Okay, but on a timeline measured in years instead of quarters, it’s really fucking stupid to punish the factory that churns out engineers for your war machines, right? The government funds STEM education, yielding STEM experts, yielding STEM productivity. Stop funding it, stop making STEM experts, vastly reduce STEM productivity. Pair this with massive reductions on immigrants (and torch the economy to lower desire to come here also) and how does this not lead to brain drain dark ages and empire collapse?

Is it more complicated than this? Am I missing something? Because usually when somebody thinks that everybody else is a fucking moron, they are the fucking moron, and I’m worried that maybe I’m just such a dumb fucking moron that I can’t see what a dumb fucking moron I am.

That depends. For pizza and Asian cuisine, Sriracha. Special shout-out to Underwood Ranch specifically, because that shit is top tier. For everything else, chipotle Tabasco. When that goes on sale, I buy a few bottles because I know I’ll go through it lol.

If you’re decent at math and physics and are even remotely handy, you can probably get into a data center or power plant. Both industries are growing like crazy while boomers and older Gen x are retiring.

It took a long while as a contractor, but I eventually got a job as an operator in a power plant. The rotating shift work can be rough, and some days are really demanding, but it’s overall not too bad usually and it pays well. Outside operators here start at like $40/hour. My water treatment specialty has gotten me a promotion and raises so now I’m at like $53.50/hour. If I can continue training and pass the test and board for it, I could make over $60/hour as a control room operator. With built-in OT and scheduled maintenance outages demanding even more OT, it’s impossible to not break $100k/year here. With bonus, I might break $150k this year.

Brush up on chiller loops, chemistry 101, physics 101, NATO phonetic alphabet, get 15k steps in a day, and change the oil in your car. If that’s pretty easy for you, there’s a career waiting for you lol.

Mask off moment. Their purpose is to protect capital. The only crimes that cops prevent are through deterrence because they are crime punishers, not crime preventers.

Not OP, but probably price gouging? Especially regarding things where you aren’t afforded the reasonable opportunity to make an informed decision (healthcare, baby formula plus necessary clean water). Also maybe regional monopolies (internet service) or pretty much anything involving an event or venue (ticket pricing or cost of a slice of pizza or a can of beer at a festival).

In all of these examples, you likely don’t have a heads-up or the chance to choose something else. Admittedly, most of the examples off the top of my head were unnecessary luxury spending, but how in the blue fuck is it okay that any of them are literally a situation of “pay me whatever price I decide or else a person will die”?

Pretty fucked up if you ask me.

Because people continue to accept that price by agreeing to pay it. The price of a product is dictated by what people are willing to pay for it. If the price is so low that the seller isn’t happy with it, they don’t sell it and stop making it.

In other words, if you think Nintendo prices are bullshit price gouging, then vote with your wallet. With enough votes, the prices come down or the company goes under. You don’t have that luxury of choice when it comes to groceries or shelter, but you absolutely do when it comes to luxury entertainment expenses. Make them earn your money.

Piggybacking this comment because similar:

Chop up some veggies (I like zucchini, yellow squash, onions, and maybe carrots), toss them in olive oil, salt, some seasoning, and an acid like lemon juice or wine (or a little balsamic vinegar if you want that vibe), then throw it into a lubed pan and into a preheated oven until roasted to your liking (probably like 15-20 minutes at 400°F).

I like this method because it’s largely passive, so this can happen while you deal with some other part of your meal. Sauce, meat, rice, whatever. Plus it’s pretty hard to fuck up unless you forget to use a timer lol.

Well, LLMs can’t drag corporate media through long, expensive, public, legal battles over slander/libel and defamation.

Yet.

So are you a writer for Black Mirror or a time traveler or…?

privacy and security

I’m not really sure how much my OS affects that though. If I remove that avenue, cool, but I’m still signed in on my browser and YouTube and various other apps, so to really protect my privacy and security, wouldn’t I need a whole slew of other changes to actually be effective? Credit bureaus, which I never even asked to have involved, can’t even keep a lid on my shit. How secure and private can I really expect to feel just from changing my phone OS, and is that warm fuzzy really good enough to justify moving from something that is working exactly as I want and expect to something that is, in a word, uncertain?

Not trying to attack you or anybody with these questions, just kinda frustrated that any time I’ve tried to look into it, all I find is a vague statement about privacy without any real elaboration, or worse, a bunch of speculation that the guy running it is unstable or something. Idk, it just feels a little like the wave of people screaming the praises of crypto.

I used to loudly support Google Fi when I switched to them from Verizon. My coverage wasn’t as good, but my bill was a small fraction of what it had been, and I’m usually on wifi so the pay for what you use model was great for me. I also really enjoyed taking it with me to Mexico on vacation. Sweet deal since my average data use was like 1GB/month.

Then like a year ago, I did some digging and found that I could have a very similar experience with Mint, except unlimited data for about the same price. Plus the price was locked in because you pay for it up front. It took maybe an hour to swap our phones over, and we kept our phone numbers. There was a little bit of hassle getting voicemail to work properly, but that got figured out.

My favorite thing about these types of services are that you can buy a pretty cheap, unlocked phone, use eSIM, and you’re not locked into your service provider. I am a fan of the Pixel a series of phones since they’ve got plenty good capability at half the price of flagship phones, but with good support. Others love the option to dump Android for Graphene OS but I really haven’t seen a compelling argument for why I personally should go to the trouble since I don’t see enough of a benefit for my use case. But that’s neither here nor there. I just like unlocked phones, and my 8a and my wife’s 6a were cheap and they were easy to transition to another provider; look into unlocked phones the next time you’re shopping for one so you can have that kind of freedom.

Right now, I’m working a ton (72 hours per week) and my wife is working and going back to school, but every Tuesday is an entire day together. We just started playing Baldur’s Gate 3 for the first time, and we look forward to it all damn week lol. We started like a month ago, but we’re still only just now wrapping up the goblin camp. We both were already really familiar with 5e DnD, so a lot of the mechanics feel pretty intuitive to us. I have gripes with the camera (PS5 version) but overall it’s a fantastic experience.

Before picking this up on sale, we were passing the controller back and forth through Astro bot. Also amazing! We rolled credits, and I’ll probably aim for the platinum trophy at some point without her. There’s truly not much left before we snag that, so she’s not missing out.

I don’t know much about tablets and opened this thread just to see if I could learn something. I think it might be a good idea to add this detail to the main post. I’ve seen some other people mention battery life as a downside to some options, so if battery life isn’t a factor since it’s gonna be plugged in most of the time, adding it to the body of the post could nudge people to recommend options that they otherwise wouldn’t have bothered to mention.

Good luck!

You probably already know, but in case you don’t, bring adapters for your phone charger and whatever else because their outlets are different. Their grid is 50Hz instead of 60Hz in the US.

Idk, call ICE on yourself or criticize a genocide enough and you might get a free flight to El Salvador. Last I heard, setting a Tesla on fire might do it now too. Pretty soon, maybe just voting for a Democrat books you a flight. We’ll see.

Ahead of its time, predicting the consequences of tariffs like that.

And they’re terrified of all the childless cat ladies opting to not produce their next generation of laborer/consumer brood to be said replacement. Hence the crackdown on abortions and contraception and people who pair up in ways that cannot yield children. You can’t have the infinite growth that capitalism demands if the number of producers and consumers goes down.

Combined cycle natural gas plant operator in the US here. Bridging the gap between low demand and high demand times is a big part of why it’s so challenging to try to reduce fossil fuel power solutions. The grid is basically a pressurized pipeline, and it’s only reliable if that pressure is maintained no matter how many “faucets” get opened or closed. Green energy solutions aren’t really able to raise that “pressure” unless we build significantly more than we need and keep a bunch of them off most of the time until peak conditions demand them. Nuclear is extremely slow (relatively speaking) to (safely) alter output to meet demand, so its best usecase is for baseloading as much as possible. But with a natural gas plant, I can put my foot on the gas pedal, figuratively speaking. It’s fucking terrible for the environment, but that’s the cost of everybody insisting on consuming so much goddamn electricity all the time. If you don’t like it, stop supporting power hogs like data centers by using AI bullshit and cloud storage and web hosting and media streaming.

This is a complicated problem, and complicated problems almost never have simple solutions. I wish we could minimize the problem of what happens when 100M+ EVs get plugged in at 7pm on a Tuesday by already having put together a strong public transportation infrastructure that people feel comfortable and safe using, but the time to start doing that was probably during the gas shortage in the 70s when we saw how overly reliant we were on cars. It’s probably not too late to start, but it’s gonna be a challenging transition now no matter what we do.

I don’t know of any piston that can initiate a fusion reaction, but that doesn’t mean it’s never going to be possible. But I think that such a thing would take teams of top researchers decades to figure out with any sort of reliability.

Regarding the rankine cycle, the diagram would need to be much more detailed. From what I am understanding of your diagram, no it couldn’t work that way. I don’t know a lot about fusion, but from my experience in fission nuclear power plants and combined cycle natural gas plants, I can make some assumptions about what to expect from a rankine cycle plant regardless of fuel source. You would need to ensure that only superheated (dry) steam is ever touching the steam turbine blades, and there is a ton of essential equipment that does exactly that. There are a ton of resources out there to learn more about this, and I’d recommend searching “rankine cycle explained” on YouTube to get started. General overview stuff might touch on things like drums and reheaters and condensers and vacuum pumps, but every little piece like that could use its own deep dive, really. It’s fascinating stuff.

Overall, I think there is already a general understanding of how to make a fusion rankine cycle power plant work, and it’s now just a matter of getting a sustainable reaction and then finding the optimal design and operation to safely and reliably maximize the extraction of that thermal energy to perform work. Should this be more like a BWR or a PWR plant? What do refuel outages look like? What sort of preventive maintenance will be required? What sort of hazards will workers be exposed to, and how can we mitigate that?

I’d love to see commercial fusion reactor plants in my lifetime, but I don’t think I’ll see it. We’re pretty close to seeing fission SMR plants really get going. As much as I hate AI shit, their data centers are power hungry af which has pushed these companies to think about providing their own on-site power to relieve strain from the grid, and these SMRs are kinda perfect for this. If we could see that scaled up or at least batched into array designs, we buy a lot of time to figure out fusion while shifting to a greener energy solution or at least replace the existing and very much aging fission plants we already have. And maybe SMRs can teach us something about fusion along the way.

Stay curious :)

So you mean more like a power plant? Are you thinking like brayton cycle, rankine cycle, or both (combined cycle)?

I don’t know much about fusion, but a big part of how a brayton works at that scale is air. For a jet engine the combustion expands, spinning the turbine or afterwards, and this spins the axially connected compressor section which sucks and squeezes air prior to the combustion chamber. A piston engine would be less continuous, so might be better suited? But in any case, this relies on whether fusion moves a shitload of air like a combustion engine does, (and like I said idk if it does,) and if it does then I guess it could be possible so long as pressures and temperatures stayed within metallurgical limits. I also don’t know how economical it could be, but let’s pretend that this is entirely exploratory and costs don’t matter. I’m not gonna shit on your idea because the truth is that I don’t know and you could be predicting a breakthrough idea 100 or 50 or 20 years ahead. Is fusion something that can quickly explode like in a piston engine in the first place or would it be better to run continuously through a turbine? Is that even possible? Idk.

Regarding the rankine cycle, that’s the assumed application of fusion power. It’s just the newest, best idea for how to boil water to superheated steam to spin turbines and condense back to feedwater. I only even bring this up because you specifically mentioned a steam generator, and that really only makes sense if you’re utilizing the rankine cycle. Combined cycle would be using that piston/turbine engine thing from earlier but recycle the exhaust heat to a HRSG which loops to a steam turbine and condenser and back. But you need a large volume of fairly continuous hot exhaust flow for this, so it’s wholly dependent on that thing I said I don’t know lol.

We need some input from people who know something about fusion. I don’t really know how we would control fusion while throwing a shitload of air into it and getting an even bigger shitload of air out the other end. Without that input, idk how anything other than rankine could be managed.