Congratulations! You are the 127,254,843rd person to make this remark and think they're clever.

Meanwhile:

>"4. Explain for laypeople (but not actual 5-year-olds)"

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and stealing elections through gerrymandering is a fundamental platform of the republican party.

http://www.redistrictingmajorityproject.com/

We could not have succeeded and cannot continue to succeed without your support

What is REDMAP?

REDMAP (REDistricting Majority Project) is a program of the RSLC dedicated to winning state legislative seats that will have a critical impact on congressional redistricting in 2011.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/REDMAP

When a political group specifically draws the voting districts to benefit themselves more than the other group(s), instead of drawing it to correctly represent the people living there.

Gerrymandering is when political representatives redraw districts so they can pick their own voters

A lot of 5 year olds understood this! Fantastic.

"The political manipulation of electoral district boundaries with the intent to create undue advantage for a party, group, or socioeconomic class within the constituency."

Debatable point: What occurs in Prison Labour camps in many doctatorships, certainly forced Labour, but slavery implies more the degradation of a human into a commodity.

After all, it is allowed even in the US for prisoners to be forced or at least coerced into work. So there is a very fine line between prisoners as labour, forced labour, and Slavery but a line exists between each step.

Maintaining a stable chain reaction is surprisingly difficult. The neutrons that come from out of the fissioning heavy atoms are going way too fast. The neutrons aren't blasting into the other atoms so much as merging with them and causing them to become unstable. If the neutrons are going too fast, they just bounce off and nothing happens.

Yes, putting fuel pellets close to each other increases the odds that the neutrons will bounce around, slow down, and then cause another atom to split. However, unless you just put a lot together, that won't happen - at least, not at a rate that maintains the chain reaction.

Nuclear bombs get around this by using conventional high explosives to compress the nuclear fuel while also setting off another nuclear fuel with a much lower half-life that spits out a huge number of neutrons. Enough neutrons are released and the nuclear fuel has been compressed enough that even with a pretty low chance of the neutrons causing more atoms to split, enough of them split anyway and boom.

Nuclear power plants use a moderator like water, which slows the neutrons down without (hopefully) absorbing too many of them. The pellets are separated by the moderator so that as a few atoms naturally fission the neutrons are slowed down by the moderator. When they get to the other fuel pellets, the neutrons are going slow enough to have a high chance of interacting and causing more fission - releasing more neutrons, etc. The process is controlled by controlling how much of the fuel is exposed to the moderator and other fuel pellets, and by controlling "shields" made out of a material (like boron) that absorbs the neutrons without doing anything, blocking the chain reaction.

The half-life is due to spontaneous decay. They're kind of unstable so there is a chance of them just going "poof" and decaying. Half-life is the time it takes for half of the atoms in any given amount of material to undergo this spontaneous decay.

However, in a reactor we've arranged it so that there is a pretty big chance that when one atom decays the neutron (small sub-atomic particle) shoots out and hits another atom, which will cause that atom to split and shoot off more neutrons, which will hit other particles and cause a cascade effect. Compare it to just shooting a billiard ball on a pool table randomly vs stacking the balls into a pyramid (shooting a ball into that pyramid will cause a whole bunch of other balls to move around).

That effect is used in a reactor, because when a whole bunch of little atoms decay quickly they release heat. In our normal powerplants they're stacked so that it happens very quickly (although our current generation is kind of inefficient and only a small percentage of the fuel is used up before the effect slows down or becomes too difficult to handle due to dangerous byproducts), and that generates a lot of heat which is used to heat water into steam and drive a steam turbine.

There is also something called a radioisotope thermoelectric generator, a nuclear battery of sorts. Basically a radioactive element that has been arranged to encourage it to just react a little bit faster. Not cascade, just generate enough heat that it can be used to generate power through the thermoelectric effect. Those batteries last a lot longer, so they're used on deep space satellites like Voyager (that travel far enough away from the sun that solar panels aren't useful anymore). Voyagers nuclear battery produced something like 60% of its original power back in 2001 (some 25 years after its launch) but theoretically a battery like this could be designed to last thousands of years.

The nuclear fuel used in reactors gets spent quickly because the fission process breaks the atoms apart, releasing energy and creating radioactive byproducts that can interfere with the reaction. It's like burning wood in a fire -- it's gone quickly because the chemical reaction releases energy and changes the wood into ash.

Think of it like a bunch of dominoes standing on end - and "half-life" is how long it typically takes half of all independent dominos to tip over because of a tiny breeze, etc.

If these dominoes are set up very far apart, then one domino randomly tipping over only releases a tiny amount of kinetic energy and isn't likely to knock any others over. This is where the natural independent "radioactive decay" idea comes into play, and is how "half-life" is defined.

On the other hand, if there are very many dominoes standing next to each other, then one domino tipping over might push two others, which might push into four others, with might push into eight others, etc. All of these dominoes (except the very first one) didn't "decay" naturally, they were all pushed! So, the amount of fallen dominoes is more a question of "How closely packed are the dominoes?" and "How long on average does a chain-reaction of domino falls last?" rather than a question of isolated "half-life".

Nuclear reactors burn through fuel quickly compared to the fuel half-life because they are designed to sustain those long chain-reactions that release more energy faster.

TLDR: Syndication is another word for re-run, and that's how major TV networks made their money on shows.

TV networks make money on ads, selling time on the air to run commercials. Without that revenue the network couldn't afford to pay anyone let alone the cost of making shows. But you can't rely 100% on original and new content, you need shows to fill time on the air.

Syndication meant re-airing the same episode of a show over and over again usually in less desirable time slots like during the day or after school.

In this way you could sell ads associated with those slots and make more money on a show that you had already paid for a long time ago. So even though you could sell a single Ad on a new episode during prime time for a lot of money, in the long run you would make far more money selling ads on re-runs of the show.

Syndicated TV shows could also be sold to other networks including foreign stations, getting even more money for the shows you created.

But to have a show available for syndication meant having at least 3 seasons worth so that you could air 5 episodes a week without repeating them for months otherwise it would get boring quick.

Even shows that did poorly would often get a 3rd or 4th lower budget season just to make sure they had enough episodes to air re-runs.

Star Trek is the quintessential example of this. When it was first aired it didn't do particularly well and the studio fought to get a 3rd season done just to have enough episodes to put it into syndication. Star Trek didn't become a huge hit until after it started being aired in the after school time slot. Unfortunately by that point all of the sets had been destroyed and they couldn't make any more episodes, leading the short lived animated series and it's eventual revival with the movies and new shows in the 80s.

As I understand it, and I’m sure I’m wrong, some networks would require so many episodes or seasons before a show could be released to syndication. This kind of prevented the production company of double dipping or diluting the audience. If a show went into syndication after one season there would be people watching the new episodes on one channel and another watching reruns on another channel so dividing the audience and the important advertising dollars.

As an example, Star Trek the next generation was produced as a syndicated show. A production company paid for the whole show and sold the episodes to a network. I want to say it aired on CBS but it might have been Fox, but the reruns started on what would be considered the UHF channels, for a lack of a better term, after the first season. The production company did this by selling the episodes below cost knowing the would make it up on syndication. Towards the end of its run it cost over a million an episode which was outrageous at the time. It was selling the episodes for about $800,000 to the network and the $400,000 per episode in syndication making more money overall.

Star Trek:Enterprise was produced by Paramount and aired exclusively on UPN, a network channel owned by Paramount, but was co-produced by another production company. Their contract required 4 seasons before syndication and Star Trek shows made a ton of money in syndication. The business model for this show pretty much counted on hitting syndication. The UPN canceled the show at the end of the 2nd season or midway through the 3rd season. The production company lowered the cost per episode, essentially paying UPN to air the show so they could stay on for a 4th season to hit syndication

*decrease

Uranium-235's half-life is 700 million years. It's not even warm to the touch. Fissioning it releases much more energy than it would decaying to lead, and much, much, much faster. So that's useful for human purposes.

I wouldn't say it's a large amount of spent fuel, considering the amount of energy released. Each fuel pellet -- the size of a fingertip -- releases about as much a ton of coal.

Nuclear fission works by a neutron (a tiny particle) hitting an atom of uranium-235, causing it to split into two new atoms, both of which are smaller.

These new atoms can't be used in a nuclear reaction but still have a lot of mass (only a teeny amount is turned into energy) so the spent fuel rod still has a mass which is almost identical to the "new" rod, hence a lot of waste being produced after the reaction because these new atoms are quite unstable in their own right.

Most TV shows are produced, at least in part, by a television network. Due to the cost of production, the network wants it to be exclusive to them in order to generate ad revenue from the broadcast. After a few seasons, there is a back catalog of episodes that can be sold to other broadcasters for re-airing. This allows the producers to earn more revenue from the program even after no new episodes are being produced.

You don’t think there is any slave labor occurring?

so typically, tv shows are exclusive to one network or provider. once it goes into syndication, it basically means that other networks buy the rights to air reruns of that show. so it's a way for the original producer of the show to continue to make money. in broadcast tv, they usually have a set schedule of when tv shows air, so they need lots of episodes in order to create a daily/weekly schedule for this show. nowadays with streaming, it doesn't matter as much. any show can be leased to any other streaming provider.

White Dwarf & Red Giant Construction Ltd: "Meh, just slap a few more neutrons into the structure. It should hold."

That's like comparing the rate at which wood rots to the rate at which it burns. Radioactive decay is the spontaneous decomposition of unstable atoms. Nuclear fission inside a reactor is a chain-reaction which causes the atoms to split, harnessing the exothermic products of the reaction to heat water and drive aturbine.

The U235 decay chain goes like this:

>Uranium-235 →Thorium-231 → Protactinium-231 →Actinium-227 →Thorium-227 →Radium-223 →Radon-219 →Polonium-215 →Lead-211 →Bismuth-211 →Thallium-207→ Lead-207 (stable)

The fission products of a nuclear reactor are far less predictable, but include isotopes of Iodine, Caesium, Strontium, Xenon, and Barium. That's because the neutrons which collide with the U235 nuclei crack them apart.

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China purposely devalues their currency making their goods attractive and also prevents people from buying foreign goods which makes it expensive to import. They purposely create this imbalance.

WHO IS BUILDING THESE RICKETY BUILDINGS?!