The issue isn't that they didn't work, as I said I wasn't expecting them to when I bought the mouse.

The issue is their behavior has started changing with updates. I don't mind, but I'm a tinkerer. My wife, my MiL, most of my friends, absolutely do not want to deal with an inconsistent computer experience.

Different definitions of 'ready' I guess. Been using primarily Linux for years, so it was 'ready' for me back then - but nothing has changed in the mean time that would change my recommendation for people who just want a boring stable computer.

I love Linux, but it isn't ready.

Two weeks ago my side mouse buttons started working (they require Logitech software on Windows, wasn't expecting them to work). Last week they stopped. This week they work again.

Is this major? Not at all. Would it drive my mother-in-law into a rage rivaling that of Cocaine Bear? Absolutely. Spare me from the bear, keep Linux for the tinkerers.

It's a rather complex topic, but the short answer isn't barbarian invasion.

The simplest correct answer is the Roman elite became less interest in preserving the Roman state and more interested in increasing their own personal wealth and influence.

Nvidia has 90% of the discrete GPU market.

Kind of important that things work there.

Linux isn't ready.

While many things will work 'out of the box', many won't. Hell, for like 3 months HDR was causing system-wide crashes on Plasma for Nvidia cards, so the devs just disabled the HDR options until there was an upstream fix.

There are still a host of resume-from-sleep issues, Wayland support is still spotty, and most importantly - not every piece of software will run.

Linux is my daily driver, I have learned to live and love the jank. My wife uses windows and does not want to be confronted with a debugging challenge 5% of the time when she turns on her computer, and I think that is fair.

These kinds of posts paper over lots of real issues and can be counterproductive. If someone jumps into the ecosystem without understanding, these kinds of posts only set them up for frustration and disappointment.

Have never listened to Rogan.

What were his claims about the vaccines, mask efficacy, and ivermectin?

Yes, of course, there is financing and everything else. I was getting a bit deeper:

If you have to spend 100 joules building a power plant, it better give back more than 100 joules during its lifetime - otherwise it was never worth it to build. That isn't strictly true, there are special purposes, but certainly as a grid-scale energy deployment you would need - at a bare minimum - for each plant to pay for itself in terms of energy investment.

The dollars follow from that physical reality.

The first hurdle for fusion to clear is that the reaction outputs more energy than it needs to sustained. This would be a great academic success, and not much more.

The second hurdle is that it outputs enough energy such that it exceeds the sustainment energy even after accounting for capture losses (e.g. from neutrons, turbine efficiency, etc.) and production efficiencies (lasers need more energy input than they impart to the reaction chamber, magnets need cooling, etc.).

The third hurdle is that over the lifetime of a plant, it produces enough excess energy to build itself and pay the embodied costs of all maintenance and operations work. If the reaction is technically energy positive, but you need to replace the containment vessel every 48 hours due to neutron embrittlement, then the plant better be productive enough to pay for refining all that extra steel.

The fourth hurdle is then that it produces more excess energy per unit of invested energy than any other form of power generation - at which point we'd never build solar panels again.

These final hurdles are in no way guaranteed to be cleared. Artificial fusion needs to be orders of magnitude denser than natural fusion (Stars) to make any sense.. a fusion power plant the size of Earth's moon, with the same power density as the Sun, could only power around 1 million US homes.

I encourage you to seriously engage with the topic and not just read and regurgitate platitudes from popsci articles.

Solar and wind are nothing like fusion.

Educate yourself, but first maybe pause and spend a second to think that perhaps you aren't the smartest person in the room and you shouldn't begin a discussion by speaking down to someone.

When everything hard looks easy, it is a sign you don't understand it as well as you think you do.

Just some advice for you as you grow up.

Economical energy production, sure, not any energy production. There is a reason we no longer burn wood to heat public baths.

I realize the science marketing of fusion over the past 60 years has been 'unlimited free energy', but that isn't quite accurate.

Fusion (well, at least protium/deuterium) would be 'unlimited' in the sense that the fuel needed is essentially inexhaustible. Tens of thousands of years of worldwide energy demand in the top few inches of the ocean.

However that 'free' part is the killer; fusion is very expensive per unit of energy output. For one, protium/deuterium fusion is incredibly 'innefficient', most of the energy is released as high-energy neutrons which generates radioactive waste, damages the containment vessel, and has a low conversion efficiency to electricity. More exotic forms of fusion ameliorate this downside to a degree, but require rarer fuels (hurting the 'unlimited' value proposition) and require more extreme conditions to sustain, further increasing the per-unit cost of energy.

Think of it this way, a fusion plant has an embodied cost of the energy required to make all the stuff that comprises the plant, let's call that C. It also has an operating cost, in both human effort and energy input, let's call that O. Lastly it has a lifetime, let's call that L. Finally, it has an average energy output, let's call that E.

For fusion to make economical sense, the following statement must be true:

(E-O)*L - C > 0.

In other words, it isn't sufficient that the reaction returns more energy than it requires to sustainT, it must also return enough excess energy that it 'pays' for the humans to maintain the plant, maintanence for the plant, and the initial building of the plant (at a minimum). If the above statement exactly equals zero, then the plant doesn't actually given any usable energy - it only pays for itself.

This is hardly the most sophisticated analysis, I encourage you to look more into the economics of fusion if you are interested, but it gets to the heart of the matter. Fusion can be free, unlimited, and economically worthless all at the same time.

The biggest factor is diet - a large portion of ingested water comes from food.

Someone who snacks on carrots is going to need to drink a very different amount of water to stay hydrated as someone who eats jerky and crackers.

There's also obviously differences in kidney function, salt retention, even just body size. Current medical advice is to just drink when you are thirsty, which works for just about everyone.

If they weren't a fascist ethnostate led by a madman, they probably wouldn't have launched the war in the first place. The utterly misguided belief in their superiority is what made them blind to the (rather obvious) conclusion that they didn't have the resources to conquer Europe (mostly) single-handedly. Let alone take Italy along with them.

Hell, the only reason it was even - somewhat - close at points was Hitler's insistence on a blitz through the Ardennes to attack France. The generals thought it was a terrible plan (and it was, that's a big reason why the French were unprepared and got essentially knocked out of the war in weeks).

WW2 is interesting precisely because the big numbers only point one way - a complete defeat of Germany and Japan by much larger and better-supplied powers. But there were multiple points where tactical developments could have become strategic victories - which are rather rare occurrences in the study of war.

E.g. the Nazis didn't have the resources to conquer the Soviet Union, but if the battles of Stalingrad and Moscow had gone their way, it is difficult to see how the USSR could have maintained a functioning government. Likewise Japan was woefully under prepared to defeat the US in the Pacific, but if the US carriers had been sunk at Pearl Harbor, maybe the Japanese hedgehog strategy to fortify the Pacific islands works out.

Of course, once the bomb was ready then nothing else matters.

Ultimately, it was all massive tragedy the likes of which I hope we never see again. The counterfactuals are fun to play out, if you can abstract away the millions of deaths in all sides.

Completely correct. There is also a (much rather in the US) ScD degree - Doctor of science.

In the US, it is often identical to a PhD. If your institution offers it, you just check a box at the end of your program on whether you want a PhD or ScD. In Europe, an ScD is a higher degree than a PhD and requires some extra work to obtain.

I find it kind of bussin', I find it kind of cap. The dreams in which I'm dying are the ones that kinda slap.

This particular deal is a good thing for the country. Metals production is incredibly capital intensive and margins on products are low (this is base production, not the high value-add specialty alloys). That means the business needs to spend billions to make millions in net profit.

This is exactly the kind of business that the American investor class lost patience with in the era of globalization, and even further with the rise of big tech - where it becomes possible to bootstrap billion-dollar businesses with millions in starting capital. Capital flight from manufacturing, and businesses with similar capex/opex/margin profiles has gutted the US manufacturing base and only a dwindling number of legacy players even operate - new entrants can't get investment and either set up overseas or just never advance past the planning stage.

The end result for US Steel has been decades of mismanagement and cost-cutting that have left the US without competitive base metals production - funds that should have been spent on R&D instead went to shareholders. This mismanagement has caught up to the business and it is now producing products of inferior quality and at higher prices than overseas suppliers who haven't spent the last 3 decades avoiding investment in their own business. The 'Buy American' provisions and metals tariffs are basically the only reason it hasn't folded already.

Enter Nippon Steel, a company very used to operating in an environment with expensive energy, labor, and inputs. It wants to buy the US Steel assets (read steel plants and workers) and operate them as an independent subsidiary in order to gain more of foothold in the American market and be eligible for US defense contracts. This capital infusion is desperately needed as the current owners of the business have underinvested since the 80s. Somehow, this story gets twisted into some nativist drivel, and now the US gov is set in blocking the deal to score political points with the uninformed. What this means is we'll be giving US Steel a taxpayer bailout in a few years, or it will go bankrupt, or the ghouls in charge will change their entire outlook and begin to treat it like a business to be managed and not a money sponge to be squeezed...

The price differential doesn't really exist anymore, though. If they were recommending 4TB, then I'd agree (only a few 4TB 5.0 and they are quite pricey), but at 2TB you're looking at like $10 difference between something like the MP700 and the SN850X they recommend (not counting all the black Friday sales going on).

I'd be very careful relying on that site.. just flipped through some of the build and it was very strange.

E.g. they were recommending a $500 or $900 CASE at the highest tiers - not even good cases, you can get something less than half the price with better performance. They recommended a single pcie 4.0 SSD and a SPINNING HARD DRIVE for a motherboard with pcie 5.0 m2 slots. Recommending CPU coolers that are far, far in excess of requirements (a 3x140mm radiator for a 100W chip? Nonsense). Memory recommendations for AMD builds are also sus - DDR5 6000 CL30 is what those cups do best with, they were recommending DDR5600 CL32 kits for no reason.

Just strange.. makes me question the rest of their recommendations.

The conspiratorial thinking isn't helping your argument.

It's quite clear you haven't engaged with this topic outside of internet arguments. I sincerely hope you do some reading and learn more here - you clearly have the passion.

Until then, find someone else to harass.

You clearly didn't comprehend what I wrote. Educate yourself on this topic - not from forum arguments, but from TEA and policy papers.

For one, I said 'base load' generation isn't needed. Your thinking that is is means your thinking on the matter is 10 years out of date. If you insist base load is needed, then gas plants and carbon capture systems are far cheaper and faster to build.

You don't care, though, as you aren't seriously involved in the policy and just want to live in a world where you are right 🤷.

Base load is an outdated concept. It is cheaper, by an order of magnitude, to install surplus generation capacity using renewables and build storage to cover periods of reduced production.

Nuclear reactors actually make terrible 'base load' generation anyway, as large swings in output induce thermal cycling stress in their metal components AND the economics of these multi-billion dollar investments depend on running near max output at all times - otherwise the payback time from selling power will extend beyond the useful life of the plant.

The policy wonks shilling for nuclear are not being honest. The economics for these plants are terrible, they are especially terrible if The Plan (tm) is to use nuclear as a transition fuel to be replaced by renewables - as then they won't even reach break even. To say nothing of the fact that a solar installation in the US takes 6 months, while there have been two reactors under construction in Georgia for a decade...

50 years ago, nuclear was a great option. Today, it is too expensive, too slow to build, and simply unnecessary with existing storage technologies.

If y'all were really worried about base load power, you'd be shilling for natural gas peaker plants + carbon capture which has much better economics.

2020 was different from 2024. It was a very unique set of circumstances with an election in the middle of pandemic, with an incumbent who was never broadly popular, amidst utterly terrible economic conditions.

Still, Trump's base showed up, just as they did on Tuesday.

Biden had the benefit of all the unlikely voters not being able to ignore the country burning down around them, he got a lot of dissatisfied people who don't pay attention to politics to come out.

Harris didn't, she got the Dem base. People broadly dissatisfied at the state of things probably voted Trump since he isn't the incumbent.

Just how it works - voters don't have to be rational.