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Cake day: June 16th, 2023

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  • I used to work for a software company that was a beneficiary of a $12 million a year political pork grant from the state of Louisiana that was officially intended for improving industrial and manufacturing capability in Louisiana. Somehow, my company was managing to spend this money in Mississippi, and giving it to a national defense contractor that wasn’t exactly in desperate need of (more) government handouts. That’s how fucking corrupt Mississippi is: they even suck in the corruption from their corrupt neighbors, while making sure that not a penny of that shit goes towards improving a state that I would describe as third-world if it wouldn’t be so insulting to the third world.







  • Can you imagine our world today if Gore had gotten in?

    It’s not very well-remembered today that Clinton’s administration ended with a budget surplus of hundreds of billions of dollars or that Gore was by far the most prominent voice in the world sounding the alarm about global warming. With a Gore victory we could have been debt-free as a nation by now and actually taking significant steps towards ending our dependency on fossil fuels; instead the debt is $35 fucking trillion dollars (which is so enormous it sounds like a joke) and the only reason this isn’t a bigger problem is that we’re cooking ourselves off the planet anyway and no amount of debt is going to matter.

    Somewhat tangential, but “global warming” was always a weak formulation of the problem and “climate change” even more so. I prefer “anthropogenic runaway global heating” which more accurately frames the actual problem and has the handy acronym ARGH.












  • Fun uranium facts: during WWII, one method that the Manhattan Project used to refine uranium (i.e. separate U235 from natural uranium which is mostly non-fissile U238) relied on magnetism. A charged particle moving through a magnetic field experiences a force perpendicular to the direction of motion, which makes it follow a slightly curved path instead of a straight line. This force is the same for both U235 and U238 but since U235 weighs slightly less, its path is slightly more curved. By charging particles of natural uranium and shooting them through a powerful magnetic field, separate collectors can be set up to gather the U235 particles.

    Creating the magnetic field required powerful electromagnets. Normally these would have used copper wire but copper was a valuable strategic metal needed for much of the other military hardware the US was producing, so the Manhattan Project “checked out” the United States’ reserves of silver to build the magnets. For good measure, the electricity for the magnets came mostly from the hydroelectric dams built as part of the Tennessee Valley Authority projects of the 1930s (this is mainly why the Manhattan Project’s uranium processing facilities were located in Oak Ridge). These dams were originally meant to power the production of aluminum, but the US had plenty of other sources for that.