How much nuclear waste would be generated, across 100 years of American levels of energy use, per person?
I'll save you the effort, it's about one chicken egg, maybe as large as a tea cup.
For your whole life, all the energy you'll use across all sectors. Over 100 years you don't think we capable of finding a space to safely fritter away a chicken egg? Or even 300 million chicken eggs?
And even more amazingly, that "waste"? It's still fuel, we could reprocess it.
Coal, you'd need 50-60,000 kilograms to create the same energy. The waste disposal for 60k kg of coal's ash is non trivial (and much harder to prevent from spreading). To say nothing of the 150-180,000 kg of CO2 emitted.
Solar panels would need to be replaced 2-5 times in that timeframe. They are a whole lot less wasteful than coal, but that'd still be a significant volume of difficult to reprocess material.
So, before wringing your hands about waste from nuclear, make sure you understand just how small the amount of waste is and think about the waste of alternatives. There's not a free lunch here, but waste just isn't a material concern compared against other power sources.
That ranks as one of the worst nuclear disasters in history, and it was really not bad on a human or planetary scale. Carbon-based power plants kill far more on an annual basis.
You say that as if it's a given that it will always leak slowly. What % of the spent fuel actually ended up being leaked across the couple decades of storage we have had now? What effects did it have? How does the human cost stack up against mining activities we would need for the massive amounts of wind turbines and solar panels when we cut out nuclear's base load function completely?
Nuclear waste leaking into the groundwater? Sure, if someone is being absurdly callous. But if we're going to invent a villain with no morals as just dumps the stuff then we might as well do the same for any other form of energy.
I prefer to assume we're comparing competent operators of any energy type in our portfolio. Saying it leaches into the groundwater is like saying "dams break and destroy towns". Yeah, it does happen I guess, but not often. And we've got lots of systems to prevent it.
Firstly, the containers are known to develop leaks over decades. Secondly, there are accidents on site every year, causing tritium leaks if not also uranium. There is also a baseline level of tritium leakage that's considered normal, but it isn't actually normal for the fishes in the river.
> I prefer to assume we're comparing competent operators
Please see the list of leakage incidents at each nuclear power plant. There is one almost every year at almost every site. The local environment pays the price for it. If they were competent, these events wouldn't happen.
None of this is an issue with solar, for example. The radius of the possible damage is minuscule.
Nuclear waste only slowly leaks if its stored improperly. The better option is to use it, reacted fuel is still super useful stuff. N breeder reactors have been developed to decrease fuel requirements by a factor of 100. Instead of one egg of "spent fuel per person... one egg per 100!
He's complied with Indian and Turkish authorities, choosing to censor. I'm sure he'd comply if asked by the trump admin and fight if asked by the Harris admin.
I think all instances of censorship are bad, personally. However, it isn’t as simple as comparing cases in different countries. Twitter/X has a policy of abiding by local laws. So if they feel government ordered censorship is legal, they’ll comply. Otherwise, they’ll refuse and challenge it. If there is no way to challenge an illegal order, they’ll refuse it and go public as they have in Brazil.
One difference in India is that the orders are not secret - they don’t come with gag orders to hide censorship from the public. Another difference is that they are legal, due to a number of regulations their government passed over the last several years. That doesn’t mean Twitter accepted these censorship demands because they (or Musk) are friendly with that government, which is a conspiracy theory I’ve seen spreading in recent times. Twitter/X literally sued the Indian government over these orders and lost back in 2023 (note Musk acquired the company in 2022), at which point they had to pay fines and comply. It’s not just Twitter/X either - Google also complies with the same orders in India and other countries, for example removing content from YouTube.
The dude burned a huge pile of money and fought a lot of opposition just to end censorship on Twitter, at least in the US. He does have his pet issues that face very minor censorship but I think he would fight any further attempts for illegal and unconstitutional government censorship. If he censors now, it will defeat his stated purpose and be just as bland as other establishment-run social media.
However its slightly different to the discussed point here, which is that people who use their dick or vagina to make money publicly can later have that used against them.
Theres nothing wrong with dating a sex worker, but when you want to make them a wife and have children, there becomes a risk that some crazy drug addict is going to spot them in the future and do something. Mabye they are going to call out to your wife while she is dropping the kids off at school. Maybe they will be a bit more sinister and threaten to send old OF videos to your kids ands kids teachers email address unless you give them some money, or do it again etc.
These are of course hypotheticals, but they have happened in the past and it is a risk, however small, of having an ex sex worker as a life partner.
It can only be used against you if people think it can be used against you.
Like, imagine a world where we said, " you flipped burgers in college? Eww gross, you've robbed your life!"
It sounds absurd because we've collectively decided one of those jobs is good and one is bad. We can collectively decide they are both fine, actually.
Also, if you're that model includes "random drug addict who is aware of my wife's porn career notices my wife, then chooses to act on it" I think your threat model may need revising. Yes, I'm sure that happens hundreds of times a year in the US. Driving a car to school seems statistically MUCH more dangerous.
That's fine for you (though I'd challenge you to ask yourself why), but younger generations and many in older generations like myself are realizing that sex work is just work. Bodies are just bodies. Relationships and past sexual history are in the past.
> sex work is just work. Bodies are just bodies. Relationships and past sexual history are in the past.
Emotions are just emotions. Might as well just stop with the whole "dating" thing and only use each other transactionally when we want kids. Or better yet, just don't reproduce, right?
This framing, "sell their dignity", is your moral judgement (coming from your cultural, religious, or some other) background.
I don't see it as any less dignified than any other work. You sell your labor to someone who pays you less than the value it produces.
Now, if you want to argue that median creators get payed only a tiny fraction of their time, and like Twitch/YouTube it's a losing game for most, then we're on the same page.
You are correct, my value judgements are very likely influenced by my cultural background and experience, as are yours.
I do live in a country where sex work is legal. There is still a darker sides to the trade. I think customers do lose even more dignity. Or someone who does sex work because it is "empowering" compared to someone that is forced into it.
> don't see it as any less dignified than any other work
You do not, and that is your moral judgement. Rationalizing earning money by any means necessary is a very slippery slope, and the discussion is much more nuanced than popular media would lead you to believe.
To the moral question, semi-related is a comment I heard about the idea that a person might raise a child for the purposes of having sex with the child when they reach some age. The idea behind this scenario is asking if such an activity or intent is moral, and if there are certain human relationships that are rich and complex and more positive by leaving the sex out? And if the answer is somehow self-evident or "just" cultural?
That depends on if you think your dignity is predicated on not having a buttplug in your ass, or not doing acts for money, or some combination of both. At the end (ha) of the day, a job is a job. You get to decide if you think it's demeaning or not.
Porn is fine. Sex has been a part of our social fabric for longer than we've been human.
Obviously, there exists a lot of exploitation in porn, but performers who enjoy doing it and can support themselves with it on a platform like of? More power to them.
Taking a wild guess, I'd say binary132's main concern was the lasting effect on the consumers, not the producers.
Girls' broken self-image, male porn addiction, substituting real intimacy, proliferating bad sex practises just to name a few.
It’s definitely not good for producers either. But yeah, the broader cultural impact is on the scale of many millions of people, some of whom develop debilitating addictions, including many kids. “Sex work” has always and probably will always exist, but it’s never been a publicly consumed service at this scale.
Doesn't that put it in the same realm as alcohol? Best enjoyed in moderation and all that. Those concerns are valid, but not necessarily solved by shunning porn. Besides, where do you draw the line?
I can go on any known porn site right now in Incognito and the front page is full of cuck, incest and trans. We aren't just talking about intercourse we are talking about certain acts of depravity being pushed into the collective conscious.
Trans people having sex is not an act of depravity, lol.
Trans people are people, and deserve sex just as much as anyone else.
Cuck porn is extremely not my thing, but strikes me as a pretty tame fetish if all parties consent. Playing with power dynamics can be a lot of fun and very strengthening for a relationship. (Good BDSM practitioners are often very consent focused and amazing listeners.)
The incest stuff is gross though. I'll shake hands with you on that.
Sure it's failed from the floor workers because they forgot the plug door needs bolted. It's failed other ways due to the other (SPEEA) union botching the MCAS.
Sometimes it's easy to lose track of how basically all the Washington unions are so broken in their homicidal negligence while begging for more money to fail miserably.
The MCAS failure was a multilayered one. The engineers who designed it, software engineers who developed it, QA, testing, pilots, managers who approved, managers who instilled that work culture, etc etc are all responsible and should all have been fired and sentenced to prison for their negligence and dereliction of duty.
In the aerospace industry, and other safety critical industries, they use the "swiss cheese" model for risk analysis. For an accident to get through all the layers (slices of cheese) meant to stop accidents, you need the holes in all of those layers to line up in just the wrong way. When that happens you need to investigate and fix each layer of cheese, not focus on the single layer of cheese on the top and ignore the rest. You will never build reliable safety critical systems with the mentality that only a single point of responsibility needs to be identified and corrected.
This thing with duty feeling is hard. They all feel they did their best. Exactly as my precursor who spend 17 years in the role and did way below bare minimum. No single comment in the code. Last project does not work at all, but was approved as finished. Laziness and ignorance are everywhere. As long as managers accept it there is no way to stop that. Maybe I should stop drawing flowcharts in ascii art manner. Nobody will say “thank you” for that anyway. Nobody will give me a raise for that. It might help the next guy in my chair, but should I care about him?
> This thing with duty feeling is hard. They all feel they did their best
If you work in aerospace and your "best" is non-redundant inputs from a sensor known to fail, you're not good enough for aerospace and never were. I know not to do that and I'm just a former SRE who also likes air crash investigation. My homelab has more redundancy than a critical system that could by design crash an airplane.
And people at Boeing knew this. That's why they hid the system's existence from everyone and lied to the FAA, who also utterly failed at doing its job.
I heard this was done on purpose because they'd need a lot more documentation if the system was important, and having redundancy would tip off the FAA to its importance.
The labor involved is highly skilled, and has seen extensive underpayment. When Boeing tried to ship manufacturing away from union shops, the quality and reliability of the planes plummeted, driving up costs for the company.
As a frequent flier, I'd much rather be in a union plane than a "cheapest labor we could find" plane.
Union labor is only going to be better if the work is compensated enough that people stay around. Unions are not magic.
Boeing has not been doing that.
They underestimate the value of retaining people who have actually seen a few full plane lines start.
They are in a situation now where there are not enough senior personal to properly guide new hires as they rotate through every 1-2 years.
You want good people, you have to pay for them.
If you've got a bunch of morons on payroll (because management spent years asleep at the wheel), paying the morons more and retaining their services for many more years so they become experienced morons won't do you a whole lot of good. Management is clearly the root cause of the problem but the solution must include trimming the incompetent workers from the company.
I am not saying that unions are bad or this union striking is bad. What I'm saying is that if you think this union action will turn Boeing around and get them flying right again, you're mistaken. Boeing needs an invasive surgery to cut out the necrotic tissue (both management and workers) if they are to have any hopes of survival as anything more than a zombie kept animated by government necromancy.
>Yeah I’m sure that was the union’s fault, and not pressure from management to work quickly, cut corners, and akip on quality.
The union's job is to fight back against those poor choices from management that negatively impact the workforce and the product delivery. Otherwise what's the point of the union? What value are they adding to the workers if they end up with the same issues as non union labor?
If the Union went on strike a year or two ago with claims(+proof) that the management was pushing down quality then I would consider the union to be doing it's job of trying to protect the workers from management like the claim was.
After a door falls out, numerous government audits and hearings, the union standing up and saying "Hey! Guys, we have an issue with management" seems to be a little barn door house.
The start of the thread was saying that union work is more quality than non-union. Child of that post claimed that union workers were the ones who missed the bolts.
If we want to claim that unions protect workers and improve quality(as opposed to those who say that unions are the reason that you can't get rid of bad workers) then the unions need to take timely action, not after.
However, the union strike is regarding pay and benefits. Not asking for better quality goals or production targets.
