Thank you for the thoughtful reply, but no, I don't assume that. I'm objecting to the "OMG the sky will fall if somebody doesn't get vaccinated" pseudo-argument, and the misuse of the concept of herd immunity in that context.
Anti-vaxxers are trying to skate on herd immunity, yes. Their presence does weaken the herd, if by "weaken the herd" you mean they increase the size of an existing vulnerable population. But they do not cause plagues, they do not cause healthy individuals to stop producing antibodies, and they do not increase the mutation rate of organisms.
There are several large non-vaccinating communities in my area (Old-Order Amish, among others) and they do endure regular, preventable epidemics. Those epidemics do not cause chain reactions into the vaccinated population. They just plain don't. These unvaccinated people interact with the rest of us all the time, and it does not destroy the herd or compromise the herd immunity. That's independently verifiable fact.
I vaccinated my children against quite a few diseases, but I read the Red Book entry and the manufacturer's data sheet on each one and researched them thoroughly first (their pediatrician was very helpful.) I did not give them the chicken pox vaccine because the version that was available at the time (preparations are changing constantly, for interesting reasons) was less reliable than sending them to play with a child that already had the pox.
My children play in the dirt and grass and sunlight and splash around in the creek. The children who do not do these things are probably more of a threat to world health than anti-vaxxers are. But my aunt died of post-polio complications (she got polio in the 1930s and was damaged all her life) so I am not an anti-vaxxer.
I think everyone wants the vax/antivax argument to be discretely binary, but it's really more of a nuanced continuum that has distinct issues relative to individual vaccine preparations, humans, and communities.
Can you prove to me that "sane management [of nuclear fission] has been made impossible by anti-nuclear activists and their propaganda"? I see zero evidence of this in reality - management of nuclear plants has been entirely driven by the nuclear industry. There is exactly one case - where a plant was to be built on a known active fault line - where "activists" have made a difference in the US, and it had nothing to do with management. Show me the evidence.
In return, here are some links to the thing you claim is laughably impossible - sustainable biofuels.
I guess you don't know how to read? Let me dumb it down for you, since you only communicate in terms of withering scorn.
First poster: vaccines only work if everyone gets one! These unvaccinated people going to kill everyone! It'll be the black death all over again!
Me: No, vaccines work on individuals. The individuals that have antibodies will still have antibodies regardless of who does or doesn't get vaccinated. You are misrepresenting or misunderstanding the concept of "herd immunity" if you think that anti-vaxxers are magically more dangerous than all the other people who don't have antibodies.
Flametard: YOUZ ARE TEH LUZER!!
(The last one was you, in case I was too subtle for you.)
I am not anti-vax, but I have seen nothing that makes me believe "vaccines rely on herd immunity".
A functional vaccine induces antibody production in the vaccinated host and that's it. The herd is not involved.
Unvaccinated individuals, however, rely on being surrounded by immune individuals in order to "free load" on the herd's immunity. This is immoral if you believe in Kant's Categorical Imperative.
I don't know where this idea you have got started, but it's like a meme now... people just repeat it without evidence all the time.
AFAIK, there are no commercial liquid fueled molten salt reactors in operation today.
Chinese propaganda claims of what they are going to do in the future have historically exceeded reality.
If you want to see progress in that sort of design, look to India - with their gigantic thorium reserves investing in fission actually makes sense for them.
In the US, we should be using our vast land mass to grow sustainable, carbon-neutral fuel crops but instead we are paying farmers not to grow anything at all, and subsidizing the coal, oil and nuclear industries.
Because all terrestrial nuclear fission (with the possible exception of LENR like Rossi's uproven Ecat, but not excepting the totally mythical Chinese power reactors referred to above) is Victorian Era technology. It's antique crap, that requires filthy and exploitative support industries like 3rd world mining, and it's completely militarily unsound, since it makes your energy infrastructure chock full of bottlenecks and dependencies that enemies can exploit.
Distributed, sustainable, carbon-neutral power generation is the way to go - but that would entail actual modern technology, like biotech and robotics, so we can't have that.
We'll stick to steam power, because people like nuclear irrationally, and are immune to data or argument. The spewing white stuff makes them feel butch, I guess? I suspect nuke shills have potency and inadequacy issues.
CLIs are for typists and computer experts. GUIs are for artists and computing beginners. Saying one is better than the other is like complaining that your bicycle is a terrible race car; it's pointless.
I liked his poetry better than his ethics... the aspartame intervention at the FDA is like a textbook example of regulatory capture and abuse of power.
You're right, though, he was a poet...
You're going to be told lots of things. You get told things every day that don't happen.
It doesn't seem to bother people, they don't-- It's printed in the press. The world thinks all these things happen. They never happened.
Everyone's so eager to get the story Before in fact the story's there That the world is constantly being fed Things that haven't happened.
All I can tell you is, It hasn't happened. It's going to happen.
What's "cd to an iso file" mean? If I drag and drop the content of a CD to my hard drive linux asks me if I want an ISO or not, if I say yes the icon is round and shiny and if I say no it looks like a regular vanilla folder. Either way, you just click on the icon and it opens, but if you say ISO you can burn a new CD from that quicker.
What is all this geeky talk? "cd?" Windows is too complicated for me, I have to use linux. I can't read manuals and stuff like you nerdy windows people.
Wow, that sounds hard! You have to do all that? Windows 8 must really suck!!!
In modern linux distributions, if there's an ISO on the media, it appears the same as any other container object, except the icon's a shiny CD looking disc instead of a manila folder. You click on it like any other container object, say for example a folder or an archive file, and it opens.
Why do you use windows if it makes you do all that crap?
It takes an imperial arse-load of money to convert a landfill into a power plant. It'll be more profitable to use that money to build a coal-fired plant, since you can entirely ignore any negative social consequences (such as dwindling fertility and rising cancer rates). It's cheaper to pollute... because of politics. We don't charge polluters for the damage they do to the taxpayer, so there is incentive to pollute.
Sorry, in European units that would be a metric fuck-tonne of money. For Americans, a standard fuck-ton, equivalent to the traditional shitload.
What is it about the methane coming from landfill sites which prevents it being used for generating electricity? Politics or science?
Economics driven by politics.
It takes an imperial arse-load of money to convert a landfill into a power plant. It'll be more profitable to use that money to build a coal-fired plant, since you can entirely ignore any negative social consequences (such as dwindling fertility and rising cancer rates). It's cheaper to pollute... because of politics. We don't charge polluters for the damage they do to the taxpayer, so there is incentive to pollute.
I'm sure the power plant requires fuel to process the food, so is it realy practical?
All energy producing industries consume energy. Coal and uranium don't mine themselves, gas doesn't pump itself through the pipeline and purify itself. Electrical generators not only use electricity to energize the generator windings, but also electricity loses energy by heating the transmission wires whenever you move it around. Don't even get me started about battery losses.
The trick is to get more energy out than you put in. Currently, you can't do that at all with fusion, and you can't do that both economically and safely with fission (although you can do one or the other) but you sure can do it with coal, wood, natural gas, or any number of other burnable resources.
But the goal is to use something renewable that does not release into the air carbon that used to be locked in the ground. Since plants take all of their carbon from the air, and none from the soil, that's the ticket!
Besides, how is this any better than using Corn or Suger Cain for fuel, that's already being done.
Sugar cane and sugar beets are great in the parts of the world where they can grow without fertilizer. Corn ethanol fuels are not economically viable without government subsidies - the same sort of anti-humanist socialism that makes nuclear plants viable - because it takes too much energy to farm and reduce corn. Corn ethanol is just corporate welfare, not a real energy policy.
Most of the agricultural waste is left to rot in the fields. To bring it to some place where it could be processed into fuel would consume fuel.
Dr. Diesel invented his engine so that it could be fueled by the crops it tended. The first demonstration engine ran on peanut oil. Fueling your vehicles is a marginal overhead cost when you're generating vehicle fuel.
At the industrial scale these problems can be conquered with modern technology. Cellulosic ethanol is readily achievable, far more efficiently than (for example) nuclear fission, and what's left over from that process can be made into methane or plastics.
At the home scale, though, you're right. Until the patents wear out on the microbes, biodigestion of cellulose is corporate territory.
His point was not that there was nothing else available, but that there was nothing else available that would economically produce the quantities of energy.
But that's absolutely false. The reason there have been no new licenses for nuclear plants for decades is that nobody has applied for any - and that, in turn, is because nuclear power cannot be generated profitably without heavy taxpayer sponsorship. The economics of nuclear power are completely impossible to work with in a purely capitalist system. This is a simple, well-known fact, not a theory or propaganda, and it's why the Cheney Energy Task Force re-implemented the Price-Anderson Act in 2005 along with per-watt subsidies. Socialism is a requirement for terrestrial nuclear power plants, because they aren't economically viable without it.
Every reputable analysis of the costs of nuclear power shows that gas, coal, and biologically produced sustainable fuels are all cheaper than fission. The market has proved this by failing to build any new nuclear plants in the absence of government sponsorship.
Methane and such like don't scale that well.
That's also absolutely false. Gas generation from waste and agriculture distributes evenly - without militarization of processing and use facilities, so it scales tremendously better than nuclear, which distributes extremely poorly due to the requirement for a relatively small number of highly secure (typically militarized) installations with titanic grid interconnection requirements.
Furthermore methane can be shipped nearly losslessly using existing pipeline distribution networks, avoiding electrical losses, or it can be cheaply converted to electricity at any point and supplied to the grid.
Nuclear's not cost-effective or desirable or carbon-neutral. With very little capital investment (relative to nuclear, although unfortunately not to coal) bio-gas is all three! But nuclear allows the preservation of existing economic and political power bases, so authoritarians and entrenched power brokers love it.
And if we don't go with nuclear - what's our other option?
Sustainably produced methane from waste and agricultural sources. It would be cheaper and safer than anything else and we already have the existing infrastructure to use it and distribute it.
But you won't listen. Because you've decided you want nuclear, and it has nothing to do with the fact that nuclear (and hydrogen, for that matter) power is really just a way for existing political and economic power bases to perpetuate their hereditary stranglehold on power. You are sold on nuclear.
"We've dispensed with generalization's and said to our customers, if you believe you're a good driver, we'll believe you and we'll even give you the benefit up front,' said Nigel Lombard of Fair Pay Insurance."
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Thank you for the thoughtful reply, but no, I don't assume that. I'm objecting to the "OMG the sky will fall if somebody doesn't get vaccinated" pseudo-argument, and the misuse of the concept of herd immunity in that context.
Anti-vaxxers are trying to skate on herd immunity, yes. Their presence does weaken the herd, if by "weaken the herd" you mean they increase the size of an existing vulnerable population. But they do not cause plagues, they do not cause healthy individuals to stop producing antibodies, and they do not increase the mutation rate of organisms.
There are several large non-vaccinating communities in my area (Old-Order Amish, among others) and they do endure regular, preventable epidemics. Those epidemics do not cause chain reactions into the vaccinated population. They just plain don't. These unvaccinated people interact with the rest of us all the time, and it does not destroy the herd or compromise the herd immunity. That's independently verifiable fact.
I vaccinated my children against quite a few diseases, but I read the Red Book entry and the manufacturer's data sheet on each one and researched them thoroughly first (their pediatrician was very helpful.) I did not give them the chicken pox vaccine because the version that was available at the time (preparations are changing constantly, for interesting reasons) was less reliable than sending them to play with a child that already had the pox.
My children play in the dirt and grass and sunlight and splash around in the creek. The children who do not do these things are probably more of a threat to world health than anti-vaxxers are. But my aunt died of post-polio complications (she got polio in the 1930s and was damaged all her life) so I am not an anti-vaxxer.
I think everyone wants the vax/antivax argument to be discretely binary, but it's really more of a nuanced continuum that has distinct issues relative to individual vaccine preparations, humans, and communities.
That's an awesome list of talking points!
Can you prove to me that "sane management [of nuclear fission] has been made impossible by anti-nuclear activists and their propaganda"? I see zero evidence of this in reality - management of nuclear plants has been entirely driven by the nuclear industry. There is exactly one case - where a plant was to be built on a known active fault line - where "activists" have made a difference in the US, and it had nothing to do with management. Show me the evidence.
In return, here are some links to the thing you claim is laughably impossible - sustainable biofuels.
http://www.bioenergyresearch.com.au/
http://sustainablebiodieselalliance.com/
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/01/100125094641.htm
http://www.virent.com/products/gasoline/
That's high-tech - the stuff Virent is doing. Hot fission plants are obsolete crap even if Rossi's ecat doesn't work.
I guess you don't know how to read? Let me dumb it down for you, since you only communicate in terms of withering scorn.
First poster: vaccines only work if everyone gets one! These unvaccinated people going to kill everyone! It'll be the black death all over again!
Me: No, vaccines work on individuals. The individuals that have antibodies will still have antibodies regardless of who does or doesn't get vaccinated. You are misrepresenting or misunderstanding the concept of "herd immunity" if you think that anti-vaxxers are magically more dangerous than all the other people who don't have antibodies.
Flametard: YOUZ ARE TEH LUZER!!
(The last one was you, in case I was too subtle for you.)
I am not anti-vax, but I have seen nothing that makes me believe "vaccines rely on herd immunity".
A functional vaccine induces antibody production in the vaccinated host and that's it. The herd is not involved.
Unvaccinated individuals, however, rely on being surrounded by immune individuals in order to "free load" on the herd's immunity. This is immoral if you believe in Kant's Categorical Imperative.
I don't know where this idea you have got started, but it's like a meme now... people just repeat it without evidence all the time.
AFAIK, there are no commercial liquid fueled molten salt reactors in operation today.
Chinese propaganda claims of what they are going to do in the future have historically exceeded reality.
If you want to see progress in that sort of design, look to India - with their gigantic thorium reserves investing in fission actually makes sense for them.
In the US, we should be using our vast land mass to grow sustainable, carbon-neutral fuel crops but instead we are paying farmers not to grow anything at all, and subsidizing the coal, oil and nuclear industries.
Because all terrestrial nuclear fission (with the possible exception of LENR like Rossi's uproven Ecat, but not excepting the totally mythical Chinese power reactors referred to above) is Victorian Era technology. It's antique crap, that requires filthy and exploitative support industries like 3rd world mining, and it's completely militarily unsound, since it makes your energy infrastructure chock full of bottlenecks and dependencies that enemies can exploit.
Distributed, sustainable, carbon-neutral power generation is the way to go - but that would entail actual modern technology, like biotech and robotics, so we can't have that.
We'll stick to steam power, because people like nuclear irrationally, and are immune to data or argument. The spewing white stuff makes them feel butch, I guess? I suspect nuke shills have potency and inadequacy issues.
I believe you have this backwards; not sure why you got all the positive mods.
I can trivially generate a 1000 F temperature on the end of a cigarette, but I sure can't do that to a football field.
Similarly, I can reduce the size of the chamber in my foundry and it will heat up faster, easier, and cheaper.
"All right, this is it! I'll talk to this Humungus! He's a reasonable man open to negotiation."
But really, the entire topic's just a troll.
CLIs are for typists and computer experts. GUIs are for artists and computing beginners. Saying one is better than the other is like complaining that your bicycle is a terrible race car; it's pointless.
I liked his poetry better than his ethics... the aspartame intervention at the FDA is like a textbook example of regulatory capture and abuse of power.
You're right, though, he was a poet...
You're going to be told lots of things.
You get told things every day that don't happen.
It doesn't seem to bother people, they don't--
It's printed in the press.
The world thinks all these things happen.
They never happened.
Everyone's so eager to get the story
Before in fact the story's there
That the world is constantly being fed
Things that haven't happened.
All I can tell you is,
It hasn't happened.
It's going to happen.
--Donald Rumsfeld, 2003-02-28 DoD briefing
OK, but I like obvious. No "Tirckery" required.
Which is why I use linux....
What are you ranting on about now?
You make an ISO by dragging the content of a CD to your hard drive and answering ISO when linux asks you if you want one.
You look at what is inside the ISO on your hard drive by clicking on it. It opens up just like a folder or a zip file.
Why do you windows people make things so hard?
What's "cd to an iso file" mean? If I drag and drop the content of a CD to my hard drive linux asks me if I want an ISO or not, if I say yes the icon is round and shiny and if I say no it looks like a regular vanilla folder. Either way, you just click on the icon and it opens, but if you say ISO you can burn a new CD from that quicker.
What is all this geeky talk? "cd?" Windows is too complicated for me, I have to use linux. I can't read manuals and stuff like you nerdy windows people.
Wow, that sounds hard! You have to do all that? Windows 8 must really suck!!!
In modern linux distributions, if there's an ISO on the media, it appears the same as any other container object, except the icon's a shiny CD looking disc instead of a manila folder. You click on it like any other container object, say for example a folder or an archive file, and it opens.
Why do you use windows if it makes you do all that crap?
It's noticeably better at generating profit for Microsoft.
Sorry, in European units that would be a metric fuck-tonne of money. For Americans, a standard fuck-ton, equivalent to the traditional shitload.
Economics driven by politics.
It takes an imperial arse-load of money to convert a landfill into a power plant. It'll be more profitable to use that money to build a coal-fired plant, since you can entirely ignore any negative social consequences (such as dwindling fertility and rising cancer rates). It's cheaper to pollute... because of politics. We don't charge polluters for the damage they do to the taxpayer, so there is incentive to pollute.
All energy producing industries consume energy. Coal and uranium don't mine themselves, gas doesn't pump itself through the pipeline and purify itself. Electrical generators not only use electricity to energize the generator windings, but also electricity loses energy by heating the transmission wires whenever you move it around. Don't even get me started about battery losses.
The trick is to get more energy out than you put in. Currently, you can't do that at all with fusion, and you can't do that both economically and safely with fission (although you can do one or the other) but you sure can do it with coal, wood, natural gas, or any number of other burnable resources.
But the goal is to use something renewable that does not release into the air carbon that used to be locked in the ground. Since plants take all of their carbon from the air, and none from the soil, that's the ticket!
Sugar cane and sugar beets are great in the parts of the world where they can grow without fertilizer. Corn ethanol fuels are not economically viable without government subsidies - the same sort of anti-humanist socialism that makes nuclear plants viable - because it takes too much energy to farm and reduce corn. Corn ethanol is just corporate welfare, not a real energy policy.
Dr. Diesel invented his engine so that it could be fueled by the crops it tended. The first demonstration engine ran on peanut oil. Fueling your vehicles is a marginal overhead cost when you're generating vehicle fuel.
And if it's all carbon neutral who cares?
At the industrial scale these problems can be conquered with modern technology. Cellulosic ethanol is readily achievable, far more efficiently than (for example) nuclear fission, and what's left over from that process can be made into methane or plastics.
At the home scale, though, you're right. Until the patents wear out on the microbes, biodigestion of cellulose is corporate territory.
Worm box!
http://www.wikihow.com/Make-Your-Own-Worm-Compost-System
Don't let it ferment, the worms get drunk and come out of the box looking for trouble. You don't want that, trust me.
But that's absolutely false. The reason there have been no new licenses for nuclear plants for decades is that nobody has applied for any - and that, in turn, is because nuclear power cannot be generated profitably without heavy taxpayer sponsorship. The economics of nuclear power are completely impossible to work with in a purely capitalist system. This is a simple, well-known fact, not a theory or propaganda, and it's why the Cheney Energy Task Force re-implemented the Price-Anderson Act in 2005 along with per-watt subsidies. Socialism is a requirement for terrestrial nuclear power plants, because they aren't economically viable without it.
Every reputable analysis of the costs of nuclear power shows that gas, coal, and biologically produced sustainable fuels are all cheaper than fission. The market has proved this by failing to build any new nuclear plants in the absence of government sponsorship.
That's also absolutely false. Gas generation from waste and agriculture distributes evenly - without militarization of processing and use facilities, so it scales tremendously better than nuclear, which distributes extremely poorly due to the requirement for a relatively small number of highly secure (typically militarized) installations with titanic grid interconnection requirements.
Furthermore methane can be shipped nearly losslessly using existing pipeline distribution networks, avoiding electrical losses, or it can be cheaply converted to electricity at any point and supplied to the grid.
Nuclear's not cost-effective or desirable or carbon-neutral. With very little capital investment (relative to nuclear, although unfortunately not to coal) bio-gas is all three! But nuclear allows the preservation of existing economic and political power bases, so authoritarians and entrenched power brokers love it .
Sustainably produced methane from waste and agricultural sources. It would be cheaper and safer than anything else and we already have the existing infrastructure to use it and distribute it.
But you won't listen. Because you've decided you want nuclear, and it has nothing to do with the fact that nuclear (and hydrogen, for that matter) power is really just a way for existing political and economic power bases to perpetuate their hereditary stranglehold on power. You are sold on nuclear.
Norbert Weiner's dinghies beg to differ.
Seriously.
http://www.angryflower.com/bobsqu.gif