I don’t know. It’s alarming how many people don’t even have a rudimentary understanding of basic scientific principles. We were taught the laws of thermodynamics in elementary school here in the states in the early '90s for me.

The biggest lesson from thermodynamics is that there’s no such thing as a free lunch. We may only be taking a minuscule fraction of the wind energy, but taken to an extreme there are bound to be some bad effects. In between those extremes, there are likely less predictable effects like disruption to local wind patterns.

I doubt we’re anywhere near that and there’s probably little chance of ever getting close to that without huge jet stream harvesting generators or turbines covering most of the land, but we can’t pretend that the energy is free and completely without side-effects.

Are you Dutch? Historically, Dutch engineers have handled some pretty impressive mountainous civil engineering projects.

RTGs aren’t used for power in earth orbit, because of the danger of releasing the radioactive contents on deorbit and because there’s enough sunlight here to make solar a much better option (lighter, cheaper).

RTGs are mostly used for the outer solar system where the sun is too dim to be useful.

I totally agree. I think keeping the extreme evil of Trump out of power was worth voting for a controlled opposition establishment Democrat (and of course I voted for Harris and didn’t sit the election out).

A campaign based on lesser evil drives down voter turnout if it’s used every single election, which it has been for so long. The one reprieve we’ve had was Obama (the first time, when he still seemed progressive) running on a campaign of hope and change. Trump is the worst we’ve seen so far, but all of the Republican candidates back to at least Reagan were pretty awful people and the Democratic stance was mostly just pointing out how awful they are.

If we consistently don’t get opposition candidates with a positive message and plan for fixing things, we end up with low voter turnout and monsters like Trump in office.

Whatever gets you through the night, buddy.

I think we can maybe build a better society by electing better representatives to office, but if you want to read that hope for a solution as some personal attack against “minorities” (which I’m apparently not anymore), then you’re just one less person trying to actually fix all this.

Maybe raging against strangers on the internet and turning people away from you will make things better. 🤷

This is like talking to a wall. I hope you’re at least getting something out of arguing with these strawmen. Take care and I hope you get better.

Dude, your establishment Democrats are part of the pedophile cabal! The lesser evil is also evil and we need to stop supporting them and pretending we’re not part of the problem.

You sound like you need to chill out a bit. We were talking about protest-non-voters in the last general election.

Pulling your head out of the sand doesn’t make you an accelerationist. Nobody with any sense wanted Trump, but thinking that a Harris win was going to set us on the right track is delusional.

I think you misunderstood me. Voting for the “lesser evil” is a valid strategy if it comes up every once in a while and you can use it to avert disaster, but when every single election comes down to voting for the “lesser evil”, then you just end up on a steady march toward an evil outcome.

We’ve been on this path for decades, with today’s Democrats being far to the right of where Republicans were fifty years ago. Even if Harris wasn’t as bad as Trump (which she almost certainly wouldn’t be), she would help build the framework for the next Trump-like monster that followed her.

You don’t fix an evil system by voting for evil over and over again, evil if it’s the lesser evil. We need to stop seeing Democratic candidates like Harris and the like for any movement away from evil to happen.

Get out of here with this tired stuff.

All of this (gestures broadly) is the direct and inevitable result of lesser-evilism. A few people not sitting out the last election may have delayed this timeline (though I’m doubtful there were even enough protest-non-voters to make any difference), but this has been building for a long time and Harris hadn’t talked about any plans to reverse that trend.

But they don’t press charges when police summarily execute someone.

Why is the text describing the strike as being “broken” with no negotiations? It sounds like the concessions were very close to the demands, making the strike a success, no?

You mean like corporations are people and they can run for congress also? New nightmare unlocked.

I can do this too, but I still use hearing protection because I’m not sure how well it it actually works at preventing damage

A slop PR should be the submitter’s responsibility, but if they’re trying to push out unreviewed slop, you know they’re just going to ask an LLM to refactor it instead of looking at it themselves. The best response is just to reject it outright and have someone else work on a new solution.

This has got to be a sight to see. I still remember the first time I saw a Shuttle up close and was floored by how absolutely huge they are.

Who will all have a harder time finding investor money and will meet with more skepticism as development proceeds.

Like all other aspects of our greedy scam culture, the possibility of this new battery chemistry and some of the remaining social trust has been monetized and traded for cash to line somebody’s pockets.

Because this is how research works and if we manage to get fusion power generation working well, we’ll have practically limitless clean energy available.

Fair enough (even though I could pick some nits concerning ionic (de)polarization and chemical signaling, all driven by various redox reactions and powered by aforementioned hydrocarbon oxidation).

In actuality, nearly nothing in the universe seems to be powered by electricity. Gravity powered fusion drives the stars, radioactive decay (fission) and gravity drive planetary activity, chemical (including photochemical) reactions drive life. Electrical current flow happens naturally, but it doesn’t seem like a big driving phenomenon.

Not to say that we shouldn’t use electric cars, or really electric everything. We should! It’s just that the OPs argument was dumb.