skibidi

I find it kind of bussin', I find it kind of cap. The dreams in which I'm dying are the ones that kinda slap.

This particular deal is a good thing for the country. Metals production is incredibly capital intensive and margins on products are low (this is base production, not the high value-add specialty alloys). That means the business needs to spend billions to make millions in net profit.

This is exactly the kind of business that the American investor class lost patience with in the era of globalization, and even further with the rise of big tech - where it becomes possible to bootstrap billion-dollar businesses with millions in starting capital. Capital flight from manufacturing, and businesses with similar capex/opex/margin profiles has gutted the US manufacturing base and only a dwindling number of legacy players even operate - new entrants can't get investment and either set up overseas or just never advance past the planning stage.

The end result for US Steel has been decades of mismanagement and cost-cutting that have left the US without competitive base metals production - funds that should have been spent on R&D instead went to shareholders. This mismanagement has caught up to the business and it is now producing products of inferior quality and at higher prices than overseas suppliers who haven't spent the last 3 decades avoiding investment in their own business. The 'Buy American' provisions and metals tariffs are basically the only reason it hasn't folded already.

Enter Nippon Steel, a company very used to operating in an environment with expensive energy, labor, and inputs. It wants to buy the US Steel assets (read steel plants and workers) and operate them as an independent subsidiary in order to gain more of foothold in the American market and be eligible for US defense contracts. This capital infusion is desperately needed as the current owners of the business have underinvested since the 80s. Somehow, this story gets twisted into some nativist drivel, and now the US gov is set in blocking the deal to score political points with the uninformed. What this means is we'll be giving US Steel a taxpayer bailout in a few years, or it will go bankrupt, or the ghouls in charge will change their entire outlook and begin to treat it like a business to be managed and not a money sponge to be squeezed...

The price differential doesn't really exist anymore, though. If they were recommending 4TB, then I'd agree (only a few 4TB 5.0 and they are quite pricey), but at 2TB you're looking at like $10 difference between something like the MP700 and the SN850X they recommend (not counting all the black Friday sales going on).

I'd be very careful relying on that site.. just flipped through some of the build and it was very strange.

E.g. they were recommending a $500 or $900 CASE at the highest tiers - not even good cases, you can get something less than half the price with better performance. They recommended a single pcie 4.0 SSD and a SPINNING HARD DRIVE for a motherboard with pcie 5.0 m2 slots. Recommending CPU coolers that are far, far in excess of requirements (a 3x140mm radiator for a 100W chip? Nonsense). Memory recommendations for AMD builds are also sus - DDR5 6000 CL30 is what those cups do best with, they were recommending DDR5600 CL32 kits for no reason.

Just strange.. makes me question the rest of their recommendations.

There were plenty of problems with the concrete policies on offer.

'most lethal military', tough on crime, secure the border.. it was ridiculous to see how far right the supposed left went in search of votes. Harris's platform looked more like Trump's from 2016 than it did Hilary's.

The conspiratorial thinking isn't helping your argument.

It's quite clear you haven't engaged with this topic outside of internet arguments. I sincerely hope you do some reading and learn more here - you clearly have the passion.

Until then, find someone else to harass.

You clearly didn't comprehend what I wrote. Educate yourself on this topic - not from forum arguments, but from TEA and policy papers.

For one, I said 'base load' generation isn't needed. Your thinking that is is means your thinking on the matter is 10 years out of date. If you insist base load is needed, then gas plants and carbon capture systems are far cheaper and faster to build.

You don't care, though, as you aren't seriously involved in the policy and just want to live in a world where you are right 🤷.

Base load is an outdated concept. It is cheaper, by an order of magnitude, to install surplus generation capacity using renewables and build storage to cover periods of reduced production.

Nuclear reactors actually make terrible 'base load' generation anyway, as large swings in output induce thermal cycling stress in their metal components AND the economics of these multi-billion dollar investments depend on running near max output at all times - otherwise the payback time from selling power will extend beyond the useful life of the plant.

The policy wonks shilling for nuclear are not being honest. The economics for these plants are terrible, they are especially terrible if The Plan (tm) is to use nuclear as a transition fuel to be replaced by renewables - as then they won't even reach break even. To say nothing of the fact that a solar installation in the US takes 6 months, while there have been two reactors under construction in Georgia for a decade...

50 years ago, nuclear was a great option. Today, it is too expensive, too slow to build, and simply unnecessary with existing storage technologies.

If y'all were really worried about base load power, you'd be shilling for natural gas peaker plants + carbon capture which has much better economics.

2020 was different from 2024. It was a very unique set of circumstances with an election in the middle of pandemic, with an incumbent who was never broadly popular, amidst utterly terrible economic conditions.

Still, Trump's base showed up, just as they did on Tuesday.

Biden had the benefit of all the unlikely voters not being able to ignore the country burning down around them, he got a lot of dissatisfied people who don't pay attention to politics to come out.

Harris didn't, she got the Dem base. People broadly dissatisfied at the state of things probably voted Trump since he isn't the incumbent.

Just how it works - voters don't have to be rational.

I really doubt double-digit millions of voters sat out because of Gaza.

Kamala's vote total is roughly in line with what would be expected looking at 2008, 2012, and 2016. The massive turnout in 2020 on the Dem side appears to be an abberation - it was unique circumstances with COVID and all that. On the Republican side, Trump ran slightly ahead of his 2020 performance, and well ahead of 2016.

It's basic electoral politics: Trump has succeeded at expanding his base of support and turning them out to vote reliably. The Democrats have not. No single issue is responsible for that.

You can blame protests or Gaza or third parties or whoever else you want - the truth remains that the Dem base from the Obama years is not large enough and not appropriately distributed to win an election against Trump's base; whatever else you think of the man, he has been very good at gaining and retaining support.

The momentum is the same, the impulse (and therefore forces) are very different. The bullet is propelled down the barrel gradually - the force is spread through the entire time it takes the bullet to travel the length of the barrel, the reaction forces are applied to the stock gradually, and spread over the area of contact between the shooter and the gun.

A bullet stopped by a vest/plate has a much larger impulse. The bullet needs to be stopped essentially immediately, rather than gradually slowed down over a length equivalent to a rifle barrel, otherwise it kills you. The force is also more concentrated, occuring over the cross-sectional area of the bullet, rather than over the entire contact surface with the rifle.

The issue isn't forwards, it is down.

You have a tungsten rod held in a clamp on a satellite in a nominally stable orbit. Releasing the clamp just means the tungsten rod is now in essentially the same nominally stable orbit as the satellite.

To deorbit it, you need to meaningfully change its velocity. As tungsten is very dense, that takes a lot of fuel. The more fuel that is used, the sooner the rod will hit the ground and the higher the angle.

Simply dropping it means you have to wait months or years for the orbit to naturally decay, a lot of energy will be lost to atmospheric friction, and there is little control over the impact point. Not exactly what you want in your WMD.