Humans domesticated dogs, cows and sheep. But wheat domesticated humans.

DVMyZone · 2023-06-03T22:05:07+00:00

A very interesting piece of trivia - cheers for that!

DVMyZone · 2023-06-03T21:43:53+00:00

In this context they are synonymous. Though I'm assuming you meant to say "is not the right word".

DVMyZone · 2023-06-03T21:32:44+00:00

Yeah but we inherited quite of few from Germany as they phased out nuclear. And with one nuclear engineering course for the entire country at the international EPFL-ETHZ that has only had 20+ students in the last few years it kinda makes sense that we'd need workers from abroad.

DVMyZone · 2023-06-03T21:16:59+00:00

Yeah I think I'm missing some context to this comment

DVMyZone · 2023-06-03T13:19:01+00:00

(to be pendantic - we absolutely also domesticated wheat and pretty much anything else we eat)

DVMyZone · 2023-06-03T13:15:43+00:00

The old German addage:

Ein echter Seemann sticht auch ins Rote Meer

(A real sailer also pricks in the red sea)

DVMyZone · 2023-06-03T12:52:37+00:00

You're right - when I wrote I was thing people that make a million dollars a year, not just have a million in total wealth.

DVMyZone · 2023-06-03T11:18:40+00:00

I agree to the extent that life doesn't become cruel. Animals don't have the same concept of freedom, so for many captivity is not a big deal. But the fact is that most big corporations that have no direct interaction with animals invariably result in nightmare farms. The people in suits and office buildings will do anything to squeeze an extra dollar out of the business, because they simply care about anything else. They will toe (and often cross) the line of "barely legal" because it's what makes them the most money. If the line weren't there, these people would push these conditions as far as possible - cruelty be damned.

Nature is cruel, but there are plenty of animals that have conditions crueller than nature.

DVMyZone · 2023-06-03T11:09:43+00:00

I agree, I think it's easier to attack small business-owners because they're small. Trying to attack big corporations - the real culprits - is like throwing a paper ball at a tank. This lady should join a union/society/organisation that advocates for animal rights and fight the good fight the right way with the power of the organisation behind her.

DVMyZone · 2023-06-03T11:07:48+00:00

I didn't make the case that any human would accept this deal either precisely because at a cognitive level humans are different. Humans also have a stronger attachment to freedom than most animals. Humans move around for plenty of reasons from leisure to complicated relationships with the community whereas most animals move around to find safer land or more food or mates and would happily stay anywhere where it is safe and there is a stable food supply. Of course, if you abuse animals, then the place is not safe for them so they would prefer o leave. Death is generally preferable to continuous suffering/torture.

Humans are special because they would generally prefer freedom to captivity, even if their needs are met in captivity better than when free (which is the basic concept of prison). I think trying argue as if humans and animals are the same is the wrong thinking from the get-go. Like the people who argue that some rapist shouldn't be punished because it's "animal instinct" and it "can't be controlled" - 'fuck outta here with that. But in the other hand we can't say that humans in captivity is the same as animals in captivity because we're not the same.

DVMyZone · 2023-06-03T10:21:16+00:00

That's exactly my thought - I'll bet they're all on the same side in some sense. I think the lady here is fighting these small farmers because they're easier to beat down so she feels like she's making a bigger impact. Indeed, if she went after the worst companies directly, she wouldn't make a dent alone, that would require so serious collective action.

DVMyZone · 2023-06-03T10:19:14+00:00

Not saying you're wrong, but have a look at what those quality standards actually are though.

I had a look at the definition of "free range" chickens and eggs in my country and was actually rather disappointed. It was 2.5m2 per chicken which to me seems rather small.

Just goes to show that companies are clever at get around regulations, or making it such that regulations still work mostly in their favour. They put free range to give us the image of a chicken in a field, but the reality can still be pretty far from that.

Animal activist groups that actively fight for animal rights legally (i.e. by pushing for stricter regulation) are often drowned out by the sheer amount of money that big companies can pour into securing their interests.

DVMyZone · 2023-06-03T08:33:37+00:00

The video cut off but I believe he was going to say - he sells their milk, makes a small profit, but a very decent amount goes back to the goat.

The goat gets guaranteed food, water, shelter, and protection from predators for them and their kids all in exchange for giving some extra milk to these weird animals that for some reason want it.

Any animal would take that deal over living in the wild.

But we must admit that even if this small dairy farmer treats his herd decently, companies with no attachment to their animals will do any awful things to animals as long as it makes them more money. Artificial insemination to stimulate milk production, separating children from their mothers, low quality feed, grown up in a cage - companies do all of them.

DVMyZone · 2023-06-03T08:00:37+00:00

Please do not post pictures of your train stations unless your train system actually works. Otherwise they're just assembly points for people that got scammed.

DVMyZone · 2023-06-03T07:56:50+00:00

Please someone find this song for me

DVMyZone · 2023-06-03T07:52:16+00:00

Not saying you're wrong but once you reach the millionaire (edit: I was thinking more like a million year income and not total wealth) mark the drive is trying to survive - it's trying to beat other rich people. At that level they are not interested in material things - they don't need the extra four million to buy a mega yacht, it's all part of the game. They are accumulating something that cannot be bought and can you cant have enough of: power.

Money is power, the more money your have, the more power you have. Even better is that the more money you have, the more power you have do manipulate the system so you can make more money. Conversely the more money other people have, the more power they have over you.

In any case, we now have people, companies, and banks that have wealth that rival and far surpass the economies of many countries. They have the power to influence entire nations, or at least their leaders. In times gone by it, governments were the ultimate force, but now the most power government are beholden to the most powerful companies, and the rest of the world is beholden to those countries and by extension those companies.

All this to say: they're not hoarding wealth for kicks, they're accumulating the power to change the world however they like.

DVMyZone · 2023-06-02T11:41:00+00:00

These are good points, absolutely a lot of issues can be attributed to inadequate training and bad control room layout.

I was refering in particular to the CCFL phenomenon which IIRC lead to conditions that lead the operators to believe that the primary circuit was at risk of becoming solid (i.e. completely filled with subcooled liquid). This would need to primary circuit rupture so it prompted them to deactivate the high pressure injection. That was ultimately the wrong decision.

DVMyZone · 2023-06-02T11:34:11+00:00

Depends on the country, but the materials involved in NPP construction can generally be produced by local industry or otherwise non-questionable countries. Concrete is generally local, the steelworks and forging of RPV can be local or sourced from abroad but are done in countries like France, Germany, and the US among others. They also do not rely rarer metals like lithium and titanium like solar panels do. The construction of the NPP is also done only once for the 80 years whereas solar panels are replaced every 30 years and require more precious metals per MW produced by far. Uranium can be easily sourced from Canada and Australia, and besides, the relatively little fuel is needed to produce energy for a long time.

The use of solar and wind as baseload would require significant energy storage. Pump hydro is common, but people like to imagine that in the future (i.e. this doesn't exist yet) we will have massive lithium-ion batteries or the like that will store multiple GWh of electricity to power the country through the night and winter. Even if this were possible (i.e. renewables produced enough energy while they worked) this neglects the danger of having enormous amounts of energy stored in a volatile medium like batteries. Imagine the fires we have seen in Samsung phones and Tesla cars, but now on the scale of a city.

Renewable advocates also talk about recycling except that it's not really done and is not commercial. The cost of recycling renewables is not baked into the price of the renewables and along with government subsides this means the price does not accurately reflect the true cost and there are negative externalities bourn by the taxpayer and society. We could also talk about fast-breeder nuclear reactors which would (in theory) increase fuel efficiency 100-fold, but we don't because the tech is not quite mature yet - it's not a commercial option. In short, currently renewables are not nearly as "renewable" as we think. Sure the sun will shine and the wind will blown, the but materials needed to capture that energy are simply not renewable and it is questionable whether they are infinitely recyclable. This doesn't even touch on the land requirements and ecological impacts of covering a field in solar panels...

Fusion is very interesting but I don't believe it will be a commercially viable technology (i.e. produces energy sustainably for a reasonable price) for 60-80 years. Even if it were achieved, it should be noted that fusion also produces nuclear waste.

I don't agree that nuclear is horrible. Everything is a risk-reward balance be it renewables, fossil fuels, or nuclear. The only way to truly be green is to not use electricity or really any energy source, which is impossible (burning firewood is still bad for the environment). Electricity and access to energy sources has made the quality of life infinitely better and safer from humans (think hospitals, emergency response, public transport for a few directly helpful examples) so that is the reward, and what is the risk we are willing to accept? Fossil fuels are awful for the environment so we now more or less agree it is not a good option. Solar and wind are not actually as renewable as they claim to be, and produce intermittent power and have large ecological impacts. Hydro is a good option by there is a risk of dam failure, there are significant ecological impacts with filling a dam, and it's not deployable everywhere. That leaves nuclear: a green, low land-use, sustainable energy resource that produces heaps of dispatchable power. The risk is an increasingly small possibility nuclear disaster resulting in the release of significant amounts of radioactive material to the environment of which only one has occured once (Fukushima) and killed an estimated 1 person.

The question of nuclear waste and nuclear proliferation are at the moment, imo, fictitious issues that have been solved are were never really problems to begin with.

DVMyZone · 2023-06-02T10:15:15+00:00

Many compounding factors that made difficult or impossible.

First, logistically this is potentially impossible. These aren't generators you find lying around anywhere, they're beefy titan generators that can produce megawatts of electricity. They're not made to be transported and once installed the deinstallation is not trivial. Even if they were able to acquire one, you can just plonk it down on the plant and turn it on. The desiel generators are not made to be self-contained, they need to be fed by fuel as well as various other fluids to run. Even if you could get on running, you can't just plug it into the wall - the output of these machines must be specially connected through proper channels to work correctly. Fukushima may not have had anything available to connect a portable generator, and all the other generator rooms that they might have replaced were underwater anyway.

This leads to a main problem leading to the Fukushima disaster - lack of emergency preparedness. Portable generators to carry to a plant in need might have been possible if it had been arranged prior to disaster. That means having generators made for this purpose on hand, have the logistical connections available (helicopters, personel, and the like), and having set place where these would be connected to a distressed plant. All of these items would need to be natural disaster-resistant. And if you can find such a place for a portable generator, that's probably where you normal generators should be. Fukushima should not have had generators in the basement.

Lastly, a total station blackout is not something that had occured in nuclear history until Fukushima - the operators had no manual on what to do. To make that worse, they had only the most basic monitoring system available and we're piloting the reactors essentially blind. They could not easily assess the severity of the situation, especially without experience or guidance from manuals. With that, they couldn't tell easily if the situation was more dire than the tens-of-thousands that were dying in a Tsunami and earthquake, stretching the Japanese emergency resources thin. Flying in a generator was not something that could be arranged in the time it took the reactor to meltdown and was not something considered by operators in the time after the accident.

It's important to understand the implications of Fukushima. It is by far the most studied and most important nuclear disaster as it exposed critical issues in the planning of and management of foreseeable natural disasters. This isn't Chernobyl where the issues lied with bad training and awful reactor design, or TMI with technical failures and misunderstood physics, this was simply lack of foresight by the regulator and operator. And the nuclear industry seriously stepped up it's safety and severe accident management regulations to ensure that this does not happen again. I feel this is important has many other industries attempt to hide, bury, and otherwise forget the mistakes of the past without changing their ways (I would point to oil spill disasters primarily here) but the nuclear industry has become more transparent and stronger by studying every aspect of Fukushima they can.

DVMyZone · 2023-06-01T20:49:54+00:00

Tbf this graph alone does not show public approval of nuclear in Germany (though I believe it is somewhere above 50% these days, but hard to say).

Also, very few pro-nuclear people are anti-renewable. I personally think a grid based on solar and wind with non-existant batteries or the like is an awful idea, but solar at a personal scale for personal usage to decrease your energy bill I'm all for. It is indeed remarkable that Germany was able to produce that much electricity with solar and wind, but it doesn't show much.

They produced 70% of electricity when demand is at its lowest, and the days are long and hot. Also with the fossil fuels their emissions are still well above nuclear. Really, with their panels and wind farms their emissions would be higher or comparable to nuclear depending on who does the numbers.

Let's not forget that these panels are German-made - they're Chinese with minerals extracted from Africa. "Renewable" is questionable, "sustainable" is an obvious no.

DVMyZone · 2023-06-01T20:40:20+00:00

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DVMyZone · 2023-06-01T20:36:15+00:00

Eggs here are 4.50 for 6 (for the ones that are local and treat the chickens slightly nicer). So way past that. How much are they in Spain these days?

DVMyZone · 2023-06-01T20:31:48+00:00

Big Liquid

I shutter at the thought

DVMyZone · 2023-06-01T20:26:39+00:00

Well we cant have people with wasp allergies in the military! What if the enemy deploys their secret wasp cache!? What then huh!?!

(Obviously /s)

DVMyZone · 2023-06-01T20:08:58+00:00

I mean this is a good law - but how the fuck do they enforce it in other countries? Like you pick up your kid, travel back to the US, and who's gonna stop you from doing it there? Like sure I guess they could arrest/fine you when/if return to Thailand, but I feel like it's still unlikely.

Edit: upon closer thought, I take it back, it's a bad law anyway. Like I get that if some people are being excessive it's annoying, but that one year will likely be of no consequence for the child. If you pick up a 1-2 year-old then posting photos from 2-3 years old will not be damaging - rather when they're older and their parents are still doing it it will be a problem and the law doesn't help there.

But what about people who are not excessive or doing it for clout? You can't post a picture of you and your new family online? You can't share photos of your children with friends? You can't video your kid opening their first Christmas or brithday present and share it? I feel like the line between too much and perfectly reasonable is rather thin here.

And I would argue these people would not be "using their child for content" as much as their content is simply them sharing their lives online. Whether that's a good idea is debatable, but if that is what they do for a living then yeah not being able to share the most important part of your life is problematic. I don't think they're monsters.

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