Having been forced to do community service in the past(required to pass a class in HS required to graduate), I can tell you that forced 'community service' doesn't increase 'involvement'.
Though I'm also back in school, upgrading my degree, have a student job, etc...
That being said, I've worked out how I can live on the $12k alone, but that involves things like selling my house, most of my stuff, and living not quite homeless.
But there are things that may drive the "long" part of the "long term" out to be much longer than you expect.
Note that I didn't put any real time-lines in, other than 'long term'. And yes, I'm very well aware that any quotation of 'estimated reserves' has hidden in it a '@$X per barrel' disclaimer, and if you raise X, the 'economically recoverable' amount goes up.
Long term, to me, I'm thinking that once oil prices exceed the theoretical minimum biofuel production cost, it'll still be 20-25 years before fossil oil becomes a 'niche' product. We've been building fossil fuel infrastructure for a long, long time.
At $100/bbl. it made sense to spend the money to frack and use expensive extraction technologies where this wasn't true at $50/bbl.
You do realize that you're explaining something to me that I had in the post you're responding to, right? Except I was thinking more about the literally mile deep wells they've drilled in the Bakken fields up in North Dakota, and that's not including that they go horizontal as well. As well as oil sands(Canada) and shales.
There is a bit of lag in the production rate so we see spikes in oil prices as demand outstrips production, but this is short term. Much of the sharp rise in motor fuel prices we recently saw where driven by supply side limits, and we briefly may have ended up close to parity with Bio-Fuels on cost, but that would have been short term, and turned out to really be an artificial supply problem caused by OPEC.
*shrug*, again, you're explaining a concept that I explained in my post - except what happened involved new sources of fossil fuels rather than biofuel. Same deal. Prices go up due to supply side shortage, and stay up until suppliers, on a construction spree, manage to produce enough supply to drop the prices again. I'm not arguing against what happened. It's just that, as time goes on, more supplies are going to dry up, we'll drill more wells, again, but at some point the biofuels will become competitive.
Second, bio fuel production costs are directly linked to energy prices. They take fuel/energy to produce (fertilizer, cultivation, harvesting, converting into fuel) especially when you have to convert it into motor fuels like diesel or ethanol.
Right now they use fossil fuels and such for this because it's the cheapest. As prices go up you'd see them shift into sustainable energy sources. Sort of like how manufacturers of solar panels used utility power that included coal, though today a lot of them have their own solar panels on the roof, that displacing most, if not all, of the coal.
So as overall fuel/energy prices rise, bio-fuels also cost more to produce. Yes, I guess there is a point where the two costs end up on par, but I have no doubt that if you took the government incentives out of the bio-fuel markets it would be a lot higher than you imagine and certainly a lot higher than we've actually seen so far.
The $20/gallon I quoted earlier is the 'current' price without subsidization. So isn't the theoretical $4/gallon they estimate they can get it down to.
as for "you do realize" again - you need to filter your talking points through my posts a bit better. I already stated in my previous post "There's also the problem that in today's subsidized environment"
Fourth, why would we waste food production capacity on this?
Ahem: "Note that I specifically decried the viability of ethanol from corn. Personally, I'm more for algae farms built in deserts that are fairly close to the ocean so it can be a source of water."
The spots that I proposed to use for biofuel production are currently mostly empty of plant life, and are very much not being used for food production. There are also proposals for deep-sea algae farms.
I think this puts "long" in the realm of a couple of de
I can mostly predict when I need a car ~30 minutes ahead of time, with things like regular commutes on order so I don't even have to call for one then.
On the other hand, having to wait half an hour seems to be an unusual length of time to have to wait, unless you're looking at an extremely unusual situation. I'd expect 5-10 minutes to be a more normal waiting period for a car to pull up.
I'm a proponent of driver-less cars, and while I don't want to 'have' to drive(that being an active activity), I still need to get places where the only practical method currently is to take a car.
I think it's less 'driverless cars' you're looking at and the proponents of 'don't even bother to OWN a car'. Those who don't want to own a car are the ones that don't have to drive much. I drive enough that it'd probably still be best for me to own my own vehicle.
It's one thing if you have a few megabytes of documents, however what if you have sensitive video or something in the Gigs? A 64GB card isn't too expensive, where ~30GB worth of bandwidth might not be readily available out of wherever you're transiting from.
Not to mention that if you're working with a paranoid government(and sadly the USA qualifies today), they might note the data traffic and follow up on that.
and it boots to a clean sanitized setup. "please don't look at my manuscripts in there, I'm not a very good writer and get embarrassed of someone reads my book I am writing. "
Better yet, a little legal heterosexual porn(think playboy tasteful), some mp3s, some movies, they're satisfied that you're an 'average' joe and you go on your way. You don't want a perfectly 'sanitized' laptop like having a perfectly clean apartment would have the cops wondering and looking for a second residence.
We have other sources of fuel yet you want to grow it?
You're coming dangerously close to setting up a straw man here. Up here in Alaska, and even down south in the upper parts of the lower 48, a lot of people heat their homes with wood. That's using a biofuel. It's substantially cheaper than heating by oil, if you have the equipment for it, though it does require more user effort.
Sure, we have other sources of fuel. But said fuel causes environmental damage and isn't free to extract either.
Well ask yourself WHY? Why do you think we should grow fuel?
You didn't actually read my post, did you? Hint: "because it puts a hard limit on the price for fossil fuels"
If your answer is that you want to protect the environment or reduce CO2 emissions, then it's not helping your cause, at all. It doesn't help and it costs a LOT of money. It's stupid to grow fuel if your concern is the environment.
Protect the environment - Something of a mixed bag; most bio-fuels still pollute by generating things like NOx compounds, but they also tend to be naturally sulfur-free. Reduce CO2 emissions: Vehicle traffic is the biggest source of CO2 after coal power. So reducing addition of CO2 will help. It costs a LOT of money: There's also the problem that in today's subsidized environment(though better than the past) it's sometimes an energy negative energy - more than a gallon of fossil fuel is 'burned' to produce a gallon of bio-fuel. However, I believe that even corn ethanol is up to about 7:1 today. That being said, another indicator that you didn't actually read my post. Or do you believe that "Current technologies are just not economical" means something other than "it's currently too expensive"?
Now if you are not using the environmentalists argument to justify growing fuel, we can talk. I've not yet heard a reasonable argument for this, but that doesn't mean one doesn't exist.
Going back to my post: "Current technologies are just not economical, but figuring out this stuff is still 'good' because it puts a hard limit on the price for fossil fuels - at some point biofuels are cheaper than fossil."
Basically, at some point biofuels will be cheaper than fossil. We keep drilling deeper and deeper for oil, not to mention that we've graduated to squeezing and melting it out of crushed rock (shale oil and oil sands). These techniques are amazingly more expensive than the old wells, especially in energy cost per barrel extracted. The latter methods are even questionable - they're burning so much natural gas to extract the oil in some cases that you'd get more miles burning it in cars adapted for NG.
Then I identify that during their last peak, fossil fuels were 'flirting' with the price range at which biofuels can be economically produced. What I mean by this is that they got very close (within ~10%) of what biofuels could be economically produced and sold for in a theoretically fully developed industry, where economy of scale has beaten prices down to close to their natural minimums. IE rather than being $20/gallon, it's $4/gallon. The numbers are all theoretical, so there's a variance in the range depending upon various presuppositions.
Note that I specifically decried the viability of ethanol from corn. Personally, I'm more for algae farms built in deserts that are fairly close to the ocean so it can be a source of water.
Finally, you'd most likely see a peak and a fall, IE "peak oil", where oil is more expensive than the minimum price for biofuels, but less expensive than boutique production. At that point you'd be seeing massive investment into biofuels, because profit CAN be made if it can be produced cheaply enough, IE with enough economy of scale. As biofuels start coming onto the market in significant, economically competitive amounts, this will have the effect of diminishing the price of fossil fuels. Drilling new wells and
Just not people in this neck of the hemisphere of the woods.
First, note 'much younger than me'.
Well yeah, but the typical idiot anti-vaxxor here in the USA is discounting the odds that their special snowflake will catch whatever the vaccines are for even if they aren't vaccinated because it's been virtually eliminated world-wide, except for the pockets you mention. They don't have anybody in their 'monkeysphere' that's been affected by the diseases. Thus, disease, serious communicable disease, doesn't exist as a real thing in their minds.
Anti-vaxxors in the areas where polio and such still exist are generally superstitious in a different way, and screw the CIA for what they did to destroy the trust in vaccination groups. Hell, they could of at least used real vaccines.
Self-driving cars are not permitted but automakers are developing them.
This isn't a ban though. As you say, car companies, even non-car companies like google, are able to get exceptions for testing on public roads.
It's better to say that self-driving cars aren't banned, it's just that the current regulatory system for cars is such that a self-driving car isn't useful right now, because the rules don't account for a computer controlling the vehicle, thus the vehicle still requires an operator capable of taking over again at a moment's notice.
They can make and operate said cars on closed tracks/private property as much as they like, even if they lack all ability for user control(IE no wheels, gas pedal, brake pedal, etc...), outside of something along the lines of an 'emergency stop' button.
That being said, with the permits and such, they're prodding lawmakers and other regulatory bodies to allow them when they have a sufficiently functional system developed. Hell, technology from self-driving development is finding it's way into new vehicles left and right - lane following, automatic collision avoidance, etc...
Actually it's the primary debate for me. It makes zero sense (and cents) to go out and actively *grow* motor fuels by farming plants to me.
Why not? It's not like we don't grow a lot of other things - food, lumber, medicine, etc...
Now, where you have a point is on the 'cents'. Current technologies are just not economical, but figuring out this stuff is still 'good' because it puts a hard limit on the price for fossil fuels - at some point biofuels are cheaper than fossil.
Matter of fact, the last peak in oil prices was flirting with that price range.
I'll note that 'biofuels cheaper than fossil' is very much not using corn based ethanol. You need crops that are much more scaleable.
You know, I was just struck with how like vaccination this whole thing is - these students grew up in a much more 'free speech' era than, say, the 1960s. As such, they aren't used to seeing the harm that anti-free speech laws and regulations cause.
Much like anti-vaxxors today who feel free to refuse vaccination because they haven't experienced the outbreaks and plagues that happened in history.
I mean, I understand because I'm old enough to have a grandfather who was permanently affected by polio. So I grew up with that. But those much younger than me?
I'd say it was easily doable if it was a B-52 style 'bomb truck', perhaps even being supersonic like the B-1.
But if it has to survive against modern air defenses that means stealth AND speed. I'm thinking of something like a supersized F-22 or 35.
As such, I'm with Richard - 100 craft delivered for less than the cost of F-35 development? Even if it's just scaling up a F-35, I don't see it happening.
Also, would you consider a 1% or so better satisfaction rate worth paying twice as much?
For that matter, do you have a citation on the quality of care? Like I mentioned, Europeans tend to live longer, and there's not actually any indication that that quality of care is higher - we get more care, but our error rate is also higher, so you have extra 'churn' which means that it's not actually more effective.
J. Edgar Hoover was head of the FBI, and nobody really wanted to give him more power if they could help it.
A perfectly logical move, come to think of it. Honestly, the federal government is large enough that some police for most of it's branches makes some sense.
Plus, by having each 'police department' in it's own agency, you don't have the problems of them getting distracted all going after pedophiles or something. Good for catching pedophiles, but eventually allowing the polluters, poachers, bank transfer fraudsters, and everybody else 'off the hook' isn't a good outcome either.
I'm downgrading you to 'moron', because you can abstract them as organizations. The federal government is a middleman. Insurance companies X,Y,Z, each with their own sets of middlemen employees, are still 'middlemen'. You have to go deeper to get to 'middlemen' with the feds as a 'single payer'.
When they've done studies, single payer systems over in Europe tend to have drastically lower paperwork costs associated with billing.
BTW, I tend to mirror insults. Don't call me names, I don't call you names.
You're the idiot. You buried the point right in your post even. "Middleman" isn't "Middlemen". Yes, you're still going to have middle management, you're just going to have a lot less of it. IE the equivalent of one dude instead of a dozen.
I've read accounts of foreign medical providers. They just don't have the billing nonsense that we worry about all the time. They don't have to fight with a dozen insurance companies, just the one, generally speaking.
I'm not that far up on the statistics, though I know they're demographic adjusted. It doesn't help that the cost disparity holds up even or especially when you look at it on a procedure basis - Procedure A in the USA will cost 3-10x as much as procedure A elsewhere. An MRI, for example, is something like 1/30th of the price in Japan.
You're still paying even if you're borrowing to pay.
A lot of those 'respectable' individual plans weren't actually respectable if you got sick. I remember reading about a plan Walmart was offering. $5k deductible, $5k maximum payout, $100/month.
No. That idea of reducing health care costs is yet another one of those lies told through statistics. The "rack rate" for some expensive procedure is X where the real cost a hospital will actually get paid is 1/2 or 1/3rd of that.
How odd, seeing as how the cost isn't calculated on what hospitals bill, but what is actually paid. IE insurance + copays(or direct payments) + government payouts.
Foreign governments are often even easier to determine.
You people are droning on about public policy and you really have no clue at all.
...based on criteria carefully chosen to make sure the US comes out worst. (Does anyone still give any credence to these types of rankings? If you do, do you also click on clickbait headlines because you're curious what "doctors hate" and what "your insurance agent doesn't want you to know"?)
Yeah, criteria carefully chosen like "median life expectancy", "median wait times for healthcare", "cost per person", etc...
US healthcare tends to be a touch quicker than Europe's, but not significantly. We live shorter lives than the Europeans though. But we pay something like double to triple for that privilege.
If we could drop healthcare costs to something approximating Europe's, we could cover everybody for what the federal and state governments currently pay to cover a fraction of the population. IE no more out of pocket expenses other than currently existing taxes for your healthcare needs.
Ok, I see where the confusion is, I've led you to believe it's all about aircraft impacts however that is not the main issue. Aircraft resistance is a consequence of what the real issue is.
Ah! Took you long enough.;) From the very beginning I was saying that 'all' reactor domes can tank being hit by an aircraft due to their strength, required in order to contain the pressure from the reactor in a worst case scenario. You kept talking about aircraft.
So, yes, it does matter whether the dome can tank it's own reactor, that's the primary design consideration, after all. However, I'll break away from you at 'thermal containment ratio', because the issue is quite a bit more complicated than merely throwing more concrete at the problem.
Ask yourself WHY the dome needs to contain so much pressure. The answer boils down to heat(snerk). If you can reduce the amount of heat produced, that reduces the pressure. If you can dispose of more heat, the pressure is reduced. AP1000, from my reading, does a lot to increase passive cooling in a worst case scenario, and it starts out at about 60% of the heat production of an EPR, being a smaller reactor. It's a bit like an internal combustion engine - a small one can easily use air cooling, like most motorcycle engines. Get over a certain size and you need water cooling.
I'd also be careful - are you arguing against the current or original AP1000 design? The DOE told them the dome they wanted was inadequate, so they went back and beefed it up. The beefed up dome passed scrutiney.
This means that TMI has the highest possibility for containing a reactor explosion such as what occurred in Fukushima. Reduce the amount of concrete below the amount of thermal energy in the reactor and you may as well not have a concrete dome at all. It just makes people feel better. AP1000's thermal containment ratio is below that of the reactor (IIRC) and certainly much less than TMI.
I'd double check how recent your source is. Also, Fukushima's domes exploded not because of heat, but because of actual explosion - under high heat situations there's a catalytic response with zirconium cladding which cracks the water in the dome into hydrogen and oxygen. Which built up, was eventually sparked off, causing explosions. In the previous thread I brought up hydrogen recombiners for this reason. The AP1000 addresses hydrogen production in this document, where they have hydrogen igniters to ensure that the hydrogen is burned off before it reaches explosive concentrations, in areas away from the containment structure.
All US reactors were required to have hydrogen management systems even before Fukushima. They all got checked again afterwards.
I'm critical of information from the manufacturers of reactors. I've never heard a company say bad things about their products and I don't expect reactor manufacturers to be any different. Independent studies and law are generally more reliable. Westinghouse want to sell nuclear reactors.
That's fine, but in that case at least come up with a independent review of the saftey systems that identifies specific problems.
That new reactors should be underground is the first and there are about 30 other recommendations like control room design and implementation of EPR like features. If you want the watered down version [nrc.gov], and no, AP-1000 has none of them.
EPR reactors aren't built underground either, that sounds like a rather silly requirement actually. Being underground makes reaching the reactor more difficult in case of an incident.
AP1000 has a lot of problems because new features introduce new failure modes.
Which shouldn't be an automatic failure, unless we want to NEVER improve anything.
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Having been forced to do community service in the past(required to pass a class in HS required to graduate), I can tell you that forced 'community service' doesn't increase 'involvement'.
I'm retired on ~$12k/year + benefits.
Though I'm also back in school, upgrading my degree, have a student job, etc...
That being said, I've worked out how I can live on the $12k alone, but that involves things like selling my house, most of my stuff, and living not quite homeless.
But there are things that may drive the "long" part of the "long term" out to be much longer than you expect.
Note that I didn't put any real time-lines in, other than 'long term'. And yes, I'm very well aware that any quotation of 'estimated reserves' has hidden in it a '@$X per barrel' disclaimer, and if you raise X, the 'economically recoverable' amount goes up.
Long term, to me, I'm thinking that once oil prices exceed the theoretical minimum biofuel production cost, it'll still be 20-25 years before fossil oil becomes a 'niche' product. We've been building fossil fuel infrastructure for a long, long time.
At $100/bbl. it made sense to spend the money to frack and use expensive extraction technologies where this wasn't true at $50/bbl.
You do realize that you're explaining something to me that I had in the post you're responding to, right? Except I was thinking more about the literally mile deep wells they've drilled in the Bakken fields up in North Dakota, and that's not including that they go horizontal as well. As well as oil sands(Canada) and shales.
There is a bit of lag in the production rate so we see spikes in oil prices as demand outstrips production, but this is short term. Much of the sharp rise in motor fuel prices we recently saw where driven by supply side limits, and we briefly may have ended up close to parity with Bio-Fuels on cost, but that would have been short term, and turned out to really be an artificial supply problem caused by OPEC.
*shrug*, again, you're explaining a concept that I explained in my post - except what happened involved new sources of fossil fuels rather than biofuel. Same deal. Prices go up due to supply side shortage, and stay up until suppliers, on a construction spree, manage to produce enough supply to drop the prices again. I'm not arguing against what happened. It's just that, as time goes on, more supplies are going to dry up, we'll drill more wells, again, but at some point the biofuels will become competitive.
Second, bio fuel production costs are directly linked to energy prices. They take fuel/energy to produce (fertilizer, cultivation, harvesting, converting into fuel) especially when you have to convert it into motor fuels like diesel or ethanol.
Right now they use fossil fuels and such for this because it's the cheapest. As prices go up you'd see them shift into sustainable energy sources. Sort of like how manufacturers of solar panels used utility power that included coal, though today a lot of them have their own solar panels on the roof, that displacing most, if not all, of the coal.
So as overall fuel/energy prices rise, bio-fuels also cost more to produce. Yes, I guess there is a point where the two costs end up on par, but I have no doubt that if you took the government incentives out of the bio-fuel markets it would be a lot higher than you imagine and certainly a lot higher than we've actually seen so far.
The $20/gallon I quoted earlier is the 'current' price without subsidization. So isn't the theoretical $4/gallon they estimate they can get it down to.
as for "you do realize" again - you need to filter your talking points through my posts a bit better. I already stated in my previous post "There's also the problem that in today's subsidized environment"
Fourth, why would we waste food production capacity on this?
Ahem: "Note that I specifically decried the viability of ethanol from corn. Personally, I'm more for algae farms built in deserts that are fairly close to the ocean so it can be a source of water."
The spots that I proposed to use for biofuel production are currently mostly empty of plant life, and are very much not being used for food production. There are also proposals for deep-sea algae farms.
I think this puts "long" in the realm of a couple of de
I can mostly predict when I need a car ~30 minutes ahead of time, with things like regular commutes on order so I don't even have to call for one then.
On the other hand, having to wait half an hour seems to be an unusual length of time to have to wait, unless you're looking at an extremely unusual situation. I'd expect 5-10 minutes to be a more normal waiting period for a car to pull up.
I'm a proponent of driver-less cars, and while I don't want to 'have' to drive(that being an active activity), I still need to get places where the only practical method currently is to take a car.
I think it's less 'driverless cars' you're looking at and the proponents of 'don't even bother to OWN a car'. Those who don't want to own a car are the ones that don't have to drive much. I drive enough that it'd probably still be best for me to own my own vehicle.
It's one thing if you have a few megabytes of documents, however what if you have sensitive video or something in the Gigs? A 64GB card isn't too expensive, where ~30GB worth of bandwidth might not be readily available out of wherever you're transiting from.
Not to mention that if you're working with a paranoid government(and sadly the USA qualifies today), they might note the data traffic and follow up on that.
and it boots to a clean sanitized setup. "please don't look at my manuscripts in there, I'm not a very good writer and get embarrassed of someone reads my book I am writing. "
Better yet, a little legal heterosexual porn(think playboy tasteful), some mp3s, some movies, they're satisfied that you're an 'average' joe and you go on your way. You don't want a perfectly 'sanitized' laptop like having a perfectly clean apartment would have the cops wondering and looking for a second residence.
We have other sources of fuel yet you want to grow it?
You're coming dangerously close to setting up a straw man here. Up here in Alaska, and even down south in the upper parts of the lower 48, a lot of people heat their homes with wood. That's using a biofuel. It's substantially cheaper than heating by oil, if you have the equipment for it, though it does require more user effort.
Sure, we have other sources of fuel. But said fuel causes environmental damage and isn't free to extract either.
Well ask yourself WHY? Why do you think we should grow fuel?
You didn't actually read my post, did you? Hint: "because it puts a hard limit on the price for fossil fuels"
If your answer is that you want to protect the environment or reduce CO2 emissions, then it's not helping your cause, at all. It doesn't help and it costs a LOT of money. It's stupid to grow fuel if your concern is the environment.
Protect the environment - Something of a mixed bag; most bio-fuels still pollute by generating things like NOx compounds, but they also tend to be naturally sulfur-free.
Reduce CO2 emissions: Vehicle traffic is the biggest source of CO2 after coal power. So reducing addition of CO2 will help.
It costs a LOT of money: There's also the problem that in today's subsidized environment(though better than the past) it's sometimes an energy negative energy - more than a gallon of fossil fuel is 'burned' to produce a gallon of bio-fuel. However, I believe that even corn ethanol is up to about 7:1 today. That being said, another indicator that you didn't actually read my post. Or do you believe that "Current technologies are just not economical" means something other than "it's currently too expensive"?
Now if you are not using the environmentalists argument to justify growing fuel, we can talk. I've not yet heard a reasonable argument for this, but that doesn't mean one doesn't exist.
Going back to my post: "Current technologies are just not economical, but figuring out this stuff is still 'good' because it puts a hard limit on the price for fossil fuels - at some point biofuels are cheaper than fossil."
Basically, at some point biofuels will be cheaper than fossil. We keep drilling deeper and deeper for oil, not to mention that we've graduated to squeezing and melting it out of crushed rock (shale oil and oil sands). These techniques are amazingly more expensive than the old wells, especially in energy cost per barrel extracted. The latter methods are even questionable - they're burning so much natural gas to extract the oil in some cases that you'd get more miles burning it in cars adapted for NG.
Then I identify that during their last peak, fossil fuels were 'flirting' with the price range at which biofuels can be economically produced. What I mean by this is that they got very close (within ~10%) of what biofuels could be economically produced and sold for in a theoretically fully developed industry, where economy of scale has beaten prices down to close to their natural minimums. IE rather than being $20/gallon, it's $4/gallon. The numbers are all theoretical, so there's a variance in the range depending upon various presuppositions.
Note that I specifically decried the viability of ethanol from corn. Personally, I'm more for algae farms built in deserts that are fairly close to the ocean so it can be a source of water.
Finally, you'd most likely see a peak and a fall, IE "peak oil", where oil is more expensive than the minimum price for biofuels, but less expensive than boutique production. At that point you'd be seeing massive investment into biofuels, because profit CAN be made if it can be produced cheaply enough, IE with enough economy of scale. As biofuels start coming onto the market in significant, economically competitive amounts, this will have the effect of diminishing the price of fossil fuels. Drilling new wells and
Just not people in this neck of the hemisphere of the woods.
First, note 'much younger than me'.
Well yeah, but the typical idiot anti-vaxxor here in the USA is discounting the odds that their special snowflake will catch whatever the vaccines are for even if they aren't vaccinated because it's been virtually eliminated world-wide, except for the pockets you mention. They don't have anybody in their 'monkeysphere' that's been affected by the diseases. Thus, disease, serious communicable disease, doesn't exist as a real thing in their minds.
Anti-vaxxors in the areas where polio and such still exist are generally superstitious in a different way, and screw the CIA for what they did to destroy the trust in vaccination groups. Hell, they could of at least used real vaccines.
Self-driving cars are not permitted but automakers are developing them.
This isn't a ban though. As you say, car companies, even non-car companies like google, are able to get exceptions for testing on public roads.
It's better to say that self-driving cars aren't banned, it's just that the current regulatory system for cars is such that a self-driving car isn't useful right now, because the rules don't account for a computer controlling the vehicle, thus the vehicle still requires an operator capable of taking over again at a moment's notice.
They can make and operate said cars on closed tracks/private property as much as they like, even if they lack all ability for user control(IE no wheels, gas pedal, brake pedal, etc...), outside of something along the lines of an 'emergency stop' button.
That being said, with the permits and such, they're prodding lawmakers and other regulatory bodies to allow them when they have a sufficiently functional system developed. Hell, technology from self-driving development is finding it's way into new vehicles left and right - lane following, automatic collision avoidance, etc...
Actually it's the primary debate for me. It makes zero sense (and cents) to go out and actively *grow* motor fuels by farming plants to me.
Why not? It's not like we don't grow a lot of other things - food, lumber, medicine, etc...
Now, where you have a point is on the 'cents'. Current technologies are just not economical, but figuring out this stuff is still 'good' because it puts a hard limit on the price for fossil fuels - at some point biofuels are cheaper than fossil.
Matter of fact, the last peak in oil prices was flirting with that price range.
I'll note that 'biofuels cheaper than fossil' is very much not using corn based ethanol. You need crops that are much more scaleable.
You know, I was just struck with how like vaccination this whole thing is - these students grew up in a much more 'free speech' era than, say, the 1960s. As such, they aren't used to seeing the harm that anti-free speech laws and regulations cause.
Much like anti-vaxxors today who feel free to refuse vaccination because they haven't experienced the outbreaks and plagues that happened in history.
I mean, I understand because I'm old enough to have a grandfather who was permanently affected by polio. So I grew up with that. But those much younger than me?
I'd say it was easily doable if it was a B-52 style 'bomb truck', perhaps even being supersonic like the B-1.
But if it has to survive against modern air defenses that means stealth AND speed. I'm thinking of something like a supersized F-22 or 35.
As such, I'm with Richard - 100 craft delivered for less than the cost of F-35 development? Even if it's just scaling up a F-35, I don't see it happening.
Do you happen to have a citation on that?
Also, would you consider a 1% or so better satisfaction rate worth paying twice as much?
For that matter, do you have a citation on the quality of care? Like I mentioned, Europeans tend to live longer, and there's not actually any indication that that quality of care is higher - we get more care, but our error rate is also higher, so you have extra 'churn' which means that it's not actually more effective.
J. Edgar Hoover was head of the FBI, and nobody really wanted to give him more power if they could help it.
A perfectly logical move, come to think of it. Honestly, the federal government is large enough that some police for most of it's branches makes some sense.
Plus, by having each 'police department' in it's own agency, you don't have the problems of them getting distracted all going after pedophiles or something. Good for catching pedophiles, but eventually allowing the polluters, poachers, bank transfer fraudsters, and everybody else 'off the hook' isn't a good outcome either.
Because generalization leads to it's own inefficiencies. The EPA is good on pollution. Fish & Wildlife knows how to manage wildlife stuff.
That being said, you are correct in wondering why they aren't subdivisions of the FBI.
What's good for the teacher is generally good for the student, that I'll give you.
But it's not always true. What about rules where a teacher can't be fired for poor performance or even a conviction for something like child abuse?
I think there needs to be is a balance of power between the teacher's union, administration, and parents.
I'm downgrading you to 'moron', because you can abstract them as organizations. The federal government is a middleman. Insurance companies X,Y,Z, each with their own sets of middlemen employees, are still 'middlemen'. You have to go deeper to get to 'middlemen' with the feds as a 'single payer'.
When they've done studies, single payer systems over in Europe tend to have drastically lower paperwork costs associated with billing.
BTW, I tend to mirror insults. Don't call me names, I don't call you names.
You're the idiot. You buried the point right in your post even. "Middleman" isn't "Middlemen". Yes, you're still going to have middle management, you're just going to have a lot less of it. IE the equivalent of one dude instead of a dozen.
I've read accounts of foreign medical providers. They just don't have the billing nonsense that we worry about all the time. They don't have to fight with a dozen insurance companies, just the one, generally speaking.
You don't think the high crime rate, especially murder, has anything to do with that? Only cost of medical care?
Our murder rate isn't that high. It only knocks a few days off, not years.
I'm not that far up on the statistics, though I know they're demographic adjusted. It doesn't help that the cost disparity holds up even or especially when you look at it on a procedure basis - Procedure A in the USA will cost 3-10x as much as procedure A elsewhere. An MRI, for example, is something like 1/30th of the price in Japan.
You're still paying even if you're borrowing to pay.
A lot of those 'respectable' individual plans weren't actually respectable if you got sick. I remember reading about a plan Walmart was offering. $5k deductible, $5k maximum payout, $100/month.
No. That idea of reducing health care costs is yet another one of those lies told through statistics. The "rack rate" for some expensive procedure is X where the real cost a hospital will actually get paid is 1/2 or 1/3rd of that.
How odd, seeing as how the cost isn't calculated on what hospitals bill, but what is actually paid. IE insurance + copays(or direct payments) + government payouts.
Foreign governments are often even easier to determine.
You people are droning on about public policy and you really have no clue at all.
As the AC said, stop looking in the mirror.
While true, you ignore the fact that they started skyrocketing long before Obamacare was passed.
Healthcare costs have been rising world-wide. Obamacare marked a decrease in the rise for the USA.
And I agree with you on the middlemen. They're adding approximately 30% to the cost of our healthcare by themselves. Minimum.
...based on criteria carefully chosen to make sure the US comes out worst. (Does anyone still give any credence to these types of rankings? If you do, do you also click on clickbait headlines because you're curious what "doctors hate" and what "your insurance agent doesn't want you to know"?)
Yeah, criteria carefully chosen like "median life expectancy", "median wait times for healthcare", "cost per person", etc...
US healthcare tends to be a touch quicker than Europe's, but not significantly. We live shorter lives than the Europeans though. But we pay something like double to triple for that privilege.
If we could drop healthcare costs to something approximating Europe's, we could cover everybody for what the federal and state governments currently pay to cover a fraction of the population. IE no more out of pocket expenses other than currently existing taxes for your healthcare needs.
Ok, I see where the confusion is, I've led you to believe it's all about aircraft impacts however that is not the main issue. Aircraft resistance is a consequence of what the real issue is.
Ah! Took you long enough. ;) From the very beginning I was saying that 'all' reactor domes can tank being hit by an aircraft due to their strength, required in order to contain the pressure from the reactor in a worst case scenario. You kept talking about aircraft.
So, yes, it does matter whether the dome can tank it's own reactor, that's the primary design consideration, after all. However, I'll break away from you at 'thermal containment ratio', because the issue is quite a bit more complicated than merely throwing more concrete at the problem.
Ask yourself WHY the dome needs to contain so much pressure. The answer boils down to heat(snerk). If you can reduce the amount of heat produced, that reduces the pressure. If you can dispose of more heat, the pressure is reduced. AP1000, from my reading, does a lot to increase passive cooling in a worst case scenario, and it starts out at about 60% of the heat production of an EPR, being a smaller reactor. It's a bit like an internal combustion engine - a small one can easily use air cooling, like most motorcycle engines. Get over a certain size and you need water cooling.
I'd also be careful - are you arguing against the current or original AP1000 design? The DOE told them the dome they wanted was inadequate, so they went back and beefed it up. The beefed up dome passed scrutiney.
This means that TMI has the highest possibility for containing a reactor explosion such as what occurred in Fukushima. Reduce the amount of concrete below the amount of thermal energy in the reactor and you may as well not have a concrete dome at all. It just makes people feel better. AP1000's thermal containment ratio is below that of the reactor (IIRC) and certainly much less than TMI.
I'd double check how recent your source is. Also, Fukushima's domes exploded not because of heat, but because of actual explosion - under high heat situations there's a catalytic response with zirconium cladding which cracks the water in the dome into hydrogen and oxygen. Which built up, was eventually sparked off, causing explosions. In the previous thread I brought up hydrogen recombiners for this reason. The AP1000 addresses hydrogen production in this document, where they have hydrogen igniters to ensure that the hydrogen is burned off before it reaches explosive concentrations, in areas away from the containment structure.
All US reactors were required to have hydrogen management systems even before Fukushima. They all got checked again afterwards.
I'm critical of information from the manufacturers of reactors. I've never heard a company say bad things about their products and I don't expect reactor manufacturers to be any different. Independent studies and law are generally more reliable. Westinghouse want to sell nuclear reactors.
That's fine, but in that case at least come up with a independent review of the saftey systems that identifies specific problems.
That new reactors should be underground is the first and there are about 30 other recommendations like control room design and implementation of EPR like features. If you want the watered down version [nrc.gov], and no, AP-1000 has none of them.
EPR reactors aren't built underground either, that sounds like a rather silly requirement actually. Being underground makes reaching the reactor more difficult in case of an incident.
AP1000 has a lot of problems because new features introduce new failure modes.
Which shouldn't be an automatic failure, unless we want to NEVER improve anything.