Posts by Alan Brown

Re: Fuck 'em

They are.

Extracting USA tentacles from their deeply embedded positions in trade, communications, logistics, finance and military systems takes time - but it's been worked on since Covid made it clear US policymakers see "rest of world" as vassals/enemies in 2019 and geared up significantly after 6th November 2024

Take a closer look at the various "compliance" with US demands that's going on and what's going on in the background. For the first time since Bretton Woods, international trade agreements are being signed off using local currencies for settlements rather than USD - the China/Japan/South Korea deal is remarkable given their 400+ year history of mutual hostility and so far the USA has lost at least $1trillion in arms sales to NATO partners whose supply contracts are now redirected to European suppliers. There's a pretty good chance that F35 sales will be limited to what's already locked in and can't be backed out of instead of the hundreds that Lockheed and others have bet the farm on.

There's a very long history of "Do as I say, not as I do" from UnKKKle Sam. They pretty much started breaking down Bretton Woods committments to mutual free trade within months of forcing "rest of world" to sign on and the shenanigans with gold that have been happening since 1971 makes it pretty clear that the thousands of tons shipped from various countries to the USA fpr safekeeping during WW2 & postwar Cold War tensions may not all be there anymore (The USA Federal Reserve's domestic and "in trust" gold holdings haven't been audited since 1954 and they've been refusing to let other countries inspect their own property since then too). There's a financial House of Cards that's teetering badly and history shows that when this happens in an authoritarian-leaning country the next step is usually to go to war to stave off the collapse (eg: Germany invaded Poland in 1939 because they'd have been bankrupt by March 1940)

Re: Dear you arse of a...

The time is rapidly coming when the USA finds that it's increasingly isolated and can't throw financial weight around because it's lost it all.

This is a direct result of several decades of this kind of chest beating, culminating in the orange toddler's mantums bringing attentiion to it in ways nobody can handwave away anymore.

OPEC's USD-only policy was dropped nearly 2 years ago and 25% of oil trade is now in alternative currencies. The hegemony is badly cracked but hasn't quite shattered yet. I was picking it would be shattered in the 2040s but wouldn't be surprised if it happens by 2030 (or much sooner). Unlike the 1990s when the USA was 45% of total global trade it's now 14% and merely 1 of 6 similar size markets (US international trade has doubled since 1990. The rest of the world has simply grown much faster without Cold War boots on throats.)

"The idea that modern Labour is a "left wing" party has more to do with what they were historically, and what they're meant to be- not what they are today, which is more like the Tories of the past."

In the same way that Republicans have gone from being right wing to extremists and the Democrats have moved from being centrist to right wing

Thatcher did say that her greatest achievement was the modern Labour party..

Say what you want about Starmer, he's currently the least bad choice in a field of remarkably awful contenders or past jobholders from either side and in an environment where the best candidates for the job have been subjected to orchestrated hate campaigns by the media

Re: and one an EU cloud takes off it will be targeted for buyout

The problem isn't the USA as much as it's rampant rent-seeking behaviour by the majors, regardless of their country of origin.

Buying out burgeoning competition in order to kill it is an ancient strategy and one that competition regulators need to pay more attention to.

Re: IMAGINE IF...

"Britain's failure to sufficiently industrialise the colonies"

Britain deliberatly DE-industrialised the colonies in many cases (eg: forcing cotton processing to be done in Manchester and forcibly shutting down Indian factories), making the clonies dependent on the "motherland" for processed goods as it was felt that a strong industrial base in any of them was a security threat to central control

It's rather telling that TV programs from the late 1970s/early 1980s which covered the microcomputer revolution paid particular attention to the challenges inherent in trying to transform Britain's "low wage economy" as they called it, pointing out that the vast majority of education was aimed at producing blue and white collar drones. It's arguable that a lot of the IT outsourcing is a case of farming out to overseas drones , but the problem is that existing local ones are still being trained & prepared for factory work that no longer exists, with a shortage of people with the necessary skills that's been biting deeper for decades.

Britain's current problems go back at least 200 years and are strongly rooted in "manifest destiny" beliefs and nationalist rhetoric along with a "capitalist" culture which worships short term profit maximisation over long-term viability whilst also regarding investment in long-term goals as something that's other people's problems (the same disease afflicts the USA, but they also have a slavery mentality still layered over the top that makes matters worse.

Re: IMAGINE IF...

If it wasn't for Fuji, ICL would have ceased to exist entirely in the 1990s.

The bigger problem is the UK government shovelling money into the gaping maws of companies which do things BADLY and which are so hidebound that they simply can't compete against more agile players.

That "can't compete" wouldn't be as much of a handicap if they did the outdated things well, but they simply don't. It doesn't halp that large customers are utterly resistant to the concept of buying off the shelf software and simply not using features they don't need. Billions get spent on (badly) reinventing wheels and one of the most egrarious examples is Oracle with its local govternment cost overruns, etc.

Councils (and companies) do need to take ownership of a large part of the blame here. Thousands of variations on a theme(*) which each need individual tweaking for the org so that procedures for staff don't change are a major part of the problem. If councils have wildly different ways of doing the SAME THING then a closer look is needed at those implementations to find out why (it usually boils down to some particularly bombastic administrator declaring "it shall be so" and nobody daring to say otherwise)

(*) Such themes seldom cover all possiblities anyway and as such have dozens of exception procedures. Better to replace entirely with one theme that's been thoroughly tested across hundreds of outfits and covers all bases even some bases aren't (currently) needed for the particular org in question. I watched one org I was working in spend millions developing something in-house that was already part of another OSS software suite that they were using (not switched on, but no cost to enable) and when it was pointed out that the other software already had this functionality without the flagrant bugs of the inhouse version, management quickly jumped to sunk cost fallacy ("we've spent so much on this that we can't jump ship now")

Re: "Sovereign".....Exactly What Does That Mean?

I can see SOME merit in designing around cloud, then using your own in-house cloud.

For starters it allows easier migration to new hardware, etc.

Using external cloud is somehting I've been deeply uneasy about from the outset and it's clear that the seagulls in upper management have less-than-zero(*) concept of security

(*) They actively reject attempts to educate them on the issues unless and until it bites them on the ass personally (and even then they'll try to find ways to blame everyone else)

Which has a reputation for "recommending" devices that turn out in the long term to be the least reliable or most expensive to operate of all the items tested in any particular group

It's almost as if they're schilling for the repair industry

Re: Americans

The bigger problem is handguns

Long guns are difficult to put in your waistband or shove down a trouser leg. That's why many countries have laws limiting the minimum length of the entire item (including stock) to around 24 inches (60cm) - enough to put a pump-action shotgun with short barrel and grip into the "handgun" category

Some go a couple of steps further, banning semiautomatic weapons and/or carbines and/or magazines greater than 5 shots and/or restrict larger calibres

I'm sure someone will argue that a handgun is necessary when hunting in order to fend off a close-in predator. Any decent hunter won't allow themselves to end up in that position.

Re: Some hope

It's the same in most countries.

"Life" may mean a decade in jail, but release is "under supervision" and they can be recalled at any time if they don't keep their nose clean.

Re: Bargaining chip (no pun)

Yes, but if you look a little more closely you'll see that it was one general and a few brigades. He was sent out to fail.

The more important point is that China doesn't WANT to go invading anyone - and thanks to the One Child Policy, it can't actually do it anyway.

The Taiwanese situation is more about ritualised shaking of fists than much else and prior to enhanced USA sabre rattling in the region around 2013 regarding the Norks, relationships had been getting closer (politically, cultirally and economically)

It's worth noting that China has spent a lot of time and effort fighting the spread of African hemooragic swine fever - which included culling hundreds of millions of pigs, effectively putting millions of smaller farrmers out of business. Farmers don't tend to buy animal feed for animales which no longer exist - with the animal feed in question being USA soybeans.

I think you can see where that's going. Having the Orange Onanist declare the collapse in soybean sales was a trade war didn't go down well with a country reeling from a major zoonotic (and critical pork shortage). The USA could have been the good guys and cemented sales into a market 3 times the size of the USA domestic pork one, but instead managed to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory.

Re: NEPA

The most ironic part of that is that the EPA was created by a Republican president - Nixon

It's one of the few things he got right in his tenure.

Re: Highly enriched fuel

To put in it context

Natural uranium (0.7% U235) and thorium are about $150/kg

3% enriched uranium is more expensive than gold (~65,000/kg)

90% enriched uranium is about $500M/kg

The only reason for using enriched uranium in terrestrial designs is because it's available as a byproduct of weaponsmaking. Given that in the absence of weapons demand you'd be tossing out 89% of your original uranium and pushing the price up 500-fold it makes more sense to design using 500kg of natural uranium instead of 1kg of 3% enriched

The original LWR design used enriched uranium because there were a few tens of tons of the stuff kicking around that uranium separation plants desperately wanted to get rid of - and it allowed building a reactor small enough to fit in a submarine hull. The design was regarded by its developer as a laboratory glassware demonstrator (which is why it has 98% wasteage and needs constant supervision), not a production prototype. It made steam because naval engineers in 1953 understood steam turbines intimately and it had to operate for weeks under ice, only being repaiarable with onboard tools.

LWR designs got locked in by a combination of commercial operators not wanting to invest a couple of billion in less wasteful designs and the military quickly realising that "dual use" and renaming processing sites to "enrichment facilities" provided a shield against limitation treaties

ALL enriched uranium designs are dependent on the weaponsmaking cycle for their fuel.

ALL solid fuel (fuel rod) designs are abusable to produce weapons-grade plutonium - even CANDU (which is how India managed to make its forst PU bomb)

LWR designs aren't hot enough to allow economic turbine operation. Wet steam is hell on turbine blades.

LWR reactors are giant steam boilers and the engineering stresses on boilers go up with the cube of the power. That drives up both reactor vessel costs and containment building requirements to untenable levels.

LWR reactors don't make "much" waste compared to coal, but it's still expensive to sequester for the ~500 years needed for the radioactivity to die off to negligable levels and at that point you have a serious problem inasmuch as that "spent" fuel has substantial quantities of plutonium in it which can be safely chemically extracted without needing hot boxes and waldos (plus, uranium and plutonium are nasty biological hazards. They're more dangerous in that respect than as radioactive sources)

Regardless of wet or supercritical steam, turbines need to be as large as materials technology allows (this applies to supercritical CO2 as well) in order to be profitable. Coal and gas fired plants are around the 1GW size for exactly the same reason that Nuke plants are around that size - economics

A 500MW "SMR" is a nice way of sucking subsidies for something that no commercial operator will touch with someone else's bargepole. On top of that nuclear reactors are like aquariums - the smaller they are the more fiddly they become to keep stable, so the idea of running multiple SMRs in parallel to feed GW-scale turbines just doesn't work economically.

The whole thing is a boondoggle which a decent accountant will shoot down unless the entire setup is heavily subsidised from start to finish

We're spending a lot of time, effort and money trying to perpetuate designs which were obsoleted 60 years ago by something smaller, cheaper, safer, hotter and which even in a worst case scenario can't spread high level radioactive materials more than a few metres from the reactor core, with cleanup mostly requiring "a broom" if it ever happens.

We're spending a lot more time, effort and money trying to avoid nuclear power - which even in LWR form is 300,000 times safer than burning coal and safer than best-case wind or solar whilst not needing crippling levels of investment in raw material production and massive (expensive) grid stabilisation systems to avoid repeats of the South Australia blackouts

Even sillier, the best fuel for the job (thorium) is readily available as the main waste product of rare earth processing - to the point that disposing of it is what makes rare earth mines uneconomic and a market for thorium would make those same mines insanely profitable (coal ash lakes have even higher thorium perecentages than monazite ore, making mining them a potentially self-funding superfund cleanup path). There's about 20,000 years supply of thorium in known existing deposits, but the perverse thing about "mineral reserves" is that they only exist if there's a market for the product - so there officially aren't any thorium reserves because there isn't any market for it.

China's cornered the rare earth global market by the simple expedient of buying up the thorium output of its domestic rare earth producers and stockpiling it in anticipation of their LFTR work paying off.

Concentrating on SMRs and uranium enrichment is playing into the deception games of the sideshow barkers and stage illusionists.

Re: we only allow the best and brightest to emigrate to NZ...

> NZ is a popular destination for rich "preppers".

What those rich preppers fail to realise is that in the event of a national emergency the government will thank them for stockpiling goods and requisition the lot. NZ has rather strict rules about firearm possession and control, particularly the kinds of weaponry that appeals to preppers, so those bunkers aren't going to be partucularly defendable and the fastest way to deal with the armadillo position is to cover the air intakes with a mound of earth.

TMSR-LF1 has entered the chat.

Unfortunately, it's not American and isn't legal to build in the USA, despite being developed and run there from 1965-69

The old school Republicans left the bnuilding several decades ago.

Eisenhower's policies have current Republicans hissing like a vampire confronted with a garlic-laced cross and a few beams of sunlight.

The driving force is that buildng a nuke plant in the USA at the moment is an endless cash cow for the contractors involved as long as they never actually complete the project

We don't need a "move fast and break things" approach. That already happened, but the military favoured pushing the mosre dangerous approaches because it provided political protectioon for their weapons programs.

Quite frankly, anything with water, sodium, lead-bismuth or CO2 in the core needs to be automatically denied. We know the downsides of all of these and they're unacceptable risks(+)

Ditto anything using enriched uranium - not because of the enriched uranium itself, but because that particular fuel is the unwanted waste product of weaponsmaking (weapons grade plutonium is made from depleted uranium and nobody makes U235 bombs because they cost hundreds of times more than plutonium ones) - IE: Enriched uranium reactors are a figleaf covering a weapons program, where you get 11% "reactor grade" uranium for power and 89% "highly depleted" uranium for bomb making.

We've had technology to build vastly cheaper, vastly safer, vastly less waste-producing nuclear reactors for 60 years and Nixon attempted to erase it from history in 1972 because widespread adoption would have put the nuclear weapons industry in danger (Hint: if it didn't work partucularly well, orders wouldn't have come down from On High to immediately shutdown the project and destroy all the documentation, nor would AEC rules have been rewritten to make that technology illegal to deploy in wording that skirted around explicitly saying "it's banned")

The economies of scaling on the non-nuclear side mean that anything smaller than 1GW power output isn't worth building, nor is anything that doesn't use supercritical steam for the turbines.

(Yes, I know about supercritical CO2, but it's not ready for mass deployment yet and rolling out TWO major technology changes at once is a recipe for financial disaster. In any case the sizing issue still stands as the only way to make the turbine side pay off is to make them as large as materials science allows them to be. If you could make reliable steam turbogenerators larger than ~1GW then that's exactly what the operators would do)

The USA has pissed away a 50-60 year lead in nuclear power in favour of oil politics/empire building (ironically, on a real "bed of sand") and the current leaders in reviving the tech are China (TMSR-LF1) - proving along the way that Weinberg's claims about directly using thorium as fuel (no reprocessing) and not needing reprocessing for intermediate actinides were both absolutely correct.

By the mid 2040s China will be _THE_ economic hyperpower and they'll have achieved it by breaking the politics of energy scarcity. There are six billion willing customers who will snap up production electrical generation plants even if the USA still manages to strongarm its "allies" into shunning it - they'll do it whilst reducing the global nuclear proliferation risk, for the simple reason that centriffuge farms will ONLY have a military use and no "dual use" justifications to cloud the issue.

Weinberg developed both LWR and LFTR technology, regarding the former as a laboratory glassware demonstrator. He was horrified when a small submarine size steam generator was scaled up to Rube-Goldberg sizes and complexities instead of pursuing the safer option that doesn't face exponentially (actually, cube-law) increasing engineering stresses as power scales up. The hideous costs of building civil nuclear power are largely driven by costs of needing a 3000MW steam boiler which can operate without maintenance for 60 years AND a building strong enough to contain a steam burst wrapped around that boiler. Whilst the hideous operating costs are largely down to internal corrosion (eg: Besse-Davis 2003(*)) and excessive steam turbine wear due to only being able to make wet steam. The horrible thermal efficiency plays into it too but it's minor compared to these two. Prolonged maintenance/refuelling downtimes don't help.

The best way for private industry to profit from LWR is never to turn them on. That's the primary reason why so many USA projects have gone vastly overbudget and behind schedule.

(*) Water at 350C and 100atm isn't benign. It's a demon trying to claw its way out of the pipework and destroy things at the best of times. Trace radioactivity from fuel rod corrosion and tritium generation is merely icing on that cake.

(+) Water - we've seen several examples. Sodium - see Santa Susanna and Monju. Lead-bismuth - see Alfa class nuke boats (polonium generated in the coolant loop, subsequently contaminating the reactor room is enough to ruin anyone's day, not to mention the biohazard of lead vapors). CO2 - see the various leaks from gas-cooled reactors.

Re: Bad idea

The station is also an increasingly dangerous biohazard, just like MIR before it.

Space Fungus is pernicious and destructive: https://youtu.be/5-J1t0rAlOU

Destructive as in eating away at the windows as well as wiring insulation, among other things

What you missed is that you should be reporting these ads to places like the ASA rather than Facebook. It's clear "self regulation" isn't working, so push it through 3rd parties

Re: No ads = no profit

If the report goes to the regulator who then confirm and levy fines, it is likely to cause Meta to start focussing.

Especially if the fines are significantly larger than what the illegal outfits are being paid, or provision is made to ban Meta from selling advertising in the UK _at all_ if the fines hit a suitable threshold.

What amazes me is that the legal advertisers aren't putting pressure on Meta - if they all pull out and Meta only has illegal gambling sites advertising, that enables a legal crackdown to take place.

Re: Duh!

To emphasise this point. Facebook got started by spamming the hell out of every possible channel and using stolen PII

Re: re: Codenamed Tempest, this is expected to be in service by 2035,

"I say the Brits have gone crazy if they are buying US jets instead of Euro ones."

HMS Sitting Duck and HMS White Elephant are only able to accomodate F35Bs - otherwise they're just oversized helicoptor carriers

The British defence establishment has been sitting on assumptions that were clearly becoming unworkable 30 years ago, let alone in the last decade (as have British politicians. The USA was never a "friend", merely an ally who found us convenient)

"I've said a number of times is that a franchise arrangement could fit the bill"

Nope. The USA will find a path to smash that wall or alter their laws to simply make it so