Slashdot Mirror

https://www.forbes.com/sites/r...

....How would you feel about losing the job of your lifetime to an accusation?

Let's assume he's 100% innocent. Why should I have more pity for this person than the millions who lost health insurance under Trump?

You may need to revisit those numbers. the uninsured rate of adults has increased one-tenth of 1 percentage point during Trump's presidency according to NHIS data. Politico Fact translates that to about 100k - far fewer than the *millions* you claimed.

Or Farmers who are losing their livelihoods because of a misguided trade war?

The tariffs have not been in place long enough to see any actual results; Most news outlets say that "farmers are worried that they may lose those commodity markets for good." Don't let facts get in the way of your political bias.

Or the children put in immigration prison and separated from their families indefinitely?

More political spin. Donald Trump merely asked to enforce existing laws and policies. His Zero Tolerance policy applies to all adults who cross the border. The 1997 "Flores" consent decree requires that the federal government release all undocumented immigrant children within 20 days. Since processing adults generally takes more than 20 days, enforcing our immigration laws and following the Flores decree effectively requires separating children from their families. Also note that the government is actively trying to reunite the 2,000 minors who were separated from their families under the zero tolerance period.

Or small investors who will lose their life savings in the next crash because the Trump administration is eliminating the CFPD and making fraud legal again. Or the thousands of Yemenis and Syrian civilians who were killed by U.S. bombs, dropped by the Trump administration?

More spin.

Or Heather Heyer who was run over by a Trump supporter, who happens to be a "good person". I could go on and on.

Talk about Goodwin! You cannot blame Trump for something that one of his supporters did.

There are millions of U.S. citizens who have very good reasons to vote against this administration in November.

I'm supposed to feel sorry for a very well-to-do jurist who went to Georgetown prep, was a legacy admission to Yale, and had political opportunities up the wazoo because he was buddies with all the right Republicans at a very early age. This person is a judge on the second-highest court in the country. He has a nice upper-class life. If he gets sick, doctors will take care of him. When he retires, or is disabled and can no longer work, he will receive a golden pension and live in dignity. I'm sorry Republicans, but I just cannot feel sorry for your boy. Even if he's 100% innocent and this is a "con-job orchestrated by the Clintons". Kavanaugh is the ultimate snow flake.

You're supposed to feel bad about someone who's receiving death threats over an unsubstantiated accusation. You can feel smug in judging him for the circumstances of his birth and privileged upbringing.

I Google'd "deaths per terawatt" and found this: https://www.statista.com/stati...

Non-paywalled data is at https://www.forbes.com/sites/j...

The biggest problem with this claim is that it is a gross oversimplification even with some pretty straight forward reasoning. To understand the deaths by certain industrial causes you have to consider direct and indirect mechanisms. Direct mechanisms contribute historical data, however indirect mechanisms do not create obvious historical data.

For us to consider deaths by Solar and Wind direct causes maybe someone falling off a roof or a tower. The duration of such incidents are hours. An indirect cause maybe a chemical byproduct of the production process or perhaps going crazy from infra sound. These are somewhat avoidable and correctable issues with a duration of months to years. Propagation over area can be tens to hundreds of metres.

To consider Coal direct causes maybe someone getting black lung from mining, being burnt to death, falling, crushed or fire. The duration of such incidents are days to weeks. Indirect causes maybe asthma or other lung diseases. You may breathe in a natural radio-isotope causing lung cancer. These are difficult to avoid and correct with a duration of years to decades. Propagation over area can be tens to hundreds of Kilometres.

These are easy to understand because the means that creates the deaths are obvious. However with Nuclear the causes of death are not so obvious.

To consider Nuclear direct causes maybe Industrial accidents similar to a coal plant or a severe exposure to radiation. The duration of such incidents are years to indefinite considering that Chernobyl has only just been bought under control with New Safe Confinement and Fukushima is barely controlled. Indirect causes for Nuclear are ignored in the forbes article because it ignores the externalities of the Nuclear industry whilst focusing on the one for other industries. These are so varied because the vectors are cancer from absorbing radio-isotopes, transgenic disease from DNA damage received in a previous generation, pregnancies that failed to come to term and fatal birth defects from those who did all occur over a long time. You may breathe in an enriched radio-isotope causing lung cancer. You may drink or eat it and you could not detect it was there as it organically binds inside your body. These are impossible to correct with a duration of decades to unknown amount of years. You can't tell if you do or do not avoid them. Propagation of radio-isotopes from Fukushima has spread all over the world, with much of it landing on the west coast of the US. We know this because the MOX fuel elements in Unit three can be tracked using data from the Nuclear test ban treaty monitoring stations. Bio-accumulation in the environment is also a complex subject that takes a long time to manifest as something that can be measured. This is all relative to the rates at which the radio-isotopes decay through their daughter products.

When I get a chance I subscribe to statistica to have a look at the underlying data however it is clear to see the flaw in the reasoning is that we are still at the beginning of the nuclear accidents, there is no historical data to compare. Considerable obfuscation of data has been performed to keep the truth vague and ambiguous. To truly understand it you have to model the propagation of these elements in the body and the environment. However I think H. L. Mencken summed it up nicely when he said:

For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong.

I Google'd "deaths per terawatt" and found this: https://www.statista.com/stati...

But that's paywalled...

Non-paywalled data is at https://www.forbes.com/sites/j...

I would have pasted it here, but:
Filter error: Please use less whitespace.

Go filter!

Why would anyone trust them after this article:

https://www.forbes.com/sites/t...

I think Nintendo was like, been there, done that :)

.

"In 2009, the federal government authorized California to set emission standards for cars and trucks that are more stringent than those set by the federal Environmental Protection Agency." https://www.forbes.com/sites/g...

Mashiki wrote:

So why don't you prove me wrong. Go out, publicly, in front of the media and take ads out in the paper with the two following subjects: "The wage gap is a myth." "No, the US rate of sexual assaults is not higher then the Congo."

I'll wait. Enjoy the public lynch mob by the way.

Don't Buy Into The Gender Pay Gap Myth. The Gender Pay Gap is a Complete Myth Wage Gap Myth Exposed — By Feminists The ‘Wage Gap’ Myth That Won’t Die .These are just the first few hits.

I have not been able to find anyone that supports the idea that sexual assaults in the US is higher than in Congo. When Hillary Clinton was Secretary of State she raised the issue of sexual violence with Congolese President Joseph Kabila; I believe she would support your position.

The $15 wage floor is slightly reminescent of Henry Ford's "$5 day" policy, which bought Ford labor peace and productivity for a few years. Soon enough, others were able to match or exceed Ford's labor rates. Some of it was fueled by productivity and sales, but a lot of it represented more rapid expansion of M2 by banks and the Fed in the 1910s. Forbes on Ford's $5 day NPR

The frightening aspect is price inflation that has already occurred and will accompany a broader application like a $15 minimum wage. Such a tremendous rising wage is a symptom of expansion of credit and money.printing, courtesy of the Federal Reserve since 2008.

Nor has China which is still building new coal plants

Except the actual and up to date source of the info in your article points otherwise.
https://www.carbonbrief.org/gu...

Planned new coal capacity has been cancelled around the world, with particularly rapid falls in China and India.
At the end of 2015, China had plans to build 515GW of new coal capacity. That figure now stands at 76GW. In India, the pre-construction pipeline has shrunk from 218GW in 2015 to 63GW today.

That's the main reason Chinese companies are scrambling around the world trying to sell their coal plants.
They already had them in the pipeline and now they can't just scrap billions of dollars already built into steam turbines.
So they are trying to get rid of them elsewhere while there's still time.

Coal is simply no longer economical.

Most notably, our figures show that less than 2GW of new coal capacity has been proposed in either China or India in 2018 - a significant development for the two countries that have been the site of 85% of the world's new coal power capacity since 2006.

While some analysts predicted the drop in China and India might be replaced with an increase throughout other parts of the world, the pipeline across the rest of the world also continues to decline.
Notably, Japan has called off 3.6GW of proposed coal capacity since 2017, while South Korea will stop issuing permits for new coal plants. ...
From January through to June 2018, nearly 20GW of new coal capacity was commissioned: 12GW in China (blue area in the chart, below) , 5GW in India (red), and 3GW in the rest of the world (South Africa, Pakistan, Vietnam, Philippines and Japan).
While significant, the amount of coal power capacity that began operating during the first half of 2018 (20GW) was nearly matched by the amount retired (16GW), for a net increase of just 4GW - the slowest rate of growth on record.
If the slowdown continues global coal capacity should peak by 2022, if not sooner.

Gas is cheap, solar is cheaper, wind is cheapest... it's simply no longer profitable to mine and burn coal.

Nor has China which is still building new coal plants

Except the actual and up to date source of the info in your article points otherwise.
https://www.carbonbrief.org/gu...

Planned new coal capacity has been cancelled around the world, with particularly rapid falls in China and India.
At the end of 2015, China had plans to build 515GW of new coal capacity. That figure now stands at 76GW. In India, the pre-construction pipeline has shrunk from 218GW in 2015 to 63GW today.

That's the main reason Chinese companies are scrambling around the world trying to sell their coal plants.
They already had them in the pipeline and now they can't just scrap billions of dollars already built into steam turbines.
So they are trying to get rid of them elsewhere while there's still time.

Coal is simply no longer economical.

Most notably, our figures show that less than 2GW of new coal capacity has been proposed in either China or India in 2018 - a significant development for the two countries that have been the site of 85% of the world's new coal power capacity since 2006.

While some analysts predicted the drop in China and India might be replaced with an increase throughout other parts of the world, the pipeline across the rest of the world also continues to decline.
Notably, Japan has called off 3.6GW of proposed coal capacity since 2017, while South Korea will stop issuing permits for new coal plants. ...
From January through to June 2018, nearly 20GW of new coal capacity was commissioned: 12GW in China (blue area in the chart, below) , 5GW in India (red), and 3GW in the rest of the world (South Africa, Pakistan, Vietnam, Philippines and Japan).
While significant, the amount of coal power capacity that began operating during the first half of 2018 (20GW) was nearly matched by the amount retired (16GW), for a net increase of just 4GW - the slowest rate of growth on record.
If the slowdown continues global coal capacity should peak by 2022, if not sooner.

Gas is cheap, solar is cheaper, wind is cheapest... it's simply no longer profitable to mine and burn coal.

Right. Lets for the sake of not having this argument go for a figure thats about half of that (I'm being generous to the "devices in china" argument.), we're still at about 750 million. The claim about "only half" uses safari kind of suggests a non iphone user. Everyone uses safari on their phone. Or at least almost everybody. There really isn't much in the way of alternatives.

Now, theres an estimate that google makes about $10 per user in profit per year ( https://www.forbes.com/sites/t... )

By my reckoning that'd make $7.5 bil the break-even figure.

The price being asked by apple here is a bit steep! I can certainly understand their imperative here, but it seems like Google would have a good case to say its not worth the price, especially with Apple blocking all of googles tracking bullshit.

Because ... global warming. Or climate change. Or whatever the high priests of global Marxist control tell us.

It was the Bush administration, in accordance with advice given by their spin doctor Frank Luntz, who were largely responsible for re-branding global warming as climate change (on the basis that "warming" was too scary). The "high priests of global Marxist control"?! How far to the right are you?

We have always been at war with Eurasia.

George Orwell, OTOH, was an avowed socialist.

I‘m not an antenna guru but the bad antenna’ seems to affect the datarate quite nicely:

https://www.forbes.com/sites/g...

While I hate mosquitoes, I would suggest caution. Mosquitoes are important in the food chain. If one species of mosquitoes are wiped out, would other insects fill the void? We need to think carefully about the ramifications of this. Of course, reducing the damage and death caused by malaria would be highly beneficial.

This is what I love about slashdot. Someone comes up with a question in less than 15 minutes. They are so sure that the question has not been tought of or asked, even by people who have been working on a problem for years, sometimes decades, that they do not even bother to search to see whether the question has been asked and answered.

In less than the time that it to you to type your "caution" you could have found an answer in the first page of Google search results, amongst many.

Why not charge those who engage in less healthy life styles more? If you think it actually makes no difference you are free to offer policies to those who would pay more at a reduced price. If John Hancock is wrong, they're leaving all kinds of money on the table by overcharging some of their customers. You could easily undercut them and make a tidy profit while doing so. Of course if they're not wrong . . .

Insurance is really just legalized gambling. Much like the tracks, not all horses are a good return on investment. No one wants to bet on a loser and the only reason to do so is because the payout is so high. Even then it's probably green overriding sense, as the results seem to show that such betting doesn't pay.

It's a free country. You're free to drink, smoke, fornicate, fight, and generally do as you please. The flip side of that is that it's also your responsibility to take care of yourself, because if someone else has to do it for you, how free are they? You can't reward good behavior without punishing bad behavior, and as far as human health goes, there's a whole lot of bad behavior.

"That premise no longer exists today, so our promise cannot be fulfilled."

I have a hunch that the USA no longer has that clout it once had. Countries are now openly willing to defy the USA.

Some countries are already trying to kill the dollar

let me hope our president will change course, though I have no doubt that some folks will hope that he doubles down.

The US had plenty of clout, backed by a network of friends and allies that was unique in human history, and potentially still is mostly salvageable. That network of allies has always been the USA's strength because everybody knew that whatever the Americans got up to they'd always be better of with those occasionally crazy Yanks than the Soviets/Russians or the Chinese. The US' position would still be unassailable if Trump wasn't busy throwing away that clout and methodically disassembling the network of friends and allies. There is a whole slew of Asian countries now cozying up to China but not necessarily because they want to. With the Trump administration adopting a policy of insulting everybody and isolating the US, they have no choice but to cozy up to China. Most of them would much prefer the US, it usually offer a better deal and, (key point here) the USA is a distant hegemon, far across the ocean. You can't drive American tanks to Asia from the continental US and amphibious operations are very expensive and hard to do right. You can, however, easily drive Chinese tanks from bases in China to most of these Asian countries and they are only too keenly aware of it. Most of them have watched China claim the south China sea to the extent that you can stand on a beach at the water's edge in some of the countries in the region and send a golden arc of piss into what China regards as its sacred territorial waters.

"That premise no longer exists today, so our promise cannot be fulfilled."

I have a hunch that the USA no longer has that clout it once had. Countries are now openly willing to defy the USA.

Some countries are already trying to kill the dollar

let me hope our president will change course, though I have no doubt that some folks will hope that he doubles down.

Or stop paying univeristy presidents high salaries that rival what CEOs make.

• • 1. Michael Crow, President, Arizona State University $1,554,058
  • 2. William McRaven, Chancellor, University of Texas system $1,500,000
  • 3. John Sharp, Chancellor, Texas A&M University system office, $1,280,438
  • 4. W. Kent Fuchs, President, University of Florida, $1,102,862
  • 5. Michael A. McRobbie, President Indiana University system $1,067,074
  • 6. Eric J. Barron, President, Pennsylvania State University at University Park, $1,039,717
  • 7. Michael V. Drake, President, Ohio State University, $1,034,574
  • 8. Michael K. Young, President, Texas A&M at College Station, $1,000,000
  • 9. Jean E. Robillard, Interim President, University of Iowa, $929,045
  • 10. Raymond Watts, President, University of Alabama at Birmingham, $890,000

  https://www.forbes.com/sites/laurensonnenberg/2017/07/17/the-top-paid-public-university-presidents/

Phones are excluded along with golf clubs and plastic napkins for some reason.

What are plastic napkins?

Xmas ornaments (what about other holiday ornaments? Mardi Gras beads for example!)
Sunglasses
Bras
more...

What Would Evade $250 Billion In Trump China Tariffs? Golf Clubs, Plastic Napkins, Cell Phones, More

Here's what is covered:

https://ustr.gov/sites/default...

Capital gains are taxed once you break $38,600 in income - long or short term capital gains. And for many people, capital gains taxes are at a level about the same as their regular income tax rates.

For overseas income, IF you live exclusively overseas then you MAY get up to your first $97,000 in income tax-free in the US, provided you paid taxes overseas. All income above that rate is taxable in the US, regardless of where you live. So overseas income is still taxable.

And loans that are forgiven are taxable income; if you default on a secured loan and lose stock/assets because of it, then it is considered income and can be subject to income tax (exclusion for the first $500K in home value). Get a loan against $1MM in shares, and default and have to sell those shares to cover the loan? You also have to pay any capital gains taxes due on that sale.

How did Microsoft buying LinkedIn affect your experience?

4 Reasons Microsoft Wasted $26.2 Billion To Buy LinkedIn.

3 Quotes:

1) "... there is no reason to believe that Microsoft has the strategic skills needed to revive LinkedIn's growth."

2) "Nadella touted the idea that business people working on projects will love the way the combined company will be able to spam them with more targeted newsfeeds! Is this the kind of magic that $26.2 billion buys? It sounds like a good reason for me to dump my LinkedIn account."

3) "This deal makes no sense to me and in the wake of its efforts to force people like me to upgrade to Windows 10 malware style, I am beginning to question Microsoft's governance."

CA doesn't have 100% clean renewables either, if you want to play that game. All energy sources produce waste, and the alternatives are much worse, even with wind and solar. Waste that isn't contained is called pollution, and only nuclear energy creates such a small waste volume that it is manageable to contain, and required by law.

Stop Letting Your Ridiculous Fears Of Nuclear Waste Kill The Planet

Jerry Brown's Secret War on Clean Energy
Had They Bet On Nuclear, Not Renewables, Germany & California Would Already Have 100% Clean Power

[sarcasm mode on]

Yep we see lots of examples of working single payer solutions.

[sarcasm mode off]

Our solution is broken, but many 1st world systems are broken. Just giving everyone access to healthcare doesn't necessarily improve healthcare. We have many more issues beyond just that. We need to come up with effective policies for handling wait times, delays for essential testing and services, the inevitable loss of incoming medical professionals when incomes stagnate or fall, and the lack of innovation in medicine that artificially deflating costs will cause (ever wonder why many of these countries sickest people seek help in the US)?

Still, it is sad that so many people waste their money while the getting is good instead of being prudent and investing for the long term. Imagine if you graduated college and got a job where the first year salary was about $450k with a guaranteed 15% raise each year for 4 years. Because that is the minimum guaranteed to every rookie drafted into the NFL last year. You might think, "gee, I could bank most of that and retire comfortably before age 30."

And yet, odds are that most of those athletes will end up living in poverty in their later years.

It seems like sound financial management is not something most parents teach their kids (maybe because they themselves don't know/understand it). Neither do the schools teach it. Then of course, there is the marketing and advertising which permeates our society today. Then there is the lifestyle that people who into these high profile occupations a) think that they should be entitled to live, and b) think others expect them to live.

Ironically, rather than being a very liberating thing the deck is stacked pretty heavily against young people who get handed bags full of cash early in life.

You know, the one that labeled "white man" as hate speech.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/e...

vs Democrats that increase my taxes and I see nothing for it because I work full time therefore get nothing in the way of services.

Democrats reduce crime, Republicans increase the national deficit. What you see for it is that you get to keep what you make because it's not being stolen from you.

Meanwhile the conservative states are insolvent and living off of State scale welfare. It really is funny/ironic that the group who champions that they are the economically informed tribe have 3rd world levels of GDP per population.

Texas called and is laughing at you

Texas Laps California in Job and Population Growth
https://www.forbes.com/sites/c...

Do lefties just make everything up ?

Objectively speaking, considering 14 different measures, Obama had a more positive impact on the economy than all but one of the last 6 administrations

Given the depth of the recession, that would have been true of any president, short of starting WWIII. And the very article you quote says "Furthermore, while shortfalls do exist on the Obama end-of-term report card, his performance holds up more than adequately against other US leaders of recent history."

What Obama should be measured by is (1) how his performance compares to his own economic predictions and promises, and (2) how the recovery compares to historical recoveries. Obama performed dismally bad by his own predictions; his economic policies failed to achieve his stated objectives. And the recovery was dismally slow (CNN, Forbes).

Obama's poor economic performance isn't surprising either: his stimulus package, fiscal policy, regulatory policy, and welfare policy worked as people expected it to and the way they have always done: they slowed economic recovery, employment, and growth.

But trade deficits aren't inherently bad. It's not like the US is paying China a bunch of money out of its tax coffers. The trade deficit merely represents the money flowing between people and companies located in different countries. Seriously, just google 'understanding trade deficit', and nearly every single article is about how trade deficits aren't a good indicator of economic performance in and of themselves, they're just a metric of trade. And I'm not talking about left-leaning publications, I'm talking about everyone. Forbes, investment news, economists—virtually everyone agrees that a trade deficit in the right circumstances can be very good.

https://www.nationalreview.com...
https://www.forbes.com/sites/d...

Really, the only person that doesn't get that is Trump.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/j...

I'm OK with that, just don't give the self-driving cars guns!

Too late! The Russians are already working on it:

The Kalashnikov Arms Factory Turns Out An Electric Car They Say Will "Rival" Tesla https://www.forbes.com/sites/g...

Will a Tesla armed with a Musk Flamethrower be a match for it . . . ?

On a per kWh produced basis the subsidies for solar power is far greater.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/j...

The thing you are missing is that the allocations are from the tax code and if you follow the chain of documents of where that is defined it leads back to SEC.1703 of 2005 US Energy Policy Act">2005 US Energy Policy Act. That made the provision for the ARRA Act that provided the additional subsidies not provided for in the Energy Policy ACT. A program that created a lot of jobs around the US for electricians and tradesmen. Subsidies that have already ended in 2016.

Also what is not mentioned is that Solar and Wind had 10 times the growth of Nuclear power. It also fails to mention - if you hadn't gone through the Policy act *BEFORE* reading the EIA report that Nuclear Power gets an input tax credit per kilowatt hour. NP also gets another source of funding that is not in the criteria of the EIA document in the form of contract construction delay subsidies.

So the Forbes article is based on an obsolete notion because the subsides ended 2 years ago and aren't part of core Energy policy according to the Act.

Look at the pie chart here on where the USA gets it's electricity:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

.

What is missing here is the mass of concrete used in base of the wind generators will be reused for the next generation of wind technology as they are being set up where the wind is. The Nacelle will be upgraded and the base re-used. The up front establishment of a new industry will have those costs the same way Nuclear Power does.

What differs is that the steel in the Nuclear plant can't be re-used as it is radio-activated. The concrete can't be used without a massive energetic cost.

Come to think of it using Uranium mine tailings as concrete bases for Wind Turbines might be a really good way of disposing of the Uranium mine tailings in a constructive way. Build more wind to clean up the nuclear industry.

I'll also say, I don't object to funding the research of nuclear reactors, what I object to is the flat out raiding of the ratepayers to keep the current failing nuclear power industry as a means for oil and coal interests to further rob taxpayers. At least the limited solar and wind subsidies are ending up in the pockets of ordinary people.

On a per kWh produced basis the subsidies for solar power is far greater.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/j...

Look at the pie chart here on where the USA gets it's electricity:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

You'll see that nuclear provides nearly 20% of our electricity. Wind less than 6%. Solar is producing so little energy that it doesn't even get broken out separately, and is just "other". Biomass produced more electricity than solar, and that's mostly just coal plants "greenwashing" their operation by mixing in some sawdust and wood chips in with the coal so they can claim to be "green".

Whatever little is spent on solar makes a large difference on the subsidies per kWh since the output from solar is so small. If you scroll down that Wikipedia page some more you will find that solar makes up about 2% of installed capacity and nuclear makes up about 10% of installed capacity. Again, nuclear produces 20% of the electricity but solar is less than 1%. To replace a single 1 GW nuclear power reactor we would need to have 4 GW of solar power capacity.

The US federal government has been subsidizing solar power for decades with very little to show for it. You think nuclear power is getting corporate welfare? Look at solar. There wouldn't be a solar power industry if the federal government hadn't been propping it up all this time.

You know all this already and are just pushing your false reality again.

Yep, just "fake news" from us nuclear power advocates. If solar power made such great business sense then why demand the subsidies? I'll find that solar power advocates rarely lie about anything, just as what you posted appears to be true. What happens with great regularity is the lie by omission. By telling only half the story, giving all the "pros" and none of the "cons", solar power looks pretty good. It's easy to reveal the half truths though.

I used to tear into wind too for their subsidies but it looks like we are actually seeing some return on that investment. I'd like to see the wind subsidies go away, as I would for all energy subsidies, but it's solar that is not giving much for even the little it gets in "corporate welfare".

It's been getting real hard to portray nuclear power as unsafe in recent years. Calling it "dirty" is getting real hard as well. Now it seems that people rely on half truths of the costs of nuclear power. How long will it take for the truth on that to become clear? Then what argument can be made to not build more nuclear power?

There is R&D happening on nuclear power, just not so much in the USA.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/r...

The Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission has a reputation as a capable regulator with many decades of experience in safe nuclear plant design review and operations oversight. It also has a process that is amenable to technologies that use nontraditional fuels and coolants.

Sweden, the original home of LeadCold, has similar remote areas and a capable regulator, but it is currently lead by a government that doesn't support nuclear energy development.

As Senator Murkowski made clear during Governor Perry's confirmation hearing to become the new Secretary of Energy, Alaska has communities with similar power needs. Unfortunately, the U.S. NRC has not yet implemented an acceptable process for reviewing nuclear reactor designs that use coolants other than water.

If people in the USA want to see more nuclear power then vote, and vote for people and political parties that support nuclear power. I've read the party platform documents from both the Democratic and Republican national committees. In the Democrat platform I recall seeing the word "nuclear" only once, and that was in reference to nuclear weapons. The Republican platform nuclear power was mentioned as one of many ways to achieve cleaner air and energy independence. I also remember a debate between McCain and Obama when they were running for POTUS. Obama made some happy mouth noises about research but McCain said we need to start building nuclear power. It's quite clear where the support lies among politicians, vote accordingly. Perhaps the two parties have had their stance on nuclear power evolve since I last looked but recent events tell me it's unlikely there's been a big change. This isn't the "far left" opposing nuclear power, this opposition is far more widespread than that.

We can throw a bunch of money at nuclear power research but nothing can provide funding and experience like private industry actually building real and actual reactors. The argument for wind and solar subsidies was made on the same premise, that nothing drives development of a technology like shipping product.

I'd like to see fourth generation nuclear reactors being built too. Seeing more third generation nuclear would please me greatly though. We aren't going to see fifth generation nuclear power, almost by definition, until fourth generation reactors have reached some kind of maturity. Again, nothing can mature a technology like shipping product. I believe that there is a lot of life in third generation nuclear yet, as it is quite safe and offers means to slow the production of nuclear waste and perhaps even consume some of the waste we already have.

They don't need to ask, Target knows their shoppers are pregnant before they tell their own family.

We had quite a set of nuclear accidents, about 10 I recall, hardly a saftey record.

Sure, accidents happen. They also happen for wind, solar, hydroelectric, natural gas, coal, and oil. The only reasonable way to evaluate safety is to compare the deaths per unit energy for all energy sources, which equalizes all the various contributing factors and gives you a fair comparison. By that measure, nuclear is orders of magnitude safer than everything else:
https://www.forbes.com/sites/j...

Also, since you will ignore me, you should look up the answers of why CO2 emissions improvement due to wind a solar additions is failing in Germany. There is plenty of information available, why do you remain ignorant to it? Here is one, there are plenty more just some google searches away.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/j...

International Energy Agency: while top exporters Qatar and Australia will remain formidable competitors, the U.S. could be the largest LNG exporter by 2025 if new projects achieve their final investment decision over the next two years.

Yes gas isn't as bad as coal, but it's no wind or solar.
I wonder who exports the most wind and solar...?
Anyone building hydro or nukes in other countries...?

Inevitable, and only reasonable that instead of foreign conglomerates exploiting their markets through colonialism, that it be replaced by indigenous exploitation of their own people through corruption. :-) See "India Continues To Rank Among Most Corrupt Countries In The World" ( https://www.forbes.com/sites/r... ).

Looks like Poland is following suit:
https://www.forbes.com/sites/t...

And Indonesia
https://www.sei.org/featured/d...

Australia is trying, although somewhat unsuccessfully
https://www.spglobal.com/platt...

So it appears to be more than just Trump. Low cost energy sources are a great way to expand the economy.

What the Powers That Be don't like is gold. Keynes called it a "barbarous relic" and Warren Buffett derided it. But, central banks have bought a lot of it. Some countries have tried to limit its private ownership, now and in the past.

Currencies started out as mutually valued, divisible objects. Wampum, cowry shells, etc. For whatever reasons, everyone valued gold. It was divisible, didn't tarnish, didn't burn - essentially indestructible. It had all the qualities of an excellent means of exchange and a store of value, over the millennia.

Then people started putting gold into storage and using slips of paper which represented that gold. They could get gold for their slips of paper at any time. The system grew. Fractional-reserve banking was discovered (you can lend out more than you have in your vault because everyone is not going to try and withdraw at once). Emergent properties appeared. People stopped using gold to transact altogether. In 1971, the US "gold window" was closed - cash could not be redeemed for gold. The system continued to function (though the price of gold skyrocketed, and around that time is the mark is the stagnation of the wages of the lower wealth percentiles of society. Coincidence? Maybe, maybe not. Side note: it seems to me to be much easier to skim paper you're printing, and to distribute it to your favored partners than it is to skim gold. But that's another topic).

Fast forward to today, and people are moving away from even using the slips of paper, going to cashless systems where only the balances of an account are tracked. "Purchasing power" is now totally virtual. Some countries and economists are pushing "cashless societies" (Note: most economists missed the oncoming 2008 Financial Crisis).

The digital accounts represent cash. Cash used to represent gold. Now it just represents "purchasing power". What does bitcoin represent that is mutually valued?

Here's a fairly balanced and more nuanced article. https://www.forbes.com/sites/a...

And it's just not one study, but several from multiple sources showing similar effects.

And the whole market isn't fungible, one college degree is not interchangeable with another, and the same for students. You're working with a lot on information other than just price and SAT/GPA. Also colleges want the degree to mean something other than "my parents could afford to pay X".

And while the classroom environment works well for some types of labor training, for other it's only value is as a signal that you intelligence + work ethic is above some minimal level. Our obsession with the college degree obscures the fact most vocations are best learned on the job or in a specialized non-classroom environment.

There are actually quite a few skilled labor areas that are starting down shortages in the coming decade because the standard default advice to intelligent students was to go to college.

If college loans were not federally guaranteed, while it would be harder for those from poor backgrounds to graduate, colleges would try to maximize potential lifetime earnings of students and retention rates. Lets be honest about the tradeoffs and costs, rather than go full bernie bro.

Let's say I concede the point, that the DOE got the materials needed for solar power off by an order of magnitude you still have on a per megawatt-hour basis....

Solar power requires 3 to 10 times the materials compared to nuclear, depending on how you want to do your math. (And it would be more like 30 times if I don't concede this point.)
Solar power causes 4 to 4000 times as many fatalities. (Here's another source for that: https://www.forbes.com/sites/j... )
Solar power has the same to 10 times the CO2 output as nuclear, depending on who you ask.
(This shows solar has about 3 times CO2 output over nuclear: https://energy.utexas.edu/news...
This shows solar and nuclear at near parity: https://www.carbonbrief.org/so... )

As for cost... I can't seem to find a straight answer. I'll search and keep finding sources from nuclear power advocacy places where they show nuclear is cheaper than solar. When I look for data from places that advocate for wind, solar, and hydro, they don't mention nuclear power at all. That in itself is quite telling. There's those studies from a place called Lazard that give wildly varied numbers on solar power based on the specific type and they include a warning not to compare intermittent energy, like wind and solar, to dispatchable energy, like nuclear and natural gas.

This warning from Lazard to compare solar power costs to nuclear become apparent when looking at the paper from Conley and Maloney where they compute that just the backup power in natural gas, or storage from pumped hydro, would cost double to 5 times the generation capacity from nuclear. Again, that's the cost to match the solar supply to the load, before the costs of the actual solar power generation is added. Again I'll give the link: http://www.roadmaptonowhere.co...

To defend your point on material needs you gave a pamphlet on a do-it-herself solar power kit that looks like something someone would prop up at a campsite, not a permanent install done by professionals.

So, if I concede the point on materials needed, and agree the DOE was off by as much as an order of magnitude, then it still doesn't look that great for solar. Would you like to go into the other points against solar now?

This article is all over the place, starts with trying to stop crime but ends up claiming crime isn't the problem, it's police corruption, so is this to stop crimes or stopping police corruption? Because there's simpler ways to stop police corruption.

Piloted plane? Is this 2003? A team of automated drones doing wide circles would be much cheaper than even one piloted plane and provide better footage in real time 24/7. Cost of a plane with maintenance, fuel, paid pilot, etc would cost a fortune in comparison.

And what about cameras? Why drones? Yes a drone could cover a wider area than a camera could, but they're also susceptible to weather, higher failure rate, battery replacement, etc. A few cameras with microphones could even triangulate the location of where shots were fired. Drones don't pick up sound so they could not do that. And with 1080p wifi cameras selling for as low as $25 now days you could have dozens of cameras for the price of a decent drone so really drones are too expensive too if the goal is to capture video over a wide area.

And we see shootings in front of cameras all the time, I don't know if cameras actually reduce time or just increase arrest rates.

I like the idea of decreasing crime, I just don't think these people know how to go about it since they're suggesting something as silly as a piloted plane with a camera attached when there are much better alternatives.

What's scary is that all of this already happened over 100 years ago. And nothing was done to fix the system. A patent troll crippled the fledgling auto industry for decades, before Ford finally won a ruling on a technicality that exempted it from the Seldon patent (its car engines used a different combustion cycle than the one described in the Seldon patent).

From the parent comment: Why did they go out of their way to call this one "free"?

Microsoft has, apparently deliberately, been releasing Windows 10 updates that cause problems.

Apparently, if you pay a monthly fee, in the future Microsoft will remove the problems. Three of the articles:

Microsoft's got a new plan for managing Windows 10 devices for a monthly fee. (July 27, 2018)

Windows 10 Leak Exposes Microsoft's New Monthly Charge. (Aug. 4, 2018) Quote: "Ever since its creation, Microsoft has described Windows 10 as a service. The fear has always been that this meant Microsoft would start charging users a monthly fee to maintain the operating system, and now a new leak has confirmed this is exactly what will happenâ¦"

Windows 10 SHOCK: Is Microsoft about to start CHARGING a monthly fee? Stunning claims made. (Aug. 6, 2018)

Some of the many articles about Windows 10 update problems:

Windows 10 Essential Updates Have Serious Problems (Jan. 10, 2018)

Windows 10 April 2018 Update could break a ton of critical features on your PC (May 3, 2018)

Microsoft Admits July 10 Patches Caused Skype and Exchange Server Problems. (July 18, 2018)

Windows 10 April 2018 Update problems: how to fix them. (Aug. 23, 2018)

This article says that Microsoft should pay users:

Windows 10 update 'fail' -- Microsoft MUST pay out as users still 'plagued with problems' (June 13, 2018) Quote: "Windows 10 users should be compensated after Microsoftâ(TM)s updates have caused havoc with PC owners 'plagued with problems' and some facing huge bills to fix software issues."

Windows 10 is Spyware:

Windows 10 is possibly the worst spyware ever made. "Buried in the service agreement is permission to poke through everything on your PC." (August 4, 2015) Microsoft and Microsoft employees have full access to everything on every computer? I don't know of anyone or any company that should allow that.

2 issues, IMO:

A huge social problem: Conflict of interest. People who do Windows OS support make more money if there are many problems.

Microsoft employees and managers seem to me to lack social ability.

From the parent comment: Why did they go out of their way to call this one "free"?

Microsoft has, apparently deliberately, been releasing Windows 10 updates that cause problems.

Apparently, if you pay a monthly fee, in the future Microsoft will remove the problems. Three of the articles:

Microsoft's got a new plan for managing Windows 10 devices for a monthly fee. (July 27, 2018)

Windows 10 Leak Exposes Microsoft's New Monthly Charge. (Aug. 4, 2018) Quote: "Ever since its creation, Microsoft has described Windows 10 as a service. The fear has always been that this meant Microsoft would start charging users a monthly fee to maintain the operating system, and now a new leak has confirmed this is exactly what will happenâ¦"

Windows 10 SHOCK: Is Microsoft about to start CHARGING a monthly fee? Stunning claims made. (Aug. 6, 2018)

Some of the many articles about Windows 10 update problems:

Windows 10 Essential Updates Have Serious Problems (Jan. 10, 2018)

Windows 10 April 2018 Update could break a ton of critical features on your PC (May 3, 2018)

Microsoft Admits July 10 Patches Caused Skype and Exchange Server Problems. (July 18, 2018)

Windows 10 April 2018 Update problems: how to fix them. (Aug. 23, 2018)

This article says that Microsoft should pay users:

Windows 10 update 'fail' -- Microsoft MUST pay out as users still 'plagued with problems' (June 13, 2018) Quote: "Windows 10 users should be compensated after Microsoftâ(TM)s updates have caused havoc with PC owners 'plagued with problems' and some facing huge bills to fix software issues."

Windows 10 is Spyware:

Windows 10 is possibly the worst spyware ever made. "Buried in the service agreement is permission to poke through everything on your PC." (August 4, 2015) Microsoft and Microsoft employees have full access to everything on every computer? I don't know of anyone or any company that should allow that.

2 issues, IMO:

A huge social problem: Conflict of interest. People who do Windows OS support make more money if there are many problems.

Microsoft employees and managers seem to me to lack social ability.

"Instead, in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis, students seem to have shifted their view of what they should be studying—in a largely misguided effort to enhance their chances on the job market."
"Students aren’t fleeing degrees with poor job prospects. They’re fleeing humanities and related fields specifically because they think they have poor job prospects."
"If the whole story were a market response to student debt and the Great Recession, students would have read the 2011 census report numbering psychology and communications among the fields with the lowest median earnings and fled from them. Or they would have noticed that biology majors make less than the average college graduate, and favored the physical sciences. Most 18-year-olds are not econometricians, and those that are were probably going to major in economics anyway."
"But most of the differences are slight—well within the margins of error of the surveys."

I think this is where Schmidt really messes up. Maybe some students are still not avoiding some of the bad economic choices, but I think after story after story of people who go bankrupt from choosing the wrong college degree and suffering from the college debts and being worse off financially than if they had gotten no degree at all, I think students listened to those stories.

"The top-paying college majors earn $3.4 million more than the lowest-paying majors over a lifetime."
Source:
https://cew.georgetown.edu/cew...

• 1 Computer Science
• 2 Engineering
• 18 Arts
• 19 Graphic Design
• 20 History
• 21 English
• 22 Social Services

https://www.forbes.com/sites/s...

Millions of dollars seems more than a "slight" difference to me.

Schmidt left off a few important graphs: 1) The decline of humanities compared to the cost of college over time. 2) The average income by degree.