Nobody but Marx? I beg to differ. In some areas they aren't likely. In other areas, at least local monopolies appear inevitable. Consider, e.g., water distribution.
OTOH, it is also true that most other governmental systems concentrate power. (Considering capitalism as a governmental system, which it shouldn't be.) So, rephrasing, most other governmental systems concentrate power. Perhaps they all do. (I can't think of a good counter example. Certainly an anarchist commune typically concentrates power.) But in some systems there tend to be larger concentrations of power than in other systems. Compare the Articles of Confederation to the Constitution. But note also that during it's early years, at least, the Constitutional US government has wide-spread approval. (Actually, it still does, but I hesitate to call it Constitutional anymore.) The major difference is probably the "closing of the frontier". Denser populations facilitate the creation of larger concentrations of power. So does better communication. But the nature of humans is such that when there are a few major concentrations of power, those most driven to occupy them are crazy, and among those crazy folk, some will be able to pass themselves as sane. A term I've heard that seems fit to describe them is "reasoning psychotic". They aren't necessarily sociopaths, but a large segment of them are. If there are dispersed centers of power, and none with major power, then these folk are generally relatively harmless, and often beneficial. (They want to hold on to the power, so they often do a good job.) But if there's any opportunity for "empire building" then they will grab it, creating a larger and more dangerous (because more attractive) center of power. This also frequently perverts the original reason for which the smaller center of power was created.
Please note that this is related to "Parkinson's law". It is an observed regularity of human behavior for which there is no formal theoretical grounding. Perhaps someone who is trying to put Sociology on a sound footing could explain this formally, as being derived from certain systems principles (with a certain probability over a certain population in a certain span of time). I can't. I can merely observe the regularity, and notice that it is socially destructive, but often beneficial to the individual holding power.
P.S.: I class most theories of human behavior with theology. Most of them seek to prescribe human behavior, without a sound basis rather than describing it in any useful manner. (I.e., they abstract out particular features that fit their theories, but don't tell you what they have omitted, and then prescribe how people should act because of that, when all an actual theory could say would be "If, in these circumstances, you perform this action, you will get this result.")
That's a good analysis, but I'm not sure I accept the claim that those are the only problems They are, however, certainly major problems with it where it clearly fails totally.
OTOH, I don't trust any system that so concentrates power. Concentrated power, even without malice, is incredibly dangerous. And when positions with concentrated power exist, they inevitable attract people who are compulsivley driven to exert power. (This is one reason why I suspect that a lottery would, on the average, provide a superior government to an election, even if the electoral system were well designed and free of corruption.)
The capitalism that you have described would still tend to accumulate monopoly power in certain areas, and the director of that power, whatever his title, would be in a position to so act as to increase his power. So he would. There needs to be a negative feedback system to prevent this from happening. One such factor used to be the progressive income tax system, but it was not well designed, and has fallen into corruption. It should be a simple tax on all income without exemptions or exceptions. If, for some social policy reason, you want to encourage some behavior, actively subsidize it, don't distort the tax system. Often for simplicity I recommend a simple: tax = rate * income - offset equation for the tax system. That's probably not actually ideal, but it's simple enough that nearly anyone can understand it, which is a real advantage. The more complex tax = rate1 * income^2 + rate2 * income - offset is more flexible, and probably could better fit the desired values. But it's harder to understand, and three adjustment constants are harder to set correctly than is one.
However, do note that these proposals are continuous functions. At every step earning more money means a larger after-tax income. Also notice that if the offset is larger than the pre-offset tax calculation, then this counts as a negative income tax. But for fairness ALL sources of income must be counted. And the tax code should NOT contain any writeoffs for "business expenses" or the like. If it is desired to provide those, that should be in a separate law.
That's actually less than clear. In Classic Greece there was little regulation of trade. (This is one of the things that disturbed the Persians. I quote(well, paraphrase): "Who are these people who have special places to go where they cheat each other?" (I forget whether that was Darius or Cyrus. I don't seem to find it on Google.)
I'd like some evidence before I believe that claim that the claims are nearly true. I seem to have seen a lot of evidence that appears to contradict that. This is most blatantly clear in the claim that there are "no cost to entering a market", but it's nearly as clear that "all players have perfect knowledge" is false.
No. The "tragedy of the commons" results of individuals sharing access to a limite resource, without being regulated in their use of it. (Though in some formulations that "without being regulated in their use of it" is left unmentioned.)
This inevitably results in the destruction through overuse of the shared resource unless the group using it is sufficiently small that the common resource can regenerate faster than it is used. But since the use is unregulated this cannot be enforced.
OTOH, the use of the atmosphere for breathing is such a resource, and it has lasted for a long time, because plants regenerate it as fast as it is used.
Still, one should note that most of the plants that regenerate the atmosphere are plankton, and the plankton are currently rapidly decreasing in number. So it is not unreasonable to project that at some future date the common atmosphere will become unbreatheable. And this would be an example of the tragedy of the commons, even though it wasn't the breathing of the atmosphere that rendered the atmosphere unbreathable. (Much Oxygen is removed from the atmosphere through processed that have nothing to do with breathing, but they still have impacts on its common use for breathing.)
Please note that I didn't mention anything about "best interests". You can make that work via a digression through game theory, but the logic isn't as straightforwards as it appears. It is, after all, a game of imperfect information played by multiple players, and such games tend to be intractable. Worse, different players have different payoffs. And many of them aren't even aware that they are playing.
I doubt that the resistance was particularly directed a vancomycin. Many antibiotic resistence genes operate on a wide variety of antibiotics, so a resistence developed against one antibiotic and yiled resistence against many. E.g., some of the genes make pumps that pump the antibiotic out of the cell. These are often adapted to a wide variety of antibiotics, including many that the cell line has never experienced.
P.S.: In evolutionary theory this is called "preadaption". It's a poor name, but a common phenomenon.
That's really something that depends on the data being protected. If it's nothing important, then just use something easy, that's easy to decode. If it's more important, well, you go all the way up to storing the key in a bank vault, and then you pass the baton to the user, and make decrypting it their problem. In Adobe's case they should have used a secure encryption, with a user specific key, and stored the keys off-line. So that technical support could retrieve them with the permission of their supervisor, on a sign for authorization basis. (I.e., as described, this hint should not have been available to the user on-line.) And the actual password should have been also retrievable, but with greater difficulty. These are users who WILL lose their passwords, and who WILL expect Adobe to "just make it work!", so the passwords *do* need to be retrievable. Or able to be regenerated, which means that you need to have some other means to identify the user.
FWIW, to me this is an argument in favor of FOSS, where such passwords are only needed by those who want to change the source tree, and where there's little financial gain by breaking in. But expecting Adobe to take that viewpoint is... unreasonable. So you need to manage the requirement responsibly.
Sorry to disagree, but I feel there SHOULD be a password hint field. I also, however, feel that it should be encrypted. And that it shouldn't be allowed to contain the password.
I've got to agree with that. But I *do* believe that if there were the political will behind it, solar, wind, etc. would replace fossil fuels...particularly if they received the level of subsidy that oil/gas/coal currently receives. OTOH, it does still require some technical innovations to really be viable. A switch made at the current level of technology would raise prices by perhaps 50%...either that or yield some *very* unreliable sources of energy.
OTOH, 5-10 years ago it would have doubled the cost of energy. So that's a moving target. If it keeps on it's current curve, then in 5-10 years solar/wind/etc. will be cheaper than oil/gas/coal.
The real problem is that even if we stopped using fossil fuels totally today, lags in the system would guarantee that global warming would continue for at least another few decades, and I don't see any reason to believe that it would cool down again after it stabilized. When the ice is off the Arctic, then there's a lot more sunlight being absorbed, and carbon dioxide lasts millenia...and it's not just in the air, a lot of it has been absorbed by the ocean.
Chernobyl isn't close to the worst It may be the worst likely, but that's not what needs to be covered. (If you have 1% chance of an accident in a year, an accident is unlikely. Unless you have more than 50 independent operations.)
There are nuclear plant close enough to New York, IIRC, so that if there were an accident only slightly worse than Chernobyl, and the wind was wrong, New York would become uninhabitable for decades. Including all the infrastructure. If the company hid the problems, or the engineers were swamped by too many alarms that they were trying to figure out, people living nearby might get a lethat in 10 years (est. avg.) dose before anyone knew what was going on. Etc. Unlikely, definitely. But plants are continually failing safety inspections, and being certified to run at higher power levels beyond their original design life. So as the number of plants increases, the probability of a really serious accident increases. A typical city has hundreds of thousands of people, but a megalopolitan area has millions...though I'll grant you actually killing those millions is unlikely...at least not quickly. (I tend to include people killed by radiation induced cancer as casualties of the radiation. So what I was thinking about was not an explosion (well, not more than a steam explosion), but a massive leak of particulate waste that drifted over the environs and exposed people without their even knowing there was a problem. And yes, this *IS* a worst case scenario. But given enough plants and enough time it will happen. Being unlikely doesn't mean it won't happen. Giant Meteor strikes are unlikely, but they have happened.
OTOH, I am clearly no expert. But failed safety inspections that are also failed on reinspection mean to me that the expert assurances of safety aren't really believable. Remember, they have a vested interest, but also they've been taught by people with a vested interest. I think they are honest, well-intentioned people (well, most of them), who don't like to think about bad things happening, so they don't. (And, yes, there are exceptions.) And they don't want you to make their job harder, so even if they see a problem, they'll try to say something that will calm you (i.e., the public) down more than explain a difficult to understand methodology. And when they're right, this is a reasonable way to proceed. It gets things done with the least effort and strain, and fewer outside overseers jostling their elbows. But if they aren't right, things don't work out so well.
Yes, but is $12 billion per incident a reasonable maximum? I'm pretty sure we haven't even had an accident close to that, so one could say yes, but given the nature of the beast we could well have an accident that exceeded it. And nobody (i.e., the individuals injured) would need to bear the difference in cost. If I'm understanding this correctly, when the cap is passed, so is all corporate liability.
A lot of modern "off" switches should really be named "sleep". They don't turn the power off. If they did you couldn't use, e.g., wake on the network. Nothing that allows remote activation really turns itself off...and that includes a huge number of things with off switches.
Why is everyone still believing that they are saying what they mean. I rather expect that the left out the US because that's primarily who this is ruling is directed at.
Sorry, but the roofs of most single family dwelling units aren't strong enough to support enough solar cells to generate enough to equal the use within that dwelling unit. This doesn't even start to count the problems you get when you start considering apartment houses, where most people live.
Roof top solar panels are a great supplement, but not sufficient. This could be fixed with the "solar shingles" that one repeatedly hears of as "under development", but under development doesn't mean it will ever come out of development.
This doesn't mean that solar isn't the answer, or at least a major piece of the answer, but it does mean that simple-minded approaches won't work. (And adding in local storage at least doubles the cost of the installation. This is reasonable only for remote locations...or if you REALLY need a UPS.)
That said, I'm not really convinced by nuclear. Nobody has tackled the waste disposal problem, and the very companies that build them refuse to handle the insurance. Fusion is looking more and more like a pipedream. Every approach seems to generate huge amounts of radioactive waste. And the last I heard steel still couldn't hold it's strength after being submerged in a flow of neutrons for awhile.
There are many small, site-specific methods that are practical, some even dependable, but the problem is that they're site specific.
There is, however, one form of nuclear energy that if probably workable, dependable, and non-polluting (once you set it up, that is). You drill a hole deep through a layer of non-permeable rock, and explode a nuclear weapon. Then you set up a heat exchanger that runs down into the cavity produced by melting all the rock. Then you pump in some water (being careful that the steam doesn't escape) to improve the heat transmission. Seal it off, and pull out the power. I don't think anyone's ever tried this, but I remember hearing it proposed, and it sounded reasonable.
Trustworth? Yeah, the US is trustworthy. The question is do you want them to do what you can trust them to do.
Actually, looked at from a historical perspective, the US has been extremely moderate for to top country with no real competition. The Romans were a lot worse. And don't talk about the Assyrians. OTOH, Egypt was probably no worse than the US. (It was another commercial empire. That may have something to do with it.)
I'm not considering Britain, as I don't feel I have sufficient historical perspective on the British empire. My impression, as a US citizen, is that it was worse than the US, but only slightly. And even that could be wrong.
OTOH, typically as a country starts on its way down from the top, it's behavior starts to degenerate. So I wouldn't expect things to stay stable. I expect US behavior to get worse both internationally and domestically. The real question is "How will China react", as that will have a large effect on the US actions. (If for no other reason, they own much of the government...indirectly, I think. [I.e., via lobbyists operated by corporations largely owned by Chinese nationals, or even directly by the government.])
FWIW, I consider China to be the dominant country in the world today, but playing a very low-key background game, and using other countries as catspaws to do things they don't want to get blamed for.
OTOH, also consider that a lot of US military action is designed to test out weapons to control a hostile population with a small number of men. And also note that many US police departments have started to use drones. I'm sure that many countries are watching how this develops with great interest.
All those costs are certainly included in the subsidy.
because, if so, I agree with you.
OTOH, it's also true that there are large subsidies for both coal and gas/oil. It's not clear to me which has the larger subsidy. What is the value of being relieved of all liability for faults in an item which has the potential to kill millions of people and to render many 10's of square miles uninhabitable, and all the materials on them likewise? It may never happen. But it might. That's got to count as a quite substantial subsidy, but it's hard to figure just how large without really knowing the probabilities of all the possible scenarios. It may well be that nuclear has a much higher subsidy than does oil. Or it may be much lower. (Oils subsidy, remember, includes a substantial presence in the middle east of the US military.)
There may be types of nuclear plant that can't produce weapons grade materials, pebble bed reactors come to mind as a possibility, but Thorium isn't a magic wand in *this* context. It can be used to produce weapons grade materials. If it can't, that's because the plant was designed so that it couldn't, not because of the starting material. U233 is sufficiently radioactive for an explosive weapon.
For that matter, even if you can't produce a nuclear explosion, you could use ground up radioactive dust combined with a conventional explosive to render quite a large area uninhabitable. Or, if you so desired, a smaller area, down to the size of only a room (though that could probably be cleaned up).
OTOH, some people fly off the handle. Areas contaminated by radiation aren't permanently uninhabitable. The most radioactive materials have short half lives. After a few decades it would be fairly safe, and after a few centuries it would approach the background level. No people may live in the vicintiy of Chernobyl, but lots of large mammals do. (Well, people live longer, and are also more aware of the danger. But the animals do live and breed there, and have for many generations now.)
It's lots more complicated than that. E.g., most people don't live the places they live in.
That said, more complicated doesn't mean it can't be done, it means the incentives aren't straightforward. Additionally, despite people wanting to think about doing it on a small scale, that's not a complete solution. You still need the grid (as you recognized). In fact a distributed power generation system requires a better grid, one that is less subject to fluctuations. (A solar storm possibility also makes that a necessity. The current grid wouldn't survive a hit by a major solar storm.) There need to be fast acting and capacious buffer capacitors. There needs to be distributed power storage. (Water towers that you pump up when there's excess power, and drain when the power level is low is one good choice, that you can use when there's noting else available...even if you need to cart in the water. It's not great, as you can't store large amounts of power that way at a reasonable price, but it's a multiple use storage system, Etc,
And for the large installations, we don't use solar cells, we use mirrors, and turbines. I doubt that solar cells will improve enough that that's not a better solution. (The mirrors heat a working fluid which is stored until needed. So it's an energy storage system combined with solar power.) And you don't use Death Valley, you use the Mojave Desert. You'll need more stuff than would easily fit into Death Valley, and it's not really a very good place for solar. It gets hot, yes, but it's a VALLEY, which means that it's only bright part of the day. (Well, I may be wrong about that last, but Death Valley retains heat, it no brighter than the surrounding countryside.)
Solar->thermal->hot fluid->turbine generator is the way for a large installation to work. (I'm pretty sure turbine is the correct generator), and that depends on a large thermal delta between the working fluid and the local environment. (So you need to have shade, and desire a mild wind.) But it comes with a built in time delay that can be stretched for weeks with good thermal insulation. This probably couldn't come on-line quite as fast as a gas generator, but probably faster than coal.
OTOH, one shouldn't be too focused on one particular modality. Wind has a lot going for it, but there needs to be a way to store the power generated. So far the only proposals I've encountered involved pumping water uphill (or into a pressurized container). And those can be difficult to implement. (Well, small water towers are pretty easy, but also don't store much.) Hydro is already pretty well developed, but we don't have many "mill pond" they hydro power sources, and we certainly could. It's a stable source of power, but each individual one wouldn't be large. (OTOH, it might well interfere with fish spawning...though the "mill pond" itself can raise fish of a different kind.)
This could go on for a long time, and I bet it's already TL;DR for most people.
Wrong assumptions? When I look at political choices being made today those seem the correct assumptions.
FWIW, yes, renewables could handle things. But you'd need a lot of them. If they got the kind of government subsidy that oil and coal get there'd be no problem, but they don't benefit big business, so that's probably not in the cards. Nuclear already has many large business supporting it, so it can be pushed, if people will just stop fighting it.
Unfortunately, when there's a problem with nuclear, the result is VERY expensive. So expensive the the companies that build the plants refuse to build them unless relieved of the responsability. Getting rid of waste is an unsolved problem. (Not insoluble, unsolved...and nobody is willing to work on a solution. IIRC fast breeders could burn radioactive waste down to nearly background level, but they can also build fission bomb materials.) So I have a VERY hard time supporting nuclear. If the companies that built the plants thought they were safe enough that they didn't need government guarantees that they wouldn't be held responsible, I might change my mind. If, also, the waste problem was reasonably solved (by which I *DON'T* mean burying it in a subduction trench), I might change my mind...though I not at all sure that I'd like fast breeders to be the solution. More along the lines of miniature power generators. Probably a difficult problem. Medical isotopes is another small use. Etc.
Their point of view is understandable. Nuclear is much more likely to get enough support among the powers. But until a bunch of outstanding problems are solved, I don't see how *I* can support it.
But don't say he used the wrong number. Given the current political power structure those are probably the right numbers.
That can be done, but that's a lot more extreme than a simple air gap. An air gap just means there's no electrical or radio connection, i.e., the signal has to go over air. Isolated is what I would call what you're referring to, and I have no reason to believe that that was meant.
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Nobody but Marx? I beg to differ. In some areas they aren't likely. In other areas, at least local monopolies appear inevitable. Consider, e.g., water distribution.
OTOH, it is also true that most other governmental systems concentrate power. (Considering capitalism as a governmental system, which it shouldn't be.) So, rephrasing, most other governmental systems concentrate power. Perhaps they all do. (I can't think of a good counter example. Certainly an anarchist commune typically concentrates power.) But in some systems there tend to be larger concentrations of power than in other systems. Compare the Articles of Confederation to the Constitution. But note also that during it's early years, at least, the Constitutional US government has wide-spread approval. (Actually, it still does, but I hesitate to call it Constitutional anymore.) The major difference is probably the "closing of the frontier". Denser populations facilitate the creation of larger concentrations of power. So does better communication. But the nature of humans is such that when there are a few major concentrations of power, those most driven to occupy them are crazy, and among those crazy folk, some will be able to pass themselves as sane. A term I've heard that seems fit to describe them is "reasoning psychotic". They aren't necessarily sociopaths, but a large segment of them are. If there are dispersed centers of power, and none with major power, then these folk are generally relatively harmless, and often beneficial. (They want to hold on to the power, so they often do a good job.) But if there's any opportunity for "empire building" then they will grab it, creating a larger and more dangerous (because more attractive) center of power. This also frequently perverts the original reason for which the smaller center of power was created.
Please note that this is related to "Parkinson's law". It is an observed regularity of human behavior for which there is no formal theoretical grounding. Perhaps someone who is trying to put Sociology on a sound footing could explain this formally, as being derived from certain systems principles (with a certain probability over a certain population in a certain span of time). I can't. I can merely observe the regularity, and notice that it is socially destructive, but often beneficial to the individual holding power.
P.S.: I class most theories of human behavior with theology. Most of them seek to prescribe human behavior, without a sound basis rather than describing it in any useful manner. (I.e., they abstract out particular features that fit their theories, but don't tell you what they have omitted, and then prescribe how people should act because of that, when all an actual theory could say would be "If, in these circumstances, you perform this action, you will get this result.")
That's a good analysis, but I'm not sure I accept the claim that those are the only problems They are, however, certainly major problems with it where it clearly fails totally.
OTOH, I don't trust any system that so concentrates power. Concentrated power, even without malice, is incredibly dangerous. And when positions with concentrated power exist, they inevitable attract people who are compulsivley driven to exert power. (This is one reason why I suspect that a lottery would, on the average, provide a superior government to an election, even if the electoral system were well designed and free of corruption.)
The capitalism that you have described would still tend to accumulate monopoly power in certain areas, and the director of that power, whatever his title, would be in a position to so act as to increase his power. So he would. There needs to be a negative feedback system to prevent this from happening. One such factor used to be the progressive income tax system, but it was not well designed, and has fallen into corruption. It should be a simple tax on all income without exemptions or exceptions. If, for some social policy reason, you want to encourage some behavior, actively subsidize it, don't distort the tax system. Often for simplicity I recommend a simple:
tax = rate * income - offset
equation for the tax system. That's probably not actually ideal, but it's simple enough that nearly anyone can understand it, which is a real advantage. The more complex
tax = rate1 * income^2 + rate2 * income - offset
is more flexible, and probably could better fit the desired values. But it's harder to understand, and three adjustment constants are harder to set correctly than is one.
However, do note that these proposals are continuous functions. At every step earning more money means a larger after-tax income. Also notice that if the offset is larger than the pre-offset tax calculation, then this counts as a negative income tax. But for fairness ALL sources of income must be counted. And the tax code should NOT contain any writeoffs for "business expenses" or the like. If it is desired to provide those, that should be in a separate law.
That's actually less than clear. In Classic Greece there was little regulation of trade. (This is one of the things that disturbed the Persians. I quote(well, paraphrase): "Who are these people who have special places to go where they cheat each other?" (I forget whether that was Darius or Cyrus. I don't seem to find it on Google.)
I'd like some evidence before I believe that claim that the claims are nearly true. I seem to have seen a lot of evidence that appears to contradict that. This is most blatantly clear in the claim that there are "no cost to entering a market", but it's nearly as clear that "all players have perfect knowledge" is false.
No. The "tragedy of the commons" results of individuals sharing access to a limite resource, without being regulated in their use of it. (Though in some formulations that "without being regulated in their use of it" is left unmentioned.)
This inevitably results in the destruction through overuse of the shared resource unless the group using it is sufficiently small that the common resource can regenerate faster than it is used. But since the use is unregulated this cannot be enforced.
OTOH, the use of the atmosphere for breathing is such a resource, and it has lasted for a long time, because plants regenerate it as fast as it is used.
Still, one should note that most of the plants that regenerate the atmosphere are plankton, and the plankton are currently rapidly decreasing in number. So it is not unreasonable to project that at some future date the common atmosphere will become unbreatheable. And this would be an example of the tragedy of the commons, even though it wasn't the breathing of the atmosphere that rendered the atmosphere unbreathable. (Much Oxygen is removed from the atmosphere through processed that have nothing to do with breathing, but they still have impacts on its common use for breathing.)
Please note that I didn't mention anything about "best interests". You can make that work via a digression through game theory, but the logic isn't as straightforwards as it appears. It is, after all, a game of imperfect information played by multiple players, and such games tend to be intractable. Worse, different players have different payoffs. And many of them aren't even aware that they are playing.
Umnnh.... The health care system isn't the ONLY problem. Perhaps not even the major problem. But it's certainly a contributory factor.
I doubt that the resistance was particularly directed a vancomycin. Many antibiotic resistence genes operate on a wide variety of antibiotics, so a resistence developed against one antibiotic and yiled resistence against many. E.g., some of the genes make pumps that pump the antibiotic out of the cell. These are often adapted to a wide variety of antibiotics, including many that the cell line has never experienced.
P.S.: In evolutionary theory this is called "preadaption". It's a poor name, but a common phenomenon.
That's really something that depends on the data being protected. If it's nothing important, then just use something easy, that's easy to decode. If it's more important, well, you go all the way up to storing the key in a bank vault, and then you pass the baton to the user, and make decrypting it their problem. In Adobe's case they should have used a secure encryption, with a user specific key, and stored the keys off-line. So that technical support could retrieve them with the permission of their supervisor, on a sign for authorization basis. (I.e., as described, this hint should not have been available to the user on-line.) And the actual password should have been also retrievable, but with greater difficulty. These are users who WILL lose their passwords, and who WILL expect Adobe to "just make it work!", so the passwords *do* need to be retrievable. Or able to be regenerated, which means that you need to have some other means to identify the user.
FWIW, to me this is an argument in favor of FOSS, where such passwords are only needed by those who want to change the source tree, and where there's little financial gain by breaking in. But expecting Adobe to take that viewpoint is ... unreasonable. So you need to manage the requirement responsibly.
That's true, but if they want to go out of their way to be insecure, it's not my fault.
Microsoft.
Sorry to disagree, but I feel there SHOULD be a password hint field. I also, however, feel that it should be encrypted. And that it shouldn't be allowed to contain the password.
I've got to agree with that. But I *do* believe that if there were the political will behind it, solar, wind, etc. would replace fossil fuels...particularly if they received the level of subsidy that oil/gas/coal currently receives. OTOH, it does still require some technical innovations to really be viable. A switch made at the current level of technology would raise prices by perhaps 50%...either that or yield some *very* unreliable sources of energy.
OTOH, 5-10 years ago it would have doubled the cost of energy. So that's a moving target. If it keeps on it's current curve, then in 5-10 years solar/wind/etc. will be cheaper than oil/gas/coal.
The real problem is that even if we stopped using fossil fuels totally today, lags in the system would guarantee that global warming would continue for at least another few decades, and I don't see any reason to believe that it would cool down again after it stabilized. When the ice is off the Arctic, then there's a lot more sunlight being absorbed, and carbon dioxide lasts millenia...and it's not just in the air, a lot of it has been absorbed by the ocean.
Chernobyl isn't close to the worst It may be the worst likely, but that's not what needs to be covered. (If you have 1% chance of an accident in a year, an accident is unlikely. Unless you have more than 50 independent operations.)
There are nuclear plant close enough to New York, IIRC, so that if there were an accident only slightly worse than Chernobyl, and the wind was wrong, New York would become uninhabitable for decades. Including all the infrastructure. If the company hid the problems, or the engineers were swamped by too many alarms that they were trying to figure out, people living nearby might get a lethat in 10 years (est. avg.) dose before anyone knew what was going on. Etc. Unlikely, definitely. But plants are continually failing safety inspections, and being certified to run at higher power levels beyond their original design life. So as the number of plants increases, the probability of a really serious accident increases. A typical city has hundreds of thousands of people, but a megalopolitan area has millions...though I'll grant you actually killing those millions is unlikely...at least not quickly. (I tend to include people killed by radiation induced cancer as casualties of the radiation. So what I was thinking about was not an explosion (well, not more than a steam explosion), but a massive leak of particulate waste that drifted over the environs and exposed people without their even knowing there was a problem. And yes, this *IS* a worst case scenario. But given enough plants and enough time it will happen. Being unlikely doesn't mean it won't happen. Giant Meteor strikes are unlikely, but they have happened.
OTOH, I am clearly no expert. But failed safety inspections that are also failed on reinspection mean to me that the expert assurances of safety aren't really believable. Remember, they have a vested interest, but also they've been taught by people with a vested interest. I think they are honest, well-intentioned people (well, most of them), who don't like to think about bad things happening, so they don't. (And, yes, there are exceptions.) And they don't want you to make their job harder, so even if they see a problem, they'll try to say something that will calm you (i.e., the public) down more than explain a difficult to understand methodology. And when they're right, this is a reasonable way to proceed. It gets things done with the least effort and strain, and fewer outside overseers jostling their elbows. But if they aren't right, things don't work out so well.
Yes, but is $12 billion per incident a reasonable maximum? I'm pretty sure we haven't even had an accident close to that, so one could say yes, but given the nature of the beast we could well have an accident that exceeded it. And nobody (i.e., the individuals injured) would need to bear the difference in cost. If I'm understanding this correctly, when the cap is passed, so is all corporate liability.
A lot of modern "off" switches should really be named "sleep". They don't turn the power off. If they did you couldn't use, e.g., wake on the network. Nothing that allows remote activation really turns itself off...and that includes a huge number of things with off switches.
Why is everyone still believing that they are saying what they mean. I rather expect that the left out the US because that's primarily who this is ruling is directed at.
IIRC, a fully open source phone would be illegal.
Low density living is much more sustainable. The problem is it requires a low population density.
Now low density living with commuting is probably NOT sustainable, but that's separate argument.
Sorry, but the roofs of most single family dwelling units aren't strong enough to support enough solar cells to generate enough to equal the use within that dwelling unit. This doesn't even start to count the problems you get when you start considering apartment houses, where most people live.
Roof top solar panels are a great supplement, but not sufficient. This could be fixed with the "solar shingles" that one repeatedly hears of as "under development", but under development doesn't mean it will ever come out of development.
This doesn't mean that solar isn't the answer, or at least a major piece of the answer, but it does mean that simple-minded approaches won't work. (And adding in local storage at least doubles the cost of the installation. This is reasonable only for remote locations...or if you REALLY need a UPS.)
That said, I'm not really convinced by nuclear. Nobody has tackled the waste disposal problem, and the very companies that build them refuse to handle the insurance. Fusion is looking more and more like a pipedream. Every approach seems to generate huge amounts of radioactive waste. And the last I heard steel still couldn't hold it's strength after being submerged in a flow of neutrons for awhile.
There are many small, site-specific methods that are practical, some even dependable, but the problem is that they're site specific.
There is, however, one form of nuclear energy that if probably workable, dependable, and non-polluting (once you set it up, that is). You drill a hole deep through a layer of non-permeable rock, and explode a nuclear weapon. Then you set up a heat exchanger that runs down into the cavity produced by melting all the rock. Then you pump in some water (being careful that the steam doesn't escape) to improve the heat transmission. Seal it off, and pull out the power. I don't think anyone's ever tried this, but I remember hearing it proposed, and it sounded reasonable.
Trustworth? Yeah, the US is trustworthy. The question is do you want them to do what you can trust them to do.
Actually, looked at from a historical perspective, the US has been extremely moderate for to top country with no real competition. The Romans were a lot worse. And don't talk about the Assyrians. OTOH, Egypt was probably no worse than the US. (It was another commercial empire. That may have something to do with it.)
I'm not considering Britain, as I don't feel I have sufficient historical perspective on the British empire. My impression, as a US citizen, is that it was worse than the US, but only slightly. And even that could be wrong.
OTOH, typically as a country starts on its way down from the top, it's behavior starts to degenerate. So I wouldn't expect things to stay stable. I expect US behavior to get worse both internationally and domestically. The real question is "How will China react", as that will have a large effect on the US actions. (If for no other reason, they own much of the government...indirectly, I think. [I.e., via lobbyists operated by corporations largely owned by Chinese nationals, or even directly by the government.])
FWIW, I consider China to be the dominant country in the world today, but playing a very low-key background game, and using other countries as catspaws to do things they don't want to get blamed for.
OTOH, also consider that a lot of US military action is designed to test out weapons to control a hostile population with a small number of men. And also note that many US police departments have started to use drones. I'm sure that many countries are watching how this develops with great interest.
Umnh....did you mean:
All those costs are certainly included in the subsidy.
because, if so, I agree with you.
OTOH, it's also true that there are large subsidies for both coal and gas/oil. It's not clear to me which has the larger subsidy. What is the value of being relieved of all liability for faults in an item which has the potential to kill millions of people and to render many 10's of square miles uninhabitable, and all the materials on them likewise? It may never happen. But it might. That's got to count as a quite substantial subsidy, but it's hard to figure just how large without really knowing the probabilities of all the possible scenarios. It may well be that nuclear has a much higher subsidy than does oil. Or it may be much lower. (Oils subsidy, remember, includes a substantial presence in the middle east of the US military.)
There may be types of nuclear plant that can't produce weapons grade materials, pebble bed reactors come to mind as a possibility, but Thorium isn't a magic wand in *this* context. It can be used to produce weapons grade materials. If it can't, that's because the plant was designed so that it couldn't, not because of the starting material. U233 is sufficiently radioactive for an explosive weapon.
For that matter, even if you can't produce a nuclear explosion, you could use ground up radioactive dust combined with a conventional explosive to render quite a large area uninhabitable. Or, if you so desired, a smaller area, down to the size of only a room (though that could probably be cleaned up).
OTOH, some people fly off the handle. Areas contaminated by radiation aren't permanently uninhabitable. The most radioactive materials have short half lives. After a few decades it would be fairly safe, and after a few centuries it would approach the background level. No people may live in the vicintiy of Chernobyl, but lots of large mammals do. (Well, people live longer, and are also more aware of the danger. But the animals do live and breed there, and have for many generations now.)
It's lots more complicated than that. E.g., most people don't live the places they live in.
That said, more complicated doesn't mean it can't be done, it means the incentives aren't straightforward. Additionally, despite people wanting to think about doing it on a small scale, that's not a complete solution. You still need the grid (as you recognized). In fact a distributed power generation system requires a better grid, one that is less subject to fluctuations. (A solar storm possibility also makes that a necessity. The current grid wouldn't survive a hit by a major solar storm.) There need to be fast acting and capacious buffer capacitors. There needs to be distributed power storage. (Water towers that you pump up when there's excess power, and drain when the power level is low is one good choice, that you can use when there's noting else available...even if you need to cart in the water. It's not great, as you can't store large amounts of power that way at a reasonable price, but it's a multiple use storage system, Etc,
And for the large installations, we don't use solar cells, we use mirrors, and turbines. I doubt that solar cells will improve enough that that's not a better solution. (The mirrors heat a working fluid which is stored until needed. So it's an energy storage system combined with solar power.) And you don't use Death Valley, you use the Mojave Desert. You'll need more stuff than would easily fit into Death Valley, and it's not really a very good place for solar. It gets hot, yes, but it's a VALLEY, which means that it's only bright part of the day. (Well, I may be wrong about that last, but Death Valley retains heat, it no brighter than the surrounding countryside.)
Solar->thermal->hot fluid->turbine generator is the way for a large installation to work. (I'm pretty sure turbine is the correct generator), and that depends on a large thermal delta between the working fluid and the local environment. (So you need to have shade, and desire a mild wind.) But it comes with a built in time delay that can be stretched for weeks with good thermal insulation. This probably couldn't come on-line quite as fast as a gas generator, but probably faster than coal.
OTOH, one shouldn't be too focused on one particular modality. Wind has a lot going for it, but there needs to be a way to store the power generated. So far the only proposals I've encountered involved pumping water uphill (or into a pressurized container). And those can be difficult to implement. (Well, small water towers are pretty easy, but also don't store much.) Hydro is already pretty well developed, but we don't have many "mill pond" they hydro power sources, and we certainly could. It's a stable source of power, but each individual one wouldn't be large. (OTOH, it might well interfere with fish spawning...though the "mill pond" itself can raise fish of a different kind.)
This could go on for a long time, and I bet it's already TL;DR for most people.
Wrong assumptions? When I look at political choices being made today those seem the correct assumptions.
FWIW, yes, renewables could handle things. But you'd need a lot of them. If they got the kind of government subsidy that oil and coal get there'd be no problem, but they don't benefit big business, so that's probably not in the cards. Nuclear already has many large business supporting it, so it can be pushed, if people will just stop fighting it.
Unfortunately, when there's a problem with nuclear, the result is VERY expensive. So expensive the the companies that build the plants refuse to build them unless relieved of the responsability. Getting rid of waste is an unsolved problem. (Not insoluble, unsolved...and nobody is willing to work on a solution. IIRC fast breeders could burn radioactive waste down to nearly background level, but they can also build fission bomb materials.) So I have a VERY hard time supporting nuclear. If the companies that built the plants thought they were safe enough that they didn't need government guarantees that they wouldn't be held responsible, I might change my mind. If, also, the waste problem was reasonably solved (by which I *DON'T* mean burying it in a subduction trench), I might change my mind...though I not at all sure that I'd like fast breeders to be the solution. More along the lines of miniature power generators. Probably a difficult problem. Medical isotopes is another small use. Etc.
Their point of view is understandable. Nuclear is much more likely to get enough support among the powers. But until a bunch of outstanding problems are solved, I don't see how *I* can support it.
But don't say he used the wrong number. Given the current political power structure those are probably the right numbers.
That can be done, but that's a lot more extreme than a simple air gap. An air gap just means there's no electrical or radio connection, i.e., the signal has to go over air. Isolated is what I would call what you're referring to, and I have no reason to believe that that was meant.