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Cake day: August 23rd, 2023

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  • From scratch it’s obviously not feasible, but having been a former Soviet state I’d imagine a good majority of the resources needed are floating around.

    The main challenges with nuclear weapons are 1. procurement of the fissile material, 2. yield efficiency, and 3. miniaturization. Once you have the first part done, as Ukraine very likely has the nuclear fuel processing facilities to do so, the second part is less important if you just want a bomb. Just look at the fact that they were so confident the Little Boy would work they didn’t even bother with a prototype, even if its yield ratio was quite low. It needed about 60kg of uranium for its 15kT yield, while Fat Man managed 21kT with only about 5kg of plutonium.

    So, it’s a tradeoff where if nuclear material is hard to come by and you need to get the bomb somewhere far away, making something really efficient is pretty important. However, if you have sufficient material and just want a decently big boom in the middle of a field, it’s quite literally something you could feasibly manage in a home workshop.

    The one other note on the importance of efficiency is in regards to fallout. Anything that isn’t used in the detonation is blasted every which-way, and isn’t really something you want as a normal military, since a nuclear wasteland isn’t strategically very useful. But, if you’re just trying to fuck up someone else’s day, then its less important and you can get into really “fun” stuff like dirty and cobalt bombs.


  • Very, very broadly, I’d say a lot of my concerns boil down to them convincing the broader industry as a whole that cutting costs and delivering a shit product is okay, so long as you’re doing it as a “technology company”

    • Pushing out buggy, half-baked SW because “we’ll fix it with an OTA” and a recall has little to no direct financial impact, allowing for you to gamble lives on hopefully getting a SW update out before the bugs cause accidents or deaths, rather than spending the time/money to get it right from the start.

    • Removing stuff like important, standard hard controls (buttons/stalks/etc) to make everything a touch control, purely for cost cutting, but acting like it’s because buttons are “old tech”

    • Pushing that 100% BEV is the only current solution, rather than pushing for a far cheaper mass improvement of fuel economy and scaling BEVs as HEVs grow too, especially in developing markets.

    • Using a proprietary charging standard for nearly a decade, solely as a sales tactic, and only cooperating with other OEMs once it allowed them to collect government subsidies

    Those are just a few I can think of off the very top of my head, and the ones I’ve seen have the most impact on the broader industry. I can go into more detail on any of them as well.




  • skyspydude1@lemmy.worldtoMicroblog Memes@lemmy.worldDecision Time
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    12 days ago

    Thinking that speaking out and condemning Israel would help them whatsoever shows you have literally no idea how US politics work. Let me preface this with the following: I’m well aware of the absolute atrocities going on, I don’t think the US should be supporting Israel given the shit they’re pulling, and do wish they would take action against them.

    However, speaking out would be FAR more damaging than anything they’ve done so far. Do you have any idea how many Christians in the US literally think of Israel as what will bring about the second coming of Christ, and thus not supporting them would basically be seen and spun as doing Satan’s work?

    The Jewish population of the US is literally double that of the Muslim population, so purely from a numbers game, any chance of even denting that support would be suicidal.

    Finally, there’s the absolutely comical mainstream media bias where the very moment Harris spoke out strongly against Israel, there’d be an endless spew of how she wants to wipe Israel off the map and finish what Hitler started.

    I get it, it’s fucking frustrating and tiring and disgusting what’s going on, but it’s sadly the way it has to be played at the moment, and acting like Trump being elected has any chance at improving the situation is delusional at best.






  • This is legitimately one of the real reasons Musk is pushing for Trump so hard. NHTSA (and all the other regulatory agencies) were effectively gutted completely by the Trump admin and it’s basically the entire reason Elon could grift his way to where he is today. The moment Biden got into office, basically every single agency in existence began investigating him and pushing blocks out of the proverbial Jenga tower of the various Musk companies. He’s praying that Trump will get elected and allow him to keep grifting, because otherwise he’s almost definitely going to jail, or at a minimum losing the vast majority of his empire.








  • despite all our previous statements to the contrary and verifiable statistics counter to this narrative

    This was by far the most frustrating part of the RTO push at my old company. The unofficial motto I was always told was “Show me the data”, as it was basically impossible to push for any sort of decision without solid data to back it up, even if everyone in the group thought it was a good idea.

    When RTO was announced and the big all people town hall was held, multiple group heads stood up and asked the execs why they were doing this, and what data they had to back it up. Literally, and I quote from one of the execs, “Well, we don’t really have any, but we feel that people will be more productive, will be sharing more ideas and innovating when in the office.”

    Yes, the executive at a multi-billion dollar automotive company literally said with a straight face to thousands of engineers who’d been working almost entirely from home for the past 3 years “This decision is based on feels, not reality”. Even better was since there was already an initial non-mandatory RTO push, some absolute chads even interrupted them to pull up hard data showing they had been tracking productivity since the RTO push, and their group members were significantly less productive on days they were in-office. Not only that, but they also showed there literally wasn’t the office space to fit everyone. The exec just hand waved it away and said “I’m sure we have plenty of desks for everyone”.

    It’s absolutely infuriating seeing these people getting paid millions, if not billions, to suck so hard at basically everything.