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Paul Krugman posted:[N]obody who has read a business magazine in the last few years can be unaware that these days there really are investors who not only move money in anticipation of a currency crisis, but actually do their best to trigger that crisis for fun and profit. These new actors on the scene do not yet have a standard name; my proposed term is 'Soroi'. I don't know enough about the economic issues involved to know how fair this assessment is, so make of it what you will.
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Oct 17, 2015 11:38
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Soroscerers are incredibly dangerous to your money, but they can only cast their spells if you've mismanaged your financials. The oaths they've sworn to gain their powers require them to Capitalize on weakness.
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Oct 17, 2015 11:59
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KomradeX posted:I think it had something to do with the collapse of the Asian Tigers in the early/ mid-90s and the not great economic prospects that Japan and South Korea has had since than for the most part to my understanding. Yeah, but what does shorting actually do in this case? In my view shorting is the equivalent of placing a bet against someone. If I place a bet against one football team beating another, it's not like that bet is really effecting the outcome. Likewise, if I short a stock then I'm basically placing a bet that the stock is going to fall in value. Hypothetically if one sells enough shares then that could cause some sort of confidence chain reaction that causes the price to plummet, but in practice you'd need to buy/borrow so many shares that you could easily cause the opposite to occur, so the net result shouldn't be a huge change either way. tl;dr with shorting you only benefit if the asset was weak and going to fall in price anyway, and the act of shorting doesn't really do anything Is shorting currency different in a way that matters?
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Oct 17, 2015 20:18
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QuarkJets posted:Yeah, but what does shorting actually do in this case? That I honestly can't say. but I think in this case its something like betting against one football team and doing all you can in order to get them to loose. I could be wrong. But thats how it always came off to me
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Oct 17, 2015 20:54
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KomradeX posted:That I honestly can't say. but I think in this case its something like betting against one football team and doing all you can in order to get them to loose. I could be wrong. But thats how it always came off to me But it's one among many ways to illegally manipulate the market and in most cases where people think such manipulation happened, it didn't really (like the financial crisis which wasn't caused by the people who took positions against the market - it was caused by years of interwoven and fundamentally unsound investment). Manipulating the market to boost a stock up and profit is probably more common, with results that are ultimately as destructive. The main problem for shorting is the way it looks. You're profiting at other people's expense. But I'd point out that this isn't as clear a distinction as it seems. If I sell a stock and it goes up 10% tomorrow I lost [out on] 10% and the buyer won 10%. If hold the stock and it goes down 10% I lost 10% and a short seller might win it. It's not a huge difference.
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Oct 17, 2015 21:08
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The thing about shorting, and one of the ways it can have a destructive effect, is that it can destroy confidence in a company even if it is in fact finacially sound in normal circumstances. An awful lot of finance is based on reputation and trust. A lot of people shorting a stock or currency can lead to other market actors second guessing themselves. You have people starting to think things like "With all this talk about possible weakness I probably should reduce my exposure to the country/company just to be safe." or "Hmm, there might be slightly more risk there than I thought, better ask for slightly more interest this time.". This can all happen without a shift in the underlying fundamentals. Now, if the market actors had access to perfect information this would not be happening but lol at the concept of perfectly transparent markets. Now, for the most part that will indeed not sink a company unless there were underlying weaknesses there but it can raise their borrowing costs and put them at a greater risk of a cashflow crisis. I don't think short sellers should be massively curbed but no one should be surprised that many people are ambivalent about them since they can seriously inconvenience the businesses their targets even if they are totally wrong. Munin fucked around with this message at 15:12 on Oct 18, 2015 |
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Oct 18, 2015 15:06
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Munin posted:The thing about shorting, and one of the ways it can have a destructive effect, is that it can destroy confidence in a company even if it is in fact finacially sound in normal circumstances. Isn't this true for anyone who ever sells a stock, though? I don't think that people usually see short positions, they just see stock sales. Is that a wrong assumption? So in this case people would just see Soros selling a bunch of currency. If that's enough to crash your currency, then it was going to happen sooner or later regardless of whether someone was in a short position.
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Oct 18, 2015 21:20
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Munin posted:The thing about shorting, and one of the ways it can have a destructive effect, is that it can destroy confidence in a company even if it is in fact finacially sound in normal circumstances. If a ton of people have taken short positions against a stock it's supposed to hurt that company's reputation, make other market actors second guess themselves and raise that company's borrowing cost. So you did a good job expressing all the useful purposes of short selling. Doing these things is exactly what a market is supposed to do and more specifically, short selling let's people who don't currently own a stock weigh in with a negative position on it.
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Oct 18, 2015 21:56
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Short selling is literally one of the dark arts of economics and it owns.
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Oct 19, 2015 00:45
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Here's an really interesting and detailed break down of the AIDS denialist conspiracy crowd. It's interesting in that the GRIDS-style right-wing "gays are just dying because they're filthy" denialists don't really come into play here, but the left-wing hippy-dippy "AIDS is a conspiracy by big pharma to make you buy their poison" crowd are the big movers.quote:And in much the same way that Jenny McCarthy became the face of anti-vaccine activists, Christine Maggiore was the most prominent spokesperson for HIV deniers. (And in fact, Maggiore was also famous for not vaccinating her children.) An HIV-positive woman who had been a successful businesswoman and promoted alternative medicine, Maggiore was an appealing presence, and she played well in the media, said Tara C. Smith, a professor of Public Health at Kent State who blogs about HIV at ScienceBlogs.
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Oct 22, 2015 22:44
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You ever see HIV yourself, like on a table or whatever? Didn't think so. Checkmate, sheeple
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Oct 23, 2015 07:44
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QuarkJets posted:Isn't this true for anyone who ever sells a stock, though? I don't think that people usually see short positions, they just see stock sales. Is that a wrong assumption? Oh, I agree that Soros was probably right to short the Asian currency market, that was a sound call. But it is a bit hard to square the circle. Soros made billions from screwing over brown people. But now because he uses that money to support progressive causes we're supposed to think he's a good guy. gently caress that. He's supporting the same currency manipulation that made him rich. (I may be kind of bitter against Soros, since I was in college during the Asian currency collapse. So some of my Asian college friends could no longer afford tuition and had to go back to their home country.) thrakkorzog fucked around with this message at 10:36 on Oct 24, 2015 |
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Oct 24, 2015 09:09
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QuarkJets posted:You ever see HIV yourself, like on a table or whatever? Didn't think so. Checkmate, sheeple Oh they say there are 7 billion humans but have you like...met them all? Check and mate. 
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Oct 24, 2015 09:30
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thrakkorzog posted:Oh, I agree that Soros was probably right to short the Asian currency market, that was a sound call. But how is short selling a form of "manipulation"? The idea that "Soros made billions from screwing over brown people" sounds like sensationalized bullshit to me. It's akin to accusing someone of biting off Holyfield's ear when all that they did was bet on the Holyfield v Tyson match.
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Oct 24, 2015 10:14
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I think it's a bit more complicated than that. I can try to explain, but bear in mind, I'm going off of a vaguely remembered explanation from an Econ class several decades again, and some brief article reading via Google. I think it all starts with countries that peg their currency to another currency. Usually the US dollar. I can't remember the entire host of reasons for doing it, but it tends to make the currency harder - "k * X of my dollars are worth X US dollar" gives you a much more solid notion of the value of one of my dollars. It probably also helps with foreign trade. Anyways, the only real way to actually have a peg work, is I set up a currency exchange, so anyone can walk in with k*X of my dollars and get X US dollars in exchange. Of course, this means I have to keep a reserve of US dollars so I can fulfill those exchanges. Now if I actually kept enough US dollars on hand so that I could handle the case if every single one of my dollars was exchanged for US dollars, I'd basically cripple myself. So, I keep a fractional reserve. I think it's basically the same way a bank will only keep a fraction of the total amount of money people deposit in it - it loans out the rest, or tries to make money by using the money somehow. And, so, if everyone came in at the same time and asked for all of their money back, the bank wouldn't be able to honor those deposits - but under normal circumstances, they work perfectly fine. That said, once I set up a peg, I can cheat by varying the fraction of US dollars that I keep as a reserve. And, I'm not certain it's exactly clear what a safe vs an unsafe fraction is, in this case. Okay, now a thing a currency speculator can do is, they can attack a pegged currency by trying to drain my US dollar reserves. Basically, take a whole large chunk of my dollars, and try to exchange them for US dollars. And do this in a visible way, that makes everyone else holding my dollars uncertain if I'll be able to maintain the peg. Because if I can't, then those k*X of my dollars that they hold, aren't really worth X US dollars. Because I'll be out of US dollars to give them. Again, this is pretty similar to a bank run. And if I'm forced drop the peg, the value of my dollar is probably going to drop. So, the attack is performed by: 1. Short a large number of my dollars. This gives the speculator a large number of my dollars that they'll eventually have to repay. In the future (see step 4). 2. Go to me, and exchange all of my dollars they got via shorting for US dollars, in an attempt to force a panic/run on my currency. 3. If they force me to drop the peg, my dollar is probably worth a lot less US dollars than it used to be. But, they probably got the pegged exchange rate, because they were the first person to exchange a large number of my dollars for US dollars. 4. So, take the US dollars they got, buy enough of my dollars at the lower exchange rate to pay back the short for step 1. And the remaining US dollars are profit.
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Oct 25, 2015 04:11
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YsENIffBFCA
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Oct 26, 2015 07:35
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This person's clearly never seen anyone be shot before. The lack of visible casings and visible flash can be attributed to the camera's quality and frame rate and the lighting of the area differing, and the recoil due to different handling and ammunition increasing recoil for the one on the left. But for the "lack of impact", you really don't see a visible impact from bullet wounds most of the time. The idea of blood spraying and holes exploding in people is a Hollywood myth from squibs. It actually takes a short time for a wound to start bleeding (unless a surface blood vessel is hit) and the hole in their clothing isn't going to be even half an inch wide, so you normally just see their clothing flutter a bit at the most and then blood begins to spread under the shirt or pool on the ground below them. With adrenaline and the general durability of the human body as well, it's not at all uncommon for mortally wounded people to run as far as 100 yards before suddenly collapsing.
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Oct 26, 2015 17:04
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chitoryu12 posted:This person's clearly never seen anyone be shot before. The lack of visible casings and visible flash can be attributed to the camera's quality and frame rate and the lighting of the area differing, and the recoil due to different handling and ammunition increasing recoil for the one on the left. But for the "lack of impact", you really don't see a visible impact from bullet wounds most of the time. The idea of blood spraying and holes exploding in people is a Hollywood myth from squibs. It actually takes a short time for a wound to start bleeding (unless a surface blood vessel is hit) and the hole in their clothing isn't going to be even half an inch wide, so you normally just see their clothing flutter a bit at the most and then blood begins to spread under the shirt or pool on the ground below them. With adrenaline and the general durability of the human body as well, it's not at all uncommon for mortally wounded people to run as far as 100 yards before suddenly collapsing. I'm never forget from All Quiet on the Western Front a part where a guy gets the back of his head blown off and had a conversation with the protagonist til they get him to an aid station where he dies cause the shock and everything else had finally worn off.
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Oct 26, 2015 22:06
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moebius2778 posted:I think it's a bit more complicated than that. I can try to explain, but bear in mind, I'm going off of a vaguely remembered explanation from an Econ class several decades again, and some brief article reading via Google. Can we blame him for a failure of fractional reserve? He made a decision based on the fundamentals and stuck to it.
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Oct 27, 2015 02:09
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Basically, it's really impolite to call bullshit on entire countries. It's also hard for people to understand how one person can have enough power to do that. Thus, conspiracy theories. (Soros acted the way a Capitalist should, that the results were monstrous has everything to do with the nature of Capitalism. )
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Oct 27, 2015 03:07
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KomradeX posted:I'm never forget from All Quiet on the Western Front a part where a guy gets the back of his head blown off and had a conversation with the protagonist til they get him to an aid station where he dies cause the shock and everything else had finally worn off. Terrifyingly, there are multiple stories from wars dating back ages of people with gratuitous head wounds surviving long enough to talk to someone. The Boys of '67 had an incident where a Viet Cong sniper shot an American soldier through the head, and he was actually coherent enough to ask "Am I going to make it?" The last thing he ever heard was "No, son. You're not."
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Oct 27, 2015 04:36
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chitoryu12 posted:Terrifyingly, there are multiple stories from wars dating back ages of people with gratuitous head wounds surviving long enough to talk to someone. The Boys of '67 had an incident where a Viet Cong sniper shot an American soldier through the head, and he was actually coherent enough to ask "Am I going to make it?" If we're looking for stories of people who could walk off what we think should be a killer injury, there's also the case of Phineas Gage. A.K.A. The railroad worker who was too close to an explosion site, and took a massive railroad spike through the head. By all accounts he just tried to walk off a deadly injury.
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Oct 27, 2015 07:19
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Peztopiary posted:Basically, it's really impolite to call bullshit on entire countries. It's also hard for people to understand how one person can have enough power to do that. Thus, conspiracy theories. (Soros acted the way a Capitalist should, that the results were monstrous has everything to do with the nature of Capitalism. ) It's really impolite to call bullshit on anyone, really
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Oct 27, 2015 07:45
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chitoryu12 posted:Terrifyingly, there are multiple stories from wars dating back ages of people with gratuitous head wounds surviving long enough to talk to someone. The Boys of '67 had an incident where a Viet Cong sniper shot an American soldier through the head, and he was actually coherent enough to ask "Am I going to make it?" Oh Sweet loving Jesus that is horrifying.
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Oct 27, 2015 08:21
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chitoryu12 posted:Terrifyingly, there are multiple stories from wars dating back ages of people with gratuitous head wounds surviving long enough to talk to someone. The Boys of '67 had an incident where a Viet Cong sniper shot an American soldier through the head, and he was actually coherent enough to ask "Am I going to make it?" Ben Carson realized he could remove half the brain of some epileptic handicapped sick girl and make her healthy due to poorly understood neuroplasticity, then did it with his Gifted Hands like some miracle healer. Things like this are why he's considered a legendary neurosurgeon in the first place. Gabrielle Giffords got her brains blown out and is slowly relearning how to walk and talk, that's what happens. You become like a baby and relearn things as your brain reconfigures. Ben Carson has prob saved mad people from bullet wounds in their head too. Suicide attempts often have to be done twice, cuz a person shoots himself in the brain and is just mad retarded and in horrible pain and has to finish the job. Its not "instant death" unless you have your brain stem damaged or experience massive trauma that prob knocks you unconscious as you bleed to death rapidly from the head wound, not Cinematic Instant Death with a 9mm bullet that causes minimal tissue damage. Military weapons and ammunition are designed to cause maximum trauma to make people "drop" by exploding their lungs and skulls all disgustingly. People think cops are racist when they empty clips into people, but its the only way to stop someone even blowing off half their head sometimes. This is just neuroscience and biology that people don't realize cuz they watch the Walking Dead and think it's a documentary. Snipers go for headshots, cuz it explodes the entire skull with a humongous bullet, its not some magic weak spot like in a videogame. If it goes through your brain and out the skull, you are probably going to be fine if you get to a surgeon, even ancient world surgeons knew how to do it.. Probably just stupider and angrier somehow, like all victims of concussive brain trauma become.
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Oct 27, 2015 09:01
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Smoothrich posted:Ben Carson realized he could remove half the brain of some epileptic handicapped sick girl and make her healthy due to poorly understood neuroplasticity, then did it with his Gifted Hands like some miracle healer. Things like this are why he's considered a legendary neurosurgeon in the first place. dont sign your posts
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Oct 27, 2015 18:40
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You see? This guy shooting a .45 has his hand jerking all over the place but the 9mm moves much less! This is weird because I have no idea how guns work! Also, Doom teaches us people explode when they get shot, so why can't we see small caliber wounds on someone wearing black? It might just be the angle but it looks like he probably missed the first couple shots so not weird you wouldn't see anything. And unless you hit someone in the heart or brain, they probably gonna be able to run after getting shot, especially from such a small bullet, probably wouldn't even notice for a few seconds. So many people are quick to call bullshit on this incident, is it really that hard to believe? Is it that people are really terrified that stuff like this can happen beyond our control so we need to make up insane theories based on ignorance? Or has mental illness really gotten so bad in America that like 25% of people have lost touch with reality? Stuff like this and Sandy Hook conspiracy stuff really gets my goat. People died, it's a tragedy, and your so eager to jump with your little smug self righteous bullshit based on nonsense. Kooky conspiracy theories are fun, but I find these really depressing.
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Oct 27, 2015 19:17
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People are just very removed from what real violence is like while simultaneously being submerged in a culture that obsesses over and mystifies it.
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Oct 27, 2015 19:29
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Moose-Alini posted:It might just be the angle but it looks like he probably missed the first couple shots so not weird you wouldn't see anything. And unless you hit someone in the heart or brain, they probably gonna be able to run after getting shot, especially from such a small bullet, probably wouldn't even notice for a few seconds. In the full video he spends nearly a full minute aiming the gun at her on camera, and they've got such tunnel vision from reporting that they don't notice the gun until he starts firing. I'm 99% sure he hit and there's just no way to see the impacts because there's no Hollywood squibs exploding blood packs under her jacket.
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Oct 27, 2015 20:09
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Moose-Alini posted:So many people are quick to call bullshit on this incident, is it really that hard to believe? Is it that people are really terrified that stuff like this can happen beyond our control so we need to make up insane theories based on ignorance? Or has mental illness really gotten so bad in America that like 25% of people have lost touch with reality? conspiracy theorists are people who deeply need to feel like they have profound understanding and special knowledge, but are unwilling or incapable of working to achieve it. so instead they focus on the appearance of understanding to masquerade as someone capable of critical analysis to others as well as themselves. it's the intellectual equivalent of people who hit the gym every day versus people who just wear sleeveless MMA shirts and fantasize about getting into fights in parking lots - it fools enough people that it kind of works, but people who know what they're talking about instantly sniff you out
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Oct 28, 2015 00:24
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Popular Thug Drink posted:conspiracy theorists are people who deeply need to feel like they have profound understanding and special knowledge, but are unwilling or incapable of working to achieve it. so instead they focus on the appearance of understanding to masquerade as someone capable of critical analysis to others as well as themselves. it's the intellectual equivalent of people who hit the gym every day versus people who just wear sleeveless MMA shirts and fantasize about getting into fights in parking lots - it fools enough people that it kind of works, but people who know what they're talking about instantly sniff you out A great many conspiracy theorists are actually just crazy. There isn't logic behind it. I'm serious. A poo poo load of them are literally schizophrenic but not being treated.
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Oct 28, 2015 03:31
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ToxicSlurpee posted:A great many conspiracy theorists are actually just crazy. There isn't logic behind it. I'm serious. A poo poo load of them are literally schizophrenic but not being treated. Also, schizotypal personality disorder. It's like schizophrenia with much milder impairments. Folks with this see spooky significance in mundane events, and frequently have bizarre beliefs resulting from strange thought patterns, rather than full-on "the lizards are telling me I'm Jesus" delusions. Lots of magical thinking and paranoia.
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Oct 28, 2015 14:09
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chitoryu12 posted:In the full video he spends nearly a full minute aiming the gun at her on camera, and they've got such tunnel vision from reporting that they don't notice the gun until he starts firing. I'm 99% sure he hit and there's just no way to see the impacts because there's no Hollywood squibs exploding blood packs under her jacket. Yeah it could very well just be the offset of the camera, but I kinda thought I remembered hearing he only hit after she started to run. It's actually pretty hard to keep a pistol steady enough one handed to hit 100% even from close range, especially if your amped up from planning to murder people. Guns are heavy. But yeah even if he did hit every shot you wouldn't see anything, especially with a black jacket on.
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Oct 28, 2015 15:01
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QuarkJets posted:Yeah, but what does shorting actually do in this case? It's not hypothetical, this is exactly what happens and it's why comparing stock markets to sports betting is a terrible analogy. For big institutional traders there isn't a bright line that separates normal trading behaviour based on fundamentals from currency manipulation. Because the loss of market confidence in a pegged currency is a self-fulfilling prophecy, there isn't a clear distinction between a speculative attack and a run on the currency, except that the former is presumed to be orchestrated in a smoky backroom somewhere while the latter arises organically. With hindsight we can say that, yeah, the Asian Tigers should've had bigger currency reserves, same for the UK. But there's no magic number of reserves that makes a country immune, and no way of forecasting how large an eventual currency run might be. Currency pegs are a lot less popular after the Asian financial crisis, for obvious reasons. IMO where you come down on short-selling depends on how you feel more generally about the role markets should play in society, kinda like payday loan places. Is it predatory or is it normal market functioning? It's in the eye of the beholder, there's no objective way of telling.
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Oct 28, 2015 15:56
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DeusExMachinima posted:Antimatter by itself won't be any kind of weapon at all because one atom of antimatter annihilates with one atom of matter. If I shot you with an antimatter atom you wouldn't implode or whatever this guy is raving about, you wouldn't even notice because nobody notices or cares about one little atom. Or a thousand. It's meaninglessly small. Now, an antimatter-catalyzed nuclear weapon would be much more destructive but that a) requires more antimatter than we can produce right now and b) is a drastically different design & delivery system than "oh we slammed some particles together and for one six-millionth of a second an antiproton existed." Antimatter produced in sufficient quantities would be the most destructive weapon known to physics. A fission nuclear bomb converts about 0.1% of the matter into energy. The number is higher for a hydrogen bomb, but at a rough guess only a few percent. Antimatter in *theory* could convert 100% of its matter into energy, although in practice it probably wouldn't be so much, although god knows what happens to the unexploded antimatter. Probably just gets blown around the place and dissipates into energy at a more relaxed pace. But it would still be an order of magnitude nastier than any nuclear bomb we could devise. The catch is twofold. 1) We have absolutely no idea how to make enough antimatter to do anything so destructive. and 2) We wouldn't have much fun trying to store the stuff. It'd react with its containment vessel and blow the gently caress up. We *could* encase it in a huge manetic field, but at that point it stops being a practical weapon. duck monster fucked around with this message at 21:40 on Oct 28, 2015 |
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Oct 28, 2015 15:58
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duck monster posted:Antimatter produced in sufficient quantities would be the most destructive weapon known to physics. A fission nuclear bomb converts about 0.1% of the matter into energy. The number is higher for a hydrogen bomb, but at a rough guess only a few percent. Antimatter in *theory* could convert 100% of its matter into energy, although in practice it probably wouldn't be so much, although god knows what happens to the unexploded antimatter. Probably just gets blown around the place and dissipates into energy at a more relaxed pace. But it would still be an order of magnitude nastier than any nuclear bomb we could devise. We're not talking I think that an antimatter bomb would be designed similarly to the original Fat Man. An effective bomb is one that releases as much energy in as short a time span as possible. You'd want to maximize the contact area between the stored antimatter with a matter composition that most effectively interacts with it (which would depend on what kind of antimatter you have stored; anti-electrons most readily interact with electrons) while violently squishing the whole package together with explosives. Fat Man obviously uses an entirely different physics process, but fundamentally the problem is similar to the problem faced by all previous bomb makers: you need to combine reactive products together before they get scattered by the explosion, and doing a better job results in a bigger bomb. But as you say, we have no way of effectively capturing and storing a sufficient quantity of anti-matter to do something like this. It's an extremely hard problem to solve, and such a bomb would be extremely cumbersome, difficult, and expensive to build. So what's the point? The guy whose e-mail Zombie Boat posted is just an idiot, though, because he's trying to say that CERN is creating an antimatter weapon that will destroy the universe, which is both preposterous and not scientifically sound. And he's also saying that small amounts of antimatter would be used to "eat up" an enemy, IE that you'd shoot a beam of antimatter at someone in order to destroy the matter in their body via direct interaction rather than using the explosive force of a large number of matter-antimatter interactions.
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Oct 28, 2015 20:09
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Nuclear weapons are inherently about chain reaction. High enough density leads to more output which leads to a cascade of activity leading to an explosion. Once the explosion is well underway, the chain reaction stops, even if there is unconsumed material. In theory all antimatter will annihilate in contact with matter, so once the explosion starts, it will continue until the antimatter is consumed.
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Oct 29, 2015 01:18
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But lets riff on how NIF was supposed to be a live testbed for our nuclear weapons simulations code and how the failure of the platform might imply that those codes are bogus.
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Oct 29, 2015 01:22
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I saw this on FB *image of someone saying vaccinations were invented by Hitler* Person A: Ugh i learned in Texas Public School that vaccinations were invented in the 18th century Person B: When you're less right than a Texas education you've got problems.
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Oct 29, 2015 03:51
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Spazzle posted:Nuclear weapons are inherently about chain reaction. High enough density leads to more output which leads to a cascade of activity leading to an explosion. Once the explosion is well underway, the chain reaction stops, even if there is unconsumed material. In theory all antimatter will annihilate in contact with matter, so once the explosion starts, it will continue until the antimatter is consumed. Right, the antimatter will all eventually get annihilated, but some non-negligible percentage of it might get annihilated in a less-than-ideal location, such as far away from your bomb site. For instance, if you're careless and just turn off the suspension vessel, the antimatter dropp will annihilate asymmetrically. This definitely creates a nice big explosion, but some fraction of the remaining antimatter droplet will be flung *somewhere else*, possibly with minimal matter contact along the way, since air is not particularly dense. This isn't terrible, but it's less than ideal. If you're careful and maximize antimatter-matter surface contact during annihilation, then you maximize your effective yield, which is the goal. That's why I suggest the Fat Man design; you basically want to explosively, symmetrically, and quickly push matter into a core made of antimatter.
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Oct 29, 2015 05:51
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