OT: EV Charging Stations Stripped of Copper Cables

Exactly. Nuclear waste.

Exactly Natuaral fission reacxtins creatng even more nuclear waste.

Any isotope with a half life of more than a few hundred years isn't very naturally radioactive.

That's the point the greentards™ cant grasp. If its going to be around thousands of years, its not very radioactive AT ALL.

Its used in te balance weighs on many airliners

Grandmother eggs suck

Precisely,. The longer it lasts the less dangerous it is,

The Greem Marxists love to conflate 'highly radioactive' 'lasts thousands of years' but its simply a propaganda lie.

That's what I have been saying. Stuff with a half life of a few hundred years is the problem, and a pyramid that works for 5000 years is plenty good enough

And you happen to be completely wrong, as usual. Stuff with a short half life is a particularly horrible threat, but you don't want environment contaminated with any of the longer lived stuff either - right out to Iodine-129 with it's 15.7 million year half-life.

Only an ignorant yokel like you could fail to see it as a threat.

For rather different reasons.

Pecking order is one area of competition. Evolution depends on having off-spring that survive to reproduce, so the capacity to get enough to eat comes into it too, amongst a whole lot of other things.

You clearly aren't up to that kind of reasoning, and like to simplify your life by leaving out the bits you have trouble comprehending.

A strange assertion. I've never asserted that "all are equal" and in fact tend to point out that the only people who even start off with identical genomes are identical twins, and even their geneomes don't stay identical much beyond conception.

You do seem to think that left-wingers insist that everybody is the same, but this isn't true.

The US Constitution does say "that all men are created equal" but it clearly didn't mean identical.

This does seem to be another of those complicated ideas that you can't actually comprehend.

That's good, even necessary, but it shouldn't supress the occasional excursion into absurdity, which is where ideas come from.

I was just talking to a guy who runs the electronics group at one of our US National Labs. He asked me what sort of stuff we do, and I said "lunatic fringe electronics." He laughed and said that's what he does too.

We agree that scientists present us with wonderful problems to instrument but are generally terrible at designing electronics themselves.

I was just reading some similar thoughts about ideas in a book by Freeman Dyson.

This supposed dichotomy between academic and pragmatic knowledge is false. Both are necessary Example 1. ======= We were developing a laser rangefinder for the Army, featuring fragile optics a ruby laser and a bloody expensive silicon photodiode. Try as we might we couldnt get more than just over a mile range from the lab roof to a white painted building about a mile away. One day a boffin with a tweed jacket and pipe came visiting, we explained our problem. "How much power is the laser?" "EWhat is te noise figure on the photodiode"? "I'll see whats what over lunch"

He came back later and sid - "Oh, well its not good news I am afraid, with that much power and that much front end noise you will be lucky to get a mile put of that with a nice reflective target" So we gave up, drained all the money out that projects budget and cancelled it.

Example 2 ======

I was tasked with designing amongst other things a FM Hifi receiver. To save time we imported a Japanese tuner head and I built the IF strip and detector. The customer was however German, and totally chauvinistic. No Japanese quality. We must have German or at least European, So we got a Philips head. At once we had massive hiss and hum. I didn't have time to track it diown so a consultant was briught on who spent a fortnight calculating the noise contribution of my IF strop and said 'well it doesn't seem to be that' 'I could have saved to two weeks of calculation' 'How so' 'Just pull the tuner out, put in a 10.7MHz signal into theh IF strip and look! No f****ng noise'

(It turned out that wunderbar German tuner head was a pile of crap. They had used a zener diode to stabilize the VCO without seeming to understand that a zener is an ideal noise source, and they had used ferrite slugs in the VCO which make marvellous detectors of magnetic fields. Germans are s*it engineers. They make up for it by testing and fiddling till stuff works. A nation of technicians)

The point here is that academic knowledge can eliminate solutions that

"Are you sure that beam will take the load of pulling an engine out of t forklift?" "we pulled a bigger one out with it last week"

Sounds like a German engineer that was in charge of a new instalation where I worked. We asked him for the settings on some instruments. He said 'we week it up and we tweak it down and when she runs , she runs.'

On a visit to the UK some years ago I went to the Science Museum in Kensington (or wherever it is). They had a Spitfire and a Messerschmit on one of the floors and each had cut-away engines. The Spitfire engine was of course a Rolls-Royce Merlin and the quality of the engineering was staggering. You didn't have to be an engineer to appreciate it. Beautifully polished components shining like mirrors. How the hell they produced workmanship like that in the middle of a major war is beyond me. It was superhuman. The German plane's engine was a pile of garbage in comparison; very crudely thrown together with poorly machined parts. Still, it did fair job I suppose, even though it couldn't match the performance of the Spitfire in the air.

Some Nazi bigwig saw a Merlin engine and announced that they would lose the war.

I think you misunderstood what he said (as usual) Bill. The kind of exposure is also highly relevant. Most notably ingestion as opposed to simple proximity to the source. You are aware - I assume - that different modes of radiation (eg. alpha, beta, gamma etc.) have different penetrative qualities and whilst lead is required to screen out some types, others can't even make it through skin.

You usually do. You don't understand much, and imagine that your own defective understanding justifies quite a bit of off-target rudeness.

The problem with the longer-lived radio-nucleotide is that they will still be dangerous long after our current civilisation is dead and forgotten. We can't predict who or what will get exposed to our radioactive waste, or how they might get exposed.

Burying it deep in some kind of geologically stable structure is the best we can do, and we still aren't actually doing it, some seventy years after we started generating high level radioative waste.

Obviously. I've had a technical education that does explicitly include that kind of information. I've even worked on electron microscopes which rely on beta-particles (electrons) as their illuminating mechanism.

If you knew what you were talking about, you'd know that, rather than having to "assume" it.

Jeez, Bill. I was only trying to be kind to you and you're attacking me for it! I don't think I'll ever understand you Communists.

It's a waste being polite to Sloman. His only mode is contempt.

So ignore him.

Pull the other leg. You were trying to be patronising about your own imagined technical expertise, and got what you deserved.

I don't think I'll ever understand you Communists.

Since you can't even identify them correctly, that isn't any surprise. If you are trying to label me as a communist, you are being remarkably stupid, even for you. From time to time I get to remind the qroup that I'm a democratic socialist - while Communists are autocratic socialists, and got slung out of the International Socialist movements in 1871, when Karl Marx's silly ideas about "the leading role" of the party were rejected.

Mikhail Bakunin's famous quote dates from that period

I do post contemptuous comments about contemptible people. They don't constitute the bulk of my output, but John Larkin only reads stuff about him, and regards anything less than fulsome flattery and awed admiration as contempt.

I've had nice things to say about Phil Hobbs and Piglet, amongst others, but John won't have read them.

Very kind of you! But a small point - the CP was, theoretically, a socialist bridge to communism. Nobody - especially Marx - know what communism would be in detail - simply that the process of revolutionary socialism would put an end to capitalism for the right reasons.

So history might suggest :-)

The problem is that the communist party was a authoritarian bridge to socialism - and authoritarian implies that was going to be a small group telling rest of the population how to be socialist. Any theory that imagines that that is every going to work is clearly based on false premises - as Bakunin clearly and prophetically pointed out.

Marx had a lot of brilliant insights into economics, but he was less brilliant at practical politics.

In other words, power corrupts.

Which means that governments are dynamically unstable, and a long-term-democratic society is a remarkable thing.

Why end "capitalism"? Economic and intellectual plualism works.

Some governments are dynamically unstable. Proportional representation (in places like Sweden, Germany and the Netherlands) seems to lead to multi-party democracy, and coalition governments. This leads to incremental change and much more stable administration.

Australia settled for a single transferable vote and single member constituencies in the lower house, and it doesn't work as well.

Nobody wants to end capitalism - but everybody recognises the need to regulate it. America - with it's anti-trust legislation - was the first to recognise the necessity, but it failed to take it anything like far enough. Others have done better.

It's a waste being polite to Sloman. His only mode is sneering contempt.

There, FIFY.