[ExI] chinese colonization of africa etc

[spike at rainier66.com]

...> On Behalf Of Adrian Tymes via extropy-chat
Subject: Re: [ExI] chinese colonization of africa etc

On Sat, Sep 13, 2025 at 5:19 PM Keith Henson <hkeithhenson at gmail.com> wrote:

>>... I gave considerable thought to this some years ago when I was in jail.
> The problems are getting Pu 239 or U 235 and then getting it to go 
> boom.  U-235 is a problem of sorting it out.  That's what they were 
> doing in Iran.  Pu-239 can be made by exposing depleted U to neutrons 
> and sorting out the plutonium chemically.
>
> A power reactor is a fine neutron source.  But you do need to subvert the staff.
>
> details here, 
> //archive.today/20130415065858/http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/2007/10/3
> 0/18253/301 Long version here, https://htyp.org/Bad_Days


>...The flash powder trick in your story, still might not be fast enough ...
_______________________________________________


Oy vey, that thread took an unexpected turn somewhere somehow.

It’s a most endearing quality of Extro-chat: the delightfully unpredictable chaos we see in every thread.  Keith and Adrian, thx for just being yourselves.

Adrian, your notion of filtering water, or Keith's, I don't know which, made me think again about the Haitian sea people, with greater access to more food than their inland neighbors whose toilet water the sea people drink.

We advanced lifeforms enjoy clean safe water, as much as we want, from a choice of half a dozen faucets in our own homes.  But... we have little or no resistance to intestinal parasites which the Haitian sea people must resist or die.  If we give them antibiotics and anti-parasite meds, then they survive infanthood without the immunities and resistances they need in that part of the world.

In retrospect, it isn't at all clear to me that supplying the sea communities in Haiti is doing them a favor, or not until we have the infrastructure in place to keep supplying the meds.

Another thought occurred to me.  Because of technology, what was once the poor neighborhood became rich.  In Haiti (as at Plymouth Rock) down by the sea at the end of the river was not prime real estate because the fresh water was too dirty by the time it got down there.  The natives had moved on upstream to cleaner water, handing it over to the Europeans, who suffered a similar fate the locals had.  In Haiti, same cause, same effect: babies develop the immunities, or die.

Now, the coasts are the good neighborhoods.  We build up all this expensive infrastructure which occasionally gets wrecked when coastal storms hit, the cost goes way the hell to the moon, then we argue that the storms are getting worse, all while the human life toll goes down over time.  Using only the satellite data only available since the 1960s, it isn't all that cut and dry obvious the storms are getting more violent, even though current theory predicts they should be getting worse.

This year so far is a quieter than average year, with the ACE (the storm metric in fashion these days) at 39 standard units, when the historic average by the ides of September is 67 standard units.  We have had one really monster storm this year which singlehandedly accounted for 73% of that measured activity (it was a really really big storm (but we didn't hear much about it (whyzat spike?  (because it didn't make landfall (so not much damage to attract our attention.)))))

OK then, how does a man steer that chaotic diversion back to Haitians along the coast and nuclear reactions?  I don't know.  I still don't know what to do to help the coastal Haitians either, half a century after witnessing a well-intentioned but failed attempt.  

Ben's notion of AI being our brutal techno-savior has been rattling around in my head like a golf ball in a 55 gallon drum.

spiike