Ah yes, it’s…

checks notes

the US fault that Russia invaded Ukraine. Right, makes perfect sense, carry on.

The only involvement the US or even most of the NATO countries have had in this complete shitshow has been to sell obsolete military hardware to Ukraine at a steep discount. It was probably cheaper to ship the stuff in bulk to Ukraine than it would cost to properly decommission it so might even have saved some money doing that.

Russia desperately wants to make this a fight with NATO or even better the US so they look like less of a laughing stock for losing this badly.

They tried making subscription turn signals but nobody bought them. /s

I seem to recall a big kerfuffle around a decade and a half back about Russia not actually knowing what became of a whole bunch of nuclear weapons in the aftermath of the USSR collapsing. There were also rumors of Soviet nukes being sold off to various unsavory groups. It really wouldn’t surprise me to find out there was some truth to that.

I have also heard that ICBMs and the like require regular expensive and specialized maintenance in order to remain functional. Knowing what we now know about Russia what do you figure the odds are that some general or other decided those maintenance funds would be better used to line their pockets since the odds of actually using those nukes were so low?

China would just wait until it’s over and then pick through the remains of Russia. Probably try to claim a big chunk of southern Russia using some excuse or another.

They appear to be a propaganda outfit. They’d fit right in with InfoWars.

I’ve learned how powerful the unelected bureaucracy is. You have to win in November … you have to dismantle the leftist state … they are devious, they are ruthless and they are out to get you.

Those are called voters.

It’s Japan, I’m sure somebody is planning to.

Hmm, it’s true that cold fusion would need some kind of physics breakthrough, although I think it might be going too far to call it junk science. To be entirely fair energy positive hot fusion also requires some kind of physics breakthrough though, although potentially a far less extreme one.

The Sun works because of its mass which generates the necessary temperature and pressures to trigger the fusion. Replicating those pressures and temperatures here though is incredibly energy intensive. In theory, on paper the energy released by the fusion reaction should exceed those energy requirements, but when you factor in that doing so requires exceedingly rare and expensive to create fuel most if not all of that energy surplus vanishes. Nobody has been able to prove that they can get more energy out of the reaction than the energy cost of creating the fuel and triggering the reaction, so until that happens hot fusion is far from proved either. There’s a few research projects that look promising, but it’s far from guaranteed that they’ll pan out.

Hydro is good when it’s available but also has some significant problems. The biggest is that it’s an ecological disaster even if the reach of that disaster is far more limited. The areas upstream of the dam flood while the ones downstream are in constant danger of flooding and drought. In the worst case if the dam collapses it can wipe entire towns off the map with little or no warning. It is objectively far more dangerous and damaging to the environment than any nuclear reactor. The only upside it has is that it’s effectively infinitely renewable barring massive shifts in weather patterns or geology.

All of that is of course assuming that hydro is even an option. There’s a very specific set of geological and weather features that must be present, so the locations you can power with hydro power without significant transport problems are limited.

It’s certainly an option, and better than coal, oil, or gas, but still generally worse than nuclear.

Why? It’s an active area of research with several companies and universities trying to solve the problem. There’s also a chance hot fusion succeeds although to my knowledge nobody has actually gotten close to solving that particular problem either. Tokamaks and such are still energy negative when taken as a whole (a couple have claimed energy positive status, but only by excluding the power requirements of certain parts of their operation). I guess maybe I should have just said fusion instead of cold fusion, but either way there are no working energy positive fusion systems currently.

Edit: To be clear, I’m not claiming that anyone has a working cold fusion device, quite the opposite. Nobody has been able to demonstrate a working cold fusion device to date. Anybody claiming they have is either lying or mistaken. But by the same token nobody has been able to show an energy positive hot fusion device either. There’s a couple that have come close but only by doing things like hand waving away the cost to produce the fuel, or part of the energy cost of operating the containment vessel, to say nothing of the significant long term maintenance costs. I’ve not seen evidence of anybody getting even remotely close to a financially viable fusion reactor of any kind.

The real problem is that there are no renewable solutions for base load, nuclear is the best we’ve got. Renewables are good, but they’re spotty, you can’t produce renewable power on demand or scale it on demand, and storing it is also a problem. Because of that you still need something to fill in the gaps for renewables. Now your options there are coal, oil, gas, or nuclear. That’s it, that’s your options. Pick one.

If we can successfully get cold fusion working we’ll finally have a base power generation option that doesn’t have (many) downsides, but until then nuclear power is the least bad option.

So yes, if you tell them “no nuclear”, you’re going to get more coal and gas plants, coal because it’s cheap, and gas because it’s marginally cleaner than coal.

It’s Russia, they only know one move “throw more bodies at it”. If it can’t be solved by shoving half trained and half equipped “soldiers” at the problem they’re basically out of ideas.

Russia’s strategy even going back to WW2 has been to throw bodies at the problem until it goes away. I think most people were just assuming that in the modern Internet connected era that that strategy would fall apart. That at some point the Russian people would get fed up with seeing their people being sent off to be slaughtered over a piece of land that means nothing to Russia. The surprise is really that that hasn’t happened yet, or that Putin hasn’t decided to cut his losses and declare the job finished and withdraw.

At some point Russia will run out of bodies to toss into the meat grinder, it’s just a question of if there will be anything left of Ukraine by that point or not.

As much as this has been (and continues to be) an absolute disaster for the Ukrainian people, from the perspective of NATO no matter the outcome this is a win. They’ve managed to get a fairly accurate look at Russia’s current military capabilities (laughably bad). Russia has badly hurt themselves even in this short period of time and the longer it goes on the worse it will be. And lastly NATO didn’t really need to do anything but donate or even sell some old hardware stockpiles they had lying around collecting dust. From a purely logical standpoint this is an absolute win for everyone but Russia and Ukraine. Even if Putin ultimately “wins” and takes over Ukraine he hasn’t really accomplished much of value.

There is an entire universe of difference between the government telling you you can’t say something and arresting and/or disappearing you if you ignore them, and privately owned museums, exhibit halls, or online platforms refusing to do business with you if you say something stupid in public that harms people’s perceptions of you. You’re absolutely free to spout every hot take and conspiracy theory you want (there’s certainly no shortage of people who do), but nobody is obligated to respect you or do business with you if you do. What’s not going to happen is an FBI agent or cop coming around to “have a chat” and if you refuse to publicly retract your statements then quietly sending you off to some gulag without telling anyone where you’ll be worked to death and then your organs harvested and sold. That’s the difference between “the West” and China.

That does appear to be the problem. The US might not officially be a gerontocracy, but it sure does a damn good job looking like it these days.

It didn’t say that it would make anything radioactive, it said there was a radiation hazard. Radar is in fact radiation, it’s just non-ionizing which means that unless you’re dealing with massive power levels it’s generally safe to be around. If they’re warning of an extreme radiation hazard it’s either not radar, or they’re pumping a ridiculous amount of power into it.

This is just the start, they’ll be dealing with this shit for decades now. This was an incredibly predictable outcome. They attempted to murder or drive out all the Palestinians living in gaza and the west bank as if that would solve any problems. All they’ve done is provided fresh atrocities for the terrorist groups to use as justification when recruiting on top of providing fresh waves of refugees primed to want to lash out. Even if they successfully murdered every last man, woman, and child living in gaza and the west bank they would still be facing terrorist attacks from their neighbors.

I’ll say the same thing I said when this was posted to news, nobody gives a shit what neo-nazis think about anything. Their opinions are less than useless.

If they’re not doing anything kick them out of anywhere they show up and then ignore them. If they start something beat their ass and put them in jail. There’s never any reason to talk to them, you’re just providing legitimacy to them that they don’t deserve if you do that. They’re ambulatory excrement and they should be treated like it.

There’s also Russian style propaganda which isn’t really about sending any specific message but more about sowing chaos. It’s about blasting people with so much contradictory information that they become overwhelmed and exhausted and just give up trying to pay attention to anything. To say it a different way it’s about lowering the signal to noise ratio to the point where most people lose the signal.

China tends to favor targeted disinformation, they tightly control what people hear and have specific messages they push. Russia just tries to scream incoherent gibberish where nobody can hold a conversation anymore.

I see Biden has learned nothing. He seems really determined to undermine himself as much as possible going into the next election. I’m not sure this country can survive another Republican presidency nevermind if Trump actually wins. If Trump wins in 2024 we might as well just rip up the constitution because it will likely require military intervention to pry Trump out of the Whitehouse if he gets in again and he and the Republicans will have 4 more years to cement the takeover of the executive and judiciary they started in 2016.