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Cake day: June 18th, 2023

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  • If I remember correctly, one of the biggest problems was the transportation issue, which no one had a solution for. How exactly do you safely transfer several tons of nuclear waste from, say, Shearon Harris to Yucca Mountain? that’s a very long train route. And you want to do this on a recurring basis? from several different locations around the country?

    How exactly are you going to convince the states in between that they should permit you to transport nuclear waste across their borders, repeatedly? Who is going to provide security for all of this nuclear waste while it’s in transit? Who is going to accept liability for any accidents that occur, and who is going to handle the PR when a truckload of irradiated water gets dumped in some neighborhood?

    Good luck getting anyone who even wants to explore establishing those arrangements as their full-time job. “Yes, I brokered the agreement for transporting radioactive material that resulted in a half-ton of waste being spread across ten backyards and an elementary school playground just outside of Birmingham.” Sounds like career suicide, and maybe not career suicide.











  • Just a warning on running a service like this - any website that allows arbitrary text entry from anonymous users will be found and flooded by bots very quickly.

    The most innocent, least damaging version of what happens is adbots posting links to shoddy websites selling “essential oils” and other homeopathy nonsense.

    More obscure but more malicious, text posts are used to control botnets for cybercrime. Basically a human running the botnet will post a string of letters and numbers to a website which the bots have been programmed to look for instructions. Websites that allow anonymous text entry are convenient for this because if the criminal activity is investigated, it’s hard to trace the instructions from the controller back to a real person.

    Just be aware that people will abuse your service for purposes you did not intend. You’ll probably need both automated tooling for identifying and blocking bot traffic, as well as human moderation.




  • Punitive measures might feel emotionally satisfying in the moment, but what they actually incentivize is hiding the corruption and exploitation better (avoiding getting caught, rather than avoiding the bad activity in the first place). Also, while an angry mob might have a taste for violence and actually perform it for a little while, it doesn’t last and it’s not a basis for a stable government or economy.

    If you want long-term stability you have to organize a system so that it incentivizes the behaviors that you want, even more than it disincentivizes the behaviors that you don’t want.

    I’m not sure what that looks like in this context, in a practical sense. But ultimately the problem is that everything in our society rewards the hoarding of wealth. This is not just a problem with capitalism - every communist or supposedly socialist society ever established also rewarded hoarding of wealth.

    For things to be different, actually different, a different value system with a fundamentally different reward structure needs to be established, and it needs to be competitive long-term with the current system in order to exist alongside it and/or eventually replace it.

    Like I said I don’t really know what that looks like in practice. The only example I can think of is the “gift economy” described in Kim Stanley Robinson’s Green Mars, in which the participants in every exchange always seek to give more than they get (essentially the reverse of normal behavior).


  • you can’t really bomb a supply chain

    Fuck yeah you can, hence my example of bombing ball bearing factories.

    Train lines are also a classic bombing target. Fuel production/refining/storage/transport, any kind of logistics hub, shipyards, airstrips, warehouses… all things that are difficult to hide because there’s always activity around them. Flatten them and the dependent supply chain grinds to a halt.


  • China and Russia both trade heavily with Iran and don’t care about embargoes.

    Also even if they could produce everything they need within the country, that doesn’t mean it’s practical to produce it all in one location. At some point you have to pull raw material out of the ground and refine it, and you probably can’t get everything you need all from the same hole in the ground. You probably can’t manufacture electronics very well next door to a mining and refining operation. There’s going to be truck routes or train lines and logistics facilities somewhere.