LarryMullins

Whether or not you want to apply the term "radioactive" to a black body emitter is completely beside the point, which is that EM radiation doesn't make things radioactive. Your objection is to the use of a word, not the physics, so I think this discussion has run its course.

> Now for some reason we've decided we need to be paranoid about them.

That last one getting noticed by the public probably had something to do with it.

Maybe it was a balloon but Kirby is being curmudgeonly and thinks it should be called an "Unmanned Buoyant Aircraft (UBA)" or something like that. These national security types love wordy terms and acronyms. Maybe he thinks calling a balloon a balloon makes it sound too trivial or something.

The Cold War wasn't uniform of course, there were periods of greatly increased tension and periods of relative relaxation (e.g. Détente.) What we have now is somewhere in the middle, I'd say on the peaceful/Détente side of the scale.

> provocation

Quite possibly. Minor provocations that by themselves are too inconsequential to warrant a response, nothing to start a war over, but incrementally provokes the target into lashing out in some way that is advantageous for China.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_salami_slicing_strateg...

(Other countries do it too, of course..)

From what I understand, in the case of the radon-contaminated nuclear worker, what they actually detected were the "radon daughters", the decay products of radon. Radon itself doesn't stick around very long, but when it decays it produces an atomic dust of polonium, lead, etc. That dust is what tripped the alarms.

Anything like that radioactive source from Australia would set of tons of alarms in a nuclear power plant. You wouldn't get it out the door. Incidents like that missing radioactive source in Australia happen where there are far fewer safeguards than at a nuclear power plant. Those sources generally go missing from abandoned medical equipment, food irradiation facilities, and that sort of thing. You'd be hard pressed to smuggle (let alone accidentally convey) something like a spent nuclear fuel pellet out of a power plant.

All deaths are permanent. Count them up and the result is clear.

> "the Japanese government approved the dumping of radioactive water of this power plant into the Pacific Ocean over the course of 30 years."

A minuscule amount of tritium, dumped into an ocean that has billions of tons of uranium dissolved in it. This Fukushima water issue is a perfect example of people letting emotions overrule rational thought.

Thermal radiation is in fact emitted from the nucleus of atoms; all matter emits black body radiation. The reason hot things generally aren't considered radioactive is because that would pull literally all matter into the discussion.

But that wasn't the point being made here. The point being made with the hot spoon example is that EM radiation doesn't make other things radioactive (except insofar as it heats things up). This is equally true of gamma radiation as thermal radiation. Thermal radiation and gamma radiation can both cause harm directly, but neither will make other things radioactive.

That's why it's completely safe to eat food that was sterilized with gamma radiation intense enough to kill you outright.

"Temporary damage", really? The deaths of those downstream from a burst dam are no less permanent than the death of an irradiated Russian. And there are a lot more of the former than the latter.

Minuscule tritium emissions are detected around nuclear power plants all the time, far below the level at which anybody should be concerned.

There was even a case where alarms were sounded when a power plant worker was found to be radioactive due to radon in his home, which triggered detectors at work. The general chemical industry doesn't operate with anything even remotely close to this degree of care.

If you want the cheapest power, then burn lots of coal and don't hold power plants accountable for their emissions. Do you really want the cheapest power?

Your hot spoon is in fact radioactive, emitting thermal radiation. Thermal radiation doesn't make things it hits radioactive. Neither does your microwave oven or even gamma radiation. Radioactivity can be induced in things by neutron radiation, but not EM radiation. It is safe to eat food which has been irradiated with gamma radiation, and chances are you have many times before (it is fairly common for dried spices and herbs to be irradiated for preservation purposes.)

There are a lot of geiger counters around operated by various organizations. Every time there is a radioactive leak just about anywhere in the world, it is promptly discovered even if that government wants to keep it a secret. In fact it is practical for you to own your own geiger counter if you live near a nuclear facility and are worried about it. The equipment needed for general analytical chemistry, which you'd need to detect a great deal of chemical pollution, is a lot less practical. For some specific chemical pollutants, there simple and cheap tests which are practical for laypeople. But there's no such thing as a simple hand-held meter that will detect any arbitrary chemical pollutant.

Hence, chemical pollution very often goes unnoticed for decades until somebody starts to wonder why half the babies in town are born without brains.

There are two main ways that something may become radioactive, being contaminated with little pieces of something radioactive (for instance nuclear fallout), or through neutron activation, in which neutron radiation creates radioactive isotopes in whatever it hits.

Assuming the fuel rods have intact cladding, then the first shouldn't be happening in a cooling pond. However the fuel rods do give off neutron radiation, and a small amount of the hydrogen in the water is turned into tritium by that neutron radiation. Tritium is a weak beta emitter, it could harm you if you drank a lot of it. But it's not a long-term problem because it has a half life of 12 years.

> The military has no problems detecting the chemicals that get leaked around bases

Even they will be hard pressed to detect chemical polutants at the extremely low concentrations that radiation can be trivially detected. But also, they know what to look for. What about everybody else in the area who don't even know what they should be looking for in the first place? With radioactive leaks it's easy, but DOW's chemical catalogue is thicker than a phonebook; you've got to be looking for something in particular or looking for half a billion different things all at once.

> It happens with non-radioactive toxic waste too

It tends to be a lot harder to detect too. With radioactive waste, we're fortunate to have very cheap and extremely sensitive instruments that can detect the tiniest leaks. This allows the nuclear industry to be held to a much higher standard than most other industries.

This is also the reason we can say with a high degree of confidence that first-world militaries have actually been very good at handling nuclear waste for a while now. The Manhattan Project era and a few years after that were very messy, but they have demonstrably cleaned up their act and figured out how to do things safely. Meanwhile the non-radioactive chemical pollution continues largely unabated. Never live near a military base if you value the well-being of any children you might have.

To say that a man is a PR department is the most grave of insults.

When their employer's parking lot has charging spots, presumably yes? Charging during the day will only become more common as more people buy EVs and demand for more charging locations increases.

Heh, but what is Elon, if not a one-man PR department?

The part I don't quite get (except insofar as it's an understandable emotional reaction) is why people are mad at companies hiring more people than they should have and then eventually laying them off a few years later. Would it have been better for those people if they were never hired in the first place, never had a few years of getting paid for extraneous work? Is the trauma of getting laid off really so great that they wish they had never been hired in the first place?

Okay, so the job wasn't the last of your career, you didn't get to commit the rest of your life to the company. But come on, it's not the 1950s anymore. People change jobs all the time, it's normal. If a company overhires for a few years then eventually corrects itself, that's the company screwing itself over but I think workers offended by this are getting emotionally over-invested. You got paid for your time and you got more out of the relationship than the company which never actually needed your labor in the first place. That's a win for you and a loss for the company, but not all good things can last forever.

Trusting an anonymous redditor because they have lots of "karma" is extremely foolish. For one, they probably got those internet points by reposting other people's cat pictures and now you're in a conversation with them about something that has nothing to do with the subject of stealing cat photos, so why should the internet points they earned doing that count for anything?

Secondly, it's easy to farm up these internet points and sell the account to somebody else who's keen on exploiting the tendency of people like you to think that the internet points confer trustworthiness.

So basically "he lied to me, lying is a human behavior, so I trust him."

Wew.

Never trust any company with a PR department at all, they're all opportunistic liars who's priority is limited damage to the company, not telling the truth. They only do the latter when they think it will have the effect of the former.

Really, don't trust corporations at all. Even if the circumstances of life force you to do business with them and hope nothing goes wrong, that's no reason to ever trust them. The bigger the corporation the more true this is, since the structure of corporations makes people feel less personally responsible for the bad things they might do to you, like lying to you about the scope of a data breach. The "just following orders" mentality allows workers to do things they'd never otherwise do to you, and that's just one example.

If any sort of business is safe to trust, it's the one-man-shop owner-operator kind of business and you can only trust those guys insofar as you can trust any other person at all. In that case you have to consider it on a case-by-case basis.

Seems like that's a consequence of the philosophical semantics of the word "know", not really a statement about the demonstrable capabilities of the LLM. In other words, why does it matter?

Certainly. I was just confused why students would pay for class then refuse to attend. Striking grad students makes a lot more sense.

A grad student strike. They're striking as employees, not students.

> That doesn't make sense. Russia can use this as a propaganda tool without having to act on it.

To acknowledge such an attack and not respond in kind would cause them to lose face, but responding in kind risks escalation. Ignoring the attack is their safest option.

Your Thai text generator example seems like a reformulation of the "Chinese Room" thought experiment, except you're running the system using a single human brain instead of many. I'm not sure that makes a difference. The human running the system doesn't understand Thai, but perhaps that system itself does.

The premise is bullshit, schools in America always give the kids lunch whether or not they have money that day. Kids who forget their money still get fed, the schools insist on it. Even if the kid pleads that he's just not hungry today, the school will put a tray of in front of him anyway. If the kid isn't getting free lunches already through the National School Lunch Act (which gives free or reduced price lunches to 30 million kids a year), then the money they owe will be recorded and their parents will be asked to pay it later. If the parents can't pay, the kid will be signed up for free lunches reimbursed by the federal government. But at no point does the school not give the kid a lunch.