I don’t know much about tablets and opened this thread just to see if I could learn something. I think it might be a good idea to add this detail to the main post. I’ve seen some other people mention battery life as a downside to some options, so if battery life isn’t a factor since it’s gonna be plugged in most of the time, adding it to the body of the post could nudge people to recommend options that they otherwise wouldn’t have bothered to mention.

Good luck!

You probably already know, but in case you don’t, bring adapters for your phone charger and whatever else because their outlets are different. Their grid is 50Hz instead of 60Hz in the US.

Idk, call ICE on yourself or criticize a genocide enough and you might get a free flight to El Salvador. Last I heard, setting a Tesla on fire might do it now too. Pretty soon, maybe just voting for a Democrat books you a flight. We’ll see.

Ahead of its time, predicting the consequences of tariffs like that.

And they’re terrified of all the childless cat ladies opting to not produce their next generation of laborer/consumer brood to be said replacement. Hence the crackdown on abortions and contraception and people who pair up in ways that cannot yield children. You can’t have the infinite growth that capitalism demands if the number of producers and consumers goes down.

Combined cycle natural gas plant operator in the US here. Bridging the gap between low demand and high demand times is a big part of why it’s so challenging to try to reduce fossil fuel power solutions. The grid is basically a pressurized pipeline, and it’s only reliable if that pressure is maintained no matter how many “faucets” get opened or closed. Green energy solutions aren’t really able to raise that “pressure” unless we build significantly more than we need and keep a bunch of them off most of the time until peak conditions demand them. Nuclear is extremely slow (relatively speaking) to (safely) alter output to meet demand, so its best usecase is for baseloading as much as possible. But with a natural gas plant, I can put my foot on the gas pedal, figuratively speaking. It’s fucking terrible for the environment, but that’s the cost of everybody insisting on consuming so much goddamn electricity all the time. If you don’t like it, stop supporting power hogs like data centers by using AI bullshit and cloud storage and web hosting and media streaming.

This is a complicated problem, and complicated problems almost never have simple solutions. I wish we could minimize the problem of what happens when 100M+ EVs get plugged in at 7pm on a Tuesday by already having put together a strong public transportation infrastructure that people feel comfortable and safe using, but the time to start doing that was probably during the gas shortage in the 70s when we saw how overly reliant we were on cars. It’s probably not too late to start, but it’s gonna be a challenging transition now no matter what we do.

So it’ll be the sharpie then.

I thought authoritarianism was supposed to at least make the trains run on time. Or maybe the dictator will just edit train schedules with his sharpie if anybody dares to ask.

there’s always one when you need to cross the tracks.

This, but you ever notice that it’s pretty much never passenger trains? This efficient mode of transportation is largely designed for and used by industry rather than for travel or commute. The exception is within big enough cities like DC and NYC to get from one side of the city to the other or anywhere between. Sure there are some trains that go between cities, but they’re largely unreliable because passenger cars yield to industrial freight, and so people are less inclined to opt for them over planes or cars, and so there are fewer trains available to go wherever you’re going in the window you’re trying to go. So you book a flight instead.

I’d take a long train ride over a road trip any fucking day. I don’t understand anybody who would rather drive than chill and read a book or play games or watch movies or nap.

“you can’t read it properly”?

I don’t know of any piston that can initiate a fusion reaction, but that doesn’t mean it’s never going to be possible. But I think that such a thing would take teams of top researchers decades to figure out with any sort of reliability.

Regarding the rankine cycle, the diagram would need to be much more detailed. From what I am understanding of your diagram, no it couldn’t work that way. I don’t know a lot about fusion, but from my experience in fission nuclear power plants and combined cycle natural gas plants, I can make some assumptions about what to expect from a rankine cycle plant regardless of fuel source. You would need to ensure that only superheated (dry) steam is ever touching the steam turbine blades, and there is a ton of essential equipment that does exactly that. There are a ton of resources out there to learn more about this, and I’d recommend searching “rankine cycle explained” on YouTube to get started. General overview stuff might touch on things like drums and reheaters and condensers and vacuum pumps, but every little piece like that could use its own deep dive, really. It’s fascinating stuff.

Overall, I think there is already a general understanding of how to make a fusion rankine cycle power plant work, and it’s now just a matter of getting a sustainable reaction and then finding the optimal design and operation to safely and reliably maximize the extraction of that thermal energy to perform work. Should this be more like a BWR or a PWR plant? What do refuel outages look like? What sort of preventive maintenance will be required? What sort of hazards will workers be exposed to, and how can we mitigate that?

I’d love to see commercial fusion reactor plants in my lifetime, but I don’t think I’ll see it. We’re pretty close to seeing fission SMR plants really get going. As much as I hate AI shit, their data centers are power hungry af which has pushed these companies to think about providing their own on-site power to relieve strain from the grid, and these SMRs are kinda perfect for this. If we could see that scaled up or at least batched into array designs, we buy a lot of time to figure out fusion while shifting to a greener energy solution or at least replace the existing and very much aging fission plants we already have. And maybe SMRs can teach us something about fusion along the way.

Stay curious :)

So you mean more like a power plant? Are you thinking like brayton cycle, rankine cycle, or both (combined cycle)?

I don’t know much about fusion, but a big part of how a brayton works at that scale is air. For a jet engine the combustion expands, spinning the turbine or afterwards, and this spins the axially connected compressor section which sucks and squeezes air prior to the combustion chamber. A piston engine would be less continuous, so might be better suited? But in any case, this relies on whether fusion moves a shitload of air like a combustion engine does, (and like I said idk if it does,) and if it does then I guess it could be possible so long as pressures and temperatures stayed within metallurgical limits. I also don’t know how economical it could be, but let’s pretend that this is entirely exploratory and costs don’t matter. I’m not gonna shit on your idea because the truth is that I don’t know and you could be predicting a breakthrough idea 100 or 50 or 20 years ahead. Is fusion something that can quickly explode like in a piston engine in the first place or would it be better to run continuously through a turbine? Is that even possible? Idk.

Regarding the rankine cycle, that’s the assumed application of fusion power. It’s just the newest, best idea for how to boil water to superheated steam to spin turbines and condense back to feedwater. I only even bring this up because you specifically mentioned a steam generator, and that really only makes sense if you’re utilizing the rankine cycle. Combined cycle would be using that piston/turbine engine thing from earlier but recycle the exhaust heat to a HRSG which loops to a steam turbine and condenser and back. But you need a large volume of fairly continuous hot exhaust flow for this, so it’s wholly dependent on that thing I said I don’t know lol.

We need some input from people who know something about fusion. I don’t really know how we would control fusion while throwing a shitload of air into it and getting an even bigger shitload of air out the other end. Without that input, idk how anything other than rankine could be managed.

I know you said first person and I’m gonna mention a third person one that’s fun, so I’m sorry if first person was truly a necessary piece of this for some reason…

Warhammer 40k Space Marines 2 came out pretty recently and it kinda feels like it’s 80-20 Gears Of War and Doom. You can play co-op for both the main campaign and a separate side mission kind of thing, and the side thing is highly replayable because you level shit up as you go and then you can play on higher difficulties to get more loot. But they can spoil the story if you do a bunch of the missions ahead of the story chapters since you’re kinda playing out the B squad adventures concurrently with the A squad missions. There’s also a pvp mode, and a horde mode is coming too.

It’s far from perfect. Load times are very long. The lore is tedious if you don’t care, but it’s honestly so fun that I don’t care that I don’t care about the lore. The devs are very much actively working on the game, bringing frequent updates and fixes, plus just straight up rolling out free additional content when ready. And there is crossplay if one of you is on console and the other is PC or something.

The party is 3 player, but if you just want 1 on 1 time with your friend, you can set your party to private and have a bot play your 3rd and he will heal you when you go down and help with the fight somewhat. This is especially nice while you’re learning the game.

“No. Fuck you. Pay me. Now pay me more. Now enjoy ads. Pay me again. We’re now introducing fees associated with the privilege of paying me. So pay that while paying me.”

– approximately everything

What’s the best alternative software to gear up to transition to? I’m pretty pissed because they finally got decent integration for PS5. I was playing Space Marines with a couple friends, one of whom is playing on PC, so we’ve been able to crossplay with voice chat.

Drown me, sky daddy.

Usually 20-25% unless the service is inexcusably bad (like 1-5% of the time, and even then I’ll tip like 15%). I’ll typically approximate 20% and round up to the nearest dollar, then maybe add a dollar or two. I remember 15% being standard with it being acceptable to go down to 10 or up to 20; 18% was sorta my standard at the time, and I’d only go as low as 15%. I’ve only ever asked to speak to a manager three times that I can remember, and both times were due to what the kitchen sent out to me. I still tipped fully to the server since it wasn’t their fault. I was a chef for years, so I know how stressful it gets back there, but there’s still no excuse for the dishes I’ve sent back. There’s usually an offer to cook something else, but if I’m sending food back it’s because I don’t trust the kitchen to send out food that won’t give me food poisoning.

Tipped minimum wage here (and therefore all tipped wage) is $2.17/hour. I believe that these businesses should be forced to pay proper wages, but stiffing your server doesn’t achieve that. These people are on their feet running around for hours and they usually don’t have enough support or leadership to do their job as well as they’d like to, and then they’re too exhausted and broke to study or work to break into another industry. We’re gonna have a lot of 30-50 year old servers living paycheck to paycheck until their knees and back give out. I’m down with tipping an extra couple bucks so they can get some Dr Scholl’s.

I don’t know that I’d call it a song per se, but Brand New did this on The Devil And God Are Raging Inside Me. I think it was like a minute of stuff that seamlessly blends right into the start of Sowing Season. I don’t own the CD and I only heard that part once like 15 years ago, so I truly can’t remember what it was. Maybe like a message on an answering machine?

Edit: found it

This, starlink regarding Russia invading Ukraine, and I’m gonna guess spacex regarding government contracts? Idk about that 3rd one being investigated but it’s definitely one of the many conflicts of interest.

Yeah but stupid people are plentiful and overly confident that they can spitball a better idea for solving the problem than literal experts with decades of expertise can because “they’re too close to the problem” or “they’re paid off by big [fill in the blank] to gum up any progress” or whatever. They just don’t believe in complicated solutions or complicated problems because most people aren’t doing anything particularly complicated with their lives. Incurious people aren’t interested in any explanations or nuance.