How is society better off because Joe spent 7 years writing about the symbolism in Oscar Wilde's writings?
Because he didn't work as a hedge fund manager instead? Who knows what good Joe, always the brooding type, would have done if he had not been occupied in that way.
Jokes aside, I frankly don't think Joe's symbolism study is harmful to society, he probably has a good grasp of the subject, and IMO it is important that people do that. He keeps the memory and knowledge alive. Because, you know, cultural heritage is also important.
One thing that might be helpful (at least from the point of view of Prof. Taylor) would be to eliminate the bullshit Ph.D.s in fields such as political science, poetry, philosophy, English literature, and so on. Seriously. I talk to these types several times a week a bar near the Arizona State University campus and it is amazing how obscure their research topics are.
Two things.
1. People need a specific subject for their PhD thesis. Normally, they are supposed to have a wide grasp of the field well beyond the headline subject per se. That's why people have "a PhD in Physics", where they probably had a thesis on a subject orders of magnitude more obscure than your Philosophy or Political Science PhD.
2. The subjects you mention are fairly useful, just not directly. If you eliminate them, you severely impoverish the cultural environment. In particular political science is applied rather a lot in government matters, although the public isn't aware of it at all.
Slashdotters like to assume incredible incompetence and irrationality on the part of anybody they have ideological differences with. Well, most people do that, not just slashdotters, but slashdotters publicly post their biased assumptions on a public website.
I'd say actually less than you would find on other fora.
Of course the brand of watch is only one factor of many, many pieces of information that is part of the analysis of these people. If it is given due weight, not too much, and not too little, it is perfectly reasonable.
In theory, yes. But when the difference between guantanamo or not is a cheap casio watch, then things are very different.
In other words, Other Peoples' Money is free money.
I know you will get a tantrum over this, but hey. You are part of a society, and to some extent, your belongings belong also to society. It is not "other peoples money". It is our money going into research.
Not that you have to worry. As soon as it is understood well enough to be profitable, it will be privatized, and someone with good connections will make a formidable amount of money on the back of the effort we, as a society, invested in risky research.
I said nothing significant happened.Obviously, that is an opinion
A formidable one, in my view. What would have to happen before you consider it significant? Tokyo deserted? Or can it be a little less?
What you and stellian do is handpick the best spin you can find and even downplay that. It is actually amazing to watch, but does not really improve any confidence in the technology.
The thing is, the accident is over. Perhaps it will amount to something significant, but that hasn't happened yet.
Please confirm: you are saying nothing happened?
This is the research. Learn by doing. People seem to ignore that there has been perhaps three other accidents comparable to Fukushima in the history of civilian power generation (as opposed to experimental reactors and military power). None of those accidents have much in common with Fukushima (all three were heavy on human operator error and light on magnitude 9 earthquakes).
And when you have accidents that rare, what do you do? Make your own accidents? That's what they did with Chernobyl, after all.
At the very least, you make some plans beforehand. Have radiation hardened heavy machinery ready for when you have the trouble. Run simulations, etc. So, no. Learning by doing doesn't cut it at all. It is very clear that there were no plans whatsoever for a contingency like this, and that is a mayor scandal. Not that it comes as a surprise to anyone who has been paying attention to the way the nuclear industry works. There weren't any plans the three or so last times, and by the looks of it, there won't be any plans the next time either.
I don't understand the kind of mentality you have. I mean, there is a pretty big permanent evacuation zone around that reactor, and you still claim nothing significant happened. Why are you so cruel and ignorant? Why do you value this technology so much higher than the fate of people?
The reason it took so long was that they weren't prepared. All the things they had to think through to use a robot in these circumstances - nobody had thought about it! All the logistics, all the money, permits, etc. weren't even halfway ready. Amazing, isn't it? That's how an industry in the hands of the Titanic syndrome looks like.
There isn't any research in how to react to such an "eventuality", because the industry doesn't want to know. It is just not supposed to happen.
The worst nuclear disaster of all time, Chernobyl, killed only 31 people.
Who did put this ridiculous lie between your ears? Yourself?
The problem with nuclear energy fanbois is that they produce this kind of lies, i don't know if out of stupidity, greed, or plain old evil. The main reason why I am against nuclear energy is because every person that is in favor of it automatically seems to become a blind and brainwashed apologist instead of at least taking the thing seriously. Dangerous technology run by the "can't happen, won't be bad if it does" kind of moronic fanbois is just way too risky.
The truth is that at least a third of the "liquidators" (a few hundred thousand people) died of radiation related illnesses. And without them, the catastrophe would have been much worse. The truth is that a vast areal is unsafe to live in, and will stay so for at least another century. If you move there, it is much more likely than not that you will die of some horrible cancer.
Check the link in my sig (and its cites), or Wikipedia (and its sites). You may have been deceived: take a bit of time to check this out. I know I was shocked.
Okey, okey. Wow I say. But I would also say that you are really being ripped off. Because for that money you are getting the worst social security system among developed countries. There are countries that live in what you would call socialism (which is nonsense, of course. I mean social democratic capitalism, like germany) and they aren't paying that much (in terms of revenue %)
I'm going to point to this news article which explains far more in depth as to why the Level 7 was chosen. After reading it, you should realize that Fukushima is not as bad as Chernobyl. Here's some summary facts.
Your first fact goes nowhere. If in Fukushima, a few weeks into this, release is still happening, then this looks as it is going to be worse than Chernobyl. Your second fact looks like an odd technicality, but hey.
I propose the following scale, I am sure you and people like you are going to like it more. I will call it the mitsne reactor mishap scale. Here it is. I'm sure you can live with Fukushima having a 7 in this scale!
1. Hiccup. Sorry for this
2. Harmless problem. This being a nuclear plant, nothing can happen anyway
5. Some sensor pretended something was wrong (ridiculous!) and we had to shut down. Manager was angry and needed a cigarette, which explains the smoke coming out of the plant
6. Still less of a problem than running a coal plant
7. Planned failure mode. Nothing to see here, except how well a nuclear plant actually works
Seems very complicated. First of all, these fuel depots will be in different orbits, going at different speeds, and your main craft zips by at yet another speed. How are you going to align everything[?]
You use modern mathematics, and computing power. Transfers from one orbit to another, pace rendezvous maneuvers, etc. are mostly handled that way already. I don't think that is the obstacle. It rather is affordable propulsion. How many Saturn Vs do you need to lift the mass equivalent of one Saturn V to space? Way too many!
Unfortunately, I am a specialist in things that are of little use in a situation like this (I am a mathematician). I thought about "just going" and helping with whatever might come up, like moving wreckage, etc. but decided I'd be more of an obstacle than any help. I cancelled the flight weeks ago, when I realized that I really couldn't reasonably do anything there.
Anyway - thanks!. And I will go to Japan eventually.
So they blow millions on a fence and then pay the guys who make copies of the gate key minimum wage? Why build the fence in the first place?
What normally happens in companies is that the people that do the hiring ("Human Resources") might not even understand what the companies actually do. So yes, they end up hiring someone for 10$ an hour and feel great because they have saved the company money. That it is stupid is something lost on them.
It seems that it is even lost on the guys working on the product.
Yes - they treated mice genetically engineered to overexpress a hormone with an antagonist to the hormone....and then...they see effects of the hormone expression are suppressed. SHOCKER (sarcasm).
It looks like an obvious result. But this is biology, so you can't really know for sure, because these systems are way too complex, and we know way too little to apply simple logic like you did. Something completely different might as well have happened, and what this study does is strengthen the evidence of the link between the hormone and its effects.
Fix the management issues how? You are volunteering?
I don't know how to fix the management issues. That does not in any way invalidate the point that there are management issues. If I knew how to fix them, I would try. One possible way might be to invite members of the local community to be present at the safety checks, and to be involved in safety policies.
I don't know any japanese. Thanks for the links anyway. I have a ticket for a (now canceled) flight to Sendai, I was supposed to go there tomorrow. I really hate what happened there and i have cried watching the news about the tsunami.
There is a lot that can be improved in industrial safety in general, and I think we should aim at it. One important difference is that the area around that refinery (i am guessing here, i couldn't read your links) will be safe in a couple of months, whereas the area around the F. plant will not be so for a very long time. Also, this thread is about the nuclear plant. I don't want to downplay the rest of the disaster.
The management is corrupt, incompetent, and greedy.
Check. Maybe it is not totally corrupt, totally incompetent, and totally greedy, but it is corrupt, incompetent, and greedy. What are you denying here?
Nuclear power itself is like a coiled serpent, ready to strike at any moment,
Check. You need active safety systems to keep it from blowing up. What are you denying here?
laying waste to hundreds of square miles of land.
Check. What are you denying here?
I don't know why you choose to believe an easy story over the evidence.
Because it is a true story supported by abundant evidence. I quite frankly don't understand why you keep denying it. It is as if you are denying that the sun went up this morning.
I regret what I said about the engineers, but the rest is pretty accurate.
The evidence is all over the place. If you can't see it, I can't help you. The evidence includes, but is not at all limited to, falsification of safety check documents by TEPCO in more than one occasion (at least one including Fukushima). It includes failing to act (as you admit somewhere else, for cost reasons) on evidence of heightened tsunami risk. Actually, the plant was tsunami-proof only by accident, and not by design (in Japan!).
Also, in case you didn't know, a huge area around Chernobyl remains evacuated to this day. Oh and it seems a large area around the Fukushima plants will also remain evacuated for a long time. In fact, as of now, they aren't even collecting the corpses left there by the tsunami.
Oh and in case you didn't notice, when the quake came, with the subsequent tsunami, the plants didn't just benevolently forgive all the human errors. They left control as soon as possible and made a pretty huge mess instead.
So, which part of
The management is corrupt, incompetent, and greedy. Nuclear power itself is like a coiled serpent, ready to strike at any moment, laying waste to hundreds of square miles of land.
is not supported by evidence?
One could even add the engineers somewhere, as propellerheads blinded by the love they have for their big machines, making up their own rules on what is acceptable risk, oblivious to the concerns of other people.
That leads us to the second fact. For all your empty words on this subject, the current accident is not bad as an outcome precisely because the plant failed in a recoverable manner.
Technically, I may agree with you in the narrow sense that it could have been worse, and that yes, great that plant wasn't built with even more disregard for safety. But the fact is that this is a loose, and not a win, because the claim was that they would not fail, and that no radioactive material would escape. Yet it did! In copious amounts! The mitnse brouhaha shows that even the experts where sure the safety measures would not fail at all. Yet they failed! One hurray for the experts!
Let me point out that despite an earthquake and tsunami considerably greater than expected, the active reactors all successfully shutdown, they didn't wash away (with a meltdown 10 km inland or somewhere out to sea), or a pile of reactor rods littering the coastline.
Nice. And I agree that it is really good that that didn't happen. But it is still a full blown failure. (And BTW the credits for that level of safety goes to those that oppose nuclear energy on the grounds that it is unsafe. Without them, the unchecked optimism of the engineers would have killed a lot more people by now).
Haha, no. Not even one. I am good old rmstar, and post only under that handle.
It's easy to go around telling everyone what should have been done after the fact, pointing out which experts should have been listened to and which should have been ignored.
It remains a fact that they ignored crucial advice. Hadn't they ignored it, none of this nuclear disaster would be happening.
But do you have a good idea, now, what should be done? Do you really think you could have done things any better than they were? Is coal or diesel better fuel for generating electricity?
The solution is to fix the risk management issues. I'm surprised nobody talks about that, although it is the fat gorilla in the room. Once that is done, yeah, go ahead and build nuclear plants.
Only ten years ago? It's too short to upgrade a nuclear plant based on revised earthquake specs
Yes, so instead it is better to continue to run such a plant even though it is known that it is unsafe? That you suggest that this is the proper way to deal with this issue shows that you do not understand what is going on at all. Not at a technical level, and not at the human level either.
Nonsense, there is a one-size-fits-all narrative to describe anything in nuclear power. The management is corrupt, incompetent, and greedy. Nuclear power itself is like a coiled serpent, ready to strike at any moment, laying waste to hundreds of square miles of land.
Yes, and the problem (for nuclear energy fanbois) with this narrative is that it is in fact a more or less accurate portrait of reality.
Reader beware: the site the parent post is linking to is a corporate pro-nuclear spin site. If you do not believe me, I invite you to read the old posts (if they are still available). You will see that their "facts" didn't carry too far, and that things got way worse than what their "facts" predicted. If you read the actual news from official sources (TEPCO, japanese government) you would know that the situation is in fact very badly fucked up, and doesn't compare with the relatively rosy picture the "MIT NSE" people are giving.
Remember that they may not have staff and time to get the English translation perfect, also.
Haha, yeah, and please put the most positive spin you can think of on whatever you read. If you read "It's a disaster" you must consider that the translation might be defective.
Sorry, but it just doesn't work that way
Can you consider the incredibly non-ideal conditions these guys are working under before you decide you have to find fault and start arm-chair quartierbacking?
What I think you are saying is, well, maybe it is a disaster, but they had a hell of an excuse!
That (i suspect willfully) misses the points completely. The reactor was not supposed to fail. Yet it did, and the results are impressive, to say the least. That a catastrophe that manages to make a reactor fail also severely hinders you ability to deal with the situation is a new thing we have learned. And that in fact nobody has a good plan for a situation like this is also suddenly in plain sight, although is nothing that wasn't known before.
Slashdot Mirror
Because he didn't work as a hedge fund manager instead? Who knows what good Joe, always the brooding type, would have done if he had not been occupied in that way.
Jokes aside, I frankly don't think Joe's symbolism study is harmful to society, he probably has a good grasp of the subject, and IMO it is important that people do that. He keeps the memory and knowledge alive. Because, you know, cultural heritage is also important.
Two things.
1. People need a specific subject for their PhD thesis. Normally, they are supposed to have a wide grasp of the field well beyond the headline subject per se. That's why people have "a PhD in Physics", where they probably had a thesis on a subject orders of magnitude more obscure than your Philosophy or Political Science PhD.
2. The subjects you mention are fairly useful, just not directly. If you eliminate them, you severely impoverish the cultural environment. In particular political science is applied rather a lot in government matters, although the public isn't aware of it at all.
I'd say actually less than you would find on other fora.
In theory, yes. But when the difference between guantanamo or not is a cheap casio watch, then things are very different.
I know you will get a tantrum over this, but hey. You are part of a society, and to some extent, your belongings belong also to society. It is not "other peoples money". It is our money going into research.
Not that you have to worry. As soon as it is understood well enough to be profitable, it will be privatized, and someone with good connections will make a formidable amount of money on the back of the effort we, as a society, invested in risky research.
A formidable one, in my view. What would have to happen before you consider it significant? Tokyo deserted? Or can it be a little less?
What you and stellian do is handpick the best spin you can find and even downplay that. It is actually amazing to watch, but does not really improve any confidence in the technology.
Please confirm: you are saying nothing happened?
At the very least, you make some plans beforehand. Have radiation hardened heavy machinery ready for when you have the trouble. Run simulations, etc. So, no. Learning by doing doesn't cut it at all. It is very clear that there were no plans whatsoever for a contingency like this, and that is a mayor scandal. Not that it comes as a surprise to anyone who has been paying attention to the way the nuclear industry works. There weren't any plans the three or so last times, and by the looks of it, there won't be any plans the next time either.
I don't understand the kind of mentality you have. I mean, there is a pretty big permanent evacuation zone around that reactor, and you still claim nothing significant happened. Why are you so cruel and ignorant? Why do you value this technology so much higher than the fate of people?
The reason it took so long was that they weren't prepared. All the things they had to think through to use a robot in these circumstances - nobody had thought about it! All the logistics, all the money, permits, etc. weren't even halfway ready. Amazing, isn't it? That's how an industry in the hands of the Titanic syndrome looks like.
There isn't any research in how to react to such an "eventuality", because the industry doesn't want to know. It is just not supposed to happen.
Who did put this ridiculous lie between your ears? Yourself?
The problem with nuclear energy fanbois is that they produce this kind of lies, i don't know if out of stupidity, greed, or plain old evil. The main reason why I am against nuclear energy is because every person that is in favor of it automatically seems to become a blind and brainwashed apologist instead of at least taking the thing seriously. Dangerous technology run by the "can't happen, won't be bad if it does" kind of moronic fanbois is just way too risky.
The truth is that at least a third of the "liquidators" (a few hundred thousand people) died of radiation related illnesses. And without them, the catastrophe would have been much worse. The truth is that a vast areal is unsafe to live in, and will stay so for at least another century. If you move there, it is much more likely than not that you will die of some horrible cancer.
Okey, okey. Wow I say. But I would also say that you are really being ripped off. Because for that money you are getting the worst social security system among developed countries. There are countries that live in what you would call socialism (which is nonsense, of course. I mean social democratic capitalism, like germany) and they aren't paying that much (in terms of revenue %)
That numbers... are completely wrong. Who is feeding you these lies?
Your first fact goes nowhere. If in Fukushima, a few weeks into this, release is still happening, then this looks as it is going to be worse than Chernobyl. Your second fact looks like an odd technicality, but hey.
I propose the following scale, I am sure you and people like you are going to like it more. I will call it the mitsne reactor mishap scale. Here it is. I'm sure you can live with Fukushima having a 7 in this scale!
You use modern mathematics, and computing power. Transfers from one orbit to another, pace rendezvous maneuvers, etc. are mostly handled that way already. I don't think that is the obstacle. It rather is affordable propulsion. How many Saturn Vs do you need to lift the mass equivalent of one Saturn V to space? Way too many!
Unfortunately, I am a specialist in things that are of little use in a situation like this (I am a mathematician). I thought about "just going" and helping with whatever might come up, like moving wreckage, etc. but decided I'd be more of an obstacle than any help. I cancelled the flight weeks ago, when I realized that I really couldn't reasonably do anything there.
Anyway - thanks!. And I will go to Japan eventually.
What normally happens in companies is that the people that do the hiring ("Human Resources") might not even understand what the companies actually do. So yes, they end up hiring someone for 10$ an hour and feel great because they have saved the company money. That it is stupid is something lost on them.
It seems that it is even lost on the guys working on the product.
It looks like an obvious result. But this is biology, so you can't really know for sure, because these systems are way too complex, and we know way too little to apply simple logic like you did. Something completely different might as well have happened, and what this study does is strengthen the evidence of the link between the hormone and its effects.
There are more falsified records. It is a known issue. Google a bit, you will find a lot of signs of incompetence, corruption, and greed at TEPCO.
It is again typical that you consider falsification of safety check records a minor issue. Sorry, but you are completely crazy.
I did. There is more, and it can be found by anyone interested. You just don't want to accept it.
I don't know how to fix the management issues. That does not in any way invalidate the point that there are management issues. If I knew how to fix them, I would try. One possible way might be to invite members of the local community to be present at the safety checks, and to be involved in safety policies.
I don't know any japanese. Thanks for the links anyway. I have a ticket for a (now canceled) flight to Sendai, I was supposed to go there tomorrow. I really hate what happened there and i have cried watching the news about the tsunami.
There is a lot that can be improved in industrial safety in general, and I think we should aim at it. One important difference is that the area around that refinery (i am guessing here, i couldn't read your links) will be safe in a couple of months, whereas the area around the F. plant will not be so for a very long time. Also, this thread is about the nuclear plant. I don't want to downplay the rest of the disaster.
Check. Maybe it is not totally corrupt, totally incompetent, and totally greedy, but it is corrupt, incompetent, and greedy. What are you denying here?
Check. You need active safety systems to keep it from blowing up. What are you denying here?
Check. What are you denying here?
Because it is a true story supported by abundant evidence. I quite frankly don't understand why you keep denying it. It is as if you are denying that the sun went up this morning.
I regret what I said about the engineers, but the rest is pretty accurate.
The evidence is all over the place. If you can't see it, I can't help you. The evidence includes, but is not at all limited to, falsification of safety check documents by TEPCO in more than one occasion (at least one including Fukushima). It includes failing to act (as you admit somewhere else, for cost reasons) on evidence of heightened tsunami risk. Actually, the plant was tsunami-proof only by accident, and not by design (in Japan!).
Also, in case you didn't know, a huge area around Chernobyl remains evacuated to this day. Oh and it seems a large area around the Fukushima plants will also remain evacuated for a long time. In fact, as of now, they aren't even collecting the corpses left there by the tsunami.
Oh and in case you didn't notice, when the quake came, with the subsequent tsunami, the plants didn't just benevolently forgive all the human errors. They left control as soon as possible and made a pretty huge mess instead.
So, which part of
is not supported by evidence?
One could even add the engineers somewhere, as propellerheads blinded by the love they have for their big machines, making up their own rules on what is acceptable risk, oblivious to the concerns of other people.
Technically, I may agree with you in the narrow sense that it could have been worse, and that yes, great that plant wasn't built with even more disregard for safety. But the fact is that this is a loose, and not a win, because the claim was that they would not fail, and that no radioactive material would escape. Yet it did! In copious amounts! The mitnse brouhaha shows that even the experts where sure the safety measures would not fail at all. Yet they failed! One hurray for the experts!
Nice. And I agree that it is really good that that didn't happen. But it is still a full blown failure. (And BTW the credits for that level of safety goes to those that oppose nuclear energy on the grounds that it is unsafe. Without them, the unchecked optimism of the engineers would have killed a lot more people by now).
You have lots of sock puppets today?
Haha, no. Not even one. I am good old rmstar, and post only under that handle.
It remains a fact that they ignored crucial advice. Hadn't they ignored it, none of this nuclear disaster would be happening.
The solution is to fix the risk management issues. I'm surprised nobody talks about that, although it is the fat gorilla in the room. Once that is done, yeah, go ahead and build nuclear plants.
Yes, so instead it is better to continue to run such a plant even though it is known that it is unsafe? That you suggest that this is the proper way to deal with this issue shows that you do not understand what is going on at all. Not at a technical level, and not at the human level either.
Yes, and the problem (for nuclear energy fanbois) with this narrative is that it is in fact a more or less accurate portrait of reality.
Reader beware: the site the parent post is linking to is a corporate pro-nuclear spin site. If you do not believe me, I invite you to read the old posts (if they are still available). You will see that their "facts" didn't carry too far, and that things got way worse than what their "facts" predicted. If you read the actual news from official sources (TEPCO, japanese government) you would know that the situation is in fact very badly fucked up, and doesn't compare with the relatively rosy picture the "MIT NSE" people are giving.
A nice summary isn't that far away
Haha, yeah, and please put the most positive spin you can think of on whatever you read. If you read "It's a disaster" you must consider that the translation might be defective.
Sorry, but it just doesn't work that way
What I think you are saying is, well, maybe it is a disaster, but they had a hell of an excuse!
That (i suspect willfully) misses the points completely. The reactor was not supposed to fail. Yet it did, and the results are impressive, to say the least. That a catastrophe that manages to make a reactor fail also severely hinders you ability to deal with the situation is a new thing we have learned. And that in fact nobody has a good plan for a situation like this is also suddenly in plain sight, although is nothing that wasn't known before.