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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   26891 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 4, 2023

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Consuming tidal energy further reduces the rotational energy, accelerates the energy loss rate, and decelerates the rotation of the Earth.

I hate how people are ridiculously long-termist when it comes to trivial nonsense like this. If we found that tidal power was slowing the rotation of the Earth, we could simply stop using it and switch to fusion. The very idea is sillier than the urban planners who despaired about cities drowning in horse shit (then we invented the car). At least horse manure was a pressing problem in the 19th century! We do not need to care about extremely long-term issues since our circumstances change. There was litigation in the US about storing waste for a million years:

The court ruled that EPA's 10,000-year compliance period for isolation of radioactive waste was not consistent with National Academy of Sciences (NAS) recommendations and was too short.

From 10,000 to one million years, EPA established a dose limit of 100 millirem per year. EPA's rule requires DOE to show that Yucca Mountain can safely contain wastes, considering the effects of earthquakes, volcanic activity, climate change, and container corrosion, over one million years.

Who cares? These people do apparently... but what does it matter what the radioactive waste will be in 10,000 years or more when the US isn't even competent enough to create a centralized nuclear waste storage site? The whole, farcically administrated Yucca waste dump was cancelled anyway. Right now it's sitting in containers next to power plants! That's obviously not secure for 100 years, 10,000 or a million. Does the government just assume that civilization is going to collapse and so nuclear waste must be secured for the benefits of Mad Max style looters and gangsters?

And at the same time, when there's actually a good reason to be longtermist (on important matters like population growth, or colonizing the universe), nobody cares. The cretins who spent serious time and money on this nonsense should be forced to copy out Bostrom's 'Astronomical Waste' by hand so they can begin to understand the scale of their folly and perverseness.

If we found that tidal power was slowing the rotation of the Earth, we could simply stop using it and switch to fusion.

The same way we've found coal power is causing problems and we can "simply" stop using it and switch to fission?

We did have a good run of switching away from coal, then the greenies got upset about realistic alternatives so we switched back. Also a war broke out.

Well we're switching away from it aren't we? If not to fission, at least other renewables.

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