Pretty much none of that is correct, unfortunately. Thorium is more abundant than uranium, but not by such a massive factor. There's no fissile isotope of thorium, so we'd have to start them on uranium. Current reactors will not breed in the thorium cycle, and it's questionable to what extend this is practical. The waste lasts for hundreds of years, reprocessing and fabrication for thorium fuel is not developed and U-233 (which the fissile isotope in the thorium cycle) certainly could be used to make a nuclear weapon.
Fast breeders on the U-Pu cycle are closer to practicality.
"for the accumulated knowledge on this subject is already sufficient to say that commercial fusion power will never become a reality.'"
As for the BBC, you trust a government owned and run network over free ones? Really? BBC is the NPR and PBS of Britain. Sorry, I think the "Bullshit" is coming from you.
The BBC is not government owned or run. And yes, I'd trust it over any commercial channel, which have obvious interests in pushing the pro-business line or chasing ratings.
You use SI prefixes with SI units. The 'byte' is not an SI unit; it's not even the most basic representation, being a group of eight bits. If you insist on using base-ten units in combination with bytes then you're essentially arguing for layering a base-ten system on top of a base-two one.
Kilo and Mega are SI terms. The point of the prefix is it means the same thing no matter what it applies to. WIthout that, there's no point in having standardised prefixes. Electron-volt isn't an SI unit either, does that mean that keV and MeV should mean something other than 1000 and 1 million eV respectively? Similarly barn, parsec etc. The confusion would be endless. Computer technologists should have made up their own damn prefix if they wanted something that meant 1024. And I don't know what your point is anyway - there's nothing "basic" about any of the SI base units, they're all arbitrary to some degree, and represent quantities not neatly represented by base-10 anything. Doesn't stop them being usable as SI units.
Your point about using "bit" as the fundamental unit of information makes a lot of sense. Would make it much easier to work out in your head how long it would take a 2 Gb file to transfer over a 100 Mbps connection, for example.
But it being much more expensive than simply mining more uranium is a valid reason.
IIRC, the MOX fabrication cost alone is higher than the current cost of fuel from mined uranium. So even if reprocessing was free, it wouldn't be economic.
"We hold these truths to be self-evident"? That's a statement, not an argument. The fact that it was used as a basis of government doesn't mean it isn't arbitrary. The bit about deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed is pretty accurate though, and is the basis of all democracies. So, if the population want government healthcare, it gets it.
In any case, I notice that life is listed but property isn't, providing further justification for taxes for healthcare even in the US.
Oddly, I've always found that the more local an authority is, the more petty and intrusive it tends to be. Give me a faceless bureaucracy any day.
Yes, I am English. Not sure why that's relevant. Having a service like that depend on volunteers seems odd to me. I don't see any fundamental distinction between a local government taking taxes and providing a service and a national one doing the same.
You are born with inherent rights. They are part of you. They cannot be taken or given away, they are not supplied by governments. They do not require someone else to provide them for you.
That's an assertion, and a highly flawed one. There's absolutely no evidence for the existence of such a thing. Your link doesn't provide one, certainly. If you think there is such a thing, provide an example of one - I suspect I can find a case where it has been violated, thus proving that in fact they can be taken away.
Conservation laws are not handwaves, they're a very useful way of considering problems like this as they let you disregard a whole lot of irrelevant detail. Yes, some angular momentum will go into the windmill blades but it won't accumulate over time, as it will be recovered when the blades stop turning.
I'm not disregarding energy at all, it's just not relevant to my point. Yes, you've taken energy out of *something* but not out of the earth's rotation. It would have been dissipated as heat eventually anyway - there's no law of conservation of kinetic energy.
Wind power slowing down the earth's rotation is not consistent with conservation of angular momentum. Unlike kinetic energy, angular momentum is always conserved in the absence of external forces (well, torques), which is why it's a much more useful quantity to work with when considering this problem.
Please try not to be patronising. I do know a bit about physics, what with having a degree and PhD in it and all.
There's no mechanism for carrying angular momentum away from the earth that involves the wind. Air has a habit of staying on Earth, after all. Therefore, wind turbines cannot affect it.
The only thing that could would be tidal forces, which have nothing to do with the wind.
Yes, pumped storage is good for rapid response to demand or supply variation. However, if you want it to allow a large fraction of electricity generated by wind, you need a lot of it, and it all adds to the cost.
In any case, I don't think that even Spain has a large enough fraction of wind power for this to be required - 11% according to wikipedia, below my original 15% estimate.
You do have a point that policing is (mostly) non-excludable and non-rivalrous and that healthcare is (again, mostly) not.
However, I don't think it changes the fundamental issue. Just because something is non-excludable and non-rivalrous does not mean it has to be done, and similarly because something is neither of those doesn't mean it shouldn't be done by government.
In the case of healthcare, I simply think that the right to life and decent health is more important than any other, including property. If any right is important, this one is. This is a bit arbitrary, but no more than the "property is more important than anything else" that libertarians are so fond of.
However, we don't have to go that far. Almost all wealth is created by trade rather than directly by labour. If something was only created by a single person, it would be easy to assign ownership [1], and indeed generally taxes only apply to transactions. But if someone has millions of dollars or even tens of thousands, it's safe to say that wealth depended on a large number of other people. In that context, a tax on it isn't redistribution so much as deciding the original distribution of the wealth generated by the division of labour.
I'm not a Marxist or any kind of socialist - there is a rather large gulf between fundamentalist free market capitalism and Marxism that it's possible to occupy. I don't object to private ownership of businesses, for example. Income taxes, typically used to fund things like universal health care, are not socialist.
I didn't address the TV point because the cost seemed rather trivial compared to welfare cost in general. But as it happens, no, I don't see the point in specifying TV as a right. Welfare makes more sense as a small living allowance that people can spend as they choose. Healthcare is different to TV in that it's more important, being directly related to the right to life and different to food in that the cost comes in huge, unpredictable bursts and is not well suited to a pay as you go model.
[1] But even then, who owned the natural resources you created it from?
Wind generally changes slowly enough that it doesn't cause massive instability providing you have sufficient backup. However, there are other problems.
Getting the percentage that high occasionally isn't amazing, especially during a time of low demand such as night. The hard part is generating an average of 50% wind overall (e.g. over a year).
Say the baseload demand is 20 GW, then you can have 20 GW of wind power installed without worrying about what to do if too much is produced. So you could even get nearly 100% wind power occasionally. The problem is for the rest of the time when demand is higher or it isn't windy. The capacity factor of wind is about 30%, and baseload is typically about 50% of average load, so that means on average you're only generating 15% of your total electricity by wind power.
A police force is excludable. You don't have to attempt to prevent or prosecute robberies of particular people in the same way you don't have to provide medical service to particular people. Similarly for the fire brigade. They're both rivalrous too - if the police are investigating a crime affecting me, they're not free to do something else.
The military may be genuinely non-excludable and non-rivalrous, but what if I don't want it, or want less of it? I still have to pay for it. I think you're drawing rather arbitray lines here.
As for your last statement, of course you can draw a line. Free healthcare, but no free Playstations, for example.
When it comes to allocating ownership of an item, we have the problem of who deserves what. Since almost all of human wealth is due to trade and division of labour (consider how much you can do by yourself without trading), labelling who owns what is not a trivial task in the first place. Obvious unfairness of the results of capitalism during the Industrial Revolution was one of the motivations for socialist philosophy in the first place.
Can you provide some fundamental, inarguable definition of "inherent rights", and explain from first principles why health care isn't one but security is?
Not really, the meaning of "self sufficiency" is fairly clear. "Self sufficiency, apart from the bits where I make use of other people's labour" doesn't really follow.
Since self sufficiency is quite impractical, we devise systems for how to manage the division of labour. Capitalism is one such system, but not the only possible one, and I don't see why making use of a government resource is any less self-sufficient than hiring someone to do a job for you. There's no reason to believe that the outcomes of free market capitalism (which needs government to work in any case) are fundamentally the correct ones in terms of moral worth and rewarding the right people for their contributions - and quite compelling evidence that they aren't. It works fairly well in practice, but that's a different issue entirely.
It still isn't self-sufficient, no matter which way you look at it. And "voluntary" can be such a fuzzy concept, especially in the context of "work for me or die because you can't afford healthcare".
The funny thing is that Pelosi's bill requires the continued activity of Old Fashioned, self-sufficient, risk-taking, business-starting/running Eeeeevil millionaires in order for it to work at all.
Business starting? You mean businesses that employ people? That doesn't sound terribly self sufficient to me.
And there's no way you can achieve the equivalent wealth of a millionaire without involving other people. No way at all - the division of labour is the key to wealth.
Except that there's no such thing as self-sufficient. You'd be lucky to survive the first winter if you really did have to provide everything for yourself.
Well no, because I'm British and we don't get Camaros:) Most of the teenagers with odd cars tend to be of the "small hatchback with noisy exhaust and various stickers" variety. If anything, they're slower than the standard ones.
There was one guy who had some what seemed to me a ridiculously expensive car but his parents were loaded. Given that he crashed the thing twice in the space of a few months, maybe they learned their lesson.
6.8 seconds? When did they start giving kids fast cars? The Ford Escort I had at 18 would probably get there in... ooh, 16 seconds, if I pushed it. Probably don't make cars that slow any more, but even so.
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Pretty much none of that is correct, unfortunately. Thorium is more abundant than uranium, but not by such a massive factor. There's no fissile isotope of thorium, so we'd have to start them on uranium. Current reactors will not breed in the thorium cycle, and it's questionable to what extend this is practical. The waste lasts for hundreds of years, reprocessing and fabrication for thorium fuel is not developed and U-233 (which the fissile isotope in the thorium cycle) certainly could be used to make a nuclear weapon.
Fast breeders on the U-Pu cycle are closer to practicality.
"for the accumulated knowledge on this subject is already sufficient to say that commercial fusion power will never become a reality.'"
The people working on ITER clearly don't agree.
As for the BBC, you trust a government owned and run network over free ones? Really? BBC is the NPR and PBS of Britain. Sorry, I think the "Bullshit" is coming from you.
The BBC is not government owned or run. And yes, I'd trust it over any commercial channel, which have obvious interests in pushing the pro-business line or chasing ratings.
You use SI prefixes with SI units. The 'byte' is not an SI unit; it's not even the most basic representation, being a group of eight bits. If you insist on using base-ten units in combination with bytes then you're essentially arguing for layering a base-ten system on top of a base-two one.
Kilo and Mega are SI terms. The point of the prefix is it means the same thing no matter what it applies to. WIthout that, there's no point in having standardised prefixes. Electron-volt isn't an SI unit either, does that mean that keV and MeV should mean something other than 1000 and 1 million eV respectively? Similarly barn, parsec etc. The confusion would be endless. Computer technologists should have made up their own damn prefix if they wanted something that meant 1024. And I don't know what your point is anyway - there's nothing "basic" about any of the SI base units, they're all arbitrary to some degree, and represent quantities not neatly represented by base-10 anything. Doesn't stop them being usable as SI units.
Your point about using "bit" as the fundamental unit of information makes a lot of sense. Would make it much easier to work out in your head how long it would take a 2 Gb file to transfer over a 100 Mbps connection, for example.
But it being much more expensive than simply mining more uranium is a valid reason.
IIRC, the MOX fabrication cost alone is higher than the current cost of fuel from mined uranium. So even if reprocessing was free, it wouldn't be economic.
"We hold these truths to be self-evident"? That's a statement, not an argument. The fact that it was used as a basis of government doesn't mean it isn't arbitrary. The bit about deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed is pretty accurate though, and is the basis of all democracies. So, if the population want government healthcare, it gets it.
In any case, I notice that life is listed but property isn't, providing further justification for taxes for healthcare even in the US.
Oddly, I've always found that the more local an authority is, the more petty and intrusive it tends to be. Give me a faceless bureaucracy any day.
Yes, I am English. Not sure why that's relevant. Having a service like that depend on volunteers seems odd to me. I don't see any fundamental distinction between a local government taking taxes and providing a service and a national one doing the same.
You are born with inherent rights. They are part of you. They cannot be taken or given away, they are not supplied by governments. They do not require someone else to provide them for you.
That's an assertion, and a highly flawed one. There's absolutely no evidence for the existence of such a thing. Your link doesn't provide one, certainly. If you think there is such a thing, provide an example of one - I suspect I can find a case where it has been violated, thus proving that in fact they can be taken away.
Conservation laws are not handwaves, they're a very useful way of considering problems like this as they let you disregard a whole lot of irrelevant detail. Yes, some angular momentum will go into the windmill blades but it won't accumulate over time, as it will be recovered when the blades stop turning.
I'm not disregarding energy at all, it's just not relevant to my point. Yes, you've taken energy out of *something* but not out of the earth's rotation. It would have been dissipated as heat eventually anyway - there's no law of conservation of kinetic energy.
Wind power slowing down the earth's rotation is not consistent with conservation of angular momentum. Unlike kinetic energy, angular momentum is always conserved in the absence of external forces (well, torques), which is why it's a much more useful quantity to work with when considering this problem.
Please try not to be patronising. I do know a bit about physics, what with having a degree and PhD in it and all.
There's no mechanism for carrying angular momentum away from the earth that involves the wind. Air has a habit of staying on Earth, after all. Therefore, wind turbines cannot affect it.
The only thing that could would be tidal forces, which have nothing to do with the wind.
Not if the earth begins to spin slower because we are taking energy out of wind.
Conservation of angular momentum is quite an important principle in physics, I don't think a few windmills will pose a threat to it.
Yes, pumped storage is good for rapid response to demand or supply variation. However, if you want it to allow a large fraction of electricity generated by wind, you need a lot of it, and it all adds to the cost.
In any case, I don't think that even Spain has a large enough fraction of wind power for this to be required - 11% according to wikipedia, below my original 15% estimate.
You do have a point that policing is (mostly) non-excludable and non-rivalrous and that healthcare is (again, mostly) not.
However, I don't think it changes the fundamental issue. Just because something is non-excludable and non-rivalrous does not mean it has to be done, and similarly because something is neither of those doesn't mean it shouldn't be done by government.
In the case of healthcare, I simply think that the right to life and decent health is more important than any other, including property. If any right is important, this one is. This is a bit arbitrary, but no more than the "property is more important than anything else" that libertarians are so fond of.
However, we don't have to go that far. Almost all wealth is created by trade rather than directly by labour. If something was only created by a single person, it would be easy to assign ownership [1], and indeed generally taxes only apply to transactions. But if someone has millions of dollars or even tens of thousands, it's safe to say that wealth depended on a large number of other people. In that context, a tax on it isn't redistribution so much as deciding the original distribution of the wealth generated by the division of labour.
I'm not a Marxist or any kind of socialist - there is a rather large gulf between fundamentalist free market capitalism and Marxism that it's possible to occupy. I don't object to private ownership of businesses, for example. Income taxes, typically used to fund things like universal health care, are not socialist.
I didn't address the TV point because the cost seemed rather trivial compared to welfare cost in general. But as it happens, no, I don't see the point in specifying TV as a right. Welfare makes more sense as a small living allowance that people can spend as they choose. Healthcare is different to TV in that it's more important, being directly related to the right to life and different to food in that the cost comes in huge, unpredictable bursts and is not well suited to a pay as you go model.
[1] But even then, who owned the natural resources you created it from?
Wind generally changes slowly enough that it doesn't cause massive instability providing you have sufficient backup. However, there are other problems.
Getting the percentage that high occasionally isn't amazing, especially during a time of low demand such as night. The hard part is generating an average of 50% wind overall (e.g. over a year).
Say the baseload demand is 20 GW, then you can have 20 GW of wind power installed without worrying about what to do if too much is produced. So you could even get nearly 100% wind power occasionally. The problem is for the rest of the time when demand is higher or it isn't windy. The capacity factor of wind is about 30%, and baseload is typically about 50% of average load, so that means on average you're only generating 15% of your total electricity by wind power.
A police force is excludable. You don't have to attempt to prevent or prosecute robberies of particular people in the same way you don't have to provide medical service to particular people. Similarly for the fire brigade. They're both rivalrous too - if the police are investigating a crime affecting me, they're not free to do something else.
The military may be genuinely non-excludable and non-rivalrous, but what if I don't want it, or want less of it? I still have to pay for it. I think you're drawing rather arbitray lines here.
As for your last statement, of course you can draw a line. Free healthcare, but no free Playstations, for example.
When it comes to allocating ownership of an item, we have the problem of who deserves what. Since almost all of human wealth is due to trade and division of labour (consider how much you can do by yourself without trading), labelling who owns what is not a trivial task in the first place. Obvious unfairness of the results of capitalism during the Industrial Revolution was one of the motivations for socialist philosophy in the first place.
Can you provide some fundamental, inarguable definition of "inherent rights", and explain from first principles why health care isn't one but security is?
Volunteer fire brigade? Really? Bloody hell.
Not really, the meaning of "self sufficiency" is fairly clear. "Self sufficiency, apart from the bits where I make use of other people's labour" doesn't really follow.
Since self sufficiency is quite impractical, we devise systems for how to manage the division of labour. Capitalism is one such system, but not the only possible one, and I don't see why making use of a government resource is any less self-sufficient than hiring someone to do a job for you. There's no reason to believe that the outcomes of free market capitalism (which needs government to work in any case) are fundamentally the correct ones in terms of moral worth and rewarding the right people for their contributions - and quite compelling evidence that they aren't. It works fairly well in practice, but that's a different issue entirely.
Could have fooled me, MRI technology is based on academic research.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Mills_Purcell
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Felix_Bloch
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Mansfield
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Lauterbur
It still isn't self-sufficient, no matter which way you look at it. And "voluntary" can be such a fuzzy concept, especially in the context of "work for me or die because you can't afford healthcare".
Presumably, in the same way that any other tax evasion will. Does the police force, military, court system, fire brigade etc. enslave people?
The funny thing is that Pelosi's bill requires the continued activity of Old Fashioned, self-sufficient, risk-taking, business-starting/running Eeeeevil millionaires in order for it to work at all.
Business starting? You mean businesses that employ people? That doesn't sound terribly self sufficient to me.
And there's no way you can achieve the equivalent wealth of a millionaire without involving other people. No way at all - the division of labour is the key to wealth.
Except that there's no such thing as self-sufficient. You'd be lucky to survive the first winter if you really did have to provide everything for yourself.
Exactly, it's just supply and demand, not some magical system where everyone gets rewarded directly proportionally to their contribution.
Obvious example: professional sportsmen.
Well no, because I'm British and we don't get Camaros :) Most of the teenagers with odd cars tend to be of the "small hatchback with noisy exhaust and various stickers" variety. If anything, they're slower than the standard ones.
There was one guy who had some what seemed to me a ridiculously expensive car but his parents were loaded. Given that he crashed the thing twice in the space of a few months, maybe they learned their lesson.
6.8 seconds? When did they start giving kids fast cars? The Ford Escort I had at 18 would probably get there in... ooh, 16 seconds, if I pushed it. Probably don't make cars that slow any more, but even so.
Insulating the first half of the prongs doesn't make the plug any bigger. Neither does having shutters on the socket.