Next those idiots that don't understand economics are going to give people free air to breathe. Obviously with a "free" resource like that everyone is just going to keep on breathing and breathing until there's no more air left.
From the excerpts I've read, this vision of the future is rather banal. It's a 1950s middle-management view of the future.
I think the whole idea of the Internet as a transformative technology is overblown. It's nice, it's convenient, but compared to some of the truly transformative technologies we had in the 19th and first 50-60 years of the 20th century, it's a yawn. Many people don't appreciate how the railroad and the telegraph changed the world. We've had some improvements in transportation speed and communication bandwidth since then, but those were the truly transformative technologies. Steamships, electric power distribution, cars, radio and airplanes weren't bad either. The Internet - not so spectacular.
I've seen one of the loudmouthed "anarcho-capitalists" on this site openly espouse *feudalism*
How ridiculous. Here's clearly an advocate of anarcho-feudalism (hey, I just invented a political philosophy!).
That's more an argument that anarcho-capitalism has nothing to do with anarchy
Yes, there's a strong argument for that, but my pedantic side couldn't help responding to the OP's "giant corporations running things is not really what anarchist theory has in mind". Frankly there are so many schools of anarchist thought that they shouldn't be lumped together under the name anarchism.
the containment vessel is designed to withstand a 9.5 earthquake (Fukushima was a 9.1)
I wonder what that means in engineering terms. The Richter (actually moment magnitude scale) measures the total energy released in the quake, but what matters for structural design is the peak ground acceleration and the peak ground velocity. The chart on the PGA page shows a remarkable lack of correlation between MMS and PGA. The highest energy quake ever recorded (9.5 Chile 1960) had a PGA of only 0.3g, where the 2011 Thoku earthquake that caused the Fukushima accident was 2.7g. The 2008 Iwate-Miyagi Nairiku earthquake was a 7.2 that had a vector sum PGA of 4.36g.
If you are a Keynes follower, you should build these in recessions
The problem is that for economic stimulus you want to start spending serious money as soon as possible, and not wait years for the planning of a plant. Of course, considering how long the economy has been in the toilet, that might not be an issue nowadays.
Just relocate the residents, give them fair market price for their property.
What do you think the fair market price is for the homes and businesses of say, one million people, in an expensive part of the country? There's an outside chance that it might be cheaper to put the nuke elsewhere. And my point was that anything within a few hundred miles (if not further) works just fine.
In the case of nukes, NIMBY sometimes makes sense. It should be practical to evacuate the area around a nuke - it's not like it's never been necessary or a wise precaution. Building in an area that's insanely difficult or slow to evacuate, like the old Shoreham, NY plant, is insane. Nor is there any practical reason to do so. They ship GigaWatts of power with little loss from Hydro-Quebec to other parts of Canada and the US, or from the Northwest to LA. The only reason to build near densely populated areas is because utilities have a limited geographic charter. That's a political/economic issue that can be dealt with.
Mod parent up. Whether you or not you like or agree w/ the PP, it's not flamebait or a troll, and doesn't deserve -1. When I use my mod points, I never mod things to -1 unless they're flamebait or a troll.
The next time there is an accident (and there will be) the people living around it will be glad we learned something from this one...
The idea of learning from this accident is to prevent another accident, so "the next time there is an accident (and there will be)" it will be because the lessons weren't learned or because of something completely different.
And the people living around where will be glad? Fukushima? I doubt they're going to let anyone build another nuke near them. Or do you mean the people living around the future inevitable accident? Why would they be happy - if there is an accident near them it means that the Fukushima lessons didn't help them. The only people who are happy when safety lessons are absorbed are people who don't even know they should be happy that no accident has occurred. Such is the rude reality of preventing accidents. You rarely get credited if it works, but you'll get blamed if it doesn't.
I also don't think my original point was so obtuse. As useful as accident investigations can be to engineers, the people who are affected by accidents generally don't care about the details or whether you got everything else right. What they know and care about is that the thing failed. That's a reasonable attitude.
It doesn't take 40 years to clean up after a fertilizer plant explodes. BTW, what happens if they get another tsunami while they're cleaning up the mess?
You don't last 2000+ years as a nation without a long term plan.
China has fallen apart, and been glued back together, many times in the last 2000+ years. Emperor/Chinese party gets too greedy, peasants revolt, place falls apart for a few centuries, new peasant leader comes along and makes himself emperor (e.g. Mao) and it stays glued together for some time, until the cycle repeats.
I'll buy that they're thinking longer term than the US, but that's also true of a hyperactive three year old. No country thinks 2000 years ahead. BTW Egypt has been around a lot longer and has at least as good of a claim to continuity.
The One Child policy for instance has created an enormous glut of working age people with few dependents that will become a tremendous burden on the country when they reach retirement age.
When you've got 1.3 billion people in a country the size of the US, overpopulation is a much bigger long term issue than having a high retiree/worker ratio for a while. If your productivity increases enough, a given number of retirees will actually be less of a burden on a smaller but more productive work force than they would be on a larger but less productive workforce. What do you think noodle robots are for?
The One Child policy combined with traditional values is also creating a tremendous imbalance in the genders, with almost 20% more boys than girls born.
That's a different story, though AFAIK the government's problem arises from an inability to stop it rather than any tolerance of it. I also find it revolting. My family values say a daughter is no less valuable than a son.
Slashdot Mirror
Next those idiots that don't understand economics are going to give people free air to breathe. Obviously with a "free" resource like that everyone is just going to keep on breathing and breathing until there's no more air left.
No need for any evidence that anybody wants it; a good ideologue knows a priori that they do.
From the excerpts I've read, this vision of the future is rather banal. It's a 1950s middle-management view of the future.
I think the whole idea of the Internet as a transformative technology is overblown. It's nice, it's convenient, but compared to some of the truly transformative technologies we had in the 19th and first 50-60 years of the 20th century, it's a yawn. Many people don't appreciate how the railroad and the telegraph changed the world. We've had some improvements in transportation speed and communication bandwidth since then, but those were the truly transformative technologies. Steamships, electric power distribution, cars, radio and airplanes weren't bad either. The Internet - not so spectacular.
I've seen one of the loudmouthed "anarcho-capitalists" on this site openly espouse *feudalism*
How ridiculous. Here's clearly an advocate of anarcho-feudalism (hey, I just invented a political philosophy!).
That's more an argument that anarcho-capitalism has nothing to do with anarchy
Yes, there's a strong argument for that, but my pedantic side couldn't help responding to the OP's "giant corporations running things is not really what anarchist theory has in mind". Frankly there are so many schools of anarchist thought that they shouldn't be lumped together under the name anarchism.
giant corporations running things is not really what anarchist theory has in mind as a good outcome
I dunno, sounds a lot like anarcho-capitalism.
Futurists exist to make astrologers look respectable.
One critical irreplaceable part breaks ...
Breaks? Guess you haven't seen how those old systems were made. You could rearrange it and make a dandy trash compactor for modern computers.
I would love to see what they have spent on maintenance over the years for that electromechanical junk.
I would love to see what they've saved on not having a bunch of programmers wondering why the latest Java update broke everything.
There were also societal requirements like having comprehensive evacuation plans for all nearby populated areas.
How ridiculous. No one has ever needed to evacuate from around a nuclear power plant, right?
the containment vessel is designed to withstand a 9.5 earthquake (Fukushima was a 9.1)
I wonder what that means in engineering terms. The Richter (actually moment magnitude scale) measures the total energy released in the quake, but what matters for structural design is the peak ground acceleration and the peak ground velocity. The chart on the PGA page shows a remarkable lack of correlation between MMS and PGA. The highest energy quake ever recorded (9.5 Chile 1960) had a PGA of only 0.3g, where the 2011 Thoku earthquake that caused the Fukushima accident was 2.7g. The 2008 Iwate-Miyagi Nairiku earthquake was a 7.2 that had a vector sum PGA of 4.36g.
If you are a Keynes follower, you should build these in recessions
The problem is that for economic stimulus you want to start spending serious money as soon as possible, and not wait years for the planning of a plant. Of course, considering how long the economy has been in the toilet, that might not be an issue nowadays.
Just relocate the residents, give them fair market price for their property.
What do you think the fair market price is for the homes and businesses of say, one million people, in an expensive part of the country? There's an outside chance that it might be cheaper to put the nuke elsewhere. And my point was that anything within a few hundred miles (if not further) works just fine.
In the case of nukes, NIMBY sometimes makes sense. It should be practical to evacuate the area around a nuke - it's not like it's never been necessary or a wise precaution. Building in an area that's insanely difficult or slow to evacuate, like the old Shoreham, NY plant, is insane. Nor is there any practical reason to do so. They ship GigaWatts of power with little loss from Hydro-Quebec to other parts of Canada and the US, or from the Northwest to LA. The only reason to build near densely populated areas is because utilities have a limited geographic charter. That's a political/economic issue that can be dealt with.
Safety-first was on [China's] mind when they built train lines and then when they derailed, buried the train, corpses and all.
Cite?
Mod parent up. Whether you or not you like or agree w/ the PP, it's not flamebait or a troll, and doesn't deserve -1. When I use my mod points, I never mod things to -1 unless they're flamebait or a troll.
The next time there is an accident (and there will be) the people living around it will be glad we learned something from this one ...
The idea of learning from this accident is to prevent another accident, so "the next time there is an accident (and there will be)" it will be because the lessons weren't learned or because of something completely different.
And the people living around where will be glad? Fukushima? I doubt they're going to let anyone build another nuke near them. Or do you mean the people living around the future inevitable accident? Why would they be happy - if there is an accident near them it means that the Fukushima lessons didn't help them. The only people who are happy when safety lessons are absorbed are people who don't even know they should be happy that no accident has occurred. Such is the rude reality of preventing accidents. You rarely get credited if it works, but you'll get blamed if it doesn't.
I also don't think my original point was so obtuse. As useful as accident investigations can be to engineers, the people who are affected by accidents generally don't care about the details or whether you got everything else right. What they know and care about is that the thing failed. That's a reasonable attitude.
and it does matter because in the real world the ideal is to learn from the past in order to better prepare for the future
It may be useful to a nuclear engineer, but I doubt most of the people living there give a damn that they almost got it right.
Groundwater.
That would have been useful at Fukushima as the core dropped into a hole recently filled with seawater.
It doesn't take 40 years to clean up after a fertilizer plant explodes. BTW, what happens if they get another tsunami while they're cleaning up the mess?
Canadian reactors overheat if the outside temperature exceeds 25C.
it was the tsunami that actually caused the meltdowns
Has anyone said otherwise? What's your point?
they just didn't design for the eventually of a tsunami
It doesn't matter what other things were done right, because in the real world it still had a meltdown.
Many of the earlier tribes of China were driven out by Han expansion ...
Somewhat like the Americans drove the Indians they didn't kill off onto reservations.
You don't last 2000+ years as a nation without a long term plan.
China has fallen apart, and been glued back together, many times in the last 2000+ years. Emperor/Chinese party gets too greedy, peasants revolt, place falls apart for a few centuries, new peasant leader comes along and makes himself emperor (e.g. Mao) and it stays glued together for some time, until the cycle repeats.
I'll buy that they're thinking longer term than the US, but that's also true of a hyperactive three year old. No country thinks 2000 years ahead. BTW Egypt has been around a lot longer and has at least as good of a claim to continuity.
The One Child policy for instance has created an enormous glut of working age people with few dependents that will become a tremendous burden on the country when they reach retirement age.
When you've got 1.3 billion people in a country the size of the US, overpopulation is a much bigger long term issue than having a high retiree/worker ratio for a while. If your productivity increases enough, a given number of retirees will actually be less of a burden on a smaller but more productive work force than they would be on a larger but less productive workforce. What do you think noodle robots are for?
The One Child policy combined with traditional values is also creating a tremendous imbalance in the genders, with almost 20% more boys than girls born.
That's a different story, though AFAIK the government's problem arises from an inability to stop it rather than any tolerance of it. I also find it revolting. My family values say a daughter is no less valuable than a son.