One time I was talking about Robin Hood with some coworkers and one guy was like “he was bad because the people he helped learned to expect handouts” and I wanted to be like… okay can you explain how that flawed capitalist propaganda applies to feudalism
That’s an exaggeration. What was invented in the 16th century was mercantilism. Capitalism really dates for the beginning of the nineteenth century, with the rise of industry and cash crops over artisans and merchants. Vulture capitalism, with the notion that companies have no duties other than generating profit, is even younger.
I think a lot of this comes from the fact that most people don’t know the formal definition of capitalism. We all know the word, we’ve all seen the jokes, but very few people bother to actually define it unless they’re talking about political theory and philosophy, so it’s easy to end up with the impression that Capitalism = Money Can Be Exchanged For Goods And Services.
Capitalism is the economic system where most of the means of production (i.e. everything people need to have to make the stuff that everyone wants) are owned by private individuals or corporations, who then hire people to provide the labor necessary to produce things, with the intent of selling the output at a profit. It’s the difference between “you’re a carpenter and you make a chair and you sell it” and “you’re Richard Q. Richington who owns a chair factory, and you pay people to sell the chairs you paid other people to make and then all the excess money goes back to you.” There have been Richard Q. Richingtons on and off throughout history, but that being the norm for every single industry is a pretty recent development.
I have been asked to highlight another campaign from someone who reached out to me. I'll keep it brief: 6 people trapped in Gaza need money to evacuate.
I am Mohammed Alanqer, married to Enas Majed. We have three childr… Abdallah Alanqar needs your support for Trapped Family in Gaza Appeals f
Their campaign has been up since April and they STILL have not raised enough money.
As of now, they are at €62,492/70,000, less than €8,000 away from their goal.
If you donate, you can message me to draw a character of your choice: x
This is revolutionary. Never again will we have a Chernobyl disaster or a Fukushima tragedy where old people literally sacrifice their remaining life in order to take care of the reactor. Every single one needs to adapt to this immediately
These reactor designs are very interesting. They've been proposed since the 40s but no one has ever built a fully functioning one yet.
They run at a much higher temperature than most reactors, which eliminates the need for a lot of cooling (which is the source of a lot of complexity and danger in a standard reactor: what if the cooling fails?).
Instead they're set up so that the fuel being cool is what makes it burn faster. So you speed up the reactor by cooling it off. This has the nice property that if you stop cooling it for whatever reason (you got hit by a tsunami or your containment just blew up), it ends up heating up, which makes it make less power, which cools itself back off again.
This makes it way safer! All the runaway reactions that could happen if something fails in a regular reactor simply can't happen here.
I think the worst thing that could happen with a PBR is that if your containment broke (which should require like twice the temperature these run at, but someone could always try to explode it or crash a plane into it) you might get a fire, because the graphite surrounding each pebble might burn, because the inert gas would get out and oxygen would help them burn. That's still a relatively minor failure mode as it's very unlikely and you could restore containment by just smothering the reactor in something that doesn't burn.
So yeah. This is very good news for nuclear power: these reactors are safer and simpler than the types we use today. They're also potentially fuel-agnostic? You could run them off thorium or unenriched uranium, which greatly lessens the proliferation risk.
One last thing: they're also easier to maintain because you don't really need to disassemble them as much to refuel them, because they're designed like a gumball machine:
You dump new pebbles in the top, and used ones pop out the bottom!
(the used ones get reused a few times: but each time they go through, they can be checked for any issues and disposed off)
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