The problem is that impact doesn't scale linearly with size - the size of the crater scales with the cube-root of the blast energy - in this case the mass, since we won't be appreciably modifying the impact speed. Break an asteroid into 8 chunks, and now you have 8 impacts, each still having half the blast radius of the original. 64 chunks would each have a blast radius 1/4 the size of the original.
And while we may not be able to accurately predict the impact point months or years in advance, it gets easier the closer the impact point becomes. It also becomes easier the larger the asteroid is, so that solar pressure, etc. have less effect on its path. Weeks away we'd know roughly where it will hit, so everybody can get ready in case they have to evacuate, and we'd have at least days to evacuate a particular city - which should be quite doable with the amount of warning possible.
Ironically enough, an ocean impact by a large meteor is probably the worst-case scenario - at orbital speeds water is only marginally less solid than rock. The tsunamis created by the blast of vaporized water would likely be more devastating than a direct land impact, and all that water in the atmosphere would wreak havoc with global weather patterns - flooding, dense cloud-cover, etc., which could devastate global food production.
Or, just land a rocket on the asteroid nose-first, and start pushing. Since you have virtually no gravity to deal with, Landing could probably be handled by redirected attitude jets. The big problems will just be balancing against the thrust of the engines, and transmitting the force through the entire length of the rocket to the nose.
You really think the angular momentum of a rotating asteroid is going to make a huge difference compared to the forces necessary to blow the thing into a bunch of pieces in the first place?
Figure, the instant the asteroid is shattered, the fact that it was rotating make no more difference, except in that the outermost pieces are traveling on their straight-line paths a bit faster and in a slightly different direction than they otherwise would have been, thanks to the addition of their original velocity around the asteroid's center of mass.
Just paint the entire thing. Only the side facing the sun will be repelled by photon pressure. Of course, that means you can only get a deflection (roughly) directly away from the sun - no tacking is possible, but that would likely be good enough.
Vaporizing is completely different than shattering. For starters, the remaining asteroid remains intact, while the vaporized rock leaves at high speed as jet engine exhaust. That works great.
Don't kid yourself that the size of the fireball has anything to do with the size of the crater it would produce though. The fireball is just superheated gas expanding through cool air, long after the blast has done its damage - it takes very little energy to produce compared to trying to vaporize or displace rock. Also, to get an appreciable crater you'd need to bury the nuke deep underground so that it blasts material upwards instead of down - similarly to how most of the energy of a meteor impact is delivered well below the surface as rock is vaporized out of its path.
And burying a nuke greatly increases the odds of shattering the asteroid rather than deflecting it. And that's almost certainly a bad thing. You've just turned a predictable rifle slug impact area that could be easily evacuated, into a shotgun blast.that will pepper the Earth with nuclear-size impact blasts. Even if half the material misses the Earth entirely, the total damage would be much greater - the size of an impact crater scales with the cube root of the impact energy (in this case, mass, since all else remains roughly constant). Break an asteroid into 8 equal pieces, and now you get 8 impact craters, each still half the diameter that the original would have been. Break it into 64 pieces, and each crater would still be 1/4 the size of the original. Even if half of them missed Earth, you'd still end up doing far more total damage.
About the only reason you'd want to risk doing that is if it was a *really* large asteroid that was going to hit the ocean, generating massive tsunamis and vaporizing a huge mass water that would devastate weather patterns for potentially years to come, doing far worse secondary damage.
And if the asteroid was that big, then even a Tsar Bomba buried in it's core might not be up to shattering it.
Plus there's the slight problem that unlike rockets capable of delivering it, we don't have any Tsar Bombas just lying around in storage (so far as I know), and building one is going to take time. time we wion't necessarily have, and even if we do, every second we wait to launch brings the asteroid closer and reduces the amount of benefit an explosion of a given size can achieve.
Go take a look at the long list of asteroids that have passed frighteningly close to Earth, that we didn't see until they were already past.
The problem is that we have a 50/50 chance that the asteroid will approach us from inside our orbit, in which case the side facing us will not be lit by the sun, rendering it nearly invisible (though the IR telescopes designed specifically for spotting asteroids by their heat signature will do better)
Indeed. If it takes more force than originally estimated to fracture an asteroid, that's a *good* think - it makes deflecting it easier. Fracturing is one of the things most asteroid-avoidance plans want to avoid.
You only want to shatter it (and only maybe) if it's already too late to deflect it - doing so turns a rifle slug who's impact point we can predict, into a shotgun blast that'll hit all over the place, but probably some of it will miss, and more of it will burn up in the atmosphere so that individual impacts are less damaging. The overall effect is likely to be more devastating though - unless the original impact point would have been something especially bad.
Well sure. But then what would be the motivation to spend vast amounts of money to become a government official?
No. Seriously. Winning U.S. Senators spent an average of $10.4 million in the 2016 race, in order to secure a job that pay 174k/year for six years. Granted, a lot of that isn't their money - but when's the last time you spent 60 years salary in order to try to get a job?
>We can either have privacy and terrorism, or no privacy and a government that can't prosecute.
What makes you think the courts couldn't prosecute? People end up in prison all the time based on nothing more than eye-witness testimony - the least-reliable form of evidence, as any scientist can tell you.
Not to mention that you forgot to add "and terrorism using unassailable encryption" to the second half of that. No terrorist organization worth half a damn would would be more than mildly inconvenienced by the deliberate compromising of "officially sanctioned / legal" encryption. Even if you don't have the chops to roll your own, you can download real, secure, encryption programs and libraries from open-source repositories around the world.
There's no putting the genie back in the bottle - the most you can do is make sure that you can spy on every online action of law-abiding citizens and the most incompetent of criminals, and hopelessly compromise their security in the process. That's not much good for fighting crime, quite the opposite in fact. But it's of great value if your real target is to be able to blackmail or destroy political opposition before it can present a real challenge.
In reality though, I suspect t won't get used much for the same reason traditional adhesives are rarely used: when you bond something to a facet of a gem, you change it's optical properties. That's a problem, especially for diamonds, where the sparkle from the internal reflections of a well-cut gem is pretty much the only reason it has any value to jewelers.
Who said anything about hot swapping? That certainly simplifies things even more, but just knowing that a component has failed *before* it becomes a problem, means that you could have a component in hand and ready to replace before shutting down the impaired computer, and thus lose only a few minutes of uptime during to the replacement, instead of likely adding at least a few hours to discover the problem and image a replacement drive while the computer is down.
Wouldn't it be easier (and more up-time friendly) to just schedule automated hardware diagnostics once a week or so? Especially if you're managing banks of computers, an automated email report that says "computer #2839 has a failing component X" is a lot more helpful than "#2839 failed it's reboot, go find the problem".
It also has the benefit of finding most problems sooner, and letting you be standing by ready with a new, freshly imaged drive to swap in when the computer is shut down.
Hmm, you'd probably need OS support, but you could even run piecemeal diagnostics on memory and CPUs while live. And those can introduce far more subtle errors in the rare cases that they start to fail.
>the Moon is just a barren rock with no real income potential
Actually, in the Moon has immense income potential if humanity gets serious about expanding into space. Doing that requires raw materials, and the moon is a pretty decent source, with an escape velocity only about 21% as high as of Earth, and no atmosphere to interfere with rail guns and other ground-based launching systems that are far more efficient than rockets(and reaction-mass free).
Think asteroid mining, with a massive honking asteroid that's already safely in a stable orbit, and offers the convenience of substantial gravity while we're first developing industrial capacity in space. It's not nice concentrated ore like a lot of asteroids may offer, but the moon has pretty much everything Earth does - seemingly even water (from which we can also produce oxygen and rocket fuel), locked up as mineral hydrates in the regolith.
And one of the most immediately valuable resources is also one of the easiest to produce: radiation shielding. All you need is mass, and it doesn't much matter what it is. Just scoop up regolith, crush it to the desired size, and ship it to orbit to install on the surface of habitats with some sort of binding agent. You can't get much better shielding than that. And the same technology likely serves as the first step for early surface mining of more refined materials like iron - just start with ore-rich regolith and extract the desired materials before launching the crushed slag as more shielding
Now, that's down the road a ways before it starts really paying off, but the moon is one of the most obvious and potent stepping stones off the planet.
>but with people wanting sleeker laptops and devices
Are you sure about that? I've met very few people that actually want thinner phones, tablets, etc. Most everybody I knows primarily wants more speed, size, functionality (e.g. camera quality) and battery life. But if you want high performance, you're pretty much stuck buying flagship devices, which are pretty much only available in "sleek" service-unfriendly devices.
You can only use the market to evaluate the popular desirability of a particular feature when there are otherwise-similar products on the market with and without the feature in question.
In the case of portable electronics, *marketers* are big fans of sleek and stylish (but lets be honest, there's not much in the way of visually distinguishable hardware features in a phone or tablet other than size), and *manufacturers* are big fans of the increased sales driven by service-unfriendly devices. The market has only really established that people are more interested in cutting-edge features than easy servicing.
>Once the threat of jail time is held over any CxO position, good fucking luck filling it.
Shouldn't be hard - just make sure the company has lots of checks and balances to ensure nobody, at any level, can get away with causing the company to engage in illegal or high-risk activities.
Would that hurt profits? Almost certainly. But it would also go a long way to making company's behave in socially responsible ways, rather than as psychopathic profit-seekers. Which is something society, and it's supposed representative in government, should probably be very interested in encouraging.
Over geological timescales, yes. Not during an icehouse glacial/interglacial period like we've been in for the entire history of the human species though. Warm things up dramatically, and we'll likely toggle to the planets hothouse state where such CO2 levels *are* fairly normal.
Once we get there, it might not be that bad - though the climate seems to have been a lot less stable in that state, with CO2 levels varying wildly, ecosystems changing frequently, and vast continent-spanning deserts not exactly being super rare. And even if we luck into tropics extending into Canada - the tropics are generally not actually considered a lovely place to live full time. The diseases alone put a damper on things.
A more immediate problem is the transition period, which tends to be a really traumatic event, with 90+% global extinction rates. Consider that an old-growth forest can't migrate very quickly, and when the trees go, so do most of the species that live there. And moving further from the equator chasing your optimal average temperature, also subjects you to more dramatic seasons. The Amazon Rainforest evolved to deal with a few degrees of seasonal variation - even if it could migrate to North America chasing the right average temperature, the seasons would kill most of it.
For a whole lot of species it *will* be the end of the world, and that's going to be really rough for us, perched on top of a global ecosystem that's already quite shaky from human-caused pollution and extinctions.
But China is actually already investing heavily in long-term fossil-carbon reduction strategies - they're installing renewable energy generating capacity as fast as the rest of the world combined. They've just decided that they're better off continuing to also use fossil energy in the mid-term to fuel their industrial revolution, and then bear the cost of some modest climate change.
And of course, their position is that as we're the ones that did most of the existing damage, and we continue to do by far the most per-capita damage, we should be the ones doing the most to improve the situation. Which is not an entirely unreasonable position.
It's also worth noting that global warming might not actually be that bad a thing for China. Like Russia, they've got a lot of very marginal frozen wasteland within their borders. And unlike Canada, they don't have any militant neighbors to the south. They're better positioned than most to benefit from modest global warming.
All of which seems to amount to, we're going to have to be the ones leading the charge. And we're probably not going to be able to avoid some pretty serious climate problems. The question is - do we want to eventually stabilize things, or tip the planet back to a dinosaur-era climate, that likely ends with a semi-tropical Canada and vast globe-spanning equatorial deserts, and around 95% global extinction during the transition.
Massive system that dwarfs the scale of the organisms modifying it, mostly only changes dramatically on timescales longer than a single organism's lifespan. Shocking!
Meanwhile, we're pretty much seeing most of the relatively minor initial changes forecast 50 years ago.
And you're continuing to miss the point. In this context, the mental health of the moderators, there is no child abuse. There is only discussions and images of child abuse. Really sucks for the kid (assuming there's an actual kid involved), but they're outside the scope of this discussion
Moderators may be traumatized by looking at such images and reading such posts, but it will not be anything remotely like actually suffering such abuse themselves.
We're not talking about child abuse in this context though - they're talking about looking at images and discussions of it. Speech about child abuse. That's a pretty serious difference, it's not like the moderator is going to suffer the trauma of the abuse that they're seeing and reading about. (presumably anyone who suffered such a thing themselves so that past traumas would be invoked would stay far away from such a job)
Do you really think reading someone's post about raping children is going to be dramatically more traumatic than reading someone's post about murdering black people?
Only I think you're thinking of protium-boron fusion being aneutronic, aka the p-B11 reaction. I'm not clear that D-B fusion is noteworthy path, but even if it is, you'd still be dealing with neutron-radiating D-D side reactions. Those side reactions put a damper on a lot of the otherwise promising aneutronic reactions.
So what? Plutonium isn't appreciably radioactive. Deutrium is much more so, but still a mere trickle compared to what you'd get feeding from feeding it into a $300 fusor.
Slashdot Mirror
The problem is that impact doesn't scale linearly with size - the size of the crater scales with the cube-root of the blast energy - in this case the mass, since we won't be appreciably modifying the impact speed. Break an asteroid into 8 chunks, and now you have 8 impacts, each still having half the blast radius of the original. 64 chunks would each have a blast radius 1/4 the size of the original.
And while we may not be able to accurately predict the impact point months or years in advance, it gets easier the closer the impact point becomes. It also becomes easier the larger the asteroid is, so that solar pressure, etc. have less effect on its path. Weeks away we'd know roughly where it will hit, so everybody can get ready in case they have to evacuate, and we'd have at least days to evacuate a particular city - which should be quite doable with the amount of warning possible.
Ironically enough, an ocean impact by a large meteor is probably the worst-case scenario - at orbital speeds water is only marginally less solid than rock. The tsunamis created by the blast of vaporized water would likely be more devastating than a direct land impact, and all that water in the atmosphere would wreak havoc with global weather patterns - flooding, dense cloud-cover, etc., which could devastate global food production.
Or, just land a rocket on the asteroid nose-first, and start pushing. Since you have virtually no gravity to deal with, Landing could probably be handled by redirected attitude jets. The big problems will just be balancing against the thrust of the engines, and transmitting the force through the entire length of the rocket to the nose.
You really think the angular momentum of a rotating asteroid is going to make a huge difference compared to the forces necessary to blow the thing into a bunch of pieces in the first place?
Figure, the instant the asteroid is shattered, the fact that it was rotating make no more difference, except in that the outermost pieces are traveling on their straight-line paths a bit faster and in a slightly different direction than they otherwise would have been, thanks to the addition of their original velocity around the asteroid's center of mass.
Just paint the entire thing. Only the side facing the sun will be repelled by photon pressure. Of course, that means you can only get a deflection (roughly) directly away from the sun - no tacking is possible, but that would likely be good enough.
Vaporizing is completely different than shattering. For starters, the remaining asteroid remains intact, while the vaporized rock leaves at high speed as jet engine exhaust. That works great.
Don't kid yourself that the size of the fireball has anything to do with the size of the crater it would produce though. The fireball is just superheated gas expanding through cool air, long after the blast has done its damage - it takes very little energy to produce compared to trying to vaporize or displace rock. Also, to get an appreciable crater you'd need to bury the nuke deep underground so that it blasts material upwards instead of down - similarly to how most of the energy of a meteor impact is delivered well below the surface as rock is vaporized out of its path.
And burying a nuke greatly increases the odds of shattering the asteroid rather than deflecting it. And that's almost certainly a bad thing. You've just turned a predictable rifle slug impact area that could be easily evacuated, into a shotgun blast.that will pepper the Earth with nuclear-size impact blasts. Even if half the material misses the Earth entirely, the total damage would be much greater - the size of an impact crater scales with the cube root of the impact energy (in this case, mass, since all else remains roughly constant). Break an asteroid into 8 equal pieces, and now you get 8 impact craters, each still half the diameter that the original would have been. Break it into 64 pieces, and each crater would still be 1/4 the size of the original. Even if half of them missed Earth, you'd still end up doing far more total damage.
About the only reason you'd want to risk doing that is if it was a *really* large asteroid that was going to hit the ocean, generating massive tsunamis and vaporizing a huge mass water that would devastate weather patterns for potentially years to come, doing far worse secondary damage.
And if the asteroid was that big, then even a Tsar Bomba buried in it's core might not be up to shattering it.
Plus there's the slight problem that unlike rockets capable of delivering it, we don't have any Tsar Bombas just lying around in storage (so far as I know), and building one is going to take time. time we wion't necessarily have, and even if we do, every second we wait to launch brings the asteroid closer and reduces the amount of benefit an explosion of a given size can achieve.
Go take a look at the long list of asteroids that have passed frighteningly close to Earth, that we didn't see until they were already past.
The problem is that we have a 50/50 chance that the asteroid will approach us from inside our orbit, in which case the side facing us will not be lit by the sun, rendering it nearly invisible (though the IR telescopes designed specifically for spotting asteroids by their heat signature will do better)
Indeed. If it takes more force than originally estimated to fracture an asteroid, that's a *good* think - it makes deflecting it easier. Fracturing is one of the things most asteroid-avoidance plans want to avoid.
You only want to shatter it (and only maybe) if it's already too late to deflect it - doing so turns a rifle slug who's impact point we can predict, into a shotgun blast that'll hit all over the place, but probably some of it will miss, and more of it will burn up in the atmosphere so that individual impacts are less damaging. The overall effect is likely to be more devastating though - unless the original impact point would have been something especially bad.
Well sure. But then what would be the motivation to spend vast amounts of money to become a government official?
No. Seriously. Winning U.S. Senators spent an average of $10.4 million in the 2016 race, in order to secure a job that pay 174k/year for six years. Granted, a lot of that isn't their money - but when's the last time you spent 60 years salary in order to try to get a job?
>We can either have privacy and terrorism, or no privacy and a government that can't prosecute.
What makes you think the courts couldn't prosecute? People end up in prison all the time based on nothing more than eye-witness testimony - the least-reliable form of evidence, as any scientist can tell you.
Not to mention that you forgot to add "and terrorism using unassailable encryption" to the second half of that. No terrorist organization worth half a damn would would be more than mildly inconvenienced by the deliberate compromising of "officially sanctioned / legal" encryption. Even if you don't have the chops to roll your own, you can download real, secure, encryption programs and libraries from open-source repositories around the world.
There's no putting the genie back in the bottle - the most you can do is make sure that you can spy on every online action of law-abiding citizens and the most incompetent of criminals, and hopelessly compromise their security in the process. That's not much good for fighting crime, quite the opposite in fact. But it's of great value if your real target is to be able to blackmail or destroy political opposition before it can present a real challenge.
So, what's the bane part?
In reality though, I suspect t won't get used much for the same reason traditional adhesives are rarely used: when you bond something to a facet of a gem, you change it's optical properties. That's a problem, especially for diamonds, where the sparkle from the internal reflections of a well-cut gem is pretty much the only reason it has any value to jewelers.
Who said anything about hot swapping? That certainly simplifies things even more, but just knowing that a component has failed *before* it becomes a problem, means that you could have a component in hand and ready to replace before shutting down the impaired computer, and thus lose only a few minutes of uptime during to the replacement, instead of likely adding at least a few hours to discover the problem and image a replacement drive while the computer is down.
Wouldn't it be easier (and more up-time friendly) to just schedule automated hardware diagnostics once a week or so? Especially if you're managing banks of computers, an automated email report that says "computer #2839 has a failing component X" is a lot more helpful than "#2839 failed it's reboot, go find the problem".
It also has the benefit of finding most problems sooner, and letting you be standing by ready with a new, freshly imaged drive to swap in when the computer is shut down.
Hmm, you'd probably need OS support, but you could even run piecemeal diagnostics on memory and CPUs while live. And those can introduce far more subtle errors in the rare cases that they start to fail.
>the Moon is just a barren rock with no real income potential
Actually, in the Moon has immense income potential if humanity gets serious about expanding into space. Doing that requires raw materials, and the moon is a pretty decent source, with an escape velocity only about 21% as high as of Earth, and no atmosphere to interfere with rail guns and other ground-based launching systems that are far more efficient than rockets(and reaction-mass free).
Think asteroid mining, with a massive honking asteroid that's already safely in a stable orbit, and offers the convenience of substantial gravity while we're first developing industrial capacity in space. It's not nice concentrated ore like a lot of asteroids may offer, but the moon has pretty much everything Earth does - seemingly even water (from which we can also produce oxygen and rocket fuel), locked up as mineral hydrates in the regolith.
And one of the most immediately valuable resources is also one of the easiest to produce: radiation shielding. All you need is mass, and it doesn't much matter what it is. Just scoop up regolith, crush it to the desired size, and ship it to orbit to install on the surface of habitats with some sort of binding agent. You can't get much better shielding than that. And the same technology likely serves as the first step for early surface mining of more refined materials like iron - just start with ore-rich regolith and extract the desired materials before launching the crushed slag as more shielding
Now, that's down the road a ways before it starts really paying off, but the moon is one of the most obvious and potent stepping stones off the planet.
>but with people wanting sleeker laptops and devices
Are you sure about that? I've met very few people that actually want thinner phones, tablets, etc. Most everybody I knows primarily wants more speed, size, functionality (e.g. camera quality) and battery life. But if you want high performance, you're pretty much stuck buying flagship devices, which are pretty much only available in "sleek" service-unfriendly devices.
You can only use the market to evaluate the popular desirability of a particular feature when there are otherwise-similar products on the market with and without the feature in question.
In the case of portable electronics, *marketers* are big fans of sleek and stylish (but lets be honest, there's not much in the way of visually distinguishable hardware features in a phone or tablet other than size), and *manufacturers* are big fans of the increased sales driven by service-unfriendly devices. The market has only really established that people are more interested in cutting-edge features than easy servicing.
>Once the threat of jail time is held over any CxO position, good fucking luck filling it.
Shouldn't be hard - just make sure the company has lots of checks and balances to ensure nobody, at any level, can get away with causing the company to engage in illegal or high-risk activities.
Would that hurt profits? Almost certainly. But it would also go a long way to making company's behave in socially responsible ways, rather than as psychopathic profit-seekers. Which is something society, and it's supposed representative in government, should probably be very interested in encouraging.
Yeah, only big instead of small little fragments.
Over geological timescales, yes. Not during an icehouse glacial/interglacial period like we've been in for the entire history of the human species though. Warm things up dramatically, and we'll likely toggle to the planets hothouse state where such CO2 levels *are* fairly normal.
Once we get there, it might not be that bad - though the climate seems to have been a lot less stable in that state, with CO2 levels varying wildly, ecosystems changing frequently, and vast continent-spanning deserts not exactly being super rare. And even if we luck into tropics extending into Canada - the tropics are generally not actually considered a lovely place to live full time. The diseases alone put a damper on things.
A more immediate problem is the transition period, which tends to be a really traumatic event, with 90+% global extinction rates. Consider that an old-growth forest can't migrate very quickly, and when the trees go, so do most of the species that live there. And moving further from the equator chasing your optimal average temperature, also subjects you to more dramatic seasons. The Amazon Rainforest evolved to deal with a few degrees of seasonal variation - even if it could migrate to North America chasing the right average temperature, the seasons would kill most of it.
For a whole lot of species it *will* be the end of the world, and that's going to be really rough for us, perched on top of a global ecosystem that's already quite shaky from human-caused pollution and extinctions.
But China is actually already investing heavily in long-term fossil-carbon reduction strategies - they're installing renewable energy generating capacity as fast as the rest of the world combined. They've just decided that they're better off continuing to also use fossil energy in the mid-term to fuel their industrial revolution, and then bear the cost of some modest climate change.
And of course, their position is that as we're the ones that did most of the existing damage, and we continue to do by far the most per-capita damage, we should be the ones doing the most to improve the situation. Which is not an entirely unreasonable position.
It's also worth noting that global warming might not actually be that bad a thing for China. Like Russia, they've got a lot of very marginal frozen wasteland within their borders. And unlike Canada, they don't have any militant neighbors to the south. They're better positioned than most to benefit from modest global warming.
All of which seems to amount to, we're going to have to be the ones leading the charge. And we're probably not going to be able to avoid some pretty serious climate problems. The question is - do we want to eventually stabilize things, or tip the planet back to a dinosaur-era climate, that likely ends with a semi-tropical Canada and vast globe-spanning equatorial deserts, and around 95% global extinction during the transition.
Massive system that dwarfs the scale of the organisms modifying it, mostly only changes dramatically on timescales longer than a single organism's lifespan. Shocking!
Meanwhile, we're pretty much seeing most of the relatively minor initial changes forecast 50 years ago.
And you're continuing to miss the point. In this context, the mental health of the moderators, there is no child abuse. There is only discussions and images of child abuse. Really sucks for the kid (assuming there's an actual kid involved), but they're outside the scope of this discussion
Moderators may be traumatized by looking at such images and reading such posts, but it will not be anything remotely like actually suffering such abuse themselves.
We're not talking about child abuse in this context though - they're talking about looking at images and discussions of it. Speech about child abuse. That's a pretty serious difference, it's not like the moderator is going to suffer the trauma of the abuse that they're seeing and reading about. (presumably anyone who suffered such a thing themselves so that past traumas would be invoked would stay far away from such a job)
Do you really think reading someone's post about raping children is going to be dramatically more traumatic than reading someone's post about murdering black people?
Yeah, but you're going to end up dead or permanently imprisoned at the end of it anyway, so why get cheap?
Quite so.
Only I think you're thinking of protium-boron fusion being aneutronic, aka the p-B11 reaction. I'm not clear that D-B fusion is noteworthy path, but even if it is, you'd still be dealing with neutron-radiating D-D side reactions. Those side reactions put a damper on a lot of the otherwise promising aneutronic reactions.
So what? Plutonium isn't appreciably radioactive. Deutrium is much more so, but still a mere trickle compared to what you'd get feeding from feeding it into a $300 fusor.
Sure, but they've got at least 10-30,000 years seniority on the rest of us upstarts.