The consumer sorting is often not very good and requires multiple bins with a higher capital and operating cost for storage and collection. It's a pain for the users. Single stream trash is the way to go with robotic sorting is the way to go. No reason it can't scale. Amazing work, one of the best uses of labeling and machine vision I've seen to date.
Nice story. Laws and regulations are broken all the time, but only used/prosecuted very rarely when the circumstances are egregious and the parties are pissed. E.g. violent criminals in jail have committed 10-30x more violent crimes than the single one they have been convicted for. Similarly most minor infractions go completely unnoticed and unreported because no one cares. The laws are are there to make things prosecutable and punishable. But they are not there. You can operate many businesses completely outside the law without running into any problems as long as you are courteous, unnoticed, and do no harm. You respect the laws in spirit, but not in practice. E.g. you don't do all the paper work, but you also are a good citizen and respect the rules in spirit if not in practice.
We could decide to dig big inland seas using nuclear weapons. We'd essentially create Mediterranean Sea habitat across southwest by bringing up the Gulf of California (what forms Baja) at Puerto Penasco and creating lots of internal coastal areas with ready access to fresh water. I would guess it could take 5-10 years for the earth moving, and 20-30 for detox, and 20-30 more years for habitat re-equilibration.
Maybe he could control much more twitter stock through friendly shareholders. e.g. I buy $1B of Twitter stock with money I borrow from Elon and pledge those shares to elect Elon's board members and what not. He'd just need 4 friendlies, and they don't even have to be billionaires.
What can we collectively do to help Musk take control of twitter? Are there are any GameStop short-squeeze strategies here?
If the reactors are on, destroying any of the infrasture around it can be devastating. The reactors need external power to operate. If external power disappears, the reactors now need emergency power from diesel gen sets. If those fail due to any reason, the reactors will probably melt down - unless they have already been off for quite a while (~weeks would be necessary). If the reactors melt down, the VVER has both a core catcher and a containment. That's not bad and much better situation than Chernobyl. But other things may go wrong such as a pressure failure and potentially related control rod ejections that could cause the temperatures to rise and pressures to become higher than what the containment can handle.
The surrounding war environment, the stressed operators, etc mean that any of these failures are now more likely. It is reaonsable that external power will not be available, it is possible the gen sets will fail, it is possible the operators will do something stupid.
To put it simply, warfare is not a design basis accident for current light water reactors like VVER-800.
Imagine Russia ousted Treudeuo for crimes against peaceful protestors (freezing bank accounts without trial etc) as occurred this month in Canada. He then sends weapons and trainers to Canada to build up resistance and military installations in Canada, perhaps even offering a treaty for Canada to join Russia as military defense allies. This is basically what the USA/Europe did in Ukraine in 2014 (McCain and company was there and USA spent 5B on NGOs overthrow democratically elected leaders of Ukraine and helped install pro US gov).
I truly hope the same measures will be taken against US or other nation's acts of aggression in the future. e.g. Yemen, Afghanistan,Iraq. This is a great precedent to set.
>people being informed of what is really happening in closed-off autocracies and dictatorships from the first-hand accounts
This extends to democratic systems as well. It seems as if a veil has been lifted on the workings of governments and corporations because information and reporting is no longer processed and packaged by a compact, semi-corrupt media system or fourth estate. No one is going to believe a Weapons of Mass Destruction lie anymore, few are buying into the Ukraine crisis etc, multiple government dissenting views on Covid have proven to be accurate despite censorship and banning. Time scales are shortened, information leakage is everywhere, distribution avenues are many orders of magnitude larger than they used to be, and people really do have a lot more time to look at and think about things. It seems like we are just now more aware of the crap that is happening at large corps/govs.
There is a fifth estate now – a formidable alternative to legacy media, of small and independent, more numerous and interesting, analysts and interpreters of the world and human affairs. This is enabled by more easily usable social media – it is twitter/YouTube/podcasts. This is special and new and I am thankful for it. Now, we have to diminish the negative addiction and consumption effects that these same systems can have.
I suspect these systems do not actually need that much money to operate and manage, and can eventually be treated as water/energy utility type businesses - regulated to fixed profits and with anti-addiction rules. This is no longer advanced technology.
Perhaps a component of this perception is that these technologies are exposing a rotten tree stump that was already there. You only think it's making things worse because you couldn't see it was already bad.
But only part of it. The mental destruction out there is real.
However, you as you scale down, all the radiation damage effects per unit volume or unit surface area increase rapidly causing higher material activation and maintenance cost.
This is true. But the barrier to using over-the-horizon weapons like icbm / hypersonic is much greater than say drone attacks or fighter jet bombs. Have over-the-horizon weapons ever been used? No. But drone attacks and fighter jet activities are daily occurrences because they can be used with little repercussions.