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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 10th, 2023

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  • The immediate issue I can see is not much to do with the base aspect of things, but more to do with the risk of salination of soils and water, but without solid numbers to go off of it’s hard to know what the impact could be.

    I’m curious if this could be made to work with elemental potassium, which doesn’t carry the same risk of salination or possibly even the liquid NaK alloy (which would carry the approximately half the risk of salination potential)


  • We already have a people being ‘nostalgic’ for plastic straws… It’s depressing that so many people are so willfully selfish that the slightest change or inconvenience to their life is met with such backlash.

    On a related note, Uranium glass isn’t dangerous at all, it’s production was phased out for nuclear weapons and reactor research, not because of any threat or harm from the glass.

    Nowadays you can even get virgin uranium glass again.

    Vitrifying (turning to/encasing in glass) nuclear waste is one of the better ways of storing it as no chance of leaking, etc.






  • TBH kinda with you here, is it just the relatively recent proximity of the use of the word to refer those with intellectual disabilities?

    I actually looked this up and found a timeline, which shows the use is much more recent in medical contexts than I thought, Rosa’s Law 2010 is where it’s use was superceded in federal usage.

    I honestly thought it was a kinda 50s to 70s kinda deal, not 70s - 2010; this does change my perspective and opinion a little bit, and I do feel a bit more sympathy as of how it’s still very much within living memory for some.

    At the same time, I wonder whether those who take issue with it being used casually (not in reference to intellectual disability), take the same issue with the use of idiot, moron or imbecile, as retarded was used because those terms became common place and slang, not exclusively medical words.

    I think that once the cat is out of the bag, (and the fact that both the medical society, and general society has moved past a single catch all term for intellectual disability) you can’t really keep a word from developing it’s own life.

    I will note, my opinion doesn’t hold any real weight here, as I’m the UK we never had AFAIK a diagnosis of “Mental retardation”