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[Trekkin]

Trump's explanation was that NK's recent comment insulting the Veep and threatening to destroy America did not foster a suitable atmosphere for peace.

It seems clear to me that Trump was sweating because he knew that he would screw up the meeting, be unable to close the deal, and fail to get the peace that everyone wanted. So he jumped at the very first excuse he got to call the whole thing off and blame someone else. Better to plunge the world into a war that he can win than to let people see him as a failure.

I suspect North Korea vacillating on complete denuclearization was the tipping point, after Bolton's influence. Trump's understanding of negotiation is that good deals involve getting everything he wants as a prerequisite for his participation. This way he wins either way, in his own mind: either they capitulate to the best dealmaker in history, or he gets to claim he's smarter than Obama because he didn't make a bad deal.

[hector13]

Well NK was balking at the talks because SK and the US can't delay for a bit something that NK has been complaining about for years in order to at least give the facade of making concessions to them.

Trump is saying talks are in doubt because he wants to look in control. He was the one that stopped the talks, not Kim.

[PTTG??]

Batteries could be a good investment even without solar being around. They reduce base-load requirements.

The standard kind runs the risk of exploding, though. Put them in every home and you increase the risk of fires. There are creative solutions with storing heat and stuff, but you lose efficiency, and therefore require more solar panels.

Point is, it's not really practical to run the whole grid on batteries. It just ends with burning (the midnight) oil because it's more cost effective.

The whole combustibility myth is an attempt at propoganda by oil companies, and a stupid attempt at that. Batteries are OBVIOUSLY safer than gasoline, and people have no problem with cars, lawnmowers, and fuel tanks in their homes. Hell, propane tanks are disasters just waiting to go off, and through it all, nobody batted an eye. Batteries are orders of magnitudes safer, and all of a sudden people are worried about flammability? I don't buy it.

Some of the new industrial-scale batteries are looking incredibly cheap, too. As in cheaper per watt-hour than coal. Molten sodium batteries only work on truly grid scales, but they're fantastic energy storage and a month or two back there was a breakthrough in electrolyte separation that's made them dramatically cheaper.

No, a 100% renewable grid is patently, obviously possible. Whenever people try to tell you otherwise, they're trying to sell you a load of coal.

[hector13]

Cancelled.

[SaberToothTiger]

2018 PEACE SUMMIT PRANK GONE WRONG GONE VIOLENT GONE SEXUAL SOCIAL EXPERIMENT IN THE HOOD

[Shazbot]

There's a NK thread. But basically, Trump is out buying a car, kicked the tires, said "Eh, lets see what my military industrial complex has for sale along the lines of just glassing your parking lot," and is leaving Kim three hostages short and a nuclear test facility demolished.

You have to be willing to walk away in order to effectively negotiate. Obama wasn't willing to walk away and Iran trampled on us throughout the Iran deal negotiations. North Korea walked out of the six party talks in 2009. This is normalcy. Trump made the correct move in response to North Korea claiming they had military leverage. They don't, because the whole country is a glass ashtray waiting to happen.

His Excellency
Kim Jong Un
Chairman of the State Affairs Commission
of the Democratic People's Republic of Korea
Pyongyang

Dear Mr. Chairman:

We greatly appreciate your time, patience, and effort with respect to our recent negotiations and discussions relative to a summit long sought by both parties, which was scheduled to take place on June 12 in Singapore. We were informed that the meeting was requested by North Korea, but that to us is totally irrelevant. I was very much looking forward to being there with you. Sadly, based on the tremendous anger and open hostility displayed in your most recent statement, I feel it is inappropriate, at this time, to have this long-planned meeting. Therefore, please let this letter serve to represent that the Singapore summit, for the good of both parties, but to the detriment of the world, will not take place. You talk about nuclear capabilities, but ours are so massive and powerful that I pray to God they will never have to be used.

I felt a wonderful dialogue was building up between you and me, and ultimately, it is only that dialogue that matters. Some day, I look very much forward to meeting you. In the meantime, I want to thank you for the release of the hostages who are now home with their families. That was a beautiful gesture and was very much appreciated.

If you change your mind having to do with this most important summit, please do not hesitate to call me or write. The world, and North Korea in particular, has lost a great opportunity for lasting peace and great prosperity and wealth. This missed opportunity is a truly sad moment in history.

Sincerely yours,

Donald J. Trump
President of the United States of America

I particularly like the "Thanks for the hostages, it was sweet of you." It is making it abundantly clear North Korea pissed it down their legs on the world stage. I'm... surprised how many of you see it the other way and are making up stories to justify that view.

[Starver]

The whole combustibility myth is an attempt at propoganda by oil companies, and a stupid attempt at that. Batteries are OBVIOUSLY safer than gasoline, and people have no problem with cars, lawnmowers, and fuel tanks in their homes. Hell, propane tanks are disasters just waiting to go off, and through it all, nobody batted an eye. Batteries are orders of magnitudes safer, and all of a sudden people are worried about flammability? I don't buy it.

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

A battery capable of powering a car must, by definition, hold enough energy to power that car. (Well, power enough (as energy/time) to roughly compete with a comparable petrochemical engine, the total energy capacity might be less at current tech levels, like a smaller fuel tank that needs filling more frequently). But, like all energy stores (combustible fuel, electrochemical potential, pressurised gas, wound rubber band, anvil hoisted up on a rope ad pulley arrangement) the potential is there for uncontrolled release of the energy stored.

A propane tank meant to be refilled every month or so has to hold a month or so of household energy (adjusted by efficiency metric of the 'proper' release method), while a day-charge/night-discharge battery system needs only be a day's-worth (or two, as buffer) of store, so basic 'explosiveness' of a wbole-home battery backup's intrinsic energy is less.

Though a fuel tank is usually inert(-enough) steel, which wouldn't add much to an unintentional whole-instant-release of energy (resistance, mainly, turning a bad burn into a worse explosion, give or take safety valves and well designed positions of intentional weak-points to maybe redirect in the most neutral direction possible if installed correctly) while a battery (depending upon the exact chemical make-up behind the electrochemical storage) might have more reactive material like lithium that, when compromised by a short-circuit and/or mechanical damage also holds otherwise unused  'manufacturing energy' (not discharged, to be recharged, in normal use) that might add to the the total output of energy once some non-normal irreversible failure occurs.

The inefficiencies between storing and retrieving of energy also come into play. Trivially stored and carried, hydrocarbon fluids (once cracked and fractionated and blended back as required) don't have much wastage on input to the eventual priming tank, but hot exhaust (once as much mechanical energy as possible has be extracted by the piston engine/boiler/etc) has energy that the proper use does not extract but ought to be counted in the catastrophic depletion.

Pre-storage inefficiencies (the pressurising and maybe cryogenic cooling of hydrogen, for example, whether slated for burning or reverse electrolysis) don't add to the catastrophe (unless failures of the 'charging' procedure is responsible for the catastrophe), so a battery system which heats up on charging (within design limits, properly heatsunk) shouldn't be an issue, but asociated heating upon discharge might indicate 'extra' energy that would emerge in an uncontrolled discharhe before the full breakdown of the electrolyte that might then happen.


I've thought a lot about the (idealised) Mister Fusion power source. Fed (chemically) inert feedstock, it is technomagically fusioned to create energy enough to supply both flux-capacity energy ("jiggawatts" of it) and hovercar capabilities (probably calculable if you have the time). Working properly, one must assume that it uses some of its own energy also to safely contain the energies involved in a feedback loop. Does it even get warm, doing this? Hot to touch, I suspect (like an esoresso machine, maybe) though not 'radioactively hot'. That's even if it's "cold fusion", as you surely can't push so much power through the base of a blender without some heat (even with extensive room-temperature superconductors, there'd be a junction with non-superconducting contacts) howeverso arranged the internals are.

And those internals must be massively over-engineered to deal with any conceivable common-or-garden failure, to mitigate any cherenkov-like leak of radiation through a crack or weakness in the physical/field-based shielding.  Treated as an alternate form of fuel-tank/battery a catastrophic failure isn't really worth considering. If H&S attitudes aren't remarkably lax (a possibility, admittedly, if brilliant but scatterbrained Doc Brown is the only one doing this precise installation of equipment) then futuretech must have solved quite a lot of the technical safety issues (maybe charged particles being the only radiation, contained with tightly defined self-reinforcing magnetic bottles, maybe some equally fantastic 'force field' internal projection that also creates the pressure surely needed)...

Awww fuggit. I've written this thing three different times now (or two-and-a-lot, as I haven't fully finished the last version), making different oververbosive things each time. Basically, a battery can go boom, because if it absolutely couldn't then it probably wouldn't be a good battery. Not that this correlates with the underlying likelihood of a boom, just where the worst-case scenario leads.

And really this discussion should move over to the Science thread. Or the Tech one. I hope the conversation here has moved on, actually, and this now looks out of place.

[Shazbot]

The context is that Trump called some people animals, they were pretty bad people though, from MS-13 and other gangs. But then he called more people animals, e.g. the entire US illegal immigrant population of 11 million people got called subhuman "animals". and Nancy Pelosi basically said it's wrong to dehumanize anyone by calling them an "animal". So now the right-wing is having a field day that Nancy Pelosi is in love with MS-13.

But the underlying context of what Trump really meant is clear: singling out some non-white people and loudly called them animals, e.g. "subhuman", or "untermensch" if you will. And I'm not really stretching it that far: as well as Trump's one-off, we have an official White house document calling MS-13 them "violent animals" in the heading, and also using the term "animals" 7 more times in the text. But it's defended because hey, MS-13 are bad motherfuckers, thus do they even deserve to be considered human beings?

But Trump also wrote this:

We have people coming into the country, or trying to come in, and we’re stopping a lot of them, but we’re taking people out of the country. You wouldn’t believe how bad these people are. These aren’t people. These are animals.

e.g. anyone they have deported, or wish to deport, which is really the entirety of the 11 million American residents who aren't citizens, "aren't people" and are "animals" whom you "wouldn't believe how bad these people are". The optics on that are pretty bad, especially when a national leader says it, e.g. literal Hitler type bad, which is what Nancy Pelosi was calling him out on.

https://youtu.be/VMsiYUjta-s

In the first FORTY SECONDS of the roundtable, in his opening remarks, he is referring to MS-13 and deporting them. In the specific context of the conversation, they are discussing frustration deporting MS-13 and other gang members. He's sitting here with a Lebanese immigrant and mayor talking about fighting to defend rule of law. Do you think he's going to call non-white immigrants animals when he's talking to one as an ally in his political goals?

It is completely and deliberately disingenuous to pretend he's calling "non-white peoples" animals. He is talking about the violent criminals from international gangs the entire room of law enforcement agents are trying to fight and deport, but are stymied by race-based machine politics based in Sacramento. I mean, for chrissake, if you absolutely must pretend this is racial and not based on punishing rape, murder and depravity, then I'll counter your false premise. I'm a "non-Hispanic white". So who is he deporting but "Hispanic whites". The whole reason for pretending Latin Americans are "non-white peoples" is to call anyone opposed to mass immigration a racist. It was a deliberate decision to start carving the "non-Hispanic white" population off the white demographic in order to use racial machine politics. I'm not going to sit here and listen to that line of patent race-baiting bullshit, because it is precisely why so many people are getting terrorized.

[Starver]

(Double post, if it still is (it isn't!), because this is back on-topic. Or half-so, given the possible NK thread place for it.)

There's a NK thread. But basically, Trump is out buying a car, kicked the tires, said "Eh, lets see what my military industrial complex has for sale along the lines of just glassing your parking lot," and is leaving Kim three hostages short and a nuclear test facility demolished.

The test facility was already demolished. 'Hostages' get freed all the time, and Trump's just on par, at the very most.

It seems Kim was losing face and had to back out, in response to which Trump jumped in there and did the "you can't fire me, 'cos I quit!" thing to save his face. Except that it was probably Kim's ass needing saving (from the usual internal pressures on any dictator) and Trump's just an ass/dick/potato about it as usual.

Consider me unimpressed. They should have just elected the author of The Art Of The Deal to the presidency, instead.

[nenjin]

Glad we printed those medals though. What a schmuck.

[Reelya]

Shazbot, when Trump said " We have people coming into the country, or trying to come in, and we’re stopping a lot of them, but we’re taking people out of the country. You wouldn’t believe how bad these people are. These aren’t people. These are animals." He definitely wasn't referring to just MS13, you're just plain cherrypicking your facts there. What he said caused a diplomatic meltdown with Mexico too.

I already laid out that quote plain as day, it's disingenous to act like it wasn't there, and that I was only referring to the MS13 statements. e.g. my post actually boils down to "trump referred to ms13 as animals, and nancy pelosi was labeled an ms13-lover for objecting to the word animals, but Trump also labeled basically all illegal immigrants as animals, carte blache, which is 11 million people and not just MS13".

~~~

When Trump wrote "We have people coming into the country, or trying to come in, and we’re stopping a lot of them, but we’re taking people out of the country. You wouldn’t believe how bad these people are. These aren’t people. These are animals.", Maybe you can claim he was "referring" to MS13, but that's just plain bullshit, because this statement doesn't contain a single reference to MS13. The only way you could "know" it was about MS13 is if you had additional information that's not contained in the message itself, e.g. the message's meaning is interpreted by each person who receives it, based on their own beliefs.

So, what does a right-wing racist think when they read that? They see it as Trump nodding to them that "all illegal immigrants are animals" or just "all immigrants are animals". Because, remember, he didn't say coming into the country illegally, he just said "people coming into the country". You can infer that this only means illegal immigrants, but someone who is anti-immigrant likely tars all immigrants "coming into the country" the same and reads this as meaning that Great Leader Trump is telling them all immigrants are animals.

And then, since Trump is a big national leader, that's just the sort of thing that stirs up the support base to go out and commit violence against the group that Great Leader is against. And that's clear when you have e.g. video of some guy going apeshit in a coffee shop because the workers there speak Spanish to each other, god forbid, and he's threatening to call ICE on his phone, get them all deported. Followers hear a statement like "they are animals" then they're not gonna be extra-careful that they only treat the minimum possible amount of people as animals, they are going to spread that around to "people who don't look like like us or speak like us, they're nothing but animals".

[sluissa]

Whether they demolished it or not it was already pretty useless. It collapsed some time last year killing 200 people. The whole area is unstable due to repeated testing and they'd likely have to find a new location to continue anyway.

[WealthyRadish]

That letter is mostly drivel and not worth nitpicking, but since it's Trump I feel an irresistible schoolboyish compulsion to do it anyway.

Spoiler: various pettiness (click to show/hide)

His Excellency
Kim Jong Un
Chairman of the State Affairs Commission
of the Democratic People's Republic of Korea
Pyongyang

Dear Mr. Chairman:

We greatly appreciate your time, patience, and effort with respect to our recent negotiations and discussions relative to a summit long sought by both parties, which was scheduled to take place on June 12 in Singapore. We were informed that the meeting was requested by North Korea, but that to us is totally irrelevant. I was very much looking forward to being there with you. Sadly, based on the tremendous anger and open hostility displayed in your most recent statement, I feel it is inappropriate, at this time, to have this long-planned meeting. Therefore, please let this letter serve to represent that the Singapore summit, for the good of both parties, but to the detriment of the world, will not take place. You talk about nuclear capabilities, but ours are so massive and powerful that I pray to God they will never have to be used.

I felt a wonderful dialogue was building up between you and me, and ultimately, it is only that dialogue that matters. Some day, I look very much forward to meeting you. In the meantime, I want to thank you for the release of the hostages who are now home with their families. That was a beautiful gesture and was very much appreciated.

If you change your mind having to do with this most important summit, please do not hesitate to call me or write. The world, and North Korea in particular, has lost a great opportunity for lasting peace and great prosperity and wealth. This missed opportunity is a truly sad moment in history.

Sincerely yours,

Donald J. Trump
President of the United States of America

His Excellency

Something something people in glass houses something something

We greatly appreciate your time, patience, and effort with respect to our recent negotiations and discussions relative to a summit long sought by both parties, which was scheduled to take place on June 12 in Singapore.

Thank you for reminding me, Kim Jong-Un, of the date and location of this meeting in the first line. Or maybe your base needs a hint about what this is referring to?

We were informed that the meeting was requested by North Korea, but that to us is totally irrelevant.

First,

North Korea

if the first line didn't do it you've now made the letter's real audience clumsily obvious by using this term, and second, if it's so irrelevant who initiated talks, why are you specifically bringing it up here? It seems to be a jab at making Kim look like the inconsistent or unserious party while establishing an impression of dignified restraint, but doesn't have any meaning in this context, and comes off as more childishly petty than dignified (much like this whole post of mine, incidentally).

You talk about nuclear capabilities, but ours are so massive and powerful that I pray to God they will never have to be used.

I think there are very few people alive who could've written this who are not Trump (without it being a parody).

I felt a wonderful dialogue was building up between you and me, and ultimately, it is only that dialogue that matters.

And you know, the actual resolutions, those probably also matter. By accentuating the "only" thing that matters, he's also implicitly referring to the things that don't matter, which from the context is probably the domestic political motivations that come along with big public international diplomatic spectacles. And he's trying to imply that doesn't matter to him, in an open letter written exclusively for a domestic political audience.

please do not hesitate to call me or write.

If anybody was still taking this seriously, this is where they should have been lost. Is he trying to be cute? Does he want to arrange a sleepover? Or is it just a holdover from past habits writing formulaic letters in 5th grade level corporate formalspeak?

lasting peace and great prosperity and wealth.

Ignoring the total baseness of inserting the word "wealth" here, he at least saved the DPRK propagandists some trouble by painting himself as an obliviously vacuous capitalist caricature.

This missed opportunity is a truly sad moment in history.

Really teasing my tearducts there Donald, that's the sort of profound eloquence that I think will really cement you as the greatest genius president since, I don't know, Buchanan?

[misko27]

So how about that Nobel Peace Prize though?

I wonder if I can go around asking about it to the Trumpers who pounced on me for mocking Trump back when this thing was announced.

[Bumber]

The whole combustibility myth is an attempt at propoganda by oil companies, and a stupid attempt at that. Batteries are OBVIOUSLY safer than gasoline, and people have no problem with cars, lawnmowers, and fuel tanks in their homes. Hell, propane tanks are disasters just waiting to go off, and through it all, nobody batted an eye. Batteries are orders of magnitudes safer, and all of a sudden people are worried about flammability? I don't buy it.
[...]

You say "OBVIOUSLY", but actually you need the proper fuel-air ratio for combustion. Bullet-punctured tanks exploding in movies is a combustibility myth of its own. Gasoline ignites at concentrations between 1.4% and 7.6% per oxygen. This means liquid gasoline does not explode! Additionally, most fuel tanks are thick steel containers, and there are regulations about open space and ventilation.

For a Li-ion battery to explode, all you need is sufficient damage to the battery unit. This can be caused by a defect, puncture, electrical short, unrelated fire, or whatever. It's odd to call it a myth when cell phones have been recalled precisely because their batteries were exploding.

Would you say that having large fuel tanks in every building is a good idea? If a fire starts in the neighborhood, suddenly every house can add to the inferno. The situation is worse in a crowded city. It's the same with putting battery arrays in every home.

[...]
Some of the new industrial-scale batteries are looking incredibly cheap, too. As in cheaper per watt-hour than coal. Molten sodium batteries only work on truly grid scales, but they're fantastic energy storage and a month or two back there was a breakthrough in electrolyte separation that's made them dramatically cheaper.

No, a 100% renewable grid is patently, obviously possible. Whenever people try to tell you otherwise, they're trying to sell you a load of coal.

Pure sodium presents a hazard, because it spontaneously burns in contact with air and moisture, thus the system must be protected from water and oxidizing atmospheres.

Possible, sure. But practical? With all the setup and materials, I don't think so for the near future. It makes more sense to stick with high energy density fuels for backup.

(Feel free to reply in the Tech thread instead.)