I would add the ability to use a bidet. Travel bidets exist, but the ideal just feels gross and embarrassing.

I can tell you are not a serious person, as you pretend impeachment means anything.

Same with Musk. I was teaching engineering courses at the time of the first falcon heavy launch. I actually stopped my class so we could watch the launch. When those boosters landed in a perfect synchronous ballet, I told my class it was “engineering as poetry.”

Why couldn’t Musk just stay the fuck out of politics?

App? What app?

I browse lemmy desktop on my phone. Fuck apps.

Internment camps are built for criminal reasons or to hold political prisoners. Concentration camps are built for eugenics purposes - to concentrate, contain, and control a target ethic group or population. ICE does not exist to address a crime problem. It exists to address the ‘problem’ that America will soon no longer be a white majority country.

The term concentration camp is accurate. When your goal is to engineer the demographics of an entire country, then you’re firmly in the territory of concentration camps. If Trump announced a new open-air prison to hold thousands of “Antifa members,” then that facility would be an internment camp. A facility is labeled based on who it holds:

Actual criminals guilty of real crimes like rape, murder, etc.: prison/jail

Political prisoners: internment camp

Targeted ethnic/demographic groups: concentration camp

The key difference on the materials is that you can use the materials endlessly with solar. With fossil fuels or even with fission, you have to constantly burn fuel. Sure, the actual fuel rods used in a reactor has a small volume. But those are made from enriched uranium, made from uranium oxide, made from uranium ore. The volume of waste generated is far larger than just the volume of the reactor core itself. But with solar? You only ever have to extract the materials once. Sure, the panels degrade over time. But after they degrade beyond usefulness, the material is still there. It’s like a lead-acid battery. They wear out after awhile, but they can be recycled. You eventually reach a point where you no longer have to mine any new materials to make new panels, or you only mine new materials as you want your electricity supply to grow. With any fuel-based power source, including fission, you have to keep extracting those fuels forever.

And don’t ignore the huge material requirement to build a reactor. You have to build a giant concrete dome around the damn things. Those domes are one of the few structures on Earth actually designed to survive a 9/11-style terrorist attack. They’re built to resist the impact of large jet aircraft. Plus the vast labyrinth of piping, heat exchangers, turbines, etc. All of this is of immense material cost. All-in, it wouldn’t surprise me at all if the mass of a GW of nuclear power plant is a lot more than the mass of a GW of solar plant. Nuclear power plants are hulking leviathans.

The US can provide for far more than its total electricity usage, with just the land area we currently use to grow corn for ethanol. You can put solar panels on parking lots, over roads, on train tracks, on rooftops, etc. You can even use the same land for both solar panels and growing certain crops. It’s called agrivoltaics. And that’s before you even get into panels in deserts, floating on water, etc.

There simply isn’t a shortage of land for solar. Unless you’re talking about tiny city-states, there just is no shortage of land needed for electric purposes. Land usage just isn’t a significant factor. Yes, land footprint is an advantage nuclear has, but it’s an advantage that really doesn’t matter much in the real world.

We’re honestly almost past that at this point. Solar is devouring the world. Total global electricity production capacity is about 10 TW. China is currently producing 1 TW of panels annually. And the panels are still getting better and the prices are still dropping. We will quickly reach the point where the vast majority of global electricity production is solar, and everything else is a rounding error.

There just isn’t going to be any reason to build fusion plants. Maybe in the distant future colonies in the outer solar system and beyond will use them. But for anything inward of Mars, solar is the way to go. Solar+batteries is already, in 2026, the cheapest form of baseload power available. Material limitations are not a problem with modern battery chemistries. Daily swings in power demand will be solved by batteries. And we simply won’t have to worry about seasonal power swings. We’ll build enough solar panels to meet all our winter needs. We’ll build enough to power our cities during the coldest, cloudiest months. And then the rest of they year we’ll have super-abundant dirt cheap power.

The future is one of vast energy abundance. We’re going to find all sorts of ways to use energy that we’ve never even dreamed of before - mostly to take advantage of the abundance of dirt cheap energy we’ll have during all but the coldest months.

The days the steam engine are numbered. With the exception of remote polar outposts, everything’s going solar. It’s simply the cheapest most abundant form of energy we’ve ever discovered. Nothing can match it.

Exactly. Look back at the Jim Crow era. That’s the goal. Jim Crow didn’t work by white people stealing the vote. It worked by writing laws that openly made it so black people couldn’t vote. Ultimately it’s a lot more sustainable to simply write laws that serve your side than it is to try to hold onto power by repeated election fraud. With the latter, you ultimately have to worry about the military just refusing to acknowledge clearly fraudulent elections. But if the elections are crooked but entirely within the law? Much more difficult for the military to refuse to acknowledge those.

Honestly, TSA itself creates a huge terror target. If some latter-day Bin Ladin wanted to disrupt the air travel system through acts of mass violence? The airport security lines themselves are a huge target. IIRC there actually have been cases of terrorists attacking airport security lines. If you’ve ever been to a packed airport on a busy travel day, it should be obvious. Giant TSA line, hundreds of people packed in like cattle. What keeps someone from just wandering up with a bomb in their carry on and detonating it right there in the line? Nothing. And nothing can. You going to make people wait in a security line to get into the security line?

And in terms of actually disrupting the infrastructure of travel, disrupting society, the economy, etc., such attacks have impacts similar to blowing a plane out of the sky. How long is that airport going to be out of commission now that the mandated security line is now a mass crime scene?

Anyway, these are the darker thoughts I think in the back of my mind when stuck in an endless TSA line…

Don’t watch the first few episodes of The Walking Dead while actually in the hospital under heavy opioid medication. That’s how you end up with extremely terrifying and vivid dreams of a zombie apocalypse in the very hospital you’re currently in! Ask me how I know!

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The truth is, Evangelical Christians are Devil worshipers. If your religion preaches hate, you’re worshiping Satan, not God.

Yes. Except before homelessness, the wealthy consume drugs at far higher rates than poor people. A wealthy person has a drug habit and can just ride through it without losing housing. If you take a homeless drug addict and give them a billion dollars, they would just be another billionaire with a ketamine habit. This is why it’s absurd and abusive to demand people get clean before you provide them housing.

NY Times, you sack of shit, the word you’re looking for is “an act of treason,” not “an escalation.”

Wealthy people use drugs at far higher rates than poor people. Drugs are expensive after all. The difference is that when you’re poor, drug use makes you homeless.

Also, I sure as hell would want to be high 24/7 if I had to sleep on the sidewalk.

Check your browser extensions. 🤣

You got the order backwards. Homelessness creates drug addiction, not the other way around.

Exactly. Start by not making homeless people jump through any moral more moralistic hoops than you ask home owners to jump through.

Your speculation doesn’t trump the massive real-world success and scientific evidence behind a housing-first approach.

You know the difference between a homeless person with mental health issues and a housed person with mental health issues? The latter has housing.