Phil Landmeier @shuttersparks@qoto.org

@N0ZB@mastodon.radio I certainly hope that's not the case. The likelihood of this being true approaches zero. The type of RTG the CIA would have used produces around 50 watts when new and its output declines about one percent per year. 50 watts is the amount of energy the sun puts on a patch of ground about 25 centimeters square.

Plutonium contamination is obviously possible. This would require that the RTG be dismantled to expose the plutonium and the plutonium (a metal) broken into some form that could get into the environment. It's possible.

@N0ZB@mastodon.radio Yes, we use them too, but only for a few specialized applications, mainly to power spacecraft that can't effectively use solar panels like the Voyagers, Curiosity, etc. We don't sprinkle thousands of them around the countryside just in case they might be needed, then abandon them.

We also build ours from expensive plutonium because it results in a compact unit that produces a lot of power and little radiation. We don't build them out of waste cesium-137 and strontium-90 that produce lots of radiation and not much power.

The USSR sprinkled more than 2,500 RTGs (small highly-radioactive generators) across the Arctic and in remote mountain locations. They are unsupervised and unmaintained, stolen and scrapped by metal dealers who sometimes die of radiation poisoning.

https://www.gizmodo.com.au/2023/06/the-ussr-sprinkled-more-than-2500-nuclear-generators-across-the-countryside/

The bird population in the U.S. is down about 3 billion breeding birds since 1970. Around a billion birds are killed in the U.S. each year by flying into windows. Around 2.5 billion birds are killed by feral cats. Learn what you can do to help birds.

https://www.birds.cornell.edu/home/seven-simple-actions-to-help-birds/

#birds #birding #ornithology #environment #OrganicFoods #pesticides

Fossil fuels companies hold us hostage, worldwide.

https://shuttersparks.net/fossil-fuel-companies-hold-us-hostage/

#oil #petroleum #energy #ClimateChange #GlobalWarming #FossilFuel #CO2 #politics #economics

@edgeoforever @rbreich That sounds more like fascism to me than conservatism. Because the GOP has co-opted the word "conservative", people think that what they're selling is conservatism. It ain't.

@orci Yes. I go through 20 to 40 pounds of feed per week. Hungry little bastages.

@rbreich Republicans have a different view of what law and order mean.

@HCBunny Come to think of it, I was born like that.

@davep When you receive a CC, you're a C.C. Rider.

@joncounts Plastic ones became available 50 years ago and they're still just as crummy as they were then.

The fact that wooden ones are still readily available tells you all you need to know.

@Teri_Kanefield How did she off-handedly know there are 33 bathrooms? Seems odd.

@confluency Exactly. Search has become a disaster because the net is flooded with "information" published by SEO experts.

Most of the time now, when I read an "informative" article about some topic or item, about a quarter of the way through I realize it was written by some guy in India who has no expertise in the field, but assembled information from other sources. Those articles often go on for pages and pages, saying the same things over and over using different wordings. Often there are ten different presentations of the same material.

Check the next seemingly unrelated site and it has the same text as the previous site, just arranged in a different order, or is an exact duplicate including the grammatical errors and incorrect usages of terminology.

The first page of search turns up nothing but this "content mill" gibberish. I hope serious students aren't using this crap to learn from.

@HCBunny Bahahaha.

@TruthSandwich Indeed. It's impossible to predict a twisted mind like his. If he planned to make off with secrets and sell them, yes, making secured copies should have been the very first thing done, immediately. Safeguarding everything also in order to retain the value of their secrecy.

But it wouldn't surprise me if they were just left in boxes piled in his bathroom. I don't understand how his mind works or if it works at all.

Trophies? Isn't being a former President of the United States enough??? An ex-president doesn't need trophies.