: they have a shelf life – most soviet-era nukes needed to be replaced every 12 years, as the loss of fissile material to natural radioactive decay would render them dirty bombs after a certain point. Now don’t get me wrong, a dirty bomb still sucks, but it’s no nuke.

So when a collapsing Russia is hypothetically selling nukes, they’re probably selling old depleted nukes or nearly expired nukes. To a terrorist it is almost the same thing, but to nation stations looking at MAD, it really isn’t.

Not in favour of the individual suffering here, but illegal mining is about the worst thing that can happen anywhere.

Furthermore, in most jurisdictions where illegal mining happens, you get these gang run pyramid scheme shenanigans going on where the miners are very nearly enslaved to their handlers. Shutting them down can only be a good thing!

On the larger scale: Environment and safety regulations exist for a reason.

That said, the suckers in the mine starving themselves to avoid arrest might not see it that way.

I love hitting these things in the real world. Not the big, but the comment. You just know someone spent a fortune in time and company resources to never solve the problem and their frustration level was ragequit. But then something stupid like adding

while (0){};

Suddenly made it work and they were like, fuckit.

Usually it’s a bug somewhere in a compiler trying to over optimize or something and putting the line in there caused the optimization not to happen or something. Black magic.

The downside is that the compiler bug probably gets fixed, and then decades later the comment and line are still there…

https://xkcd.com/979/

How did you switch to Azerbaijan?

The perspective on this one keeps throwing me off. That cat feels like a tiger in this photo.

All this shows is that other countries (China, etc.) will have carte blanche if they have nukes. If they don’t, they’ll get them. Imagine a nuclear armed Venezuela going after their neighbours because conventional intervention is too risky suddenly. Blah.

No, but the blanket style is. ;)

I got it decades ago from my grandfather, who could very well have bought it from a random truck stop or something.

One cat is an owl ;)

Atwood is also one of the sanest centrist voices I’ve ever read, in essays and interviews. (Centrist by Canadian standards – probably quite left by US standards). She always seems to be acutely aware of institutional inertia and how things like independent courts are vital to free societies. Wish there were more like her.

The tops of the clouds on the night side of Venus are about -45°C. So it’s not actually glowing like the image implies. But in infrared, you can reprocess the colours to make a delightful image like the above.

Well, I know you’re implying the greenhouse gases will kill us all. And that might be true, but probably not in ten years.

Does it matter if they don’t honour the patents of the rest of the world?

Your assertion that the document is malicious without any evidence is what I’m concerned about.

At some point you have to decide to trust someone. The comment above gave you reason to trust that the document was in a standard, non-malicious format. But you outright rejected their advice in a hostile tone. You base your hostility on a youtube video.

You should read the essay “on trusting trust” and then make a decision on whether you are going to participate in digital society or live under a bridge with a tinfoil hat.

In Canada, and elsewhere, insurance companies know everything about you before you even apply, and it’s likely true elsewhere too. Even if they don’t have personally identifiable information, you’ll be in a data bucket with your neighbours, with risk profiles based on neighbourhood, items being insuring, claim rates for people with similar profiles, etc. Very likely every interaction you have with them has been going into a LLM even prior to the advent of ChatGPT, and they will have scored those interactions against a model.

The personally identifiable information has largely been anonymized in these models. In Canada, for example, there are regulatory bodies like OSFI that they have to report to, and get audited by, to ensure the data is being used in compliance with regulations. Each company will have a compliance department tasked with making sure they’re adhering.

But what you will end up doing instead is triggering fraudulent behaviour flags. There’s something called “address fraud”, where people go out of their way to disguise their location, because some lower risk address has better rates or whatever. When you do everything you can to scrub your location, this itself is a signal that you are operating as a highly paranoid individual and that might put you in a bucket. If you want to be the most invisible to them, you want to act like you’re in the median of all categories. Because any outlying behaviours further fingerprint you.

Source: I have a direct connection to advanced analytics within insurance industry (one degree of separation).

Wow, your paranoia is dialed up to 11.

I want to take the little one on the right and put it in a teacup.

The premise here is that Trump loses but refuses to back down, attempting to forcibly claim victory. If Trump legitimately wins, there is a different path. Then…

Assuming multiple systematic failures occur simultaneously, including any of: actual voter fraud, fraudulent electors, congress refusing to certify, a captured supreme court acting in favour of Trump, or actual insurrection on or before Jan 6th.

I actually expect the US Military to step in. Every member is sworn to uphold the constitution. But if the constitution has been discarded, then I’d expect them to step in to restore it.

Failing that, the US likely fractures and we leave the Republic phase.

1000 km and 5000 seconds. Doesn’t seem very capable of hitting much, unless it flew intentionally a very high arc.

Love the solid rocket exhaust aesthetics though. Too bad it is produced as a weapon.