Just a quick point on the cost of nuclear. A large part of the cost of nuclear is due to the very intense safety systems which have been added on a little at a time. Each small safety thing has increased the cost but nobody has taken all of the intentions of those changes and integrated them into a stable and safe system without the need for all the little safety features.

The best example I can give is cars. Adding air bags, lane change detection, car in front detection, ABS, and so on each makes cars safer, but never questions the underlying adduction that cars are good. Why not trains?

In rectors we can have passive safety systems where the moderator is a liquid which is blocked in by a solid plug. The solid plug is frozen moderator and sits at the bottom of the system. If the power is cut or fails the plug stops being cooled and melts, draining the moderator. Without the moderator the neutrons are going too fast to trigger the chain reactions and everything stops. No sensors or control systems are needed, it just passively stops and cools naturally, while also being way cheaper.

That is essentially what gluetun does. It is a little simpler to set up given that it is all preinstalled and you just select your provider and details and it is done. And again, you just specify the network for other containers to use the gluetun service and it is done. Very simple, easy for using many services through one VPN connection, and available on things like CasaOS with simple setup.

A quick point to add. Adding fat to your meal makes it more filling and for longer. The worst fats are trans fats, second worse are polyunsaturated fats, and mono seem to be fairly good along with most saturated fats. In terms of cost some of the vegetable fats are much cheaper but they often have trans fats which are essentially toxic and they also go rancid very easily.

Saturated fats are generally solid at room temperature and don’t absolutely need to be refrigerated on cool to moderate weather days. If you would sweat the butter would too, so put it in the fridge.

If you add a small amount of mince to your beans it will stretch really far and add tonnes of flavour and protein without breaking the bank. Cheaper mince comes with more fat but if you are making beans you want that, so get the cheaper mince, lean is not helpful.

Beans on rice freezes well for weeks. Beans without rice is good for months frozen. Beans with rice and any cheese or sour cream is not OK frozen. Beans with cheese microwaves well, but add sour cream after heating.

To make it more satisfying you can add a little bit of some chilli sauce. Hotter sauces go further, but the best is fermented sauces. The cheapest chilli sauces are full of sugar and water, so they just sweeten and dilute rather than flavour your dish.

If your beans tastes sour add a small amount of sugar, stir for a minute, and test again. Sugar fixes the sourness quite well.

For extra flavour a stock cube can be added. I would recommend beef stock for beans, but it will work with chicken or fish too. Most stocks are now vegan because they re synthetic, but they add a lot of flavour and are perfectly fine to eat.

The best option if you can manage it is to learn how to make a beef broth from bones. You boil the bones for hours, around 8 or so should do, and the bones will start to soften and become translucent. At this point all the nutritional goodness of the bones is in the broth. You can then use this as a base for making stew, beans, soup, etc, or you can reduce it by open top heating it and letting the steam leave. This will make a strong stock you can use to add flavour and nutrition to other meals for the cost of some energy and cheap bones.

A slow cooker can make cooking all of this much easier and safer. Electric slow cookers are able to be set up in the morning and have dinner most of the way ready by dinner time. The slow steady heat is great for bones and for softening meat and the easy of use is just fantastic.

This system is fundamentally broken. In Australia there is no path by which people on Centrelink would not have their payments processed for more than a few days. I remember a bank issue which caused a bunch of people to not get their payments on time and it was a major issue, people were absolutely livid. That was only a couple of days late and was resolved promptly with hardship temporary support available for those who really needed it.

For the system to be able to fail like this means those who designed the system want it to fail this way. They could change the funding mechanism to make sure SNAP is immune to government shutdowns if they wanted to. They have chosen not to so that they can use hurting poor people as a political weapon. Removing this weapon should be the goal of any reasonable party and it should be urgent. There are many similar funding holes that can be closed with reasonable legislation and would take away the impact of political dysfunction from the poorest and most vulnerable of society. Choosing to do otherwise is choosing that harm.

As a fellow Aussie I share your conclusion, though the Made in Australia plan from the Albanese government seems like it could change the game. Producing solar panels here would make purchasing them cheaper even if just from the shipping costs. Add the federal investment and the creation of demand and it should get cheaper again.

Now I do worry about things going the way of the NBN, starting with a goal of future proof fibre to the home being chipped away by the LNP until it was a small upgrade on internet service funded by the government but not anything like the goal. I want good green tech, not just barely solar sometimes.

Coal is dying as an investment but existing coal plants will likely run for a long while. Overall demand for energy is rising, the new demand is being met mostly with renewables, but there is a small amount of that increase that is being met by a small increase in coal usage. As renewable manufacture gets faster and more efficient I expect the coal growth will reverse, but it is all about when. If it happens quickly we have less apocalyptic damage. If it happens slowly then we will be more fucked.

Solar is far and say the cheapest form of new energy to roll out. Wind is a not so close second. Coal is getting more expensive by the day. The only reason to roll out coal is insufficient production of solar and wind. It takes time to increase manufacturing capacity but we are getting there and we can do this.

I am reminded of hospital acquired infections being treated like car crashes or plane crashes.

Car crashes kill massive numbers of people each year, just under 5 per 100,000 people per year here in Australia. That is way down and we are quite low globally, with the EU overall around 9 and 14 for the USA. We have taken fairly agressive steps to curb road deaths and made real progress, but a certain number of deaths is accepted as necessary. A crash is investigated for fault attribution and insurance but not for preventing a repeat.

Plane crashes are totally different. If something caused a plane crash we figure it out, make a mitigation, and make it never happen again. Flying is one of the safest modes of transport and it keeps getting safer.

In hospitals most of them had the car crash mentality for hospital acquired infections. A hospital putting in a plane crash mentality investigator for their Infection Prevention chair will have very different outcomes, especially over time. Someone got an infection from bad clean technique? Make it a checklist item. Someone still got another infection? Change gloving technique so that you wear two layers and only touch the outer gloves with clean inner gloves. Another case? Have a second staff member assist with your donning of PPE and going through the checklist. Each step reduces the risk, each mitigation makes everyone safer. Eventually you have so few infections it is hard to test new processes.

For anyone wondering edgydoc.com is the site for the aforementioned doctor and he is a blast. But yeah, if you treat a consequence as a cost of doing business nothing changes. If you make failure an existential risk you can eliminate problems. Corporations are run by people. Those people should be accountable for the crimes of the company.

Thanks for the concern, it came across as genuine in your previous replies. I think people tend to get really locked in to having the right answer and then start to identify with their conclusion, making it part of who they are. It makes it very difficult for them to consider if there is something they are wrong about without feeling threatened. Having a good conversation like this is fairly rare online, so it has been good fun and quite enjoyable.

The response was not unwarranted or redundant. The information I have today is just information I didn’t have in the past, so if I am correct I am just there a little earlier than you. If I am not correct then I am off the right path and need to correct. Either way talking about it is good and helps to find errors in logic and evidence.

I think that something as shitty as seizures can seem life ruining or horrible and sure, they suck, but I am very lucky to have a strong and capable partner who in the face of seizures looks for solutions and has hope for the future. My partner is the one who has to have the seizures, I just get to support them and learn what does or doesn’t work. Also, their pupils sometimes do a bit of a crazy dance when one will dilate and constrict rapidly while the other slowly dilates, it looks absolutely insanely cool and while it sucks it is also really interesting, so at least there is that.

The carbs - fibre = true carbs is accurate in some countries, not in others. If the fibre is listed at the same level of indentation as the carbs it is already removed. If the fibre is listed indented under the carbs it is included in the total fibre number and the subtraction is needed.

For example

Carbohydrate

• Fibre
  

Or

Carbohydrates

Fibre

Fibre being critical is not the most well supported thing. There are definitely ways it could be useful, mostly by having bacteria break down the fibre into ketones which are then absorbed by the gut. This is useful because some of the ketones are quite powerfully anti inflammatory. That said, some people have gut issues like Crohn’s disease which make them unable to have fibre safely pass through their gut.

Biology is complicated, we are all stuck doing an experiment of one, but hopefully we can figure something out. I find it all fascinating but the most important thing to me is my partner currently can go whole days without a seizure. If I never understand how and why but I get to have that be the case then I am content.

Yeah, we need fats for sure. Our thinking at this point is to aim for saturated fats as much as possible, less than 5% polyunsaturated and less than 30% mono. That said, pork belly has a tonne of fat but a surprisingly large amount of mono. Also, it is delicious.

The nuts and seeds are just not something we are doing at the moment. We will experiment with introducing small amounts of interest foods but I think seeds are largely out because of the various chemicals in the casing. Some beans may be OK after sprouting them because that takes the acid from the skin and recycles it into energy for the growing plant, but there is no similar disarming strategy for most seeds.

As for fibre, adding fibre led to a fairly serious gut issue, think blood and pain. For now fibre is banned, not allowed in the food club. Given some time it may be tested again, but the last time showed me unspeakable horrors.

I think the diet is currently robust enough for the next year. After that other things may be viable, but most likely it will be very small amounts and infrequently. If we do try fibre again it will probably be home ferments like pickles because the bacteria which break down the fibre are there in the food, so even if there is a problem with my partner digesting the fibre the bacteria there can help.

During the first day the rate dropped, halving by the end of the first day. On day 3 they dropped to a few per day. By the end of the week they were basically gone, though some are absent seizures and harder to catch without active monitoring.

As for ongoing it has been very stable. Adding in anything like milk or cheese caused as spike in seizures along with massive carb cravings. The few accidental carb exposures have been fairly obviously bad because of the seizure spikes following.

We don’t use a Continuous Glucose Monitor but honestly, no pattern this obvious requires such detailed measurements. Add carbs, get seizures. Add dairy, get seizures. Butter is dodgy, maybe an issue, but seems to be at least not obviously an issue, we will try without to be sure.

I joined in for solidarity at the start but honestly, it works for me too. I have pretty bad ADHD and cooking has always been really difficult to manage. So many different things happening at the same time with various timers, cutting foods, adding sauces, stirring, making sure it doesn’t burn, and then magically some people just deliver it all hot at the same time. Absolute madness. Instead I fire up the BBQ or air fryer and cook the meat.

I have noticed that my dandruff is way less, my skin doesn’t flake, I can focus better (not as good as meds but maybe 30% of the way there). I also dropped body fat a bit and gained some muscle, but I need to do that for other reasons too. Overall it is not an awful diet. Eat meat, add fat. The only problem is eating enough, I frequently miss my target of 3000 kcal, but I am simply not hungry much of the time.

Yeah, it worked really well actually. It seems that their seizures are related to sugar metabolism in the brain and switching to a fasted state enabled the production and use of ketones instead of glucose. That leas to a reduction from seizures as much as twice an hour to one or less per day most of the time. Now we (solidarity and other benefits) eat a really simple diet of mostly simple cuts of meat cooked to medium-rare as well as chicken wings and butter. The butter maybe an issue though, so we are testing removing that too after the next long fast to see if we get better results.

So down from ~30 seizures per day to maybe 1 seems like a fairly good fix and we just treat it like an allergy. No carbs, no fibre, no sugar alcohols, no artificial sweeteners, and soon maybe no butter either. Better thab seizures, good for overall health so far, and fairly sustainable. I may miss cheesecake but not as much as I don’t miss my partner having seizures all day.

I’ve done 7 days on a fast, water only. My partner and I were testing if their seizures would stop without food and they did.

Yes, we have a good idea as to why. There are a few key factors involved starting with a shift away from full time employment and towards part time and gig work. This means that the number of people working full time jobs with the protections they provide has not gone up even though the population has gone up over that time. These workers are more precarious, experiencing less stable hours, unpredictable income, and easier firing processes. This makes people feel less secure and accept worse conditions. People with precarious employment may be less likely to report wage theft for example, which to be clear is more than all other types of theft combined.

Do you mean that ironically or literally?

Tbh, if I didn’t actually attach things to myself I would lose them. If I had a kid I would have a strap to connect them. When I take my cat for walkies we have a harness and lead which never leaves my hand. I have my keys set up to lock the front door from the outside so I cannot lock myself out without my keys.

ADHD can suck, but with good tools and processes it is much more manageable.

I have ADHD so I get rid of most problems by literally tying things to myself. I have a second belt which goers over my pants and have a hip bag attached to it. In that I have the following;

Disposable nitrile gloves (3-4 pairs)

Hand sanitiser

Power bank (10000mAh)

USB C cable

Thumb drives (one with kids shows, one with software, one blank)

USB A to C adapter

Wallet

ID lanyard

Emergency cash (not in wallet because if I lose my wallet I still have my cash)

Tissues

Aspirin, paracetamol, and ibuprofen

Ritalin

Plastic bags for rubbish

Nasal inhaler (for blocked nose, long term issue)

Car and house keys (attached on a clip, not inside)

Then I have my pockets for phones (I have 2), wireless headphones, and anything else for the day.

By keeping my keys attached I cannot get in the car without my belt bag.

Technically, yes, if you have access to the system, but it does mean you have to switch the storage from append only to read write, then pull out the original files, recompute the hashes from the time you did the modifications, and do all the rewriting as you go. For a continuous thing like this your security is only as good as the weakest link, so you could have a problem there, but publishing or sharing the hashes as you go could further protect in this situation. If others have the hashes and then some of them change we know there was a change of data. Add or change something and every hash from then on is different. Seems plausible to make it much better than take my word.

This is actually one of the very few reasonable use cases for block chain technology.

You have a security camera on site. It takes recordings and sends them to a data centre which then appends the footage and uses various algorithms to make a much smaller block chain compatible summary, a small hash for each snippit of video. The hash is then mixed with the previous sum of all hashes and appended to the video. This means that after the fact modifying the video is effectively impossible. You would have to do it between the camera and the data centre, so yes, still possible, but doing it at a later date would be very hard. You could also make sure this data was stored in an append only form, say magnetic tape, which has physical measures to prevent access after the date of storage.

Lots of options, but the simplest is to lower the contrast and brightness values for your monitor. That will work on everything including images and video. You could also consider something like the redmode features of your OS and maybe even look at colour balance settings. If you take the curves and lower the highest bits you will selectively reduce brightness at the highest end without messing with less intense stuff too much. It looks a little weird but is easy enough to get used to.

Yep, very much improved. I recking it will turn out like Blender. It sucks right now compared to some other tools like Fusion360, but given time it will improve and at some point it will tip over into being the default. It all depends on buy in. If a few bigger players get behind it because they can avoid predatory fees and costs associated with using a proprietary piece of software they will switch, invest in their own mods, then drive the industry knowledge standard towards FreeCAD. That will break the hold the proprietary apps have as workers gain skills in the new context, leaving the old proprietary stuff to rot. I hope it is soon, but it will happen eventually.