Failure to deal with risk and liability in a way that is consistent with what you think is the proper way of dealing with it is not necessarily irrational.
Nor is it necessarily rational. I base my observation on such things as reporting thresholds versus levels required for a lethal dose (eg, LD50, 50% chance of dying from a dose).
Yeah, well. You really don't get it.
That reminds me of the numbers coming out of Tchernobyl recently. The message was something like, "yeah, kids get cancer a lot more often, but that's not a problem because most survive". I mean - do you understand whats wrong with that sentence? Do you understand how such a sentence causes damage to your cause?
You haven't shown why your trust is of any value to me.
Oh, it seems I had forgoten to mention "breathtaking arrogance" in my list of reasons why the nuclear industry is so utterly discredited. Thank you for reminding me.
If you really work for the Industry - hey, man, get a clue. Your problem is foremost a political one, and one of management. How can you fail to understand and act on that?
Most of this is just failures of society to rationally deal with risk and liability, not some intrinsic feature of nuclear power. Radioactive waste is treated far more stringently than similarly hazardous non-radioactive waste (or radioactive waste that manages to be classified as non-radioactive).
Two things:
Failure to deal with risk and liability in a way that is consistent with what you think is the proper way of dealing with it is not necessarily irrational.
Given the eternal downplaying and lying of the nuclear industry, and its incredible lack of transparence in dealing with issues, it seems entirely rational to consider it absolutely unworthy of any trust.
I can tell you I know quite a few small business owners and none of them have invested in gold because of their libertarian beliefs (they aren't libertarians - they don't even think they're libertarians) or out of following others. They are doing it because they are deathly afraid of losing their wealth from the inflation of the money supply.
The real question is - why gold, of all things? Is there a chemical explanation, or some other logic? If not, then they are doing it because everybody else is doing it.
Nope. Most currencies are backed by a government and not just some guy on the internet.
What, like the government of Zimbabwe?
For example. Or the government of the USA. Or the government of Japan. Has a different effect every time. Why did you bring up Zimbabwe, of all things?
Do you understand why gold and silver are skyrocketing in USD?
Yes. It is a bubble fueled by libertarian misthinking. And that herd mentality that is so very well known for leading to disaster. People are buying gold on margin so the thing is getting more explosive by the day.
And if a situation is really intolerable, you can leave despite financial hardship.
That displays breathtaking ignorance on your part. Or is it cruelty? "Financial hardship" could mean anything from "kids starving" to "can't pay for medicine". For many people it is impossible to change job, so they basically are slaves.
Unions are nothing more than institutions devoted to distorting the labor market.
That is incorrect. Unions correct a distortion of the market: the asymmetry of having on one side an HR department with excellent lawyers and negotiators, and on the other hand fairly helpless individuals with little clout to achieve anything.
In the process of their activities, they weaken private property rights which are the key to wealth creation and economic prosperity.
It is not the only key, and it sometimes must be overruled to satisfy more key keys. Your one-track-mind attitude reveals you really know little about economics.
Government employee unions are actually branches of the government and work against the interests of tax payers. Private sector unions protect the job security of older workers at the expense of younger workers. All unions protect lazy and incompetent workers at the expense of more productive workers.
Right. Fire that geezers, let those useless bastards starve. I am sure you have a better idea?
At least the competent and young workers are in the position to actually compete for other things.
Potato, potato. is quantitative easing not defaulting by another (newspeak) name ?
No. Default is when the government is unable to service its debt and obtain new one. Interestingly, without QE there would be terrible deflation, which would push the US closer to default.
As things stand now, the US can borrow money with very low interest rates, and is thus very far from default.
1. It's a private company, so if it fails it fails on its own dime (rather than getting millions of tax dollars infused into it) 2. It actually sponsors some new research.
As to 1: it is raising a tax on you by patent licensing. Moneywise it is the same thing, the difference is that since it is a private company, you have no vote on the matter.
As to 2: the French gov. sponsors a shitload of research, orders of magnitude beyond what IV will ever be able to do.
Also, if the patents are in the hands of the government, odds are you will be able to do bulk licensing for a pittance.
If you feel you're not being paid enough, ask for a raise. If you don't get it and you're still unhappy, then change workplace.
Do you really believe that is easy? Getting a new job involves time searching for it. Also, not having a job even for a short period of time is not an attractive option for most people, which complicates the matter further. There's a lot of friction in the job market, which is why it doesn't work well at all without unions and regulation.
Actually they are backed by the printing press. If the two people retrieve their $100, the bank lends itself $100 from the fed, which is "printed" money. Otherwise, a full $100 would disappear (that of the second chap). In this way, money printing can keep the amount of money constant (I'm simplifying a bit).
That "deleveraging of the economy" you hear about sometimes is in fact a huge destruction of money. The fed is printing copiously to compensate and avoid deflation. As you can see if you care about these things, inflation has been rather moderate.
This cannot be done with a gold-standard based currency, which is why it is unstable and can lead to disaster.
Oh jeez not the "go to college to become a better rounded person" argument. College costs as much as a mid-range to high-end sports car. Lower and middle-class people don't have the luxury of going to college for the pleasure of learning. There must be a return on such a significant investment. It's that simple, it has nothing to do with anti-intellectualism.
Your position is deeply anti-intellectual, apart of being factually wrong. The "become a better rounded argument" wasn't being made. An intellectual derives from his knowledge and thoughts, from his creations and his intellectual environment much more pleasure and fullfillment than most people get out of owning a sports car.
That was the anti-intellectualism in your post. The factually wrong part comes from many lower and middle-class people going to college for the pleasure of learning. They really do. It's called having a life. It might not be the best in terms of money, but it is not that bad either.
You see, not doing the things you want to do in life for purely economic reasons is also irrational behaviour.
- NiMH planes were hardly a joke. There was a lot of airracing done with them. Worked well.
- Many model planes get a lot of time out of their LiPo batteries, making the pilot want to have a break before the battery is empty. Gas, of course, runs much longer and you can sustain power for longer, but often the drawbacks (the mess) dominate.
Still, flying most distances of interest with a useful load is off limits for batteries.
there is not very much logical reason for a university or business to host a massively bandwidth hogging haven for criminal activity, full of drama and expense that was almost entirely devoted to non-educational activity. I mean how did they ever justify it in their budget?
Your mistake is assuming there needed to be a thoroughly sound logical reason for the institution to engage in it.
In reality, these things tend to be rather accidental and chaotic. The people providing the funding for the computers were giving it to the unis to come up with basically whathever (i.e. research). They didn't want to know in detail what was being done with every cpu or every hard disk. The people running the irc servers were hooked, doing it for fun, and some other strange reasons that fall under "human nature".
The inconsistencies you noted are just typical human nature. It won't change, btw. The idea that institutions or humans act rationally just does not correspond to reality.
Well, we are talking scales and scales here. The energy density of gasoline is still about a 100 times higher than that of the best batteries available. And it's not like there hasn't been any research on batteries.
Nitpic: the market for electric model airplanes took off before, with the NiMH cells. Of course, LiPo batteries are a lot nicer still.
It's the government pussying out and bending over for big corp lobbyists that's the real issue. No government capitulation, no problem.
The government as an institution has a hard time defending against big corp lobbyists, who have essentially unlimited funding compared with the working budget of congressmen or senators, and have far less tasks to concentrate on. They have done a lot to undermine government, and it took them a comparatively long time. So where I do disagree with you is in your implication that big corp is not to blame for this. They could as well have behaved in an ethical manner.
I actually have a lot more sympathy for your position that you think. But the industry has to realize that it is special in many ways. Many of the things that happen with it just captivate the imagination of people in difficult ways.
At least in Germany, the industry has done, politically, everything wrong it ever could do wrong. It has alienated way too many people, and it has lied more than once too many, and has been caught. The HTTR episode was really, really bad from a political point of view. The civil-war-like images of the Wackersdorf protests were also a public relations disaster of high order. Nuclear energy has the image of a dangerous and expensive technology that has been established by corruption and police brutality alone. Given all that has happened, you need to be very forgiving to see something else.
There is the theory that Merkel, being involved in the Asse fiasco, having seen all the corruption and lies, has had enough herself and thus seized the first real opportunity that crossed her way to end the madness.
It is nice that the IAEA looks at the paperwork, but they don't matter that much politically. It is the local comunities that should look at it. It is greenpeace that should look at it.
Whoa. That is so completely and utterly wrong. As in: not true by a long shot. Where did you just pull that out from? They keep smokescreening, lying, covering up, etc. That's not open.
And there's no real waste problem. You might have heard that all the high-level waste after reprocessing would only take the size of one football field and about 1 meter deep.
High-level meaning what? And what about the rest? Given your record, and that of the industry, the "medium level" waste is very likely to be compeltely scary poisonous stuff that's going to remain active for a million of years. And in copious amounts.
And all that after granting that tale about the high level waste.
Perhaps because I am not a propellerhead with a bad case of aspergers. Somehow, there is this misconception that if you build to spec and something goes wrong, it is not your fault.
That's not aspergers, that's plain justice. If someone builds a bridge given the specification that it handle a 10 ton load, and it collapses given a 15-ton load, that's not the builder's fault.
Wellcome to the real world. The question is immediately, why did 15 tons pass over it? Did the builder accept the contract knowing that the safety margin was unrealistically tight, thus recklessly endangering lives for money? Etc, etc. And, in the case of nuclear plants, the safety margin is more or less made up by the power companies, so they get the blame for setting the wrong safety margin too.
I am not belittling anything. It is you who are belittling things.
"Why are you so attached to that technology? It is scary."
Because there's no alternative. And denying it guarantees that we'll head hit the worst GW projections.
There's plenty of alternatives. You are just completely blind to them. Come on, use your imagination!
* How about huge solar arrays in Saudi Arabia. Will that not work? Who says the Germans have to produce their electricity in Germany. They don't do it with oil.
* How about reducing consumption?
* And, since you are such a fan of nuclear energy. How about actually changing the ways of the nuclear industry, convince it to stop lying like mad, and actually come up with truly safe designs, plus a solution to the waste problem? And, importantly, INVOLVING THE PUBLIC IN THE PROCESS.
Given the way nuclear energy fans behave, the last one is the most unlikely to work.
You demand for nuclear power to be insured against the possible radiation leaks.
They are called nuclear accidents. They involve sudden evacuation of large areas possibly with a huge economic (not to mention human) impact. In particular in densely populated areas. Please stop belittling it.
"Saying nuclear is "self-contained" is just a blatant lie. Self contained perhaps if you look at a given year of operation, but certainly not on the long rung, and not at all if something bad happens."
So are ALL other types of energy production. And your point is...?
It is you who claimed that nuclear is self contained. My point is that you, who know better, are lying. I really would like to know why. Why are you so attached to that technology? It is scary.
I've never been at an open pit mine. But I am quite sure the ones in Germany will be completely safe at the very latest a decade or two after the end of operation, with or without accidents. Well, people might drown while swimming in the lake they are going to put there, but hey. So, where do you get the "many hundreds of years" figure?
It would not surpise me, however, if it is like that in the US, where doing it right at a higher cost normally is not acceptable (cf. hydrocracking and stuff like that). But that's another matter entirely. You shouldn't let randroids do open pit mines, but much less nuclear reactors.
Natural gas power plants have insurance against global warming effects, do they?
No, they don't. But in civilized countries, the operators get heavily taxed because of this. Anyway, what exactly is your point?
It's kinda dishonest to compare dirty fossil fuels with uninsured and unpaid externalities
I don't understand your sentence. How are dirty fossil fuels supposed to be like unpaid and uninsured externalities? And who is making that comparison?
I presume you mean, how dare I call bullshit to your "low cost" claim, even if it is just that, bullshit? I am not claiming gas is good, I'm saying that nuclear is not the alternative. And that your "low cost" claim is just an accounting fraud.
essentially self-contained nuclear power.
Saying nuclear is "self-contained" is just a blatant lie. Self contained perhaps if you look at a given year of operation, but certainly not on the long rung, and not at all if something bad happens.
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, well. You really don't get it.
That reminds me of the numbers coming out of Tchernobyl recently. The message was something like, "yeah, kids get cancer a lot more often, but that's not a problem because most survive". I mean - do you understand whats wrong with that sentence? Do you understand how such a sentence causes damage to your cause?
Oh, it seems I had forgoten to mention "breathtaking arrogance" in my list of reasons why the nuclear industry is so utterly discredited. Thank you for reminding me.
If you really work for the Industry - hey, man, get a clue. Your problem is foremost a political one, and one of management. How can you fail to understand and act on that?
Two things:
Failure to deal with risk and liability in a way that is consistent with what you think is the proper way of dealing with it is not necessarily irrational.
Given the eternal downplaying and lying of the nuclear industry, and its incredible lack of transparence in dealing with issues, it seems entirely rational to consider it absolutely unworthy of any trust.
The real question is - why gold, of all things? Is there a chemical explanation, or some other logic? If not, then they are doing it because everybody else is doing it.
We'll have to trust you on that one...
For example. Or the government of the USA. Or the government of Japan. Has a different effect every time. Why did you bring up Zimbabwe, of all things?
Yes. It is a bubble fueled by libertarian misthinking. And that herd mentality that is so very well known for leading to disaster. People are buying gold on margin so the thing is getting more explosive by the day.
That displays breathtaking ignorance on your part. Or is it cruelty? "Financial hardship" could mean anything from "kids starving" to "can't pay for medicine". For many people it is impossible to change job, so they basically are slaves.
That is incorrect. Unions correct a distortion of the market: the asymmetry of having on one side an HR department with excellent lawyers and negotiators, and on the other hand fairly helpless individuals with little clout to achieve anything.
It is not the only key, and it sometimes must be overruled to satisfy more key keys. Your one-track-mind attitude reveals you really know little about economics.
Right. Fire that geezers, let those useless bastards starve. I am sure you have a better idea?
At least the competent and young workers are in the position to actually compete for other things.
No. Default is when the government is unable to service its debt and obtain new one. Interestingly, without QE there would be terrible deflation, which would push the US closer to default.
As things stand now, the US can borrow money with very low interest rates, and is thus very far from default.
Here you find rates:
http://online.wsj.com/mdc/public/page/2_3022-govtbonds.html?mod=topnav_2_3000
As to 1: it is raising a tax on you by patent licensing. Moneywise it is the same thing, the difference is that since it is a private company, you have no vote on the matter.
As to 2: the French gov. sponsors a shitload of research, orders of magnitude beyond what IV will ever be able to do.
Also, if the patents are in the hands of the government, odds are you will be able to do bulk licensing for a pittance.
Do you really believe that is easy? Getting a new job involves time searching for it. Also, not having a job even for a short period of time is not an attractive option for most people, which complicates the matter further. There's a lot of friction in the job market, which is why it doesn't work well at all without unions and regulation.
Actually they are backed by the printing press. If the two people retrieve their $100, the bank lends itself $100 from the fed, which is "printed" money. Otherwise, a full $100 would disappear (that of the second chap). In this way, money printing can keep the amount of money constant (I'm simplifying a bit).
That "deleveraging of the economy" you hear about sometimes is in fact a huge destruction of money. The fed is printing copiously to compensate and avoid deflation. As you can see if you care about these things, inflation has been rather moderate.
This cannot be done with a gold-standard based currency, which is why it is unstable and can lead to disaster.
Libertarian stupidity. That's something pretty durable.
No, but you can find Cuba here. It's interesting.
Your position is deeply anti-intellectual, apart of being factually wrong. The "become a better rounded argument" wasn't being made. An intellectual derives from his knowledge and thoughts, from his creations and his intellectual environment much more pleasure and fullfillment than most people get out of owning a sports car.
That was the anti-intellectualism in your post. The factually wrong part comes from many lower and middle-class people going to college for the pleasure of learning. They really do. It's called having a life. It might not be the best in terms of money, but it is not that bad either.
You see, not doing the things you want to do in life for purely economic reasons is also irrational behaviour.
- NiMH planes were hardly a joke. There was a lot of airracing done with them. Worked well.
- Many model planes get a lot of time out of their LiPo batteries, making the pilot want to have a break before the battery is empty. Gas, of course, runs much longer and you can sustain power for longer, but often the drawbacks (the mess) dominate.
Still, flying most distances of interest with a useful load is off limits for batteries.
Your mistake is assuming there needed to be a thoroughly sound logical reason for the institution to engage in it.
In reality, these things tend to be rather accidental and chaotic. The people providing the funding for the computers were giving it to the unis to come up with basically whathever (i.e. research). They didn't want to know in detail what was being done with every cpu or every hard disk. The people running the irc servers were hooked, doing it for fun, and some other strange reasons that fall under "human nature".
The inconsistencies you noted are just typical human nature. It won't change, btw. The idea that institutions or humans act rationally just does not correspond to reality.
Well, we are talking scales and scales here. The energy density of gasoline is still about a 100 times higher than that of the best batteries available. And it's not like there hasn't been any research on batteries.
Nitpic: the market for electric model airplanes took off before, with the NiMH cells. Of course, LiPo batteries are a lot nicer still.
The government as an institution has a hard time defending against big corp lobbyists, who have essentially unlimited funding compared with the working budget of congressmen or senators, and have far less tasks to concentrate on. They have done a lot to undermine government, and it took them a comparatively long time. So where I do disagree with you is in your implication that big corp is not to blame for this. They could as well have behaved in an ethical manner.
I have heard rumors that Yeltsin had a high exposure to solvents and disinfectants. Is that true??
I actually have a lot more sympathy for your position that you think. But the industry has to realize that it is special in many ways. Many of the things that happen with it just captivate the imagination of people in difficult ways.
At least in Germany, the industry has done, politically, everything wrong it ever could do wrong. It has alienated way too many people, and it has lied more than once too many, and has been caught. The HTTR episode was really, really bad from a political point of view. The civil-war-like images of the Wackersdorf protests were also a public relations disaster of high order. Nuclear energy has the image of a dangerous and expensive technology that has been established by corruption and police brutality alone. Given all that has happened, you need to be very forgiving to see something else.
There is the theory that Merkel, being involved in the Asse fiasco, having seen all the corruption and lies, has had enough herself and thus seized the first real opportunity that crossed her way to end the madness.
It is nice that the IAEA looks at the paperwork, but they don't matter that much politically. It is the local comunities that should look at it. It is greenpeace that should look at it.
Whoa. That is so completely and utterly wrong. As in: not true by a long shot. Where did you just pull that out from? They keep smokescreening, lying, covering up, etc. That's not open.
High-level meaning what? And what about the rest? Given your record, and that of the industry, the "medium level" waste is very likely to be compeltely scary poisonous stuff that's going to remain active for a million of years. And in copious amounts.
And all that after granting that tale about the high level waste.
Wellcome to the real world. The question is immediately, why did 15 tons pass over it? Did the builder accept the contract knowing that the safety margin was unrealistically tight, thus recklessly endangering lives for money? Etc, etc. And, in the case of nuclear plants, the safety margin is more or less made up by the power companies, so they get the blame for setting the wrong safety margin too.
I am not belittling anything. It is you who are belittling things.
There's plenty of alternatives. You are just completely blind to them. Come on, use your imagination!
* How about huge solar arrays in Saudi Arabia. Will that not work? Who says the Germans have to produce their electricity in Germany. They don't do it with oil.
* How about reducing consumption?
* And, since you are such a fan of nuclear energy. How about actually changing the ways of the nuclear industry, convince it to stop lying like mad, and actually come up with truly safe designs, plus a solution to the waste problem? And, importantly, INVOLVING THE PUBLIC IN THE PROCESS.
Given the way nuclear energy fans behave, the last one is the most unlikely to work.
They are called nuclear accidents. They involve sudden evacuation of large areas possibly with a huge economic (not to mention human) impact. In particular in densely populated areas. Please stop belittling it.
It is you who claimed that nuclear is self contained. My point is that you, who know better, are lying. I really would like to know why. Why are you so attached to that technology? It is scary.
I've never been at an open pit mine. But I am quite sure the ones in Germany will be completely safe at the very latest a decade or two after the end of operation, with or without accidents. Well, people might drown while swimming in the lake they are going to put there, but hey. So, where do you get the "many hundreds of years" figure?
It would not surpise me, however, if it is like that in the US, where doing it right at a higher cost normally is not acceptable (cf. hydrocracking and stuff like that). But that's another matter entirely. You shouldn't let randroids do open pit mines, but much less nuclear reactors.
No, they don't. But in civilized countries, the operators get heavily taxed because of this. Anyway, what exactly is your point?
I don't understand your sentence. How are dirty fossil fuels supposed to be like unpaid and uninsured externalities? And who is making that comparison?
I presume you mean, how dare I call bullshit to your "low cost" claim, even if it is just that, bullshit? I am not claiming gas is good, I'm saying that nuclear is not the alternative. And that your "low cost" claim is just an accounting fraud.
Saying nuclear is "self-contained" is just a blatant lie. Self contained perhaps if you look at a given year of operation, but certainly not on the long rung, and not at all if something bad happens.