Having said that, I wouldn't partake in an uprising at this point. Our government is bad -- there is enough unwarranted surveillance and corruption in government right now to make that a given -- but I'm not yet at the point where I want to participate in a violent revolution.
Agreed.
However, I am actively investigating moving to another country. Both for above stated reasons and for cultural and personal reasons.
I do wish, however, that there was a way to get the voters outraged enough to vote out all the losers in office and replace them with representatives who will actually try to make the U.S. a better place.
Well, I frequently vote libertarian, but I don't like who they picked for president this year, frankly. He's a libertarian-leaning republican, not the other way around.
However, it's hard not to apathetic when my vote has never been in a group that gained more than 3% of the vote.
I won't even go into Ted "series of tubes" Stevens.............. gak.
The FBI recently argued in a case that is still pending that "reading email from a server" is not wiretapping as it is "public space", akin to reading post-cards left on the doorstep.
See, they're not breaking the law. They're "testing" the law.
If it fails, they'll try it again some other time, in a different jurisdiction... until it sticks and then IT IS the law.
Hmm.. well here is a ranking of subjective "freedom of the press". These rankings are based on how often reporters are harassed or jailed for their stories and how much influence the government has on deciding what they can and can't report. Since this is considered a "fundamental" freedom (as part of the first amendment) it should be important to the US, right? hah!
1 Iceland 1 Norway 3 Estonia 3 Slovakia 5 Belgium 5 Finland 5 Sweden 8 Denmark 8 Ireland 8 Portugal 11 Switzerland 12 Latvia 12 Netherlands 14 Czech Republic 15 New Zealand 16 Austria 17 Hungary 18 Canada 19 Trinidad and Tobago...snip...
41 Croatia 42 Romania 43 South Africa 44 Israel (Israeli territory) 45 Cape Verde 45 Cyprus 47 Nicaragua 48 United States 49 Togo 50 Mauritania
Here is the "quality of life" index from "The Economist" which is US periodical that is very highly regarded by US Businessmen and Politicians, as being very neutral and well-documented. Here's the top 15 or so from the list.
You might note, near the top of both of those lists reside some countries such as Norway, Sweden, Iceland, Ireland. New Zealand, Canada, Australia and others also rank as very comparable to the US in quality of life, but much higher in freedom of the press.
So where would someone want to go? I don't know. Ireland? Norway? How about The Netherlands? Austria? They seem appealing these days.
I don't understand why more people are not acting in the US, why more people are not literally walking into every local government meeting and screaming long and loud for accountability from their leaders, pushing upward on the system every place they can.
Uhm.. hang on... Season 3 of "Lost" is about to start.
The Zulu nation overthrew the Brits in Africa, even thought the Zulu nation was armed with spears and arrows and the Brits were armed with guns.
Which they outnumbered almost 15-to-1 and who's leader was so arrogant he didn't even bother with proper battlefield tactics.
Japanese martial arts (well, at least some of them) were invented as a way for peasant farmers, who were essentially unarmed, to defend themselves against sword-wielding, armored samurai and ronin.
Whom they outnumbered something like 500-to-1 (and continued to be subject to for almost 800 years).
The only thing that makes it look so overwhelming now is that we don't have the advantage of hindsight to see what the weaknesses of modern armies are. They are definitely there, but it's hard to see what weakness to exploit when you have a front-row seat to the battle.
I agree. I think their weakness is their infrastructure dependence. They can't fly without gas and electricity. I think it would involve shutting down essential services such as electricity and fuel to bring a modern military down to civilian "street fighting" actions.
How many people would willingly destroy their city's infrastructure for a chance to pick a new government? Not many, unless things were REALLY bad.
I don't mean "you might be jailed for subtle dissidence" sort of bad. I mean "random people put to firing squads in the street" sort of bad.
Unfortunately, the "you might be jailed for subtle dissidence" government SHOULD be stopped. but it won't happen.
When was the last time someone "properly organized" a group millions of untrained, citizens into spontaneous, irreversible and potentially violent action to overthrow their own government "in a few days"? AND did it with sufficient surprise that nobody in power was aware it was going on?
You have a really shallow understanding of how this sort of thing works.
the military, as a unit, wouldn't be fighting "the people" as a unit.
It would be a nuanced war of "dissidents" versus "sympathizers" where the population was split... some cities would be primary dissidents, others might be primarily sympathizers. Neighbors may be split.
Fighting might spark from a heated political exchange between neighboring states or between neighbors, or a popular riot that was violently put down by police forces, in much the same way as happens all over the world, on a regular basis (and even sometimes in the US).
This isn't some drone in a tank fighting the other 290 million people. It's people who believe in the system fighting against people who think the system is broken and would involve conspiracy, dissonance, propaganda and many other tools beyond just "my rifle, your tank".
Thinking of it in such simple terms is silly.
HOWEVER, if one of the two groups is able to maintain reasonably strong control over the current military structure of the US, any violent conflict would be rapidly, conclusively and decisively won by that side of the aisle.
the US government isn't going to "declare war" on the people and such a simple-minded assertion is silly, prima facie.
But let me put it to you a different way.
The British Government "declared war" on its people in 1772. They were detaining people with no recourse, enforcing draconian taxes, making regulations about property that were completely contrary to the well-being of the populace.
However, many people were "sympathizers", siding with the British because of territorial allegiance, history or merely out of the belief that "to the victors, go the spoils".
Were the British unable to secure food or munitions? No, they weren't. Many of those fighting on the British side were neighbors and friends of those fighting with the Colonials.
If you simplify things that much, you make it sound silly and absurd. Study history. Read about how the French Revolution started (that's one of the most CLEAN CUT revolutions and still involved thousands of deaths). Read about some of those that were far worse in Latin America and South East Asia and read about the countless ones that have been put down violently, by force.
Have you ever heard the parable of the frog in boiling water?
if you toss a live frog in boiling water it immediately jumps out to saftey (this is your analogy).
The reality is more like the other way of boiling a frog.
Put him in the water when it's luke warm and gradually warm it.
He will sit there enjoying the warmth until he's been boiled alive.
There won't be 80 million people who suddenly, some day, say "oh man, dictatorship just happened this morning, lets fight".
If it happens, it will start, as any other revolution...
The french revolution was started by somewhere between 50-100 people rioting outside a prison. The police forces arrived to put down the riot and they simply out numbered the police. The police shot many of them, but there were too many of them.
Then the survivors from the crowd broke into a prison and freed the prisoners. (are you seeing this happening in the US?)
In the US, the revolution was spurred on by events like the Boston Tea Party. Somewhere around 45 armed men took an entire port, by force, and destroyed a massive quantity of government-owned property.
They then escaped anonymously and were not able to be apprehended because they were not recognized due to the extreme darkness.
Does this work in the modern world?
You're grossly missing out on the historical context of revolution. There NEVER is a morning where everyone wakes up and goes "damn, that's the line, I'm going to join 80 million of my friends and riot".
No, it always starts with a few dozen people who, over months, gain traction and grow in numbers.
I don't believe this is possible in the modern world in quite the same way. I think the frog in boiling water will be the analogy of future declines in freedom.
Maybe one day it will be so bad that everyone in the country will know someone who is being detained for "political reasons" without trial and maybe then there will be substantial impetus for revolution en-masse, but isn't that point ALREADY TOO LATE to save the framework of what we already have?
At that point, it has to be trashed and started over...
Well, actually, the number of soldiers killed is so small as to be almost insignificant in any real scale. Something like 50 (FIFTY) times more people are killed on American roads each year than are killed in Iraq.
I don't think we should be over there hemorrhaging money, but the death toll is hardly astronomical.
revolutions don't start with well-to-do and influential members of society.
They generally start with people who are on the fringes and are regarded by "authorities" as "up to no good".
The concept of a "mass uprising" is not a historical reality. The truth is that a small group of dissidents gradually builds momentum by stirring up crowds and having small tactical victories over the course of weeks.
That wouldn't be allowed in today's society of instant communications and global response capability.
Rebellions are started by rabble-rousers. Usually a small group of people get together and cause a big fuss.
In the past, a determined group of 50 people could march on a town-hall meeting and pretty much overpower the local authorities by force. This was the case in almost every society where rebellion was successful, be it revolutionary France, pre-renaissance Scotland, Hapsburg Austria, colonial America, etc.
If a group of pissed off radicals with guns entered a US city, there would not be substantial resistance to shooting them down.
You don't just suddenly get 40% of the population to take up arms against the country. It doesn't happen spontaneously. It's a bit of a grass-roots thing and our government is EXTREMELY good at rooting out grass-roots armed resistance.
"the people of the US" in this sense is a misnomer. They wouldn't be out shooting Jane Soccer Mom... it would start with that crazy hippie who screams about freedom and those hackers who must have been up to no good.
If they showed up on the steps of the capitol with weapons, what do you think would happen? If they weren't shot on site, they would be met by a well-trained force of anti-riot police bearing full body armor, riot shields, tear gas, mace and loaded weapons.
One of the reasons for the riot police using so much "non-lethal" weaponry is that there far less resistance to shooting at protesters with that stuff, but it's enough to put down almost any crowd, as violent political protests in massively corrupt countries like Venezuela, Nicaragua, China, Kenya, Ethiopia, Uganda and others have shown.
You simply don't have a pissed off band of civilians having ANY success against a large group of trained combatants with specialized crowd dispersal devices COMBINED with tactical weapons advantages.
Having worked in about 20 different environments I can share some numbers.
Again, this is a silly thing to base your staffing on, but since it's being asked, I'll answer... These are average companies... web presence, critical systems, but not entirely "IT centric" business.
Ratios are IT:users.
Help desk staff (answering phones) 1:1000-1:4000 Desktop Support (fixing windows) 1:100-1:800 Network Support (routing, switching, etc) 1:400-1:1000 Telecom Support (fixing phones, VOIP, etc) 1:1000-1:5000 Programmers (this is very rough) 1:100-1:1000
Yeah, but betavoltaics require isotopes with half lives on the order of 10-20 years, like tritium, not 14 billion.
Thorium is totally useless for betavoltaics.
You cited Voyager, but you neglect to mention that carried something on the order of 100 pounds of pure Plutonium 239.
I won't even begin to estimate how much that would cost, nor how difficult it would be to obtain, because it's not a natural element. It ONLY comes out of nuclear reactors.
In fact, any element with a half-life short enough to be a betavoltaic substance is going to be non-natural. You either have to bombard it with neutrons to get a weird isotope, or you have to pull it from a reactor as a fission byproduct... or something equally exotic. Ick.
Tritium is the most likely culprit because it can be made in reasonable bulk and manufacturing capability can be added as a side-job of existing plants AND it's only needed in tiny quantities to provide power for 20 years, but it would still make for ABSURDLY expensive batteries. I believe tritium costs about $100,000 per gram for research purposes and requires DOE approval to obtain.
already sitting there burning at the same rate underground right now
You clearly don't understand nuclear physics.
Thorium natural isotope has a half-life 13 billion years (yes, 13 billion).
Uranium's natural isotope has a half-life of 4.4 billion years.
Neither are "burning up underground".
Most fuel is created by modifying it to create less stable isotopes. Then, when you put a big pile of it together (and/or bombard it with particles, as in the previous article), it creates a chain-reaction that triggers rapid fission. This is VERY different than half-life decay.
You do, indeed, "burn" it up. I'm not arguing against nuclear power, but just pointing out that your post is pretty much 100% entirely made up gibberish.
Setting aside the fact that basically all oceans are outside national borders -- why they're called international waters
Yes, setting that aside.... uhm... because "international waters" begin 200 nautical miles offshore.....
have you heard of Enron and power "deregulation" in California a few years back.
Yeah, you can sell power to other states at market rates... neato.
In addition, are you aware of how large the US is? Do you know of any power lines that stretch over 1,000 miles between a power station and a home? The prices may be regulated, but electrical loss and electrical resistance do not give a rat's ass about in-state vs. out-of-state vs. international.
It is impossible to be more than about 1500 miles from a coast anywhere in the United States.
HVDC transmission lines remain economical, in terms of electrical losses, to a distance of about 4,000-6,000 miles. The longest currently operating singe transmission lines in the world are around 1,200 miles. Losses are not zero, but for the most part are relatively negligible.
Far more problems would be solved if some of those lazy social science majors would get off their collective asses and take some "hard" science and/or engineering courses.
I find this particularly ironic, seeing how you just blatantly misused any number of diciplines from electrical engineering to physics to geography AND probably economics and politics. America!! Fuck Yeah!!
Not all "nukes" are trying to replicate Chernobyl contrary to popular belief, and I don't see us running out of thorium anytime soon.
While thorium has slightly less transuranic byproducts, it still produces a number of radioactive wastes. I'll also point out this quote from the article you cited:
"This is a market economy so the economics will have to be in favor for thorium to move that way," said Kazimi. "It could take another 50 years for us to reach the level where uranium prices are so high that thorium looks attractive."
Bottom line: too many people. Conserve all you want, and I applaud you for doing so; however, unless we can reduce our population substantially, even the most efficient home times a few billion is more than wind and solar -- and maybe even nuclear -- can bear.
While I agree about overpopulation, electricity is NOT the reason for this problem, food is. The amount of solar energy reaching the surface of the planet is so vast that in one year it is about twice as much as will EVER be obtained from the all of earth's non-renewable resources of coal, oil, natural gas and fissionable elements combined.
Simply put, roofing houses with high efficiency solar cells would solve most of our issues. Areas of low sunlight coverage (which are ironically, mostly coastal) can rely on a lot of other things, such as hydro, geothermal or tidal resources.
Non-renewable fuels (Thorium included) are awfully nice short-term solutions, but are... by definition, non-renewable. They also have byproducts (even if they are slightly less noxious than what we currently use).
I don't see a huge number of people in the US putting up quite the same effort in staying childless, but I guess that's just a little too much to ask.
You DO REALIZE that in the United States, Canada, Europe, and much of Asia, the birth rate is below the replacement rate? You knew that, right??? Or is that one of those "lazy social science" things?
Being smug and condescending is fun.
But you really sound like an idiot when almost every smug and condescending statement you make is factually incorrect.
The tough and stringy poor people may have been common in the middle ages, but frankly, there is an almost exact inverse proportion between obesity rates and income.
Rich people are tough and stringy. Poor people are squishy and round.:-)
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Having said that, I wouldn't partake in an uprising at this point. Our government is bad -- there is enough unwarranted surveillance and corruption in government right now to make that a given -- but I'm not yet at the point where I want to participate in a violent revolution.
Agreed.
However, I am actively investigating moving to another country. Both for above stated reasons and for cultural and personal reasons.
I do wish, however, that there was a way to get the voters outraged enough to vote out all the losers in office and replace them with representatives who will actually try to make the U.S. a better place.
Well, I frequently vote libertarian, but I don't like who they picked for president this year, frankly. He's a libertarian-leaning republican, not the other way around.
However, it's hard not to apathetic when my vote has never been in a group that gained more than 3% of the vote.
I won't even go into Ted "series of tubes" Stevens.............. gak.
you do realize that colleges (mostly community, but also universities) work opposite recession cycles often.
unemployed professionals often go back to school when they cant find work. the numbers this year at schools i work with are already way up. :-)
oh yes, won't someone please THINK OF THE CHILDREN?!?1
The FBI recently argued in a case that is still pending that "reading email from a server" is not wiretapping as it is "public space", akin to reading post-cards left on the doorstep.
See, they're not breaking the law. They're "testing" the law.
If it fails, they'll try it again some other time, in a different jurisdiction... until it sticks and then IT IS the law.
meh.
The second thing is what country is better?
Hmm.. well here is a ranking of subjective "freedom of the press". These rankings are based on how often reporters are harassed or jailed for their stories and how much influence the government has on deciding what they can and can't report. Since this is considered a "fundamental" freedom (as part of the first amendment) it should be important to the US, right? hah!
1 Iceland ...snip...
1 Norway
3 Estonia
3 Slovakia
5 Belgium
5 Finland
5 Sweden
8 Denmark
8 Ireland
8 Portugal
11 Switzerland
12 Latvia
12 Netherlands
14 Czech Republic
15 New Zealand
16 Austria
17 Hungary
18 Canada
19 Trinidad and Tobago
41 Croatia
42 Romania
43 South Africa
44 Israel (Israeli territory)
45 Cape Verde
45 Cyprus
47 Nicaragua
48 United States
49 Togo
50 Mauritania
Here is the "quality of life" index from "The Economist" which is US periodical that is very highly regarded by US Businessmen and Politicians, as being very neutral and well-documented. Here's the top 15 or so from the list.
Ireland 8.333 1 36,790 4 3
Switzerland 8.068 2 33,580 7 5
Norway 8.051 3 39,590 3 0
Luxembourg 8.015 4 54,690 1 -3
Sweden 7.937 5 30,590 19 14
Australia 7.925 6 31,010 14 8
Iceland 7.911 7 33,560 8 1
Italy 7.810 8 27,960 23 15
Denmark 7.796 9 32,490 10 1
Spain 7.727 10 25,370 24 14
Singapore 7.719 11 32,530 9 -2
Finland 7.618 12 29,650 20 8
United States 7.615 13 41,529 2 -11
Canada 7.599 14 34,150 5 -9
New Zealand 7.436 15 25,110 25 10
Netherlands 7.433 16 30,920 15 -1
Japan 7.392 17 30,750 16 -1
You might note, near the top of both of those lists reside some countries such as Norway, Sweden, Iceland, Ireland. New Zealand, Canada, Australia and others also rank as very comparable to the US in quality of life, but much higher in freedom of the press.
So where would someone want to go? I don't know. Ireland? Norway? How about The Netherlands? Austria? They seem appealing these days.
I don't understand why more people are not acting in the US, why more people are not literally walking into every local government meeting and screaming long and loud for accountability from their leaders, pushing upward on the system every place they can.
Uhm.. hang on... Season 3 of "Lost" is about to start.
Can we get back to this later?
Yeah... that would be great...
Thanks for stopping by. Do you want some nachos?
Sorry, what were you saying?
Just because someone in power says "well... i know it's possible but, i promise we won't." - that doesn't make it OK.
In fact, that just underscores how gullible they think you are.
If it's possible, it will happen. That guy might not do it, but his successor might... or someone 20 years from now.
Maybe it won't be race, but economic or political or philosophical...
it shouldn't even BE POSSIBLE.
The Zulu nation overthrew the Brits in Africa, even thought the Zulu nation was armed with spears and arrows and the Brits were armed with guns.
Which they outnumbered almost 15-to-1 and who's leader was so arrogant he didn't even bother with proper battlefield tactics.
Japanese martial arts (well, at least some of them) were invented as a way for peasant farmers, who were essentially unarmed, to defend themselves against sword-wielding, armored samurai and ronin.
Whom they outnumbered something like 500-to-1 (and continued to be subject to for almost 800 years).
The only thing that makes it look so overwhelming now is that we don't have the advantage of hindsight to see what the weaknesses of modern armies are. They are definitely there, but it's hard to see what weakness to exploit when you have a front-row seat to the battle.
I agree. I think their weakness is their infrastructure dependence. They can't fly without gas and electricity. I think it would involve shutting down essential services such as electricity and fuel to bring a modern military down to civilian "street fighting" actions.
How many people would willingly destroy their city's infrastructure for a chance to pick a new government? Not many, unless things were REALLY bad.
I don't mean "you might be jailed for subtle dissidence" sort of bad. I mean "random people put to firing squads in the street" sort of bad.
Unfortunately, the "you might be jailed for subtle dissidence" government SHOULD be stopped. but it won't happen.
haha
hahaha
HAHAHAHAHA
"a properly organized revolt"
That, my friend, is a good one.
When was the last time someone "properly organized" a group millions of untrained, citizens into spontaneous, irreversible and potentially violent action to overthrow their own government "in a few days"? AND did it with sufficient surprise that nobody in power was aware it was going on?
Good luck with that one.
Sigh.
You have a really shallow understanding of how this sort of thing works.
the military, as a unit, wouldn't be fighting "the people" as a unit.
It would be a nuanced war of "dissidents" versus "sympathizers" where the population was split... some cities would be primary dissidents, others might be primarily sympathizers. Neighbors may be split.
Fighting might spark from a heated political exchange between neighboring states or between neighbors, or a popular riot that was violently put down by police forces, in much the same way as happens all over the world, on a regular basis (and even sometimes in the US).
This isn't some drone in a tank fighting the other 290 million people. It's people who believe in the system fighting against people who think the system is broken and would involve conspiracy, dissonance, propaganda and many other tools beyond just "my rifle, your tank".
Thinking of it in such simple terms is silly.
HOWEVER, if one of the two groups is able to maintain reasonably strong control over the current military structure of the US, any violent conflict would be rapidly, conclusively and decisively won by that side of the aisle.
OK. You're seeing things so black and white.
the US government isn't going to "declare war" on the people and such a simple-minded assertion is silly, prima facie.
But let me put it to you a different way.
The British Government "declared war" on its people in 1772. They were detaining people with no recourse, enforcing draconian taxes, making regulations about property that were completely contrary to the well-being of the populace.
However, many people were "sympathizers", siding with the British because of territorial allegiance, history or merely out of the belief that "to the victors, go the spoils".
Were the British unable to secure food or munitions? No, they weren't. Many of those fighting on the British side were neighbors and friends of those fighting with the Colonials.
If you simplify things that much, you make it sound silly and absurd. Study history. Read about how the French Revolution started (that's one of the most CLEAN CUT revolutions and still involved thousands of deaths). Read about some of those that were far worse in Latin America and South East Asia and read about the countless ones that have been put down violently, by force.
Oh bull shit.
Have you ever heard the parable of the frog in boiling water?
if you toss a live frog in boiling water it immediately jumps out to saftey (this is your analogy).
The reality is more like the other way of boiling a frog.
Put him in the water when it's luke warm and gradually warm it.
He will sit there enjoying the warmth until he's been boiled alive.
There won't be 80 million people who suddenly, some day, say "oh man, dictatorship just happened this morning, lets fight".
If it happens, it will start, as any other revolution...
The french revolution was started by somewhere between 50-100 people rioting outside a prison. The police forces arrived to put down the riot and they simply out numbered the police. The police shot many of them, but there were too many of them.
Then the survivors from the crowd broke into a prison and freed the prisoners. (are you seeing this happening in the US?)
In the US, the revolution was spurred on by events like the Boston Tea Party. Somewhere around 45 armed men took an entire port, by force, and destroyed a massive quantity of government-owned property.
They then escaped anonymously and were not able to be apprehended because they were not recognized due to the extreme darkness.
Does this work in the modern world?
You're grossly missing out on the historical context of revolution. There NEVER is a morning where everyone wakes up and goes "damn, that's the line, I'm going to join 80 million of my friends and riot".
No, it always starts with a few dozen people who, over months, gain traction and grow in numbers.
I don't believe this is possible in the modern world in quite the same way. I think the frog in boiling water will be the analogy of future declines in freedom.
Maybe one day it will be so bad that everyone in the country will know someone who is being detained for "political reasons" without trial and maybe then there will be substantial impetus for revolution en-masse, but isn't that point ALREADY TOO LATE to save the framework of what we already have?
At that point, it has to be trashed and started over...
That sucks.
Well, actually, the number of soldiers killed is so small as to be almost insignificant in any real scale. Something like 50 (FIFTY) times more people are killed on American roads each year than are killed in Iraq.
I don't think we should be over there hemorrhaging money, but the death toll is hardly astronomical.
revolutions don't start with well-to-do and influential members of society.
They generally start with people who are on the fringes and are regarded by "authorities" as "up to no good".
The concept of a "mass uprising" is not a historical reality. The truth is that a small group of dissidents gradually builds momentum by stirring up crowds and having small tactical victories over the course of weeks.
That wouldn't be allowed in today's society of instant communications and global response capability.
Oh bullshit.
Rebellions are started by rabble-rousers. Usually a small group of people get together and cause a big fuss.
In the past, a determined group of 50 people could march on a town-hall meeting and pretty much overpower the local authorities by force. This was the case in almost every society where rebellion was successful, be it revolutionary France, pre-renaissance Scotland, Hapsburg Austria, colonial America, etc.
If a group of pissed off radicals with guns entered a US city, there would not be substantial resistance to shooting them down.
You don't just suddenly get 40% of the population to take up arms against the country. It doesn't happen spontaneously. It's a bit of a grass-roots thing and our government is EXTREMELY good at rooting out grass-roots armed resistance.
"the people of the US" in this sense is a misnomer. They wouldn't be out shooting Jane Soccer Mom... it would start with that crazy hippie who screams about freedom and those hackers who must have been up to no good.
If they showed up on the steps of the capitol with weapons, what do you think would happen? If they weren't shot on site, they would be met by a well-trained force of anti-riot police bearing full body armor, riot shields, tear gas, mace and loaded weapons.
One of the reasons for the riot police using so much "non-lethal" weaponry is that there far less resistance to shooting at protesters with that stuff, but it's enough to put down almost any crowd, as violent political protests in massively corrupt countries like Venezuela, Nicaragua, China, Kenya, Ethiopia, Uganda and others have shown.
You simply don't have a pissed off band of civilians having ANY success against a large group of trained combatants with specialized crowd dispersal devices COMBINED with tactical weapons advantages.
I just don't see it happening.
Having worked in about 20 different environments I can share some numbers.
Again, this is a silly thing to base your staffing on, but since it's being asked, I'll answer... These are average companies... web presence, critical systems, but not entirely "IT centric" business.
Ratios are IT:users.
Help desk staff (answering phones) 1:1000-1:4000
Desktop Support (fixing windows) 1:100-1:800
Network Support (routing, switching, etc) 1:400-1:1000
Telecom Support (fixing phones, VOIP, etc) 1:1000-1:5000
Programmers (this is very rough) 1:100-1:1000
Server Admins (staff-to-servers) 1:50-1:250
There ya go.
Yeah, but betavoltaics require isotopes with half lives on the order of 10-20 years, like tritium, not 14 billion.
Thorium is totally useless for betavoltaics.
You cited Voyager, but you neglect to mention that carried something on the order of 100 pounds of pure Plutonium 239.
I won't even begin to estimate how much that would cost, nor how difficult it would be to obtain, because it's not a natural element. It ONLY comes out of nuclear reactors.
In fact, any element with a half-life short enough to be a betavoltaic substance is going to be non-natural. You either have to bombard it with neutrons to get a weird isotope, or you have to pull it from a reactor as a fission byproduct... or something equally exotic. Ick.
Tritium is the most likely culprit because it can be made in reasonable bulk and manufacturing capability can be added as a side-job of existing plants AND it's only needed in tiny quantities to provide power for 20 years, but it would still make for ABSURDLY expensive batteries. I believe tritium costs about $100,000 per gram for research purposes and requires DOE approval to obtain.
The flying spaghetti monster commands it.
He talks to me... seriously.
He told me to invade Tahiti... it's my duty.
seriously.
Supply and demand have not been followed.
Today, the demand for gasoline is about 18% higher than in 1999. Refined supply is about 8% higher.
Prices are 485% higher.
In which chapter does your Jr High School textbook put that discrepancy?
already sitting there burning at the same rate underground right now
You clearly don't understand nuclear physics.
Thorium natural isotope has a half-life 13 billion years (yes, 13 billion).
Uranium's natural isotope has a half-life of 4.4 billion years.
Neither are "burning up underground".
Most fuel is created by modifying it to create less stable isotopes. Then, when you put a big pile of it together (and/or bombard it with particles, as in the previous article), it creates a chain-reaction that triggers rapid fission. This is VERY different than half-life decay.
You do, indeed, "burn" it up. I'm not arguing against nuclear power, but just pointing out that your post is pretty much 100% entirely made up gibberish .
Setting aside the fact that basically all oceans are outside national borders -- why they're called international waters
Yes, setting that aside.... uhm... because "international waters" begin 200 nautical miles offshore.....
have you heard of Enron and power "deregulation" in California a few years back.
Yeah, you can sell power to other states at market rates... neato.
In addition, are you aware of how large the US is? Do you know of any power lines that stretch over 1,000 miles between a power station and a home? The prices may be regulated, but electrical loss and electrical resistance do not give a rat's ass about in-state vs. out-of-state vs. international.
It is impossible to be more than about 1500 miles from a coast anywhere in the United States.
HVDC transmission lines remain economical, in terms of electrical losses, to a distance of about 4,000-6,000 miles. The longest currently operating singe transmission lines in the world are around 1,200 miles. Losses are not zero, but for the most part are relatively negligible.
I find this particularly ironic, seeing how you just blatantly misused any number of diciplines from electrical engineering to physics to geography AND probably economics and politics. America!! Fuck Yeah!!
Not all "nukes" are trying to replicate Chernobyl contrary to popular belief, and I don't see us running out of thorium anytime soon.
While thorium has slightly less transuranic byproducts, it still produces a number of radioactive wastes. I'll also point out this quote from the article you cited:
"This is a market economy so the economics will have to be in favor for thorium to move that way," said Kazimi. "It could take another 50 years for us to reach the level where uranium prices are so high that thorium looks attractive."
Bottom line: too many people. Conserve all you want, and I applaud you for doing so; however, unless we can reduce our population substantially, even the most efficient home times a few billion is more than wind and solar -- and maybe even nuclear -- can bear.
While I agree about overpopulation, electricity is NOT the reason for this problem, food is. The amount of solar energy reaching the surface of the planet is so vast that in one year it is about twice as much as will EVER be obtained from the all of earth's non-renewable resources of coal, oil, natural gas and fissionable elements combined.
Simply put, roofing houses with high efficiency solar cells would solve most of our issues. Areas of low sunlight coverage (which are ironically, mostly coastal) can rely on a lot of other things, such as hydro, geothermal or tidal resources.
Non-renewable fuels (Thorium included) are awfully nice short-term solutions, but are... by definition, non-renewable. They also have byproducts (even if they are slightly less noxious than what we currently use).
I don't see a huge number of people in the US putting up quite the same effort in staying childless, but I guess that's just a little too much to ask.
You DO REALIZE that in the United States, Canada, Europe, and much of Asia, the birth rate is below the replacement rate ? You knew that, right??? Or is that one of those "lazy social science" things?
Being smug and condescending is fun.
But you really sound like an idiot when almost every smug and condescending statement you make is factually incorrect.
Hahahaha.
Uhm. It's called Fusion.
It involves converting matter into energy.
Net effect is that a few micrograms of matter is turned into pure energy which can (hopefully) be extracted.
Well, it's not practical in basement laboratory environments right now, but a few large-scale reactors DO get more out than you put in.
That's energy... not matter, which is consumed...
Neat how nuclear fusion works, isn't it? :-)
Your old sig is a bit ironic.
The tough and stringy poor people may have been common in the middle ages, but frankly, there is an almost exact inverse proportion between obesity rates and income.
Rich people are tough and stringy. Poor people are squishy and round. :-)
With a warrant, I'd think that breaking in is totally legit.
The problem is that PGP and Truecrypt, etc are unbreakable in any practical sense.
So other than sniffing his password (which I guess they could do)... they won't ever get that info without him volunteering it.
It's very sad that the evil corporations basically make 80% of the decisions for your oh-so-altruistic government.