FaceDeer

First thing I’d do when boarding a Federation ship is tell the computer it’s authorized to keep an eye on my vitals.

Most nuclear fission products don’t remain radioactive for long periods either, let alone “virtually forever.” Bear in mind that the longer-lived a radioisotope is, the less radioactive it is.

For JET, I dug up the actual numbers (LLW is low-level waste and ILW is intermediate-level waste):

Radioactive wastes arising from operation and decommissioning of the JET experimental nuclear fusion reactor, located at Culham, are already factored into the UK radioactive waste inventory. Forecast LLW and ILW packaged volumes are 4,120 m^3 and 480 m^3, respectively; activated steels and alloy plant and equipment, including the JET vacuum vessel, are a major contributor to the ILW arising.

According to this page a typical 1-gigawatt fission reactor produces 3 m^3 of high-level waste per year, 7 m^3 of intermediate-level waste, and 90 m^3 of low-level waste per year while operating.

I’m having trouble finding easily comparable numbers for the wastes produced during decommissioning, this page had a lot of detail but was focused more on the area of land that needed to be sealed off rather than the cubic meters of material contained there. It does talk about the mass of some of the turbines being considered as low-level waste being in the range of a few hundred tons, which isn’t much.

It’s true that spent fission fuel rods are high level waste, but the total volume of that is quite small and it’s in a very manageable form. So overall, I’m not really sure there’s going to be a big improvement on nuclear waste production with fusion power. It’s certainly not going to be a panacea, we’re still going to need nuclear waste repositories and still be dealing with processing and sequestering large amounts of materials there.

I have to throw a little water on the “clean” part of the claim, unfortunately. JET does deuterium/tritium fusion, which produces neutron radiation that causes the lining of the reactor to become radioactive. The lining needs to be replaced every once in a while, producing nuclear waste.

BoPLS for short, I assume. Should I add BoPLS+ to be on the safe side?

Well yes, then. That’s what I said. You’d be a programmer who had free underlings doing whatever grunt work you directed them to.

Or are you questioning my use of the term “team” for the AIs? LLMs are specialized in various ways, you’d likely want to have multiple ones that handle different tasks.

Abrams wanted to have Starkiller Base blow up Coruscant in “The Force Awakens” but he wasn’t allowed so he made up Hosnian Prime as an indistinguishable stand-in. He seems to really like blowing up a key planet whenever he takes over a setting.

The role of the human is to tell the AI what it’s supposed to do. If you’re worried about AI that’s sophisticated enough to be completely self-directed then you’re worrying about AGI, which will be so world-changing that piddly little concerns such as “what about my job?” Are pretty trivial.

I’m in a similar place to you career-wise. Personally, I’m not concerned about becoming just a “debugger.” What I’m expecting this job to look like in a few years is to be more like "the same as now, except I’ve got a completely free team of “interns” that do all the menial stuff for me. Every human programmer will become a lead programmer, deciding what stuff our AIs do for us and putting it all together into the finished product.

Maybe a few years further along the AI assistants will be good enough to handle that stuff better than we do as well. At that point we stop being lead programmers and we all become programming directors.

So think of it like a promotion, perhaps.

If I had to make it make sense, Riker killing those clones might have been different because the clones weren’t “awakened” yet.

Or do cloning. If their own DNA is too messed up by the Phage then pick a non-Vidiian species that’s particularly compatible and start running off copies to harvest. Apparently killing clones is fine by the Federation, paragons of moral virtue that they are, so this should be an acceptable solution.

Deflation is bad for people too.

It could shoot back up when the Strait of Malacca gets blockaded, or when it turns out that major oil production companies depend on Chinese-made equipment, or when Russia collapses and stops selling oil to India because China dropped its military support for them, or any number of other possible knock-on effects.

The exact details are not the important thing in what I was talking about. The point is that China’s economic woes will have an effect on you, not what precisely what those effects will be.

Okay, so you’re fine with it. Bully for you. There are a lot of people in your society who are living much closer to the edge and will find themselves in a lot of trouble if prices for the stuff they need go up.

The point of why this is a problem is ripple effects. None of us own shares in Evergrande. But Evergrande’s collapse could cause such big ripples that it’s bound to affect us anyway, even way out at the fringes of seemingly unrelated economies. Your lifestyle may not be impacted directly but you’ll find yourself wondering “why are there suddenly a bunch of wars in southeast Asia?” Then “why are gas prices through the roof?” And then “why are all the prices through the roof?” And finally “why are the poors rioting in the streets and burning my house? Don’t they know how expensive it is now?”

That category is sparser than you might think. If China’s economy collapses you will definitely see an affect on what you pay for stuff. And there’ll be other geopolitical impacts too, as the countries around the world readjust priorities to account for this change.

No, but forms of protest that are specifically intended to destroy the property of unrelated people aren’t particularly legitimate.

Marches are one traditional approach. Those can be disruptive, but they don’t deliberately cause property damage to unrelated victims so that’s way better.

Okay, amend my comment to read “throwing soup at paintings.” Any other changes needed?

We’re talking about what idiots they are.

Pithy quotes aside, not all publicity is good publicity.

Throwing soup on paintings discredits environmentalism to a lot of people. But what they should really be upset about is misleading graphs cherry-picked to look as alarming as possible.

Sea ice is a concerning indicator, sure, but if you look at other news and other graphs about it you’ll not find anything like this gigantic drop. In particular in the section of that page about Antarctic ice:

At the beginning of December, ice extents were at record low levels. However, the seasonal decline in Antarctic ice extent subsequently slowed. As a result, by the beginning of the new year, extent was only sixth lowest.

It also notes that Arctic sea ice extents were typical during 2023, so whatever was happening to Antarctic ice wasn’t necessarily an indication of global trends.

I am an environmentalist, I want to see continued effort being made on switching to renewable resources and ameliorating the effects of climate change. But I worry that a lot of environmentalists are crying wolf very loudly and it’s going to harm the movement in the long run when people realize how overblown some of these arguments are.

My own personal style of humor is to say absurd things with a straight face, and unfortunately I have found that on the Internet there is always going to be someone who believes me without question no matter how absurd a statement I make. Because unfortunately there’s always someone on the Internet who actually believes something that absurd.