The nuke will actually put out 1500MW consistently regardless of weather conditions
Theoretically - mostly yes. I don't know nothing about the environmental laws in the USA, but in Germany there are laws allowing only a specific maximum of thermal energy to be diverted into the nearby rivers - so in a hot summer the nukes can only operate at 30% or even less (like in 2006) - source)
Practically they are down quite often. They can only operate 92% of the time for maintenance reasons (same source). And even after maintenance they fail quite often. From the 17 or so nuclear plants in Germany at least one is down for security reasons at every given time. So even without a warm summer they are up at most ~85%, with a hot summer perhaps only ~75%.
So with an average uptime of about 80% and the 40% average capacity of wind farms stated by shermo nukes are still fifty times(!) more expensive than wind farms.
I have a different take on it. I think Marx was indeed railing against capitalism, but not against free markets.
I agree. To give an example: Imagine a current capitalist society and replace the management of the corporations by workers who were voted into that position by the other employees of the corporation. You would have something like cooperatives wich were still acting in a market.
Voluntary collaboration is capitalistic and leads to progress.
Trite, and not always true. Voluntary collaboration does not always lead to progress. Sometimes it leads to collusion that prevents progress.
Communism/socialism, on the other hand, demands forced collaboration.
Which can also lead to progress.
I'd like to note that, with the exception of anarchical systems, capitalism also demands forced collaboration. There are choices removed by force in any system that contains a legal system.
Exactly. For example, in capitalism, the individual is forced to work if it wants to survive.
And to GP's note that capitalism leads to progress: You are aware that the Russia that didn't even have electricity in most parts of the country in 1917 won WWII practically alone (USA entered the war in 1943 IIRC) and won the space race with Sputnik?:)
Capitalism optimizes for microeconomic efficiency, the authoritarian socialism of last century optimized for macroeconomic efficiency (for example east germany never once in its 40 years of existence had a growth rate of less than 2,5%).
Marx states that only a temporal all powerful all seeing state can crush away the minority of those few greedy individuals that control society by means of capital and use their power to perpetuate such 'statu quo'. Once the goal acomplished, such powerful state machinery would dismantle itself and vanish.
Yeah, that worked out great for Russia now didn't it. Those crazy people holding the power of the state machinery just said, "Okay, we've crushed everyone now let's just sprinkle this power all around to them to make them feel better."
GP talked about Marx' concept of communism. The communist theory practised in Russia was stalinist. According to Marx, the change from communism to capitalism would happen in the economically most developed country, which at that time was England. Marx thought that this would happen quasi automatically, given a particular state of economical development. Stalin disagreed:)
Very well said, thank you. While I think that the only just purpose of government is infrastructure, the only point I would clarify is that the only thing that makes government special is that they are the one company whose actions can not ever be accused of being criminal, from taking in the form of taxes, to the use of force to compel people to do things. Smith and many other Free Market supporters speak of the invisible hand of the economy. Government is often an invisible gun. In any argument that begins with "The government needs to..." should simply be replaced with "The use of violence is necessary because...". I think this would make many debates go much more smoothly, and also much more honest about what we expect the "government" to do.
You have to remember that Adam Smith's government was a different one than the (more or less) democratic government of today: Smith talked about feudalism and its constrains to society (and economy).
The key is that the Internet is Infrastructure. The tools we develop on it to organize ourselves are just Infrastructure. Open Source software, OSes and libraries are Infrastructure. It makes sense that individuals will sometimes collaborate in their own self interest to build common infrastructure, because ultimately it results in more benefit to individuals in the form of increased economic activity. If you're going to call the Internet Communist, you might as well also tar roads, bridges, water systems, sewage...
Many think it should all be privatized, but this is a fringe view and the view of the majority is that some infrastructure is best implemented as some kind of collective endeavor, and that this is fine and normal. Communism is just a scare-word to make you think that this is somehow not good and normal.
Interesting insight. The key I think is that what is defined as infrastructure not something objective, but is subjectively defined by the particular society. For example, in my opinion, water systems, education (including universities) and health care all are necessary infrastructure of a society, and so have to be controlled and owned socially. Yet, the water system in my town is privatized, the better schools are privately owned, health care gets privatized and so on.
What, do you think some sort of Utopian society can actually exist? Name for me one society which has not been "sick". Failing that, can you present a logical argument as to why one might even be possible?
Not everything ist black and white. To give you an example of effects of societies: In Germany, the amount of stress-related illnesses (mental breakdowns, axieties etc.) in the population has tripled in the last 25 years. That development coincides with the rise of neo-liberalism as the main economical paradigm in Germany. Thats a correlation, no causation, but I predict that, as the economical paradigm shifts again to center more on the human beings it means to support, these illnesses will lessen.
I spent my youth in former Eastern Germany, which, as you may know, had an authorian-socialist economical system. Because the people had way less stress during work, the stress-related illnesses were real low in that system. It's quite clear that the way a particular society is organized has an effect on body and mind of the inhabitants.
Mod parent up. People who want to raise taxes on evil "big business" seem to not understand that the end result is that those evil "big businesses" will have to fire people or increase their prices to remain competitive successful.
Big businesses employ big numbers of people. This concept is lost on most Democrats and populists that scapegoat big corporations. You can't just blame big companies for everything and expect that they'll ignore this and carry on!
And I think the concept of an income tax is lost on you: You pay them on corporate earnings. Which means profit.
Where exactly do you think the businesses are going to come up with the extra money? Unlike the U.S. government, they can't just print more of it. No, they'll raise prices, lower dividends, lower wages, and offer fewer jobs. FEWER JOBS. Does this sound like a good idea?
So, the government gets the money and then what? Burns it? Why do you think that tax money does not show up as demand on the (educational, infrastructure,...) market?
A small percentage of a lot of money moving around produces a lot more revenue than a large percentage of a receeding economy that you're busy trying to inefficiently nationalize into oblivion. See Venezuela for an example.
Do you mean the Venezuela where unemployment dropped from 17% to 7%? Where poverty dropped from 55% to 40% and absolute poverty halved in the last 10 years? The Venezuela that still has an estimated growth of 2% in 2009, despite the crisis?
(all the numbers are from the german Wikipedia)
...Unlike the auto industry where it can be shown that the workers are equally or better paid without unions and the end product is higher quality without unions...
I have anecdotal evidence much like yours, but so far educational science has proven your parent right, especialy in institutions where the student's assessments are used to rank and/or fire teachers.
How about Students, give students an anonymous evaluation form to put their feelings of teachers on them
Sounds good, but the students only know whether or not they like the teacher. That doesn't say much about the teachers qualities in teaching (as there is no measurable correlation between both items). A pity, because that would be a very easy method.
Go by Heinlein's adage that you can track all costs eventually to labor.
I think Karl Marx said that before Heinlein;)
That said, I fully agree with your post. Especially Software Development is even directly mostly labor costs. Makes it even more unplausible why employers often are so cheap with good tools like proper workstations when 1. the costs compared to the costs of the employee using it are insignificant and 2. the employer can maximize productivity of the employees with the right tools of trade.
They sell far fewer as they also are required to only sell higher margin cars. They haven't yet imploded. My first car was a 1968 Beetle. Now they are priced at a completely different market which is much smaller.
They are not forced, they just use other brands for that market (Skoda in the european market, for example). VW is doing quite well, in fact. They already made EUR 3.7bn this year (but are hit by the crisis too, of course).
But that does not matter, the point is that you can't just invent a causal relationship between unions and problems of the auto industry if the data doesn't even reveal a clear correlation. Thats unscientific.
Perhaps a better approach would be to look at the world wide recession in the early 70s. The economical context is similar to the present (minus the financial crisis), and most countries and industries were affected. Everything I've read about that recession shows that there was no correlation between the force of the recession and the level of unionization.
Dude, please. As if unions would have _any_ correlation with this crisis. So the finance sector collapsed because all these people were unionized?
Oh and as you are speaking of VW: about 95 percent of the german employees are unionized. In the same union. Thats 105000 of the 110000 VW workers in Germany. They work 34 hours a week, and have about 28 to 30 days of holiday a year (forgot the exact number).
The union is named IG Metall, if you want to google for these numbers.
To quote someone famous "testosterone causes homicide." if that is true then we have to work the aggression out of these people before they grow up and become repressed fiends hell bent on vengeful murder.
I don't know how this hypotheses is called in english, but it has been falsified about 50 years ago.
Please, there is a science for stuff like that. Read a book or two about developmental psychology before making claims like this.
Fifth, the _children_ rated their own behavior. We all know how good people are at rating themselves. In Germany, there was a study about teachers who had to guess the proportion of them praising or punishing their students. There was no correlation _at all_ between their guesses and reality. And these people studied that stuff for 5-8 years.
Sixth, the article does not state whether the researcher even tried to weed of other variables like aggressiveness of the parents (e.g. how do the parents solve conflicts, are they beating their kids etc.)
Other comments indicate that the mobile solar technology is probably not efficient enough (yet), so you could do your own offsetting. Not as sexy, but proven to be green: Just calculate the power usage of your mobile devices (including the inefficient chargers etc.). Then buy a small stationary setup for your home that produces this amount of energy. Either feed it back to the grid or attach a battery and power the lights in your basement with it or the radio in the kitchen. Or even your TV, if you have a small one.
Now all your mobile gadgets are (indirectly) CO2 neutral:)
Slashdot Mirror
This discussion ist most probably dead by now, but for the sake of future googlers I just want to add a link for a news post from today:Currently, 8 of the 17 active German nuke plants are offline because of technical problems. Interestingly this does not cause any baseload problems.
The nuke will actually put out 1500MW consistently regardless of weather conditions
Theoretically - mostly yes. I don't know nothing about the environmental laws in the USA, but in Germany there are laws allowing only a specific maximum of thermal energy to be diverted into the nearby rivers - so in a hot summer the nukes can only operate at 30% or even less (like in 2006) - source)
Practically they are down quite often. They can only operate 92% of the time for maintenance reasons (same source). And even after maintenance they fail quite often. From the 17 or so nuclear plants in Germany at least one is down for security reasons at every given time. So even without a warm summer they are up at most ~85%, with a hot summer perhaps only ~75%.
So with an average uptime of about 80% and the 40% average capacity of wind farms stated by shermo nukes are still fifty times(!) more expensive than wind farms.
I have a different take on it. I think Marx was indeed railing against capitalism, but not against free markets.
I agree. To give an example: Imagine a current capitalist society and replace the management of the corporations by workers who were voted into that position by the other employees of the corporation. You would have something like cooperatives wich were still acting in a market.
Trite, and not always true. Voluntary collaboration does not always lead to progress. Sometimes it leads to collusion that prevents progress.
Which can also lead to progress. I'd like to note that, with the exception of anarchical systems, capitalism also demands forced collaboration. There are choices removed by force in any system that contains a legal system.
Exactly. For example, in capitalism, the individual is forced to work if it wants to survive.
And to GP's note that capitalism leads to progress: You are aware that the Russia that didn't even have electricity in most parts of the country in 1917 won WWII practically alone (USA entered the war in 1943 IIRC) and won the space race with Sputnik? :)
Capitalism optimizes for microeconomic efficiency, the authoritarian socialism of last century optimized for macroeconomic efficiency (for example east germany never once in its 40 years of existence had a growth rate of less than 2,5%).
Marx states that only a temporal all powerful all seeing state can crush away the minority of those few greedy individuals that control society by means of capital and use their power to perpetuate such 'statu quo'. Once the goal acomplished, such powerful state machinery would dismantle itself and vanish.
Yeah, that worked out great for Russia now didn't it. Those crazy people holding the power of the state machinery just said, "Okay, we've crushed everyone now let's just sprinkle this power all around to them to make them feel better."
GP talked about Marx' concept of communism. The communist theory practised in Russia was stalinist. According to Marx, the change from communism to capitalism would happen in the economically most developed country, which at that time was England. Marx thought that this would happen quasi automatically, given a particular state of economical development. Stalin disagreed :)
Very well said, thank you. While I think that the only just purpose of government is infrastructure, the only point I would clarify is that the only thing that makes government special is that they are the one company whose actions can not ever be accused of being criminal, from taking in the form of taxes, to the use of force to compel people to do things. Smith and many other Free Market supporters speak of the invisible hand of the economy. Government is often an invisible gun. In any argument that begins with "The government needs to..." should simply be replaced with "The use of violence is necessary because...". I think this would make many debates go much more smoothly, and also much more honest about what we expect the "government" to do.
You have to remember that Adam Smith's government was a different one than the (more or less) democratic government of today: Smith talked about feudalism and its constrains to society (and economy).
The key is that the Internet is Infrastructure. The tools we develop on it to organize ourselves are just Infrastructure. Open Source software, OSes and libraries are Infrastructure. It makes sense that individuals will sometimes collaborate in their own self interest to build common infrastructure, because ultimately it results in more benefit to individuals in the form of increased economic activity. If you're going to call the Internet Communist, you might as well also tar roads, bridges, water systems, sewage...
Many think it should all be privatized, but this is a fringe view and the view of the majority is that some infrastructure is best implemented as some kind of collective endeavor, and that this is fine and normal. Communism is just a scare-word to make you think that this is somehow not good and normal.
Interesting insight. The key I think is that what is defined as infrastructure not something objective, but is subjectively defined by the particular society. For example, in my opinion, water systems, education (including universities) and health care all are necessary infrastructure of a society, and so have to be controlled and owned socially. Yet, the water system in my town is privatized, the better schools are privately owned, health care gets privatized and so on.
What, do you think some sort of Utopian society can actually exist? Name for me one society which has not been "sick". Failing that, can you present a logical argument as to why one might even be possible?
Not everything ist black and white. To give you an example of effects of societies: In Germany, the amount of stress-related illnesses (mental breakdowns, axieties etc.) in the population has tripled in the last 25 years. That development coincides with the rise of neo-liberalism as the main economical paradigm in Germany. Thats a correlation, no causation, but I predict that, as the economical paradigm shifts again to center more on the human beings it means to support, these illnesses will lessen.
I spent my youth in former Eastern Germany, which, as you may know, had an authorian-socialist economical system. Because the people had way less stress during work, the stress-related illnesses were real low in that system. It's quite clear that the way a particular society is organized has an effect on body and mind of the inhabitants.
For some reason, you are assuming that physical separation suddenly turns people into sociopaths.
Well, yeah, because thats proven. Remember the Milgram experiment?
Mod parent up. People who want to raise taxes on evil "big business" seem to not understand that the end result is that those evil "big businesses" will have to fire people or increase their prices to remain competitive successful.
Big businesses employ big numbers of people. This concept is lost on most Democrats and populists that scapegoat big corporations. You can't just blame big companies for everything and expect that they'll ignore this and carry on!
And I think the concept of an income tax is lost on you: You pay them on corporate earnings. Which means profit.
Can you people possibly be this naive?
Where exactly do you think the businesses are going to come up with the extra money? Unlike the U.S. government, they can't just print more of it. No, they'll raise prices, lower dividends, lower wages, and offer fewer jobs. FEWER JOBS. Does this sound like a good idea?
So, the government gets the money and then what? Burns it? Why do you think that tax money does not show up as demand on the (educational, infrastructure, ...) market?
A small percentage of a lot of money moving around produces a lot more revenue than a large percentage of a receeding economy that you're busy trying to inefficiently nationalize into oblivion. See Venezuela for an example.
Do you mean the Venezuela where unemployment dropped from 17% to 7%? Where poverty dropped from 55% to 40% and absolute poverty halved in the last 10 years? The Venezuela that still has an estimated growth of 2% in 2009, despite the crisis? (all the numbers are from the german Wikipedia)
...Unlike the auto industry where it can be shown that the workers are equally or better paid without unions and the end product is higher quality without unions...
wow. Care to give some evidence?
I have anecdotal evidence much like yours, but so far educational science has proven your parent right, especialy in institutions where the student's assessments are used to rank and/or fire teachers.
How about Students, give students an anonymous evaluation form to put their feelings of teachers on them
Sounds good, but the students only know whether or not they like the teacher. That doesn't say much about the teachers qualities in teaching (as there is no measurable correlation between both items). A pity, because that would be a very easy method.
Go by Heinlein's adage that you can track all costs eventually to labor.
I think Karl Marx said that before Heinlein ;)
That said, I fully agree with your post. Especially Software Development is even directly mostly labor costs. Makes it even more unplausible why employers often are so cheap with good tools like proper workstations when 1. the costs compared to the costs of the employee using it are insignificant and 2. the employer can maximize productivity of the employees with the right tools of trade.
This insane amount of state intervention spawns corruption in the production and supply of the solar panels, which explains such high prices.
[citation needed]
Really, I know that "state intervention == inefficient" is a popular meme in the US of A, but is there any scientific proof of your assumption?
or, to reply to myself, read this: http://news.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1067239&cid=26165263
have a look at http://news.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1067239&cid=26166351
They sell far fewer as they also are required to only sell higher margin cars. They haven't yet imploded. My first car was a 1968 Beetle. Now they are priced at a completely different market which is much smaller.
They are not forced, they just use other brands for that market (Skoda in the european market, for example). VW is doing quite well, in fact. They already made EUR 3.7bn this year (but are hit by the crisis too, of course).
But that does not matter, the point is that you can't just invent a causal relationship between unions and problems of the auto industry if the data doesn't even reveal a clear correlation. Thats unscientific.
Perhaps a better approach would be to look at the world wide recession in the early 70s. The economical context is similar to the present (minus the financial crisis), and most countries and industries were affected. Everything I've read about that recession shows that there was no correlation between the force of the recession and the level of unionization.
Oh and as you are speaking of VW: about 95 percent of the german employees are unionized. In the same union. Thats 105000 of the 110000 VW workers in Germany. They work 34 hours a week, and have about 28 to 30 days of holiday a year (forgot the exact number).
The union is named IG Metall, if you want to google for these numbers.
To quote someone famous "testosterone causes homicide." if that is true then we have to work the aggression out of these people before they grow up and become repressed fiends hell bent on vengeful murder.
I don't know how this hypotheses is called in english, but it has been falsified about 50 years ago.
Please, there is a science for stuff like that. Read a book or two about developmental psychology before making claims like this.
Sixth, the article does not state whether the researcher even tried to weed of other variables like aggressiveness of the parents (e.g. how do the parents solve conflicts, are they beating their kids etc.)
Now all your mobile gadgets are (indirectly) CO2 neutral :)