I tried discourse. But when someone is so stubborn about war that they can't even see the facts they just said themself, it's time to wind down the discourse. Because it's going nowhere.
Hopefully others can see the facts we exposed, and the failures of thoe arguments before it all crashed and burned. Practically no one changes their minds during these arguments, but I'd hope they have a chance to think again on the new info once they're safely away in private.
The ex-president of Iceland who presided over their conversion says the US can do it. The US has lots of geothermal. And once it's electric, it can be pumped around the grid. Or it can power electrolysis to produce liquid fuels.
Also, I didn't say solar could do it alone. The point of what I said was that lots of alternatives to nukes and coal (and oil) exist. They can all be combined to scale up quickly.
If you think a radical conversion to more efficient energy is "ponies and rainbows", then you don't know what $200:bl oil means. Or even $100 oil for a year or more.
What's more massive government intervention than the $TRILLION (and thousands of lives, tens of thousands maimed) spent on Iraq because of its oil? That has done little but quintuple the profits we've paid out on multiplying oil demand. But we somehow should have pulled off conservation in the 1970s, when Gerald Ford (R-MI/GM) was running the show? Carter, who was a nuke engineer but instead amped up solar until Reagan/Bush shut it down? The US has never seen politics and economics so heavily against just burning more oil. That's the only reason nukes get considered (OK, also Cheney loves them like only the devil could). But what has also changed is that America's European competitors have demonstrated wind and geothermal on a scale that could replace petrofuels if applied in the US, with our own conditions.
You just lost me calling conservation efforts "ponies and rainbows". And that "mass transit in general is unrealistic in the near future". You're demanding that nukes, the energy that's been massively government subsidized from the very beginning (and before) and still isn't economical, replace all other alternatives to petrofuels. Which itself would take decades of building, growing pains that would see unsafe plants built and operated. But that's not "ponies and rainbows": it's macho, and it's clean because "it's physics". Meanwhile, Sweden too is going to be off petrofuels (despite neighboring #3 exporter Norway) before a single new US nuke plant is built.
I'll see you in the future. Then we'll see what's right. Until then, I'm not wasting any more energy on this conversation.
And we know that Romney's answers aren't just microtailored to his Slashdot audience, because he never does that. He isn't just another CEO who'll say anything, anytime, for power. He's honest.
Hell, we don't even know that it's really Romney answering, and not some minimum wage nerd he's to phoning in the answers.
In fact, if I built a slick robot with perfect hair, I think "Romney" would be a good name. Welcome to the Romney 101.
We pay the FBI a lot of money to infiltrate and bring to justice these organized criminal networks. But the FBI isn't bothering.
Of course, the banks are supposed to defend their trademarks from anyone, including phishers, who uses them to pretend to be the bank. But they're not bothering.
Iceland started out with little science, less engineering, and one of the world's poorest economies in the 1980s. After a couple decades, they're generating 70% their energy from geothermal. The US energy demand is larger, but we've got even more geothermal resources, more money, all of Iceland's experience, and greater urgency.
Wind, tidal and solar also can be built out fast. Nuke plants take a long time, in addition to their risks.
Each of those can be built where they work best. And conservation can reduce big chunks, like eliminating practically all the appliance standby power, requiring practically all cars to get over 30MPG, revamping airline logistics to minimize circling/taxiing for delays (and slow down flights to arrivals when they do occur), and converting commuter highways to rail conveyors (and just using mass transit instead of individual transit).
We're not trapped in a choice between nukes and coal. Though I'm sure Dick Cheney will never believe it.
Do you realize how many people have died from mining the nuke fuel? And how many have died from the other bad manufacturing processes? And how many will die when there's an accident (or sabotage) at the waste storage dumps, sometime in the next several hundred/thousand years?
There are already terrorist attacks on oilfields. What happens when they hit a nuke plant? What happens when they just rob one?
Nuclear power is a civil engineering matter. The safety of nuclear power is not.
All the major accidents have had the same story line of confusion, the accident, and then an attempt to cover up. Windscale, TMI, chernobyl. Accidents which should not have happened but for bad management and lack of experienced engineers on site. The Windscale fire was caused by the pile being run way outside it's original design limits to create more plutonium and tritium for the British bomb projects.
Chernobyl is being used as a bargaining chip by Russia. They will not strengthen the sarcophagus without outside investment. Europe feels pressured to pay because they also can imagine the consequences. This creates tension.
While nuclear power plants have become more reliable, there are other issues to consider before they can be considered safe.
The "little more than an adjustment of the economy from wartime mobilization" was, even by your own count, 19 months out of the 48 months from the war's end through 1949.
The 1970s economy was a lot worse than just the 16 months during the "oil crisis".
You obviously don't want to admit that war is bad for the economy. Why don't you look at the current US economy after 6 years of war, despite $TRILLIONS spent propping it up with debt. You like war. Now that's established, you're not worth listening to.
War is a great motivator for people to do things, which can force an economy to produce when it's failing, especially if due to labor/management conflicts or disorganization rather than supply chain problems (like no resources or investment money to buy them). It also literally destroys your competition. If you emerge as the source for rebuilding, it can create demand, which can multiply in return if you have enough capital left to invest in growing the destroyed areas' own production, which can repay your investment at interest. War also lets the victor specify the loser's economy, and often the economy of the allies dependent on your helping them recover (eg. the US required Europe to switch from local coal to imported oil to get money from the Marshall Plan). And of course the winner can steal all the booty from the loser.
But all of that has to count against the destruction of capital, and therefore wealth, that is the main activity of war. And count against the destruction of the war materiel capital itself, like the bombs, bullets, fuel, planes, boats, tanks, trucks... all of which consumed wealth to produce, and create nothing, but themselves are destroyed in the process.
None of the upside is happening in Iraq and Afghanistan, and all of the downside. Those countries aren't going to be growing into big customers for American industry, because their people hate us now. They'll be much better customers for our competitors, especially China, and probably Russia, which are also their neighbors. Sure, Iraq's oil is booty, but even if American oil corps get it, that's not good for "the" economy: it's good for the American oil corp economy, which is so multinational and crony that it doesn't really help the vast majority of Americans. In fact, it helps the oil corps steal from us.
The US went through a serious recession for several years after victory in WWII. It went through another one after defeat in Vietnam. The Iraq and Teror wars are doing nothing but damage to the overall US economy, and show no sign of any reason for benefit, outside a small crony group like Exxon/etc, Halliburton, Blackwater, all of which offshore their profits and don't even pay taxes on them.
"War is good for the economy" is one of the Big Lies. Unless you're in the war business itself. Which we're not. The rest of us are casualties.
Am I glad that we're making military robots with advanced sight. I wouldn't want to waste any more time and money on distractions like an orderly withdrawal from Iraq, or beating the Taliban in Afghanistan, or healing the tens of thousands of maimed soldiers the Pentagon has created over there, or stopping nuke proliferation.
Yeah, subsidizing global R&D by inventing seeing military robots under the totally inefficient Pentagon budget is my idea of victory.
Privacy advocates could do a lot of good just giving away RFID erasers for everyone. Not everything with RFID embedded will survive zapping in a microwave.
Sponsor dry cleaners and laundromats to "debug" clothes with RFID found and erased, and give the customers the report.
I could see a great public demo of an RFID reader out in a park or at a busy intersection with a big display superimposing the tag#s over video of the people on whom they're riding. With an eraser and some pamphlets. In fact, that setup could probably sell enough erasers to finance giving away lots more.
Despite the many critical exceptions and the overall downward trend, practically all searches in the US are overseen by a judge (except for the major critical exception of vehicle searches).
Just because Bush has shredded the 4th Amendment in a long line of presidents and Congresses trampling it doesn't mean Americans like me are giving up on our rights. Especially when they're still usually protected.
Public Citizen should help them appeal this decision to a non-fascist superior judge. And when it's overturned, the original judge's record should be checked for other fascist, or just retarded, rulings. Those rulings should count against their promotions, raises and pensions. When there are enough overturns, they should have their judge robes torn up. And really serious ones should see them tried for obstruction of justice, if nothing else.
Judges are generally good deciders. But that lets the rest get a free pass. There should be feedback with teeth, just like the teeth the judges apply to the public.
The only encryption worth trusting is end-to-end, where at least one end is verified secure by you (because inevitably you'll have to trust the person at the other end, no matter how secure their tech is). Why would I trust Skype to be the middleman? Either to ensure the encryption works, or not to allow backdoors (designed or unexpected) in their carriage of the signals.
When the network and all its intermediary nodes don't have to be trusted, because they just carry opaque traffic that only the endpoints can decrypt, that's worth calling "secure".
In the meantime, what can be cracked by a private entity can also be cracked by public entities, like police. But of course the police must be bound by oversight. In the US, that would mean no peeking without prior evidence showing probable cause, decided and kept track of by a judge, according to the law. In Germany, they might have their own way of doing it, but if it doesn't require evidence, independent control deciding whether there's enough evidence to warrant the snooping, and public oversight of the overall program and its controls, it's violating their rights. And people whose rights are violated aren't cooperative with the violators in the long run.
Yes, that's true, but the buzz comes at the cost of others in the market knowing they can't rely on your supply chain. Which, among other ill effects (like a rollercoaster supply chain, with all its extra inefficiency costs), means corporations won't buy into your platform, which means no critical mass in that major market segment, a self-reinforcing failure.
Slashdot Mirror
I tried discourse. But when someone is so stubborn about war that they can't even see the facts they just said themself, it's time to wind down the discourse. Because it's going nowhere.
Hopefully others can see the facts we exposed, and the failures of thoe arguments before it all crashed and burned. Practically no one changes their minds during these arguments, but I'd hope they have a chance to think again on the new info once they're safely away in private.
The TechCrunch audience is the Slashdot audience.
I'm not wasting my time on another word from Romney. Every word is a lie, and different for every listener - I can just make up the article myself.
/usr/games/fortune for president!
The ex-president of Iceland who presided over their conversion says the US can do it. The US has lots of geothermal. And once it's electric, it can be pumped around the grid. Or it can power electrolysis to produce liquid fuels.
Also, I didn't say solar could do it alone. The point of what I said was that lots of alternatives to nukes and coal (and oil) exist. They can all be combined to scale up quickly.
If you think a radical conversion to more efficient energy is "ponies and rainbows", then you don't know what $200:bl oil means. Or even $100 oil for a year or more.
What's more massive government intervention than the $TRILLION (and thousands of lives, tens of thousands maimed) spent on Iraq because of its oil? That has done little but quintuple the profits we've paid out on multiplying oil demand. But we somehow should have pulled off conservation in the 1970s, when Gerald Ford (R-MI/GM) was running the show? Carter, who was a nuke engineer but instead amped up solar until Reagan/Bush shut it down? The US has never seen politics and economics so heavily against just burning more oil. That's the only reason nukes get considered (OK, also Cheney loves them like only the devil could). But what has also changed is that America's European competitors have demonstrated wind and geothermal on a scale that could replace petrofuels if applied in the US, with our own conditions.
You just lost me calling conservation efforts "ponies and rainbows". And that "mass transit in general is unrealistic in the near future". You're demanding that nukes, the energy that's been massively government subsidized from the very beginning (and before) and still isn't economical, replace all other alternatives to petrofuels. Which itself would take decades of building, growing pains that would see unsafe plants built and operated. But that's not "ponies and rainbows": it's macho, and it's clean because "it's physics". Meanwhile, Sweden too is going to be off petrofuels (despite neighboring #3 exporter Norway) before a single new US nuke plant is built.
I'll see you in the future. Then we'll see what's right. Until then, I'm not wasting any more energy on this conversation.
And we know that Romney's answers aren't just microtailored to his Slashdot audience, because he never does that. He isn't just another CEO who'll say anything, anytime, for power. He's honest.
Hell, we don't even know that it's really Romney answering, and not some minimum wage nerd he's to phoning in the answers.
In fact, if I built a slick robot with perfect hair, I think "Romney" would be a good name. Welcome to the Romney 101.
We pay the FBI a lot of money to infiltrate and bring to justice these organized criminal networks. But the FBI isn't bothering.
Of course, the banks are supposed to defend their trademarks from anyone, including phishers, who uses them to pretend to be the bank. But they're not bothering.
Iceland started out with little science, less engineering, and one of the world's poorest economies in the 1980s. After a couple decades, they're generating 70% their energy from geothermal. The US energy demand is larger, but we've got even more geothermal resources, more money, all of Iceland's experience, and greater urgency.
Wind, tidal and solar also can be built out fast. Nuke plants take a long time, in addition to their risks.
Each of those can be built where they work best. And conservation can reduce big chunks, like eliminating practically all the appliance standby power, requiring practically all cars to get over 30MPG, revamping airline logistics to minimize circling/taxiing for delays (and slow down flights to arrivals when they do occur), and converting commuter highways to rail conveyors (and just using mass transit instead of individual transit).
We're not trapped in a choice between nukes and coal. Though I'm sure Dick Cheney will never believe it.
Do you realize how many people have died from mining the nuke fuel? And how many have died from the other bad manufacturing processes? And how many will die when there's an accident (or sabotage) at the waste storage dumps, sometime in the next several hundred/thousand years?
There are already terrorist attacks on oilfields. What happens when they hit a nuke plant? What happens when they just rob one?
Until they subpoena Google. Or we find out that Google secretly turns over its data already.
The "little more than an adjustment of the economy from wartime mobilization" was, even by your own count, 19 months out of the 48 months from the war's end through 1949.
The 1970s economy was a lot worse than just the 16 months during the "oil crisis".
You obviously don't want to admit that war is bad for the economy. Why don't you look at the current US economy after 6 years of war, despite $TRILLIONS spent propping it up with debt. You like war. Now that's established, you're not worth listening to.
For everyone left alive after all the kinks are worked out through trial and error.
Rockets never explode during launch, and satellites never fall to Earth in big chunks.
As far as we know. How many other suppressed videos, or events without videos, are there?
And the people who die from nuke mining don't think it's so safe, even if they don't appear in a video.
Yes, we must not count the other parts of the system that are unsafe when considering how safe nuke plants are.
How unfortunate we are that we can choose between only nukes and coal.
See, nuke power is safe, and we always know how bad even these contained breakdowns are.
War is a great motivator for people to do things, which can force an economy to produce when it's failing, especially if due to labor/management conflicts or disorganization rather than supply chain problems (like no resources or investment money to buy them). It also literally destroys your competition. If you emerge as the source for rebuilding, it can create demand, which can multiply in return if you have enough capital left to invest in growing the destroyed areas' own production, which can repay your investment at interest. War also lets the victor specify the loser's economy, and often the economy of the allies dependent on your helping them recover (eg. the US required Europe to switch from local coal to imported oil to get money from the Marshall Plan). And of course the winner can steal all the booty from the loser.
But all of that has to count against the destruction of capital, and therefore wealth, that is the main activity of war. And count against the destruction of the war materiel capital itself, like the bombs, bullets, fuel, planes, boats, tanks, trucks... all of which consumed wealth to produce, and create nothing, but themselves are destroyed in the process.
None of the upside is happening in Iraq and Afghanistan, and all of the downside. Those countries aren't going to be growing into big customers for American industry, because their people hate us now. They'll be much better customers for our competitors, especially China, and probably Russia, which are also their neighbors. Sure, Iraq's oil is booty, but even if American oil corps get it, that's not good for "the" economy: it's good for the American oil corp economy, which is so multinational and crony that it doesn't really help the vast majority of Americans. In fact, it helps the oil corps steal from us.
The US went through a serious recession for several years after victory in WWII. It went through another one after defeat in Vietnam. The Iraq and Teror wars are doing nothing but damage to the overall US economy, and show no sign of any reason for benefit, outside a small crony group like Exxon/etc, Halliburton, Blackwater, all of which offshore their profits and don't even pay taxes on them.
"War is good for the economy" is one of the Big Lies. Unless you're in the war business itself. Which we're not. The rest of us are casualties.
Moderation -1
100% Flamebait
Oh, yeah, complaining about wasting our money on war is just "flamebait". TrollMods have to destroy this discussion in order to save it.
Am I glad that we're making military robots with advanced sight. I wouldn't want to waste any more time and money on distractions like an orderly withdrawal from Iraq, or beating the Taliban in Afghanistan, or healing the tens of thousands of maimed soldiers the Pentagon has created over there, or stopping nuke proliferation.
Yeah, subsidizing global R&D by inventing seeing military robots under the totally inefficient Pentagon budget is my idea of victory.
Privacy advocates could do a lot of good just giving away RFID erasers for everyone. Not everything with RFID embedded will survive zapping in a microwave.
Sponsor dry cleaners and laundromats to "debug" clothes with RFID found and erased, and give the customers the report.
I could see a great public demo of an RFID reader out in a park or at a busy intersection with a big display superimposing the tag#s over video of the people on whom they're riding. With an eraser and some pamphlets. In fact, that setup could probably sell enough erasers to finance giving away lots more.
Despite the many critical exceptions and the overall downward trend, practically all searches in the US are overseen by a judge (except for the major critical exception of vehicle searches).
Just because Bush has shredded the 4th Amendment in a long line of presidents and Congresses trampling it doesn't mean Americans like me are giving up on our rights. Especially when they're still usually protected.
Public Citizen should help them appeal this decision to a non-fascist superior judge. And when it's overturned, the original judge's record should be checked for other fascist, or just retarded, rulings. Those rulings should count against their promotions, raises and pensions. When there are enough overturns, they should have their judge robes torn up. And really serious ones should see them tried for obstruction of justice, if nothing else.
Judges are generally good deciders. But that lets the rest get a free pass. There should be feedback with teeth, just like the teeth the judges apply to the public.
The only encryption worth trusting is end-to-end, where at least one end is verified secure by you (because inevitably you'll have to trust the person at the other end, no matter how secure their tech is). Why would I trust Skype to be the middleman? Either to ensure the encryption works, or not to allow backdoors (designed or unexpected) in their carriage of the signals.
When the network and all its intermediary nodes don't have to be trusted, because they just carry opaque traffic that only the endpoints can decrypt, that's worth calling "secure".
In the meantime, what can be cracked by a private entity can also be cracked by public entities, like police. But of course the police must be bound by oversight. In the US, that would mean no peeking without prior evidence showing probable cause, decided and kept track of by a judge, according to the law. In Germany, they might have their own way of doing it, but if it doesn't require evidence, independent control deciding whether there's enough evidence to warrant the snooping, and public oversight of the overall program and its controls, it's violating their rights. And people whose rights are violated aren't cooperative with the violators in the long run.
Yes, that's true, but the buzz comes at the cost of others in the market knowing they can't rely on your supply chain. Which, among other ill effects (like a rollercoaster supply chain, with all its extra inefficiency costs), means corporations won't buy into your platform, which means no critical mass in that major market segment, a self-reinforcing failure.