Blunt answer: If you are really calculating your costs properly, yes, long-term, OUTSOURCING COSTS YOU MORE!!!
Short-term, however, when one chooses outsourcing, one shows that one is poking the domestic labor force in the eye - figuratively speaking. This causes the shareholders to make creamy wet spots in their pants.
This is the modern goal of all business.
Not inventing or innovating. Not even making widgets, or making this quarters' numbers.
It's all about getting the shareholders hot and horny, RIGHT EFFING NOW.
If you outsource, you kill the goose that laid your golden eggs. You cut your own throat, collect the blood, and feed it to your competitors overseas.
Never mind that many people who are even LOOKING at alternative medicine as a treatment, have already exhausted every avenue of "mainstream" medicine, to absolute failure, and are looking at a last-resort solution. Mainstream medicine can not "cure" diabetes, many forms of chronic pain, heart disease, obesity, (the list goes on and on). (and neither can alternative medicine, that's not my point). The "conspiracy theories" about big pharma are easy to buy into when one has paid tens of thousands of dollars in health insurance premiums, lost one's house because one has had to pay a $50,000 bill for cancer surgery that the insurance didn't cover, and then finally found out that one is still sick. Even moreso when they begin to look for their own answers online, and are exposed to a community full of people living the "same exact story" (which is a guaranteed selection bias, right? Who goes to the "I'm dying of cancer" blogs, other than the *arbitrarily low percentage of* people who are not having a good mainstream medicine experience?).
I do agree that these are exactly the faculties of Reason. And even mainstream science is beset with and absolutely plagued by selection bias. Selection bias, is perhaps, perniciously, an integral part of Reason.
Our capacity to Reason is one thing. Our language had to develop the capacity to COMMUNICATE Reason as well. I'm not sure that syntax and vocabulary were up to snuff before our mental (internal) capacity to Reason existed. Higher mammals, hell, even rats can problem-solve/Reason. It takes linguistic skill to be able to re-define symbolic meanings to manipulate things like religion and nationalism and political intent.
So, I think that there are really two distinct things here.
Yeah, seriously - like: "I ripped 2000 CD's, which I legally purchased, back in 1997, and then I had my CD's stored in a shed in the back yard, there was a fire, that shed, and the CD's burned down, so now all I have are the digital copies." completely plausible - and if true, completely legal! Never mind the issue of Vinyl, where perhaps, I digitized them, and destroyed the Vinyl copies, because I didn't want to store them (due to the bulk - etc.); this is completely legitimate (even if from an "audiophile's" point of view, it's attrocity.) There is no need for any "laundering".
Unless they have your verifiable IP address on a server log offering downloads. (and even this is a fairly sketchy evidence in most courts now)
Fallacy: If you made college free in the USA, you would not get more engineers. You would get more English and Basket-Weaving majors. Of this, I am certain. The fundamental flaw in our system, is rooted in our failing methods of math and science (mostly math) education for GRADE SCHOOL children. Our kids start behind, and they stay behind. With the exception of the top 5%, very few can handle math beyond algebra in secondary school. And most of the sciences rely on math this advanced. (actually, far beyond this). Kids should be getting their introduction to calculus concepts in middle school. All children.
The reason we do not, is the dismal funding state of our grade and middle schools, and our absurd focus on athletics as some kind of social panacea. Fitness is important. Socialization IS important. But we fucking WORSHIP it. And this religion will be our undoing.
Draft a few million cyber soldiers? Lol. What you will have is a few million idiot script kiddies. What is needed is perhaps ONE man, who can think, and write the code, that is smarter than the attacker's code. Of course a large, competent, trained staff will be needed to implement that in IT systems, just like, Einstein came up with E=mc^2, and we needed a Manhattan Project to build *A Bomb*, and then we needed a huge military-industrial complex and a global empire, to create the situation of MAD, to hold the Soviets at bay during the cold war (long enough so that their own arrogance could be their economic undoing. . . which ultimately was the case).
My point is that - I agree somewhat with your idea: but we can't just take the "America" we have now, and throw money at it to solve this problem. We need to recognize that the educational solutions we've been pursuing for the last two generations have been FOR SHIT. We have screwed ourselves over. And the only way out, is to re-invest in education for our youth, and MAYBE, in 10-15 years, we can BEGIN to see the benefits, in terms of competitiveness. Until then, we are fucked-fucked-fucked.
I imagine that not all of those voters understand that voting is only one part of a whole course of action, which includes making a lot of other difficult choices towards sustainability, including supporting alternate forms of power generation technology including renewables.
None of that is even really possible without the first step of removing nuclear as an option. Nuclear is too damn attractive as a large financing option, when it comes to banks and lending, because governments have been too willing to bear the risks. But after a few of these disasters, and seeing the outcome - (no insurance payout will ever return this land to those people. . . we must wait 100 or more years) - governments (and the voters who make them) are seeing that nuclear is not actually worth the risk. You can't quantify that as a coefficient in a formula. But you can measure it, when a number of people say "fuck no, not in my back yard."
It's clear that fossil fuels aren't viable even in the medium term, and unless we stop our population growth or drastically change lifestyles,
If we do not (stop our population growth, or drastically change lifestyles) - nature will make that choice for us.
This is a fact - whether we continue with energy sources we have today, whether we bring new renewables on line, or whether we "invent" useful fusion, or use all of the above. It does not need to be a painful transition, but it seems as if humanity has been faced with this obvious choice for many decades now, and the response has been denial. So the outcome will be similar to what occurs when an addict, in denial, is faced with the reality that the addict can not continue on his destructive course forever.
Shutting down wood-burning as a form of major power generation, was not slowing progress.
I think it is long past time to move beyond (ie. progress) nuclear. Staying with nuclear, and allowing power companies to press 40 year old plants into continued service, is byzantine. And as we continue to learn, painfully, dangerous.
No amount of backup power would have saved Fukushima.
The whole story still is not out yet, but all three operating reactors at the time of the quake experienced major cooling loss prior to the tsunami. It's been publicly reported about Unit I. But it is also the case for II and III, and this truth will come out in time. It is in the details of the IAEA findings. They will be forced to report it as soon as they get workers into Units II and III to actually view those RPVs. I *do* find it amazing that they completely melted down, and the RPVs remained mostly intact, and contained the molten fuel. They were able to cool it somewhat with the seawater, I guess.
Bottom line is, all three units did not withstand the quake that they were designed and certified to withstand. The tsunami was a fortunate side-effect, to cover-up this fact.
WE - didn't DO anything. We built advanced designs in the 1960's and 1970's. Liquid sodium reactors. They had their own problems. The one in present-day Oxnard had a cooling failure - probably the closest equivalent to a "meltdown" a liquid sodium reactor can have. And there was leakage and contamination that is seldom discussed publicly; now that area is built up with very dense housing.
(of course, the health impacts of this contamination are subtle, and shown only in statistical models - this does not mean that there are not real-live actual human victims. What it does mean is that there is no legal recourse for them.)
Advanced nuclear power, both liquid sodium designs, and pebble bed designs, have been given their due, and have been found wanting. What more do you want? There is no free lunch.
The problems of procuring fuel, and storing waste, are still largely ignored by industry proponents.
The residents of Fukushima fought for decades to get the plant shut down. Even (and especially) after the evidence of safety violations and rampant fraud from TEPCO there. Now there are no more residents in Fukushima. It wasn't fear that caused the disaster. It was greed.
If you believe LA drivers are nuts, then you have never driven in Boston. In Boston, your punishment for lawfully stopping at a stop sign, is the drivers behind you, will go around you, flip you off, and honk their horn.
Because the shorter yellow light is UN NECESSARY to implement the red-light camera.
We could have the safety benefit of the red-light camera (fewer head-on and oblique accidents), AND the safety benefit of a longer yellow, (fewer rear-end collisions). But the yellow lights are shortened to make the cameras more profitable for the private operators. At the expense of public safety. This is outrageous.
The problem with item 4; is that many of these red-light systems are handled by a special "external court", which is not really a real court, but basically a fee-processing center, set up by the company appointed by the city. They simply have no legal way to handle any disputes. The bar is set very high, there are very steep filing fees, and the burden of proof is on the driver. In my unfortunate experiences, it is very difficult to contest the charges against you under any circumstances. It's either pay-up, and lose the license-point, or pay MORE.
I don't really have a problem with the red-light cameras, in principle. I do like the idea of stopping people who blow-off red lights. I think that people who skate through at the end of a yellow, should be cut some slack, because we all do it sometimes, and it's not a safety hazard, because the other side has not begun moving yet. But there are a LOT of people who do just brazenly blast through red lights because they think they can get away with it. I like that these cameras are there to bust those fuckers.
But I think that farming them out to a private company with a "special court" is a terrible idea. I think that permitting a shorter yellow light is an incredibly horrible idea, because it really does cause more rear-end accidents (this is a statistical fact) - and while that's preferable to high speed head-on and oblique collisions from people running red-lights, it is a trade-off that is completely unnecessary. The only reason for the shorter yellow, is to attempt to "trap" more offenders, in order to make the systems more profitable. At the expense of public safety. Disgusting. This should never have been considered as a private for-profit enterprise.
Another common trick, is when electronic format is demanded, they will provide it in the form of a PDF file, but the pages are encapsulated jpg images of scans, so there is no searchable text. You must be extremely explicit with these lawyer weasels.
Human beings are not "birth-control-farmo-bacteria" and never will be.
Having developed and fully taken advantage of the Haber-Bosch process to increase crop yields, and thus allow our own reproduction to spew into geometric bacteria-like rates, without any thought to how we deal with our own waste products, we are just about headed for a yeast-like die-off.
The OP's experiment is flawed - more like the actual experiment I did in high school biology with yeast. It was a classic exercise to teach us how to count microorganisms, prepare and mount microscope slides, take samples, make graphs. You know, basic bio lab techniques. When the yeast in the culture reached a certain point, their waste products, alcohol and carbon dioxide, built up, turned the food medium toxic, and the population level peaked, and they all died. (at least they died drunk and happy)
On Earth, we will see the same thing. We already are - in terms of fresh-water supply, contamination of our environment with toxic pollutants and radioactive contaminants, mass extinction of wild species, collapse of biodiversity, and rapid climate change. Go ahead and deny it. The science shows very clearly that this is all happening.
I'm not here to promote "hippie policies".
I don't think there's a damn thing we can do to stop it now. Or even slow it down. Personally, I think we long, long, ago, crossed the line of no return. Maybe in the mid 1950's. We had no idea what the fuck we were doing then. People think that splitting the atom was the worst thing we ever did. I think it was the Haber-Bosch process, and allowing and encouraging the world's population to exceed 2 billion. (which, on a national-level, has always been a form of passive inter-cultural warfare).
If you believe that we can control our population growth - or find new resources, or even properly dispose of our own waste products - you are incredibly deluded. We can't even bring our 7 billion properly to full literacy. You try to limit their reproduction, or tell them how to dispose of their waste, and a good 80% will try to fucking kill you. Humans are at the top of the food chain because we are the most efficient predators nature ever devised. We can't manage eachother, we will refuse to BE managed, and nature can't manage us without killing us.
The most effective contraception known to man, is providing women with college-level education and careers. This is a statistical fact. It works better than any "product" "drug" or "device".
And because of the instability of the middle east region, oil and thus gas prices are higher than they otherwise should be. High gas prices are detrimental to an economy trying to dig itself out of a recessionary hole.
Given the nature of the OPEC cartel, and commodity speculation that does nothing productive for anyone's economy, this is really not an argument for or against "keeping political negotiations secret" - repressing people through violence and dictatorship. To keep oil prices down for us? Because high oil prices are inconvenient? That actually goes AGAINST Free Market theory. . . (why should the government intervene to keep one industry's feedstock prices low? Shouldn't that industry have to compete with others on a level playing field?)
The bottling up of these ugly negotiations and horse-trading, is what has perpetuated hatreds and conflicts in the region (and around the world) for what has been an incredibly violent and bloody century. All because high oil prices are inconvenient? I say: low oil prices are inconvenient. Because they prevent a good competitor from coming out of the laboratory, being developed and arising in the market. And low oil prices are very inconvenient to the millions who have died, starved, been blown into bloody bits of hamburger meat in our wars, and given the (petroleum-driven) Haber-Bosch process - the HUNDREDS of millions who were born who probably would not have otherwise been born; - - - and born into poverty, ignorance, religious intolerance, tribal warfare, colonial subjugation, disease and starvation. All due to the artificial manipulation of this commodity's dominant market position. Because we like to keep embarrassing secrets secret.
Obviously, the long-held goal of the US, and many world powers, has been stability, and maintenance of imperial power, and control of existing resources. And that is why the leaks have been dangerous for them. They are bringing about revolution and democracy to a world that can not possibly support itself with so many free opinions.
I can't project what will happen to world oil prices next. Will prices go down, once the die-off begins, because fewer humans will demand less energy? Or will prices go up, as extraction, transport, and refinery infrastructure is destroyed in the ensuing conflict over what remains?
I have no response to that, other than; been there, done that, and completely agree. I would rather be stabbed, beaten and burned, than go through what my ex put me through again.
Go to the IAEA web site. Or that very interesting XKCD web graphic, showing how completely harmless all this stuff is. Like a chest x ray. Or a flight to Paraguay. Trust the Government and Industry to protect you when things are dangerous. Turn on the lights, pay your bills, and don't ask questions.
Besides, if you detect radiation in your food, what are you going to do? Stop eating? Move to another country? Where? Where would you go that is unaffected. Just relax and accept the new "normal".:)
Well, it was also fairly obvious given the following: - Among the long history of safety procedure fraud at Fukushima, by TEPCO, were instances where repairs were performed using procedures that were not approved by standards, but signed off as otherwise. (therefore - plant infrastructure which may have been *designed* to withstand certain g acceleration forces of an earthquake in 1971, may not be able to withstand those forces 40 years later, after these un-approved, but fraudulently certified repairs.) - The article which mentions these variances does not provide specifics.
- When Unit 1, and 3 exploded, the roofs of the building blew off. This indicates that the hydrogen had been generated in a reactor core at over 2200 degrees C, in the presence of water, and escaped the primary cooling system, venting into the reactor building's structure through the particle scrubbers, and exploded. A hydrogen explosion is not good, of course, but only indicative of a loss-of-cooling, at a minimum. Many experts will say that hydrogen generation is pretty much a sure sign of melting; it's not precise, but when you're in the ballpark, in a nuclear reactor, things can get very unstable very quickly, (like, milliseconds-quickly). None of these units had instrumentation, or controls, or active cooling going on. As hot byproducts are released - they have much lower melting points than the Uranium fuel, and they can migrate around, and collect in different states (or chemically react with eachother, and have a completely different set of properties - and these properties could be caustic, or explosive) . . . and cause hotspots, regions of high flux. (while some byproducts absorb neutrons and slow the reaction down). Pretty much all bets are off, as far as predicting what's going to happen.
Strictly speaking, hydrogen generation does not mean melting HAD to happen. But in this situation, it was highly improbable that melting wasn't happening in conjunction with that. (and the hydrogen generation did not necessarily happen at the time of the explosions - the explosions happened later).
- When Unit 2 exploded, the explosion blew out the side of the base of the building, through the condenser, in the primary cooling. This means that the hydrogen collected and ignited in the primary cooling system. This also means that there was enough heat in the condenser to provide ignition. This could have been due to excessive steam pressure, (compression-ignition) - with oxygen leaking IN through structural cracks. It strongly suggests that Unit 2 was damaged structurally, (the concrete torus), in the quake. It could be that thermally hot byproducts or corium caused the ignition in the RPV, maybe with an oxygen isotope (I don't know if this is possible or not, probably not), or dissasociated water,(weird isotope chemistry?) or the ignition source made it's way into the torus (which would mean, holey RPV+holey primary cooling = open core). I can't really say what the ignition source could have been, but the presence of oxygen is the crazy bit, and the simplest explanation is structural issues in the concrete (or connecting cooling pipes/valves).
I think it was pretty idiotic and foolish (okay. . . unprofessional?) for TEPCO to state, in the immediate aftermath of the first hydrogen explosion, that they knew that the RPV was intact. They couldn't get instrument readings, or even a visual inspection for many days after that explosion to even get a half-assed confirmation of that statement. It was this kind of fumbling around and PR mismanagement that does the most damage to the industry's credibility. It would have been better for them to state what they definitely knew - what data they had, and the range of possibilities that it could have meant. That first hydrogen explosion was absolutely the time to press the panic button and evacuate residents.
Radiation is good for you. Everybody could take a hundred chest x-rays a year. Ought to have em too. Cesium-137? sprinkle it over your breakfast cereal for flavor in the morning. Makes you strong, like bull.
Dang tree-hugging whiners! If you had your way, we'd all be eating coal, and living in caves, and smearing our dung on eachother, and copulating with jellyfish like primitive apes! PROGRESS! Drill baby drill! Split them atoms! Yeah!!!
(this message has been brought to you by, one sarcastic bastard).
Exactly right. Coders' "passion" is fine and dandy and all. But process recognizes that we don't put passion above sound engineering principles. And that individual coders are not infallible. Without process, you'll write very cool flash games, to be sure.
. . . and by "efficient", you mean, using slave labor, no environmental regulations, and an entrenched oligarchy of priviliged business interests to centrally manage distribution of resources. Much like the direction the US economy is headed.
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Blunt answer: If you are really calculating your costs properly, yes, long-term, OUTSOURCING COSTS YOU MORE!!!
Short-term, however, when one chooses outsourcing, one shows that one is poking the domestic labor force in the eye - figuratively speaking. This causes the shareholders to make creamy wet spots in their pants.
This is the modern goal of all business.
Not inventing or innovating. Not even making widgets, or making this quarters' numbers.
It's all about getting the shareholders hot and horny, RIGHT EFFING NOW.
If you outsource, you kill the goose that laid your golden eggs. You cut your own throat, collect the blood, and feed it to your competitors overseas.
Never mind that many people who are even LOOKING at alternative medicine as a treatment, have already exhausted every avenue of "mainstream" medicine, to absolute failure, and are looking at a last-resort solution. Mainstream medicine can not "cure" diabetes, many forms of chronic pain, heart disease, obesity, (the list goes on and on). (and neither can alternative medicine, that's not my point). The "conspiracy theories" about big pharma are easy to buy into when one has paid tens of thousands of dollars in health insurance premiums, lost one's house because one has had to pay a $50,000 bill for cancer surgery that the insurance didn't cover, and then finally found out that one is still sick. Even moreso when they begin to look for their own answers online, and are exposed to a community full of people living the "same exact story" (which is a guaranteed selection bias, right? Who goes to the "I'm dying of cancer" blogs, other than the *arbitrarily low percentage of* people who are not having a good mainstream medicine experience?).
I do agree that these are exactly the faculties of Reason.
And even mainstream science is beset with and absolutely plagued by selection bias. Selection bias, is perhaps, perniciously, an integral part of Reason.
Our capacity to Reason is one thing.
Our language had to develop the capacity to COMMUNICATE Reason as well. I'm not sure that syntax and vocabulary were up to snuff before our mental (internal) capacity to Reason existed. Higher mammals, hell, even rats can problem-solve/Reason. It takes linguistic skill to be able to re-define symbolic meanings to manipulate things like religion and nationalism and political intent.
So, I think that there are really two distinct things here.
Yeah, seriously - like: "I ripped 2000 CD's, which I legally purchased, back in 1997, and then I had my CD's stored in a shed in the back yard, there was a fire, that shed, and the CD's burned down, so now all I have are the digital copies." completely plausible - and if true, completely legal! Never mind the issue of Vinyl, where perhaps, I digitized them, and destroyed the Vinyl copies, because I didn't want to store them (due to the bulk - etc.); this is completely legitimate (even if from an "audiophile's" point of view, it's attrocity.) There is no need for any "laundering".
Unless they have your verifiable IP address on a server log offering downloads. (and even this is a fairly sketchy evidence in most courts now)
Fallacy: If you made college free in the USA, you would not get more engineers. You would get more English and Basket-Weaving majors. Of this, I am certain. The fundamental flaw in our system, is rooted in our failing methods of math and science (mostly math) education for GRADE SCHOOL children. Our kids start behind, and they stay behind. With the exception of the top 5%, very few can handle math beyond algebra in secondary school. And most of the sciences rely on math this advanced. (actually, far beyond this). Kids should be getting their introduction to calculus concepts in middle school. All children.
The reason we do not, is the dismal funding state of our grade and middle schools, and our absurd focus on athletics as some kind of social panacea. Fitness is important. Socialization IS important. But we fucking WORSHIP it. And this religion will be our undoing.
Draft a few million cyber soldiers? Lol. What you will have is a few million idiot script kiddies. What is needed is perhaps ONE man, who can think, and write the code, that is smarter than the attacker's code. Of course a large, competent, trained staff will be needed to implement that in IT systems, just like, Einstein came up with E=mc^2, and we needed a Manhattan Project to build *A Bomb*, and then we needed a huge military-industrial complex and a global empire, to create the situation of MAD, to hold the Soviets at bay during the cold war (long enough so that their own arrogance could be their economic undoing. . . which ultimately was the case).
My point is that - I agree somewhat with your idea: but we can't just take the "America" we have now, and throw money at it to solve this problem. We need to recognize that the educational solutions we've been pursuing for the last two generations have been FOR SHIT. We have screwed ourselves over. And the only way out, is to re-invest in education for our youth, and MAYBE, in 10-15 years, we can BEGIN to see the benefits, in terms of competitiveness. Until then, we are fucked-fucked-fucked.
I imagine that not all of those voters understand that voting is only one part of a whole course of action, which includes making a lot of other difficult choices towards sustainability, including supporting alternate forms of power generation technology including renewables.
None of that is even really possible without the first step of removing nuclear as an option. Nuclear is too damn attractive as a large financing option, when it comes to banks and lending, because governments have been too willing to bear the risks. But after a few of these disasters, and seeing the outcome - (no insurance payout will ever return this land to those people. . . we must wait 100 or more years) - governments (and the voters who make them) are seeing that nuclear is not actually worth the risk. You can't quantify that as a coefficient in a formula. But you can measure it, when a number of people say "fuck no, not in my back yard."
It's clear that fossil fuels aren't viable even in the medium term, and unless we stop our population growth or drastically change lifestyles,
If we do not (stop our population growth, or drastically change lifestyles) - nature will make that choice for us.
This is a fact - whether we continue with energy sources we have today, whether we bring new renewables on line, or whether we "invent" useful fusion, or use all of the above. It does not need to be a painful transition, but it seems as if humanity has been faced with this obvious choice for many decades now, and the response has been denial. So the outcome will be similar to what occurs when an addict, in denial, is faced with the reality that the addict can not continue on his destructive course forever.
Shutting down wood-burning as a form of major power generation, was not slowing progress.
I think it is long past time to move beyond (ie. progress) nuclear. Staying with nuclear, and allowing power companies to press 40 year old plants into continued service, is byzantine. And as we continue to learn, painfully, dangerous.
No amount of backup power would have saved Fukushima.
The whole story still is not out yet, but all three operating reactors at the time of the quake experienced major cooling loss prior to the tsunami. It's been publicly reported about Unit I. But it is also the case for II and III, and this truth will come out in time. It is in the details of the IAEA findings. They will be forced to report it as soon as they get workers into Units II and III to actually view those RPVs. I *do* find it amazing that they completely melted down, and the RPVs remained mostly intact, and contained the molten fuel. They were able to cool it somewhat with the seawater, I guess.
Bottom line is, all three units did not withstand the quake that they were designed and certified to withstand. The tsunami was a fortunate side-effect, to cover-up this fact.
WE - didn't DO anything. We built advanced designs in the 1960's and 1970's. Liquid sodium reactors. They had their own problems. The one in present-day Oxnard had a cooling failure - probably the closest equivalent to a "meltdown" a liquid sodium reactor can have. And there was leakage and contamination that is seldom discussed publicly; now that area is built up with very dense housing.
(of course, the health impacts of this contamination are subtle, and shown only in statistical models - this does not mean that there are not real-live actual human victims. What it does mean is that there is no legal recourse for them.)
Advanced nuclear power, both liquid sodium designs, and pebble bed designs, have been given their due, and have been found wanting. What more do you want? There is no free lunch.
The problems of procuring fuel, and storing waste, are still largely ignored by industry proponents.
The residents of Fukushima fought for decades to get the plant shut down. Even (and especially) after the evidence of safety violations and rampant fraud from TEPCO there. Now there are no more residents in Fukushima. It wasn't fear that caused the disaster. It was greed.
If you believe LA drivers are nuts, then you have never driven in Boston. In Boston, your punishment for lawfully stopping at a stop sign, is the drivers behind you, will go around you, flip you off, and honk their horn.
It is still a bullshit question.
Because the shorter yellow light is UN NECESSARY to implement the red-light camera.
We could have the safety benefit of the red-light camera (fewer head-on and oblique accidents), AND the safety benefit of a longer yellow, (fewer rear-end collisions). But the yellow lights are shortened to make the cameras more profitable for the private operators. At the expense of public safety. This is outrageous.
The problem with item 4; is that many of these red-light systems are handled by a special "external court", which is not really a real court, but basically a fee-processing center, set up by the company appointed by the city. They simply have no legal way to handle any disputes. The bar is set very high, there are very steep filing fees, and the burden of proof is on the driver. In my unfortunate experiences, it is very difficult to contest the charges against you under any circumstances. It's either pay-up, and lose the license-point, or pay MORE.
I don't really have a problem with the red-light cameras, in principle.
I do like the idea of stopping people who blow-off red lights. I think that people who skate through at the end of a yellow, should be cut some slack, because we all do it sometimes, and it's not a safety hazard, because the other side has not begun moving yet. But there are a LOT of people who do just brazenly blast through red lights because they think they can get away with it. I like that these cameras are there to bust those fuckers.
But I think that farming them out to a private company with a "special court" is a terrible idea. I think that permitting a shorter yellow light is an incredibly horrible idea, because it really does cause more rear-end accidents (this is a statistical fact) - and while that's preferable to high speed head-on and oblique collisions from people running red-lights, it is a trade-off that is completely unnecessary. The only reason for the shorter yellow, is to attempt to "trap" more offenders, in order to make the systems more profitable. At the expense of public safety. Disgusting. This should never have been considered as a private for-profit enterprise.
Another common trick, is when electronic format is demanded, they will provide it in the form of a PDF file, but the pages are encapsulated jpg images of scans, so there is no searchable text. You must be extremely explicit with these lawyer weasels.
Human beings are not "birth-control-farmo-bacteria" and never will be.
Having developed and fully taken advantage of the Haber-Bosch process to increase crop yields, and thus allow our own reproduction to spew into geometric bacteria-like rates, without any thought to how we deal with our own waste products, we are just about headed for a yeast-like die-off.
The OP's experiment is flawed - more like the actual experiment I did in high school biology with yeast. It was a classic exercise to teach us how to count microorganisms, prepare and mount microscope slides, take samples, make graphs. You know, basic bio lab techniques. When the yeast in the culture reached a certain point, their waste products, alcohol and carbon dioxide, built up, turned the food medium toxic, and the population level peaked, and they all died. (at least they died drunk and happy)
On Earth, we will see the same thing. We already are - in terms of fresh-water supply, contamination of our environment with toxic pollutants and radioactive contaminants, mass extinction of wild species, collapse of biodiversity, and rapid climate change. Go ahead and deny it. The science shows very clearly that this is all happening.
I'm not here to promote "hippie policies".
I don't think there's a damn thing we can do to stop it now. Or even slow it down.
Personally, I think we long, long, ago, crossed the line of no return. Maybe in the mid 1950's. We had no idea what the fuck we were doing then. People think that splitting the atom was the worst thing we ever did. I think it was the Haber-Bosch process, and allowing and encouraging the world's population to exceed 2 billion. (which, on a national-level, has always been a form of passive inter-cultural warfare).
If you believe that we can control our population growth - or find new resources, or even properly dispose of our own waste products - you are incredibly deluded. We can't even bring our 7 billion properly to full literacy. You try to limit their reproduction, or tell them how to dispose of their waste, and a good 80% will try to fucking kill you. Humans are at the top of the food chain because we are the most efficient predators nature ever devised. We can't manage eachother, we will refuse to BE managed, and nature can't manage us without killing us.
The most effective contraception known to man, is providing women with college-level education and careers. This is a statistical fact. It works better than any "product" "drug" or "device".
And because of the instability of the middle east region, oil and thus gas prices are higher than they otherwise should be. High gas prices are detrimental to an economy trying to dig itself out of a recessionary hole.
Given the nature of the OPEC cartel, and commodity speculation that does nothing productive for anyone's economy, this is really not an argument for or against "keeping political negotiations secret" - repressing people through violence and dictatorship. To keep oil prices down for us? Because high oil prices are inconvenient? That actually goes AGAINST Free Market theory. . . (why should the government intervene to keep one industry's feedstock prices low? Shouldn't that industry have to compete with others on a level playing field?)
The bottling up of these ugly negotiations and horse-trading, is what has perpetuated hatreds and conflicts in the region (and around the world) for what has been an incredibly violent and bloody century. All because high oil prices are inconvenient? I say: low oil prices are inconvenient. Because they prevent a good competitor from coming out of the laboratory, being developed and arising in the market. And low oil prices are very inconvenient to the millions who have died, starved, been blown into bloody bits of hamburger meat in our wars, and given the (petroleum-driven) Haber-Bosch process - the HUNDREDS of millions who were born who probably would not have otherwise been born; - - - and born into poverty, ignorance, religious intolerance, tribal warfare, colonial subjugation, disease and starvation. All due to the artificial manipulation of this commodity's dominant market position. Because we like to keep embarrassing secrets secret.
Obviously, the long-held goal of the US, and many world powers, has been stability, and maintenance of imperial power, and control of existing resources. And that is why the leaks have been dangerous for them. They are bringing about revolution and democracy to a world that can not possibly support itself with so many free opinions.
I can't project what will happen to world oil prices next.
Will prices go down, once the die-off begins, because fewer humans will demand less energy?
Or will prices go up, as extraction, transport, and refinery infrastructure is destroyed in the ensuing conflict over what remains?
Banyan, how could you let my networking skills die on the Vines?!
I have no response to that, other than; been there, done that, and completely agree. I would rather be stabbed, beaten and burned, than go through what my ex put me through again.
. . . . because this worked sooo well for Egypt!
Just don't worry about this at all.
Go to the IAEA web site. Or that very interesting XKCD web graphic, showing how completely harmless all this stuff is. Like a chest x ray. Or a flight to Paraguay. Trust the Government and Industry to protect you when things are dangerous. Turn on the lights, pay your bills, and don't ask questions.
Besides, if you detect radiation in your food, what are you going to do? Stop eating? Move to another country? Where? Where would you go that is unaffected. Just relax and accept the new "normal". :)
Well, it was also fairly obvious given the following:
- Among the long history of safety procedure fraud at Fukushima, by TEPCO, were instances where repairs were performed using procedures that were not approved by standards, but signed off as otherwise. (therefore - plant infrastructure which may have been *designed* to withstand certain g acceleration forces of an earthquake in 1971, may not be able to withstand those forces 40 years later, after these un-approved, but fraudulently certified repairs.) - The article which mentions these variances does not provide specifics.
- When Unit 1, and 3 exploded, the roofs of the building blew off. This indicates that the hydrogen had been generated in a reactor core at over 2200 degrees C, in the presence of water, and escaped the primary cooling system, venting into the reactor building's structure through the particle scrubbers, and exploded. A hydrogen explosion is not good, of course, but only indicative of a loss-of-cooling, at a minimum. Many experts will say that hydrogen generation is pretty much a sure sign of melting; it's not precise, but when you're in the ballpark, in a nuclear reactor, things can get very unstable very quickly, (like, milliseconds-quickly). None of these units had instrumentation, or controls, or active cooling going on. As hot byproducts are released - they have much lower melting points than the Uranium fuel, and they can migrate around, and collect in different states (or chemically react with eachother, and have a completely different set of properties - and these properties could be caustic, or explosive) . . . and cause hotspots, regions of high flux. (while some byproducts absorb neutrons and slow the reaction down). Pretty much all bets are off, as far as predicting what's going to happen.
Strictly speaking, hydrogen generation does not mean melting HAD to happen. But in this situation, it was highly improbable that melting wasn't happening in conjunction with that.
(and the hydrogen generation did not necessarily happen at the time of the explosions - the explosions happened later).
- When Unit 2 exploded, the explosion blew out the side of the base of the building, through the condenser, in the primary cooling. This means that the hydrogen collected and ignited in the primary cooling system. This also means that there was enough heat in the condenser to provide ignition. This could have been due to excessive steam pressure, (compression-ignition) - with oxygen leaking IN through structural cracks. It strongly suggests that Unit 2 was damaged structurally, (the concrete torus), in the quake. It could be that thermally hot byproducts or corium caused the ignition in the RPV, maybe with an oxygen isotope (I don't know if this is possible or not, probably not), or dissasociated water,(weird isotope chemistry?) or the ignition source made it's way into the torus (which would mean, holey RPV+holey primary cooling = open core). I can't really say what the ignition source could have been, but the presence of oxygen is the crazy bit, and the simplest explanation is structural issues in the concrete (or connecting cooling pipes/valves).
I think it was pretty idiotic and foolish (okay. . . unprofessional?) for TEPCO to state, in the immediate aftermath of the first hydrogen explosion, that they knew that the RPV was intact. They couldn't get instrument readings, or even a visual inspection for many days after that explosion to even get a half-assed confirmation of that statement. It was this kind of fumbling around and PR mismanagement that does the most damage to the industry's credibility. It would have been better for them to state what they definitely knew - what data they had, and the range of possibilities that it could have meant. That first hydrogen explosion was absolutely the time to press the panic button and evacuate residents.
Hey, where is the "ALARMIST!" tag?
Radiation is good for you. Everybody could take a hundred chest x-rays a year. Ought to have em too. Cesium-137? sprinkle it over your breakfast cereal for flavor in the morning. Makes you strong, like bull.
Dang tree-hugging whiners! If you had your way, we'd all be eating coal, and living in caves, and smearing our dung on eachother, and copulating with jellyfish like primitive apes! PROGRESS! Drill baby drill! Split them atoms! Yeah!!!
(this message has been brought to you by, one sarcastic bastard).
Exactly right.
Coders' "passion" is fine and dandy and all. But process recognizes that we don't put passion above sound engineering principles. And that individual coders are not infallible. Without process, you'll write very cool flash games, to be sure.
. . . and by "efficient", you mean, using slave labor, no environmental regulations, and an entrenched oligarchy of priviliged business interests to centrally manage distribution of resources. Much like the direction the US economy is headed.