Thank Elon Musk for Bringing Me Back

Failing to Escape the Internet since the 90s

[surpluscornbread]

[dailycutepets]

[yossyislandd]

@mewtonian-physics

[picsthatmakeyougohmm]

[eldritchscholar]

#kind of a milf reblog

[starscreamhecatoncheries]

I won't apologize

[rogueinkglitch]

How the hell could I possibly explain this post to somebody not on tumblr

[surpluscornbread]

I could do this easily. Just built different.

[acanticleforkev]

finally

[eightyonekilograms]

Zoomers you sick fucks. YKINMKATOK but you’ve gotta draw the line somewhere.

[official-kircheis]

What do you mean exactly when you say that we can deal with nuclear “waste” by putting it in a fast reactor or something like that.

yeah sure burn it in fast reactors, but the main thing is there is just not that much of and it's actually easy to handle and dispose of. the entire lifetime energy usage of a person in a rich country corresponds to about one beer can of spent nuclear fuel. this is an incredibly tiny amount of waste.

and its in ceramic form, not green goo like the Simpsons and idiots who get their information from the Simpsons, like Greenpeace, would have you believe. it's not volatile or particularly hard to contain. it's spicy rock.

just putting it below several hundred metres of geologically stable rock is enough to keep it out of the biosphere for the time it's dangerous. scientifically illiterate greens will be all, oooh but no one can predict what will happen over ThOusAnDs oF yEaRs. this is, of course, like, young earth creationism levels of "geology doesn't real". we know from the oklo natural reactor that radionucleides don't even move more than a few centimetres.

this was figured out in the 70s and early 80s, by the way

tl;dr nuclear waste was a solved problem 40 years ago and enemies of humanity like greenpeace have been lying and spreading FUD about it ever since. "no one knows what to do with nuclear waste" is as false as "no one knows what to do about measles"

[official-kircheis]

no one has ever been hurt by commercial nuclear waste, meanwhile waste "management" for fossil fuels looks like this

and kills millions of people every year. finland and sweden are finally building repositories of an early 80s designed .

this is the standard the KBS-3 system is designed to (from the massive report):

The principal acceptance criterion requires that “the annual risk of harmful effects after closure does not exceed 10^–6 for a representative individual in the group exposed to the greatest risk”. “Harmful effects” refer to cancer and hereditary effects. The risk limit corresponds to an effective dose limit of about 1.4·10^–5 Sv/yr. This, in turn, corresponds to around one percent of the effective dose due to natural background radiation in Sweden.

one percent of background radiation in a worst-case scenario. and this is supposed to hold for 100 000 years. no other engineering project is held to nearly the same standard. and the system still meets it!

in KBS-3 the fuel is encased in cast iron and copper, sealed with bentonite clay, and buried below 500 m of bedrock

even if you didn't bother with the metals and clay, and just put the spent fuel in a hole in the ground the risks would not exceed background radiation (thick red line in the figure) for a million years.

you know what we deal with by just putting it in a hole in the ground? lots of other toxic waste! like arsenic and mercury!

Waste Management - K+S Aktiengesellschaft

As a certified specialist waste management company, REKS provides solutions in the areas of disposal, covering of potash tailings piles, as

after 100 000 years, spent nuclear fuel is as radioactive as natural uranium ore. so it's as dangerous as it was when you dug it up in the first place. you know what the half-life of mercury is? eternity. but no one bats much of an eye at just putting the thing that literally stays dangerous forever in a hole in the ground, with far less study going into it than any nuclear waste repository, because it's not RaDiOaCtiVe.

saying "nuclear waste is too dangerous" while the world is still burning coal is like, I don't know, having food at home but you might trip and fall walking to the fridge so you'll continue to ride your motorcycle, without a helmet, black-out drunk, on icy roads, at night, to go get McDonald's

[morlock-holmes]

I'm pro-nuclear, and particularly agree with the last paragraph right above this response, but I have to say, as a civilian and doofus, I don't understand why people are so bad at explaining nuclear waste disposal?

The big question I have after reading all these explainers is:

What's up with that "This is not a place of honor" memes? Are those unnecessary silliness because the waste is going to become safe well before any kind of civilizational collapse that could wipe out our accumulated cultural knowledge of nuclear waste?

[postsforposting]

The memes are because they're fun. Just because there shouldn't be a civilizational collapse, does not mean you should forgo planning for that possibility.

[surpluscornbread]

You should do that planning IF AND ONLY IF the costs it adds are not so great that it will prevent us from actually using nuclear. Because let’s be clear, too much greenhouse emissions can cause civilizational collapse. A few potential sentient beings who are especially adventurous getting radiation poisoning (which will quite quickly have whatever society exists then form their own containment of the site that will make sense to them) will not.

“But what if they build a whole city on top of the site???”

Then it’ll probably be a situation like Ramsar, Iran that has what are supposed to be dangerous levels of radiation and...it’s fine. There’s been no detected ill effects. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ramsar,_Iran

I don’t think it’s a good idea to spend a ton of money that could be used to scale up clean power even faster and that contributes to the exaggerated sense of risk people have about nuclear power. We’re spending so much time thinking about an extremely low probability events that in the worst case scenario will only impact a small number of future sentient people before they figure out the issue themselves. That’s not a rational cost-benefit calculation!

[wiremxther-deactivated20230819]

radfems are consistently so fucking funny but completely unintentionally just accidental clowns

[averagesizedperson]

Every male astronaut wants to fuck the moon!

[surpluscornbread]

Correction: Every male astronaut wants to fuck the moon!

[eightyonekilograms]

Is Binance.US a Fake Exchange?

Billions in customer funds transferred directly from Binance.US to offshore Binance exchange. Is this just a ploy to trick regulators?

(this is the same place that published “Is Alameda Research Insolvent?”, which is what kicked off that whole thing)

[surpluscornbread]

The only reason Binance isn’t in the exact same boat as FTX is because they likely have a somewhat more competent trading arm (not a hard hurdle to jump over given the reporting on Alameda).

[homunculus-argument]

Imagine talking to a hot girl on tinder who's kinda odd and quirky but also way too pretty to be talking to you in the first place. And then she wants to meet up at an odd place to hook up and you figure alright I'm either getting laid or having my organs sold in the black market, win-win in my books, so you go meet up.

But once you get there, there's no girl or anyone throwing a bag over your head to take you to a secondary location. Just an alien who goes "oh shit, that's a rare one", and snaps a few photos of you for their personal collections.

You fucking hate it when they do that. Spotting humans in the wild is all fine for a boring-ass hobby, but using fake mating calls to lure you in is just fucking cheating.

[girlballs-archive]

the thing about AI art is there's a whole- wait. did you guys hear that

oh shit heimdall just sounded the gjallarhorn to signal the arrival of naglfari

[spacedoutsheepy]

an interesting part of migrating to tumblr and learning its culture is figuring out by clues how bloggers announce that they don't give a fuck about whatever issue of the week is happening and don't want to get wrapped up in the discourse. If that's indeed what this means idk

[rabbitindisguise]

that's very close, it mostly signals that the awareness of the discourse has reached critical mass on people's dashboards and folks are parodying the most common popular posts. Kind of like a clown routine making fun of other clowns when they're not looking, except everyone can see it and hits reblog anyways. There's a whole category of post that makes fun of the discourse of pet ownership that's like "lumberjack is an invasive species in hardware stores." Self aware humor is the vibe. Don't worry it's easy, just use form without the original context like

"learning about tumblr culture like" *spins roulette wheel* "running outside and touching grass all the time"

"actually that's not quite true because" *spins roulette wheel* "most tumblr users don't know what outside is nevermind how to touch things"

it's also a subtle jab at the original conversation being really dumb. It's not about not commenting or participating, it's PVP. You've just entered an attack zone, anyone can jump in on this conversation and own you or me or both of us at any time. It's great.

[girlballs-archive]

what are y'all talking about can we Please focus on the fact that the sons of Muspel literally just destroyed the Bifröst

[surpluscornbread]

Also wait a minute...who the fuck talks about Naglfari?! Doesn’t he get like 1 line from Snorri Sturluson?

[femmenietzsche]

U.S. Catholic Priests Are Increasingly Conservative as Faithful Grow More Liberal

Research has found that younger priests and those ordained in more recent years are noticeably more conservative than older priests, with ne

Research on Catholic clergy by the Austin Institute has found that younger Catholic priests and priests ordained in more recent years tend to be noticeably more conservative than older priests on a host of issues, including politics, theology and moral teaching. The Survey of American Catholic Priests has found that since the 1980s, successive cohorts of priests have grown more conservative, according to a 2021 summary report.

Regarding the church’s prohibitions of contraception, masturbation, homosexual behavior and suicide, the impossibility of women’s ordination to the priesthood, and the necessity for salvation of faith in Jesus, each successive 10-year cohort of priests supports church teaching more strongly than the one before it. Those ordained in 2010 or later are the most conservative of all—and the least happy with Pope Francis, with roughly half disapproving of him, according to the Austin Institute survey. The Vatican didn’t respond to a request for comment. 

...

Almost 80% of priests ordained before 1980 “approve strongly” of the current pontiff, compared with 20% of those ordained in 2010 or later, according to the 2021 survey. Nearly half of the younger priests disapprove of the pope, either “strongly” or “somewhat.” 

I'm half surprised they could even find a statistically significant number of priests who were ordained after 2010

[tanadrin]

yeah this seems to be an artifact of just fewer men wanting to join the priesthood to begin with. (it’s also possibly indicative of why the American bishopry is so insanely conservative relative to the body of the nation’s catholics.)

eventually there’s gonna come a point where either the clergy has to be reformed, because it only consists of ultras who are actively alienating parishoners, or the institution as a whole is going to have to become comfortable with that alienation, and turn inward to become even more reactionary. but since these processes are so gradual, it could take decades. anyway, my bet is on the latter outcome; i think the american catholic church would rather self-destruct than concede it’s out of step with the needs of american catholics, or that it has lashed itself politically to a movement (ideological conservatism) that despises it and holds in contempt almost everything else it believes, outside of abortion and gay marriage.

[surpluscornbread]

While I think the analysis of why younger priests are so conservative is right, I don’t really think there’s good reason to believe that at this point going more liberal will do much more than slow down the bleeding in the US. Why? Because liberal people are increasingly irreligious in general in a trend that’s been accelerating for 30 years. I’d like to cite a couple of surveys that help illustrate what’s happening.

First, an earlier one from Pew Research 2011 here: https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/2009/04/27/faith-in-flux3/

This discusses the reasons people leave and the ones we’re likely categorize as “the church is not liberal enough” (which I’m marking in red on the below screenshot) lean heavily towards non-affiliation with any faith, which is the single largest group of leavers (numbers don’t add to 100% because this is the percent of respondents citing the following as a reason and people were allowed to choose as many as they wanted to):

What then is likely happening? Well people who leave the church when citing these reasons aren’t finding that they need any religion to satisfy their needs in life. Note that people leaving for Evangelical churches (which tend towards conservativism) substantially outnumber those leaving for Mainline churches (which tend towards liberalism) and non-affiliation outnumbers the mainlines by over 3-to-1. This also explains why groups like Unitarian-Universalists or Quakers who lean hard into liberal/leftist values aren’t seeing explosions of converts from more conservative or even centrist denominations. When liberals decide to leave, they just don’t see the value of religious membership. This is reinforced by a 2021 Gallup survey here: https://news.gallup.com/poll/393737/belief-god-dips-new-low.aspx

The single trait that correlates stronger than any other on belief in god this survey recorded was not age, education, urban vs suburban vs rural, which part of the country a person lives in, or race: it was self-identification as a liberal/leftist. As of 2021, nearly 40% of self-identified liberals do not believe in God whatsoever. That’s a fairly astounding figure given that the figure for the population as a whole is 19% (do note they’re grouping “unsure” and “do not believe” together but for the purposes of this point that’s not important). So what’s happening?

My reading of this is that further left political positions generally don’t find the “god-shaped hole” that many religious people think of when they think of non-belief. The rituals, the community, the support services just aren’t appealing to those with liberal/leftist people sufficiently to make them want to find a religion that aligns with their values. So even if the church does go left, they will at most prevent this group from straying. Since most liberals are still believers in god that is reason to think they’ll stay if the church is better aligned with them. But it won’t win back those who have left for those reasons because they’re not even looking for anything like what a religion has to offer.

There would, however, likely be an exodus of conservatives mostly to protestant right-leaning denominations. That’s already happened some but is limited compared to the likely impact of fully embracing liberalism. And that would include some of the richest and more politically influential members of the American Catholic church. As seen by the string of highly right-wing Catholic supreme court judges, many right wing Catholics are in fact quite well off and influential. Furthermore the problem of not getting liberal/left priests will likely continue. That implies a real commitment to the faith that on average these trends in leaving don’t indicate is there. Which likely means plenty of paper members like in Western Europe, but not many committed ones.

Now, full disclosure, I’ve been an atheist since high school and left vague protestantism behind, but the trend exists there too. Religion is just not that high a priority for most liberal/leftist people and those few for whom it is haven’t really found a way to reverse that in the developed world at least. I don’t even know if reversing that trend is possible at this point. I imagine that Catholic leadership is looking at this too and coming to similar conclusions. If they turn hard right they will lose most followers but keep their hard core base. If they turn further left they’ll likely at least slow the total follower loss but lose the hard core base. Both of those likely seem like losing propositions so the answer becomes much more limited rear-guard actions while hoping something external changes the trend lines.

[adz]

what the libcucks fail to understand is that this is a small price to pay for the end goal: an embedded HUD with unskippable advertisements in the margins of your eyesight

[ultraviolet-divergence]

this screenshot is a headline edit/joke, about a real USA Today article (which is far more praising) and is spreading around twitter and here. The real number of primates they've killed is lower, but I think it's important to understand why.

Neurallink is a fucking awful company whose marketing materials and CEO are outright lying as to their products' supportable potential. But they're not big enough to actually have killed 3,000 primates. Most significantly, we know that the the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine filed a lawsuit against a UC Davis lab for invasive and deadly brain experiments on 23 intelligent primates.

The Physician Committee points out in its complaint that Neuralink and UC Davis staff failed to provide dying monkeys with adequate veterinary care, used an unapproved substance known as “Bioglue” that killed monkeys by destroying portions of their brains, and failed to provide for the psychological well-being of monkeys assigned to the experiment.

The reason it's important to point out that it's less than 3,000 is that this kind of work is very often done at university laboratories, which gives us more leverage to slow it down or keep it out of this dude's hands.

[ultranos]

Holy...okay. 3000 non-human primates might not be the correct number, but even 23 primates dead in this experiment is horrifying from a science perspective.

I worked in a neuroscience lab that did work with one (1) rhesus monkey. His name was Beckett. Beckett had better healthcare than a university undergraduate. Hell, it took less hoops to get some experimental studies involving undergrad volunteers up and running than it was to do one experiment with Beckett wherein he got to sit in a chair and eat grapes.

See, the paperwork regarding experiments with animals was intense. I spent three days filling out the forms and going back and forth with the ethics board to let us do experiments on terminal mice wherein they'd peacefully be put under anesthesia and never wake up from surgery. As in we were putting a sick mouse to sleep and had to be 100% sure it would not be in any pain or distress. Screwing up and causing a mouse harm or killing it outside of these exact bounds? You'd be lucky if you ever got to work with a mouse again.

Not only that, but since an animal was expected to die in the experiment, we had to report how many we needed in the experiment and then how many actually died. And if the latter number was higher, you better believe the ethics board would be on our case demanding to know what the actual hell happened.

(There's a plaque, by the way, in the labs, in remembrance of all the animals whose lives we ask for in the pursuit of science. It's right there when you walk in.)

The paperwork and restrictions get more and more complex and strict the higher up the "evolutionary chain" you go up. If you MUST use an animal model, you use the lowest one on the chain that can meet your requirements. As in, why use frogs if you can use zebrafish? Why use fish if you can use fruitflies? Why use a living creature at all if your computer simulation is good enough? And if you can't give a good answer, your proposal should be denied.

Back to the monkeys and Beckett. Monkeys, or "non-human primates" as they're often known as, are usually at the top of this chain. Ideally, you treat them like humans who are unable to consent for themselves. Which means they need advocates for them. Beckett pretty much had a vet assigned just to him. If he so much as had a sniffle, the vet had the power to veto any and all experiments he'd be involved in until he was feeling better.

This was important because if your lab had a monkey and that monkey died for reasons other than "natural causes" that the ethics board did not okay? There was going to be an investigation and if they didn't like what they found, not only would your lab never get another monkey again, but there was a damn good chance you'd be barred from working with any and ALL animals.

So from this perspective, "23 monkeys dead" should be read a very specific kind of shock and disgust. One dead should have made any kind of ethics board hit the breaks on this shit and start asking pointed questions as to "why".

(Oh, and in case you're wondering, there is an answer to the question of "what happens to monkeys who can't be used in research anymore?"

They're sent to the farm.

No, really. There are legit primate sanctuaries specifically for retired research primates. Where they get to live out the rest of their days in peace and safety in as close to a natural environment as possible. Beckett was a cranky old guy, and when I left the lab he was still there, but the plan had been for him to retire to one of those. I hope he got there and ate as many grapes as he could sucker the researchers into giving him as he could.)

[magical-awesome-kid]

Fellow researcher here, and I can 100% concur with the above. It takes SO much work and paperwork to get approved for every animal you get your hands on. We have hundreds of documents that will state essentially the same 5 things over and over because we HAVE to have a paper trail.

Having almost two dozen non-human primates dead? That's horrifying. Someone was bribed and the ethics board should be at all of their throats, shutting down this project forever.

[guerrillatech]

[woketopus]

Oh it gets worse

[nafinstabs]

And worse

[surpluscornbread]

No it’s fine! Look we put a metro station on top of an urban freeway with a bunch of parking lots/parking garages nearby. See? America can do urbanism!!!

[ultirex]

go to this random coordinates generator and say in the tags how you would fare if you were dropped where it generates without warning. i’ll go first i’d be dropped in the middle of the fucking south atlantic ocean and perish

[deerspace9]

I could easily survive it I would swim to Bouvet island and call a cab from there

[surpluscornbread]

Oh this is easy mode! All I’ve gotta do is have a heavy coat and gloves to survive the sub-freezing temperatures and walk for about 2 hours to the nearest buildings I could find on Google while not experiencing hypoxia from being nearly 3 miles above sea level. Easy mode!

[pileofknives]

North Korea shooting missiles in the air to keep the rent in the sea of Japan low

[squareallworthy]

I think the most interesting and far-reaching effect of the collapse of FTX is how all the other cryptocurrency exchanges have immediately pivoted to demonstrating how trustworthy they are by commissioning independent audits and outside oversight and other verifiable safeguards of their depositors' money ha ha no they're all scams.

[surpluscornbread]

No they scrambled to find sketchy auditing firms doing instantaneous shots of accounts to convince people they’re better than a firm that everyone in crypto was previously convinced offered a gold standard for transparency and upright behavior in the space. This is just another excuse to fall for crypto’s basic lack of appealing products besides the claim that later on someone else will buy it for more than the current investors did.

It’s on crypto to not offer what they’re comfortable with but offer the level of transparency normal securities do. But if they did that then the one unique appeal they have, not currently being regulated like normal securities, would be undermined.

[afloweroutofstone]

For the first time in US history, guns are now the #1 cause of death for children

[the-grey-tribe]

That graph tells me nothing. Were overall gun deaths going up or down? Do more or fewer children survive into adulthood now?

[surpluscornbread]

That’s not really true. It tells you where the next area of primary focus should be. Child deaths are bad and society should be constantly trying to find ways to lower them. A vital, though incomplete, part of knowing which to lower is knowing which are doing the most killing. Once you’ve got that list you can then work out more details like “what actions are needed to lower this type of death?” and then “how much cost comes with those actions and what are the side effects of them”.

If you take a graph like this as a starting point for further discussion and research, it’s quite useful.