Need to let loose a primal scream without collecting footnotes first? Have a sneer percolating in your system but not enough time/energy to make a whole post about it? Go forth and be mid: Welcome to the Stubsack, your first port of call for learning fresh Awful youā€™ll near-instantly regret.

Any awful.systems sub may be subsneered in this subthread, techtakes or no.

If your sneer seems higher quality than you thought, feel free to cutā€™nā€™paste it into its own post ā€” thereā€™s no quota for posting and the bar really isnā€™t that high.

The post Xitter web has spawned soo many ā€œesotericā€ right wing freaks, but thereā€™s no appropriate sneer-space for them. Iā€™m talking redscare-ish, reality challenged ā€œculture criticsā€ who write about everything but understand nothing. Iā€™m talking about reply-guys who make the same 6 tweets about the same 3 subjects. Theyā€™re inescapable at this point, yet I donā€™t see them mocked (as much as they should be)

Like, there was one dude a while back who insisted that women couldnā€™t be surgeons because they didnā€™t believe in the moon or in stars? I think each and every one of these guys is uniquely fucked up and if I canā€™t escape them, I would love to sneer at them.

(Semi-obligatory thanks to @dgerard for starting this)

    • Charlie Stross@wandering.shop
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      2 months ago

      @gerikson @techtakes The thing about Lunar 3He mining is ā€¦ it presupposes you can build aneutronic fusion reactors (a 3rd generation fusion reactor: not simple!). But if you can fuse 3He, youā€™re almost certainly able to run a P + 11B reactor (which is also an aneutronic reaction), and hydrogen and boron are readily available on Earth. Thereby removing the entire incentive to strip-mine the moon at vast expense.

      TLDR: Lunar 3He is a non-working economic justification for space colonization.

        • Charlie Stross@wandering.shop
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          2 months ago

          @gerikson @techtakes Ian is a *very* good writerā€”but for those books he uncritically adopted the American colonialist ideologuesā€™ idea of an good reason for space colonization: and sure, his Lunar colony is a capitalist hellscape, but thatā€™s not the point. (The P + 11B aneutronic fusion pathway was already known about at the time.)

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          • Charlie Stross@wandering.shop
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            2 months ago

            @gerikson @techtakes

            Anyway, if I was going to go mining 3He in space Iā€™d bear in mind itā€™s in the regolith because itā€™s part of the solar wind and gets trapped there. Is it possible to collect it more cheaply using a really huge solar sail (with station-keeping as a side-purpose) made out of a membrane that traps it directly and can be reprocessed to outgas the stuff? That way youā€™re not grinding up gigatons of fucking rock to extract an incredibly rare volatile.