A ton of Instagram content is designed to amp up your insecurities and then sell you some course or whatever… lots of goofy activities going on like influencers banding together to rent massive houses and nice cars as the backdrop for some video about how they’re gajillionaires at 20 and you can be too if you just buy their course 🙄. And as you said for the real people on there who aren’t influencers there is a bias towards generally wanting to post the things that put themselves in the best light.

I only use Instagram these days when an old pal sends me a reel, the influencer to friend ratio is too high nowadays for my taste

No one changes minds on the internet but I like to yap so w/e though I did almost drop when my draft got wiped.

In my opinion, this is the waving away bit I referred to earlier. Europe doesn’t have a “middle of nowhere.” There is no such thing as a “secure location.” There is at best one with slightly reduced risks. There are people spread out everywhere, you’re going to end up in somebody’s backyard who doesn’t want it there. You need to be very careful that this stuff doesn’t escape its container and seep into groundwater. And this needs not to happen for a minimum of a century. You’re not breathing in the fumes constantly, sure. That’s why it’s better than a coal plant. You’re risking radiation leakages over a very long time for future generations, should we survive this as a species. It’s human hubris to say we can engineer around this threat on a scale of centuries.

Lower populations are fine and plenty of undesirable villages are depopulating as young folks move to the cities and pensioners shuffle off this coil. Find one with an agreeable populace (not as hard as you think, many communities actually try to be selected for waste disposal projects and try to promote their site over others), no seismic activity of importance for a geologically sustained period of time, and impermeable clay soil far below any important aquifer. Place it there with compacted bentonite clay or similar as a liner. Insanely low hydraulic conductivity (~10^-13 m/s) through the torturous paths in the clay which also simultaneously has a strongly adsorbent effect where the solute gets scrubbed out by the clay while the water is on its long journey out means even if the cans fail and a substantial amount of material gets out it won’t be going far… not enough moving aggressively enough to impact hundreds of feet above. As it happens there was already a trial run done by Mother Nature billions of years ago in the natural nuclear reactors of Oklo, Gabon and it turned out that the fission products didn’t get very far at all even with less than ideal materials.

A significant number of inland plants are built close to rivers for the perceived ease of getting the water. We just need one of them to fail unexpectedly to have a big problem. I’m not sure using groundwater for cooling is a great idea for much the same reasons as it isn’t for data centers. We need to manage our water resources, especially drinking water, as Europe heats up. We need to plan for a time when there is no “surplus water.” And damming up rivers is expensive and the benefits of that to the environment are limited. If we go to these lengths to preserve a nuclear fission plant we might as well built a solar farm and a wind farm.

It’s a rare river that suddenly deletes itself with no forewarning of reduction in flow but anyway the amount of water needed for sustained cooling of fuel pools is substantially lower than that needed to support active operation at full power so if the river reroutes itself entirely or whatever you have in mind then you can scram to shut the plant down. Then your remaining needs can be handled by onsite water storage which is mandated by the regulator along with alternate flexible means of getting the water into the pools such as using firehoses. I’ve seen a site that pumped groundwater to cool the reactor and there was no concern of depletion because it was near a water source that left it constantly charged, even excessively so to the point that flooding would regularly render some of the pump stations inaccessible except by boat in the wetter seasons of the year. I was not getting at building a dam to save a nuke plant but rather pointing out that there are many different designs that can handle different environmental conditions so having hot and low flow rivers does not entirely cancel the prospects for nuclear power entirely even if some specific sites are rendered uneconomical and IF it is worth it perhaps alternatives may exist for a particular site like extending storage ponds and tanks to ride out irregularities in weather and river flow. It’s a good idea to have a mixed power grid that’s not overly reliant on one or two elements subject to shocks.

I understand that emissions-wise nuclear fission is a great way to avoid those and it thus beats burning fossils. It’s still more of a “the plague or cholera?” kind of choice between them. If everything around nuclear power plants is that great and nothing to worry about, why Three Mile, Chernobyl, and Fukushima? It’s the hubris of we’ve got forces much more powerful than us under control. Until we don’t. We’ve thought of everything! Until we find out we didn’t. You put all of this together and that’s why I think fission is a stop gap technology we should phase out completely - drastically, at the very least.

The halt on nuclear but continuing energy demand resulted in continued massive rollout of fossil fuels with all their attending health consequences and the cøimate crisis. Nuclear is right at the bottom of deaths per MW produced between solar and wind. Hydro and the natural gas are two orders of magnitude higher and coal is yet another. If people think that for their area nuclear is prudent and can convince and live up to the standards of the regulator then I see no reason to stand in their way and tell them no such that they build some way deadlier energy source. A lot of expansion is happening for nuclear, much more for solar, and I see both of those developments as really really good if they are preventing something worse like gas from coming online. For what it’s worth ithe worst of the three accidents you mentioned is not physically possible in western reactors which have a negative void coefficient of reactivity whereas Chernobyl had a positive one. In the Chernobyl reactor graphite was the moderator (slows down neutrons to a speed where they will actually interact with the fuel) and water was the coolant whereas in western reactors water is both the coolant and moderator. So at Chernobyl the water wasn’t as good at moderating as the graphite and actually acted as a neutron absorber that ate up neutrons without contributing to fission reactions. So when they heated up, the water expanded and became less good at absorbing which meant less neutrons got consumed so more flew on into the graphite to get moderated and could cause fissions which made more power which boiled more water to repeat the cycle and that’s how you got a runaway reaction at a plant that also didn’t even have a containment. In western reactors since the water is the moderator if it expands from heating then it also becomes worse at slowing down the neutrons because more are sailing through and not slowing down to interact with the fuel. So this limits how high you can get the power much more sharply, plus we have containments to keep the material there even if the vessel loses its integrity. This is part of why the deaths and radioactive releases are insanely less for the other two combined vs. Chernobyl. Those events changed how nuclear does business and inaugurated WANO and comprehensive sharing of operating experience and strategies on safely operating plants, including on beyond design basis accidents in the wake of the unprecedented earthquake and tsunami combo that took out Fukushima. Honestly for mostly safe but occasionally punctuated with insanely deadly and/or displacing tragedies hydro should be considered as scarier than nuclear, meanwhile fossil fuels are just slowly killing people everywhere to general shrugs.

Yeah ancestral plants that became many crops look almost nothing like their descendants in many cases

The funniest I think are secondary crops like oats and rye. Our forebears weren’t even trying to grow a better version of those, those started off as just weeds that people were trying to get rid of in their wheatfields. In the course of purging them they accidentally selected for more wheat-like plants that people would be less likely to rip out until they became actual decent crops on their own, while also maintaining hardiness in areas that wheat couldn’t handle such that they spun off and became popular on their own rights.

It creates highly toxic waste products that nobody wants to keep stored for centuries in their backyard, just not a lot of CO2. That gets waved away a lot like it isn’t an issue. It’s better than burning gas, oil, or coal. It’s not better than renewables in my opinion. And nuclear needs a reliable cooling chain for its survival and all the people unfortunate enough to live close by. That’s normally done with water that happens to flow by the plant. If the increasing heat dries out these rivers, you’ll get a slightly more stretched out version of Fukushima.

It’s a very small amount that can be contained in secure casks and concentrated in a particular secure location in the middle of nowhere as opposed to other industrial wastes that are blasted out into the environment and our lungs.

You do need cooling water to keep a plant operational at full power by ensuring your condenser can handle all the steam coming in. If it can’t due to declining river volume then the operators must reduce power (thus making less steam which needs less condensing), if they for whatever reason were not paying attention to the alarms going off then their plant would automatically shut down for loss of condenser vacuum and restore that margin by itself. You don’t have to use rivers as the source of cooling for every nuclear reactor either though some existing ones are designed that way. You can source water from oceans, lakes, groundwater, heck you can make artificial bodies of water that are filled with surplus water and can be used in times of diminished water from whatever is used to feed them, etc.

I figured it was something like that haha just curious what angle you were coming from

300% reduction would mean you no longer pay for heating and instead get paid twice as much as you used to pay

What a weird way to open a banana. I always open a seam along the back and pop it out of there.

I don’t get why people on Lemmy care so much about either of them so passionately, I passively see more Linux vs Windows in a week here than basically the rest of my life before joining this site. Is every other person here some kind of computer science enthusiast or something like that?

I don’t think most people would really care about a one off… but if it becomes a regular thing and/or the person has very low credibility then they’ll be more interested on if they’ve been taken for a ride or not.

https://www.hhs.gov/sites/default/files/surgeon-general-social-connection-advisory.pdf

Not having friends has similar health impacts to smoking 15 cigarettes a day. Making friends makes you physically and mentally healthier, gives connections that can help you out of rough patches in your life and into opportunities.

You ‘can’ live without them, but probably not as long as you would have otherwise.

Kingdom of Dragon Pass / Six Ages is pretty niche and the lore there basically has people larping so hard to re-enact divine stories that the divinity rubs off on them and gets them magic and neat stuff. Or terrible deaths.

Ex. head of the Orlanthi pantheon in myth slays a dragon to rescue a rain god inside it and end a drought:

The “We have that at home” version:

(They have even larped as cows… that one’s on the dangerous side though…)

Edit: I think I misunderstood what you were going for nvm

I’m flattered but I don’t know the first thing about modding and I’m just here to goof off so I don’t want to make it a chore, if that makes sense. I’ll certainly subscribe to that group, though.

Before WWI the Kurdish people were split between the Ottoman Empire, Persia, and a tiny number in the Russian Empire.

The Ottomans entered WWI when a faction within it pulled an ill-advised gamer move against Russia that pushed the whole state into the war. Persia under the Qajar dynasty was very weak and informally controlled in large areas by Russia and the British so although they were officially neutral basically nobody else respected that so they were a battleground also. The Entente basically surrounded the Ottomans except for in the European part and they also had powerful naval forces so there were many fronts to the war. The British got a foothold in Iraq and convinced the Arabs to rebel. The Ottomans were losing ground gradually, especially in the south but fortunately for them the Russians fell to pieces so from there they could rest or advance on the northern Persian and Caucasus fronts and got a really good set-up there. However later on the southern fronts in Syria and Iraq were going badly and Bulgaria sued for peace which then put their now-exposed capital in Europe at risk, so the Ottoman government situated there determined the war was unwinnable and signed an unfavorable armistice that had them retreat from their gains, have some areas to be occupied by Europeans while a peace treaty was hammered out and to demobilize the army. Many of the people and army were incensed at this and would keep fighting at small scale. During this time Ataturk put out a communication that said the country’s independence and integrity was in grave danger, that the government was compromised and that delegates from the provinces should hold congresses in the safest areas of Turkey away from outside influence to determine the path forward. These established a burgeoning rival government to the one in the capital which was hemorrhaging legitimacy since it was being pressured by forces stationed right there to be compliant. As part of the new order envisioned in the newly drafted Treaty of Sevres, in addition to the ceding of land and influence to the British and French, there were also to be cessions to Greece, Italy and Armenia as well as a Kurdish autonomy or independence.

By that point though control of the unoccupied areas had firmly shifted to the Ankara government which did not agree to the terms. It warred with Armenia over their disputed territory and won, then when the Bolsheviks took over Armenia shortly after Turkey series of treaties with them that basically established the current borders and friendly relations (both had similar enemies at the time and wanted some friendly borders which would continue until Stalin fumbled things later). So that border set as Turkish one side, Soviet on the other. There was a small Kurdish population that they would intermittently make an autonomy (“Red Kurdistan”) for when sweet-talking Kurdish groups and then dissolve later, but no intention of independence from the USSR. There had been some earlier instances of Kurds revolting in Armenia and Azerbaijan but that was all squished by the time the Soviets rolled in.

Turkey continued with wars against the occupying powers and after forcing back a Greek attempt to push for Ankara the French agreed to settle the border (some modication would occur later w.r.t. Hatay state) in exchange for Turkey recognizing Syria as French in a 1921 treaty. There was a small Kurdish population in Syria at the time but more would flee there from turmoil in southeastern Turkey later. That was great as far as the French were concerned and they encouraged that since they figured that would boost the economy and simultaneously weaken the issue of Arab nationalism plaguing them in Syria (the Terrier Plan) but they wanted to control Syria themselves, not to give it to the anyone. Neither did Syria later on though under Assad rule it did allow Kurdish separatist groups aimed at Turkey to use some areas as training grounds safely out of Turkish reach so it would have leverage to make demands on other matters. Way way later on the SDF was able to control a decent chunk of Syria in the chaos of the Syrian civil war but they recently saw much of their majority Arab territories swap over to the new Syrian government and with a really bad situation if it goes to military means again they are integrating now.

The 1923 Treaty of Lausanne officially canceled the Treaty of Sevres and confirmed the border Turkey had with French Syria but the border with British Iraq was more contentious and was left tbd since both sides wanted the Mosul area (which was expected to be rich in oil). It was referred to the League of Nations which settled in favor of the area belonging to Iraq in 1926. Turkey was miffed but the British agreed to give them a part of the oil revenue and some other sweet rights and benefits so the Turks signed a treaty with them on it. The British did not want an independent Kurdistan because the oil was necessary for their navy and King Faisal of Iraq (a Sunni Arab) wanted to be able to have a higher Sunni population to balance against the many Shia Arabs in his kingdom. The Barzanis especially tried many many many times to get Kurdish state off the ground. Such attempts have been helped out at times by Turkey, Iran, the US etc. whenever they wanted to tweak the British/Iraq and presently they have an autonomous region albeit smaller than it was before the failed independence referendum.

Anyway in the meantime relations between Turks and Kurds had gone way south. For some background Sunni Kurds had for centuries been favored by the Ottoman governments and granted many traditional rights (albeit eroded in the latest Ottoman modernization campaigns) in exchange for serving as the first line of defense against the Shia leaning Qizilbash Turks who were often aligned with the various Iranian dynasties. After Turkey won back control of Thrace and Istanbul it had ended the monarchy but maintained the role of the former sultan as Caliph. The Caliph went into exile and his cousin was subsequently elected as new Caliph but it was a powerless position. He asked for more money and foreign scholars asked for him to have more power, but aggressive secularist Ataturk (who does not want religious influence entering politics) seized on this potential channel for “foreign influence” as grounds to actually abolish the Caliphate as well and force the Caliph and his family out of the country. He made many secular reforms in an attempt to shift from religious based identity to a Turkish national identity and promoted the Turkish language in line with that nation-state model.

All of that was quite toxic to Sunni traditionalists, and to ones who were also Kurdish it was viewed as sundering the only link that tied them together so that was an extra twist of the knife. Sheikh Said called all Muslims to rise up but he was only really answered by Kurdish groups (though notably some Kurdish Qizilbash who had previous been a big pain for the Ottomans opposed Sheikh Said). They laid siege to Diyarbakir but ultimately the rebellion was crushed. It was very expensive and worrisome for the Turkish government which commissioned a report on what to do. The Report for Reform in the East made many extreme recommendations on what to do that kicked Turkification into overdrive, established martial law in eastern areas and so on and made life very difficult for Kurds. In my opinion it sowed the seeds of many future problems ex. Dersim massacre. But as of yet despite insurgencies and the like, no Kurdish autonomy or independent state has been allowed from Turkey.

Qajar Iran was kind of a doormat that everyone stepped on. Much of it was basically occupied by the British and Russians and at times in WWI the Ottomans were making serious incursions. The Ottomans and early Turkey supported a revolt by Simko Shikak in western Iran (who had earlier fought them) who was eventually put down and forced into exile in Iraq by the new Pahlavi dynasty. Later on as described before Kurdish relations had gotten worse and rebellions were becoming a problem in Turkey so Turkey and Iran agreed to delimit the border more strictly which set the modern borders (very similar to older ones excluding ex. loss of Iraq) in 1937. In WWII Iran got invaded by the British and Soviets accompanied by some revolts. At the end of the war the British and the Soviets were supposed to leave but pro Soviet governments were declared in Mahabad (Kurdish) and Tabriz (Azeri). Tribes in the British occupation zone were not interested though and these attempted states collapsed when the Soviets blinked under American pressure and withdrew to leave them to Iran’s mercies. Some support flowed from the USSR and even Saddam’s Iraq to Kurdish groups in Iran (which similarly meddled back in Iraq) with a big revolt after the Iranian Revolution. Of course as you’ll know this didn’t work though some Kurdish insurgent groups exist to this day.

To make a long story short, the folks altering the maps were generally looking to do so in their own favor. Kurdish independence was mostly something to support somewhere else that you didn’t plan on annexing yourself and that would cause a power you were concerned with to be distracted. These were largely very poor tribal areas so with a poor economy they don’t have much ‘oomph’ so to speak in a prolonged war themselves so they would need support… which is also hard to provide because as they’re landlocked a ways in from the water you need the backing of a neighbor to actually get arms and supplies to them. And all the countries currently with a large Kurdish population - Iran, Iraq, Syria, Turkey - share an incentive to not actually want an independent Kurdish state that would may be ideologically inclined to provide a safe haven for their separatists to retreat to and strike back from. Plus Kurdish people are ideologically divided with constellations of parties with different objectives.

I got permabanned from Reddit for supporting terrorism because I posted an ISIS flag in a comment while pointing out how the part of it depicting Muhammad’s seal is based on a forgery some Europeans made as part of a fake relic to scam the Ottomans out of cash… which imo makes ISIS look like morons rather than somehow lending them support but apparently whoever reviews appeals can’t be bothered to read.

The west has maintained more of the larger, predators certainly. Not as much here in the east. Coyotes are invading and sort of acting in the now unoccupied larger land predator niche but given their small size they still don’t really take out deer in any serious quantity.

They are extremely overpopulated in much of the US, in part because most of the natural predators capable of keeping their numbers down have been killed off and there has been a huge artificial increase in field/forest interfaces where they thrive. Huge amounts of starving deer abound and descend on diminishing native vegetation with a voracious appetite while generally ignoring weird invasive foreign plants. Many native plant gardeners are vexed by their tendency to gnaw native plants, trees and shrubs to death unless those are caged in and some got a taste for venison out of revenge haha.

Would be cool if we could re-introduce red wolves and the like to keep a lid on the deer without like half of the predators ending up shot or run over

Mozambique has you covered

12 inches isn’t that bad as far as subsidence issues can get. The ground below you is filled with very tiny holes and gaps that water seeps down into and fills and flows through, kind of like a sponge. While water fills those pores it’s difficult to squish down the soil.

If a heavy weight is on them like a building, though, that can put on enough pressure to push the water out of those pores and flow down out and around. A mix of soil and voids/air give much less resistance to weight than a mix of soil and water filling the gaps so then the voids get compacted down and the ground sinks. Different soils in different conditions may not evenly subside and that can give you a situation like the Leaning Tower of Pisa where one side was subsiding faster than the other side. In modern construction people try to get the water out and compact the ground ahead of time so that it acts more consistently and doesn’t make big changes when a heavy object is placed on it.

Here’s a picture from an agricultural area in California illustrating ~30 ft of subsidence that occurred in that area over a half century of pumping out the groundwater to water the crops.

(This also makes flooding worse… ground that used to be filled with holes that could channel the water down and away into large aquifers is now compacted such that those holes are gone. So instead water piles up on the surface in huge sheets that flow and wipe out whatever is between them and a lower elevation.)