marcie (she/her)

  • 26 Posts
  • 353 Comments
Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: March 22nd, 2024

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  • Is it really waste if you can use all of its “waste” outputs for useful things? Tritium can just be rebreeded into the fusion process, so its 12 year half life will rarely come up. Molybdenum-99 is used in medical imaging and is frankly in short supply, we would eat that up instantly and the world would be better off for it. Tritium is also just very useful medically in general. The largest stable byproduct by far is non-radioactive helium which has many thousands of use cases. The majority of the “waste” (80%) simply dissipates into thin air as pure, harmless neutrons.

    You could maybe argue that the internals of a fusion reactor would be embedded with radiation from the tritium supply. Tritium itself is generally not very dangerous to humans. Even if you inhaled pure tritium it cannot enter the blood supply. It would have to be ingested by eating and somehow stay lodged inside of your intestines to do real damage, and in that case it would still be limited by its 12 year half life.

    Some of the steel and nickel plating could probably be warped by the fusion process, and this would be considered low-level waste. The less nickel that is in the steel, the less radioactive it will be. Metals are generally not of great concern when it comes to radioactivity because they are very easily sequestered. Even if you were in full body naked direct contact with nickel-63 for a whole year, you would likely be fine. Most of these radioactive metals would decay even faster, generally less than 5 years. The most concerning one is nickel which can become nickel-63 in very small quantities and can last for 100 years. I would like to remind everyone that the sun, rare earth materials for solar and wind, and geologic processes can produce nearly as much radiation as these materials can. We should prevent exposure but even in a nightmare scenario, the situation is manageable and far better than cooking the planet. The highest danger is always from ingestion with fusion materials, but that is very rare.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ramsar,_Iran By the way, read about this city if you want to read about a high baseline radioactivity in an inhabited area that occurs from a natural geologic process.


  • Surprisingly enough when using the Origin build of brave I saw no measurable difference in fingerprinting artifacts after reviewing the list from EFF’s Cover Your Tracks and browserleaks.com

    I haven’t done a really big audit of the two yet to determine their differences in fingerprinting, but ostensibly its a different browser and has a much smaller userbase and it would be harder for you to hide your fingerprint. Linux is an even smaller subsect of a subsect and likely has only maybe a couple thousand users on Linux’s Origin. If you don’t care about that so much and stick to open source websites its not a very big deal if you’re just trying to avoid big tech algorithms.

    It is a pretty big browser at this point though. It is also generally more resilient to the shenanigans that websites pull to track you over other browsers due to their hardened containers between tabs. Firefox is a bad choice for this reason alone, the sandboxing is nearly nonexistent, even Tor Browser advises you to stick to one tab only. And for similar reasons, you should never install Brave through Flathub until Flathub-Next fixes the nested containerization issue that tampers with Chromium tab containers (170k people have done so regardless of this).


  • Brave is a very secure browser with the correct settings. Grapheneos agrees with this take as well and consider it the second most secure chromium browser (though imo vanadium has it’s own shortcomings in regards to AdBlock, brave shields is very effective). Read my other comment for an analysis

    I wouldn’t pay for it because that deliberately destroys most privacy benefits. Origin is only worth it on Linux imo. Brave mostly takes advantage of tech illiterate people so the tech literate people can secure their privacy and blend in to a larger crowd. It’s not very ethical but they are the largest privacy browser as a result of being able to afford ad campaigns from this exploitation of illiteracy. I mostly dream of the day that someone forks it and makes it perfect on the backs of all their development money


  • I don’t really think it’s that simple. They currently have the best security focused AdBlock of any browser (built in rust, default to the browser, works on a higher level than ublock origin, immune to upstream changes like manifest v3, can clear persistent data for specific sites, has containerization modes for changing browser fingerprint on the fly). I’m hoping vanadium or ungoogled chromium (security nightmare btw even though it has no startup telemetry, but I do think it’s an interesting project for learning purposes) eventually adds brave shields to their browsers. The default settings aren’t great but the right settings config clears out all potential telemetry and phoning home.

    For what it’s worth, the grapheneos team agrees with me and considers brave to be the second best chromium browser after vanadium for security purposes 🤷‍♀️









  • The big issue with immigrating directly to China is that you will only be allowed to stay in their higher tier cities afaik, this is because of the Hukou system which treats every region of China like its own country with visa restrictions, essentially. Its great for preserving cultures but not so great if you like to travel a lot. So its unlikely that you could take advantage of the collective lands rules as a foreigner unless you married into a family in an area with collective lands. You can obviously visit any region of China but visas/hukou do have limits if you try to go for residency.

    There are some loopholes to getting Chinese citizenship, you can move to for example Taiwan or Hong Kong, get residency / citizenship in those places, and then the mainland would consider you a citizen by proxy. But usually if you’re moving from one region to another you can only live in the higher tier cities. You can read a little more about it here https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hukou



  • People online, and especially newspapers, always act like China is having a gig nightmare, and that everyone is stuck in unemployment hell. But they obviously don’t see the totality of the economy, they are just looking at one number or another. A large number of unemployed people can be good because that can be a long period of personal, consensual downtime from work. So many newspapers were also reporting what you just posted as a brutal bust in the housing market ripping wealth away from millions of Chinese. But they do not understand the context of the economy whatsoever. A house isn’t an investment, and its something that takes up such a little part of someone’s total wealth in China that they do not care if the prices keep going down. You can pay off a big 80k rmb house in the countryside in about 3.3 years of minimum wage work, and by countryside I mean a rural/suburb area, you still have access to a fast train to the local big city. You typically pay nothing for the land the house is on, its free when allotted by the collective lands comittee, so you’re pretty incentivized to set up your own house by ordering a prebuilt one to be shipped there or paying builders to do it. Or if you really wanted to save money, you can hook up a fancy yurt to the free electric and sewage lines and grow your own food, this style of life is so cheap and easy to maintain in China that it really isn’t even worth mentioning the numbers. I talked to a trans lady that did that.


  • China is a more enticing proposition but it’s very difficult/impossible for a foreigner to get a permanent residence permit.

    There is apparently a trick, you can apply for permanent residence in Taiwan. Since Taiwan is considered part of China, the mainland also will support Taiwan’s permanent residency rules and will give you permanent residency on the mainland (in tier 1 cities only afaik).