• 7 Posts
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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: October 19th, 2023

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  • It does not ignore any information.

    The cost per kWh is the totality of all information. It is the end product. That is the total costs of everything divided by the number of kilowatt-hours of electricity produced.

    I understand that you’re deeply invested in this argument, but you’ve lost. You’re repeating the same claim over and over, and when proven wrong, you just said “nuh uh” and pretended that nothing I said is true.

    Nuclear energy can be cheaper than solar or wind. It is more reliable than solar and wind. It uses less land than solar or wind. All of these are known facts. That’s why actual scientists support expanding nuclear energy 2 to 1.

    But people will still dislike it because they’re scared of building the next Three Mile Island or Fukushima. That, as I explained, is the reason why fewer nuclear plants are being built. Because the scientists, the ones who know the most about these, are not in charge. Instead, it’s the people in the last column that are calling the shots. Do not repeat this drivel of “iF nUcLeaR pOweR PlanTs So Good WhY aRen’T tHerE moRe of ThEM??”. I have explained why. It is widely known why. Your refusal to accept reality does not make it less real.

    That is the end of the argument. I will not respond to anything else you say, because it is clear to me that no amount of evidence will cause you to change your mind. So go ahead, post your non-chalant reply with laughing emojis and three instances of “lol” or “lmao” and strut over the chessboard like you’ve won.

    Because I don’t give a pigeon’s shit what you have to say any more.





  • The easiest, but not necessarily the most applicable answer, is that it is possible to wager money on the outcome of sports games. Very large sums of money. Ruinous, life-altering sums.

    The more common answer is that this is a sense of personality for some people. They identify with a certain sports team and spend a lot of their time cheering them on and building up the belief that they are the best team, undefeatable under any fair circumstance. When that team loses, they then take it personally. After all, if their team lost, could it mean they’re not actually the best team? Did I choose wrong?

    No. Impossible. It’s those damn referees, blind as they are, missing the most obvious fouls and treating my team unfairly, punishing my team’s players more harshly for the tiniest infractions. Nay, not even that; my team didn’t break the rules; it’s that other team’s fault!

    &c., &c., until you get bored.

    It isn’t reasoning driving these decisions. It’s emotion. And before any of us get too haughty about it, it’s also a very human reaction. Humans were not designed to reason, we were designed to feel. And yes, everyone has a set of circumstances that will cause their logical processing to shut off and allow emotion to take control. It just might not be sports.








  • Other people have described the health effects, so I’ll describe the chemistry. Fats are made of long chains of carbon atoms surrounded by hydrogen atoms attached to a “head”, which is made of other elements or structures. Carbon atoms normally can make a total of 4 bonds. Hydrogen atoms can make 1 bond.

    Carbon being able to make 4 bonds means that in the chain of carbon and hydrogen atoms in fat molecules, each carbon atom makes a bond with the carbon atom before it in the chain, a bond with the carbon atom after it in the chain, and then bonds with two hydrogen atoms separately off to the side. This makes a total of 4 bonds. If all of the carbon atoms in the chain are like this, that’s “saturated fat”, because the chain of carbon is completely “saturated” with hydrogen atoms.

    (Hydrogen atoms are white, carbon atoms are black, oxygen atoms are red)

    Saturated fats have the often desirable property of being able to be tightly packed together, and thus are typically solid at room temperature. Butterfat is mostly saturated fat.

    However, carbon atoms can also make a double bond with other carbon atoms. If a particular carbon atom in the chain makes a double bond with the carbon atom before it, it could cause a bend in the chain of carbon atoms. In that case, it also means that those particular carbon atoms in the chain that have formed a double bond with each other only have 1 available bond left (after also forming a separate single bond with the carbon atom before or after it), so it can only bond with one hydrogen atom. These are, therefore, called “unsaturated fats”, and because they don’t pack together easily, they are typically liquid at room temperature.

    If there is a single double bond in the chain, it’s a monounsaturated fat.

    If there are two or more double bonds, it’s a polyunsaturated fat.

    Notice how the hydrogen atoms connected to the double-bonded carbon atoms in unsaturated fats can be connected to either the same side or the opposite sides of the two hydrogen atoms. If they’re on the same side, they are called cis-unsaturated fats. If they’re on opposite sides, they are trans-unsaturated fats, or trans fats in short.

    This is oleic acid, a cis monounsaturated fat commonly found in many vegetable oils:

    While this is vaccenic acid, a trans-monounsaturated fat. It is found naturally in butter and human milk and is not particularly bad for you:

    Note that this is NOT the same picture as the one I showed for saturated fat. The 7th and 8th carbon atoms from the left are double-bonded and, therefore, are each missing a hydrogen atom. The one remaining hydrogen atom on each is bonded on opposite sides.

    Note that trans-unsaturated fats are also pretty straight. This means that they can also pack together with saturated fats to make a solid product at room temperature.

    “Hydrogenation” is the process of adding hydrogen to unsaturated fats to saturate them. This means that liquid oil can be processed into a solid product. That’s how margarine and shortening are made. In previous years, partially hydrogenated oils that weren’t fully hydrogenated could leave substantial quantities of trans-unsaturated fats left in the product, but after health concerns, many countries’ food safety authorities banned these artificial trans fats. Fully hydrogenated fats consist of only saturated fats since they have been “fully” hydrogenated, and that is what food manufacturers have been doing instead.