My Zoe on a PCP cost me £2k upfront and then £160 per month (electricity costs are negligible, under a fiver a week). I think that's pretty damn cheap for a new car.
Hmm, let's see if I can spot the difference between an accident mechanism which is very real and is the reason why nuclear plants spend billions on preventative and adaptive mechanisms and some made-up imaginative bollocks about solar panels that I'm going to cite for fun reasons of false equivalence. Why yes, I can. Because I'm not a complete idiot.
People really do seem to struggle with the word "conceivable", don't they? I know reactors have not killed that many so far (although I'll bet accident rates during construction are in line with industry average, not zero). But people aren't worried about an accident in line with historical nuclear accidents. They're worried about an accident that is *out of line*. A catastrophe. At which point, saying "how were we supposed to know? All previous accidents weren't that bad!" is really not going to cut it.
No no no. NOT "given past events as examples". I said "conceivably*, didn't I? We don't plan safety engineering on the basis that "nothing too awful has happened so far".
Why people are so obtuse on this point is quite beyond me.
A nuclear power plant accident could conceivably injure or kill tens of thousands of people and render large tracts of land off-limits for human use for centuries. That is *precisely why* great efforts are made to create safety systems that mitigate these risks, such as defense-in-depth, redundancies, over-engineering, etc etc. But pretending the underlying risk doesn't exist because it's been mitigated so far (well, the injury / death part -- large tracts of land are indeed off-limits due to nuclear accidents for centuries to come) -- that's just moronic.
I have absolutely no fucking clue what you're talking about
You really didn't need to explain that. It was perfectly apparent. I assure you, this is to do with your lack of intellect, not his lack of communication skills, what with everyone else understanding him very well.
By all means, when you get cancer, go find yourself an oncologist who isn't passionate about treating cancer. Find one who doesn't give much of a shit, secure in the knowledge that their lack of passion means they'll be dispassionate in their judgements.
Nuclear power... kills fewer people per energy produced.
FFS. If things go really, catastrophically wrong with a solar panel installation, how many people could it conceivably kill? One or two if it fell off a roof? Whereas, if things go really, catastrophically wrong with a nuclear power plant, how many people could it conceivably kill? Bearing in mind that no production pebble bed reactors are in operation anywhere.
Tilting at strawmen rather than acknowledging the actual safety concerns people have about nuclear makes you look like a shite imitation of Don Quixote.
The whole point of the fat man problem is to raise the question of whether there is, in fact, a moral difference. There is no definitive resolution.
In any event, you're rather missing the point of what I'm arguing: I didn't raise the trolley car to *defend* the doctor actively taking someone's life early in order to harvest organs to save another -- that doctor has behaved unethically. I raised the trolley car to point out that if everyone refrains from donating organs for fear of being killed by an evil doctor of this sort, then that ultimately causes more harm and costs many more lives. So we should: - create systems that guard against doctors acting on the incentives to take lives too early (such incentives are small in my view, but still this should be policed) - create systems that minimise the incentives (opt-out DNR does this by increasing the supply of organs, reducing the intensity of demand for any single organ. Increasing the supply of organs has other benefits too, of course) - not act like dicks and thus not shout about minuscule risks while ignoring much bigger harms - prevent more suffering and harm by being cautious about the use of close to end-of-life interventions, per Atul Gawande
The chance of any one of us being in a position where we might donate organs is low in the first place. The UK had 1,364 deceased donors in 2015, out of 529,655 deaths. That's 0.26% of all deaths, and 0.0023% of the population. Let's say 1% of deceased donors involved some sort of unethical collection: that would be 14 out of 529,665 deaths (0.0026%), or more practically out of 60m people (0.000023%). I say "more practically" because if we're assessing personal risk, we start with the assumption that we're among the living population, not the subset of those who will die this year. In the UK that's c60m.
That's what I meant by irrelevant. Each one of us is quite unlikely to die; of those of us who do, only a small fraction will donate organs; and a low risk of malfeasance means that each of us can be pretty damn sure that however we go, it won't be due to an evil doctor hastening our deaths in order to harvest our organs. Sheesh, people.
You want to worry about something: worry about pointless interventions being done to keep you alive when all it does is cause you suffering. That's a real risk, and that's driven by real incentives in the system: doctors' and families' wishes to do "everything possible" (partly driven by cultural conditioning that this is the right thing to ask for) plus fear of getting sued if you can't show you did everything possible. Atul Gawande has much to say about this.
Instead of shouting "pig" and "murder" like a dimwit who's never heard of the trolley car problem, you could on occasion try engaging what passes for your tiny mind in some actual hard thinking.
Amazingly enough, the risk that patients might possibly be murdered is not in fact the only relevant consideration for the ethics of organ transplantation, a subject about which, I am fairly confident, I know a shit load more than you. For example, there is some moral weight to attach to all the people who will die if everyone is imbecilic enough not to allow their organs to be donated on account of the kind of hysteria you have so amply displayed.
Modern stock markets do not enable any one buyer to know the motivations of any one seller. It will not in practice be possible to distinguish between the sale by someone who is divesting for moral reasons from the sale by someone who's going through a divorce and needs the cash and the sale by someone who has lost confidence in the stock. All a buyer can see is the offer to sell. Most of the time, it'll be one algo speaking to another, so no humans will be involved in the actual transaction to think about the rationales in the first place.
You are a lot more convinced of your knowledge of how this works than is justified.
You really *really* don't need to reduce all stock market capitalization to reduce demand for fossil fuel stocks. I mean, what you're suggesting would imply that a national stock market could not suffer a crash because capital would flow into the market to make up for local sell-offs. You imagine that a divestiture is an attempt to "depress the stock value below what it's worth". You're ignoring the fact that the divestiture is itself a price signal to the market and weakens confidence in the stock; yet this is the essence of how price-setting works! It is *impossible* to sell a stock for "below what it's worth" -- a stock is worth what someone will pay for it, obviously. The fewer the buyers, the lower the demand, and thus the lower the price.
The path you describe from public to private ownership via an orderly company buy-back as the share price declines ignores the real world, where declining share prices make existing stockholders really really unhappy, and regularly leads to CEOs being fired and significant re-evaluations of company strategy.
What difference does it make whether there's a distinct market for fossil fuel stocks or not? What are the practical implications? Sectoral performance is clearly a real thing; that's why you can find lots of biz and scholarly articles on just that, such as this one: http://www.mckinsey.com/busine...
The New Yorker piece is talking out of its arse. As aggregate demand for an industrial sector's stock falls, so does the stock price -- on average, and over the medium term. The whole point of a boycott is to affect *aggregate* demand. A successful boycott is one that manages to reduce aggregate demand in this way. The purpose of this story is to highlight the progress being made towards that goal for carbon-intensive power generation. Clearly, reducing aggregate demand by 0.1% will not be material; clearly, reducing aggregate demand by 50% will. Where the boundary lies between these two is a matter for debate.
Your analogy is really flawed. A better analogy is the introduction of new medical techniques. They are often cheaper, more efficacious, etc -- but they have to be proven out. In the process of doing that, we often come to the conclusion that the evidence base for the existing techniques was sorely lacking, to put it mildly. For example, anti-pyretics have been RX'd for 150 years for febrility, and we've known for 10+ years that this practice actively increases risks for patients. Yet anti-pyretics continue to be used in virtually every surgery. Or look at ERAS protocols, which ought to be standard practice but still aren't. Science does not drive medicine to anything like the degree it should, and the same is true for science and energy policy (to put it mildly).
Alternative medicine is much more like desktop fusion than it is renewables.
Seems to have eluded all my mates who work in the City, are distinguished economists, etc. Markets are markets, by and large. Fear and greed, supply and demand, gluts, panics, quants, HVTs, it's all there in both.
You appear to think you have a point that is very obvious. You are deluding yourself.
What irony? Seriously? Do I really have to spell this out? It's absurd to complain about renewables advocates not undertaking a holistic evaluation on the one hand, and then push for nuclear without acknowledging that it is *precisely* the non-financial concerns about this power source that have held it back. Whether you think the risks are mitigable or not, this remains the case.
Not to mention the truly mad suggestion that you could have new nuclear by next winter. Obviously, new nuclear takes many years to plan and build.
I just don't get why this is so ridiculously partisan, instead of being more dispassionate. Every power source has advantages and disadvantages, and we'll have a mix for many years to come. There is reasonable space to argue about whether we push the mix in one direction or another, based on weighing relative merits and challenges of different sources against our changing needs over time. Things like capital intensity, speed to delivery, baseload vs peaking, extraction impacts, carbon intensity, cost per KWh, waste generation and management, finance availability, regulatory restrictions, etc etc. Obviously, you can't do a one-time assessment either, as important factors such as cost will fall fast over time for newer tech.
Life is much better if your panties aren't in quite so much of a wad.
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Why on earth would you predict the same levels of traffic, though? People charge EVs at home and work. People don't fuel ICEs at home and work.
My Zoe on a PCP cost me £2k upfront and then £160 per month (electricity costs are negligible, under a fiver a week). I think that's pretty damn cheap for a new car.
Hmm, let's see if I can spot the difference between an accident mechanism which is very real and is the reason why nuclear plants spend billions on preventative and adaptive mechanisms and some made-up imaginative bollocks about solar panels that I'm going to cite for fun reasons of false equivalence. Why yes, I can. Because I'm not a complete idiot.
If I'm cuddling the kid, I'm not smoking. Just sayin'. :)
If only that were universal...
If a cancer doctor tells you "stop smoking" and you respond by saying "I don't have time! I'm gonna cuddle my young child instead" -- you're a muppet.
People really do seem to struggle with the word "conceivable", don't they? I know reactors have not killed that many so far (although I'll bet accident rates during construction are in line with industry average, not zero). But people aren't worried about an accident in line with historical nuclear accidents. They're worried about an accident that is *out of line*. A catastrophe. At which point, saying "how were we supposed to know? All previous accidents weren't that bad!" is really not going to cut it.
No no no. NOT "given past events as examples". I said "conceivably*, didn't I? We don't plan safety engineering on the basis that "nothing too awful has happened so far".
Why people are so obtuse on this point is quite beyond me.
A nuclear power plant accident could conceivably injure or kill tens of thousands of people and render large tracts of land off-limits for human use for centuries. That is *precisely why* great efforts are made to create safety systems that mitigate these risks, such as defense-in-depth, redundancies, over-engineering, etc etc. But pretending the underlying risk doesn't exist because it's been mitigated so far (well, the injury / death part -- large tracts of land are indeed off-limits due to nuclear accidents for centuries to come) -- that's just moronic.
I'm guessing he voted for Brexit, ie ignoring experts is core to his identity
I have absolutely no fucking clue what you're talking about
What a pile of horsecock. Science uses adjustments to account for systemic error such as in measuring instruments the entire frigging time.
To give one example from another unrelated field:
https://www.sfu.ca/colloquium/...
You people who think you know something about science. You really are pathetic.
By all means, when you get cancer, go find yourself an oncologist who isn't passionate about treating cancer. Find one who doesn't give much of a shit, secure in the knowledge that their lack of passion means they'll be dispassionate in their judgements.
Except it happened. Every fricking year. So this was actually crying wolf and a wolf showing up each time.
Nuclear power ... kills fewer people per energy produced.
FFS. If things go really, catastrophically wrong with a solar panel installation, how many people could it conceivably kill? One or two if it fell off a roof? Whereas, if things go really, catastrophically wrong with a nuclear power plant, how many people could it conceivably kill? Bearing in mind that no production pebble bed reactors are in operation anywhere.
Tilting at strawmen rather than acknowledging the actual safety concerns people have about nuclear makes you look like a shite imitation of Don Quixote.
The whole point of the fat man problem is to raise the question of whether there is, in fact, a moral difference. There is no definitive resolution.
In any event, you're rather missing the point of what I'm arguing: I didn't raise the trolley car to *defend* the doctor actively taking someone's life early in order to harvest organs to save another -- that doctor has behaved unethically. I raised the trolley car to point out that if everyone refrains from donating organs for fear of being killed by an evil doctor of this sort, then that ultimately causes more harm and costs many more lives. So we should:
- create systems that guard against doctors acting on the incentives to take lives too early (such incentives are small in my view, but still this should be policed)
- create systems that minimise the incentives (opt-out DNR does this by increasing the supply of organs, reducing the intensity of demand for any single organ. Increasing the supply of organs has other benefits too, of course)
- not act like dicks and thus not shout about minuscule risks while ignoring much bigger harms
- prevent more suffering and harm by being cautious about the use of close to end-of-life interventions, per Atul Gawande
Why would you think I would be?
The chance of any one of us being in a position where we might donate organs is low in the first place. The UK had 1,364 deceased donors in 2015, out of 529,655 deaths. That's 0.26% of all deaths, and 0.0023% of the population. Let's say 1% of deceased donors involved some sort of unethical collection: that would be 14 out of 529,665 deaths (0.0026%), or more practically out of 60m people (0.000023%). I say "more practically" because if we're assessing personal risk, we start with the assumption that we're among the living population, not the subset of those who will die this year. In the UK that's c60m.
That's what I meant by irrelevant. Each one of us is quite unlikely to die; of those of us who do, only a small fraction will donate organs; and a low risk of malfeasance means that each of us can be pretty damn sure that however we go, it won't be due to an evil doctor hastening our deaths in order to harvest our organs. Sheesh, people.
You want to worry about something: worry about pointless interventions being done to keep you alive when all it does is cause you suffering. That's a real risk, and that's driven by real incentives in the system: doctors' and families' wishes to do "everything possible" (partly driven by cultural conditioning that this is the right thing to ask for) plus fear of getting sued if you can't show you did everything possible. Atul Gawande has much to say about this.
Instead of shouting "pig" and "murder" like a dimwit who's never heard of the trolley car problem, you could on occasion try engaging what passes for your tiny mind in some actual hard thinking.
Amazingly enough, the risk that patients might possibly be murdered is not in fact the only relevant consideration for the ethics of organ transplantation, a subject about which, I am fairly confident, I know a shit load more than you. For example, there is some moral weight to attach to all the people who will die if everyone is imbecilic enough not to allow their organs to be donated on account of the kind of hysteria you have so amply displayed.
Oh goody. Why don't you tell us what proportion of donated organs have been collected through such unethical means? 50%? 10%? 1%? 0.5%? 0.2%?
If you can show it's above 1%, let's talk again. Otherwise, it's essentially an irrelevant risk
I'm both sorry for your loss and in awe of what you and Sue did.
Modern stock markets do not enable any one buyer to know the motivations of any one seller. It will not in practice be possible to distinguish between the sale by someone who is divesting for moral reasons from the sale by someone who's going through a divorce and needs the cash and the sale by someone who has lost confidence in the stock. All a buyer can see is the offer to sell. Most of the time, it'll be one algo speaking to another, so no humans will be involved in the actual transaction to think about the rationales in the first place.
You are a lot more convinced of your knowledge of how this works than is justified.
You really *really* don't need to reduce all stock market capitalization to reduce demand for fossil fuel stocks. I mean, what you're suggesting would imply that a national stock market could not suffer a crash because capital would flow into the market to make up for local sell-offs. You imagine that a divestiture is an attempt to "depress the stock value below what it's worth". You're ignoring the fact that the divestiture is itself a price signal to the market and weakens confidence in the stock; yet this is the essence of how price-setting works! It is *impossible* to sell a stock for "below what it's worth" -- a stock is worth what someone will pay for it, obviously. The fewer the buyers, the lower the demand, and thus the lower the price.
The path you describe from public to private ownership via an orderly company buy-back as the share price declines ignores the real world, where declining share prices make existing stockholders really really unhappy, and regularly leads to CEOs being fired and significant re-evaluations of company strategy.
What difference does it make whether there's a distinct market for fossil fuel stocks or not? What are the practical implications? Sectoral performance is clearly a real thing; that's why you can find lots of biz and scholarly articles on just that, such as this one:
http://www.mckinsey.com/busine...
The New Yorker piece is talking out of its arse. As aggregate demand for an industrial sector's stock falls, so does the stock price -- on average, and over the medium term. The whole point of a boycott is to affect *aggregate* demand. A successful boycott is one that manages to reduce aggregate demand in this way. The purpose of this story is to highlight the progress being made towards that goal for carbon-intensive power generation. Clearly, reducing aggregate demand by 0.1% will not be material; clearly, reducing aggregate demand by 50% will. Where the boundary lies between these two is a matter for debate.
Your analogy is really flawed. A better analogy is the introduction of new medical techniques. They are often cheaper, more efficacious, etc -- but they have to be proven out. In the process of doing that, we often come to the conclusion that the evidence base for the existing techniques was sorely lacking, to put it mildly. For example, anti-pyretics have been RX'd for 150 years for febrility, and we've known for 10+ years that this practice actively increases risks for patients. Yet anti-pyretics continue to be used in virtually every surgery. Or look at ERAS protocols, which ought to be standard practice but still aren't. Science does not drive medicine to anything like the degree it should, and the same is true for science and energy policy (to put it mildly).
Alternative medicine is much more like desktop fusion than it is renewables.
Seems to have eluded all my mates who work in the City, are distinguished economists, etc. Markets are markets, by and large. Fear and greed, supply and demand, gluts, panics, quants, HVTs, it's all there in both.
You appear to think you have a point that is very obvious. You are deluding yourself.
What irony? Seriously? Do I really have to spell this out? It's absurd to complain about renewables advocates not undertaking a holistic evaluation on the one hand, and then push for nuclear without acknowledging that it is *precisely* the non-financial concerns about this power source that have held it back. Whether you think the risks are mitigable or not, this remains the case.
Not to mention the truly mad suggestion that you could have new nuclear by next winter. Obviously, new nuclear takes many years to plan and build.
I just don't get why this is so ridiculously partisan, instead of being more dispassionate. Every power source has advantages and disadvantages, and we'll have a mix for many years to come. There is reasonable space to argue about whether we push the mix in one direction or another, based on weighing relative merits and challenges of different sources against our changing needs over time. Things like capital intensity, speed to delivery, baseload vs peaking, extraction impacts, carbon intensity, cost per KWh, waste generation and management, finance availability, regulatory restrictions, etc etc. Obviously, you can't do a one-time assessment either, as important factors such as cost will fall fast over time for newer tech.
Life is much better if your panties aren't in quite so much of a wad.