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Joined 23 days ago
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Cake day: April 14th, 2026

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  • In the 1990s, the NRC had to “take repeated actions to address defective welds on dry casks that led to cracks and quality assurance problems; helium had leaked into some casks, increasing temperatures and causing accelerated fuel corrosion”.[11]

    With the zeroing of the federal budget for the Yucca Mountain nuclear waste repository in Nevada in 2011, more nuclear waste began being stored in dry casks. Many of these casks are stored in coastal or lakeside regions where a salt air environment exists, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology posited that corrosion in these environments could occur in 30 years or less, while the NRC was studying whether the casks could be used for 100 years as some hoped.[12]

    Impervious to absolutely anything, except a little helium, or slightly salty air.





  • I’m not sure I agree that we have problematic debt or affordability issues — at least not ones that artificially constraining the money supply would solve.

    There are short-term cost price inflation problems like the cost of eggs due to an avian cull after a bird flu outbreak. That’s not a problem caused by printing money.

    Ditto oil shocks. An affordability crisis unrelated to money supply.

    Then we get to long-term affordability problems like housing. Housing is expensive due to policies that constrain new construction (NIMBYs) like parking requirements, supposed environmental concerns (on dense urban infill construction?) and the like.

    But what makes housing really expensive is the financialization of homeownership. 100 years ago, if you took a loan on a house, the term was typically five years. The concept of a mortgage then was more like the concept of a title loan today. There’s remnants of this idea today in the game Monopoly — you buy a home cash, and if you run out of cash you mortgage the property — get some quick cash but sign the income over to the bank until you pay off the mortgage.

    Now with 30 year loans, you’re really just renting your house and the bank is the landlord. But the 30 year loans jacks up the sale price which benefits the seller, the realtor, the broker, the city/state/whatever that collects property tax and the bank that actually owns the home until you pay it off.

    Again, not a problem of money supply.

    I’d challenge anyone who thinks the gold standard is a solution to read any book on modern monetary theory (MMT) and tell me they still think so after. Stephanie Kelton is a great MMT theorist.

    In a nutshell, MMT says that the only constraint on a fiat currency issuer’s ability to print money is their tolerance for inflation. Which I don’t think gold bugs would like but would be forced to agree with.






  • resipsaloquitur@lemmy.cafetoComic Strips@lemmy.worldAnything but metric
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    4 days ago

    Unless you give me a reason for converting miles to inches outside of a lab, you haven’t shown what you say you’ve shown.

    I can demand you do a bunch of time conversions in your head and pretend your inability to do so means we should switch to metric time. But that would be silly.

    I took an astronomy course in college (in America). Want to guess what system we used? It wasn’t inches.

    Though even astronomy uses AU, which isn’t an even base-10 multiple of meters but a useful human-scale (or solar system-scale) measurement.



  • resipsaloquitur@lemmy.cafetoComic Strips@lemmy.worldAnything but metric
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    4 days ago

    I presume you use an electric kettle, then?

    So you have it boil water by specifying the number of Joules to use? Or kilocalories?

    What even is this line of reasoning? Outside of a lab, I don’t need to know the amount of energy used to boil water. That’s the point. It’s boiling when it boils.

    And 100°C isn’t even the boiling point of water at altitude. It’s a totally arbitrary scale, not very useful in day-to-day situations.


  • resipsaloquitur@lemmy.cafetoComic Strips@lemmy.worldAnything but metric
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    4 days ago

    Do you really need to know the number of inches from Los Angeles to Portland outside of a lab? Seems unlikely.

    That’s the point. In a lab, where conversions and formulas are frequently used, metric makes sense. I use it all the time. Even the US military uses metric for their specifications.

    Outside the lab, it makes little sense.


  • resipsaloquitur@lemmy.cafetoComic Strips@lemmy.worldAnything but metric
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    4 days ago

    I don’t believe you. Any time you’re looking at an apartment or house and don’t have a floorplan or a 10’+ tape measure, you walk the length of each side of a room side heel-and-toe to get a rough idea. The deviation of the length of your foot from 12 inches isn’t material in this situation.

    And if you’re really struggling with this, a room with a 10’ side would be about ten small steps across, a bit more than three strides.

    I know intuitively how long my foot is and how long my stride is. I don’t know intuitively what the length of the path travelled by light in vacuum during a time interval of ⁠1/299792458⁠ of a second, where the second is defined by a hyperfine transition frequency of caesium.


  • resipsaloquitur@lemmy.cafetoComic Strips@lemmy.worldAnything but metric
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    4 days ago

    So what if someone is standing back trying to communicate with you how much to raise it so it looks good?

    “Raise it by the length of the last segment of your thumb!” You’ve just re-invented the inch. Congrats.

    “Raise it by 2.54cm!” Wow, great units that are easy to eyeball without a ruler. Based on a subdivision of the great circle of the earth going through Paris (of all places). Definitiely not arbitrary and very useful in everyday situations.