How does that work though? Sedimentary rocks formed in the last 100 years must be way deeper than any of the soil that could be affected by the atmosphere?
Or am I overthinking this and you’re saying that there’s an indicator in recent soil deposits that correlates to radioactive testing.
The current geological era will have measurable levels of radioactive isotopes different from expectations. Just like we can tell when plants started making oxygen from the Fossil record and rock chemistry, we’ll be able to tell when humans started having some physics fun time in the atmosphere.
Other fun fact is that we’ve added a decent set of new markers for future archeologists to date things with.
I think we’ve caused some of the carbon dating techniques to need a little * in the future, since we’ve shifted the baseline level around quite a bit.
We also added some new radioactive isotopes to the mix, like strontium, which show up in your teeth. Not new-new, but measurably increased levels.
We can actually use the levels in your teeth to predict your age within a year or two.
The discovery of this is part of what motivated the partial nuclear test ban that had both the US and Soviet Union stop testing in the atmosphere.
half of budgets for pharma companies is spent on marketing. Discourage that and they will be forced to spend more on R&D.
You can pass a law to ban pharma commercials on the grounds that prescriptions should be prescribed by doctors. You could also simply tax marketing spending as though it were the same as profits, applying corporate taxes to marketing spending.
Associated Press - News Source Context (Click to view Full Report)Information for Associated Press:
> MBFC: Left-Center - Credibility: High - Factual Reporting: High - United States of America
> Wikipedia about this source
The comparison to Chernobyl is obviously powerful rhetorically, but is it relevant? Is plutonium the most dangerous set of isotopes at Chernobyl? Are there other decay products at Chernobyl that make it an exclusion zone which are not present at Los Alamos?
It should be a scientific discussion which informs public policy, and framing it as comparable to Chernobyl is perhaps misleading.
fuck no, currently most important isotopes are cs-137 and sr-90, both with half lives about 30 years. plutonium isotopes have half lives from 14 (241; probably tiny amount) 90 (238; also not much) to thousands of years (239 and 240; most likely bulk of it). what did the most damage in chernobyl were even shorter lived (days) and so spicier isotopes that normally are given time to decay in spent fuel pools
As a tangent, I hate the way reporting often lists the longest half lives, ignoring that fact that the longer the half life of an isotope is, the less dangerous it is. Highly radioactive isotopes are highly radioactive because they have short half lives.
Yeah this is an article freaking people out over Pu-238, Pu-239, and Pu-240. All of which are alpha emitters (radiation easily blocked by clothes and skin) and all of them have half lives measures in years or decades.
This article has juuust enough detail to get a reader riled up without actually educating them enough to understand what they are reading.
The National Park Foundation, which Congress created in the 1960s to support national parks, will receive the donation from Indianapolis-based foundation Lilly Endowment Inc.
Hmm, strings attached? We'll take it, the NFS needs the funds. And hey, any other wealthy donors out there who think Lilly is being a bunch of cheapskates, feel free to show us how much class you have by donating even more to the NPF, by all means.
Associated Press - News Source Context (Click to view Full Report)Information for Associated Press:
> MBFC: Left-Center - Credibility: High - Factual Reporting: High - United States of America
> Wikipedia about this source
Public health advocates also called for the government to post signage warning visitors so they can make an informed decision about using a trail contaminated with toxic waste.
Members of the general public can’t make this sort of informed decision. They don’t have the very specific background knowledge necessary. Plutonium in small amounts is not dangerous unless you eat it or breathe it in as dust. How much Plutonium dust is in the air near this trail? What is the level of radiation exposure from it compared to the background level that everyone is exposed to? What risk of cancer does the increased exposure correspond to?
These are questions that experts are able to answer but almost all hikers aren’t. The general public already trusts experts to regulate nuclear power plants, radiology equipment, etc. It makes no sense to want a warning sign here unless you already live in a state of constant paranoia.
I don’t see it as a matter of keeping information from the public. The wording on the sign would be technically true, but the clear implication would be that the area is particularly dangerous. Why else would there be a sign? If the area is not particularly dangerous (which is what experts have determined) then the sign is actually causing the public to believe something false.
It’s like those California warnings about cancer-causing chemicals in pretty much everything. They’re not literally false but they don’t take relative risk into account and the right thing to do is to ignore all of them. To the extent that the public doesn’t ignore them, the public has been misinformed by the California government.
do you know there’s chloroform in chlorinated water? it’s some laughable ppt of it, but analytical chemists got so good at detecting random shit they can make entire career out of scaring morons
This creates a significant legal issue - AI generated images have no age, nor is there consent.
The difference in appearance between age 16 and 18 is minimal, but the legal difference is immense. This is based entirely on a concept that cannot apply.
How do you define what’s depicting a fictional child? Especially without including real adults? I’ve met people who believe that preferring a shaved pubic area is pedophilia. This is even though the vast majority of adult women do so. On the flip side, teenagers from the 70s and 80s would be mistaken for 40+ today.
Even the extremes aren’t clear. Adult star “Little Lupe”, who was 18+ in every single appearance, lacked most secondary sex characteristics. Experts testified in court that she could not possibly be an adult. Except she was, and there’s full documentation to prove it. Would AI trained exclusively on her work be producing CSAM?
To paraphrase someone smarter than me, “I’ll know it when I see it.”
But naturally I don’t want to see it. One of the things I miss the least about reddit is the constant image posts of anime characters, who may be whatever age they say but which are clearly representative of very young girls with big tiddies bolted on. It’s gross, but it is also a problem thatsl’s more widespread and nebulous than most people are willing to admit.
Sometimes something cant have a perfect definition. What’s the difference between a gulf, a bay, and a channel? Where does the shore line become a beach? When does an arid prairie become a desert? How big does a town have to grow before it becomes a city? At what point does a cult bevota religion?When does a murder become premeditated vs a crime of passion? When does a person become too drunk to give active consent? Human behavior is a million shades of gray, just like everytbing else we do, and the things that don’t fit into our clear definitions are where the law needs to be subjective.
Just when trying to guess someone’s age (we’ll assume completely family-friendly and above board), think back to high school. How old did you and your peers look? Now go take a look at high schoolers today. They probably seem a lot younger than you did. The longer it’s been (i.e. the older you are), the younger they look. Which means, “when I see it” depends entirely on the age of the viewer.
This isn’t even just about perception and memory- modern style is based on/influenced heavily by youth. It’s also continuing to move in the direction. This is why actors in their 30s - with carefully managed hair, skin, makeup, and wardrobe - have been able to convincingly portray high schoolers. This means that it’s not just you - teens really are looking younger each year. But they’re still the same age.
Great. Give Harris the time slot for a big town hall speech and Q&A. Every 15 minutes, read a reminder to everyone watching that Trump declined to debate.
Keep the two podiums and put a wax figure of Trump in a chicken suit behind the other one. Put the camera on it with dead air for a few seconds every time it’s his turn to speak.
Weird that the anti crime criminal is promoting crime coin, or not weird at all. Republican party has for years campaigned on fires they started (see debt, immigration, economy, etc)
I guess supporting something whose only legitimate uses are digital theft, money laundering, and buying human trafficking victims are their way of ensuring cartels won’t ever stop existing
Weird that the anti crime criminal is promoting crime coin
Crypto is a painfully both-sides affair, what with the enormous volumes of investor cash flooding the election system. This went back to JP Morgan’s backing of Etherium during the Obama administration, with crypto-bros infesting multiple Fed banks and throwing their own batch of state and federal office holders at the wall. Then Scam Bankrupt Greed’s FTX went big and straight up bought out Senators Cynthia Lummis and Catherine Gillibrand to write crypto-friendly regulatory reforms. His bank imploded before that legislation could worm its way through Congress.
But now they’re back and with even more obscene piles of cash. Mistaking the Crypto-bros as uniquely Republican is going to bit liberals in the ass biggly. You’re going to start finding crypto investments in your pension funds, your 401ks, and your college trusts very soon, if the Newsome Imperium and the Bloomberg banksters are allowed to ram their novelty tech innovation bills through Congress uninhibited.
Newsom is largely centrist, its less that crypto is party aligned and more that its corruption aligned - the republicans are just more corrupt on average.
He’s absolutely buried within the Silicon Valley lobbying community and has repeatedly wielded his gubernatorial power to quash pro-labor and pro-regulatory legislation on those grounds.
the republicans are just more corrupt on average
California Democrats are a stone’s throw away from any Midwestern Republican when it comes to “business friendly” state policies. The only thing either group cares about is economic growth.
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