• 3 Posts
  • 131 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 24th, 2023

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  • I’ve been happily using RSS feeds for many years. I mostly use them for webcomics. I’ve got a bunch of different webcomic feeds. But I also use RSS to follow a bunch of low-traffic sites that I care about the content of but don’t want to have to manually visit just to see if there’s an update.

    Also, I don’t have a google account, but I use RSS to follow a couple of youTube channels that I find interesting. (Again, stuff that rarely updates. eg. hbomberguy.)



  • Funny joke. But yeah, the creation, distribution, and disposal are not free - even if they are created from trees. Using two sheets isn’t a big deal, but why use double what you need?

    Anyway, I’m not trying to say we need to be super-frugal with our paper towels. I’m really talking about people who just keep grabbing more and more of them until their hands are dry. I’m sure we’ve all seen bins overflowing with barely-used paper towels. We don’t need that.


  • I just wish people would know how to use paper towels so that they don’t end up wasting huge piles of them for nothing. 1 sheet is enough. You don’t need 5. Do it like this:

    • After washing your hands, brush excess water off each hand using your other hand. Your hands should not be dripping wet when you reach for the paper towel.
    • Take a single paper towel. Don’t scrunch it up, and don’t just clasp the towel. Use all parts of the paper towel to deliberately wipe your hands. The paper towels are quite absorbent. They don’t need to be 100% dry to remove the water from your hands.

    The end. If you do this, your hands will not be wet. You will not need a second paper towel.




  • I’m still using Windows 10 on my personal work laptop, and I’ve got to say that what you’ve described sounds pretty appealing. Windows 10 with most of the crapware removed, and extended support. That sounds like a good deal…

    But on the flip side, I think it’s a bad idea to get an OS from a piracy site. Maybe it’s all genuine and tickety-boo, but being a reputable 3rd party source is a fairly high bar. I certainly wouldn’t trust a site I’ve never heard of to give me a legitimate copy of a better-than-standard version of Windows. Their offer to verify their own files is less than convincing. I think I’d need to be an active part of the scene to be able to trust something like that - because it certainly smells like an easy way to get back-doored.




  • People in this thread are hitting us with all sorts of whatabout stories with extreme conditions; and meanwhile I’m working in a office where people will come in and turn on the cooling because they just walked up some stairs, and then turn on the heating after they’ve sat down for a couple of minutes. No concept of self regulation. Just any hint of discomfort means the room has to change temperature.

    It that context, the pushback in this thread is a bit depressing.








  • The cost of constructing and decommissioning power plants is important for sure; but it has nothing to do with energy density - which is what we were talking about before. It’s true that building solar panels takes energy and resources, and the panels don’t last indefinitely. So there is a lifecycle cost to using them. But the same is true for all forms of power generation.

    A common way to compare these costs is to look at the ‘payback time’ of each form of power generation. The payback time is the amount of time it would take for the power plant to produce enough energy to pay back the lifecycle costs required to build, operate, and decommission that type of plant. It’s basically how long it takes for the construction to have been ‘worth it’.

    In terms of payback time, wind power is by far the best; typically taking less than 1 year to pay itself off. Solar is pretty good too, but is highly dependent on where it is used. And nuclear… is not good on this measure. It takes decades for a nuclear power plant to pay itself off, because the plants are very expensive to build and decommission.

    Obviously there are other things to consider in terms of the strengths and weaknesses of different forms of power generation. But you’ve been talking about the cost of materials and construction as though it is a weakness of renewables, and it really really isn’t. That’s in fact one of their strengths, and a major weakness of nuclear. Its strange that you say nuclear is ‘insanity powerful for its cost’, because its cost is the greatest weakness of nuclear power. Its much cleaner than coal, but much more expensive, even though it uses so little fuel. And it is not cleaner than solar or wind, but it is still more expensive.

    Your point about land usage is a stronger point in favour of nuclear power… except that depending on what country you are talking about, that could easily swing the other way. Solar and wind do take up more space than nuclear, that’s for sure. But nuclear requires certain geological conditions for the safe operation of the plant, and the storage of waste. So depending on where you live, finding unused land suitable for renewables can be much easier than finding a suitable location for a nuclear power plant and waste containment facility.