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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 20th, 2023

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  • Sugar and refined carbohydrates are two big culprits. Then changing the balance of HDL-cholesterol to LDL-cholesterol changes with weight gain making it all worse and possibly leading to a positive feedback loop. The historic denigration of all fats, good and bad, helped to further tilt the HDL to LDL in the population making lots of people less healthy. It isn’t HFCS, it is the over use of sugar in most of our food. This is especially true in North America, but then we exported much of the same food tech to the rest of the world who did the same.

    All that processed food? Full of refined carbs and sugar. Drinks? Often full of sugar. Cheap food? Usually highly processed and refined, so more sugar and refined carbs. You need carbs for energy and fats to keep everything going with balance of nutrients and protein. Any of that out of balance and health suffers. Too little fat can even kill you (rabbit starvation/protein poisoning). The modern diet in North America is terrible because we were told good things were bad and carbs were good. So we ate too little of the good fats, too much of the refined carbs, and too much sugar. Now were here, increased heat disease, diabetes, obesity, and cancer.


  • This is very good. Oklo is specifically aiming to provide power with minimal maintenance to remote areas that otherwise wouldn’t have power. This contract is a very good testbed for the technology before being deployed to remote areas.

    There have been research reactor that have been run successfully that cannot meltdown like Fukushima, Chernobyl, or Three Mile Island. Oklo is a fast reactor of similar design. Such reactor designs often will cool down and the nuclear reaction stop even when completely losing all coolant and power. They fundamentally cannot get into a positive feedback loop like an reactors that are have been run commercially. I’m unsure how long Oklo’s nuclear waste is dangerous, but some fast reactors can actually be used to burn up waste from other reactors making. Their waste is dangerous for a few hundred years, instead of the tens of thousands of years of other reactors.





  • There have been ways to recycle organic waste into oil for decades. They even built a full sized plant to use turkey offal from a nearby turkey processor (initially could get it for free). Even ran demos on tire rubber or plastics. Initially cost effective when oil prices were high as they could sell the oil.

    Few of problems. Up front cost is high. Oil price volotility and the drop in oil prices made it uneconomic. Coupled with needing to pay for the turkey offal (someone else started paying the processor for it), killed the plant being fully self funded.

    Since then refinements in the process, or closely related ones, keep being developed without being able to overcome the economics. These processes can recycle from just about anything organic, including plastics, to whatever oil feedstock you want. Plastic as good as virgin plastics, pharmaceuticals, or whatever oil you want. Still the economics don’t work when oil is cheap and new oils societal costs are externalized.