"Fundamental principle of market economics: you have to take in at least as much as you spend."
Erm, not actually true for insurance. Insurers typically do not get as much from premiums as they spend on claims (losses plus expenses plus commissions) -- ie they make a loss on underwriting. They still make a margin because of the returns on their investments of the cash that insurees pay them (policyholder surplus and premium / loss reserves).
Congratulations: yours must surely be the dumbest post in the thread, and it makes it all the better that you think you're so damn clever.
Rationing, which you decry as a terrible evil that costs a fortune and requires endless bureaucrats to run, is conceptually the exact same thing as insurers' exclusions. The main differences between the US and the UK health systems in this regard is that in the US, management costs are higher (the NHS is notoriously under-managed, despite what you and the Daily Mail say) and individuals are much more likely to be refused coverage for treatment. Oh whoops, I forgot one other difference: individuals can be refused insurance, or only offered very expensive insurance in the US, resulting in 40m who have no insurance, whereas in the UK everyone is covered. So the UK delivers more care to more people for less money.
But dammit, the *whole frigging point* of insurance is to pool risk! Insurance is a method of pooling risk among individuals and over time, as a means of managing cashflow. If insurers are allowed to differentiate too extensively between customers on the basis of the risk posed, then eventually there becomes no point in having insurance at all -- you might as well just put the money in savings or investments instead.
You don't honestly think you could win this war if only the military were allowed free rein, do you? You're fighting a guerilla war and your rate of killing non-combatants is pretty high already -- raising that proportion in order to increase the number of guerillas you kill doesn't seem like a winning proposition. Most of the people you're fighting took up arms after you invaded, and large numbers of them did so because you invaded. They still are a smallish proportion of the total fighting age population -- what are you going to do when they become, say, 30% of the population? Kill them all? You might get tactical success (ie no-one shooting at you anymore), but you will have failed in your stated strategic objective (make the country safe).
Convoys Two dozen soldiers interviewed said that this callousness toward Iraqi civilians was particularly evident in the operation of supply convoys--operations in which they participated. These convoys are the arteries that sustain the occupation, ferrying items such as water, mail, maintenance parts, sewage, food and fuel across Iraq. And these strings of tractor-trailers, operated by KBR (formerly Kellogg, Brown & Root) and other private contractors, required daily protection by the US military. Typically, according to these interviewees, supply convoys consisted of twenty to thirty trucks stretching half a mile down the road, with a Humvee military escort in front and back and at least one more in the center. Soldiers and marines also sometimes accompanied the drivers in the cabs of the tractor-trailers.
These convoys, ubiquitous in Iraq, were also, to many Iraqis, sources of wanton destruction.
According to descriptions culled from interviews with thirty-eight veterans who rode in convoys--guarding such runs as Kuwait to Nasiriya, Nasiriya to Baghdad and Balad to Kirkuk--when these columns of vehicles left their heavily fortified compounds they usually roared down the main supply routes, which often cut through densely populated areas, reaching speeds over sixty miles an hour. Governed by the rule that stagnation increases the likelihood of attack, convoys leapt meridians in traffic jams, ignored traffic signals, swerved without warning onto sidewalks, scattering pedestrians, and slammed into civilian vehicles, shoving them off the road. Iraqi civilians, including children, were frequently run over and killed. Veterans said they sometimes shot drivers of civilian cars that moved into convoy formations or attempted to pass convoys as a warning to other drivers to get out of the way.
"A moving target is harder to hit than a stationary one," said Sgt. Ben Flanders, 28, a National Guardsman from Concord, New Hampshire, who served in Balad with the 172nd Mountain Infantry for eleven months beginning in March 2004. Flanders ran convoy routes out of Camp Anaconda, about thirty miles north of Baghdad. "So speed was your friend. And certainly in terms of IED detonation, absolutely, speed and spacing were the two things that could really determine whether or not you were going to get injured or killed or if they just completely missed, which happened."
Following an explosion or ambush, soldiers in the heavily armed escort vehicles often fired indiscriminately in a furious effort to suppress further attacks, according to three veterans. The rapid bursts from belt-fed.50-caliber machine guns and SAWs (Squad Automatic Weapons, which can fire as many as 1,000 rounds per minute) left many civilians wounded or dead.
"One example I can give you, you know, we'd be cruising down the road in a convoy and all of the sudden, an IED blows up," said Spc. Ben Schrader, 27, of Grand Junction, Colorado. He served in Baquba with the 263rd Armor Battalion, First Infantry Division, from February 2004 to February 2005. "And, you know, you've got these scared kids on these guns, and they just start opening fire. And there could be innocent people everywhere. And I've seen this, I mean, on numerous occasions where innocent people died because we're cruising down and a bomb goes off."
Several veterans said that IEDs, the preferred weapon of the Iraqi insurgency, were one of their greatest fears. Since the invasion in March 2003, IEDs have been responsible for killing more US troops--39.2 percent of the more than 3,500 killed--than any other method, according to the Brookings Institution, which monitors deaths in Iraq. This past May, IED attacks claimed ninety lives, the highest number of fatalities from roadside bombs since the beginn
British. And I don't have a problem with homosexuality. The fact that you do makes me think you have a problem with thinking, as does the fact that you seem not to have noticed that the US has only one other nation providing substantive military support in Iraq -- the British. So unless you've decided you hate everyone who's not American, there are probably better examples of nations to feel self-righteous about.
Then you've not understood what happened. His army did surrender, and you then disarmed it, creating a power vacuum your army could not fill, and which was instead filled not by the secular Ba'athists who composed the army, but by religious provocateurs who've neatly sucked you and the whole of Iraq into a hellhole.
Horseshit. Since you overthrew Saddam, there have been about nearly three-quarters of a million Iraqi deaths in just four years. You didn't kill the majority of them, but the US has certainly killed thousands, if not tens of thousands. 80%+ of the dead are civilians -- and of course, a high proportion of the militants you've killed were not militants at the start but took up arms against their oppressors.
Oh bollocks. There are hundreds of solider's own witness accounts of "shoot first, ask questions later" from the Iraq war. Convoys routinely smash or shoot all other traffic off the road. This is a stupidly horrific war, and millions of Iraqis now hate Americans -- not just the US, but Americans -- for it. Would the world have looked different if GW and Cheney had read all those old Robert Heinlein juvies about how this sort of thing plays out: clodhopping brutes enforcing the will of an overmighty nation appear to win at first and then get beaten back in the end by an increasingly restive native population. There was Between Planets, Citizen of the Galaxy and The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, among others.
But the same cannot be said for nation-states. The US, after all, is ahead of most other countries in terms of gun deaths and has more liberal gun laws than most. The Swiss are an exception to this.
I know where you're coming from on this, but really, I don't think you're right. Human rearing doesn't depend solely on innate knowledge; for hundreds of thousands of years, it's depended on culture as well. Throughout most of that time, part of the culture of rearing has been that new mothers have had the benefit of watching other women breastfeed, talking to them about it, and getting direct coaching and support as they began. In the developed world, that extensive support has dropped away (eg it's only recently become acceptable to breastfeed in public, which means that most new mothers have had very little direct visual experience of seeing babies being fed), hence the need for paid professionals to provide a hurry-up education. So while almost every mother can in theory breastfeed, in practice, few in our cultures have the intimate knowledge of how to do it that would ease the transition process. And there are many other factors militating against successful breastfeeding as well, including the birthing environment (frequently noisy, impersonal, not very private, and with the baby whisked away from the mother for a completely pointless scrubbing off of the vernix).
I'm not confused at all. But consumers will be. The distinction between openmoko and neo1973 is clear as daylight to us and clear as mud to joe sixpack.
Apple's development speed seems like it's glacial? Would you care to explain the reasoning behind that priceless statement?Apple is non-innovative? I can only assume you don't understand that ideas are nothing without execution. And Apple has a track record of outstanding execution.
The parent isn't suggesting there's no reason for the name. The parent is suggesting that the reasoning behind the name is stupid. If the phone is going to sell to the consumer electronics mass market, there's no point giving it a name looking back 33 years and with all the appeal of "cowpat 3.2". Or in having two names. Neo1973 / openmoko appears to be a great demonstration of why brand management is on the list of Things That Should Not Be Developed as an Open Source Project.
"No need for ad hominem attacks"?! Wtf do you think you started with with all your "horseshit" comments? If you don't like people being rude to or about you, don't be rude about them in the first place.
As for the rest of your comment, I don't think we're close to agreement at all: 1) The links I provided comprehensively refute any idea that we have recoverable uranium that will fuel all of humanity's energy needs for thousands of years, never mind the billions you cite. b) The quote you cited was from a longer article that discussed long-term (ie decades) availability of uranium. It does nothing to prove your point about the very long term (ie millenia or longer). c) The problem the Brits have had with dumping nuclear waste down unsealed shafts has sod all to do with the Manhattan project. That's a spectacularly bizarre link you've made. You asserted in your OP that there's never been any problems with nuclear waste (I paraphrase, but not unfairly, I think). That's clearly not true. d) I mentioned a load of other options to you, but not biofuels. You didn't discuss any of them, but you did discuss biofuels. That's an odd thing to do.
Your argument only holds water if you ignore what he wrote after the 50's, which seems a bit of an odd way of looking at his work.
In Expanded Universe, Heinlein speculates that the computer chip would revolutionise the world. In the Number of the Beast, Friday, the Moon is a Harsh Mistress and other novels, computers are central to the story. Friday has something that sounds quite similar to an intranet.
You're being ironic, right? You couldn't deliberately have meant to say what you said seriously, in a public forum, could you? It's just too humiliating for you to make such dumb statements.
I have no idea whether or not nuclear power plant operators have a consistently superb record in relation to a) and b) in the US, but they certainly don't in the UK. Problems of unsafe secret disposals of nuclear waste have dogged the industry for years. To take just a single example, waste was tipped down an unsealed shaft for 19 years between 1958 and 1977 at Dounreay fast reactor -- it stopped because the shaft actually blew up! Cleanup will cost £100m-plus and take twenty years. The story is dealt with at length in the following documentary: http://news.bbc.co.uk/nol/shared/bsp/hi/pdfs/14_06 _05_radiation.pdf Quote: "O'HALLORAN: How do you characterise the way nuclear waste was dealt with in your time at the plant? LYALL: There's only one answer to that, a complete shambles and a damn disgrace."
As for every single molecule of waste being accounted for, low-level waste (not particularly radioactive, but certainly not what you'd be happy to have stored under your bed) is still discharged into the Irish sea at Sellafield. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irish_Sea
So you're writing either out of ignorance or malice when you say "every single molecule of waste has been accounted for". Or else you think the world consists of America and everywhere else, and only America counts.
And I'm interested to see you think that the concept of "economically recoverable" is just a buzzword. I'd love to see how long it took Exxon executives to stop laughing at such cretinous idiocy. Economic recoverability is what determines whether oil, natural gas, uranium and similar deposits are worth exploiting. Tar shales are not generally economically recoverable, despite the vast quantities of oil they contain. The same will be true for some sources of uranium, including, unless you're aware of some magic technology that no-one else knows about, seawater. Seawater also contains huge amounts of gold, but we still dig it out of the ground, because the concentrations are so low that's it's not economically viable to recover the gold. And, because I have doubts you'll be able to see it without someone pointing it out to you -- the lower the concentration of uranium, the less net energy you get from burning it. In fact, most poor quality ores would, if used, cost more energy than they produce.
Let's see if you've got the brains to understand the difference between quantity and concentration. On your current form, frankly, I doubt it.
If by some chance you do get it, perhaps you'll actually answer the question I posed: "Can you cite any reliable sources for the stock of *economically recoverable* uranium, and how long that stock could meet *all human energy needs* including ground transportation?"
These sources all talk in terms of decades, not billions of years.
Finally, I'm all for having solutions. I'd just like ones that don't make things actually worse. Some examples would be: combined heat-and-power; having stores deliver shopping, rather than people picking it up; using coaches instead of buses; increasing use of wave, solar and wind power; opening window
Clearly, that economic model won't work. But if you rented the packs instead, the issue goes away. And I thought these packs didn't have the same problems with charge/discharge cycles?
Swapping out batteries works pretty well for phones and laptops. Is anyone working on swappable batteries for cars? Filling stations would offer a pretty good infrastructure for keeping people on the road. What are the conceptual problems, if any?
Can you cite any reliable sources for the stock of *economically recoverable* uranium, and how long that stock could meet *all human energy needs* including ground transportation?
Additionally, safety concerns have to do with the fact that nuclear power plant operators have a pretty poor track record of a) disposing of waste properly, and b) telling the truth about what they've done.
1) Hydrogen doesn't allow you to ditch the fossil fuel dependency. You still need to make the hydrogen, which costs energy. Most methods of hydrogen manufacture are carbon-intensive. 2) Hydrogen is not very energy dense by volume, even when compressed (which itself is an energy intensive process). And adsorbed hydrogen doesn't look like a goer either.
But of course, they've done a tiny fraction of the damage caused by the folks running the oil and car companies, etc. You know, the ones who *deliberately* pursue the destruction of the environment in the name of making more money. The guys who pursue a bad idea with (technically, not morally) good implementation.
Why not cut the load on the air con (and use less power too) by a) opening both doors on the car for a minute or two before getting in; and b) buying a reflective cover for your car
But the end goal of terrorism isn't terror. Terror is a means to an end. Impact is all, as I say. And there's greater impact from hitting hard targets than soft. The aim isn't to terrify an entire population, but to have maximum impact on the government (and possibly economy). Al Qaeda is seeking to change US policy in the Middle East and establish a caliphate -- it seeks to terrorise the US population only as a means to that end.
As for your second point, I think the impact of 911 would have been much much less had the attackers split up into 4-5 school shooting groups rather hijacking four planes and crashing them into the WTC and Pentagon. Even if they'd killed kiddies. I rather think your example proves my point -- they'd have needed to attack 30 or 40 schools and killed dozens of children to have achieved similar levels of impact, and even then it would have been lessened by the precedent of other school shooters (eg Columbine).
Slashdot Mirror
The immune system works on the principle of "once bitten, twice shy", not "use it or lose it".
"Fundamental principle of market economics: you have to take in at least as much as you spend."
Erm, not actually true for insurance. Insurers typically do not get as much from premiums as they spend on claims (losses plus expenses plus commissions) -- ie they make a loss on underwriting. They still make a margin because of the returns on their investments of the cash that insurees pay them (policyholder surplus and premium / loss reserves).
Congratulations: yours must surely be the dumbest post in the thread, and it makes it all the better that you think you're so damn clever.
Rationing, which you decry as a terrible evil that costs a fortune and requires endless bureaucrats to run, is conceptually the exact same thing as insurers' exclusions. The main differences between the US and the UK health systems in this regard is that in the US, management costs are higher (the NHS is notoriously under-managed, despite what you and the Daily Mail say) and individuals are much more likely to be refused coverage for treatment. Oh whoops, I forgot one other difference: individuals can be refused insurance, or only offered very expensive insurance in the US, resulting in 40m who have no insurance, whereas in the UK everyone is covered. So the UK delivers more care to more people for less money.
But dammit, the *whole frigging point* of insurance is to pool risk! Insurance is a method of pooling risk among individuals and over time, as a means of managing cashflow. If insurers are allowed to differentiate too extensively between customers on the basis of the risk posed, then eventually there becomes no point in having insurance at all -- you might as well just put the money in savings or investments instead.
You don't honestly think you could win this war if only the military were allowed free rein, do you? You're fighting a guerilla war and your rate of killing non-combatants is pretty high already -- raising that proportion in order to increase the number of guerillas you kill doesn't seem like a winning proposition. Most of the people you're fighting took up arms after you invaded, and large numbers of them did so because you invaded. They still are a smallish proportion of the total fighting age population -- what are you going to do when they become, say, 30% of the population? Kill them all? You might get tactical success (ie no-one shooting at you anymore), but you will have failed in your stated strategic objective (make the country safe).
From http://www.guardian.co.uk/Iraq/Story/0,,2125135,00 .html
.50-caliber machine guns and SAWs (Squad Automatic Weapons, which can fire as many as 1,000 rounds per minute) left many civilians wounded or dead.
It's a left-wing newspaper. If that's enough for you to discount the article, more fool you.
Convoys
Two dozen soldiers interviewed said that this callousness toward Iraqi civilians was particularly evident in the operation of supply convoys--operations in which they participated. These convoys are the arteries that sustain the occupation, ferrying items such as water, mail, maintenance parts, sewage, food and fuel across Iraq. And these strings of tractor-trailers, operated by KBR (formerly Kellogg, Brown & Root) and other private contractors, required daily protection by the US military. Typically, according to these interviewees, supply convoys consisted of twenty to thirty trucks stretching half a mile down the road, with a Humvee military escort in front and back and at least one more in the center. Soldiers and marines also sometimes accompanied the drivers in the cabs of the tractor-trailers.
These convoys, ubiquitous in Iraq, were also, to many Iraqis, sources of wanton destruction.
According to descriptions culled from interviews with thirty-eight veterans who rode in convoys--guarding such runs as Kuwait to Nasiriya, Nasiriya to Baghdad and Balad to Kirkuk--when these columns of vehicles left their heavily fortified compounds they usually roared down the main supply routes, which often cut through densely populated areas, reaching speeds over sixty miles an hour. Governed by the rule that stagnation increases the likelihood of attack, convoys leapt meridians in traffic jams, ignored traffic signals, swerved without warning onto sidewalks, scattering pedestrians, and slammed into civilian vehicles, shoving them off the road. Iraqi civilians, including children, were frequently run over and killed. Veterans said they sometimes shot drivers of civilian cars that moved into convoy formations or attempted to pass convoys as a warning to other drivers to get out of the way.
"A moving target is harder to hit than a stationary one," said Sgt. Ben Flanders, 28, a National Guardsman from Concord, New Hampshire, who served in Balad with the 172nd Mountain Infantry for eleven months beginning in March 2004. Flanders ran convoy routes out of Camp Anaconda, about thirty miles north of Baghdad. "So speed was your friend. And certainly in terms of IED detonation, absolutely, speed and spacing were the two things that could really determine whether or not you were going to get injured or killed or if they just completely missed, which happened."
Following an explosion or ambush, soldiers in the heavily armed escort vehicles often fired indiscriminately in a furious effort to suppress further attacks, according to three veterans. The rapid bursts from belt-fed
"One example I can give you, you know, we'd be cruising down the road in a convoy and all of the sudden, an IED blows up," said Spc. Ben Schrader, 27, of Grand Junction, Colorado. He served in Baquba with the 263rd Armor Battalion, First Infantry Division, from February 2004 to February 2005. "And, you know, you've got these scared kids on these guns, and they just start opening fire. And there could be innocent people everywhere. And I've seen this, I mean, on numerous occasions where innocent people died because we're cruising down and a bomb goes off."
Several veterans said that IEDs, the preferred weapon of the Iraqi insurgency, were one of their greatest fears. Since the invasion in March 2003, IEDs have been responsible for killing more US troops--39.2 percent of the more than 3,500 killed--than any other method, according to the Brookings Institution, which monitors deaths in Iraq. This past May, IED attacks claimed ninety lives, the highest number of fatalities from roadside bombs since the beginn
British. And I don't have a problem with homosexuality. The fact that you do makes me think you have a problem with thinking, as does the fact that you seem not to have noticed that the US has only one other nation providing substantive military support in Iraq -- the British. So unless you've decided you hate everyone who's not American, there are probably better examples of nations to feel self-righteous about.
Then you've not understood what happened. His army did surrender, and you then disarmed it, creating a power vacuum your army could not fill, and which was instead filled not by the secular Ba'athists who composed the army, but by religious provocateurs who've neatly sucked you and the whole of Iraq into a hellhole.
Horseshit. Since you overthrew Saddam, there have been about nearly three-quarters of a million Iraqi deaths in just four years. You didn't kill the majority of them, but the US has certainly killed thousands, if not tens of thousands. 80%+ of the dead are civilians -- and of course, a high proportion of the militants you've killed were not militants at the start but took up arms against their oppressors.
Oh bollocks. There are hundreds of solider's own witness accounts of "shoot first, ask questions later" from the Iraq war. Convoys routinely smash or shoot all other traffic off the road. This is a stupidly horrific war, and millions of Iraqis now hate Americans -- not just the US, but Americans -- for it. Would the world have looked different if GW and Cheney had read all those old Robert Heinlein juvies about how this sort of thing plays out: clodhopping brutes enforcing the will of an overmighty nation appear to win at first and then get beaten back in the end by an increasingly restive native population. There was Between Planets, Citizen of the Galaxy and The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, among others.
But the same cannot be said for nation-states. The US, after all, is ahead of most other countries in terms of gun deaths and has more liberal gun laws than most. The Swiss are an exception to this.
I know where you're coming from on this, but really, I don't think you're right. Human rearing doesn't depend solely on innate knowledge; for hundreds of thousands of years, it's depended on culture as well. Throughout most of that time, part of the culture of rearing has been that new mothers have had the benefit of watching other women breastfeed, talking to them about it, and getting direct coaching and support as they began. In the developed world, that extensive support has dropped away (eg it's only recently become acceptable to breastfeed in public, which means that most new mothers have had very little direct visual experience of seeing babies being fed), hence the need for paid professionals to provide a hurry-up education. So while almost every mother can in theory breastfeed, in practice, few in our cultures have the intimate knowledge of how to do it that would ease the transition process. And there are many other factors militating against successful breastfeeding as well, including the birthing environment (frequently noisy, impersonal, not very private, and with the baby whisked away from the mother for a completely pointless scrubbing off of the vernix).
I'm not confused at all. But consumers will be. The distinction between openmoko and neo1973 is clear as daylight to us and clear as mud to joe sixpack.
Apple's development speed seems like it's glacial? Would you care to explain the reasoning behind that priceless statement?Apple is non-innovative? I can only assume you don't understand that ideas are nothing without execution. And Apple has a track record of outstanding execution.
The parent isn't suggesting there's no reason for the name. The parent is suggesting that the reasoning behind the name is stupid. If the phone is going to sell to the consumer electronics mass market, there's no point giving it a name looking back 33 years and with all the appeal of "cowpat 3.2". Or in having two names. Neo1973 / openmoko appears to be a great demonstration of why brand management is on the list of Things That Should Not Be Developed as an Open Source Project.
"No need for ad hominem attacks"?! Wtf do you think you started with with all your "horseshit" comments? If you don't like people being rude to or about you, don't be rude about them in the first place.
As for the rest of your comment, I don't think we're close to agreement at all:
1) The links I provided comprehensively refute any idea that we have recoverable uranium that will fuel all of humanity's energy needs for thousands of years, never mind the billions you cite.
b) The quote you cited was from a longer article that discussed long-term (ie decades) availability of uranium. It does nothing to prove your point about the very long term (ie millenia or longer).
c) The problem the Brits have had with dumping nuclear waste down unsealed shafts has sod all to do with the Manhattan project. That's a spectacularly bizarre link you've made. You asserted in your OP that there's never been any problems with nuclear waste (I paraphrase, but not unfairly, I think). That's clearly not true.
d) I mentioned a load of other options to you, but not biofuels. You didn't discuss any of them, but you did discuss biofuels. That's an odd thing to do.
Your argument only holds water if you ignore what he wrote after the 50's, which seems a bit of an odd way of looking at his work.
In Expanded Universe, Heinlein speculates that the computer chip would revolutionise the world. In the Number of the Beast, Friday, the Moon is a Harsh Mistress and other novels, computers are central to the story. Friday has something that sounds quite similar to an intranet.
You're being ironic, right? You couldn't deliberately have meant to say what you said seriously, in a public forum, could you? It's just too humiliating for you to make such dumb statements.
I have no idea whether or not nuclear power plant operators have a consistently superb record in relation to a) and b) in the US, but they certainly don't in the UK. Problems of unsafe secret disposals of nuclear waste have dogged the industry for years. To take just a single example, waste was tipped down an unsealed shaft for 19 years between 1958 and 1977 at Dounreay fast reactor -- it stopped because the shaft actually blew up! Cleanup will cost £100m-plus and take twenty years. The story is dealt with at length in the following documentary:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/nol/shared/bsp/hi/pdfs/14_06 _05_radiation.pdf
Quote:
"O'HALLORAN: How do you characterise the way nuclear waste was dealt with in your time at the plant?
LYALL: There's only one answer to that, a complete shambles and a damn disgrace."
As for every single molecule of waste being accounted for, low-level waste (not particularly radioactive, but certainly not what you'd be happy to have stored under your bed) is still discharged into the Irish sea at Sellafield.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irish_Sea
So you're writing either out of ignorance or malice when you say "every single molecule of waste has been accounted for". Or else you think the world consists of America and everywhere else, and only America counts.
And I'm interested to see you think that the concept of "economically recoverable" is just a buzzword. I'd love to see how long it took Exxon executives to stop laughing at such cretinous idiocy. Economic recoverability is what determines whether oil, natural gas, uranium and similar deposits are worth exploiting. Tar shales are not generally economically recoverable, despite the vast quantities of oil they contain. The same will be true for some sources of uranium, including, unless you're aware of some magic technology that no-one else knows about, seawater. Seawater also contains huge amounts of gold, but we still dig it out of the ground, because the concentrations are so low that's it's not economically viable to recover the gold. And, because I have doubts you'll be able to see it without someone pointing it out to you -- the lower the concentration of uranium, the less net energy you get from burning it. In fact, most poor quality ores would, if used, cost more energy than they produce.
Let's see if you've got the brains to understand the difference between quantity and concentration. On your current form, frankly, I doubt it.
If by some chance you do get it, perhaps you'll actually answer the question I posed: "Can you cite any reliable sources for the stock of *economically recoverable* uranium, and how long that stock could meet *all human energy needs* including ground transportation?"
As the chance of your doing this are pretty minimal, I'll help you out:
http://www.world-nuclear.org/sym/2005/pdf/Gitzel.p df
http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm200506/ cmselect/cmenvaud/584/5110906.htm
http://www.i-sis.org.uk/DTNPM.php
http://www.bnes.com/myths.html
These sources all talk in terms of decades, not billions of years.
Finally, I'm all for having solutions. I'd just like ones that don't make things actually worse. Some examples would be: combined heat-and-power; having stores deliver shopping, rather than people picking it up; using coaches instead of buses; increasing use of wave, solar and wind power; opening window
Clearly, that economic model won't work. But if you rented the packs instead, the issue goes away. And I thought these packs didn't have the same problems with charge/discharge cycles?
Swapping out batteries works pretty well for phones and laptops. Is anyone working on swappable batteries for cars? Filling stations would offer a pretty good infrastructure for keeping people on the road. What are the conceptual problems, if any?
Can you cite any reliable sources for the stock of *economically recoverable* uranium, and how long that stock could meet *all human energy needs* including ground transportation?
Additionally, safety concerns have to do with the fact that nuclear power plant operators have a pretty poor track record of a) disposing of waste properly, and b) telling the truth about what they've done.
1) Hydrogen doesn't allow you to ditch the fossil fuel dependency. You still need to make the hydrogen, which costs energy. Most methods of hydrogen manufacture are carbon-intensive.
2) Hydrogen is not very energy dense by volume, even when compressed (which itself is an energy intensive process). And adsorbed hydrogen doesn't look like a goer either.
But of course, they've done a tiny fraction of the damage caused by the folks running the oil and car companies, etc. You know, the ones who *deliberately* pursue the destruction of the environment in the name of making more money. The guys who pursue a bad idea with (technically, not morally) good implementation.
Why not cut the load on the air con (and use less power too) by
a) opening both doors on the car for a minute or two before getting in; and
b) buying a reflective cover for your car
But the end goal of terrorism isn't terror. Terror is a means to an end. Impact is all, as I say. And there's greater impact from hitting hard targets than soft. The aim isn't to terrify an entire population, but to have maximum impact on the government (and possibly economy). Al Qaeda is seeking to change US policy in the Middle East and establish a caliphate -- it seeks to terrorise the US population only as a means to that end.
As for your second point, I think the impact of 911 would have been much much less had the attackers split up into 4-5 school shooting groups rather hijacking four planes and crashing them into the WTC and Pentagon. Even if they'd killed kiddies. I rather think your example proves my point -- they'd have needed to attack 30 or 40 schools and killed dozens of children to have achieved similar levels of impact, and even then it would have been lessened by the precedent of other school shooters (eg Columbine).