skibidi

Have never listened to Rogan.

What were his claims about the vaccines, mask efficacy, and ivermectin?

You're right, it's all lies. The Dems had the best platform ever and that's why they won.

Y'all are really just allergic to actual discourse.

I get it, you don't like Trump being president. Neither do I. Personally blaming me for the party gaslighting about Biden's fitness, then running Kamala on trans erasure, 'most lethal' military, a militarized border, tax cuts, etc. etc. Is counterproductive. Large parts of her platform, and this is not an exaggeration, were literally what Trump ran on in 2016.

Did you vote for Trump's policies in 2016? Why are you insisting everyone do just that in 2024?

How has voting against worked for you? Given that you fled the country, it doesn't sound like it got the outcome you wanted.

With the data point, I'll keep voting for things I want - will let you know if that strategy works better.

It is impossible to argue against conspiratorial thinking.

Let's say Kamala had narrowly won the election, would 2028 be the right time to hold the Democrats accountable for real, useful, policy changes? Or would there be another Republican Boogeyman (maybe Ted Cruz again? Or Desantis?) that would absolutely need to be defeated before it would be proper - in your opinion - to ask these public servants to actually serve me?

According to many commenters here, and I assume many of the downvoters whenever a comment questions the utility of unconditional loyalty to the blue party, the US has been hovering just above an irreversible descent into a fascist dictatorship.

So let me ask you, which of the leaders you voted for reversed that decline? Because the 'vote blue no matter who' dogma has given over a decade of historically unpopular candidates who consistently lose to - again according to you - naked fascists.

Yes, of course, there is financing and everything else. I was getting a bit deeper:

If you have to spend 100 joules building a power plant, it better give back more than 100 joules during its lifetime - otherwise it was never worth it to build. That isn't strictly true, there are special purposes, but certainly as a grid-scale energy deployment you would need - at a bare minimum - for each plant to pay for itself in terms of energy investment.

The dollars follow from that physical reality.

The first hurdle for fusion to clear is that the reaction outputs more energy than it needs to sustained. This would be a great academic success, and not much more.

The second hurdle is that it outputs enough energy such that it exceeds the sustainment energy even after accounting for capture losses (e.g. from neutrons, turbine efficiency, etc.) and production efficiencies (lasers need more energy input than they impart to the reaction chamber, magnets need cooling, etc.).

The third hurdle is that over the lifetime of a plant, it produces enough excess energy to build itself and pay the embodied costs of all maintenance and operations work. If the reaction is technically energy positive, but you need to replace the containment vessel every 48 hours due to neutron embrittlement, then the plant better be productive enough to pay for refining all that extra steel.

The fourth hurdle is then that it produces more excess energy per unit of invested energy than any other form of power generation - at which point we'd never build solar panels again.

These final hurdles are in no way guaranteed to be cleared. Artificial fusion needs to be orders of magnitude denser than natural fusion (Stars) to make any sense.. a fusion power plant the size of Earth's moon, with the same power density as the Sun, could only power around 1 million US homes.

I encourage you to seriously engage with the topic and not just read and regurgitate platitudes from popsci articles.

Solar and wind are nothing like fusion.

Educate yourself, but first maybe pause and spend a second to think that perhaps you aren't the smartest person in the room and you shouldn't begin a discussion by speaking down to someone.

When everything hard looks easy, it is a sign you don't understand it as well as you think you do.

Just some advice for you as you grow up.

Economical energy production, sure, not any energy production. There is a reason we no longer burn wood to heat public baths.

I realize the science marketing of fusion over the past 60 years has been 'unlimited free energy', but that isn't quite accurate.

Fusion (well, at least protium/deuterium) would be 'unlimited' in the sense that the fuel needed is essentially inexhaustible. Tens of thousands of years of worldwide energy demand in the top few inches of the ocean.

However that 'free' part is the killer; fusion is very expensive per unit of energy output. For one, protium/deuterium fusion is incredibly 'innefficient', most of the energy is released as high-energy neutrons which generates radioactive waste, damages the containment vessel, and has a low conversion efficiency to electricity. More exotic forms of fusion ameliorate this downside to a degree, but require rarer fuels (hurting the 'unlimited' value proposition) and require more extreme conditions to sustain, further increasing the per-unit cost of energy.

Think of it this way, a fusion plant has an embodied cost of the energy required to make all the stuff that comprises the plant, let's call that C. It also has an operating cost, in both human effort and energy input, let's call that O. Lastly it has a lifetime, let's call that L. Finally, it has an average energy output, let's call that E.

For fusion to make economical sense, the following statement must be true:

(E-O)*L - C > 0.

In other words, it isn't sufficient that the reaction returns more energy than it requires to sustainT, it must also return enough excess energy that it 'pays' for the humans to maintain the plant, maintanence for the plant, and the initial building of the plant (at a minimum). If the above statement exactly equals zero, then the plant doesn't actually given any usable energy - it only pays for itself.

This is hardly the most sophisticated analysis, I encourage you to look more into the economics of fusion if you are interested, but it gets to the heart of the matter. Fusion can be free, unlimited, and economically worthless all at the same time.

The biggest factor is diet - a large portion of ingested water comes from food.

Someone who snacks on carrots is going to need to drink a very different amount of water to stay hydrated as someone who eats jerky and crackers.

There's also obviously differences in kidney function, salt retention, even just body size. Current medical advice is to just drink when you are thirsty, which works for just about everyone.

If they weren't a fascist ethnostate led by a madman, they probably wouldn't have launched the war in the first place. The utterly misguided belief in their superiority is what made them blind to the (rather obvious) conclusion that they didn't have the resources to conquer Europe (mostly) single-handedly. Let alone take Italy along with them.

Hell, the only reason it was even - somewhat - close at points was Hitler's insistence on a blitz through the Ardennes to attack France. The generals thought it was a terrible plan (and it was, that's a big reason why the French were unprepared and got essentially knocked out of the war in weeks).

WW2 is interesting precisely because the big numbers only point one way - a complete defeat of Germany and Japan by much larger and better-supplied powers. But there were multiple points where tactical developments could have become strategic victories - which are rather rare occurrences in the study of war.

E.g. the Nazis didn't have the resources to conquer the Soviet Union, but if the battles of Stalingrad and Moscow had gone their way, it is difficult to see how the USSR could have maintained a functioning government. Likewise Japan was woefully under prepared to defeat the US in the Pacific, but if the US carriers had been sunk at Pearl Harbor, maybe the Japanese hedgehog strategy to fortify the Pacific islands works out.

Of course, once the bomb was ready then nothing else matters.

Ultimately, it was all massive tragedy the likes of which I hope we never see again. The counterfactuals are fun to play out, if you can abstract away the millions of deaths in all sides.

Thermo-electrochemical cycles.

The idea is simple: the favorability of a chemical reaction is a function of temperature, some reactions are more favorable at high temperatures, some at lower. For electrochemical reactions (e.g. batteries) this means a change in voltage at different temperatures. Some reactions have higher voltages, some lower. By choosing a pair of redox reactions such that the direction of charge transfer can be reversed within a specified temperature envelope, one can create a thermal engine that directly converts heat to electrical energy without requiring a turbine.

There's lots of research on this, sometimes called the 'omnivorous' flow battery.