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Joined 8 months ago
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Cake day: May 28th, 2024

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  • I wouldn’t call it worse than renewables. It’s a sidegrade from coal burning. Where I’m from, solar is non-viable 6 months of the year. Wind is theoretically viable year-round but in reality it’s less than that due to cold snaps and the intermittent nature of wind. And there’s no way that wind power alone could provide enough power even when running at 100%. There are no viable rivers here for hydro either. Geothermal is nigh impossible here as well. So without a reliable back-up power source, everyone here would be experiencing brown outs on a fully renewable system. Many wouldn’t receive power at all due to a significant rural population and the challenges inherent to it (and forcing people into cities is not a viable option). So the only options are fossil fuels and nuclear. Given that we’re killing everything with the former, I would much prefer we give the latter a go.



  • Look, friend: as much as I like nuclear energy and decentralization of the powder grid, per home reactors could never, ever work. For the simple reason that the majority of us filthy apes are complete idiots. Furthermore, nuclear works currently because it has oversight by educated, trained professionals in a setting where oversight can be effective. Even if you had some sort of travelling nuclear engineer that would check up on your garage reactor, if anything ever went wrong with it then the response time would be too long to adequately deal with the situation.

    The only way a distributed network of reactors could work is if it either had massive overhead or if literally everyone had training on the maintenance of a nuclear reactor. And this isn’t even mentioning the possibility of adverse weather events potentially damaging the reactor or how the waste would be dealt with.








  • Okay, first of all: the DSM is used primarily in North America. The majority of the world uses ICDM.

    Secondly, the DSM has gone through many iterations and changes. For instance, DSM-I and -II contained psychopathy as a mental illness. It was replaced by ASPD in DSM-III. What we term today as “major depressive disorder” was also introduced in DSM-III. Did depression not exist prior to the third DSM? Did ASPD not exist? Does psychopathy not exist now that it has been replaced by ASPD?

    Thirdly, there’s so much bloody overlap in conditions listed in the DSM that you could present two psychiatrists with the same list of symptoms and they would diagnose two different disorders. And to my mind, this lends more credence to the first DSM’s principle classifications of psychotic, neurotic, and behavioural disorders.

    To summarize, the DSM is regional and therefore cannot be applied globally. It describes medical conditions and those medical conditions can be redefined at any time. And it is borderline unreliable due to diagnostic confusion and overspecification. In short, the presence or lack thereof of some cluster of symptoms in the DSM is not an indicator of the existence of a condition.