Most of the violence and oppression gets exported, so it’s probably best to just sit tight here in the heart of the empire.

Vance himself was a DEI student at Yale. Hypocrisy doesn’t matter.

How long until you retire? If you’ve still got another thirty to forty years of wage slavery ahead of you then don’t worry about it. Just keep contributing and make sure to get all of your employer’s match, if any.

What are “end-of-life batteries” in this case? Is the plan to reuse used batteries that are no longer fit for automotive service?

The lynching narrative presupposes that the perpetrators are a mob of otherwise normal people driven to take justice into their own hands by extreme ignorance and prejudice that can eventually be overcome by education in tolerance. Is that how you feel about the Israeli settlers? The way I feel about them is that they are not normal yet severely ignorant people. They are invaders who know exactly what they are doing. There is no pretense of justice for them to take into their own hands. They cannot be taught to coexist with the Palestinians they are trying to ethnically cleanse from the West Bank. They need to be driven at gun point back to Long Island or at least Israel 1948. Calling it lynching minimizes the settlers’ culpability.

You should consider how using the wrong words for things might be playing into the hands of Zionists. Maybe you are.

Part of what makes a lynching a lynching is subversion of the criminal justice process and yes that probably often involved cops joining the lynch mob. However, these Israeli settlers aren’t subverting anything. They are not vigilantes. They are attacking and terrorizing Palestinians without any pretext of justice.

The problem is this case is that ‘a lynching’ implies that the mob is going against the authorities, which is absolutely not the case when it comes to settler violence. The Israeli soldiers are there to protect and facilitate the settlers in their attacks against Palestinians. Under no circumstances does the IDF deserve the benefit of the doubt and the article makes it clear that they are the ones who abducted Hamdan anyway.

Means, motive, lack of scruples: it’s all there.

I wonder if proof of sabotage actually exists, but whoever has it is withholding it from the public for blackmail.

China already gets a lot of (undeserved) bad press. An experiment breaching containment and causing a pandemic is bad for scientific research everywhere.

Okay, sure, but to what end? It’s not clear to me how accusations of an accidental release are bad for China. Is the purpose actually to cover up intentional sabotage by an anti-China entity? It’s not clear to me either who it helps or hurts for the COVID-19 outbreak to have been a completely natural occurrence.

[extremely space orc voice] Gotta be red to build faster.

I don’t have any bookmarked, but I did a quick search and found this one from 2023, which looks at the available data and circumstances to argue that the lab leak hypothesis is stronger than the wet market one. I’m not aware of any evidence that has been published that definitively proves or disproves either.

People seem to have a stronger aversion to the lab leak hypothesis, which I don’t understand. To me it seems like the simplest, most benign explanation. However, it does open up the possibility of sabotage. Maybe that’s the issue.

That seems like a reasonable challenge to the lab leak hypothesis, but I have to defer to my wife on it. She has a relevant background in microbiology, medicinal chemistry, and pharmacology and says that something about the structure of the viruses suggests convincingly that at least one of the COVID variants was of man-made origin. She’s also been working in labs for almost twenty years and has seen too many accidents and near-misses. As a lay person, that explanation makes enough sense to me to find the lab leak hypothesis plausible. Also, I’m not going to disagree with a well-published scientist who is also my wife.

At least the lab leak hypothesis isn’t as sinophobic as the “wet market” one.

I really don’t think it’s that hard to believe that some postdoc in Wuhan screwed up and let it loose accidentally.

Those are fair considerations. However, I think in the context of a massive cargo ship, a penalty on energy density might be worth it to avoid the risks associated with ammonia releases. Of course, a nuclear reactor powered ship would run on the highest energy density fuel and is arguably safer to operate than a ship that runs on ammonia.

Hydrogen is definetly harder to store than ammonia and it takes a lot of energy to compress or liquify it.

It takes a lot of energy to convert hydrogen to ammonia and whatever challenges there are to handling and storing hydrogen, ammonia has its own. At least a hydrogen release isn’t a toxic, polluting event.

And I certainly don’t want commercial nuclear ships, because companies will just create “independent” companies that will “mysteriously” go bankrupt once a ship reaches end of life and needs to be decontaminated.

So the taxpayer would have to pay for the decomissioning costs.

Yes. Let’s just get ahead of the game and nationalize shipping.

Hydrogen will leak through a latex balloon, but it is not going to leak through the steel wall of a pressure vessel. The leak risk occurs at the various fitting connections in a hydrogen system, which is overcome by using the proper fittings.

That is an interesting article, but the authors are clear that they don’t know what to expect for hydrogen leakage in a developed hydrogen economy. Sure, hydrogen might be a greenhouse gas, but you can’t really compare it to carbon dioxide because that’s a waste product that we actively dispose of to the atmosphere. You can’t really compare it to methane either because it’s naturally abundant and the LEL is much higher. Relatively leaky valves and fittings are unfortunately acceptable in natural gas service. In other words, hydrogen leakage is barely tolerable, so we have no choice but to employ technology and techniques to prevent it.