Blake [he/him]

  • 2 Posts
  • 39 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 12th, 2023

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  • When it comes to generating electricity, nuclear is hugely more expensive than renewables. Every 1000Wh of nuclear power could be 2000-3000 Wh solar or wind.

    If you’ve been told “it’s not possible to have all power from renewable sources”, you have been a victim of disinformation from the fossil fuel industry. The majority of studies show that a global transition to 100% renewable energy across all sectors – power, heat, transport and industry – is feasible and economically viable.

    This is all with current, modern day technology, not with some far-off dream or potential future tech such as nuclear fusion, thorium reactors or breeder reactors.

    Compared to nuclear, renewables are:

    • Cheaper
    • As clean or cleaner, in terms of emissions
    • Faster to provision
    • Less environmentally damaging
    • Not reliant on continuous consumption of fuel
    • Decentralised
    • Much, much safer
    • Much easier to maintain
    • More reliable
    • Much more capable of being scaled down on demand to meet changes in energy demands

    Nuclear power has promise as a future technology. But at present, while I’m all in favour of keeping the ones we have until the end of their useful life, building new nuclear power stations is a massive waste of money, resources, effort and political capital.

    Nuclear energy should be funded only to conduct new research into potential future improvements and to construct experimental power stations. Any money that would be spent on building nuclear power plants should be spent on renewables instead.

    Frequently asked questions:

    • But it’s not always sunny or windy, how can we deal with that?

    While a given spot in your country is going to have periods where it’s not sunny or rainy, with a mixture of energy distribution (modern interconnectors can transmit 800kV or more over 800km or more with less than 3% loss) non-electrical storage such as pumped storage, and diversified renewable sources, this problem is completely mitigated - we can generate wind, solar or hydro power over 2,000km away from where it is consumed for cheaper than we could generate nuclear electricity 20km away.

    • Don’t renewables take up too much space?

    The United States has enough land paved over for parking spaces to have 8 spaces per car - 5% of the land. If just 10% of that space was used to generate solar electricity - a mere 0.5% - that would generate enough solar power to provide electricity to the entire country. By comparison, around 50% of the land is agricultural. The amount of land used by renewable sources is not a real problem, it’s an argument used by the very wealthy pro-nuclear lobby to justify the huge amounts of funding that they currently receive.

    • Isn’t Nuclear power cleaner than renewables?

    No, they’re pretty comparable in terms of emissions, and renewables are cleaner in terms of other environmental impacts. You can look up total lifetime emissions for nuclear vs. renewables - this is the aggregated and equalised emissions caused per kWh for each energy source. It takes into account the energy used to extract raw materials, build the power plant, operate the plant, maintenance, the fuels needed to sustain it, the transport needed to service it, and so on. These numbers generally show that renewables tend to be as clean or cleaner in terms of total lifetime emissions, and in addition, since nuclear relies on fuel extraction (mining) and has lots of issues regarding waste, renewables is overall cleaner than nuclear.

    • We need a baseline load, though, and that can only be nuclear or fossil fuels.

    Not according to industry experts - the majority of studies show that a 100% renewable source of energy across all industries for all needs - electricity, heating, transport, and industry - is completely possible with current technology and is economically viable. If you disagree, don’t argue with me, take it up with the IEC. Here’s a Wikipedia article that you can use as a baseline for more information: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/100%25_renewable_energy


  • Hijacking your thread to advocate for my lazy ideology. Disclaimer I have pretty severe ADHD so this might be extreme for most people but for me this makes life liveable.

    Forget trying to make things look super tidy and neat like in an IKEA commercial. Make your living space functional, comfortable and easy to maintain. Reduce the amount of physical, mental and emotional effort required to maintain your environment. For example, for laundry:

    1. Don’t iron anything unless you really need/want to. (Job interview, going on a date, appearing in court, etc.)
    2. Anywhere you’re liable to undress, have a basket for dirty clothes. It should be open-topped (no lid!) and mobile, like a laundry basket, so when you need to do a load of laundry, you can pick up and use the whole basket - functioning both as the hamper and the basket. Bedroom and bathroom are the usual places for this! You want the act of tossing dirty clothes in the laundry to be just as easy as tossing it on the floor.
    3. There’s no such thing as odd socks. They’re called mix ‘n’ match socks now. Like Mashems!
    4. No neatly folded clothes or hangers or anything like that, except for very special things such as in point 1 - everything just gets dumped into big drawers based on category. I have little fabric boxes that fit into a kallax to keep this relatively neat looking but super easy.
    5. If something can’t survive going in the washing machine mixed load cycle and the tumble dryer daily load, it is not welcome in my life. (There’s a similar rule about the dishwasher!)

    You get the idea. Embrace your laziness, don’t bother yourself with half a second what people might think of how you live. This is surprisingly neat and orderly and takes almost no effort to maintain. If you keep finding your basket is misplaced, buy another basket and keep it in two places. Stop fighting the current and go with your flow. Accept who you are, even if you’re a lazy bitch like me!



  • As much as I support this, it’s not going to win this fight.

    We keep fighting them by their rules, with their systems, and in the places where they are strong.

    The law, the politicians, the media and the wealthy are all on their side.

    Peaceful protest, legal battles, voting, the free market, regulation, international summits, agreements, accords, and treaties, all of these things have failed.

    The time has long since passed to take action into our own hands and remind the ruling class who they should be afraid of.

    If you’re reading this and you agree, don’t just upvote and move along. Join the IWW, search online for groups organising direct action in your area, learn about mutual aid and get out there. Share the message far and wide. We can’t just sit back and tell each-other that if we vote for the right people it’ll end this shit, because it won’t.


  • All of the evidence says that vaping is much less harmful than smoking, so I’m afraid that I will have to disagree with you on that. This kind of misinformed comment is not helpful to discourage vaping, as it just makes all anti-vaping messaging seem deceptive, which is why I asked for personal stories from people about their experience.

    I agree with what you wrote about vape products being marketed at young people, but that isn’t the focus of this post.



  • So it’s a monetary thing, mainly? If it was cheap would you still want to quit?

    I’m very curious on the topic - having had many friends and relatives who have started vaping, I wanted to get an understanding of the topic, both in terms of health data, but also the perspectives of people who vape.

    It’s incredibly difficult to get good, clear information about this - lots of responses are from smokers talking about how much better vaping is than smoking - but we know that kids/teens have been picking up vaping at a high rate without ever having smoked and have been doing so now for a number of years, so those responses aren’t helpful.

    On the other hand, when it comes to finding the negatives of vaping, it’s very difficult - so much has been written about one or two overblown stories (e.g. vitamin E acetate in THC vapes, or issues involving black-market or gray-market vapes/nicotine solutions) which absolutely drowns out the ability to find information about the negative health effects of a typical vape user buying name-brand products from reputable suppliers.

    Long story short, I’m just trying to gather opinions and personal experience with vaping products. I have no real opinion either way, I’m just looking for the truth.

    If you do want to help people avoid nicotine, all of the research has shown that the best anti-smoking campaigns used storytelling and strong emotional messaging - so I would encourage you to share your story if you’ve had a negative experience with vaping.

    Edit: I just saw your edit saying my questions were a bit specific, it’s possibly my autism or something that makes me inclined to the way I asked, if that helps. It’s genuinely just curiosity, I’m just weird, haha






  • Oh boy, Travis Worthington comes off as such a selfish asshole in this interview. Paraphrased, and being a bit unfair to him, he just kind of says, “oh, we know fine well that we are benefiting from stealing art from others, and I’d really like if you believed that I cared about that, but the reality is that I don’t really give a shit, and if you’re an illustrator, just give up on your dreams of getting a job someday, because I certainly won’t be paying you”

    Definitely gonna be avoiding indie games studios from now on.





  • When it comes to generating electricity, nuclear is hugely more expensive than renewables. Every 1000Wh of nuclear power could be 2000-3000 Wh solar or wind.

    If you’ve been told “it’s not possible to have all power from renewable sources”, you have been a victim of disinformation from the fossil fuel industry. The majority of studies show that a global transition to 100% renewable energy across all sectors – power, heat, transport and industry – is feasible and economically viable.

    This is all with current, modern day technology, not with some far-off dream or potential future tech such as nuclear fusion, thorium reactors or breeder reactors.

    Compared to nuclear, renewables are:

    • Cheaper
    • Lower emissions
    • Faster to provision
    • Less environmentally damaging
    • Not reliant on continuous consumption of fuel
    • Decentralised
    • Much, much safer
    • Much easier to maintain
    • More reliable
    • Much more capable of being scaled down on demand to meet changes in energy demands

    Nuclear power has promise as a future technology. But at present, while I’m all in favour of keeping the ones we have until the end of their useful life, building new nuclear power stations is a massive waste of money, resources, effort and political capital.

    Nuclear energy should be funded only to conduct new research into potential future improvements and to construct experimental power stations. Any money that would be spent on building nuclear power plants should be spent on renewables instead.

    Frequently asked questions:

    • But it’s not always sunny or windy, how can we deal with that?

    While a given spot in your country is going to have periods where it’s not sunny or rainy, with a mixture of energy distribution (modern interconnectors can transmit 800kV or more over 800km or more with less than 3% loss) non-electrical storage such as pumped storage, and diversified renewable sources, this problem is completely mitigated - we can generate wind, solar or hydro power over 2,000km away from where it is consumed for cheaper than we could generate nuclear electricity 20km away.

    • Don’t renewables take up too much space?

    The United States has enough land paved over for parking spaces to have 8 spaces per car - 5% of the land. If just 10% of that space was used to generate solar electricity - a mere 0.5% - that would generate enough solar power to provide electricity to the entire country. By comparison, around 50% of the land is agricultural. The amount of land used by renewable sources is not a real problem, it’s an argument used by the very wealthy pro-nuclear lobby to justify the huge amounts of funding that they currently receive.

    • Isn’t Nuclear power cleaner than renewables?

    No, it’s dirtier. You can look up total lifetime emissions for nuclear vs. renewables - this is the aggregated and equalised environmental harm caused per kWh for each energy source. It takes into account the energy used to extract raw materials, build the power plant, operate the plant, maintenance, the fuels needed to sustain it, the transport needed to service it, and so on. These numbers always show nuclear as more environmentally harmful than renewables.

    • We need a baseline load, though, and that can only be nuclear or fossil fuels.

    Not according to industry experts - the majority of studies show that a 100% renewable source of energy across all industries for all needs - electricity, heating, transport, and industry - is completely possible with current technology and is economically viable. If you disagree, don’t argue with me, take it up with the IEC. Here’s a Wikipedia article that you can use as a baseline for more information: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/100%25_renewable_energy