The biggest factor is diet - a large portion of ingested water comes from food.
Someone who snacks on carrots is going to need to drink a very different amount of water to stay hydrated as someone who eats jerky and crackers.
There’s also obviously differences in kidney function, salt retention, even just body size. Current medical advice is to just drink when you are thirsty, which works for just about everyone.
Thermo-electrochemical cycles.
The idea is simple: the favorability of a chemical reaction is a function of temperature, some reactions are more favorable at high temperatures, some at lower. For electrochemical reactions (e.g. batteries) this means a change in voltage at different temperatures. Some reactions have higher voltages, some lower. By choosing a pair of redox reactions such that the direction of charge transfer can be reversed within a specified temperature envelope, one can create a thermal engine that directly converts heat to electrical energy without requiring a turbine.
There’s lots of research on this, sometimes called the ‘omnivorous’ flow battery.
I find it kind of bussin’, I find it kind of cap. The dreams in which I’m dying are the ones that kinda slap.
The conspiratorial thinking isn’t helping your argument.
It’s quite clear you haven’t engaged with this topic outside of internet arguments. I sincerely hope you do some reading and learn more here - you clearly have the passion.
Until then, find someone else to harass.
You clearly didn’t comprehend what I wrote. Educate yourself on this topic - not from forum arguments, but from TEA and policy papers.
For one, I said ‘base load’ generation isn’t needed. Your thinking that is is means your thinking on the matter is 10 years out of date. If you insist base load is needed, then gas plants and carbon capture systems are far cheaper and faster to build.
You don’t care, though, as you aren’t seriously involved in the policy and just want to live in a world where you are right 🤷.
Base load is an outdated concept. It is cheaper, by an order of magnitude, to install surplus generation capacity using renewables and build storage to cover periods of reduced production.
Nuclear reactors actually make terrible ‘base load’ generation anyway, as large swings in output induce thermal cycling stress in their metal components AND the economics of these multi-billion dollar investments depend on running near max output at all times - otherwise the payback time from selling power will extend beyond the useful life of the plant.
The policy wonks shilling for nuclear are not being honest. The economics for these plants are terrible, they are especially terrible if The Plan ™ is to use nuclear as a transition fuel to be replaced by renewables - as then they won’t even reach break even. To say nothing of the fact that a solar installation in the US takes 6 months, while there have been two reactors under construction in Georgia for a decade…
50 years ago, nuclear was a great option. Today, it is too expensive, too slow to build, and simply unnecessary with existing storage technologies.
If y’all were really worried about base load power, you’d be shilling for natural gas peaker plants + carbon capture which has much better economics.
2020 was different from 2024. It was a very unique set of circumstances with an election in the middle of pandemic, with an incumbent who was never broadly popular, amidst utterly terrible economic conditions.
Still, Trump’s base showed up, just as they did on Tuesday.
Biden had the benefit of all the unlikely voters not being able to ignore the country burning down around them, he got a lot of dissatisfied people who don’t pay attention to politics to come out.
Harris didn’t, she got the Dem base. People broadly dissatisfied at the state of things probably voted Trump since he isn’t the incumbent.
Just how it works - voters don’t have to be rational.
I really doubt double-digit millions of voters sat out because of Gaza.
Kamala’s vote total is roughly in line with what would be expected looking at 2008, 2012, and 2016. The massive turnout in 2020 on the Dem side appears to be an abberation - it was unique circumstances with COVID and all that. On the Republican side, Trump ran slightly ahead of his 2020 performance, and well ahead of 2016.
It’s basic electoral politics: Trump has succeeded at expanding his base of support and turning them out to vote reliably. The Democrats have not. No single issue is responsible for that.
You can blame protests or Gaza or third parties or whoever else you want - the truth remains that the Dem base from the Obama years is not large enough and not appropriately distributed to win an election against Trump’s base; whatever else you think of the man, he has been very good at gaining and retaining support.
The issue isn’t forwards, it is down.
You have a tungsten rod held in a clamp on a satellite in a nominally stable orbit. Releasing the clamp just means the tungsten rod is now in essentially the same nominally stable orbit as the satellite.
To deorbit it, you need to meaningfully change its velocity. As tungsten is very dense, that takes a lot of fuel. The more fuel that is used, the sooner the rod will hit the ground and the higher the angle.
Simply dropping it means you have to wait months or years for the orbit to naturally decay, a lot of energy will be lost to atmospheric friction, and there is little control over the impact point. Not exactly what you want in your WMD.
Dropping anything in orbit just means it is still in orbit.
You’d need a lot of fuel to deorbit that cube on a steep trajectory.
It depends on the type of fusion.
The easiest fusion reaction is deuterium/tritium - two isotopes of hydrogen. The vast majority of the energy of that reaction is released as neutrons, which are very difficult to contain and will irradiate the reactor’s containment vessel. The walls of the reactor will degrade, and will eventually need to be replaced and the originals treated as radioactive waste.
Lithium/deuterium fusion releases most of its energy in the form of alpha particles - making it much more practical to harness the energy for electrical generation - and releases something like 80% fewer high energy neutrons – much less radioactive waste. As a trade-off, the conditions required to sustain the reaction are even more extreme and difficult to maintain.
There are many many possible fusion reactions and multiple containment methods - some produce significant radioactive waste and some do not. In terms of energy output, the energy released per reaction event is much higher than in fission, but it is much harder to concentrate reaction events, so overall energy output is much lower until some significant advancement is made on the engineering challenges that have plagued fusion for 70+ years.
But if you could see them, they could see you …
Well, sort of. HDCP exists, and does make it harder to capture an AV stream.
For interactive content, the current push online components hosted on external servers adds a lot of complexity. While a lot of that stuff can be patched around by a very dedicated community, not every piece of content gets enough community appeal to attract the wizards to do such a thing.
And while anyone can digivolve into a wizard given enough commitment and effort, the onramp is not easy these days. Wayyy back when cracking a game meant opening the file and finding the line for 'if cd_key == ‘whru686’, it was much easier to get casually involved. Nowadays, DRM has gotten so much more sophisticated that a tech background is essentially required to start.
Yes, you. And me. And probably most of the people reading this, who live in the US or another Western country
Not quite. 1% of global population is ~80 million people. There are about a billion people in the highly developed nations (US, Canada, Western Europe, Japan, South Korea, and some minor others). So the top 8% of the golden billion, if we assume all in the US, the top ~25% of the country.
The argument the person above you is making is that they also profit off people who never file claims in the first place. In fact those people are more profitable since they do not consume labor to process claims.
The Byzantine system of rules and coverage exemptions exists to disincentive people from filing claims just as it exists to give leeway to deny them.
Of course the overall point that paid claims must be less than premiums charged (and investment income) is correct.
Don’t see mention of fixes for the resume-from-sleep bugs that have been around since at least 6 :'(
No, not even close.
I’ve used Unix systems for years at work, and have dual-booted windows with various flavors of Linux at home for just as long. When I just need something to work, particularly something new or after a stressful day at work, I just use windows.
Why? Because it will just work. Maybe it won’t work precisely how I want it to, maybe it will send all my data to Bill’s push notifications, but it will run. In the rare case it doesn’t, a quick google will fix it.
Compare that to Linux, where most things will work most of the time. And when they don’t, you get to hunt through GitHub issues off-the-clock like a peasant, wading through comments from people with entirely different configurations and ‘dunno it works for me’.
Linux is for tinkerers, and for people who want a Unix shell and can’t afford a Mac, it has a long way to go to be more than that.
The ideal answer is compost, regenerative agriculture, and (better treated) human-sources waste.
Organic crop yields will almost certainly reduce a bit without animal waste fertilizer, but that is fine since crop consumption will fall by a greater amount due to not needing to feed a bunch of extra animals.
Many games use multiple threads, but they don’t do so very effectively.
The vast majority of games use Unreal or Unity, and those engines (as products) are optimized to make the developer experience easy - notably NOT to make the end product performant.
It is pretty common that there is one big thread that handles rendering, and another for most game logic. This is how Unreal does it ‘out of the box’. It also splits the physics calculations off into multiple threads semi-automatically, and the standard default setup will have render and game logic on separate threads.
Having a lot of moving characters around is taxing because all the animation states have to go through the main thread that is also doing pathfinding for all the characters and any AI scripts that are running… often you can’t completely separate these things since where a character wants to move may determine whether they walk/run/jump/fly/swim and those need different animations.
This often leads to the scenario where someone with an older 8+ core chip is wondering why the game is stuttering when ‘it is only using 10% of my cpu’ - because the render thread or game logic thread is stuffed and is pinning one core/thread at 100%.
Effective concurrency requires designing for it very early, and most games are built in iterative refinements with the scope and feature list constantly changing - not conducive to solving the big CS problem of splitting each frame’s calculations into independent chunks.