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Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: June 15th, 2023

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  • Because teenagers often exclude, harass, and verbally abuse others in the same age group for no real reason. If you’re a teen who often ends up on the receiving end of that, then interacting with older people may be the only way you can have a normal conversation. Talking to adults is a last defense against missing a stage of social development and developing depression and social phobia.

    That doesn’t mean that you are personally required to talk to teens, but cutting them off from adult society completely is cruel.

    And it is possible for a teen and an adult to share an interest—baseball, or sewing, or entomology, or whatever. Some people like talking to others who are enthusiastic about the same subject, even if that person is young and “still learning”. Some adults even enjoy teaching.






  • Posted article indicates that even if the experiment performs to expectations, there will still be waste to be disposed of. They hope to convert most of the nasty, longer-lived radionucleides into something useful, but most is not all. Plus, part of their selling point is conversion into medical radionucleide sources, and to be honest, the market there isn’t all that big (like, “a single reactor in Canada supplied a high percentage of these sources for many years” not-that-big). It can probably absorb the output of this reactor, but ramp the idea up into a general solution for all nuclear waste everywhere, and we’ll likely end up with more medical and industrial radionucleide sources than we know what to do with.

    (There’s also the question of what kinds of waste could be reprocessed. Only enriched waste from light-water reactors? What about waste from heavy-water reactors, which tends to be bulkier but considerably less radioactive?)





  • Might be nice for a certain age group to make them evaluate multiple search engines as a class project. (“If it provided a summary, did it say what its sources were?” “When you checked the sources, did they actually say what the summary said they said?” “How many actual results did it return for these searches?” “How many of the results on the first page were useful?” etc.) Improved media literacy in general, and they all learn that more than one search engine exists.









  • Judging from the content of the article, the problem is that Google’s local subsidiary started on construction prematurely before the environmental assessment paperwork was complete (but after they already owned the site). Short of keeping a watch on the site 24/7, I don’t see how the local authorities could have prevented that. It’s possible that they may have been lazy and complacent, but absent actual evidence I doubt they were complicit.

    Our society operates to a large extent on an underlying assumption that most people will not try to do anything blatantly illegal in plain view. Finland has just learned the hard way that this is not true of large American corporations.