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Cake day: June 14th, 2023

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  • 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.




  • 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.









  • 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.


  • UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.worldtoLemmy Shitpost@lemmy.worldWar
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    20 hours ago

    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.



  • 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.







  • And why does it seem like they all hate Pewdiepie?

    He took a fascist turn during Trump 1 and never really recovered his image. Got into a bunch of weird exploitative shit, not unlike Mr Beast. The most notable being when he tested the Fiverr service and paid five dollars to get Indian freelance actors to laugh and show a sign saying ‘Death to all Jews’.

    After that, he started getting deplatformed and his following fell off considerably. So, like a bunch of other has-been YouTube starlets, he decided to get even more edgy and reactionary, further poisoning his image. It’s the same death spiral Russell Brand and Rob Schneider fell down.