Ah the old "it's all your fault because you live in a wealthy country." There has to be someone close at hand to blame. It couldn't stop at the shitty governments in south America. No. It can't stop at the overly powerful companies. No. God forbid. No, it has to be shifted until the person you're talking to is being held responsible because he walked past one of the above on the street one day. Why? because *random person in the first world* hasn't hunted down and shot the CEO of Mcdonalds? Because he's occasionally paid for services from the company?
So any transfer of money now makes you responsible for all evil done by everyone who touches that money from that point on? Are you responsible for rapes committed by that weird guy working at costco? If you hadn't given money to the store where he worked in exchange for that product you wanted they mightn't have been able to pay him which might have meant he wouldn't have been able to afford the van he abducted his victims with! YOU MURDERER!
There's good reason to shift the focus on to people who are doing the slash and burn. He didn't demonise them, he recognised that they have a very good reason to do what they're doing. And in the end they're the people who have to be helped if we want to do something about the problem. Going after the CEO of McDonald's might have the whole David vs Goliath feel but in this case beating the Goliath would do sweet fuck all. Another company would step in to fill their place, or 3 companies owned through the philippines would step in and do the same thing and sell on to a 4th based in the Bahamas which would sell on to McDonalds or Walmart or ten thousand independent little bars, cafes, restaurants and diners which are not part of any giant and easy to complain about company.
And the above poster also used a very misleading argument for the purposes of emotional manipulation. To use a weaponry analogy it is like comparing the potential lethality of a knife to a handgun.
What I meant is that if it ever becomes enough of a problem there are other options. Nuclear waste doesn't have to be a problem for thousands of years.
I don't live in the UK. Where I live we have a certain amount of gun control laws but they're not illegal.(basicly you have to show you know gun safety and get some forms stamped saying you're not insane or a criminal in order to own a shotgun) Our head of government didn't have to kept behind 6 inches of bullet-proof glass. Hell I have a friend who raised a bit of noise(a very small bit) with the papers after he kept walking up to him and asking the same embarasing question and trying to get an actual answer (gay marriage rights related) until one of the 2 security guards threatened to have him arrested. Do you think any joe slob where you live would be allowed to walk up to your head of state on the street? Granted my friend didn't get a straight answer but he didn't get put through 12 hours of questioning before being allowed within a kilometer.
So you're saying there wasn't a vast number of people who hated him anyway? If the grandparent were correct then one really pissed person would be enough. In 8 years out of hundreds of millions of people, not one of the pissed assholes amongst them managed it.
Authority does tend to be based on the threat of violence but in the case of your handgun vs the US government it's basicly spitting at a thunderstorm. Even if you and everyone you know stands spitting at the storm you still achieve nothing.
I get the feeling there'd be some way to exploit this system but I can't think clearly now... Make the bounty too large and you'll find inspectors bribing plant employees to create violations.
You seem to have missed the point entirely. That everything has a downside, neither are perfect. Solar isn't some magic pollution free bullet.Neither is nuclear.
Nuclear just happens to produce a remarkably small amount of waste per megawatt.
You really believe people will take care of their local reactor? Oh they will at the start, but then 10 years down the line, nothing's gone wrong, the local council is looking for extra money because the cost of maintenance has gone up but sure it's fine!just money grubbing councilors! nothing's gone wrong up till now! And I don't want to pay more taxes/fees!
And while I'm pro-nuclear I really don't like the idea of tens of thousands of pissant little reactors being maintained by Joe the plumber rather than a few hundred big efficient plants being run by properly trained people.
What percentage of generated power is lost in transmission? How much less efficient are mini plants to large ones?
As for uranium, they're doing some interesting work extracting uranium from seawater cheaply, which would give us all we'd ever possibly need. Breeder reactors aren't the devil anyway.
You forgot to include the cost of everything you have to have to make the system useful, batteries to run it etc, unless you're not talking about powering a home.
Years ago it could have been true that a solar pannel system wouldn't pay itself off, the cost of the pannels, the batteries, the transformers, the cost of labour etc etc added up to a pretty penny and could exceed the money saved on your electric bill over the lifetime of the system.
Now days though such systems are a much wiser investment depending on where you live.
A surprisingly high percentage of roof tops have more than adequate solar exposure.
...in vegas perhaps. for some places that have lots of sunshine and little cloud it's a good idea. Other places it's just a waste.
Distribution (the grid) is unloaded in the extreme because neighborhoods would be generating most of their power needs
Sure sounds good but how much more infrastructure do you think it takes to absorb and manage ten thousand pissant litte streams of power from different people? Who's going to maintain all the transformers, substations etc? and how much more work to deal with all this than power coming from a handful of large effecient plants. Sure neighbourhoods will be generating power, at midday when everyone's out at work (when the factories miles away are the ones needing the power) and then the good old reliable solar power isn't available in the mornings when people are turning on their heaters and having hot showers, or at night when they're turning on their lights and having baths.
Solar has it's place and sure it can generate X ammount of power per year but it generates it at exactly the wrong times for it to be useful.
nuclear plants cost $6,000 - $8,000 per kW of generating power
How old is your data? this sounds decades old. from a quick google: "the AP1000, will cost USD $1400 per KW for the first reactor and fall to USD $1000 per KW for subsequent reactors" China is starting to build it's own plants and the expected cost per kw isn't much higher. Technology hasn't stood still these last 30 years.
no operational costs
Ah so you're proposing those brand new self repairing systems? If a cable rusts or breaks it won't cost you anything, you don't need to buy parts or hire a professional to fix it, yep, zero opperational cost.
electricity produced by coal, gas, oil, or nuclear are all getting more expensive
true, true true, FALSE. coal, gas and oil are getting more expensive. Nuclear is getting cheaper in real terms.
Three Mile Island has not produced 1 kWh of electricity for decades but there is still a crew working at the plant 24/7/365
Citation needed. AS far as I can find, half the plant is shut down but the TMI-1 plant is still producing power.
If what you said held any weight then bush would have been gunned down years ago. But he wasn't. despite the vast numbers of people who hated him. Not one of them got a shot off.
You know how much difference it makes that you have guns? Sweet Fuck All. Your senator isn't scared by your penis extension. He has a security team who can use theirs much better than you can.
how much effort do you think it would take the government to frame a political dissident and have him locked in the dark for 20 years, simply disappear or "fall" down the stairs.
Personally I don't agree with the death penalty but for completely different reasons. It is of course not acceptable to have a death penalty where there is uncertainty as to the guilt of the subject. Because of that a great deal of checking and re-checking must be done. Court cases, appeals, more appeals. etc. and it still won't be utterly perfect but hey.
As a result it takes such resources to actually dish out the death penalty that only a few hundred people are actually executed each year in the US. With the time it takes to go through the process you're more likely to be killed dealing crack on the street in a given year than you are to be killed sitting on death row.
So it isn't much of a deterrent. You might get caught and given the death penalty but if you're in a gang you're much more likely to be shot by a rival gang member. The death penalty is so unlikely that it deters crime about as much as deaths by lightening deter people from playing golf.
You could solve this by lowering the standards, execute vastly more people. but there would be a price. More innocent people would be killed. If you wanted to make the death penalty into a real risk that might put people off committing a crime then you'd have to so dramatically lower the requirements for giving the death penalty that an insane number of innocents would get killed.
meh, where I'm living in europe on a prepay package I pay 20 a month and can text/call as much as I want for no cost as long as I'm calling the same network(everyone my age uses this network though). the 20 euro of credit easily covers all calls to people not on the same network as me. It's handy being able to call someone for an hour and knowing it's not costing me a dime.
Is it true they even charge you for receiving calls in the states????
no i mean humanity. we're using a lot of the easily accesible oil.True. On the other hand we're only using a tiny fraction of the enegy sources available to us. It's like when people spew bullshit about how there's only 100 years of copper left or 50 years of uranium or yada yada yada. There's vast quantities of just about everything, it's simply slightly more expensive to get at. As technology advances and deposits which were formerly not economic to get at become available the quantities available rises vastly. Just about the only natual resource we're truely wasting is genetic code. Wiping out the various plant and animal speciese is akin to drilling for natural gas in a situation where you have no way to use it and simply releasing it into the air (wait, we do that...). All that genetic code could be worth much much more in years to come when genetic engineering and cloning gets more refined.
Are there even any projects to collect viable genetic material from near-extinct species so we can hopefully bring them back later?
Given the fairly legit reasons average tech users have to believe that windows has a few backdoors installed for groups like the NSA to use(whether this is true or not we can't be sure but personally I'd bet on there being a backdoor) that militaries in other countries would have the sense to not use windows on their most expensive assets.
Ya but he mentioned nothing of the chance of rape at the hands of fundamentalist christians. Since catholic priests love the rape, or so the media coverage would tell us. How much video footage of muslims sitting at home reading the paper are you shown? there's a billion of them out there but all you ever see is are the rabble rousers and nutcases. Imagine if all they ever saw of america on their TV shows was Westboro Baptist Church protests,KKK protests and rednecks talking about how they'd love to shoot all dem damn muslums and George Bush. They might decide that Americans were all violent fundamentalist nutcases. And they'd be exactly as right as you are.
I too am living somewhere with similar union laws to the UK. Employers don't like them much and I know a few places where conditions improved when talk of a union stared but I've never heard of unions pushing non-members out. We have a massive (far too powerful) teachers union here which causes some problems but only about half the teachers in my school when I was younger were actually members.
Unions don't have to be the mafia. They dont even have to have many people running them. At one of my workplaces I was a member of a nationwide office workers union and the main contribution from the union was a professional negotiator when there was some disputes over wages. Which was all that was needed. He got a very decent deal too.
I'd just like to note that in my university there are second years who are 17(started first year at 16). You could, in complete sobriety, hook up with a girl in your class when you're 20/21 and suddenly be the same as someone who bundled a 5 year old into a car trunk and raped them. all because of idiots who believe that on your 18th birthday a magical fairy drops from the clouds and bestows maturity. I can think of 20 year olds who should be considered children and pleanty of under 18's who are more mature mentally than some 40 year olds.
isn't this basicly what many of the spam blacklists do? then of course you get people complaining because they bought hosting from a company which got blacklisted for nothing more than hosting spammers who sent out a few billion mails.
3% more each year would be a bit much but with improvements in breeding stock, feeds, etc each one does produce a hell of a lot more milk and meat than it would have 100 years ago.
There is a fixed amount of natural, life-sustaining resources in the world, of which we're using the most miniscule fraction. What's expanding is our ability to get at those resources cheaply or create aditional resources.
Do you not have wireless internet in america? Where my girlfriend lives there's 3 wireless providers within range, to connect you get an account and a router which connects wirelessly to a nearby tower. the bandwidth/latency isn't as great as with wired connections but there certainly isn't a monopoly and the price of wired internet is driven down by these providers being there. How are internet connections a natural monopoly again????
Slashdot Mirror
Ah the old "it's all your fault because you live in a wealthy country."
There has to be someone close at hand to blame.
It couldn't stop at the shitty governments in south America. No.
It can't stop at the overly powerful companies. No.
God forbid.
No, it has to be shifted until the person you're talking to is being held responsible because he walked past one of the above on the street one day.
Why? because *random person in the first world* hasn't hunted down and shot the CEO of Mcdonalds? Because he's occasionally paid for services from the company?
So any transfer of money now makes you responsible for all evil done by everyone who touches that money from that point on?
Are you responsible for rapes committed by that weird guy working at costco? If you hadn't given money to the store where he worked in exchange for that product you wanted they mightn't have been able to pay him which might have meant he wouldn't have been able to afford the van he abducted his victims with!
YOU MURDERER!
There's good reason to shift the focus on to people who are doing the slash and burn. He didn't demonise them, he recognised that they have a very good reason to do what they're doing. And in the end they're the people who have to be helped if we want to do something about the problem. Going after the CEO of McDonald's might have the whole David vs Goliath feel but in this case beating the Goliath would do sweet fuck all. Another company would step in to fill their place, or 3 companies owned through the philippines would step in and do the same thing and sell on to a 4th based in the Bahamas which would sell on to McDonalds or Walmart or ten thousand independent little bars, cafes, restaurants and diners which are not part of any giant and easy to complain about company.
And the above poster also used a very misleading argument for the purposes of emotional manipulation. To use a weaponry analogy it is like comparing the potential lethality of a knife to a handgun.
What I meant is that if it ever becomes enough of a problem there are other options.
Nuclear waste doesn't have to be a problem for thousands of years.
I don't live in the UK.
Where I live we have a certain amount of gun control laws but they're not illegal.(basicly you have to show you know gun safety and get some forms stamped saying you're not insane or a criminal in order to own a shotgun)
Our head of government didn't have to kept behind 6 inches of bullet-proof glass. Hell I have a friend who raised a bit of noise(a very small bit) with the papers after he kept walking up to him and asking the same embarasing question and trying to get an actual answer (gay marriage rights related) until one of the 2 security guards threatened to have him arrested.
Do you think any joe slob where you live would be allowed to walk up to your head of state on the street? Granted my friend didn't get a straight answer but he didn't get put through 12 hours of questioning before being allowed within a kilometer.
So you're saying there wasn't a vast number of people who hated him anyway? If the grandparent were correct then one really pissed person would be enough. In 8 years out of hundreds of millions of people, not one of the pissed assholes amongst them managed it.
Authority does tend to be based on the threat of violence but in the case of your handgun vs the US government it's basicly spitting at a thunderstorm. Even if you and everyone you know stands spitting at the storm you still achieve nothing.
I get the feeling there'd be some way to exploit this system but I can't think clearly now...
Make the bounty too large and you'll find inspectors bribing plant employees to create violations.
WOOOOSH!
You seem to have missed the point entirely. That everything has a downside, neither are perfect. Solar isn't some magic pollution free bullet.Neither is nuclear.
Nuclear just happens to produce a remarkably small amount of waste per megawatt.
Long term solution to waste?
We use it as fuel!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Integral_Fast_Reactor
You really believe people will take care of their local reactor?
Oh they will at the start, but then 10 years down the line, nothing's gone wrong, the local council is looking for extra money because the cost of maintenance has gone up but sure it's fine!just money grubbing councilors! nothing's gone wrong up till now! And I don't want to pay more taxes/fees!
And while I'm pro-nuclear I really don't like the idea of tens of thousands of pissant little reactors being maintained by Joe the plumber rather than a few hundred big efficient plants being run by properly trained people.
What percentage of generated power is lost in transmission? How much less efficient are mini plants to large ones?
As for uranium, they're doing some interesting work extracting uranium from seawater cheaply, which would give us all we'd ever possibly need. Breeder reactors aren't the devil anyway.
You forgot to include the cost of everything you have to have to make the system useful, batteries to run it etc, unless you're not talking about powering a home.
Years ago it could have been true that a solar pannel system wouldn't pay itself off, the cost of the pannels, the batteries, the transformers, the cost of labour etc etc added up to a pretty penny and could exceed the money saved on your electric bill over the lifetime of the system.
Now days though such systems are a much wiser investment depending on where you live.
A surprisingly high percentage of roof tops have more than adequate solar exposure.
...in vegas perhaps.
for some places that have lots of sunshine and little cloud it's a good idea. Other places it's just a waste.
Distribution (the grid) is unloaded in the extreme because neighborhoods would be generating most of their power needs
Sure sounds good but how much more infrastructure do you think it takes to absorb and manage ten thousand pissant litte streams of power from different people? Who's going to maintain all the transformers, substations etc? and how much more work to deal with all this than power coming from a handful of large effecient plants.
Sure neighbourhoods will be generating power, at midday when everyone's out at work (when the factories miles away are the ones needing the power) and then the good old reliable solar power isn't available in the mornings when people are turning on their heaters and having hot showers, or at night when they're turning on their lights and having baths.
Solar has it's place and sure it can generate X ammount of power per year but it generates it at exactly the wrong times for it to be useful.
nuclear plants cost $6,000 - $8,000 per kW of generating power
How old is your data?
this sounds decades old.
from a quick google:
"the AP1000, will cost USD $1400 per KW for the first reactor and fall to USD $1000 per KW for subsequent reactors"
China is starting to build it's own plants and the expected cost per kw isn't much higher.
Technology hasn't stood still these last 30 years.
no operational costs
Ah so you're proposing those brand new self repairing systems? If a cable rusts or breaks it won't cost you anything, you don't need to buy parts or hire a professional to fix it, yep, zero opperational cost.
electricity produced by coal, gas, oil, or nuclear are all getting more expensive
true, true true, FALSE.
coal, gas and oil are getting more expensive.
Nuclear is getting cheaper in real terms.
Three Mile Island has not produced 1 kWh of electricity for decades but there is still a crew working at the plant 24/7/365
Citation needed.
AS far as I can find, half the plant is shut down but the TMI-1 plant is still producing power.
and the sad thing is you really believe this.
If what you said held any weight then bush would have been gunned down years ago.
But he wasn't. despite the vast numbers of people who hated him.
Not one of them got a shot off.
You know how much difference it makes that you have guns? Sweet Fuck All.
Your senator isn't scared by your penis extension. He has a security team who can use theirs much better than you can.
how much effort do you think it would take the government to frame a political dissident and have him locked in the dark for 20 years, simply disappear or "fall" down the stairs.
Personally I don't agree with the death penalty but for completely different reasons.
It is of course not acceptable to have a death penalty where there is uncertainty as to the guilt of the subject. Because of that a great deal of checking and re-checking must be done. Court cases, appeals, more appeals. etc. and it still won't be utterly perfect but hey.
As a result it takes such resources to actually dish out the death penalty that only a few hundred people are actually executed each year in the US.
With the time it takes to go through the process you're more likely to be killed dealing crack on the street in a given year than you are to be killed sitting on death row.
So it isn't much of a deterrent. You might get caught and given the death penalty but if you're in a gang you're much more likely to be shot by a rival gang member. The death penalty is so unlikely that it deters crime about as much as deaths by lightening deter people from playing golf.
You could solve this by lowering the standards, execute vastly more people. but there would be a price. More innocent people would be killed. If you wanted to make the death penalty into a real risk that might put people off committing a crime then you'd have to so dramatically lower the requirements for giving the death penalty that an insane number of innocents would get killed.
meh, where I'm living in europe on a prepay package I pay 20 a month and can text/call as much as I want for no cost as long as I'm calling the same network(everyone my age uses this network though). the 20 euro of credit easily covers all calls to people not on the same network as me.
It's handy being able to call someone for an hour and knowing it's not costing me a dime.
Is it true they even charge you for receiving calls in the states????
no i mean humanity.
we're using a lot of the easily accesible oil.True.
On the other hand we're only using a tiny fraction of the enegy sources available to us.
It's like when people spew bullshit about how there's only 100 years of copper left or 50 years of uranium or yada yada yada.
There's vast quantities of just about everything, it's simply slightly more expensive to get at. As technology advances and deposits which were formerly not economic to get at become available the quantities available rises vastly.
Just about the only natual resource we're truely wasting is genetic code. Wiping out the various plant and animal speciese is akin to drilling for natural gas in a situation where you have no way to use it and simply releasing it into the air (wait, we do that...).
All that genetic code could be worth much much more in years to come when genetic engineering and cloning gets more refined.
Are there even any projects to collect viable genetic material from near-extinct species so we can hopefully bring them back later?
Given the fairly legit reasons average tech users have to believe that windows has a few backdoors installed for groups like the NSA to use(whether this is true or not we can't be sure but personally I'd bet on there being a backdoor) that militaries in other countries would have the sense to not use windows on their most expensive assets.
Does islam encourage the rape of children ? Well here's the description of what the paedophile prophet did to a 9 year old he had bought :
islam encourages child rape as much as christianity encourages smashing babies heads against rocks.
How blessed will be the one who seizes and dashes your little ones Against the rock.
Ya but he mentioned nothing of the chance of rape at the hands of fundamentalist christians.
Since catholic priests love the rape, or so the media coverage would tell us.
How much video footage of muslims sitting at home reading the paper are you shown? there's a billion of them out there but all you ever see is are the rabble rousers and nutcases.
Imagine if all they ever saw of america on their TV shows was Westboro Baptist Church protests,KKK protests and rednecks talking about how they'd love to shoot all dem damn muslums and George Bush. They might decide that Americans were all violent fundamentalist nutcases. And they'd be exactly as right as you are.
I too am living somewhere with similar union laws to the UK.
Employers don't like them much and I know a few places where conditions improved when talk of a union stared but I've never heard of unions pushing non-members out.
We have a massive (far too powerful) teachers union here which causes some problems but only about half the teachers in my school when I was younger were actually members.
Unions don't have to be the mafia.
They dont even have to have many people running them.
At one of my workplaces I was a member of a nationwide office workers union and the main contribution from the union was a professional negotiator when there was some disputes over wages.
Which was all that was needed. He got a very decent deal too.
I remember when I was 11, back when 16 or 17 year old girls were something to fantasise about. Not much as changed in the fantasys since then.
I'd just like to note that in my university there are second years who are 17(started first year at 16).
You could, in complete sobriety, hook up with a girl in your class when you're 20/21 and suddenly be the same as someone who bundled a 5 year old into a car trunk and raped them.
all because of idiots who believe that on your 18th birthday a magical fairy drops from the clouds and bestows maturity.
I can think of 20 year olds who should be considered children and pleanty of under 18's who are more mature mentally than some 40 year olds.
change the voting system. PR works much better anyway.
isn't this basicly what many of the spam blacklists do?
then of course you get people complaining because they bought hosting from a company which got blacklisted for nothing more than hosting spammers who sent out a few billion mails.
3% more each year would be a bit much but with improvements in breeding stock, feeds, etc each one does produce a hell of a lot more milk and meat than it would have 100 years ago.
There is a fixed amount of natural, life-sustaining resources in the world, of which we're using the most miniscule fraction. What's expanding is our ability to get at those resources cheaply or create aditional resources.
Do you not have wireless internet in america?
Where my girlfriend lives there's 3 wireless providers within range, to connect you get an account and a router which connects wirelessly to a nearby tower.
the bandwidth/latency isn't as great as with wired connections but there certainly isn't a monopoly and the price of wired internet is driven down by these providers being there.
How are internet connections a natural monopoly again????