If you can find a nearby community college offering a molecular biology class that includes a practical lab then I'd say a couple quarters of time and tuition.
DIY that will depend on your level of ability. You can do this stuff in your kitchen but learning it from a textbook will be daunting for many (most?) people.
What is this, the hipster approach to technology evaluation? Steam conversion efficiency doesn't make sense as a metric for nuclear because (AFAIK) fuel consumption per watt isn't the primary driver of cost for that technology. Or am I mistaken?
> I still have pinning rust disks, but only because they are cheap. If SSDs were cheaper, then we would see a massive switch.
I only use this technology because it is more competitive than the alternatives for my usecase ... ?
> denigrating steam also denigrates all fossil fuel electricity sources
I doubt name calling is a sensible basis for policy decisions.
It's actually hipsters that are into steam, you know, the steam punks.
I don't care about steam conversion efficiency as much as I care that steam Rankine cycle engines are a solved problem so there is no more technological advancement. One of the biggest advancements over the past decades is using a Britton cycle in front for natural gas, ie moving away from steam engines.
> I only use this technology because it is more competitive than the alternatives for my usecase ... ?
If I understand you, yes of course use the more competitive technology. Sticking with steam when there are cheaper alternatives is a poor idea. But moreover as we look to what people choose as technology improves, we will find that steam usage will be relegated to things like geothermal, which like nuclear has essentially free fuel, but doesn't have to go down for a month to refuel, has the potential for more variable generation instead of undesirable constant generation, and is far less complicated.
> denigrating steam also denigrates all fossil fuel electricity sources
The critique is not name calling, it's pointing out that the technology is mature and not improving, unlike the technologies that are recolutionizing grid energy right now across the world. The number of applications that use fuel to generate electricity via steam are shrinking. Perhaps hydrogen in the future, if electrolyzers ever come down the cost curve, but it's pretty speculative.
Horse buggies still exist, but mostly as novelties. Steam generation is headed the same direction.
If you have credible figures then present them with citations. Otherwise you're just hand waving.
I don't think anyone will dispute that the initial build out for solar is far far cheaper. That much is self evident to everyone. The devil is in the rest of the details.
>I don't think anyone will dispute that the initial build out for solar is far far cheaper.
OK.
>The devil is in the rest of the details.
Now, this is "hand wavy" instead of answering my question and pointing to sources who support the up thread claim that nuclear will be "cheap" v. alternatives.
Do you have an LCOE study showing nuclear as "cheap"?
The issue with spent fuel has to do with the long term (essentially permanent) storage part and is purely political. It's a solved problem except for getting approval for the solution.
The other fuel issues you mention are already dealt with today as a matter of course. It's just the final part that remains up in the air.
You are the one hand waving about failure modes. As with aircraft, as failures have happened we've learned from them. New designs aren't vulnerable to the same things old ones were. All the mishaps have happened with old designs.
Personally I think the anti-nuclear FUD that the climate activists push is unfortunate. We would likely have been close to carbon neutral by now if we'd started building it out in the late 90s.
That said, I'm inclined to agree that solar might be a better option at this point in environments that are suited to it. The batteries still aren't entirely solved but seem to be getting close. In particular, the research into seasonal storage using iron ore looks quite promising to me.
> All frame extraction happens client-side via canvas – no server processing, no pre-generated thumbnails.
Doesn't that mean the client has to grab a bunch of extra data when it first opens the page, at least if the user calls up the seek feature? Since you effectively have to grab various frames from all throughout the video to generate the initial batch. It seems like it would make more sense to have server side thumbnails here as long as they're reasonably sparse and low quality.
Although I admit that one line client side integration is quite compelling.
Exactly. I view this cache similarly to how a browser (or Google Image Search) caches thumbnails locally. Since I'm only storing small Canvas elements, the memory footprint is much smaller than the video itself. To keep it sustainable, I'm planning to implement a trigger to clear the cache whenever the video source changes, ensuring the client's memory stays fresh.
> due to the length of the trunking and the number of bends, I'm not too sure if I can safely drag a new fibre cable through.
I saw someone commented elsewhere about a plastic bag and a vacuum. Another option to keep in mind is a lubricant intended specifically for the task of pulling cable through a conduit.
Yes to all of the above. I knew of addicts who managed to get their hands on it many years ago when it required a prescription. Most weren't that resourceful though.
> running out of people to kill with our indifference.
I wouldn't call it indifference. It's the drug policies that we've very intentionally adopted in the west that result in people purchasing from the black market. It's about as indifferent as the deaths due to denatured alcohol poisoning during prohibition when the additive was silently switched.
We know these policies result in mass deaths; we know other policies result in many fewer deaths; we choose the former policies.
I think that is partly because enough people consider those addicted to drugs to be subhuman - enough don't care much what happens to the addicted people. IMHO in that's because we a large political movement encourages indifference to those different from us, whether the difference is race, politics, gender/sexuality, nationality, or anything else.
> I think that is partly because enough people consider those addicted to drugs to be subhuman - enough don't care much what happens to the addicted people. IMHO in that's because we a large political movement encourages indifference to those different from us, whether the difference is race, politics, gender/sexuality, nationality, or anything else.
I think this is a false dichotomy: Either you campaign for $SPECIFIC_SOCIAL_CHANGE or you think that addicts are subhuman? There's no in-between? You don't think that casting the conversation in this light ("Anyone not with us thinks $PEOPLE are subhuman") is a bad faith argument?
The most reasonable explanation I can think of is that people just don't care enough about some $SPECIFIC_SOCIAL_CHANGE.
Someone not interested in voicing their opinion on Palestine/Gaza, BLM or addicts doesn't mean that they think the victims in those circumstances are subhuman.
The parent could be alluding to the sort of novel approaches jurisdictions barely engage in, but with even the most traditional and politically conservative policy approach to these problems, medical treatment, BC is still not really engaging in that with the effort one would expect from an announced "crisis".
If you walked up to a doctor in BC and said you have a fentanyl drug use disorder and you've hit rock bottom and you're ready for treatment, they can't help you, and you'll be put on a waiting list. I imagine many other jurisdictions across North America are the same.
Of course what happens is that in the days that follow the window of opportunity is missed, the person goes and gets some more street drugs to self medicate their addiction, the only option because there is no prescribed option, and those street drugs are cut with toxic who knows what and the person overdoses and dies (because there is no safe known dosage of street drugs that contain ???).
No real surprise that 6-7 people have been dying a day for years now.
You'd think at some point someone would build some more treatment beds but that costs money and how dare you raise taxes. So the status quo of indifference and death continues.
To be blunt it was total bullshit. Pharmaceuticals have an extremely wide range of dosages. Fentanyl is on the extreme low end, benadryl an adult might take 25 mg or 50 mg, tylenol an adult might take 500 mg, and something like amoxicillin an adult might take as much as 3000 mg for a severe infection. There are standard, extremely reliable ways to prepare pills that contain the correct dosage regardless of the potency of the pure chemical.
Obviously fentanyl (or its precursor) is imported (ie smuggled) in highly pure form in order to minimize the size of the shipment. Obviously it can't be consumed in that form.
The combination of being potent and cheap to smuggle lends itself nicely to cutting other (more expensive) products with it. That's false advertising but it won't typically kill you in and of itself.
When laymen who don't know what they're doing, don't have access to proper facilities, and certainly can't set up proper quality controls process something that potent it's no wonder that things go wrong and people die. If (for example) the same victims had purchased fentanyl from a pharmacy (as opposed to whatever it was they thought they were consuming) they almost certainly would not have had any issues. Almost no one ODs intentionally.
The point is that it's not "fentanyl is toxic so you OD" it's "the person compounding the pill messed up the dosage, you took more than you thought, so you OD". This could happen just as easily with any other drug. The danger here is due to pills not containing the dosage that the consumer believes them to.
Other drugs aren't dosed in micrograms. It's pretty believable that street labs don't having the precision to get reliable dosing in such small quantities. 50/100mcg is the typical ambulance dosing of fentanyl (where it's often used as the primary painkiller) - so at 500 times smaller than that of benadryl, it would take a reasonably high-end lab (at least by mid-level drug dealer standards) to not wildly mess up the dosing all the time - even if you mixed at larger scales, that still doesn't easily guarantee a uniform blend.
It couldn't happen "just as easily" with any other drug.
LSD is dropped onto paper in solution though. So to control dose is easy since you can easy halve a dose by doubling the volume of solution. Dosing a powder/crystal is much more difficult, especially if you need to get it back out of solution.
LSD is a powder/crystal (a salt). People just don't consume opioids orally, usually. There's something similar though: skin patches, since (other than LSD) fentanyl can be absorbed through the skin.
In context, we're talking about pills cut with fentanyl, in which case it is often consumed orally, mixed in at a very small concentration compared to the other ingredients.
Powedered drugs like cocaine mixed with fentanyl are even more horrible, since there is absolutely nothing to keep the concentration of fentanyl homogeneous throughout as it is handled.
That's "pretty believable" but it's also complete bullshit. Why do you feel it necessary to comment in an authoritative manner when you don't know what you're talking about? It's literally spreading misinformation.
The relevant technique is called "serial dilution" and it's regularly practiced in intro level chemistry and molecular biology classes. An otherwise untrained undergrad, using only a pipette and a volumetric flask, can consistently and reliably dilute samples to nanogram per liter levels. The error accumulates as some (exceedingly small) percentage of the target value per dilution step so even after 10 or more steps the error will remain well within manageable range.
The issue is not fentanyl having a power level over 9000 or whatever other nonsense. It's people who don't know what they're doing, don't have access to a proper setup, and have no realistic way to implement a proper quality control regime manufacturing pharmaceuticals.
Fentanyl didn't kill all these people. Objectively poor public policy indirectly led to the deaths of those who violated the law just as it did during prohibition.
FYI DEA shares the stance around microdosing gone bad causing fatal overdose. This isn’t heresay. Perhaps you should read the links I shared in another comment.
DIY that will depend on your level of ability. You can do this stuff in your kitchen but learning it from a textbook will be daunting for many (most?) people.
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