For anyone not familiar with thorium...

Thorium is a great nuclear fuel. Much much safer than the uranium we currently use, because the reaction works best only within a narrow temperature band. Unlike uranium which can run away, a thorium reactor would become less efficient as it overheats possibly preventing a huge problem. That means the fuel must be melted into liquid to achieve the right temperature. That also provides a safety mechanism, you simply put a melt plug in the bottom of the reactor so if the reactor overheats the plug melts and all the fuel pours out into some safe containment system. This makes a Chernobyl / Fukushima style meltdown essentially impossible.

There are other benefits to this. The molten fuel can contain other elements as well, meaning a thorium reactor can actually consume nuclear waste from a uranium reactor as part of its fuel mix. The resulting waste from a thorium reactor is radioactive for dozens or hundreds of years not tens of thousands of years so you don't need a giant Yucca Mountain style disposal site.
And thorium is easy to find. Currently it is an undesirable waste product of mining other things, we have enough of it in waste piles to run our whole civilization for like 100 years. And there's plenty more to dig up.

There are challenges though. The molten uranium is usually contained in a molten salt solution, which is corrosive. This creates issues for pipes, pumps, valves, etc. The fuel also needs frequent reprocessing, meaning a truly viable thorium plant would most likely have a fuel processing facility as part of the plant.

The problems however are not unsolvable, Even with current technology. We actually had some research reactors running on thorium in the mid-1900s but uranium got the official endorsement, perhaps because you can't use a thorium reactor to build bombs. So we basically abandoned the technology.

China has been heavily investing in thorium for a while. This appears to be one of the results of that investment. Now this is a tiny baby reactor, basically a lab toy, a proof of concept. Don't expect this to power anybody's house. The point is though, it works. You have a 2 megawatt working reactor today, next you build a 20 megawatt demonstrator, then you start building out 200 megawatt units to attach to the power grid.

Obviously I have no crystal ball. But if this technology works, this is the start of something very big. I am sure China will continue developing this tech full throttle. If they make it work at scale, China becomes the first country in the world that essentially has unlimited energy. And then the rest of the world is buying their thorium reactors from China.

So riddle me this. Inner City, poor area, 2:00 a.m.
One gang member approaches another rival gang member, pulls out an illegally modified full auto pistol, dumps an entire 30 round magazine into him.
Does he get the death penalty?

How many times did he shoot himself?

I mean there is a pattern to these things.
If Putin doesn't like you, you shoot yourself and then jump out of a building.
If the Clintons don't like you, you shoot yourself twice in the back of the head before driving your car off a cliff.
If you have dirt on powerful people, you hang yourself in prison.

It's NYT. If you can't defend Thompson as being worth keeping alive, may as well play the woke race card and say we only like him because he's an attractive white male.

No they aren't, and with that attitude we will continue to repeat this mistake over and over and over.

The people want change. A lot of change. You can work 40 hours a week and barely scrape by paycheck to paycheck, and it's been like that for years. Housing is even more unaffordable.
Nothing has changed for years.
People are angry.

Donald Trump taps into that. That is his whole message. That he is an outsider, he is not the status quo, he is the one who shakes things up. He does not listen to PR people. He says what's on his mind. He is the closest thing to a Bulworth candidate we've had in quite some time.

I personally think he is a liar and a criminal, but not everybody shares that view.

What does Kamala have going for her? She is the vice president, next in line of a succession. There is no radical reform there. It is status quo. And let's not forget that before Biden dropped out and Kamala was crowned successor, she was pulling very low even among Democrats.

The problem is not that America refuses to hand the country over to a woman. The problem is that the DNC keeps putting forward the wrong people as candidates, and expects the whole nation to vote for them simply because they're not Republican. It doesn't work that way.

My point is though, as long as you blame sexism or racism or whatever for Trump's win, you hide the real problem and thus prevent it from being fixed.

It NEEDS to be fixed.
For the good of the country, we (Dems) cannot expect people to just vote for us because we're not Republican. We need to offer them something better. Obama did that. That's why he won. Hope, change, yes we can. That was something better. And so he defeated a real non-crazy Republican.

Whoever is the next Democratic candidate, they need to do that. Offer a real message and a real plan. Not just 'I'm not red'.

This is actually a real problem more so in this case than most. There's an awful lot of satellites in low Earth orbit, altitude of a few hundred to several hundred kilometers. Atmospheric drag still exists here a little bit, and thus space junk will reenter and burn up in years or decades.

This satellite was in geostationary orbit, at an altitude of about 36,000 km. Debris up there can take hundreds of years to come down. Geostationary is a special altitude where the satellite orbits at exactly the same rate as the Earth spins. That means that a fixed dish on Earth will always point at the satellite without needing to move or track. So there's just one narrow orbital ring around the equator for that. That ring is not a place we want space junk to be, because if it gets too hazardous for satellites in GEO that basically removes our capability as a species to use fixed satellite dishes for anything. And that problem won't go away for centuries.

4. Change the UI and mess with plugins.
5. More bloat in the install package that should be optional plugins.

That's when an operating system is supposed to do. They make mistakes when they make it worse. Usually, the operating system starts worse and eventually gets tolerable. That happened with Windows 10. Initial versions were far inferior to Windows 7, but now it's at a pretty good state. Windows 11 is a pile of fucking garbage. There is no compelling feature in Windows 11 that would make anyone want to upgrade. There are compelling reasons not to upgrade, such as advertising, menus that require more clicks to get the same shit done, forced use of Microsoft account, etc.

There's also the fact that Windows 11 refuses to run unless you have a handful of specific hardware in your computer, such as TPM 2.0, and a relatively modern processor. There is no technical reason for this requirement, it was discovered very early on that if you override the check it will install and run just fine. But Microsoft seems determined to get people to throw away their older but still perfectly good computers.

That is a very big part of why Windows 10 is still so popular. If you have a computer from six or seven years ago that you've upgraded once or twice, it's probably still perfectly good. No reason to throw it away for Windows 11 when you can keep on trucking with Windows 10.

I agree. Even at $120 each. 120 times tens of millions is serious fucking cash. We need to have a couple of big companies go bankrupt over this shit. Then maybe they will start taking it seriously. Perhaps at that point maintaining personal data on people will be seen as a liability rather than an asset. And that's what we really need.

Just disable TPM in your BIOS if you have that option. Win 11 needs modern TPM so it won't upgrade you if you don't have one.

I think it should become customary that if a politician advocates for a certain punishment for a crime, and then commits that particular crime, that they receive the punishment they advocated for (within the bounds of current law of course). He wants a 10-year prison sentence for destroying a statue, he should get a 10-year prison sentence for destroying the statue.

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and for all this, your alarm reminders become yet another datapoint for personalized ads, your phone alarm to wake you up then plays at full blast through the living room computer and wakes everybody else up, and you agreed to a 750kb privacy policy that displays in a 2"x3" window with 500 pages to scroll through.