Yet another novel I will no longer write - <AUTHOR> https://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2020/04/reality-keeps-stealing-my-line.html <comment><USER3> > And then COVID-19 came along and basically rendered the whole thing > unneccessary because we are all getting a real world crash-course in how we > deal with people suffering from a viral pandemic, and we do /not/ generally > deal with them using shotguns and baseball bats even if they're so > contagious that contact might kill us.

But that's not the standard zombie scenario. Having 1% of the population being somehow sick and dying or a strain on the medical resources doesn't make society collapse.

The zombie scenario is that only 1% of the population is unaffected and society breaks down and disappears and modern humans, humans living after the Enlightement, have to survive in a hostile environment.

I agree with Charles Stross that people don't just bash their heads in a crisis but that they start to look after their own community. But this probably stops after we reach the magical number of 150 people.

After that, other people are not friends anymore and how we deal with them when resources are scarce, well, I'm not as optimistic as he is. Just look at the current mediterranean situation and that's when resources aren't actually scarce.

<comment><USER4> Person 151 is not a non-person, they're just a member of another group, who's leadership will include the other groups within the 150 monkey-sphere hence the basis of hierarchical human societies.

The dumbest thing about most "preppers" is that they invariably develop absurd ideas about how their fortress will beat back the hordes they imagine to descend (sound familiar?) yet pay basically no attention to their local council, who would be the nearest level of organization and planning continuance which would allow a practical response if the larger systems failed.

This isn't even speculative: the current the COVID-19 response in America has required local councils and city boards to coordinate, particularly in the absence of any clear direction at a Federal and frequently State level.

<comment><USER5> Reminds me of the Subgenius advice for the faithful. In the end times don't be a sap holed up waiting for defend yourself against marauding gangs. Join a marauding gang as soon as possible.

<comment><USER6> I guess creating an apocalypse simulator game where you could play it very differently would be very hard to create (agent simulation) and might not be fun at all to play...

<comment><USER7> You don't need agent simulation to do that, you just need properly-motivated writing and design teams.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> This is an interesting take on what zombie fiction is about:

> _The zombie myth has roots in Haitian slave plantations: they 're fairly > transparently about the slaves' fear of being forced to toil endlessly even > after their death. Then this narrative got appropriated and transplanted to > America, in film, TV, and fiction. Where it hybridized with white settler > fear of a slave uprising. The survivors/protagonists of the zombie plague > are the viewpoint the audience is intended to empathize with, but their > response to the shambling horde is as brutal and violent as any plantation > owner's reaction to their slaves rising, and it speaks to a peculiarly > American cognitive disorder, elite panic_.

Contrast this to Christian Thorne [0], who writes:

> _Zombie movies are always going to be about crowds. People-in-groups are the > genre's single motivating concern. Other classic movie monsters are like > malign superheroes, possessed of special powers, great reserves of speed and > strength. What's peculiar about zombies, when put alongside vampires or > werewolves or aliens, is that they are actually weaker than ordinary human > beings. They are really easy to kill for a start, because their bodies are > already moldering. Their arms will tear clean off. They go down by the > dozen. You're in no danger of being outwitted. They can kill only because > they have the numbers, and so that's the menace that zombie movies are > always trying to clarify: The threat of multitudes_.

I've watched/read a fair bit of zombie stuff, and I think Thorne is more on the mark about modern zombie movies. -- lots of scenes of zombies breaking down barricades or tearing people out of their cars (America's favorite refuge against crowds!). But movies that try harder to have a point, like the original Day of the Dead, lay it on pretty thick that _we_ are the zombies (who, even after death, return to the mall to amble around). Which is, I think, more in-keeping with a 'zombies are slaves doomed to eternal toil' reading.

Colson Whitehead's 'Zone One' flips the slave/master dynamic by having a mediocre black protagonist advance in post-zombie society way more than he was ever going to pre-outbreak, because the C student who survives in a low-effort way is more resilient than traditional high-achievers.

0: [https://sites.williams.edu/cthorne/articles/the-running- of-t...](https://sites.williams.edu/cthorne/articles/the-running-of-the-dead- part-2/)

<comment><USER9> I would say it's possible that the zombie myth has been independently reinvented in multiple places. I don't think it's necessarily been "appropriated". Though there is an obvious parallel in that both myths are about lack of freedom.

IMO, zombie movies symbolize a desire that people have to be free from the usual norms of society. More broadly, there is some part of us that desires chaos, and sees it as freeing. In a post-apocalyptic zombie world, there are no jobs, no rent to pay, no worrying about grooming yourself or fancy clothes, etc. Zombies are irredeemable, unsalvageable enemies. It's kill or be killed. In some ways, you could say that's simpler than modern society, with its many parallel games, hierarchies and rigid structures. In zombieland, there are no rules.

Beyond that, zombie movies are also an outlet for people to channel that pent up rage. They like to fantasize that they would be the badass survivor, shooting zombies in the head with a shotgun and chopping them up with axes, in some kind of ultimate "fuck you" to society. But hey, it's okay to kill people now, in that world, it's completely legit, they're no longer people.

Personally, I don't watch zombie movies because I feel like there's enough real drama in the world that I don't need to worry about gross imaginary drama. I also don't think it's the healthiest thing to cultivate violent fantasies where you kill everyone. Your life, your real life, may have its share of problems, but this definitely isn't how you're going to escape them.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> I just don't get the multiple people saying "Zombie epidemics as a topic are over because of COVID-19". They might be over just because there's been a glut of them, but in no way, shape, or form does the current pandemic resemble a zombie pandemic.

<comment><USER11> He's not saying that zombie epidemics as a topic are over, just that his take on it has been rendered obsolete by current events. It's sort of like a short short (either written by or edited by Isaac Asimov, I don't remember—I read it forty years ago) that proposed that Everest would never be summited because it had been colonized by Martians. Between acceptance and publication, Everest was summited.

<comment><USER11> Another similar instance just popped into my brain—in college a friend wrote a piece for the college paper in which, writing about political changes in Eastern Europe, he wrote, "but don't expect the Berlin Wall to come down any time soon."

As you might have guessed, the Berlin Wall came down between the writing and the publication.

<comment><USER12> I recall a book in the bookstore in 1989 about how IBM was inevitably going to grow and take over the world. Wish I'd bought it. :-)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> > _The survivors /protagonists of the zombie plague are the viewpoint the > audience is intended to empathize with, but their response to the shambling > horde is as brutal and violent as any plantation owner's reaction to their > slaves rising, and it speaks to a peculiarly American cognitive disorder, > elite panic.

Elite panic is the phenomenon by which rich and/or privileged people imagine that in times of chaos all social constraints break down and everyone around them will try to rob, rape, and murder them. To some extent this reflects their own implicit belief that humanity is by nature grasping, avaricious, amoral, and cruel, and that their status depends on power and violence. It's a world-view you'd expect of unreconstructed pre-Enlightenment aristocrats, or maybe a society dominated by a violent slave-owning elite._

This is such a salient point. It's something I've noticed when someone recommended me The Walking dead years ago. It's horrendous how reactionary and borderline fascist that show is in its nihilistic display of humanity where tribal survival is all that matters and every individual encountered is almost certainly some sort of rapist or cannibal and just needs to be stomped out. At one point I was thinking if the show is actually pushing this narrative so hard as to parody it but it certainly doesn't seem to be viewed that way.

<comment><USER14> His observation is wrong. In all societies in which there is a power vacuum gangs take over. Witness Africa, South America, Burma, and the middle Eastern countries in which we have removed the "dictators."

Asia after WW2 was different because the West essentially sponsored state corporate Facism in Japan and Korea until they had 30-50 years to evolve into something resembling a true democracy.

Even the term "elite panic" is lie. The elite are fine in a disaster and they know it. Look at Venezuela, the rich and elite simply moved behind walls and continue on. They have ways of isolating themselves and maintaining separation from the rabble.

The panic strikes the middle class more than any other group, because their status is the most easily lost. Unlike the rich, their power goes away with their jobs. Their lifestyle, however much you'd like to mock trips to Starbucks, weekend shopping at Pottery Barn, and all that - it all goes away. The tenuous advantage they've built up vanishes.

The truly elite use that fear. They aren't afraid themselves.

<comment><USER15> > In all societies in which there is a power vacuum gangs take over.

Such gangs are the basic form of government. They have command structure, and a population base they exploit. Over time, as gang grows, it comes into conflict with other gangs and one eventually emerges as the dominant. Once in command over a big chunk of population, it either splits into many smaller bands, repeating the cycle, or it evolves to be more structured, and rules appear, which regulate how gang members operate and what they are allowed to do. You may know these rules as 'laws'.

This happens because every gang eventually understands that in the long term, taxing a prosperous population is far more profitable and stable than unlimited plundering.

<comment><USER16> How does your hypothesis apply to, for example, Mexico? Seems that "eventually" may mean decades, if not longer.

<comment> barry-cotter It seems to apply pretty well to Mexico. Every time the cartels reach an equilibrium of violence where there's a clear chain of command and territories violence drops. Then the Mexican state decides that having para-states on its territory is unacceptable, smashes them and violence increases. You see the same dynamic though not on the same scale in US organized crime history; the Mafia were brutal thugs just like the brutal thugs who are criminals in US inner cities now. The Mafia used violence less often because they were organized. People knew where they stood. Pay your protection money, don't talk to the police unless they're our police and you're done.

No crime is better than organized crime is better than widespread disorganized crime.

<comment><USER17> I agree with you 100%, just wanted to add as an extra data point that after reading some of Max Weber's works I realised that he was the one that best described how society works in modern times (not saying that his observations were perfect, just closer to the perceived truth). He is of course the one that re-popularised the "monopoly on violence" [1] term that describes (among other, countless things) Italian Mafia's tactics (which I think Weber even mentions) and today's Mexican cartels' way of doing things.

As such, I highly recommend Weber's "Economy and Society" [2].

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monopoly_on_violence](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monopoly_on_violence)

[2] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economy_and_Society](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economy_and_Society)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> What always bugged me about zombie movies is that no one seems to figure out a way to take advantage of it beyond total anarchy.

I would expect enterprising individuals to see zombies as a potential tool. Like maybe figure out what makes them tick (they never seem to possess intelligent thought) and leverage them for a labour force or army. What are they fuelled by? Can they be taught to perform complex tasks through reward / punishment?

Seems like the next logical distopian step to take, and brings up all sorts of complicated mechanics, economics, and morality questions.

<comment><USER19> It's not really the point of a zombie movie, or any movie or story containing magical, free-energy beings/things/spells/doodads for that matter. It's just an accidental consequence of the magic/fantasy.

For zombies the point (and the plot) should always revolve around the existential dread of relentless, never-ending hordes of beings who want to eat your brains.

It's like the old story about the very best thing superman could do is simply turn a crank powering the world's energy. All that flying around saving people is actually a massive, inefficient, effectively people-killing, waste of time.

Try writing many series of comics about that though!

<comment> rkuykendall-com [https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/2011-07-13](https://www.smbc- comics.com/comic/2011-07-13)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> > this narrative got appropriated and transplanted to America, in film, TV, > and fiction. Where it hybridized with white settler fear of a slave > uprising. The survivors/protagonists of the zombie plague are the viewpoint > the audience is intended to empathize with, but their response to the > shambling horde is as brutal and violent as any plantation owner's reaction > to their slaves rising

I think it's a pretty fair to say the modern zombie story starts with Night of the Living Dead, and this viewpoint couldn't possibly be any further from how Romero handles themes of race, class, and authority.

I mean, maybe it's because I don't watch Walking Dead, but I've never seen a zombie film where I thought I was supposed to empathize with the protagonists. Except maybe Shaun of the Dead!

</comment><comment><USER21> Should have adopted the strategy of assuming the book exists and write a review. Used so effectively by Borjes it won him a Nobel.

<comment><USER22> If you mean Jorge Luis Borges, sadly no Nobel for him.

P.S. Local press had an item about an "International Writers Committee" naming Borges for the 2018 prize posthumously: [https://www.dn.pt/lusa/comite- internacional-de-escritores-at...](https://www.dn.pt/lusa/comite- internacional-de-escritores-atribui-nobel-da-literatura-a-jorge-luis- borges-9988389.html)

<comment><USER21> Thanks for the ( _double_ ) correction! Just read he "lost" in 65' with Nabokov and Neruda. Nice list to be in.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> I was just browsing/reading his old Linux articles. May be interest for others as well: [http://www.antipope.org/charlie/old/linux/index.html](http://www.antipope.org/charlie/old/linux/index.html)

</comment><comment><USER24> One of my favorite authors. Listening to his novel, Glasshouse, right now. If you're looking for something to read right now, check him out.

<comment><USER25> I read Neptune's Brood and was hooked. It's a fun surreal sci-fi adventure/romp with a heck of a lot of really interesting, geeky tech interludes. Who knew a novel about futuristic accountancy and forex could be so intriguing?

<comment><USER26> > The theory of interstellar trade is a well-understood topic, with an > extensive literature consisting of one paper (pdf) I wrote in 1978. > Interstellar finance, however, is less well covered.

> That's all about to change, however. I'm reading an advance copy of Charlie > Stross's Neptune's Brood. (Hey, I have connections!) And it is the best > thing by far written on the subject to date, partly because it is, as far as > I know, the only thing written on the subject to date.

> It's also a fantastic novel.

[https://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/05/20/the-theory- of-i...](https://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/05/20/the-theory-of- interstellar-finance/)

> This paper extends interplanetary trade theory to an interstellar setting. > It is chiefly concerned with the following question: how should interest > charges on goods in transit be computed when the goods travel at close to > the speed of light? This is a problem because the time taken in transit will > appear less to an observer travelling with the goods than to a stationary > observer. A solution is derived from economic theory, and two useless but > true theorems are derived.

[https://www.princeton.edu/~pkrugman/interstellar.pdf](https://www.princeton.edu/~pkrugman/interstellar.pdf)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Pet peeve: An expatriate isn't like an ex-skier, it comes from "to expatriate", ie to drive out of one's country, like "excommunicate" or "excise". Something that has been excised wasn't formerly cised.

<comment><USER28> I think you missed a joke at the expense of the toothsome nightmare of après ski culture.

<comment><USER27> Maybe, but I don't think I did, mainly because "expatriate" isn't spelled with a hyphen.

<comment><USER29> I thought that was pretty obviously tongue-in-cheek: _ex-zombie...ex- skier...ex-patriate_. And this was disclaimed as a very rough first draft - I'm guessing the author (in subsequent drafts),an editor or a test-reader would have caught it & have it revised (it's pretty low-effort wordplay - <USER2> that's more than OK for a first _draft_ as disclaimed, and the author could even keep it if they feel strongly about it)

<comment><USER27> Hmm, yes, it could be. I've seen it written like that too often for it to be a good joke, but who knows what the intention was.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> Hmm.

There are some science fiction tropes that become really obvious when you start looking for them. For one, check out _Invasion of the Body Snatchers_ or Heinlein's _Puppet Masters_ : that's "the Commies are among us", and it's not surprising that it became a significant thing in the 1950s. Although the idea that there are a group of people out there who look and act completely normal but who are actually out to destroy everything that decent people hold dear is a pretty common fear; demonic possession and all.

The Zombie 'Pocalypse is another. Charlie's right, it is the same fear as that of the owners of an antebellum Southern plantation at the mention of a slave uprising. The idea that all of the people you live with every day might suddenly turn into degenerate, savage monsters yearning to snack on your favorite nervous system is pretty scary, though. But it doesn't really have anything to do with infection or disease, and he is wrong to try to tie the two together. The infection isn't the important part.

Oh, and let's wait until the next time something like the current pandemic happens before we pass too much judgement on how people react. Consider the difference between the Northeast blackout of 1965 and the New York City blackout of 1977.

</comment><comment><USER31> Includes first draft of first chapter.

</comment><comment><USER32> His previous novels had many tropes. In fact, most stories do, and it should probably not stop one from writing them. You will be hard-pressed to find stories without numerous familiar tropes.

[https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Literature/Rule34](https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Literature/Rule34)

[https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Literature/HaltingSta...](https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Literature/HaltingState)

</comment><comment><USER33> Still hoping for a 3rd novel in the Freyaverse. It doesn't have to be named Uranus's Spawn.</comment>


Why China's Deleveraging Has Faltered - <AUTHOR> https://www.wsj.com/articles/why-chinas-deleveraging-has-faltered-1542964998 <comment><USER2> Partial paywall bypass: [https://outline.com/e96Z82](https://outline.com/e96Z82)

It seems a few paragraphs from the top of the article are missing in the outline.</comment>


Ask HN: What are the current best web analytics tools? - <AUTHOR>

<comment><USER2> [http://kilometer.io](http://kilometer.io) is a new promising analytics tool made for startups

<comment><USER3> That website does not encourage me to try. It's so bland, and uninformative. Its done in a consumer marketing style that is not suitbale for B2B. And really doesn't give me a feel for anything they do better than any of a bunch of alternate options. If it is a good product they should really re-think how they sell this.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Nothing beats segment.com imho. Their API's, SDK 's and documentation are superb.

<comment><USER5> Don't they aggregate the data that a real web analytics company would track (mixpanel and kissmetrics are on their free tier). I wouldn't call Segment a 'web analytics' company but they are very useful.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> This is a very broad question. What is your primary goal(s) you are trying to achieve?</comment>


Will aluminum Ford F-150 be a rolling beer can? - <AUTHOR> http://www.usatoday.com/story/driveon/2013/12/26/ford-f-150-aluminum/4203935/ <comment><USER2> Aerospace engineer here, weighing in...

I have two areas of expertise on this matter. First, I was on UW-Madison's competition-winning FutureTruck team about 10 years ago. We were, IIRC, the only team of about 15 other universities that replaced our competition car's (a Ford Excursion) entire frame with aluminum. In addition to replacing many other steel parts/assemblies with aluminum equivalents, we managed to bring the newly parallel hybrid SUV under stock weight... despite adding a large battery pack and motor. The thing I learned from this experience was: even though aluminum has about 1/3 the density of steel, your parts end up being about 50–55% of the steel weight because you need to add more aluminum to maintain equivalent strength. Basically, given the same tensile strength properties of a part, an aluminum one will be about half as heavy.

Second, I worked as a payload mechanical engineer for a number of spaceflight systems. Suffice to say, our base material for consideration was aluminum. Sure, we deferred to steel for certain applications (e.g., ball bearings, rat cage bars, fasteners, etc) and to myriad materials in others, aluminum was the standard. It has a tremendous strength/weight ratio, can be alloyed in many different ways to get different characteristics, is non-magnetic, is relatively cheap, and can have a number of interesting surface coatings applied. About the only major systemic problem aluminum has is that it is difficult to weld. Not impossible, as my FutureTruck experience tells me, but difficult. It didn't matter to us, though, since NASA generally frowns upon welded joints anyway. Too much strength variation due to heat stress and potential for FOD if not ground properly.

Anyway, I've been waiting for the auto industry to catch up to a bunch of college students for 10 years now. Nice to see one of the Big Four finally getting it. And cheers to the smaller car companies that have been doing it for years.

<comment><USER3> Since you seem to have some expertise, maybe you can answer this question: Is there a work function difference between steel in contact with aluminum, and does it accelerate corrosion in the steel?

<comment><USER2> The three main things to be concerned about are corrosion, galvanic corrosion[1] and galling[2].

Corrosion is more commonly known as rust, but that's technically reserved for steel (or, more accurately, iron) oxidation. Aluminum certainly corrodes, but it corrodes into aluminum oxide, or alumina, which is actually a ceramic that is stronger than aluminum. In fact, good luck using aluminum without a coating of alumina... it naturally occurs on the surface of atmospherically exposed aluminum. As a result, when a chunk of aluminum is broken off of a larger piece, the material almost immediately forms a protective layer of alumina. It's almost like aluminum self-heals in the presence of oxygen.

Galvanic corrosion occurs when dissimilar metals come into contact amidst an electrolyte solution. In the case of vehicles, that's usually seawater/sea- mist or salted winter roads. While saltwater is also responsible for accelerating normal corrosion, it also plays a part in galvanic corrosion. So yes, having aluminum and steel touching is a recipe for galvanic corrosion, but galvanic corrosion is not black-and-white. Each metal has an anodic index; a high or low anodic index doesn't matter all that much. What matters is the difference between the anodic indices of the touching metals. For aluminum and steel, that difference is quite small, so galvanic corrosion isn't a huge issue, but it's not negligible either.

Galling occurs when the sliding friction of two parts, say a screw and its threaded mate, results in plastic deformation, usually in the more ductile of the two pieces. This generally doesn't come into play in the construction of a vehicle because many parts are attached either by welding or by a bolt-nut combo. Choosing the correct materials for the bolts and nuts (basically, just use hardened, but not stainless, steel) gets rid of this concern in most cases. In cases where one must screw a steel fastener into a threaded aluminum piece, a helical insert is usually prescribed. While many manufacturers make these, we typically used Helicoil for spaceflight ops because they're tested and rated for spaceflight (batch traceability, proper composition docs, etc).

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galvanic_corrosion](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galvanic_corrosion)

[2] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galling](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galling)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> The Land Rover has had an aluminium body since 1948, plenty of time to figure out if it's a good or bad choice for an off-road vehicle.

There seems to be a lot of FUD around the new F-150, and as a European, it's hard not to see the similarities with U.S reactions to small turbocharged engines, and smaller vehicles in general.

* [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Land_Rover_Series](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Land_Rover_Series)

<comment><USER5> The series LR's had complete Birmabright (aluminum/magnesium alloy) bodies; though the more recent models Discovery I/II, LR3, Range Rover have used only aluminum body skins.* Meaning the structural body is steel, though the outward panels are aluminum.

The 2013 Range Rover has a complete aluminum body (skin and structure), with a 700lb weight reduction for US models.[1]

1\. [http://www.caranddriver.com/news/2013-land-rover-range- rover...](http://www.caranddriver.com/news/2013-land-rover-range-rover-photos- and-info-news)

* Various differences among models some have steel roofs, doors etc.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> I am glad to see that trucks are catching up with bicycles!

The bicycle business moved to aluminium a generation ago. For at least a decade carbon fibre has been the material of choice for road bikes. Nowadays if you are from the school of 'steel is real' then you are going to have to buy a cheap 'bicycle shaped object', get something custom handmade or go for something deliberately hipster-retro.

Clearly there have been aluminium bodied cars for some time, even a 'truck' if you count the Land Rover. However, there is aluminium and there is aluminium. I suspect that the new Ford truck has a bit more to it than the Land Rover (or even the Audi A2) has.

In the bike business there is 6 series aluminium and 7 series aluminium, to name the most popular alloys. The original aluminium frames were welded together tubes, for a while 'bonding' was experimented with but that proved to be unreliable. The current state of the art is 'hydroformed' aluminium, welded. The 'hydroformed' frames are works of art, with the metal where you need it for strength, the grain structure also aligned for strength. The tubes are anything but plain cylinders and much more useful for design than was possible in the days of steel.

Does anyone have any more technical information on what the processes and alloys are going to be on this new-fangled truck?

<comment><USER7> > Nowadays if you are from the school of 'steel is real' then you are going to > have to buy a cheap 'bicycle shaped object', get something custom handmade > or go for something deliberately hipster-retro.

Not entirely. [http://surlybikes.com/](http://surlybikes.com/)

Steel is still cheaper, easier to fix, and more comfortable.

<comment><USER6> As it happens I ride steel, primarily for the first reason you mention! I am also from the UK and I was over-generalising about what is available. There are plenty of people that still prefer steel, this is something I like about bicycles, there is a lot more individuality going on with bikes than you get (generally) with motoring.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> No. It will not. But it may be made of aluminum. What's with this headline?

<comment><USER3> The headline addresses the very real concern that Ford has with the _image_ their customers might have with an aluminum truck. They're concerned that people might equate aluminum with flimsy. Expect competitors to encourage this thinking (till their own aluminum designs are ready). Image is very important in the pickup truck market.

But to give potential critics some credit, aluminum can be made very thin, like a beer can, in which case it _is_ flimsy. It can also be made thicker, like the aluminum siding of the 60s and 70s, in which case it may still ding easily and lose its appearance.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Many cars prior to the F-150 have had aluminum bodies (Land and Range Rovers, for instance) that sold well. I would think that many truck drivers are more concerned with towing capacity, power and fuel economy than the specific metal the body is made from. Besides, the aluminum won't rust!

<comment><AUTHOR> If you're buying a F-150, you are more concerned with it holding up[1]. This is the vehicle of construction sites and farmers. It is truly the vehicle of I need to haul that stuff over there where they might not be a road. The concern is that the 2014 F-150 will not hold up and be more expensive to repair.

This is Ford's flagship vehicle. It cannot just sell well, it must put up amazing numbers. Its the iPhone of the car world.

1) the F-150's gas mileage isn't stellar, but it does even out when hauling.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Car and Driver once had a piece about a largely aluminum Audi that they were reviewing [1]. They got into an accident (not terrible--no one hurt), and the $30,000 repair took months at the only facility in Michigan that could repair aluminum-built cars. Now the Audi used aluminum in its frame, and maybe that's all the difference in the world, but I'd like to see Ford address repairability.

Otherwise, I'd welcome not only the weight reduction, but the avoidance of rust and body rot.

[1] [http://www.caranddriver.com/reviews/2007-audi-s8-long- term-r...](http://www.caranddriver.com/reviews/2007-audi-s8-long-term-road- test)

<comment><USER10> I have an aluminum Audi A2, and it's great! The fuel economy is good, and it's perky because of the lightness. Also happens to be one of the most reliable vehicles in it's age group. It drives really well because of the low center of gravity and thoughtful suspension, even if it is narrow and tall on the outside. It's actually a car that has been coherently designed.

[http://www.motormobiles.de/motor/a2i.jpg](http://www.motormobiles.de/motor/a2i.jpg)

The model was too expensive to produce and was cancelled by Audi in 2005. No aluminum Audis after that except some sport models. It's sort of a hidden gem.

To an outsider, making a big pickup truck from aluminum is like creating a paperweight out of some expensive lightweight material. Isn't the whole point of a pickup to most people (not all) being imposing and bulky? They even mention the 5000 pound weight in advertising, I assume they try to impress that it weighs a lot.

<comment><USER11> Cool photo. Bare aluminum is really shiny and attractive compared to mild steel. What are your maintenance costs on the A2? I need a new used car...

<comment><USER10> The windshield wiper motor died and I ordered a new one from a German web shop Audi Zentrum Göttingen for 100 euros (payment with Paypal), and a small town VAG specialist changed it. There are lots of repair shops around here that fix these cars just fine, even when they weren't imported here when they were new. So all cars are second hand imports. The wiper motor part cost would have been more than double locally. It helped to know some German. :)

Then the rear brakes also had to be fixed for the yearly checkup, normal wearing parts. And the internal heater had a connection problem, discovered when it started being cold enough that it was used (it's an aftermarket job anyway, to connect the car to an electricity outlet and warm up the engine block with a resistor and the interior with a resistor+fan).

I've had the car for six months and from rough memory, spent maybe 400 euros for maintenance.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Wouldn't the lack of weight be a factor in snow, or generally poor-traction situations? Being in Buffalo, NY I already see plenty of trucks fishtailing as it is.

Disclaimer: Truck !== Good in Snow

<comment><USER13> Whatever happened to putting sandbags in the back of the truck? When I lived in Buffalo, that was the preferred method of adding extra weight in the winter. Bonus: free sand in case you got stuck somewhere :-D

On the flip side: how will the ever present salt affect the aluminum body?

<comment><USER12> Yea, sandbags are the preferred method. Problem is, there are quite a few people that still think having a truck makes you impervious to poor driving conditions...and they skip the sandbags.

All metals will corrode in the presence of salts. Though aluminum does not exhibit rusting like steel does, it will develop a chalky film and pitting in the metal surface when exposed to salt for long periods. I believe that this is aluminium oxide.

Some reading: [http://www.boatingmag.com/how-to/maintenance/protecting- alum...](http://www.boatingmag.com/how-to/maintenance/protecting-aluminum- boats-salt-water-corrosion)

<comment><USER14> So then the lack of weight won't really be a factor in the snow. The ignorance of some owners will be.

<comment><AUTHOR> The ignorance is often cured by the tow truck driver explaining what you did wrong, sometimes the police if you are particularly unlucky.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> The Acura NSX had an aluminum body back when it was first introduced in 1990. I'm glad to see aluminum bodies now being used in more mainstream vehicles.

</comment><comment><USER11> All pickups use body-on-frame construction (image: [http://bit.ly/1cFsxn2](http://bit.ly/1cFsxn2)). The backbone that bears most of the load remains steel. It probably always will, because the strength requirements would necessitate a huge, expensive chunk of aluminum.

If the bed interior is aluminum, they will have to increase the thickness compared to steel, but it will do just fine at distributing the load to the frame.

Aluminum has a softer surface and will scratch easier. I'm guessing the Aluminum F-150 will come with a bed liner from the factory.

<comment><USER3> > All pickups use body-on-frame construction

Including the Honda Ridgeline? I thought that was an exception. In any case, you're mostly right, and that design is unlikely to change. Folks who actually use trucks in their work often bolt on various different styles of body: contractor bodies with large storage cabinets on the sides, enclosed van-like boxes, dumping beds, etc.

But frames can certainly be made of aluminum. The East company, which makes flat-bed and dumping trailers for semis, makes frames from aluminum. An unloaded, aluminum-framed flat-bed is very noticeable for its pronounced arch.

The scratchable surface of the bed will be paint, just as in the steel models.

<comment><USER16> The Honda Ridgeline is generally classified as a "sport utility truck", a category in which you'll also find vehicles like the Chevrolet Avalanche and Ford Explorer Sport Trac. It's basically an SUV (which are commonly unibody) without the rear enclosure. The distinction is that their primary design purpose is aligned more with that of an SUV than that of a pick-up truck.

I'm not aware of any true pick-up that uses a unibody design, and probably for the reasons you've stated.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> On PBS where I saw a brief description of aluminum and how difficult it was to refine and even when abundant supplies were available it's a soft metal if not an alloyed with copper or other metals. And the alloy is still soft unless it's forged correctly it takes time and heat, or so the show indicated, it was quite interesting.

For all that work you'd think these days carbon fibre would be just as good, economically-wise.

</comment><comment><USER18> Who knows. It _will_ make firefighters' jobs a lot more interesting at accident scenes: [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_z2uwC4mvoY](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_z2uwC4mvoY)

<comment><USER19> If you've hit something with enough force to turn the body panels into powder, they won't need firefighters - just a MOP...

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> _F-150 will blaze the way._ Ha. The first time one of these catches fire, it will put the Tesla to shame. [http://www.g2mil.com/aluminum.htm](http://www.g2mil.com/aluminum.htm)

<comment><USER21> If you look at the wikipedia page for that ship, you'll see that is isn't even built from aluminium! Really, that link is a bunch of crap. When was the last time you heard of a plane's aluminium skin catching fire (apart from when there is a bunch of avgas or jet-a on fire?)</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Do any real world systems use Functional Relational Programming? - <AUTHOR> <comment> a-saleh I don't think anybody used it as describe in the original Out of the tarpit [1] (I hope I got the right paper :)

Closest I saw might be the now defunct Eve lang [2], because it was a reactive system based on datalog (?) semantics, so it looks like it is one of the few attempts, that played with some sort of relational semantics.

Second I might consider could be C# with LINQ? This is probably the most interesting embedding of relational programming into a modern mainstream language :)

Third, these-days you mostly see Functional Relational Programming, that seems to be trying to solve a similar problem. It drops the Relational entirely, but there still is large focus on state-management.

[1] [http://curtclifton.net/papers/MoseleyMarks06a.pdf](http://curtclifton.net/papers/MoseleyMarks06a.pdf) [2] [https://github.com/witheve/eve-native](https://github.com/witheve/eve- native)

</comment><comment><USER2> I would argue Clojure gets close to it, especially in combination with Meander [0], a lib for declarative/functional data transformation.

Unfortunately, I don't know if Meander is used in any production systems.

[0] [https://github.com/noprompt/meander](https://github.com/noprompt/meander)</comment>


Retention Strategy? Comparison - Google vs My Company - <AUTHOR>

While Google is attempting to retain employees with raises and bonuses, in a twisted effort to somehow retain engineers and eliminate poaching, my boss has decided to threaten to terminate anyone in our division keeping a LinkedIn or StackOverflow Careers profile or a resume on a personal web site or social network of any kind.<p>Has anyone else encountered such a thing? What would you do? Is this fair to anyone? <comment><USER2> Start interviewing at other companies</comment>


Heritability of Lifetime Earnings - <AUTHOR> https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10888-019-09413-x <comment><USER2> > The contribution of the shared environment is negligible

Typical. As with most things, parenting doesn't matter.</comment>


Destruction of Nuclear Bombs Using Ultra-High Energy Neutrino Beam (2003) - <AUTHOR> https://arxiv.org/abs/hep-ph/0305062 <comment><USER2> The idea is kind of cool, but doesn't sound very practical. The beam width is my concern. If it's really narrow, then we have to know exactly where every nuclear warhead is to hit it. If it's really wide, then the power draw will be that much more immense, plus a huge risk of collateral damage to any life, human or otherwise, that happens to get in the path of the beam.

Not to mention that the prospect of detonating every nuke in the world, even at only 3% or so of normal yield, sounds pretty destructive too. If we're gonna get rid of some nukes, how about Megatons to Megawatts instead? [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Megatons_to_Megawatts_Program](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Megatons_to_Megawatts_Program)

<comment><USER3> > plus a huge risk of collateral damage to any life, human or otherwise, that > happens to get in the path of the beam.

Why? This doesn't actually deposit that much energy directly in any given volume. The beam is about a meter wide and the power is about a kilowatt (1000 joules per second). The authors say

> This is equivalent to about 1 Sv/sec. We note that this value of the > radiation dose is very large, compared with the U.S. Federal off-site limit > of 1 mSv/year.

but that seems wrong. Up to a dimensionless factor Q that adjusts for biological details, a sievert (Sv) is 1 joule of radiation energy deposited per kilogram. But that neutrino beam has a mean-free-path of the diameter of the Earth! That means it is roughly distributing the kilowatt of energy over 1 m^2 * 13,000 km ~= 1e7 m^3. At the density of water, that's 1e10 kg, so the deposited power is about a 1e-7 watts per kilogram, or roughly 100 nano sieverts per second. You'd have to point the beam at someone for 3 hours straight to exceed the (conservative) federal limit.

<comment><USER4> My reading of the paper shows they already factored that into the equation. So at the target, in the 1m² cross-section, 1,000 W of energy is being delivered. It takes about 50,000,000,000 W at the beam generator to achieve that.

<comment><USER5> If it's just 50 gigawatts it is potentially viable, considering the stakes of nuclear warfare. The precise locations of most stationary nuclear weapons systems are already known, though this would run into some trouble finding nukes on submarines unless they were detected by submerged drones or subullites. I'd look into it.

<comment><USER6> > most

Sounds really perilous. If even one is missed isn't its risk of usage now astronomically higher?

<comment><USER5> Well I don't think anyone in charge is really happy about how nuclear weapons are handled these days, but generally speaking I'd say that most people don't want to use them, but they're forced into over-worrying about attack vectors because that's the nature of MAD. Even so, there are so many ways of doing so much damage to an adversary right now I doubt if a major nuclear power would actually deploy[0] offensive neutrino weapons outside of an actual war.

[0] There is a difference between use and deploy in military terminology.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> In many ways, I'm glad this is so impractical. If it weren't, the prime candidate for actually doing this is one of the nuclear powers. They'd just "forget" to target their own nukes.

</comment><comment><USER8> Not sure triggering every nuclear bomb on the planet is a great outcome. I suppose if nations knew this was coming, they'd either dismantle their weapons or try to destroy the 1000km accelerator.

<comment><USER9> I'd put my money on the latter. Perhaps with the former.

<comment><USER10> Both will destroy the nukes with similar collateral effects.

Throwing them on the accelerator may even be the less damaging option.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Not sure this would work for the nukes that are constantly moving around on submarines. Would have to know the exact position of the sub to aim the beam.

</comment><comment><USER12> It's not clear why they are aiming at exploding the nuclear bombs instead of simply degrading them. If you induce enough plutonium nuclei to split, the core won't reach criticality when the implosion happens, so no mushroom cloud.

To do that, you can point a lower intensity neutrino beam for years at a nuke or a group of nukes. The adversary won't even know the nukes are compromised.

<comment><USER13> So it accelerates the decay of Pu or U-xxx inside the bomb. But this process is heat- and radiation-emitting, so I suspect if stockpile is monitored for either of these (probably both), something will be detected.

<comment><USER12> You are correct. I thought the heat would be negligible, but it's not. A modern plutonium pit is about 3kg [1]. If you want to induce a 5% decay, that's 150g. Each gram is equivalent with about 3 tons of coal [2] , so that's about 450 tons. If you do that over a period of 1 year, that's still about 1 ton of coal per day. That won't go unnoticed.

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pit_(nuclear_weapon)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pit_\(nuclear_weapon\))

[2] [https://www2.lbl.gov/abc/wallchart/chapters/14/1.html](https://www2.lbl.gov/abc/wallchart/chapters/14/1.html)

<comment><USER14> >That won't go unnoticed.

Given the size of the pit that would probably literally melt the pit right out of the warhead.

<comment><USER15> Which would pretty much be mission accomplished. Cleaning up a spill of pure plutonium would be an extremely lengthy process, months or maybe even years. It would contaminate the entire room/building/ship.

<comment><USER16> Unless they noticed before it melted out, and launched the thing...

<comment><USER7> > Unless they noticed before it melted out, and launched the thing...

1\. They'd know who to launch it at

2\. You can't just launch 1 nuke - it's all or nothing. And for the most part, it's probably nothing: countries besides the US and Russia just don't have very deep nuclear stockpiles[1].

___

1\. [https://www.armscontrol.org/factsheets/Nuclearweaponswhohasw...](https://www.armscontrol.org/factsheets/Nuclearweaponswhohaswhat)

<comment><USER17> > 1\. They'd know who to launch it at

Not really. "If we detect such an attack, we'll launch against you both. Make sure nobody on your side develops such a weapon".

It's called "MAD" for a reason.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> The title alone should give you pause; neutrinos are no easy thing to wrangle. We build giant swimming pools of water underground in the dark to try to catch them.

[https://what-if.xkcd.com/73/](https://what-if.xkcd.com/73/)

"We emphasize that the whole technology is futuristic and thereason should be clear toall the accelerator experts. Actually, even the simplest prototype of our proposal, i.e. theneutrino factory of GeV range needs substantial R & D work. Wealso note that a 1000 TeVmachine requires the accelerator circumference of the order of 1000 km with the magnetsof≃10 Tesla which is totally ridiculous. Only if we can invent a magnet which can reachalmost one order of magnitude higher field than the currentlyavailable magnet, the proposalcan approach the reality. Even if it becomes the reality, thecost of the construction is ofthe order of or more than 100 billion US$. Also we note that thepower required for theoperation of the machine may exceed 50 GW taking the efficiencyinto account. This is abovethe total power of Great Britain. This implies that no singlecountry will be able to affordthe construction of this machine and also the operation timemust be strictly restricted. Webelieve the only way this machine may be built is when all the countries on earth agree todo it by creating an organization which may be called the "World Government" for whichthis device becomes the means of enforcement."

<comment><USER19> Particle physicist here! Actually it's pretty easy to generate intense neutrino beams. You just have to accelerate protons and smash them into a lead wall. This produces all kinds of particles, including for instance muons. Since muons are charged, you can filter and focus them into a beam using magnets, and then they rapidly decay in flight, producing a beam of neutrinos going in the same direction.

As you say, they are quite difficult to detect once produced. This is exactly what the DUNE experiment will be doing. It's a large underground detector in North Dakota that will measure properties of neutrinos produced in a beam at Fermilab near Chicago.

The difficulties mentioned in the quote from the article have little to do with neutrinos. 1000 TeV is simply an insanely high energy for any particle beam.

<comment><USER20> Sanford Underground Research Laboratory is in Lead, _South_ Dakota.

<comment><USER21> > Lead

I guess it is not a coincidence they are putting a neutrino detector in a place called that way.

Am I correct to assume there are old lead mines there?

Edit: there are mines, very deep mines, but not Lead mines in fact. And the detector is in one of them.

<comment><USER22> Lead is not named for the element lead nor is it pronounced the same. It's pronounced like leader (without the er, of course) and named for a mining term[0].

[0]: [https://www.britannica.com/place/Lead-South- Dakota](https://www.britannica.com/place/Lead-South-Dakota)

<comment><USER21> yes, I did check the wiki page after posting my comment, hence my edit :)

<comment><USER20> The fun part is there is actually a Leeds, ND (pronounced the same but spelled different) which is named for a place in England which was a bit common in North Dakota even with the large Nordic immigrations. Of course, anything that the Natives put "Spirit" into got renamed "Devil".

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> This would explain two recent secretive projects.

First is the various attempts by China to build underground "neutrino detectors" in various parts of the country. Before all of the Chinese Academy of Science websites were taken down, you could see pictures of it. They were tunneling quite deep. 100 miles at around average depth of 4,000 feet.

Of course no one does nuclear like the Americans. The Department of Energy's secretive DUNE project...Deep Underground Nuetrino [E] is well under way across Illinois and will eventually extend the accelerator at Fermilab to over 800 miles underground.

This technology is, to use an overused term, the Manhattan Project of the 21st century.

<comment><USER24> > DUNE

Give me a break. The Deep Underground Neutrino Experiment is not secretive. Why do you and so many people make up BS like this?

No accelerator is extended at all, let alone beyond FNAL border and certainly not 800 miles.

<comment><USER23> Lol look I'm not spouting HAARP weather control conspiracy theories over here. Also the distance from Fermi Lab to Lead, South Dakota is 800 miles no?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> In terms of engineering, I can't see how steering this beam would be remotely viable: it appears you've got to line up the long axes of the 1000 km circumference muon ring to point exactly in the direction of the weapon to be targeted. So to have it steerable at all it appears necessary to make it space-based. Having done that, it seems the energy, reaction mass and and time required to steer the thing would be pretty crazy.

From a basic physics viewpoint this seems surprisingly within grasp though in terms of energy scales. Greatly entertaining!

</comment><comment><USER26> From the introduction of the Paper:

"We emphasize that the whole technology is futuristic and the reason should be clear to all the accelerator experts... We also note that a 1000 TeV machine requires the accelerator circumference of the order of 1000 km with the magnets of ≃ 10 Tesla which is totally ridiculous... Even if it becomes the reality, the cost of the construction is of the order of or more than 100 billion US$... the power required for the operation of the machine may exceed 50 GW"

<comment><USER27> $100 billion for a high-tech structure of 1000km in size? I think you're severely underestimating.

<comment><USER28> It's a ring, so it should be thought of as something pi _1000km in length, not pi_ (500km)^2 in area. The inside of the ring is not used for the structure. $32,000/meter sounds pretty generous.

<comment><USER27> LHC is 27km long and cost $4.75 billion.

Which is around $175,900 per meter.

<comment><USER28> That's a good reference point. Cost for infrastructure projects usually isn't linear. I've seen an exponent of .6 used to extrapolate costs.

(3140km/27km)^.6 * $4.75B = $82B. Adjusting for inflation gives you something a bit over the $100B. They probably came up with the number in a similar fashion.

Do you know if your number includes the detectors? They would have contributed significantly to the total cost.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> The concept reminds me a lot of device described in [https://www.amazon.com/The-Genesis-Machine-James-P-Hogan- aud...](https://www.amazon.com/The-Genesis-Machine-James-P-Hogan- audiobook/dp/B00BJ3P91C) I wonder if the authors have read it ...

</comment><comment><USER30> Not to be a snob but I have a problem with the quality of this paper. Take the following passage:

"Actually, even the simplest prototype of our proposal, i.e. the neutrino factory of GeV range needs substantial R & D work. We also note that a 1000 TeV machine requires the accelerator circumference of the order of 1000 km with the magnets of ≃ 10 Tesla which is totally ridiculous."

Assigning such value-laden language as 'totally ridiculous' could be explained away as simply an artefact of translation, but it continues...

"Even if it becomes the reality, the cost of the construction is of the order of or more than 100 billion US$."

According to whom?

"Also we note that the power required for the operation of the machine may exceed 50 GW"

Again - reference?

"... taking the efficiency into account. This is above the total power of Great Britain. This implies that no single country will be able to afford the construction of this machine..."

Does it? How does GB power production imply that one of the superpowers could not build such a device? Might as well say that the power required is 100x the power output of the DRC, or that it is equivalent to the acoustic energy of 40 million duck quacks, or 1/5 the energy emitted by the Sun in 200 milliseconds. These comparisons add nothing to the paper.

"... and also the operation time must be strictly restricted. We believe the only way this machine may be built is when all the countries on earth agree to do it by creating an organization which may be called the "World Government" for which this device becomes the means of enforcement."

World government??? Since when was this a political paper? We already have many multinational organisations - NATO, WHO, some for atomic energy.

I've no doubt the paper was written in good faith but this really, really needed an editor and some peer review. Something that arxiv.org, as much as I support its core aims, sorely lacks.

<comment><USER31> I really liked the candid tone, and I think it was appropriate given the highly theoretical topic of the paper.

And of course they're saying "some World Government", they don't want to make predictions about whether it'd be NATO or the UN, just some world collaboration.

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> Is this similar to the idea that solar neutrinos might affect nuclear decay rates on earth? And if so, I thought this was very speculative still.

<comment><USER33> It makes no sense to me that half-lives can't be affected by anything. Do you have a source for a discussion of this?

<comment><USER34> [https://arxiv.org/pdf/1301.3754.pdf](https://arxiv.org/pdf/1301.3754.pdf)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> It feels like it would be much easier to modify the nuclear weapons to be immune to this device than to actually build it.

OTOH it may be easier to build than authors assume: what if it is build in orbit so it doesn't have shoot the beam across the Earth? I know we don't do accelerators in space, but it may be easier than reaching 1000 TeV.

</comment><comment><USER36> Sorry, this wouldn't work at all. I don't have time and desire to verify their neutrino beam / neutron shower calculation, but they want to detonate bombs by raising the core temperature to 300C, assumed ignition temperature of surrounding explosives.

This doesn't work, because: 1) you cannot detonate explosives there by simple ignition, 2) you need a very precise timing for simultaneous activation of all detonators, to achieve the smooth shockwave front, and 3) even if all this somehow happened, you just can't explode the bomb just lying around AT ALL, as it is not in pre-critical configuration yet. There are many things that need to happen simultaneously, in exact order and with nanosecond precision. There are PAL devices that provide encrypted timing differences to the detonation controller by loading external codes — without these codes, it is physically impossible to achieve nuclear explosion, even if you somehow activated all other things from pre-detonation checklist. Etc etc.

Not to mention that in the real bomb, there is much less plutonium than 10 kg they have mentioned.

I assume the rest of the paper is of similar quality.

<comment><USER37> The paper seems to be talking about merely destroying bombs, rather than getting a nuclear yield.

<comment><USER36> They assume 3% fizzle yield. It wouldn't work anyway (there will be exactly zero yield), the core will remain intact, ready for insertion into another physics package.

<comment><USER38> I don't know the details of how durable a uranium warhead core is (and I suspect it's very highly classified) but they're pretty precisely machined bits of metal. Even a 3%-yield fizzle should be more than enough to de-rate one. At that point the uranium could be recycled to build a new core, but that's about it.

<comment><USER36> I know some details. (It is plutonium, not uranium). Any yield, even fizzle yield, is impossible by simply igniting the explosives around the core. Again, it is not in pre-critical configuration yet at this point. Arming the device, i.e. assembling the initial configuration, is an incredibly complicated and precise process. It is so beautiful from the engineering point of view.

<comment><USER9> You don't seem to get it. The object of the exercise is not nuclear yield. BTW, you can physically damage fissile material that needs to be in a particular physical configuration with neutrons and/or x-rays. One is not trying to detonate the weapon, but rather render it in a state where it cannot reach the desired yield (preferably none at all, of course).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> Reads like something out of Vernor Vinge's Peace War.

<comment><USER40> The invention of a "fission blanket" (aka "weak force intermodulation projector") that renders fission impossible, at a distance, is also part of the backstory for a scifi novel 'Emprise', by Michael P. Kube-McDowell.

</comment></comment><comment><USER41> What about all the nuclear material in the earth itself. Isn't the dynamo core hot due to radioactivity? We don't want to affect that...

</comment><comment><USER42> Star Trek needs this.

"Mr Saru, destroy all the Klingon relay stations on the surface."

"But Captain, some of them are on the other side of the planet."

"Use the neutrino beam."

"Aye Captain."

<comment><USER9> I used to work with a guy from LLNL who was involved with some of the X-Ray laser stuff and the like. There were some systems that, in theory, weren't that attenuated by the atmosphere...

And that's where I learned the phrase: "Pre-Boost Phase" — hit them in the silos. None of those systems appears to have borne fruit (or have they? oooo- eeeee [x-files music]).

<comment><USER43> > And that's where I learned the phrase: "Pre-Boost Phase" — hit them in the > silos. None of those systems appears to have borne fruit

Other than ICBMs, of course. IIRC it took quite a few years for ICBMs to become robust and responsive enough to launch in response to an attack and have enough time to escape the kill radius of the incoming nukes. If it took 15 minutes to fuel, target and launch, and you have 10 minutes warning... Well, you'd better hope your bunkers and silos held up.

<comment><USER9> No, this was ICBMs, including SS-19 and SS-20 in their hardened silos. Pre- boost.

Of course, the only way that works is if you use your devices preemptively. Hence you get the oh-shit realization that a technically sweet solution is politically destabilizing (given that any preemptive capability encourages the enemy to strike first). The same thing happened with some other systems, like a long-ranged stealthy cruise missle: it caused more problems than it would solve. At the end of the day, the problem is avoiding nuclear war, not winning it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER44> 2020: 1\. Covid 2\. Polic Brutality 3\. Cicadas 4\. Global Thermal Nuclear war

Yep....

Hey, it's only a "3% fizzle reaction". How bad can that be?

<comment><USER45> The US sent 3 carriers towards Asia last week to deter China and other countries from thinking that the corona pandemic and US riots was a good time to escalate.</comment></comment>