You have the most insightful and coherent comment that could be said to (at least partly) counter my point. And it was interesting too! You deserve an equally coherent reply, and I will try to give you one.
You are absolutely right that insurance costs are one of the two major reasons why nuclear plants are an economic failure.
I'm going to dismiss the other major reason, which is the externalization of costs of fossil fuel plants, for this post. I don't think the cost advantages of gas and coal plant operation are necessarily going to last, because people are fed up with fracking and coal pollution.
But I'm going to try to argue that Mario Cuomo(?) made the right choice at Shoreham, as weird as that seems. It certainly would have been better not to build the thing at all, yes - but it was built, and since a politician was able to gain electoral advantage by shutting it down, there's a very high probability that the majority of voters simply did not want it. And we're supposed to have a government by, of, and for the people, so that's a good enough reason not to have a nuclear plant in a densely populated area. People just didn't want it.
Now, I'm totally aware that many anti-nuke people are raving lunatics, and most of them are misinformed. I'm not going to count myself in that group, though - I used to earn my daily bread testing ICBM launch systems, and I wrote code back in the day for the Infotrol DCS management system used in the Savannah nuclear plants. And let's admit that that a cursory examination of the replies to my own post proves the pro-nuke people have plenty of their own raving wingnuts who are sorely misinformed! I don't think we have any reason to believe that the lunatics aren't reasonably evenly distributed. The country's chock full o' nuts, they vote on all sides of any issue.
So basically I propose that it's OK that the market for insurance is being partly driven by people's desires and the resultant political instability that you've pointed out. I think it's part of living in a democratic republic, and I consider it a strength, not a weakness, even in the context of ridiculous boondoggles like Shoreham. It's also the way a free market system is supposed to work - it's lossy and clumsy but it eventually arrives wherever the people who the market serves want it to go. I know that markets don't solve all problems but I believe in this case it did the job - New Yorkers got what they wanted.
Excellent point, and I'll add that Joe Public's perfectly rational fear of corporate greed and managerial incompetence abetted by government corruption is also an issue...
If you prefer to trudge through raw data sources, which will contain tons of stuff that isn't relevant, you can look at the DOE's 1992 report on direct government subsidies to energy production and the 1999 update to that report, and of course you can look up the actual Price-Anderson act at the NRC site (note in passing how the NRC pretends it isn't a subsidy, and how they gloss over the goverment's role in assuming costs of fuel and waste processing). At the NRC's site you can find an attempt to refute my statement, in which the NRC will do all sorts of gymnastics to try to explain the fact that no profitable enterprise is willing to build a plant without subsidization. That's the real proof - when subsidies exist, there are new license applications, and when subsidies expire, there are none. I can link stuff all day long but the empirical proof is hard to ignore!
This post will likely get marked "troll" too, because the nuke shills have a bury brigade here on slashdot. Sorry about that.
The link you provided says the Toshiba design has not yet been built or approved - thus there are none in commercial production, right?
I said there are no commercial nuclear reactors that are not subsidized by taxpayer dollars. In the USA, sbusidies include the Price-Anderson act (which provides subsidized insurance) and the Cheney energy policy of 2005 (which provides per-kilowatt incentives and removes requirements for set-aside of decommissioning costs). Naturally, I got modded troll for speaking independently verifiable truths about a controversial topic.
Maybe it would be great if commercial nuclear fission were economically viable in the future, as your link suggests might be the case with Toshiba's product, but I'm talking about now.
Thanks for the link, though - it was very interesting!
Local battery storage is cost-ineffective for most small solar producers/ homeowners. If you don't aggressively manage your batteries they don't last worth a damn, and even if you do daily hygrometer checks etc. and get every last minute of life out of them, battery banks are unfortunately quite costly. I have an antique lead-acid electric tractor so I speak from experience!
But nickel iron batteries are back on the market - and despite their poor energy density, high mass & volume, and high cost they are still a great alternative for homeowners because they are so extremely robust. Market capitalism to the rescue? It's certainly a different approach than nuclear socialism, which is the model France and Scandinavia are on (and which the USA is attempting to emulate, only with our own special sauce of corporate profiteering liberally slathered over the top).
I assume that's the reason the government hasn't approved construction of one in 34 years.
Nope. Two mistakes!
First, no approvals have been made because no proposals have been up for approval. Nuclear power isn't viable without government subsidies and there weren't any between 1980 and 2005, because the government in that time frame actually attempted to reflect the will of the taxpayers (oh, for such innocent times to come again!).
Second, the government doesn't actually do the approvals - the NRC does. The nuclear industry is regulated by the nuclear industry, effectively. The government is a couple steps away hiding behind some smoke and mirrors.
There are no economically viable nuclear plants without heavy taxpayer subsidies.
The original post implies that nuclear plants have been turned down for decades and now suddenly they aren't. This is bullshit.
Corporations are lining up for the gravy train of taxpayer dollars provided by the Cheney energy policy of 2005. Per-kilowatt subsidies, construction subsidies, reauthorization and extension of the Price-Anderson Act (which makes taxpayers liable for disasters), all negotiated in secret because taxpayers don't want their money spent that way.
Nuclear power is no different than TARP. It's corrupt politicians giving away taxpayer money to their rich cronies. People don't want it, don't need it, and it's not competitive with any other source of power economically.
I see what you mean... good engineering practice would be to always use the most effective, least toxic vaccines (with the understanding that this would markedly decrease the profits of vaccine vendors in the short term, since they'd have to rebuild their processes). If taxpayer money has to be spent - which I doubt - spend it helping vaccine vendors modernize.
OK, look, the topic of this thread is doctors refusing medical care for the unvaccinated.
The topic of this sub-thread is whether the human population is going to be "substantially" damaged "like a house of cards" because of anti-vaxxers. I am taking the position that herd immunity does not work that way, and that therefore this is not a valid reason to oppress anti-vaxxers. Herd immunity is simply a statistical emergent property that won't suddenly disappear due to the unresolved issues of fearful people, and herd immunity is not a god-given right anyway.
By taking a position in the argument opposing me, you are supporting what I am attacking, like it or not. Perhaps that was not your intention? In any case, in the context of the subthread, you made a statement along the lines of "if anti-vaxxer stupidity continues to spread" the sky will fall and dogs and cats will be living together yada yadda yadda I'm not going to look it up. I have simply asked you to relate your statement to the subject of the argument - it's not a straw man, I'm asking you to prove your words were relevant to the issue in the context of the position I am defending against your attack.
If you are not supporting the withholding of medical care from anti-vaxxers, and you agree that herd immunity is not so fragile that non-conformists are going to cause a mass die-off of a significant portion of humanity, then we have no argument, you see?
I apologize if my poor writing skills have led to any misunderstandings, but my position has been that there's no good reason to combat anti-vaxxers with anything more than education. Herd immunity will not cease to function.
Grishnahk (in another branch) has argued persuasively that I'm at least partially wrong - he suggests more than just simple education would be optimal; that law and policy should be modified so that more effective vaccines will be created by the vaccine vendors instead of encouraging them to use the cheapest possible formulations like we do today. A large part of anti-vaxxer fear is based on their understanding of the motives and practices of the vaccine vendors, so he may well be right.
The area has been densely populated for 300 years. The stream's thoroughly loaded with bacteria that originally came out of human digestive tracts. You can see the shattered bits of drainage tile from septic fields exposed in the stream banks where the course has changed over the years.
Sounds icky, I know, but humans are evolved to drink free-running water, so I knew it wouldn't kill me, and I was in some major distress from having my gut flora completely destroyed by broad-spectrum antibiotics.
We have healthy populations of deer, raccoon, ducks, opossum, geese, and fox that get all their water from the stream.
Some of the numbers are difficult. Take mercury, for example - if the only exposure your kid has to mercury is a couple doses of vaccine, it's not going to do anything. But mercury exposure is cumulative, and damage persistent. So most parents want to try for zero mercury exposure in their children, just to give them more headroom in the case of an accidental ingestion of bad fish or whatever, and they see no problem in paying more for vaccines without mercury. But the vaccine vendors successfully lobbied for a return of mercury based on fear-mongering about hypothetical bird flu epidemics... and fear seems to sell these days. This whole thread is about fear... the anti-vaxxers fear of vaccine toxicity, and the anti-anti-vaxxers fears of vaccine ineffectiveness (thus their obsession with herd immunity).
I dunno what the answer is, frankly. But I'm really fed up with the fear mongering.
When treatment for Lyme disease wrecked my bowels, I went to the health food store and bought every damn live thing they had on the shelves. Yoghurt, kombucha, goat cheese, all kinds of weird stuff that tasted funny. Only criteria was that it should be alive.
It took me a couple of days to eat it all, and some of it was pretty stinky. I drank water right out of the stream outside my house to wash it down.
It was very unscientific because I didn't measure anything, but it worked. Kind of russian roulette approach, but I was in some distress at the time and willing to gamble. Mainstream medicine did not have any effective cure.
Yeah, that's not the way to go. Even though the numbers are really a lot lower than that for most vaccines... if your only child was one of the ten kids Wikipedia says died from the Salk vaccine, that's 100% of your sample.
I usually work on the categorical imperative as my answer to anti-vaxxers. If you can get people to accept that they have a moral responsibility to other humans, you can build on that.
Yes, OK, I would only point out that those groups aren't being put at risk by the unvaccinated - they are being prevented from enjoying a certain protection, rather. Sort of like how not having a wealthy senator for a father prevents me from enjoying protection from DUI tickets, eh? I don't know if I stated that very well, I hope you get it.
The source of the risk is nature, evolution, and the way the universe works. The source of the protection is herd immunity. The groups you mentioned aren't having something taken from them, they are being prevented from enjoying the benefits of something, and the anti-vaxxers are voluntarily becoming a part of that unprotected group.
I don't want my children in that group, so they've had a fair number of vaccinations. But it would not be a criminal act for me to refuse. It would just be stupid.
So then, why don't they make vaccines in other versions that people aren't allergic to?
Probably for the same reason they didn't want to eliminate mercury, and once the autism link was disproved the mercury came back. It's cheaper to produce something that works for 80% of the population, even if that harms 5% of the population (and realistically, for most vaccines it's not even 5% - it's far less than 1% that actually take harm).
I think it's because monetary profit is more important to the vaccine vendors than assuaging people's fears. So, we are going to have anti-vaxxers acting based on fear.
And that's OK with me... as long as neither group is pretending to be Mother frickin' Teresa saving the world. I understand Big Pharma needs to make profit to continue to operate. I understand people have to do what they think best for their children.
It's just not a problem that needs any intervention stronger than simple education.
But - do you think that everything you just said will cease to be true if we don't deny medical care to anti-vaxxers?
Because that's what this argument is about. The claim that herd immunity will be destroyed "like a house of cards" by the presence of anti-vaxxers. I objected to that claim and now I'm getting a torrent of abuse from self-appointed champions of vaccination. (Er, I do not include you in that category, since you offered no such abuse, apologies).
...true, the argument does get nuanced, and there are sometimes questions about the value of specific vaccines for specific diseases, etc. But most of the vaccines that are part of the normal vaccine schedule aren't on that list. However, when someone says anti-vax, they're talking about the hardline ignorant folks that willingly take the larger risk, refusing vaccines for patently and provable absurd reasons while riding on the back of herd immunity...
Here we are in complete agreement!
But the Harvard animation uses a flawed paradigm, which is also shown in this statement of yours:
...the Amish, are often very isolated. They do interact with the outside world, but those interactions area rare...
This is false. Interaction is daily on an very large scale. I live right between two large Amish communities (near Dover & Avondale, respectively) that depend on the "English" for commerce. I see them almost every single day and actually touch their unvaccinated flesh at least once a week. We breathe the same air, and handle the same money.
One of the reasons I am comfortable with the presence of large unvaccinated communities is because they represent a scientific control - a group that empirically tests the claims made by amoral actors like for-profit vaccine vendors. And empirically, the oft-repeated claim that anti-vaxxers are going to doom us all appears to be nonsense.
Get vaccinated, yes. Round up the anti-vaxxers and forcibly innoculate them? No. You have to draw a line somewhere.
Influenza is believed to mutate primarily in its alternate hosts, not in humans. Ducks and pigs, I think? Hmmm, medline says yes.
See Source for influenza pandemics by C. Scholtissek (Institut fur Virologie, Justus Liebig Universitat, Giessen, Germany) for example.
Even if you eliminate all pathogens without alternate hosts, you will still have no shortage of ever-mutating diseases that we humans are susceptible to.
The raw fact is that unimmunized individuals are not the source of epidemics among vaccinated populations. These vast plagues people are claiming are caused by anti-vaxxers simply do not exist, because herd immunity is not significantly impacted by the existence of anti-vaxxers. It's just a fairy story to demonize people who don't trust the pharma industries.
Check my other post for some examples of serious high tech fuel companies working on producing sustainable biofuels today. Using the latest technology, we can turn cellulose into gasoline - and we don't have to do any clumsy smashing of atoms to do it, we can use biotech finesse.
And "producing energy by wishful thinking," as you put it, is the very essence of the nuke shill argument. In reality, terrestrial nuclear fission is completely economically unsound - which is abundantly documented, and empirically proven by the fact that no company in the USA was willing to build a new commercial reactor until the Cheney energy policy of 2005 instituted per-kilowatt subsidies and construction cost subsidies, re-instituted the Price-Anderson act (which makes taxpayers foot the bill for private industries' insurance liabilities), and retroactively legalized the common practice of failing to escrow profits for future decomissioning costs.
I guess I can work in the Nazis right there, since you asked - and I don't have to get far off course! Forcing taxpayers to foot the bill for industries they provably do not want, "for the good of society" is National Socialism at its' finest, eh? But that's really just a play on words. Socialism, in reality, entails spending other people's money for the good of the largest group, and the only groups profiting from the Bush administration's recall of fission from the dustbin of history are multinational corporations. Nuclear power is not socialism, it's fascism - the "socialize costs and privatize profits" mantra of modern American politics.
I appreciated your gentle mockery, by the way - understated humor is not something you see much on the Internets.
I tend to agree! The greens in the USA are pretty much powerless, especially compared to the doves and hawks.
It's appropriate for India to go for thorium power, because they control the world's largest reserves of thorium. I hope it works out for them; after all, they've got population density problems.
The USA has vast farmlands we pay people not to farm. We should be doing something a lot more high-tech than nuclear fission. Virent is a good example of what I'm talking about; build innovatively on our strengths instead of sticking to our old weaknesses.
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You have the most insightful and coherent comment that could be said to (at least partly) counter my point. And it was interesting too! You deserve an equally coherent reply, and I will try to give you one.
You are absolutely right that insurance costs are one of the two major reasons why nuclear plants are an economic failure.
I'm going to dismiss the other major reason, which is the externalization of costs of fossil fuel plants, for this post. I don't think the cost advantages of gas and coal plant operation are necessarily going to last, because people are fed up with fracking and coal pollution.
But I'm going to try to argue that Mario Cuomo(?) made the right choice at Shoreham, as weird as that seems. It certainly would have been better not to build the thing at all, yes - but it was built, and since a politician was able to gain electoral advantage by shutting it down, there's a very high probability that the majority of voters simply did not want it. And we're supposed to have a government by, of, and for the people, so that's a good enough reason not to have a nuclear plant in a densely populated area. People just didn't want it.
Now, I'm totally aware that many anti-nuke people are raving lunatics, and most of them are misinformed. I'm not going to count myself in that group, though - I used to earn my daily bread testing ICBM launch systems, and I wrote code back in the day for the Infotrol DCS management system used in the Savannah nuclear plants. And let's admit that that a cursory examination of the replies to my own post proves the pro-nuke people have plenty of their own raving wingnuts who are sorely misinformed! I don't think we have any reason to believe that the lunatics aren't reasonably evenly distributed. The country's chock full o' nuts, they vote on all sides of any issue.
So basically I propose that it's OK that the market for insurance is being partly driven by people's desires and the resultant political instability that you've pointed out. I think it's part of living in a democratic republic, and I consider it a strength, not a weakness, even in the context of ridiculous boondoggles like Shoreham. It's also the way a free market system is supposed to work - it's lossy and clumsy but it eventually arrives wherever the people who the market serves want it to go. I know that markets don't solve all problems but I believe in this case it did the job - New Yorkers got what they wanted.
Excellent point, and I'll add that Joe Public's perfectly rational fear of corporate greed and managerial incompetence abetted by government corruption is also an issue...
Sure can! But only because you asked so nicely...
Libertarian think-tank contends nuclear power is not economically viable in a free and fair marketplace
If you prefer to trudge through raw data sources, which will contain tons of stuff that isn't relevant, you can look at the DOE's 1992 report on direct government subsidies to energy production and the 1999 update to that report, and of course you can look up the actual Price-Anderson act at the NRC site (note in passing how the NRC pretends it isn't a subsidy, and how they gloss over the goverment's role in assuming costs of fuel and waste processing). At the NRC's site you can find an attempt to refute my statement, in which the NRC will do all sorts of gymnastics to try to explain the fact that no profitable enterprise is willing to build a plant without subsidization. That's the real proof - when subsidies exist, there are new license applications, and when subsidies expire, there are none. I can link stuff all day long but the empirical proof is hard to ignore!
This post will likely get marked "troll" too, because the nuke shills have a bury brigade here on slashdot. Sorry about that.
The link you provided says the Toshiba design has not yet been built or approved - thus there are none in commercial production, right?
I said there are no commercial nuclear reactors that are not subsidized by taxpayer dollars. In the USA, sbusidies include the Price-Anderson act (which provides subsidized insurance) and the Cheney energy policy of 2005 (which provides per-kilowatt incentives and removes requirements for set-aside of decommissioning costs). Naturally, I got modded troll for speaking independently verifiable truths about a controversial topic.
Maybe it would be great if commercial nuclear fission were economically viable in the future, as your link suggests might be the case with Toshiba's product, but I'm talking about now.
Thanks for the link, though - it was very interesting!
Local battery storage is cost-ineffective for most small solar producers/ homeowners. If you don't aggressively manage your batteries they don't last worth a damn, and even if you do daily hygrometer checks etc. and get every last minute of life out of them, battery banks are unfortunately quite costly. I have an antique lead-acid electric tractor so I speak from experience!
But nickel iron batteries are back on the market - and despite their poor energy density, high mass & volume, and high cost they are still a great alternative for homeowners because they are so extremely robust. Market capitalism to the rescue? It's certainly a different approach than nuclear socialism, which is the model France and Scandinavia are on (and which the USA is attempting to emulate, only with our own special sauce of corporate profiteering liberally slathered over the top).
Nope. Two mistakes!
First, no approvals have been made because no proposals have been up for approval. Nuclear power isn't viable without government subsidies and there weren't any between 1980 and 2005, because the government in that time frame actually attempted to reflect the will of the taxpayers (oh, for such innocent times to come again!).
Second, the government doesn't actually do the approvals - the NRC does. The nuclear industry is regulated by the nuclear industry, effectively. The government is a couple steps away hiding behind some smoke and mirrors.
What I see on the sticker is what I pay.
Items with tax - mainly fuel, cigarettes and alcoholic beverages - are priced including tax, same as Oregon.
There are no economically viable nuclear plants without heavy taxpayer subsidies.
The original post implies that nuclear plants have been turned down for decades and now suddenly they aren't. This is bullshit.
Corporations are lining up for the gravy train of taxpayer dollars provided by the Cheney energy policy of 2005. Per-kilowatt subsidies, construction subsidies, reauthorization and extension of the Price-Anderson Act (which makes taxpayers liable for disasters), all negotiated in secret because taxpayers don't want their money spent that way.
Nuclear power is no different than TARP. It's corrupt politicians giving away taxpayer money to their rich cronies. People don't want it, don't need it, and it's not competitive with any other source of power economically.
I see what you mean... good engineering practice would be to always use the most effective, least toxic vaccines (with the understanding that this would markedly decrease the profits of vaccine vendors in the short term, since they'd have to rebuild their processes). If taxpayer money has to be spent - which I doubt - spend it helping vaccine vendors modernize.
OK, look, the topic of this thread is doctors refusing medical care for the unvaccinated.
The topic of this sub-thread is whether the human population is going to be "substantially" damaged "like a house of cards" because of anti-vaxxers. I am taking the position that herd immunity does not work that way, and that therefore this is not a valid reason to oppress anti-vaxxers. Herd immunity is simply a statistical emergent property that won't suddenly disappear due to the unresolved issues of fearful people, and herd immunity is not a god-given right anyway.
By taking a position in the argument opposing me, you are supporting what I am attacking, like it or not. Perhaps that was not your intention? In any case, in the context of the subthread, you made a statement along the lines of "if anti-vaxxer stupidity continues to spread" the sky will fall and dogs and cats will be living together yada yadda yadda I'm not going to look it up. I have simply asked you to relate your statement to the subject of the argument - it's not a straw man, I'm asking you to prove your words were relevant to the issue in the context of the position I am defending against your attack.
If you are not supporting the withholding of medical care from anti-vaxxers, and you agree that herd immunity is not so fragile that non-conformists are going to cause a mass die-off of a significant portion of humanity, then we have no argument, you see?
I apologize if my poor writing skills have led to any misunderstandings, but my position has been that there's no good reason to combat anti-vaxxers with anything more than education. Herd immunity will not cease to function.
Grishnahk (in another branch) has argued persuasively that I'm at least partially wrong - he suggests more than just simple education would be optimal; that law and policy should be modified so that more effective vaccines will be created by the vaccine vendors instead of encouraging them to use the cheapest possible formulations like we do today. A large part of anti-vaxxer fear is based on their understanding of the motives and practices of the vaccine vendors, so he may well be right.
The area has been densely populated for 300 years. The stream's thoroughly loaded with bacteria that originally came out of human digestive tracts. You can see the shattered bits of drainage tile from septic fields exposed in the stream banks where the course has changed over the years.
Sounds icky, I know, but humans are evolved to drink free-running water, so I knew it wouldn't kill me, and I was in some major distress from having my gut flora completely destroyed by broad-spectrum antibiotics.
We have healthy populations of deer, raccoon, ducks, opossum, geese, and fox that get all their water from the stream.
Some of the numbers are difficult. Take mercury, for example - if the only exposure your kid has to mercury is a couple doses of vaccine, it's not going to do anything. But mercury exposure is cumulative, and damage persistent. So most parents want to try for zero mercury exposure in their children, just to give them more headroom in the case of an accidental ingestion of bad fish or whatever, and they see no problem in paying more for vaccines without mercury. But the vaccine vendors successfully lobbied for a return of mercury based on fear-mongering about hypothetical bird flu epidemics... and fear seems to sell these days. This whole thread is about fear... the anti-vaxxers fear of vaccine toxicity, and the anti-anti-vaxxers fears of vaccine ineffectiveness (thus their obsession with herd immunity).
I dunno what the answer is, frankly. But I'm really fed up with the fear mongering.
Literally everything. And start over.
It'll be fun. Well, more fun than fighting someone you can't live with any more, anyway.
Just my lame ass advice... I don't know your situation. But it's what I'd do.
When treatment for Lyme disease wrecked my bowels, I went to the health food store and bought every damn live thing they had on the shelves. Yoghurt, kombucha, goat cheese, all kinds of weird stuff that tasted funny. Only criteria was that it should be alive.
It took me a couple of days to eat it all, and some of it was pretty stinky. I drank water right out of the stream outside my house to wash it down.
It was very unscientific because I didn't measure anything, but it worked. Kind of russian roulette approach, but I was in some distress at the time and willing to gamble. Mainstream medicine did not have any effective cure.
Yeah, that's not the way to go. Even though the numbers are really a lot lower than that for most vaccines... if your only child was one of the ten kids Wikipedia says died from the Salk vaccine, that's 100% of your sample.
I usually work on the categorical imperative as my answer to anti-vaxxers. If you can get people to accept that they have a moral responsibility to other humans, you can build on that.
I stand by the statements you quoted.
And I reject your interpretation of them.
How, exactly, does withholding medical care from the unvaccinated cause "anti-vaxxer stupidity to spread?"
I think approaching the problem as an excuse for a fight, and demonizing your opponents, is more likely to have that effect. Think about it, eh?
The Sabin vaccine can spread by being shed in feces, but this is the first time I've heard of that called a feature of design.
Your point is still valid whether Sabin intended it or not, though. Very interesting, thanks!
Yes, OK, I would only point out that those groups aren't being put at risk by the unvaccinated - they are being prevented from enjoying a certain protection, rather. Sort of like how not having a wealthy senator for a father prevents me from enjoying protection from DUI tickets, eh? I don't know if I stated that very well, I hope you get it.
The source of the risk is nature, evolution, and the way the universe works. The source of the protection is herd immunity. The groups you mentioned aren't having something taken from them, they are being prevented from enjoying the benefits of something, and the anti-vaxxers are voluntarily becoming a part of that unprotected group.
I don't want my children in that group, so they've had a fair number of vaccinations. But it would not be a criminal act for me to refuse. It would just be stupid.
Probably for the same reason they didn't want to eliminate mercury, and once the autism link was disproved the mercury came back. It's cheaper to produce something that works for 80% of the population, even if that harms 5% of the population (and realistically, for most vaccines it's not even 5% - it's far less than 1% that actually take harm).
I think it's because monetary profit is more important to the vaccine vendors than assuaging people's fears. So, we are going to have anti-vaxxers acting based on fear.
And that's OK with me... as long as neither group is pretending to be Mother frickin' Teresa saving the world. I understand Big Pharma needs to make profit to continue to operate. I understand people have to do what they think best for their children.
It's just not a problem that needs any intervention stronger than simple education.
100% agree!
But - do you think that everything you just said will cease to be true if we don't deny medical care to anti-vaxxers?
Because that's what this argument is about. The claim that herd immunity will be destroyed "like a house of cards" by the presence of anti-vaxxers. I objected to that claim and now I'm getting a torrent of abuse from self-appointed champions of vaccination. (Er, I do not include you in that category, since you offered no such abuse, apologies).
I never said herd immunity is bullshit. READ WHAT I WROTE and stop putting words in my mouth!
I said claiming herd immunity will fail if we don't start oppressing anti-vaxxers is a bullshit argument.
And YOU cherry-picked influenza as an example, not me. Don't blame me that it supports my point more than yours.
Here we are in complete agreement!
But the Harvard animation uses a flawed paradigm, which is also shown in this statement of yours:
This is false. Interaction is daily on an very large scale. I live right between two large Amish communities (near Dover & Avondale, respectively) that depend on the "English" for commerce. I see them almost every single day and actually touch their unvaccinated flesh at least once a week. We breathe the same air, and handle the same money.
One of the reasons I am comfortable with the presence of large unvaccinated communities is because they represent a scientific control - a group that empirically tests the claims made by amoral actors like for-profit vaccine vendors. And empirically, the oft-repeated claim that anti-vaxxers are going to doom us all appears to be nonsense.
Get vaccinated, yes. Round up the anti-vaxxers and forcibly innoculate them? No. You have to draw a line somewhere.
Your example is very good.
Influenza is believed to mutate primarily in its alternate hosts, not in humans. Ducks and pigs, I think? Hmmm, medline says yes.
See Source for influenza pandemics by C. Scholtissek (Institut fur Virologie, Justus Liebig Universitat, Giessen, Germany) for example.
Even if you eliminate all pathogens without alternate hosts, you will still have no shortage of ever-mutating diseases that we humans are susceptible to.
The raw fact is that unimmunized individuals are not the source of epidemics among vaccinated populations. These vast plagues people are claiming are caused by anti-vaxxers simply do not exist, because herd immunity is not significantly impacted by the existence of anti-vaxxers. It's just a fairy story to demonize people who don't trust the pharma industries.
Check my other post for some examples of serious high tech fuel companies working on producing sustainable biofuels today. Using the latest technology, we can turn cellulose into gasoline - and we don't have to do any clumsy smashing of atoms to do it, we can use biotech finesse.
And "producing energy by wishful thinking," as you put it, is the very essence of the nuke shill argument. In reality, terrestrial nuclear fission is completely economically unsound - which is abundantly documented, and empirically proven by the fact that no company in the USA was willing to build a new commercial reactor until the Cheney energy policy of 2005 instituted per-kilowatt subsidies and construction cost subsidies, re-instituted the Price-Anderson act (which makes taxpayers foot the bill for private industries' insurance liabilities), and retroactively legalized the common practice of failing to escrow profits for future decomissioning costs.
I guess I can work in the Nazis right there, since you asked - and I don't have to get far off course! Forcing taxpayers to foot the bill for industries they provably do not want, "for the good of society" is National Socialism at its' finest, eh? But that's really just a play on words. Socialism, in reality, entails spending other people's money for the good of the largest group, and the only groups profiting from the Bush administration's recall of fission from the dustbin of history are multinational corporations. Nuclear power is not socialism, it's fascism - the "socialize costs and privatize profits" mantra of modern American politics.
I appreciated your gentle mockery, by the way - understated humor is not something you see much on the Internets.
I tend to agree! The greens in the USA are pretty much powerless, especially compared to the doves and hawks.
It's appropriate for India to go for thorium power, because they control the world's largest reserves of thorium. I hope it works out for them; after all, they've got population density problems.
The USA has vast farmlands we pay people not to farm. We should be doing something a lot more high-tech than nuclear fission. Virent is a good example of what I'm talking about; build innovatively on our strengths instead of sticking to our old weaknesses.