Al Bundy avi

This checks out.

But why does Haley Joel Osment have AIDS?

Do it armed with overpowered flashlights and broom handles. Those dogs are dogshit.

I mean, you say that. But we have a quarterly all-hands office meeting at my company. Every meeting kicks off with “This is how many accidents we had this quarter. We are aiming for ZERO accidents. Zero Is Achievable.” And in the quarters we’ve had zero accidents, the upper management makes a big deal out of it.

There have been a number of campaigns to eliminate certain viruses from the human population - smallpox being the most famous. And there was quite a bit of glory doled out to celebrate the regional elimination of these contagions.

It’s possible to make prevention a celebrated endeavor. But you do have to prioritize it. And you can’t run away and blow it off when you fail. I think the real “no glory” issue is in bungled preventative campaigns. Far easier to insist vaccinations don’t work than to acknowledge our pre-Trump efforts at vaccinating the population have been half-assed and profit-motivated.

As a guy who runs Nurgle, this is genuinely quite hurtful.

There’s issues of base load, of compactness, of reliability, and of yield. That’s why new Chinese coal plants (and Indian and African/Latin American plants) keep getting built.

But there’s a bottleneck in material supply across the pie of energy options. China gets much of its coal from Australia, a country that’s increasingly hostile to the CCP government. As a result, domestic coal production in China has picked up notably.

It’s still a grim picture of the future, precisely because these emerging market states state puts mid-term economic growth ahead of long-term ecological preservation. The current western governments are, similarly, prioritizing annualized rates of growth/consumption over real ecological limits.

But for Oil/Gas production, this war is definitely reshaping what countries consider viable or sustainable even in these short-term time horizons.

each ‘incident’ can v easily have been explained

You hear this from serial sexual harassers all the time. Every individual incident has plausible deniability. It’s the trend line that eventually catches up with you.

your type are to tightly wound up

My type being… big budget advertisers on YouTube?

I’ve seen much the same in the US. Work for a pipeline company and the demand for LNGs is basically maxed out.

That said, a lot of this is coming from retirement of coal plants and other less efficient means of energy generation.

Also, at least wrt Saudi Arabia, they’re having very similar problems to Qatar. And don’t forget that this was kicked off by Israeli strikes on Iranian production. The whole region is getting rattled.

Coal power drops in China and India for first time in 52 years after clean-energy records

Coal is too expensive and inefficient. Solar/Wind with battery backup is becoming the new hotness, as rechargeable lithium and sodium battery prices/kwh plunge below coal mining costs.

A big appeal of natural gas was its dirt cheap extraction and transportation cost. You pressurize a well and it pumps itself. Gas is lightweight and easy to pump along pipes, so transportation is low-cost and very easy. And the machinery to convert the gas into electricity is cheap and prolific.

Coal doesn’t work that way. Huge manual labor for extraction and transport. And using coal to generate electricity requires enormous capital investment that is heavily centralized. If you don’t already have a coal plant, you’re unlikely to build any new ones. Even in the US, a country flush with coal, the federal government is needing to force plants to stay open and operating at a loss in order to keep demand up.

AreWeTheBaddies.jpg

Not my area of expertise, so please tell me if the idea is complete garbage.

Turning a laptop battery into a weapon is a non-trivial endeavor. The absurdity of TSA was more their attempt to police based on weak science than the real danger of an airplane full of lithium battery powered devices.

hed did a bad thing that one time

Far more than the one time. He had a whole routine about exploiting overseas labor to perform humiliating stunts.

A drone listing is described in the seller’s catalogue as a “cruise missile” able to carry a 2kg warhead 30km

If you’re lucky, it’ll carry a 0.5kg warhead 10km. That’s assuming they don’t ship it with any missing pieces.

Why would a computer automatically process QR codes?

Because it needs to translate the code into text for the viewer, so the viewer can decide whether or not to go to the link.

Open up your camera, set it to capture mode, hover over a code, and see for yourself. You’ll get a link-text right above the code that you can click on.

No. Because that’s third and fourth order effects of generically bad US public policies. The opioid overdoses, in particular, were driven by the legal prescriptions of Oxycotin giving way to a wave of criminalization and cutbacks on a newly created population of addicts, for instance. American vets committing suicide are a problem in peacetime and wartime alike, largely driven by the abysmal treatment of enlisted men.

Not according to Wayne Gretzky

It is trivially easy to make effective shapes charges and energetics at home.

Safely?

If I wanted to, I could

You’ve got enough information to try to execute the above formula. Okay. And you’ve still got all your fingers after attempting this… more than zero times?

The drone parts and control surface actuation is by far harder and I say this as someone who has a professional background in computer science and software engineering.

Absolutely. We invented gunpowder centuries before we invented airplanes.

That said… as an anecdote, I had a friend who had a janitorial position. Cleaning a particularly stubborn toilet and dumped a bunch of bleach into the bowl. His coworker came in behind him and proceeded to piss in said boil, creating a toxic miasma that forced them to exit the restroom quickly and heavily ventilate it before returning.

“I could cook up some blasting caps with the trash from a frat party” is a theoretically believable claim.

“Every time I clean up a frat party, I add a dozen shaped charges to my inventory” is not.

Certainly possible. But you’re still stuck on the r² problem of diminishing returns at a distance. Light doesn’t like staying in a tight beam. The vortex loop is typically not much bigger than the wavelength. I don’t see much of a solution for transmitting energy long distances through air.