It's the gamma radiation that makes it less of a proliferation risk. Can't have detonators around that.
As for the radioactivity, yes, it's highly radioactive, but properly processed the waste is in said highly radioactive state for a substantially shorter period of time. Basically, it'll reach background levels in a period shorter than human civilization, not longer.
I'm fine with going with IFR, but I'm not sure what you mean by 'loose energy' (lose energy) for mining and processing Thorium - Thorium is currently a byproduct of rare earth mining and refining; currently they're avoiding some of the richest Thorium ore because there's no demand for thorium, thus it's expensive to handle the ore.
Start up a few thorium reactors such that there's a commercial demand for the metal, and it'll get mined along with the other stuff. One thing I've learned is that a 'pure' mine is actually pretty rare. Copper and gold mines also tend to produce silver. Rare earths are usually mixed. Etc...
Monitoring is cheap on the plant grounds, and the casks probably cost less than shipping them to a different location. At the scales and price ranges we're looking at, concrete basically rounds to 'free'.
Well the AP1000 is the only approved design and my understanding of that design doesn't lead me to that conclusion. Safer reactor designs are already available, the features aren't implemented in AP-1000 because they are too expensive so the AP-1000's design still falls short. For accident mitigation the EPR design is better. Briefly the buildings that service the reactor are split into four (main) operational divisions (and the reactor containment). An accident, failure or maintenance in the other areas can be mitigated by the other divisions. It's planning, and being prepared for, problems.
You know, it's odd, I searched my posts multiple times and didn't find the AP1000 listed? I didn't even mention GenIII. First: I was pretty much talking globally in my posts, thus the NRC could be considered a 'local' issue. Second: More designs can gain approval.
AP1000 vs EPR: Per wiki the AP1000 has a core damage frequency of 5.09e-7 per plant years, EPR is rated at 6.1e-7 per plant year. So by that metric they're both neck and neck (e-7), with the AP1000 having a slight lead over the EPR. The EPR is about 50% more powerful though, so on a per kWh basis it's a touch safer, as you'd need 3 APs to replace 2 EPR. You're still very close though.
For example, Yankee Rowe, was a controlled shutdown of a functioning reactor. It cost half a billion dollars to clean-up and it was only 137 Megawatts, less than a quarter of the size of TMI-2.
The problem here is that you're assuming a linear relationship between clean-up costs and reactor power size. Personally, I figure that the cost has an extremely large static component - IE the relationship is not linear, and should be cheaper per MW the larger the reactor.
Basically, just getting set up to handle the cleanup is more expensive than actually doing it, especially for a smaller plant.
NRC guidelines permit the venting of radioactive effluents into the environment every two weeks Firethorn. There is no evidence that the AP-1000 series improves on that.
Citation? Hell, citation that plants routinely vent radioactive materials into the environment outside of emergency circumstances!
Actually it is specifically the Thermal Containment ratio, which refers to how much concrete is in the dome, is higher in TMI than other NPP concrete domes.
My point was that even a normal dome will still tank an aircraft.
AP-1000 is a rehash of the Standard Westinghouse Nuclear Utility Power Plant (SNUPPs) examples of which are installed at Wolf Creek [wikipedia.org] and Callaway,
This is a bit like comparing a 4 stroke 4 cylinder from the '80s to a modern 4 stroke. Sure, there may be broad similarities, but there's also refinements in pretty much every aspect.
I'm afraid that I have to go - I've re-entered college to upgrade my degree and have to get to class. I need to get some other work done, so I'm afraid that I'm going to take a while to respond to your other posts, as well and being unable to go quite as deep into the research as I'd like.
Personally, rather than going 'greenfield', I'd prefer to do an immediate reconstruction in most areas - remove the old reactor, and put a new plant down in it's place, whether that be an AP1000, EPR*, or one of the other dozen approved GenIII designs out there. AP1k might be the only one in production, but it's not the only one approved.
*EPR might not be approved in the USA, but getting it so shouldn't be a huge regulatory hurdle, relatively speaking, especially if it's as safe as you say.
First you are talking about GenIII's and AP-1000, then you are saying thorium reactors, then you talk of reprocessing.
That's because there's different issues at play. I'm not a 'one true power' believer, so in a non-hydrocarbon fueled world, my benchmark is around 40% nuclear, 20% solar, 20% wind, and 20% 'everything else'.
I'm also not a 'one true' believer in the 'solution' for nuclear power. IE there's space for GenIII reactors such as the AP1000 to run alongside reactors that are more theoretical at this point, providing incentive to recycle current nuclear waste.
The breaks between quotes are there for a reason, each section is in response to a specific section of your post.
As for 'deadly to our genome', that's actually very common. There's plenty of chemical hazards out there.
To summarize: I'd like to see a number of GenIII(minimum) plants produced, in sufficient quantity such that they aren't all effectively prototype plants, but can share developmental knowledge in order to reduce expenses. Along with that, I'd also like to see a GenIV plant developed and deployed, but realistically we'd be looking to break ground for one of them around the time we have most of the GenIII's powered up, enabling us to shut down most of the coal and oldest nuclear plants. I happen to like the promise of the molten salt reactor, given that the thing can't suffer a meltdown because that's it's normal operating mode. This enables higher temperatures, with a real-world efficiency of slightly over 50% possible. This would shrink the size necessary for the thermal reactor, so it could be placed in smaller areas, and combined with higher efficiency, the waste heat could be used industrially, or for district heating.
The usual, mean time between expected accidents, radiation releases, etc... We're talking about an order of magnitude or two longer times.
By some ironic quirk TMI *is* one of the safest designs because it was designed to be resistant to aircraft impacts
Actually, it wasn't. It's just a quirk that a giant concrete pressure dome like what the USA and the rest of the sane world puts around nuclear reactors happens to sneer at plane impacts.
Coal and Nuclear are as bad as each other but for different reasons. Nuclear kills people for subsequent decades as the radioactive effluents make their way through our water and food supply, it also reduces the birth rate because pregnancies fail to come to full term. The key thing is it happens very slowly and the majority of effects are still years away as opposed to coal whose effects are almost instantaneous in comparison.
"radioactive effluents"? You do realize that nuclear reactors don't release any radioactivity under normal operating conditions? Major releases are on the order of once a decade or more, and that's with our aging GenII reactors, world wide. GenIII would be a lot safer.
Also, citation on the birth rates. Citation on "majority of effects" being still years away - if anything we should be recovering from the effects of post WWII above ground nuclear bomb tests.
From my understanding of this technology it's spent fuel product is 233 Thallium, IIRC, which is characterized by many daughter products with short half lives. I'm not saying it isn't better reactor technology however it would seem the central issue of current reactor technology, the long term storage of spent fuel products, is an issue for thorium reactor technology as well.
Question, do you know what "short half lives" amounts to? It means that the material in question is much more radioactive - but that means it also decays in radioactivity much faster. Something with a half-life of 10 days will be virtually entirely gone within a year. Something with a half-life in the decades will still be churning a century from now, but it's initially safer to be around.(Safer being a relative quality).
Until we have effective, geologically stable and appropriate spent fuel containment facilities then we will always have higher levels of risk with greater levels of impact as a result of accidents in the nuclear industry. For that reason it's important to reduce that level of risk and impact to the community regardless of what reactor technology is deployed.
Above ground caskets are working well. I figure that we'd be digging up anything we bury within a century to reprocess it anyways. Heck, let it sit in a cask for 40 years and so much of the 'hot' stuff has decayed that it should make reprocessing significantly cheaper.
By the time 3-eyed babies appear, the perps or their trail may be long gone.
Indeed, this is why I support some regulation despite my libertarian tendencies. It's entirely too easy to cause far more damage than you could every repay in seeking what amounts to a 'modest' profit. By the time it could be handled in a post-liability fashion, the person is already dead or broke. Leaving potentially thousands or even millions of people injured without the ability to seek redress.
As such, stopping them sooner rather than later is a 'once of prevention is worth a pound of cure' move.
Anything popular is going to attract all manner of crazy from the general public.
Doesn't even have to be all that popular. Just be glad that we have professionals at the FCC listening to these nuts, and I figure the nuts probably write the FCC quite often, rather than us having to listen to them.
Sensor manufacturers, for instance, may be untruthful about their abilities or, more likely, reliability. While the integrators will be inherently distrustful, as they will take the liability, one can see smaller vendors telling lies if they see it as the only way to get a big sale for their business."
I like how he pretty much answers his own question. Car manufacturers aren't going to give those making parts for them an inch. They'll test everything, like they're used to doing. Now, a defective lot of parts getting through is a known hazard. But ideally speaking, self driving cars will be made with the same redundancies as planes - IE one failed part isn't enough to cause a hazardous condition.
More likely, VW's shenanigans are likely to cause governments to require more independent testing before approval.
While Fukushima was the latest accident, I always like to point out that the Fukushima plant is actually older than TMI, by at least by a few months, depending on how you measure it - do you start the time when construction started, or when criticality was first achieved?
Modern, actual modern nuclear plants would be far safer.
And yes, Coal power kills more people any given day than Nuclear does all decade.
I'd really like to see a high-efficiency high temperature molten salt thorium reactor deployed.
Single junction cells are currently the winner for actual installs, multi-junction cells are the ones that are so expensive that you want to focus many time's the sun's emissions on it.
Basically, you're comparing a family car against a top fuel car.
Context of the article, than the panels they were selling previously. If they developed a trick that allows them to produce panels that produce 30% more power than their last product line at not added expense, that makes them that much more competitive.
The previous product line was probably around 17% efficient.
The question is, did they have enough money to fulfill their charter or did they just say screw it and do nothing because they didn't get what they asked for?
It can get even more complicated. Consider that there are always static costs - it takes a certain amount of money to just keep the lights on, the management staff paid and kept in offices, etc...
In short, if you cut a department's budget by 20%, without implementing additional measures to control FWA and/or otherwise reduce expenses, you should expect to see more than a 20% drop in performance.
Basically, the ER visit is the initial, subsequent encounters are for 'ongoing treatment', IE physical therapy and such. Sequela is for when new complications show up.
Basically, there are many businesses in the USA who won't ship internationally for many reasons. Heck, some won't even ship to parts of the USA like Alaska (ask me how I know). Said reasons include customs difficulties, fraud, damage in transit, time, etc... Thus, there's a market for 'reshippers'. People who accept packages on behalf of their clients and act as facilitators for international shipping. Good ones handle the customs requirements, any extra packaging, etc...
Thing is, they can be a bit like a pawn shop. You have legit ones, and you have ones that are more straight out fences.
Given the description, it sounds like they're ripe for some additional regulation.
Just to be a spoil-sport, "subsequent encounter" isn't that they've experienced whatever injury again, it's that a complication popped up after primary treatment, such that they need more medical care.
For example, you're sucked into a jet engine and survive. They patch you all up, then 6 months later they discover that there was a laceration in your small intestine that they didn't catch and it's now infected, inflamed, and such. That's a subsequent encounter.
I think that even things like physical therapy can carry that code.
From that I've read, it's actually a point. A badly maintained junker that's burning a quart of oil every 200 miles can actually pollute, per mile driven, equal to around 1k new cars that are properly compliant. For that matter, operating a push lawnmower for long enough to mow your yard will emit more than your car will all month.
Allowable NOx levels were cut by an order of magnitude last round, and in previous rounds as well.
Sorry for the delay, started composing, ended up not using that computer again for a bit and forgot about it.
1. Labor and resources is the reason BEHIND my proposal - by making the process more efficient you can provide the same amount of aid while using less resources. IE fewer administrators, and as I said, studies show money is actually the best form of aid in most cases. 2. No, you don't get to call my 'disclaimer' bogus then reason 'as if demand were perfectly inelastic'. So, have fun with those strawmen, as I stated that the expected outcome of an additional chip factory would be reduced prices, resulting in more chips being sold. 3. Extremely rich people often stuff it into property such as land, resulting in inflation, not additional construction. Government debt is only a good deal when you're looking for extreme safety. 4. I'm not sure what 'progressivism' means, but I am basically Keynesian. Still, as far as being a 'permanent fixture of the economy' goes, I'd like to clarify that I think that Keynesian systems need to be 'baked' into the economy/government mostly because people, including economists and politicians, are extremely bad at guessing where the economy is and where it's going. As such, 'automatic', 'mechanical' systems are actually superior in keeping the economy properly balanced. 5. Mixing up welfare and economy: You can say I'm 'mixing up the two for political reasons', but I only 'mix them up' in the sense that they already are mixed up - spending money, especially huge globs of it, already affects the economy, and spending globs of money is what welfare is. I only bring up the economic side when it's brought up by somebody else, and it's important to note that something as huge as implimenting a BIG is going to affect the economy. 6. Reducing welfare money is, sadly, not much of an option. There are other negative effects to doing that. Which is why the system needs to be reformed instead.
Ah, the usual progressive platitudes and denunciations of anybody who disagrees with you as a selfish prick.
You need to go back to the mirror. It's not that I believe what I said there - I was mirroring what you said back at you. I just re-wrote it a bit for applicability.
Oh, and nice finishing on a false equivalence. In order to prove that it's NOT a false equivalence, please provide sources or at least detailed reasoning why it would be so disastrous.
And, while not particularly correct, it at least has the benefit that the younger crowd who aren't into retro stuff will at least know what they're talking about.
For examples, there's videos out there of kids being presented with older technology, like walkmans, and asked if they could figure it out.
A lot of them can't figure out how to operate a VCR, for example. It might of been staged, but another had a fun time trying to get a cassette into a tape drive, then finding out that fast forward wasn't an instant skip...
DRM is Digital Rights Management. Preventing a special cartridge from being rewound without inerting a pin into a special hole on the rental tape is not digital. It's a literal mechanical lock. Probably easily defeated too, but most people wouldn't bother unless someone else made a machine to do it for them.
Given what I've seen, if the company had succeeded you would have been able to purchase everything from a completed rewinder* to a kit to plans where you have to get all the mechanics yourself.
So between the one-watch model, the higher startup-costs associated with having to buy the TV/VCR combo, and the reduced portability I can see why the system didn't really take off.
Don't forget reduced quality over the original broadcasts - tape tech wasn't quite there yet, so it only recorded every third frame. 20 fps vs 60 (rounding).
Like a lot of start-ups in the multimedia format business, DRM is nothing but a weighted chain. Formats succeed despite DRM, not because of it.
*Sold even in the VCR days so you could watch a different tape while rewinding the first.
You're not the 'average' user though. The average user doesn't care about tracking that much. I use 'punch the monkey' as the ads that broke the barrier for where the effort of developing ad-blockers was worth it. Going beyond them only sped the development.
Slashdot Mirror
It's the gamma radiation that makes it less of a proliferation risk. Can't have detonators around that.
As for the radioactivity, yes, it's highly radioactive, but properly processed the waste is in said highly radioactive state for a substantially shorter period of time. Basically, it'll reach background levels in a period shorter than human civilization, not longer.
I'm fine with going with IFR, but I'm not sure what you mean by 'loose energy' (lose energy) for mining and processing Thorium - Thorium is currently a byproduct of rare earth mining and refining; currently they're avoiding some of the richest Thorium ore because there's no demand for thorium, thus it's expensive to handle the ore.
Start up a few thorium reactors such that there's a commercial demand for the metal, and it'll get mined along with the other stuff. One thing I've learned is that a 'pure' mine is actually pretty rare. Copper and gold mines also tend to produce silver. Rare earths are usually mixed. Etc...
No monitoring, just cheap storage.
Monitoring is cheap on the plant grounds, and the casks probably cost less than shipping them to a different location. At the scales and price ranges we're looking at, concrete basically rounds to 'free'.
Hm... He also ignored my signature "I don't read AC" AC = Anonymous Coward.
I'm also a big mystified at who or what he's aiming the post at.
Well the AP1000 is the only approved design and my understanding of that design doesn't lead me to that conclusion. Safer reactor designs are already available, the features aren't implemented in AP-1000 because they are too expensive so the AP-1000's design still falls short. For accident mitigation the EPR design is better. Briefly the buildings that service the reactor are split into four (main) operational divisions (and the reactor containment). An accident, failure or maintenance in the other areas can be mitigated by the other divisions. It's planning, and being prepared for, problems.
You know, it's odd, I searched my posts multiple times and didn't find the AP1000 listed? I didn't even mention GenIII.
First: I was pretty much talking globally in my posts, thus the NRC could be considered a 'local' issue.
Second: More designs can gain approval.
AP1000 vs EPR: Per wiki the AP1000 has a core damage frequency of 5.09e-7 per plant years, EPR is rated at 6.1e-7 per plant year. So by that metric they're both neck and neck (e-7), with the AP1000 having a slight lead over the EPR. The EPR is about 50% more powerful though, so on a per kWh basis it's a touch safer, as you'd need 3 APs to replace 2 EPR. You're still very close though.
For example, Yankee Rowe, was a controlled shutdown of a functioning reactor. It cost half a billion dollars to clean-up and it was only 137 Megawatts, less than a quarter of the size of TMI-2.
The problem here is that you're assuming a linear relationship between clean-up costs and reactor power size. Personally, I figure that the cost has an extremely large static component - IE the relationship is not linear, and should be cheaper per MW the larger the reactor.
Basically, just getting set up to handle the cleanup is more expensive than actually doing it, especially for a smaller plant.
NRC guidelines permit the venting of radioactive effluents into the environment every two weeks Firethorn. There is no evidence that the AP-1000 series improves on that.
Citation? Hell, citation that plants routinely vent radioactive materials into the environment outside of emergency circumstances!
Actually it is specifically the Thermal Containment ratio, which refers to how much concrete is in the dome, is higher in TMI than other NPP concrete domes.
My point was that even a normal dome will still tank an aircraft.
AP-1000 is a rehash of the Standard Westinghouse Nuclear Utility Power Plant (SNUPPs) examples of which are installed at Wolf Creek [wikipedia.org] and Callaway,
This is a bit like comparing a 4 stroke 4 cylinder from the '80s to a modern 4 stroke. Sure, there may be broad similarities, but there's also refinements in pretty much every aspect.
I'm afraid that I have to go - I've re-entered college to upgrade my degree and have to get to class. I need to get some other work done, so I'm afraid that I'm going to take a while to respond to your other posts, as well and being unable to go quite as deep into the research as I'd like.
Personally, rather than going 'greenfield', I'd prefer to do an immediate reconstruction in most areas - remove the old reactor, and put a new plant down in it's place, whether that be an AP1000, EPR*, or one of the other dozen approved GenIII designs out there. AP1k might be the only one in production, but it's not the only one approved.
*EPR might not be approved in the USA, but getting it so shouldn't be a huge regulatory hurdle, relatively speaking, especially if it's as safe as you say.
First you are talking about GenIII's and AP-1000, then you are saying thorium reactors, then you talk of reprocessing.
That's because there's different issues at play. I'm not a 'one true power' believer, so in a non-hydrocarbon fueled world, my benchmark is around 40% nuclear, 20% solar, 20% wind, and 20% 'everything else'.
I'm also not a 'one true' believer in the 'solution' for nuclear power. IE there's space for GenIII reactors such as the AP1000 to run alongside reactors that are more theoretical at this point, providing incentive to recycle current nuclear waste.
The breaks between quotes are there for a reason, each section is in response to a specific section of your post.
As for 'deadly to our genome', that's actually very common. There's plenty of chemical hazards out there.
To summarize: I'd like to see a number of GenIII(minimum) plants produced, in sufficient quantity such that they aren't all effectively prototype plants, but can share developmental knowledge in order to reduce expenses. Along with that, I'd also like to see a GenIV plant developed and deployed, but realistically we'd be looking to break ground for one of them around the time we have most of the GenIII's powered up, enabling us to shut down most of the coal and oldest nuclear plants. I happen to like the promise of the molten salt reactor, given that the thing can't suffer a meltdown because that's it's normal operating mode. This enables higher temperatures, with a real-world efficiency of slightly over 50% possible. This would shrink the size necessary for the thermal reactor, so it could be placed in smaller areas, and combined with higher efficiency, the waste heat could be used industrially, or for district heating.
By what standard?
The usual, mean time between expected accidents, radiation releases, etc... We're talking about an order of magnitude or two longer times.
By some ironic quirk TMI *is* one of the safest designs because it was designed to be resistant to aircraft impacts
Actually, it wasn't. It's just a quirk that a giant concrete pressure dome like what the USA and the rest of the sane world puts around nuclear reactors happens to sneer at plane impacts.
Coal and Nuclear are as bad as each other but for different reasons. Nuclear kills people for subsequent decades as the radioactive effluents make their way through our water and food supply, it also reduces the birth rate because pregnancies fail to come to full term. The key thing is it happens very slowly and the majority of effects are still years away as opposed to coal whose effects are almost instantaneous in comparison.
"radioactive effluents"? You do realize that nuclear reactors don't release any radioactivity under normal operating conditions? Major releases are on the order of once a decade or more, and that's with our aging GenII reactors, world wide. GenIII would be a lot safer.
Also, citation on the birth rates. Citation on "majority of effects" being still years away - if anything we should be recovering from the effects of post WWII above ground nuclear bomb tests.
From my understanding of this technology it's spent fuel product is 233 Thallium, IIRC, which is characterized by many daughter products with short half lives. I'm not saying it isn't better reactor technology however it would seem the central issue of current reactor technology, the long term storage of spent fuel products, is an issue for thorium reactor technology as well.
Question, do you know what "short half lives" amounts to? It means that the material in question is much more radioactive - but that means it also decays in radioactivity much faster. Something with a half-life of 10 days will be virtually entirely gone within a year. Something with a half-life in the decades will still be churning a century from now, but it's initially safer to be around.(Safer being a relative quality).
Until we have effective, geologically stable and appropriate spent fuel containment facilities then we will always have higher levels of risk with greater levels of impact as a result of accidents in the nuclear industry. For that reason it's important to reduce that level of risk and impact to the community regardless of what reactor technology is deployed.
Above ground caskets are working well. I figure that we'd be digging up anything we bury within a century to reprocess it anyways. Heck, let it sit in a cask for 40 years and so much of the 'hot' stuff has decayed that it should make reprocessing significantly cheaper.
By the time 3-eyed babies appear, the perps or their trail may be long gone.
Indeed, this is why I support some regulation despite my libertarian tendencies. It's entirely too easy to cause far more damage than you could every repay in seeking what amounts to a 'modest' profit. By the time it could be handled in a post-liability fashion, the person is already dead or broke. Leaving potentially thousands or even millions of people injured without the ability to seek redress.
As such, stopping them sooner rather than later is a 'once of prevention is worth a pound of cure' move.
Anything popular is going to attract all manner of crazy from the general public.
Doesn't even have to be all that popular. Just be glad that we have professionals at the FCC listening to these nuts, and I figure the nuts probably write the FCC quite often, rather than us having to listen to them.
Sensor manufacturers, for instance, may be untruthful about their abilities or, more likely, reliability. While the integrators will be inherently distrustful, as they will take the liability, one can see smaller vendors telling lies if they see it as the only way to get a big sale for their business."
I like how he pretty much answers his own question. Car manufacturers aren't going to give those making parts for them an inch. They'll test everything, like they're used to doing. Now, a defective lot of parts getting through is a known hazard. But ideally speaking, self driving cars will be made with the same redundancies as planes - IE one failed part isn't enough to cause a hazardous condition.
More likely, VW's shenanigans are likely to cause governments to require more independent testing before approval.
While Fukushima was the latest accident, I always like to point out that the Fukushima plant is actually older than TMI, by at least by a few months, depending on how you measure it - do you start the time when construction started, or when criticality was first achieved?
Modern, actual modern nuclear plants would be far safer.
And yes, Coal power kills more people any given day than Nuclear does all decade.
I'd really like to see a high-efficiency high temperature molten salt thorium reactor deployed.
Disinfection, alone, is a bit like kicking some hobos out from under a bridge. Without further action, they'll just be replaced by more hobos.
Single Junction vs Multi-Junction.
Single junction cells are currently the winner for actual installs, multi-junction cells are the ones that are so expensive that you want to focus many time's the sun's emissions on it.
Basically, you're comparing a family car against a top fuel car.
Context of the article, than the panels they were selling previously. If they developed a trick that allows them to produce panels that produce 30% more power than their last product line at not added expense, that makes them that much more competitive.
The previous product line was probably around 17% efficient.
The question is, did they have enough money to fulfill their charter or did they just say screw it and do nothing because they didn't get what they asked for?
It can get even more complicated. Consider that there are always static costs - it takes a certain amount of money to just keep the lights on, the management staff paid and kept in offices, etc...
In short, if you cut a department's budget by 20%, without implementing additional measures to control FWA and/or otherwise reduce expenses, you should expect to see more than a 20% drop in performance.
Apparently yes. Note: Wearing a helmet seems to have been a survival factor.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
Good point: http://news.aapc.com/initial-s...
Basically, the ER visit is the initial, subsequent encounters are for 'ongoing treatment', IE physical therapy and such. Sequela is for when new complications show up.
Basically, there are many businesses in the USA who won't ship internationally for many reasons. Heck, some won't even ship to parts of the USA like Alaska (ask me how I know). Said reasons include customs difficulties, fraud, damage in transit, time, etc...
Thus, there's a market for 'reshippers'. People who accept packages on behalf of their clients and act as facilitators for international shipping. Good ones handle the customs requirements, any extra packaging, etc...
Thing is, they can be a bit like a pawn shop. You have legit ones, and you have ones that are more straight out fences.
Given the description, it sounds like they're ripe for some additional regulation.
I always figure that a code is in the book because somebody, somewhere actually got hurt that way. The thought is amusing.
Just to be a spoil-sport, "subsequent encounter" isn't that they've experienced whatever injury again, it's that a complication popped up after primary treatment, such that they need more medical care.
For example, you're sucked into a jet engine and survive. They patch you all up, then 6 months later they discover that there was a laceration in your small intestine that they didn't catch and it's now infected, inflamed, and such. That's a subsequent encounter.
I think that even things like physical therapy can carry that code.
From that I've read, it's actually a point. A badly maintained junker that's burning a quart of oil every 200 miles can actually pollute, per mile driven, equal to around 1k new cars that are properly compliant. For that matter, operating a push lawnmower for long enough to mow your yard will emit more than your car will all month.
Allowable NOx levels were cut by an order of magnitude last round, and in previous rounds as well.
Sorry for the delay, started composing, ended up not using that computer again for a bit and forgot about it.
1. Labor and resources is the reason BEHIND my proposal - by making the process more efficient you can provide the same amount of aid while using less resources. IE fewer administrators, and as I said, studies show money is actually the best form of aid in most cases.
2. No, you don't get to call my 'disclaimer' bogus then reason 'as if demand were perfectly inelastic'. So, have fun with those strawmen, as I stated that the expected outcome of an additional chip factory would be reduced prices, resulting in more chips being sold.
3. Extremely rich people often stuff it into property such as land, resulting in inflation, not additional construction. Government debt is only a good deal when you're looking for extreme safety.
4. I'm not sure what 'progressivism' means, but I am basically Keynesian. Still, as far as being a 'permanent fixture of the economy' goes, I'd like to clarify that I think that Keynesian systems need to be 'baked' into the economy/government mostly because people, including economists and politicians, are extremely bad at guessing where the economy is and where it's going. As such, 'automatic', 'mechanical' systems are actually superior in keeping the economy properly balanced.
5. Mixing up welfare and economy: You can say I'm 'mixing up the two for political reasons', but I only 'mix them up' in the sense that they already are mixed up - spending money, especially huge globs of it, already affects the economy, and spending globs of money is what welfare is. I only bring up the economic side when it's brought up by somebody else, and it's important to note that something as huge as implimenting a BIG is going to affect the economy.
6. Reducing welfare money is, sadly, not much of an option. There are other negative effects to doing that. Which is why the system needs to be reformed instead.
Ah, the usual progressive platitudes and denunciations of anybody who disagrees with you as a selfish prick.
You need to go back to the mirror. It's not that I believe what I said there - I was mirroring what you said back at you. I just re-wrote it a bit for applicability.
Oh, and nice finishing on a false equivalence. In order to prove that it's NOT a false equivalence, please provide sources or at least detailed reasoning why it would be so disastrous.
And, while not particularly correct, it at least has the benefit that the younger crowd who aren't into retro stuff will at least know what they're talking about.
For examples, there's videos out there of kids being presented with older technology, like walkmans, and asked if they could figure it out.
A lot of them can't figure out how to operate a VCR, for example. It might of been staged, but another had a fun time trying to get a cassette into a tape drive, then finding out that fast forward wasn't an instant skip...
DRM is Digital Rights Management. Preventing a special cartridge from being rewound without inerting a pin into a special hole on the rental tape is not digital. It's a literal mechanical lock. Probably easily defeated too, but most people wouldn't bother unless someone else made a machine to do it for them.
Given what I've seen, if the company had succeeded you would have been able to purchase everything from a completed rewinder* to a kit to plans where you have to get all the mechanics yourself.
So between the one-watch model, the higher startup-costs associated with having to buy the TV/VCR combo, and the reduced portability I can see why the system didn't really take off.
Don't forget reduced quality over the original broadcasts - tape tech wasn't quite there yet, so it only recorded every third frame. 20 fps vs 60 (rounding).
Like a lot of start-ups in the multimedia format business, DRM is nothing but a weighted chain. Formats succeed despite DRM, not because of it.
*Sold even in the VCR days so you could watch a different tape while rewinding the first.
You're not the 'average' user though. The average user doesn't care about tracking that much. I use 'punch the monkey' as the ads that broke the barrier for where the effort of developing ad-blockers was worth it. Going beyond them only sped the development.
More like every 10 oil changes or so - roughly at the half-way point between the a major change-out of the fluids.