Actually, there's a far more pragmatic reason for those laws - if the temperature drops below freezing and a home that isn't winterized isn't heated, the pipes could freeze and burst, causing far more damage than what a few hundred to low thousands of dollars of electricity would cost.
Ergo, it's actually better for the power companies to put a lien on the house rather than cut off electricity in freezing temperatures. It's better for the bank that owns the note, the insurance company that would have to pay for the repairs, it's even probably better for the electric company in the end(more likely to be able to get the money from a lien for a house without burst pipes).
There's fewer filters than you might think. Plus, it's ALSO mind boggling of all the garbage the slashdot filters have to deal with - it's not surprising that the occasional bit slips through. Same deal as with spam.
The Chernobyl disaster had nothing to do with leaky pipes but everything with braindead engineering and even worse management of dangerous technology. Contributing was an intense fear of authority, a rather large dose of personal ignorance and a complete disregard for safety protocols or safety in general. In other words, the pinnacle of the Soviet Union.
Anything in particular give you the impression that I didn't already know this, and just didn't want to make a post the size of a small novel?
and yes, they still run these braindead RBMK-type reactors in many plants.
To be fair, they have tightened up the rules and made adjustments to improve safety, both procedural and physical.
As underscored in another post, conditions for successful use of waste heat in people's home are population density, (rather low) demand for electricity in summer and concentration of people around heavy industry in climates with long and cold winters.
Where'd the useage of waste heat come from? I was talking about the heat exchangers that transfer energy from the core water to the steam water that powers turbines to produce electricity. Then the steam water is cooled by lake/river/ocean water for the return cycle.
Sure, I like the idea of cogeneration or even trigeneration plants, but yeah, you have to find an economic justification.
In areas that don't need lots of heat for homes or businesses, ideally you'd use it for industry. Ethanol production, providing steam for oil sand/shale extraction, etc...
Chemical disasters are surely disastrous as seen in Bhopal, but nuclear meltdowns are worse on several orders of magnitude.
Uh... I think you need to work on your numbers.
Bhopal: Killed 2,259 immediately, 3,787 related to the release. Other estimates vary between 8k-15k. 500k injured, 3k permanently.
TMI: No Deaths attributed to TMI by any reputable source
Chernobyl: 31 dead within 3 months due to radiation. 237 suffered 'acute radiation sickness'. 216 total 'non-cancer' deaths from emergency workers. UNSCEAR predicted 4k additional cancer cases due to the accident, but has since said those estimates were high. - ' In addition, the IAEA states that there has been no increase in the rate of birth defects or abnormalities, or solid cancers (such as lung cancer) corroborating UNSCEAR's assessments.[92]'
So, you're saying that an accident that KILLED 4k people is orders of magnitude lass than one that killed less than a thousand directly, and might of caused less than 4k additional cases of cancer(many of which were relatively easy to treat)?
I'd call them in the same OOM, personally. Heck, there's even complaints that the Bhopal accident is still making people sick today due to environmental contamination.
Chemical spills wash out, dilute, decompose, break down - but nuclear waste, radioactive dust and irradiated matter just keeps on giving, year after year, for what is probably the rest of human existence.
*SNORT* - You fail at understanding radioactive decay then. Lead, arsenic, mercury, etc... They're forever. A stable chemical won't break down without some outside force. Radioactive materials actually decay into lesser or non-radioactive forms all on their own. And radioactive materials can be dispursed the exact same way chemicals can.
India could have ten chemical spills the size and effect of Bhopal per year, but we could still go on with our normal lives. But if we had just another 5 Chernobyls anywhere, we would have roughly doubled the natural background radiation of the entire Earth for several millenia.
And would that doubling actually do anything, especially compared to the human toll additional Bhopals would impose? Background radiation on earth varies by more than an OOM anyways, and people in Colorado don't have a higher cancer rate than those in, say, Mississippi.
Indeed, disasters like Chernobyl are very much unlikely in the rest of the world because we use saner reactors and actually pre-entomb them.
We start with 'heat exchangers need maintenance' and end with chernobyl?
The Chernobyl disaster didn't have anything to do with the heat exchangers, and core water leaking where it isn't supposed to is too big of a headache to take much risk with. For one thing, leaking exchangers(or pipes) is going to be taking water from where it's supposed to be and put it somewhere it isn't; unbalancing the system.
Question is, can the political and economical forces driving this process be trusted or not?
Going by world history outside of the USSR? Yes, it can.
Even the worst oil spills are tiny little specks of chickenshit compared to a nuclear power plant crew that absolutely, positively needs to get a certain experiment completed before the 1st of May annual Workers Party celebration.
No water is cycled through those reactors and back out - they are self contained.
Uh, that's true for every halfway sane nuclear reactor out there.
Most nuclear plants actually consist of two to three separate water loops - reactor core, which would be the heavy water that CANDU reactors(as well as others) use. The heat from this is transferred to the second which is used for the steam cycle that actually turns the turbines - this is generally treated distilled water. The last would be the water that's generally taken from a lake or river, and used to cool the steam water, then returned.
Some plants combine the first two, directly using the water from the reactor to power the turbines.
Me, I'd like to see a city go full-tilt with this - perhaps something like hook all the government buildings up, and encourage places like malls, large stores, and employers to get their own station.
The critical factor is that you need a certain minimum market penetration before it makes sense for people to start taking the cars and for businesses and residences to start installing stations. Same as with elsewhere - businesses won't pay for stations before there's a certain number of potential customers riding it, and riders won't ride until it goes to a number of their destinations.
I noticed this as well. In addition, you spend all this effort upgrading your ship, only to have tehm only make a difference in how you started(and finished) in the end of the game.
I'm commanding a warship, how about some naval combat that's ISN"T cutscene based?
There's a lot of background processing and signalling that goes on behind the scenes on smart phones.
This isn't any different for traditional* computers either... Once I went dual core, I never wanted to go back, for precisely this reason.
As long as the OS is smart about it, dual core fixes a lot of user experience issues - for example, the OS not responding well when I set off a single thread but CPU intensive program became a thing of the past.
*I was going to just say 'computers', then 'standard', but let's face it, my smartphone is more powerful than the desktop computer I had a decade ago.
It involves two lawyers, a judge, and usually twelve citizens.
As I mentioned, the USA has been willing to release a number of the people in Gitmo - but no country will accept them(not even the USA).
As for the actual 'holding', as long as you have enough to call them a combatant, you can hold them as a POW, without trial, for the duration of the conflict.
But as you say, Gitmo is an unholy mix between trying to treat them as criminals, while holding them under warfare rules.
In pre-9/11 American jurisprudence, they had to either charge you or release you.
Actually, no.
As mentioned, back in the '40s we rounded up lots of Japanese-Americans and put them in what were essentially concentration camps. We ended up paying restitution, but only a few years ago.
Even without that, remember that those sent to Gitmo weren't sent there solely for 'legal' reasons. Many were/are, in effect, POWs. It has always been possible to hold POWs captive for the 'duration of the conflict' without trial. This, of course, is made very complicated when you figure that most aren't members of a nation in a declared state of war, but they were combatants(or at least believed to be)* in organizations hostile to the very existence of the USA, and quite open about swearing to fight until we're dead. Thus, no defined end to the conflict.
Now, I object to not treating them as POWs, but then there's the criminal matters rearing it's ugly head again. I don't so much object to the existence of Gitmo or the indefinite detaining of prisoners, so much as the waterboarding and lack of communication.
*Detaining random people just doesn't pass the sniff test - you'd expect those doing the detaining to actually get guilty people - innocents who aren't involved are just a waste of resources.
there were no places to put known terrorists, suspected terrorists
Yep, reality intervened and messed up Obama fulfilling this campaign pledge.
Fact is, most of the people remaining at Gitmo are bad, bad, men. There may not be enough evidence for 'beyond a reasonable doubt' at a trial, but a number don't have any real citizenship in a country, or their country of citizenship refuses to take them back.
If the USA is unwilling to take them itself, where are they to go?
You're thinking of the Hague Convention, and it's certainly not 'All NATO allies' - the US uses them in certain applications.
The Hague Convention bans expanding bullets, which the USA has voluntarily interpreted under Geneva conventions as to 'cause unnecessary suffering'. Thing is, when testing showed a hollopoint bullet design intended for use by snipers was more accurate than FMJ, to not expand signficantly more than the standard FMJ, and the results were generally lethal anyways, they approved the bullet.
More accurate = more effective + doesn't cause more suffering = approved under Geneva.
Exactly. They haven't pulled a major terrorist operation on US Soil, nor have they succeeded at taking a US flagged vessel.
Why doesn't one of the companies spend the money they were going to pay out in ransoms on hitmen to kill the pirates?
The insurance is for paying the ransoms to get the crew back; not hiring hitment. Besides, hitment would be more expensive, at least initially.
I think the 'best' solution would be to arrange to sink a number of pirate boats on the down-low - IE you don't advertise, the pirate's support and peers simply notice that many ships just aren't coming back anymore. It gets a reputation for being dangerous, they quit doing it.
But the only reason the crews are willing to take the risk is because they know they have ransom insurance.
If the piracy problem keeps expanding, at some point the insurance will get too expensive or even unavailable, at which point alternative solutions will be sought. Whether that be additional security or bypassing the region entirely.
Oddly enough, NOT paying now and going for alternative solutions will probably result in less loss of life compared to what it'd cost to supress the piracy at that point.
1. General criminal response to a homeowner(or other occupant) showing up with a gun? - Running, not shooting. 2. 'Wild Wild West' had lower crime rates than the developed area back east did at the time. 3. Washington DC, one of the cities with the toughest gun laws on the books in the USA, has consistently been in the top 3 cities for violent crime.
So to get peace in Afghanistan and Iraq, all we have to do is to allow conceal-carry and not take away their weapons?
Actually, they already sort-of have it; every family is allowed an AK-47 or such for self defense, even if it's full auto. There's rules against having an armory, though.
You mention Germany and Belgium. Have you read their rules on weapon possession? How about Switzerland, which has a similar gun ownership rate to the USA, but far fewer weapons. The USA has always had a higher murder rate than England, even when England didn't restrict firearms.
The problem in Iraq, Afghandistan is that the 'bad guys' have too much power, there's not enough competent police/military to supress them. In the USA I blame the drug war, we're handling it very poorly.
I can only come to the conclusion that it's about culture.
On the original post - in the 'religion' specified, they often have that distorted view of the 'wild, wild west' being a violent, dangerous place, full of murdering gunslingers.
In reality, violent crime rates were actually higher back east. Still, the image persists, thus the comparison simply leads to that of the 'gun grabber' religious types being mistaken about yet another aspect.
would lead to an arms race that could cost the shipping companies more than the ransoms.
Look at it another way - the pirates are pirates because it's the most profitable enterprise they've found. If the shipping companies upgun and start refusing to pay ransoms, sure, the pirates could get more violent. But they'll also be making less money, which would lead to less piracy.
Remember, if they get too violent, they'll piss off somebody like the USA and we'll add a third country to our occupation list. Or maybe we'll just settle for a lightning raid and burn the ports the pirates use to stash the freighters.
The problem is that this is happening off the coast of Somalia - a 'country' that's effectively not a country. It has less government than Afghanistan had under the Taliban, or even today.
The facts are simple. A shipping company is not going to risk losing a $500 million dollar ship, $30 million in cargo, and the lives of its crew members when it can pay a tiny fraction of that to get their ship back.
By the same token, are the pirates going to take the risk and fight as hard against a ship that's presenting countermeasures, much less lethal countermeasures, as opposed to backing off and looking for easier prey?
Plus, there's the part about short term vs long term cost - paying off the pirates results in lower short term costs, but actually solving the pirate problem lowers long term costs. Remember the saying "Those that pay the danegeld never get rid of the dane"? Same deal with pirates, kidnappers, frivolous lawsuits, etc...
I'd ask 'What Treaty?" The rules that forbid most merchantmen from having weapons is twofold, but neither is, to my knowledge, enshrined in any treaties.-
One- the flagging nation has to allow the vessel to be armed. If the USA chooses to allow it's vessels to be armed, armed US merchantment would be able to sail into any US harbor, armed with whatever the USA allows them to have(Subject to US rules and regulations, of course).
Two- the port the ship is traveling to, as well as any national waters, the ship has to comply with host nation law. This can vary between 'bring whatever you want' to 'unarmed'. However, given the hundreds of different countries, the standard has pretty much devolved down to 'unarmed', just because it's such as hassle.
Really though, all it'd take would be a semi-serious boycott of ports that insist you come in unarmed(or make being armed too much of a hassle) despite increased piracy to cause many nations to have a 'oh shit' moment and relax their rules.
Slashdot Mirror
Bad publicity?
Actually, there's a far more pragmatic reason for those laws - if the temperature drops below freezing and a home that isn't winterized isn't heated, the pipes could freeze and burst, causing far more damage than what a few hundred to low thousands of dollars of electricity would cost.
Ergo, it's actually better for the power companies to put a lien on the house rather than cut off electricity in freezing temperatures. It's better for the bank that owns the note, the insurance company that would have to pay for the repairs, it's even probably better for the electric company in the end(more likely to be able to get the money from a lien for a house without burst pipes).
There's fewer filters than you might think. Plus, it's ALSO mind boggling of all the garbage the slashdot filters have to deal with - it's not surprising that the occasional bit slips through. Same deal as with spam.
Reading the 'article', I get the idea that it's the reporter messing with twitter, and the MS Rep communicating with said reporter via it.
The MS Rep never mentioned talking to the mother via twitter. It could have been by snail-mail letter for all we know.
There's no gain in banning a non-cheating autistic kid. I can see an automatic system doing it if it's screwed up, but human review should fix that.
The Chernobyl disaster had nothing to do with leaky pipes but everything with braindead engineering and even worse management of dangerous technology. Contributing was an intense fear of authority, a rather large dose of personal ignorance and a complete disregard for safety protocols or safety in general. In other words, the pinnacle of the Soviet Union.
Anything in particular give you the impression that I didn't already know this, and just didn't want to make a post the size of a small novel?
and yes, they still run these braindead RBMK-type reactors in many plants.
To be fair, they have tightened up the rules and made adjustments to improve safety, both procedural and physical.
As underscored in another post, conditions for successful use of waste heat in people's home are population density, (rather low) demand for electricity in summer and concentration of people around heavy industry in climates with long and cold winters.
Where'd the useage of waste heat come from? I was talking about the heat exchangers that transfer energy from the core water to the steam water that powers turbines to produce electricity. Then the steam water is cooled by lake/river/ocean water for the return cycle.
Sure, I like the idea of cogeneration or even trigeneration plants, but yeah, you have to find an economic justification.
In areas that don't need lots of heat for homes or businesses, ideally you'd use it for industry. Ethanol production, providing steam for oil sand/shale extraction, etc...
Chemical disasters are surely disastrous as seen in Bhopal, but nuclear meltdowns are worse on several orders of magnitude.
Uh... I think you need to work on your numbers.
Bhopal: Killed 2,259 immediately, 3,787 related to the release. Other estimates vary between 8k-15k. 500k injured, 3k permanently.
TMI: No Deaths attributed to TMI by any reputable source
Chernobyl: 31 dead within 3 months due to radiation. 237 suffered 'acute radiation sickness'. 216 total 'non-cancer' deaths from emergency workers. UNSCEAR predicted 4k additional cancer cases due to the accident, but has since said those estimates were high. - ' In addition, the IAEA states that there has been no increase in the rate of birth defects or abnormalities, or solid cancers (such as lung cancer) corroborating UNSCEAR's assessments.[92]'
So, you're saying that an accident that KILLED 4k people is orders of magnitude lass than one that killed less than a thousand directly, and might of caused less than 4k additional cases of cancer(many of which were relatively easy to treat)?
I'd call them in the same OOM, personally. Heck, there's even complaints that the Bhopal accident is still making people sick today due to environmental contamination.
Chemical spills wash out, dilute, decompose, break down - but nuclear waste, radioactive dust and irradiated matter just keeps on giving, year after year, for what is probably the rest of human existence.
*SNORT* - You fail at understanding radioactive decay then. Lead, arsenic, mercury, etc... They're forever. A stable chemical won't break down without some outside force. Radioactive materials actually decay into lesser or non-radioactive forms all on their own. And radioactive materials can be dispursed the exact same way chemicals can.
India could have ten chemical spills the size and effect of Bhopal per year, but we could still go on with our normal lives. But if we had just another 5 Chernobyls anywhere, we would have roughly doubled the natural background radiation of the entire Earth for several millenia.
And would that doubling actually do anything, especially compared to the human toll additional Bhopals would impose? Background radiation on earth varies by more than an OOM anyways, and people in Colorado don't have a higher cancer rate than those in, say, Mississippi.
Indeed, disasters like Chernobyl are very much unlikely in the rest of the world because we use saner reactors and actually pre-entomb them.
We start with 'heat exchangers need maintenance' and end with chernobyl?
The Chernobyl disaster didn't have anything to do with the heat exchangers, and core water leaking where it isn't supposed to is too big of a headache to take much risk with. For one thing, leaking exchangers(or pipes) is going to be taking water from where it's supposed to be and put it somewhere it isn't; unbalancing the system.
Question is, can the political and economical forces driving this process be trusted or not?
Going by world history outside of the USSR? Yes, it can.
Even the worst oil spills are tiny little specks of chickenshit compared to a nuclear power plant crew that absolutely, positively needs to get a certain experiment completed before the 1st of May annual Workers Party celebration.
What about chemical disasters?
No water is cycled through those reactors and back out - they are self contained.
Uh, that's true for every halfway sane nuclear reactor out there.
Most nuclear plants actually consist of two to three separate water loops - reactor core, which would be the heavy water that CANDU reactors(as well as others) use. The heat from this is transferred to the second which is used for the steam cycle that actually turns the turbines - this is generally treated distilled water. The last would be the water that's generally taken from a lake or river, and used to cool the steam water, then returned.
Some plants combine the first two, directly using the water from the reactor to power the turbines.
Look up Personal Rapid Transit. As Esben mentioned, it's come up many times.
Me, I'd like to see a city go full-tilt with this - perhaps something like hook all the government buildings up, and encourage places like malls, large stores, and employers to get their own station.
The critical factor is that you need a certain minimum market penetration before it makes sense for people to start taking the cars and for businesses and residences to start installing stations. Same as with elsewhere - businesses won't pay for stations before there's a certain number of potential customers riding it, and riders won't ride until it goes to a number of their destinations.
I'm the same way.
I noticed this as well. In addition, you spend all this effort upgrading your ship, only to have tehm only make a difference in how you started(and finished) in the end of the game.
I'm commanding a warship, how about some naval combat that's ISN"T cutscene based?
There's a lot of background processing and signalling that goes on behind the scenes on smart phones.
This isn't any different for traditional* computers either... Once I went dual core, I never wanted to go back, for precisely this reason.
As long as the OS is smart about it, dual core fixes a lot of user experience issues - for example, the OS not responding well when I set off a single thread but CPU intensive program became a thing of the past.
*I was going to just say 'computers', then 'standard', but let's face it, my smartphone is more powerful than the desktop computer I had a decade ago.
It involves two lawyers, a judge, and usually twelve citizens.
As I mentioned, the USA has been willing to release a number of the people in Gitmo - but no country will accept them(not even the USA).
As for the actual 'holding', as long as you have enough to call them a combatant, you can hold them as a POW, without trial, for the duration of the conflict.
But as you say, Gitmo is an unholy mix between trying to treat them as criminals, while holding them under warfare rules.
In pre-9/11 American jurisprudence, they had to either charge you or release you.
Actually, no.
As mentioned, back in the '40s we rounded up lots of Japanese-Americans and put them in what were essentially concentration camps. We ended up paying restitution, but only a few years ago.
Even without that, remember that those sent to Gitmo weren't sent there solely for 'legal' reasons. Many were/are, in effect, POWs. It has always been possible to hold POWs captive for the 'duration of the conflict' without trial. This, of course, is made very complicated when you figure that most aren't members of a nation in a declared state of war, but they were combatants(or at least believed to be)* in organizations hostile to the very existence of the USA, and quite open about swearing to fight until we're dead. Thus, no defined end to the conflict.
Now, I object to not treating them as POWs, but then there's the criminal matters rearing it's ugly head again. I don't so much object to the existence of Gitmo or the indefinite detaining of prisoners, so much as the waterboarding and lack of communication.
*Detaining random people just doesn't pass the sniff test - you'd expect those doing the detaining to actually get guilty people - innocents who aren't involved are just a waste of resources.
You don't think the contents of that cable wouldn't also apply, just about word for word, with the UK?
there were no places to put known terrorists, suspected terrorists
Yep, reality intervened and messed up Obama fulfilling this campaign pledge.
Fact is, most of the people remaining at Gitmo are bad, bad, men. There may not be enough evidence for 'beyond a reasonable doubt' at a trial, but a number don't have any real citizenship in a country, or their country of citizenship refuses to take them back.
If the USA is unwilling to take them itself, where are they to go?
must outweigh what it would cost to covertly pay some other Somalians to kill a few pirates.
You'd have to arm them; at which point they become a threat themselves.
Even if the hiring works, they're unlikely to keep their mouths shut; word on what's happening will get back.
I figure this is less likely if contractors foreign to the area are used.
You're thinking of the Hague Convention, and it's certainly not 'All NATO allies' - the US uses them in certain applications.
The Hague Convention bans expanding bullets, which the USA has voluntarily interpreted under Geneva conventions as to 'cause unnecessary suffering'. Thing is, when testing showed a hollopoint bullet design intended for use by snipers was more accurate than FMJ, to not expand signficantly more than the standard FMJ, and the results were generally lethal anyways, they approved the bullet.
More accurate = more effective + doesn't cause more suffering = approved under Geneva.
I suppose it's Africa.
Exactly. They haven't pulled a major terrorist operation on US Soil, nor have they succeeded at taking a US flagged vessel.
Why doesn't one of the companies spend the money they were going to pay out in ransoms on hitmen to kill the pirates?
The insurance is for paying the ransoms to get the crew back; not hiring hitment. Besides, hitment would be more expensive, at least initially.
I think the 'best' solution would be to arrange to sink a number of pirate boats on the down-low - IE you don't advertise, the pirate's support and peers simply notice that many ships just aren't coming back anymore. It gets a reputation for being dangerous, they quit doing it.
But the only reason the crews are willing to take the risk is because they know they have ransom insurance.
If the piracy problem keeps expanding, at some point the insurance will get too expensive or even unavailable, at which point alternative solutions will be sought. Whether that be additional security or bypassing the region entirely.
Oddly enough, NOT paying now and going for alternative solutions will probably result in less loss of life compared to what it'd cost to supress the piracy at that point.
1. General criminal response to a homeowner(or other occupant) showing up with a gun? - Running, not shooting.
2. 'Wild Wild West' had lower crime rates than the developed area back east did at the time.
3. Washington DC, one of the cities with the toughest gun laws on the books in the USA, has consistently been in the top 3 cities for violent crime.
So to get peace in Afghanistan and Iraq, all we have to do is to allow conceal-carry and not take away their weapons?
Actually, they already sort-of have it; every family is allowed an AK-47 or such for self defense, even if it's full auto. There's rules against having an armory, though.
You mention Germany and Belgium. Have you read their rules on weapon possession? How about Switzerland, which has a similar gun ownership rate to the USA, but far fewer weapons. The USA has always had a higher murder rate than England, even when England didn't restrict firearms.
The problem in Iraq, Afghandistan is that the 'bad guys' have too much power, there's not enough competent police/military to supress them. In the USA I blame the drug war, we're handling it very poorly.
I can only come to the conclusion that it's about culture.
On the original post - in the 'religion' specified, they often have that distorted view of the 'wild, wild west' being a violent, dangerous place, full of murdering gunslingers.
In reality, violent crime rates were actually higher back east. Still, the image persists, thus the comparison simply leads to that of the 'gun grabber' religious types being mistaken about yet another aspect.
would lead to an arms race that could cost the shipping companies more than the ransoms.
Look at it another way - the pirates are pirates because it's the most profitable enterprise they've found. If the shipping companies upgun and start refusing to pay ransoms, sure, the pirates could get more violent. But they'll also be making less money, which would lead to less piracy.
Remember, if they get too violent, they'll piss off somebody like the USA and we'll add a third country to our occupation list. Or maybe we'll just settle for a lightning raid and burn the ports the pirates use to stash the freighters.
The problem is that this is happening off the coast of Somalia - a 'country' that's effectively not a country. It has less government than Afghanistan had under the Taliban, or even today.
The facts are simple. A shipping company is not going to risk losing a $500 million dollar ship, $30 million in cargo, and the lives of its crew members when it can pay a tiny fraction of that to get their ship back.
By the same token, are the pirates going to take the risk and fight as hard against a ship that's presenting countermeasures, much less lethal countermeasures, as opposed to backing off and looking for easier prey?
Plus, there's the part about short term vs long term cost - paying off the pirates results in lower short term costs, but actually solving the pirate problem lowers long term costs. Remember the saying "Those that pay the danegeld never get rid of the dane"? Same deal with pirates, kidnappers, frivolous lawsuits, etc...
When did this treaty come into effect?
I'd ask 'What Treaty?" The rules that forbid most merchantmen from having weapons is twofold, but neither is, to my knowledge, enshrined in any treaties.-
One- the flagging nation has to allow the vessel to be armed. If the USA chooses to allow it's vessels to be armed, armed US merchantment would be able to sail into any US harbor, armed with whatever the USA allows them to have(Subject to US rules and regulations, of course).
Two- the port the ship is traveling to, as well as any national waters, the ship has to comply with host nation law. This can vary between 'bring whatever you want' to 'unarmed'. However, given the hundreds of different countries, the standard has pretty much devolved down to 'unarmed', just because it's such as hassle.
Really though, all it'd take would be a semi-serious boycott of ports that insist you come in unarmed(or make being armed too much of a hassle) despite increased piracy to cause many nations to have a 'oh shit' moment and relax their rules.