Even the nuclear agnostic in me calls silly on this:
"And Fukushima style cost-cutting for nuclear power won't ever happen again."
Designs need to be good enough that human error/corruption can't lead to catastrophe. This is a high bar, but every time somebody says "can't happen again," their credibility sinks.
The smart-ass in me ponders how nuclear proponents claim it is safe now (not like past designs), while complaining about safety regulations which (ideally) were put in place because of past incidents.
Insurance rates will fix this. They will charge people appropriately for the risk. "You will save X money if you get in this safer car." People will go for the cash and watch tv while they ride along.
I'm going to go out on a limb and say that there's more habitable space on the roof of my apartment building than in the whole rest of the solar-system off-earth.
The urge to quit Earth is the urge to dump our problems without fixing them. This will not help us survive in more hostile environments. If we send a tiny group of people, or even somehow hundreds or thousands, they will take the lessons our species learned on Earth. Long after a few brave adventurers have fallen to the same challenges we face here (times x), the many billions (or even if disaster strikes millions) of adaptable people at home will be muddling on.
Space exploration is an interesting fantasy. It may be worthwhile, but as an alternative to creating better conditions in the real world, it is a sad escapist trap.
Not disagreeing with "evil" here as far as excuses not to help others.
But I understand the Great Depression led to the largest rise in membership and influence in the Communist Party (when they were ignorant of and/or ignoring Stalin) and other lefty organizing in the US since the first Red Scare in the 1910's. Economic hardship led directly to the New Deal, a response from the powers trying to forestall wider unrest. I don't think people were more selfish, they were pissed and ready for change. Kinda like today. I think crime was way down too?
How about: The Disneyland outbreak was in fact localized in the unvaccinated (or those whose status was undocumented.)
"Among the 110 California patients, 49 (45%) were unvaccinated; five (5%) had 1 dose of measles-containing vaccine, seven (6%) had 2 doses, one (1%) had 3 doses, 47 (43%) had unknown or undocumented vaccination status, and one (1%) had immunoglobulin G seropositivity documented, which indicates prior vaccination or measles infection at an undetermined time.
"Twelve of the unvaccinated patients were infants too young to be vaccinated. Among the 37 remaining vaccine-eligible patients, 28 (67%) were intentionally unvaccinated because of personal beliefs, and one was on an alternative plan for vaccination.
"Among the 28 intentionally unvaccinated patients, 18 were children (aged http://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/previe...
I don't think it's hypocritical for someone to say they support paying more taxes for infrastructure, etc, while voluntarily donating money to private organizations working for the public good.
More like walking the talk: "I think it would be good if all my peers paid useful taxes, and I'm willing to give up cash right now to demonstrate my belief."
"Moral decisions should be made by individuals, not governments."
By the time any individual is presented with these choices they've already been filtered by many much larger institutions, including in this case government, pharmaceutical corporations, university research labs, various levels of scientists, (and maybe you should include pressure brought by the media/Slashdot), so I wouldn't single out government influence for wrath as if everything else is individual choice.
It isn't a couple in the back of a car who suddenly flip a coin to decide what hair colours they want their kid to have. There's a lot more people already involved, and the decisions already have a lot of outside pressure when it gets to potential individual parents.
The original "President Bill" was elected by lot and ran the country from a comic in the pages of Washington DC's City Paper in the Eighties. Great strip.
My fave was his environmental preservation policy which started with the question, "When was the environment least polluted?" Staffers then roll out maps of the proposed, "Vast Inland Sea." I still want a t-shirt of that.
Not one single life will be lost to climate change. Similarly, local weather doesn't accurately reflect change on a global scale. Climate change whenever it happens and for whatever reason seems likely to kill many, many people for many reasons. Drought, disease, war, flooding, heat, cold, hunger, etc. Such things have killed hundreds of millions of people in the past, we may just be speeding on the next example.
When we look back in 100 years we may well be able to map out quite a number of single lives lost, it will take time.
I think the reason people fear nuclear reactors is because of nuclear weapons. The public has spent more than half a century hearing about various ways to use real weapons of mass distraction to kill millions of people (or maybe almost everyone, depending on the movie). I think if we hadn't had bombs hanging over our heads, a few reactor accidents would be scary, but not mythically terrifying.
The rather creepy history of "atoms for peace" being an excuse for weapons programs doesn't help. The bombs and the toxic disaster-areas left by their manufacture are linked in the public's mind as a problem that threatened them for generations, and they don't see that its been solved.
Real nuclear power for peace may well be a fine idea, but it's saddled with the burden not just of it's own risks and expense, but of the whole Cold War nuclear legacy.
People ignore coal's constant risks (until faced with direct consequences like trains or waste nearby) because they've never been told to be afraid of a coal bomb blowing up the world. (Though one could say that Global Warming is pretty close to that picture.)
I don't know how nuclear promoters can distance themselves from peoples' fears of the weapons as long as the weapons remain an issue. Especially since they're still used for fear mongering. i.e. "I will protect you from the terrorists who want to blow up the reactor down the coast, or use dirty-bombs on our cities, or whatever, and maybe we need a few more of these bombs ourselves, oh, and how 'bout these new friendly reactors?" Tough sell.
"I suspect most people in late-1700s America would too".
If they supported the American revolutionaries, and if the "police" were British, I assume people would think hard about what they said when questioned about guys in their neighbourhood.
Anybody remember "Randomocracy?" Back in the 1980s William Brown's http://www.wmlbrown.com/index.... comic "President Bill" presented a candidate who was elected by random draw from the total voting population. He seemed to do about as good as the guys we pay billions to elect now.
I'm still waiting for his proposed, "Vast Inland Sea" environmental restoration project.
In Communist Canada we have rules about media coverage of elections within certain days of the voting. We don't have "the 1st Amendment," but the elections don't seem less free than the terribly broken examples in the US. (I'm going for duel citizenship so I criticize both.)
There are so many examples from around the world that could improve the American electoral process. If we had a system that reflected the majority in a sane way, we might easily implement some of them. Oh, wait...
As someone who's writing a non-fiction history book I wonder if this effects what I'm doing. I use google and the net a lot and find many little nuggets of information tucked away that I would have missed. A very significant thing though is the deeper I get, the more I realize how much information is not online. Vast quantities of historical old paper have not been digitized. Seriously, most of human knowledge is not available to me when I look for it.
If, as this article argues, individuals think they're smarter because they consult the net, I wonder if research (and researchers) and their books and work published using the net may also suffer from this? Are researchers (perhaps including the writers of this article, hmm?) stupider when they rely on google for their writing.
Google gives me a wide but shallow feeling while doing research. It takes a great deal of extra work to pull the tiny nuggets from google and find the actual paper sources that take you to yet new things. The internet is a nice start, but to get anything of quality you have to go deeper. And of course the collating and analysis and arguments don't come from the search-bar, that's still human. But if we look online and stop at what I now think of as just the seed of a topic, we miss the eventual mass of data that isn't there yet.
So, is internet research going to produce dumber research, and dumber researchers? Maybe more information will become available (can I add: damn you extended copyright, jailor of so much monetarily valueless culture.) But if a researcher thinks a quick search makes them more of an expert, should we all doubt their findings even more?
Just off the top of my head, I'd guess that rather than specific spending items, a lot of "corporate welfare" consists of tax-free benefits or breaks that real people pay for but corporations get as "incentives." (Insert debate on taxing individual people vs. taxing corporation people here.)
Not in any way non-partisan, but the old-school peace group the War Resister's League (founded back in post-war 1923) likes to point out a variety of expenses that stem from military adventures: https://www.warresisters.org/f... They include past military expenses like servicing payments on the portion of the national debt racked up by borrowing to pay for wars, or medical expenses of veterans (those people we said we supported but often seem to forget about as they need care for the next forty years or so).
If you set aside Social Security, which is supposed to be a savings plan not a tax-funded social program, then the military portion of the discretionary budget is substantial. It should be added that the War Resistors go on to suggest that people simply stop paying for wars. Simple? Maybe not so much.
If they're shilling for a pharmaceutical company, why are they pushing aspirin, which went out of patent in 1917?
Had to look that up – interesting stuff; German-spy conspiracies and everything! Who knew Edison's record factories competed for raw-materials with pain-releaver production? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H...
I remember talk about the laser record players. They found it much harder to achieve (warped records, etc) than they expected.
And I believe there were two video disk technologies. Laserdisks, which were like giant CD's with digital video on, and Video Disks, which were about the same 12" size, but came in a hard shell-case sort of like old floppy disk, and they were in fact an analog video medium in a grooved disk. You put the case in the machine and then removed it, leaving the disk inside (you never saw the actual disk). That technology still blows me away.
The two disk formats went at it for a while in the 80s, and then failed, with VHS tapes winning most of the American market until DVD's came along.
I'm sure different people use it in different ways based on their experience, but "blockbusting" was a tactic created and used by real-estate businesses, not "black people." It was neither invented nor particularly helpful for most black home-buyers. Real estate folks made a crap-load of money though off of convincing people to sell low in fear of new neighbours, and then jacking the price to others moving in. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/B...
Mary Shelly, failed writer of speculative fiction
on
Overly Familiar Sci-Fi
·
· Score: 1
It's not great, but interesting for a number of reasons. For one, it inspired dozens of "apocalype-plague" movies like The Omega Man and such. The other grim element is that everyone in book dies of plague (spoiler, except the Last Man), but all the characters are based on people in Shelly's real life who had actually died and left her alone – her husband, her children, friends etc. Yikes.
One of the most interesting things about the book though is that it is set in a Europe 400 years in the future. And Shelly, writing in 1820, totally missed the coming Industrial Revolution. So in her 2100 the only new technology is a few hot air balloons. One result of this lack of technology is that without germ-theory the plague of the book is a totally uncontrollable force with no hope of controlling with any medical science.
Of course forward-looking writers miss things. We can't foresee the future. And preoccupation with the events of today (like everybody you know dying) are a reasonable excuse for focusing on the story instead.
A difference here is that you seem to be proposing that others' rights should be restricted to prevent you from committing a crime. i.e. Clothes (or lack of clothes) might make you want to rape people.
The case in question (way up above all the curious "stop talking about free speech" spam) seems to be one where a person was threatening to break the law by hurting people himself, not provoking some crime in others.
I'm no constitutional lawyer, but I do see a difference between concern about this person's threats and your concern about your susceptibility to raping people.
I'd suggest perhaps closing your eyes all the time and imagining people dressed in calming clothes. This might be a less restrictive solution for everyone. You won't commit a crime based on your lack of self control, and the rest of us can get on with life.
Slashdot Mirror
Even the nuclear agnostic in me calls silly on this:
"And Fukushima style cost-cutting for nuclear power won't ever happen again."
Designs need to be good enough that human error/corruption can't lead to catastrophe. This is a high bar, but every time somebody says "can't happen again," their credibility sinks.
The smart-ass in me ponders how nuclear proponents claim it is safe now (not like past designs), while complaining about safety regulations which (ideally) were put in place because of past incidents.
Insurance rates will fix this. They will charge people appropriately for the risk. "You will save X money if you get in this safer car." People will go for the cash and watch tv while they ride along.
I'm going to go out on a limb and say that there's more habitable space on the roof of my apartment building than in the whole rest of the solar-system off-earth.
The urge to quit Earth is the urge to dump our problems without fixing them. This will not help us survive in more hostile environments. If we send a tiny group of people, or even somehow hundreds or thousands, they will take the lessons our species learned on Earth. Long after a few brave adventurers have fallen to the same challenges we face here (times x), the many billions (or even if disaster strikes millions) of adaptable people at home will be muddling on.
Space exploration is an interesting fantasy. It may be worthwhile, but as an alternative to creating better conditions in the real world, it is a sad escapist trap.
Not disagreeing with "evil" here as far as excuses not to help others.
But I understand the Great Depression led to the largest rise in membership and influence in the Communist Party (when they were ignorant of and/or ignoring Stalin) and other lefty organizing in the US since the first Red Scare in the 1910's. Economic hardship led directly to the New Deal, a response from the powers trying to forestall wider unrest. I don't think people were more selfish, they were pissed and ready for change. Kinda like today. I think crime was way down too?
Broke my link, sorry:
http://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/previe...
How about: The Disneyland outbreak was in fact localized in the unvaccinated (or those whose status was undocumented.)
"Among the 110 California patients, 49 (45%) were unvaccinated; five (5%) had 1 dose of measles-containing vaccine, seven (6%) had 2 doses, one (1%) had 3 doses, 47 (43%) had unknown or undocumented vaccination status, and one (1%) had immunoglobulin G seropositivity documented, which indicates prior vaccination or measles infection at an undetermined time.
"Twelve of the unvaccinated patients were infants too young to be vaccinated. Among the 37 remaining vaccine-eligible patients, 28 (67%) were intentionally unvaccinated because of personal beliefs, and one was on an alternative plan for vaccination.
"Among the 28 intentionally unvaccinated patients, 18 were children (aged http://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/previe...
I don't think it's hypocritical for someone to say they support paying more taxes for infrastructure, etc, while voluntarily donating money to private organizations working for the public good.
More like walking the talk: "I think it would be good if all my peers paid useful taxes, and I'm willing to give up cash right now to demonstrate my belief."
"Moral decisions should be made by individuals, not governments."
By the time any individual is presented with these choices they've already been filtered by many much larger institutions, including in this case government, pharmaceutical corporations, university research labs, various levels of scientists, (and maybe you should include pressure brought by the media/Slashdot), so I wouldn't single out government influence for wrath as if everything else is individual choice.
It isn't a couple in the back of a car who suddenly flip a coin to decide what hair colours they want their kid to have. There's a lot more people already involved, and the decisions already have a lot of outside pressure when it gets to potential individual parents.
Randomocracy! Your time has come up!
The original "President Bill" was elected by lot and ran the country from a comic in the pages of Washington DC's City Paper in the Eighties. Great strip.
My fave was his environmental preservation policy which started with the question, "When was the environment least polluted?" Staffers then roll out maps of the proposed, "Vast Inland Sea." I still want a t-shirt of that.
http://www.wmlbrown.com/wmlbpb...
If somebody starts to shit graphene, they'll be rich. If it's survivable.
Not one single life will be lost to climate change. Similarly, local weather doesn't accurately reflect change on a global scale. Climate change whenever it happens and for whatever reason seems likely to kill many, many people for many reasons. Drought, disease, war, flooding, heat, cold, hunger, etc. Such things have killed hundreds of millions of people in the past, we may just be speeding on the next example.
When we look back in 100 years we may well be able to map out quite a number of single lives lost, it will take time.
I think the reason people fear nuclear reactors is because of nuclear weapons. The public has spent more than half a century hearing about various ways to use real weapons of mass distraction to kill millions of people (or maybe almost everyone, depending on the movie). I think if we hadn't had bombs hanging over our heads, a few reactor accidents would be scary, but not mythically terrifying.
The rather creepy history of "atoms for peace" being an excuse for weapons programs doesn't help. The bombs and the toxic disaster-areas left by their manufacture are linked in the public's mind as a problem that threatened them for generations, and they don't see that its been solved.
Real nuclear power for peace may well be a fine idea, but it's saddled with the burden not just of it's own risks and expense, but of the whole Cold War nuclear legacy.
People ignore coal's constant risks (until faced with direct consequences like trains or waste nearby) because they've never been told to be afraid of a coal bomb blowing up the world. (Though one could say that Global Warming is pretty close to that picture.)
I don't know how nuclear promoters can distance themselves from peoples' fears of the weapons as long as the weapons remain an issue. Especially since they're still used for fear mongering. i.e. "I will protect you from the terrorists who want to blow up the reactor down the coast, or use dirty-bombs on our cities, or whatever, and maybe we need a few more of these bombs ourselves, oh, and how 'bout these new friendly reactors?" Tough sell.
"I suspect most people in late-1700s America would too".
If they supported the American revolutionaries, and if the "police" were British, I assume people would think hard about what they said when questioned about guys in their neighbourhood.
Anybody remember "Randomocracy?" Back in the 1980s William Brown's http://www.wmlbrown.com/index.... comic "President Bill" presented a candidate who was elected by random draw from the total voting population. He seemed to do about as good as the guys we pay billions to elect now.
I'm still waiting for his proposed, "Vast Inland Sea" environmental restoration project.
In Communist Canada we have rules about media coverage of elections within certain days of the voting. We don't have "the 1st Amendment," but the elections don't seem less free than the terribly broken examples in the US. (I'm going for duel citizenship so I criticize both.)
There are so many examples from around the world that could improve the American electoral process. If we had a system that reflected the majority in a sane way, we might easily implement some of them. Oh, wait...
As someone who's writing a non-fiction history book I wonder if this effects what I'm doing. I use google and the net a lot and find many little nuggets of information tucked away that I would have missed. A very significant thing though is the deeper I get, the more I realize how much information is not online. Vast quantities of historical old paper have not been digitized. Seriously, most of human knowledge is not available to me when I look for it.
If, as this article argues, individuals think they're smarter because they consult the net, I wonder if research (and researchers) and their books and work published using the net may also suffer from this? Are researchers (perhaps including the writers of this article, hmm?) stupider when they rely on google for their writing.
Google gives me a wide but shallow feeling while doing research. It takes a great deal of extra work to pull the tiny nuggets from google and find the actual paper sources that take you to yet new things. The internet is a nice start, but to get anything of quality you have to go deeper. And of course the collating and analysis and arguments don't come from the search-bar, that's still human. But if we look online and stop at what I now think of as just the seed of a topic, we miss the eventual mass of data that isn't there yet.
So, is internet research going to produce dumber research, and dumber researchers? Maybe more information will become available (can I add: damn you extended copyright, jailor of so much monetarily valueless culture.) But if a researcher thinks a quick search makes them more of an expert, should we all doubt their findings even more?
(Dumb/clever closer: "Google that question.")
Just off the top of my head, I'd guess that rather than specific spending items, a lot of "corporate welfare" consists of tax-free benefits or breaks that real people pay for but corporations get as "incentives." (Insert debate on taxing individual people vs. taxing corporation people here.)
Not in any way non-partisan, but the old-school peace group the War Resister's League (founded back in post-war 1923) likes to point out a variety of expenses that stem from military adventures: https://www.warresisters.org/f... They include past military expenses like servicing payments on the portion of the national debt racked up by borrowing to pay for wars, or medical expenses of veterans (those people we said we supported but often seem to forget about as they need care for the next forty years or so).
If you set aside Social Security, which is supposed to be a savings plan not a tax-funded social program, then the military portion of the discretionary budget is substantial. It should be added that the War Resistors go on to suggest that people simply stop paying for wars. Simple? Maybe not so much.
If they're shilling for a pharmaceutical company, why are they pushing aspirin, which went out of patent in 1917?
Had to look that up – interesting stuff; German-spy conspiracies and everything! Who knew Edison's record factories competed for raw-materials with pain-releaver production? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H...
You won't change your mind about climate change until the Arctic is "ice free"?
I'm in favour of considering its merits well before that.
"Real problems are those that can only be solved with violence."
Really? Literally?
I remember talk about the laser record players. They found it much harder to achieve (warped records, etc) than they expected.
And I believe there were two video disk technologies. Laserdisks, which were like giant CD's with digital video on, and Video Disks, which were about the same 12" size, but came in a hard shell-case sort of like old floppy disk, and they were in fact an analog video medium in a grooved disk. You put the case in the machine and then removed it, leaving the disk inside (you never saw the actual disk). That technology still blows me away.
The two disk formats went at it for a while in the 80s, and then failed, with VHS tapes winning most of the American market until DVD's came along.
I'm sure different people use it in different ways based on their experience, but "blockbusting" was a tactic created and used by real-estate businesses, not "black people." It was neither invented nor particularly helpful for most black home-buyers. Real estate folks made a crap-load of money though off of convincing people to sell low in fear of new neighbours, and then jacking the price to others moving in. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/B...
My favourite example of missing future changes is Mary Shelly's other book, The Last Man (1826). http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T...
It's not great, but interesting for a number of reasons. For one, it inspired dozens of "apocalype-plague" movies like The Omega Man and such. The other grim element is that everyone in book dies of plague (spoiler, except the Last Man), but all the characters are based on people in Shelly's real life who had actually died and left her alone – her husband, her children, friends etc. Yikes.
One of the most interesting things about the book though is that it is set in a Europe 400 years in the future. And Shelly, writing in 1820, totally missed the coming Industrial Revolution. So in her 2100 the only new technology is a few hot air balloons. One result of this lack of technology is that without germ-theory the plague of the book is a totally uncontrollable force with no hope of controlling with any medical science.
Of course forward-looking writers miss things. We can't foresee the future. And preoccupation with the events of today (like everybody you know dying) are a reasonable excuse for focusing on the story instead.
A difference here is that you seem to be proposing that others' rights should be restricted to prevent you from committing a crime. i.e. Clothes (or lack of clothes) might make you want to rape people.
The case in question (way up above all the curious "stop talking about free speech" spam) seems to be one where a person was threatening to break the law by hurting people himself, not provoking some crime in others.
I'm no constitutional lawyer, but I do see a difference between concern about this person's threats and your concern about your susceptibility to raping people.
I'd suggest perhaps closing your eyes all the time and imagining people dressed in calming clothes. This might be a less restrictive solution for everyone. You won't commit a crime based on your lack of self control, and the rest of us can get on with life.
Will there be more spam now?
Imagine if there was a wind-turbine on every billboard. We'd be done. (And they'd pay for themselves.)