as alive as you need me to be
Yeah pretty much, they're basically, at their core, private contractors, whose nearly sole customer is governments.
Governments outsourced the management and operations of the Torment Nexus, not because they were forced to or didn't want or didn't have the resources...
... They were just too incompotent to do it themselves.
So... yeah, now they're now functionally part of the government, of multiple governments actually.
This is how we ... get to? Or have arrived at? ... just actual cyberpunk dystopia, where the Corps just are, in every meaningful way, on top.
I mean, Thiel is part of the 'basically an actual vampire irl' club, right?
Gets infusions?
Fentanyl.
Fentanyl laced urine.
That's what he said.
Its basically a modern update on how the CIA would just dose their coworkers with LSD, but much more overtly weaponized.
... I am fairly sure that that would count as a war crime, if done on a battlefield.
stumbles awkwardly out of recently materialized 80s era phone booth
dons tricorner hat
checks breast pocket for printed copy of ancient proto proto anarchist zine, 'Common Sense'
brings out boombox
"Let us commence to jam, sucka!"
hits play on RATM: Renegades of Funk, extremely patriotically
This is such a good comment that I have been trying to think of something useful to add for days, and I can't.
So I'm just gonna star/bookmark it for future reference =D
... wow.
Ok.
I thought some local may have been passing along a tall tale, fucking, nope, there is a print source, and it is Noem herself.
... yeah I haven't read her book.
This woman is a portrait of a violent antisocial psychopath.
Like, if you were poor, and you did this kind of shit, you'd get either imprisoned or institutionalized.
She also clearly has body dysmorphia, as demonstrated by her ... can we just call it 'Fox News Face' - affirming care?
I think you mean fetch updates.
(EDIT: I guess 'fetch' is indeed never going to happen =C)
tips patriotism hat highly ironically
... they currently have more funding than the Marine Corp.
So, functionally, we're now up to 7 branches of the Military:
Army
Navy
Marines
Airforce
Coast Guard
Space Force
DHS/ICE
The latter two were created by Trump, and of course the last one is the uh, inward facing, definitionally tyrannical military branch, you know, the kind of thing this country was founded on fighting a revolutionary war against.
There's a reason we have a whole initial Ammendment out of the first 10, about not being able to quarter troops in private citizen's homes.
So most of us remember Noem's main claim to fame being that she executed her new puppy, after... not training it properly, and being annoyed by it.
Well I'd like to remind folks she was behind this ad campaign:
Nope, not a joke, not a photoshop, not AI hallucination... this was her baby, and it was real.
Finally... I present to you,
KristiKaren Noem:Yeah thats from ~7 years ago, when she still had a vaguely human face.
If memory serves... she is still, herself, personally banned from setting foot on any Indian/Native Tribal land in the entire state of South Dakota, basically for consistently being a racist c*nt, consistently disrespecting any and all tribal attempts to keep their land clean from industrial waste.
EDIT:
(I've been told by a local from Rapid City that she also executed a goat in a similar violent outburst as with her new puppy... but I have not been able to verify this myself, with a citable print source.
Local told me that its not uncommon to basically just rent a or some goats as basically au naturale lawnmowers, which does make sense to me...
... but she apparently got annoyed by the bleating, and one day just shot someone else's goat, that she was renting, to be a lawnmower on her ranch.
... Yeah.)
Well hey, ok, that's what I asked for, its a detailed outline of the process!
What that whole process ultimately is, is pumping a bunch or energy into a machine, a process, that outputs hydrocarbons, which are basically energy in another form.
(Or maybe more accurately, precursors to being able to form more typical HC energy, or useful inputs to some other chemical sysnthesis process)
So, for this to even conceptually make sense, overall, you'd need to have your ... fusion reactor be able produce an over unity surplus of energy, at a constant rate, that is equal in $$$ value to... basically, the sellable price of the hydrocarbon fuel you are producing, at that same rate.
And that's simplifying out, assuming that you don't need to further refine or otherwise transform the hydrocarbons produced by this process, which you probably would.
They do outline output volumes and concentrations, as well as... enough info that you could work backward and figure out how much energy they're actually pumping in to this process, to achieve said yields.
So, from that, you could figure out what the required... ratio of over unity-ness of the fusion generator would have to be.
But, also, note that prices of various forms of energy, input energy, output hydrocarbon, they're a major factor in whether or not this whole idea is viable or not, and prices can and will fluctuate.
It seems to me that this particular process ... the authors seem to be describing it as not producing very high amounts of the most useful kinds of precursors for general fuel production, but is producing potentially useful amounts of precursors for other kinds of processes:
The low DME concentration and high H2: DME molar ratio in the CO2-to-HC reactions in this study may facilitate hydrogen transfer for the chain growth termination step and therefore limit the C chain length of the products, leading to formation of isobutane and isopentane as dominant products instead of isobutane and triptane, as observed at greater DME concentration. These light branched paraffins (isobutane and isopentane), which are not ideal blendstocks for high-octane gasoline, are in fact versatile precursors for SAF synthesis via commercially available alkane dehydrogenation and alkene oligomerization processes.[29], [34], [35].
They also seem to reference other attempts at modifying something like an FT process, that are more productive at producing precurors for, general fuel:
Other research groups have investigated CO2 hydrogenation over similar composite catalyst systems...
Hydrophobic modification of HBEA to improve water tolerance substantially increased C4+ HC yield and selectivity to 6.1% and 22.3%, respectively. [19] Using a 2-stage reactor system provided flexibility to control temperature of the reactors independently to achieve high CO yield in the first reactor which facilitated MeOH and MTH synthesis at the second reactor at 300 °C. The inter-stage water removal improved the activity of HBEA for MTH, resulting in C4+ HC yield and selectivity of 6.8% and 14.9%, respectively. [16]
This is genuinely novel and interesting, so I do thank you for actually informing me of this, and rescind my earlier claim of 'bullshit', modifying it to 'needs further research', specifically in the realms of how you'd scale this up, and what surrounding infrastrucure and economic parameters you'd need for this to be economically viable.
It is neat to learn that this is a thing that we can actually do... but you'd still have to work out the math of the conditions under which it would make sense to do, and be overall productive and useful... figure out how much over-unity-ness you'd need from a theoretical fusion generator for doing this to make sense.
Also:
We have termed this approach the high-octane-gasoline (HOG) pathway.
I just want to take a moment and laugh at that, lol.
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Hi every one, my name is Tim, and I like video games.
I like it when kids can fully enjoy playing video games.
Kids are great, they're the future, and they should be able to enjoy video games!
. .. ...
You know what else I like?
Well, its called ERP, and it stands for...
wretching, vomit splashing noises
I mean, true, but, going by pornhub numbers from Republican areas... oh they see trans people all the time.
Yep, ding ding ding, buy a burner phone, with cash, from a store that doesn't have many or very good cameras.
Bringing your real main phone is you thinking you know more about cybersecurity and surveillance than Palantir, than all the cybersec and intel firms the US Mil and Police departments have been partnering with with over a decade now.
99.99999999% chance you don't.
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My god, the outspoken billionaire pedophile club just keeps growing.
Just can't fucking help themselves.
... though... that... does makes sense, that you would lack self-inhibition... if you were a pedophile.
Hooray clown world!
... Some time back I put forward the idea of just making a game that is like, half splinter cell/mgs stealth combat, and half dating sim.
Basically, you have to guide the neediest, clumsiest, insecure, easily distracted, most frustrating npc through what is ostensibly a combat game... but the game just actually is an escort quest, with extra steps.
I put it forward as a joke, and a surprising number of people said they'd play it.
Apparently, fun, ... is just a kind of frustration, that I guess... seems solvable.
While I agree with you in theory, in practice, no, we could not transform that fast, to a significant degree, unless we first basically had something like a Maoist genocide of current landowners, burned all the existing building and land use codes, and started over.
More than just the whole... rich people have way too much control over society thing...
The amount of NIMBYism in the US is insane.
(Not In My BackYard)
Every single element of every city's zoning laws and building regulations are designed to benefit existing property owners and existing properties, as they currently are.
We would have to dismantle a whole lot of that to actually change the fundamental street grid system.
... The problem is complex not so much in technical, engineering, how do we actually do this kinds of ways... but in the way of: there are way too many powerful groups and actors that will fuck up every stage of any process that is attempting to change anything about urban design.
I guess you could say our governance structures are as gridlocked as the actual streets are.
So, to combine both:
Make The Sims, but they are taught to be industrial engineers, who build factories instead of homes.
You can only partially direct their social and personal actions, you can't do the builder aspect of The Sims now, you have to teach them how to do it.
And your Sims have to both hit production quotas, and also not all kill each other.
Or, make Factorio, but what you're building is personality templates, who you then put into some kind of dollhouse type environment, and keep testing, untill you manufacture androids that produce the... sitcoms?... that you desire.
... so you're saying to use i guess infinite amounts of energy to ... do abiotic synthesis and just literally produce hydrocarbons?
... Like, just Fischer-Troph everything?
I suspect you are wildly oversimplifying the complexity of the chemical processes involved...
...for the general concept of what you are saying, to make actual sense...
Your abiotic hydrocarbon synthesis process would have to be less energy demanding than the constant surplus energy production rate of a theoretical over unity fusion generator.
Just getting any fusion generator than is any miniscule amount of truly over unity, thats not enough.
Thats infinite energy... if you have an infinite amount of time to wait, and an infinite amount of some kind of battery system to contain that energy in.
Synthetic fuel production is kind of notorious for being immensely energy intensive.
And for FT at least, you need a feedstock of either biomass, coal or natural gas.
If you want to just do some kind of variant of an FT like process, where your feedstock is ultimately 'refined air'... you're going to need even more energy, a fusion generator than is over unity by an even larger margin.
It is a little more complicated than just 'heat up CO2'.
Unless you can point me to ... somebody who has actually worked out the chemistry of how you can just synthesize hydrocarbons from... ambient CO2... that you're scrubbing from the air... demonstrated this entire process at a tiny scale as proof of concept... and described the total amount of energy required to power this process...
Yeah I'm calling bullshit.
Port hole for petting a very needy kitty with attachment anxiety.
.
..
...
Fuck, wait! I meant an actual cat!