Also, how would the new IRS differ? What policies of the current IRS do you think should be changed? Because it seems to me that as long as someone has to enforce tax collection, they have to look much like the current IRS.
Indeed. The IRS is shaped by the laws and requirements imposed on it by congress. If you substantially change the laws governing it, that it ovesees, it will change itself.
For example, if you eliminate the personal income tax in exchange for a global sales tax, it'd stop auditing individuals and shift towards auditing businesses exclusively.
Yeah, but to go along with the original AC's premise about abolishing the IRS, I have to tell those that want to 'get rid of the IRS' that you'd need the IRS even under there scheme. As long as the government is collecting taxes, it needs to have a department collecting them.
Department of War, Department of Defense, same difference. Ditto with whatever you 'replace' the IRS with.
Do you mean in terms of nuclear waste or some other toxic externality? Would you please clarify what you mean here?
Nuclear waste - The federal government charged a mandatory fee in exchange for a promise to dispose of the nuclear waste. Yucca Mountain never opened, ergo the federal government renegaded on it's deal, but it's still collecting the fees. Without them stepping in, the power companies would have figured something out themselves.
Not for pu-239, about 50 times more time is right. Remember it is still highly toxic even when you exclude its radioactive emmissions and that's what it will take to do that.
Lead is highly toxic by way of being a heavy metal and most versions of it are perfectly stable. My opinion is that if we bury it X deep, that any future humans that go digging it up should be able to determine that it's toxic and mildly radioactive and know how to handle it if they're going that deep into the ground.
Anything those reactors produced will be hot and as toxic to life as anything can be. No structure will last 10k years and siting them in a porus mountain is the same amount of effort to do it in a mountain which actually would last.
You're forgetting the 'more radioactive = shorter halflife' thing. The problem with nuclear waste and current standards isn't the short lived isotopes, it's the less radioactive long half life isotopes. Pull out the long-life ones, feed them through the reactors again until there's only short half-life isotopes left. Yes, they'd be radioactive as all hell. But only for a short period of time. "A Candle that burns twice as bright burns for half as long" type thing.
Oh, and I disagree with you on our ability to construct a facility that would last 10k years. It'd be expensive, but we can do it rather easily.
You are just defeating your own argument there. Why should nuclear be so heavily subsidised and not be liable for the massive costs that oil is? If BP can be on the hook for $43bn why can't nuclear? It's because the maximum cost is actually an order of magnitude or two more than $43bn, and the government set the rate a long time ago and never changed it.
- At least in the USA, the government has never paid out under price-anderson. It's paid out, but that was for incidents involving government run reactors. - Amount of subsidy: We now have a rate of around 1 Major disaster per 20 years between Chernobyl and Fukushima. I don't count power plants that contained the radiation and the only property ruined was the power company's. There are 437 nuclear reactors for electricity generation. That's 8740 reactor-years per disaster. Let's say each disaster runs around $100B(a Fukushima estimate). That works out to $11.4M per reactor year. However, keep in mind that it's your first dollar of insurance that's the most expensive - So it's likely closer to $6M per year, given that the first $12B is covered by the nuclear industry itself. The plants pay out more than that in nuclear specific taxes(~$8M). - I don't disagree that the government set the rate a 'long time ago' and never changed it. It probably should. - Without the government changing anything, building a new reactor does increase the amount covered, because it's a set amount per reactor.
If all the subsidies were cut I'd be happy, because no-one would build any more nuclear plants anyway.
Nope, you'd just get to choke on the coal exhausts...
Also, more nuclear plants would be built if they'd get rid of the bullshit, ineffective(at anything but preventing construction) regulations. I'm not talking about the good rules, but there's a lot of bad ones.
I cited with a link showing that the nuclear industry would pay out over $12B before the US Government spent a single dime in compensation. They would, of course, be spending lots of money in investigations and congressional hearings before that, but such is the nature of politics.
Also, Fukushima is in many ways worse than the worst case scenario - it's really 4 melted down reactors in one spot. They're also mixing decommissioning costs and compensation in that article, the $12B is what's to cover payouts to OTHER people harmed by whatever disaster. Oh, and doubling the number of reactors in the USA would double that $12B, because of the way the law is written.
Calling me an idiot doesn't change my mind. Attacking the speaker, not the argument and all that.
And I still say that they're being a touch paranoid about the radiation. I'd basically take their containment measures down a step, though there would still be no-go areas within what are currently no-go areas.
Again - no significant radiation release, it was a prototype reactor from 1962, no injuries amongst the workers, and cleaned up a few years later.
You guys are using accident characteristics for a Stanley Steamer to try to assess the accident danger of a Tesla Model S. How about this: Hans Petersen, or this unnamed gentleman. Then there's 3.
Hey, what do you know. Solar electrical power has had more fatalities in California alone than Nuclear electrical in the last decade...
only a fool would talk about how having only two "busted"plants is proof of anything.
And only somebody who hasn't taken statistics can say this. The accident rate for nuclear plants is extremely low, and we can do better. For example, did you know that the Fukushima plant predates both the TMI and Chernobyl plants? Modern plants would be much safer.
TMI - no significant radiation release. Windscale - google shows that it wasn't a power plant, but a nuclear weapon generation facility. Fermi - No significant radiation release.
I'll take nuclear power, even with it's risks, over coal, oil, and gas any day. Solar and wind can't cover 100% otherwise. My 'ideal' non-carbon mix for electricity generation is ~40% nuclear, 20% solar, 20% wind, and 20% other(hydro, geothermal, biomass, etc...)
Forced their hand? Last time I checked, they are: 1) still operating the program, and 2) tenaciously defending it.
It's a bit like the Japanese and Whaling. Turns out that the whalers operate at a loss, nobody in Japan actually likes whale meat, etc... But as long as they're under outside pressure to end the program, it becomes a matter of face to defend it.
In short, they may have ended the program since then if Snowden hadn't leaked because the program wasn't justifying itself, but now they're having to defend their illegal and unconstitutional actions, thus they 'have' to continue and justify the program in order to avoid saying they made a mistake.
...what is very little recognized worldwide, is that nuclear energy gets a free lunch at the expense of the taxpayers, as regards risk insurance.
How many other industries have more than $12B in insurance before the government will step in?
I mean, there's no other industry that could cause that much damage in a single incident, is there?
It is the most damned uninsured thing in developed countries and when one of these plants goes bust, you know what happens, ref. Fukusima.
Yeah, we're up to 2 busted nuclear plants in the whole world. All of them were old as hell plants, newer plants survived just fine, and realistically speaking we're being paranoid about the radiation.
If nuclear industry wishes to operate on-par terms with other forms of green technologies, please, bring the actuarial scientists in, to do all the math!
They have. It has even fewer deaths per TWh, including Chernobyl and Fukushima, than solar & wind
Sure, just as soon as the federal government pays them back for the fees it charged while promising to take care of the waste...
Oh, and enjoy how things end up priced as we force this standard on other companies... Many of the pollutants that other companies are releasing don't break down, period.
10M years is a bit long as well - allow reprocessing and such, and you can get rid of 90% of the 'waste' by reusing it, and of the 10% remaining, you only need to keep it 'safe' for about 1-10k years, not the over 100k.
I think my point still applies - get a lamp that's designed for LEDs and comes with them as standard, as opposed to paying even more money for 'adapting' bulbs.
Do the EU regulations specify gaming consoles? Or are they like the USA - TVs, DVD players, and VCRs are specified, but DVRs and consoles aren't (yet).
In your case I'd consider getting away from 'bulbs' and going with a new fixture. That's what I've been doing lately. Rather than toss 2-3 'bulbs' into a fixture meant for incandescent, I've been replacing it with a fixture with the LEDs integrated. No cooling problems when you can scatter the emitters throughout the fixture's light emitting surface.
Remember this isn't a criminal offense. Most warehouse workers are 'judgement proof', in that they don't have the assets to pay anything. The court isn't going to say 'you have to quit your job' because it has financial interest in NOT paying for their welfware because they can't work at what they're skilled at due to the non-compete.
Amazon would pay more than they could recover pretty much every day the court trial went on. Also, there might actually be enough push-back if they tried to change laws.
Personally, I'd like to see a law of 'sure, write up whatever non-competes you want. However, it means that the the employee is still your employee during the non-compete period. Which means you still have to pay them their salary and benefits'. Don't want them working for the competitor for 12 months? You gotta pay them to sit on their ass for 12 months.
Finally, it sounds like they stuck the non-compete into their boilerplate employment documents. It's not intentionally targeting warehouse people, though I suppose that with the increasing amounts of robotics in them, it might be deliberate, so said workers don't go describing how the robots work.
I remember reading that the $20k 'hammer' was actually a set of tools, including a spade & pick, made of a special set of alloys(can't remember what) designed to be non-magnetic, non-sparking, and a few other nons for use in helping to clean up stockpiles of explosives that were destabilizing, getting more sensitive. Given the location and amounts, they couldn't just set them off in location.
The toilet seat was actually a whole toilet system, I can't remember if it was for a plane or submarine. Still not cheap, but something that had to be custom designed and produced for that vehicle, and they were including design costs.
You're only using the FIRST definition of 'break'. There are many more.
"To break something is to" also covers:
to overcome or wear down the spirit, strength, or resistance of; to cause to yield, especially under pressure, torture, or the like:
to disable or destroy by or as if by shattering or crushing: to ruin financially; make bankrupt
to impair or weaken the power, effect, or intensity of to train to obedience; tame
to become inoperative or to malfunction, as through wear or damage
I think my use of the word is particularly appropriate.
CANDU is the only plant design that I'm aware of that doesn't require enrichment. I should have said 'No idea if they're using one', IE a design that doesn't require enrichment.
They should, of course, avoid the problematic RBMK design.
Going by the AC's picture, I guess I'd have to amend my statement to 'center of mass spends at least some time in one of the orbital bodies', if Jupiter and Saturn are enough to yank it outside on occasion.
Such agreements actually exist in the USA, it's just that there are exemptions like 'only if it's 300 ft or less, in which case the person requesting service has to pay for the extra distance'. Generally said distance is 'around' double the average necessary hookup distance, and the extra install is at the marginal cost - IE the extra labor & materials. If it costs $1k just to show up on location and start pushing pipe, but only $1/ft after that, a 100 foot install would cost $1100, the maximum 300 foot one $1300, and the homeowner that's 400 feet away would be charged only $100 for being hooked up.
I said 'for example', and that they need to be 'broken'. That can mean either removing their monopolistic protections, or breaking them through regulations. I suggested examples of both paths.
If service in an area is so broken that a community decides to replace them by issuing municipal bonds to form a cooperative, that's their business.
He might not know about it. Going by what's reported, Comcast really screwed the pooch customer service wise. They spent plenty of effort, just not effective effort.
Slashdot Mirror
Also, how would the new IRS differ? What policies of the current IRS do you think should be changed? Because it seems to me that as long as someone has to enforce tax collection, they have to look much like the current IRS.
Indeed. The IRS is shaped by the laws and requirements imposed on it by congress. If you substantially change the laws governing it, that it ovesees, it will change itself.
For example, if you eliminate the personal income tax in exchange for a global sales tax, it'd stop auditing individuals and shift towards auditing businesses exclusively.
Yeah, but to go along with the original AC's premise about abolishing the IRS, I have to tell those that want to 'get rid of the IRS' that you'd need the IRS even under there scheme. As long as the government is collecting taxes, it needs to have a department collecting them.
Department of War, Department of Defense, same difference. Ditto with whatever you 'replace' the IRS with.
Do you mean in terms of nuclear waste or some other toxic externality? Would you please clarify what you mean here?
Nuclear waste - The federal government charged a mandatory fee in exchange for a promise to dispose of the nuclear waste. Yucca Mountain never opened, ergo the federal government renegaded on it's deal, but it's still collecting the fees. Without them stepping in, the power companies would have figured something out themselves.
Not for pu-239, about 50 times more time is right. Remember it is still highly toxic even when you exclude its radioactive emmissions and that's what it will take to do that.
Lead is highly toxic by way of being a heavy metal and most versions of it are perfectly stable. My opinion is that if we bury it X deep, that any future humans that go digging it up should be able to determine that it's toxic and mildly radioactive and know how to handle it if they're going that deep into the ground.
Anything those reactors produced will be hot and as toxic to life as anything can be. No structure will last 10k years and siting them in a porus mountain is the same amount of effort to do it in a mountain which actually would last.
You're forgetting the 'more radioactive = shorter halflife' thing. The problem with nuclear waste and current standards isn't the short lived isotopes, it's the less radioactive long half life isotopes. Pull out the long-life ones, feed them through the reactors again until there's only short half-life isotopes left. Yes, they'd be radioactive as all hell. But only for a short period of time. "A Candle that burns twice as bright burns for half as long" type thing.
Oh, and I disagree with you on our ability to construct a facility that would last 10k years. It'd be expensive, but we can do it rather easily.
You are just defeating your own argument there. Why should nuclear be so heavily subsidised and not be liable for the massive costs that oil is? If BP can be on the hook for $43bn why can't nuclear? It's because the maximum cost is actually an order of magnitude or two more than $43bn, and the government set the rate a long time ago and never changed it.
- At least in the USA, the government has never paid out under price-anderson. It's paid out, but that was for incidents involving government run reactors.
- Amount of subsidy: We now have a rate of around 1 Major disaster per 20 years between Chernobyl and Fukushima. I don't count power plants that contained the radiation and the only property ruined was the power company's. There are 437 nuclear reactors for electricity generation. That's 8740 reactor-years per disaster. Let's say each disaster runs around $100B(a Fukushima estimate). That works out to $11.4M per reactor year. However, keep in mind that it's your first dollar of insurance that's the most expensive - So it's likely closer to $6M per year, given that the first $12B is covered by the nuclear industry itself. The plants pay out more than that in nuclear specific taxes(~$8M).
- I don't disagree that the government set the rate a 'long time ago' and never changed it. It probably should.
- Without the government changing anything, building a new reactor does increase the amount covered, because it's a set amount per reactor.
If all the subsidies were cut I'd be happy, because no-one would build any more nuclear plants anyway.
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=7169003&cid=49369391#
Nope, you'd just get to choke on the coal exhausts...
Also, more nuclear plants would be built if they'd get rid of the bullshit, ineffective(at anything but preventing construction) regulations. I'm not talking about the good rules, but there's a lot of bad ones.
12billion?
You are kidding?
I cited with a link showing that the nuclear industry would pay out over $12B before the US Government spent a single dime in compensation. They would, of course, be spending lots of money in investigations and congressional hearings before that, but such is the nature of politics.
Also, Fukushima is in many ways worse than the worst case scenario - it's really 4 melted down reactors in one spot. They're also mixing decommissioning costs and compensation in that article, the $12B is what's to cover payouts to OTHER people harmed by whatever disaster. Oh, and doubling the number of reactors in the USA would double that $12B, because of the way the law is written.
Calling me an idiot doesn't change my mind. Attacking the speaker, not the argument and all that.
And I still say that they're being a touch paranoid about the radiation. I'd basically take their containment measures down a step, though there would still be no-go areas within what are currently no-go areas.
If governmental employees think that "saving face" is more important than doing the right thing, they shouldn't be governmental employees any more.
Now this is a comment I agree with.
Again - no significant radiation release, it was a prototype reactor from 1962, no injuries amongst the workers, and cleaned up a few years later.
You guys are using accident characteristics for a Stanley Steamer to try to assess the accident danger of a Tesla Model S.
How about this:
Hans Petersen, or this unnamed gentleman. Then there's 3.
Hey, what do you know. Solar electrical power has had more fatalities in California alone than Nuclear electrical in the last decade...
only a fool would talk about how having only two "busted"plants is proof of anything.
And only somebody who hasn't taken statistics can say this. The accident rate for nuclear plants is extremely low, and we can do better. For example, did you know that the Fukushima plant predates both the TMI and Chernobyl plants? Modern plants would be much safer.
TMI - no significant radiation release.
Windscale - google shows that it wasn't a power plant, but a nuclear weapon generation facility.
Fermi - No significant radiation release.
I'll take nuclear power, even with it's risks, over coal, oil, and gas any day. Solar and wind can't cover 100% otherwise. My 'ideal' non-carbon mix for electricity generation is ~40% nuclear, 20% solar, 20% wind, and 20% other(hydro, geothermal, biomass, etc...)
Forced their hand? Last time I checked, they are: 1) still operating the program, and 2) tenaciously defending it.
It's a bit like the Japanese and Whaling. Turns out that the whalers operate at a loss, nobody in Japan actually likes whale meat, etc... But as long as they're under outside pressure to end the program, it becomes a matter of face to defend it.
In short, they may have ended the program since then if Snowden hadn't leaked because the program wasn't justifying itself, but now they're having to defend their illegal and unconstitutional actions, thus they 'have' to continue and justify the program in order to avoid saying they made a mistake.
...what is very little recognized worldwide, is that nuclear energy gets a free lunch at the expense of the taxpayers, as regards risk insurance.
How many other industries have more than $12B in insurance before the government will step in?
I mean, there's no other industry that could cause that much damage in a single incident, is there?
It is the most damned uninsured thing in developed countries and when one of these plants goes bust, you know what happens, ref. Fukusima.
Yeah, we're up to 2 busted nuclear plants in the whole world. All of them were old as hell plants, newer plants survived just fine, and realistically speaking we're being paranoid about the radiation.
If nuclear industry wishes to operate on-par terms with other forms of green technologies, please, bring the actuarial scientists in, to do all the math!
They have. It has even fewer deaths per TWh, including Chernobyl and Fukushima, than solar & wind
Sure, just as soon as the federal government pays them back for the fees it charged while promising to take care of the waste...
Oh, and enjoy how things end up priced as we force this standard on other companies... Many of the pollutants that other companies are releasing don't break down, period.
10M years is a bit long as well - allow reprocessing and such, and you can get rid of 90% of the 'waste' by reusing it, and of the 10% remaining, you only need to keep it 'safe' for about 1-10k years, not the over 100k.
I think my point still applies - get a lamp that's designed for LEDs and comes with them as standard, as opposed to paying even more money for 'adapting' bulbs.
Do the EU regulations specify gaming consoles? Or are they like the USA - TVs, DVD players, and VCRs are specified, but DVRs and consoles aren't (yet).
Not if they're 'energy star rated' Then the limit is less than 1 watt.
In your case I'd consider getting away from 'bulbs' and going with a new fixture. That's what I've been doing lately. Rather than toss 2-3 'bulbs' into a fixture meant for incandescent, I've been replacing it with a fixture with the LEDs integrated. No cooling problems when you can scatter the emitters throughout the fixture's light emitting surface.
Remember this isn't a criminal offense. Most warehouse workers are 'judgement proof', in that they don't have the assets to pay anything. The court isn't going to say 'you have to quit your job' because it has financial interest in NOT paying for their welfware because they can't work at what they're skilled at due to the non-compete.
Amazon would pay more than they could recover pretty much every day the court trial went on. Also, there might actually be enough push-back if they tried to change laws.
Personally, I'd like to see a law of 'sure, write up whatever non-competes you want. However, it means that the the employee is still your employee during the non-compete period. Which means you still have to pay them their salary and benefits'. Don't want them working for the competitor for 12 months? You gotta pay them to sit on their ass for 12 months.
Finally, it sounds like they stuck the non-compete into their boilerplate employment documents. It's not intentionally targeting warehouse people, though I suppose that with the increasing amounts of robotics in them, it might be deliberate, so said workers don't go describing how the robots work.
I remember reading that the $20k 'hammer' was actually a set of tools, including a spade & pick, made of a special set of alloys(can't remember what) designed to be non-magnetic, non-sparking, and a few other nons for use in helping to clean up stockpiles of explosives that were destabilizing, getting more sensitive. Given the location and amounts, they couldn't just set them off in location.
The toilet seat was actually a whole toilet system, I can't remember if it was for a plane or submarine. Still not cheap, but something that had to be custom designed and produced for that vehicle, and they were including design costs.
You're only using the FIRST definition of 'break'. There are many more.
"To break something is to" also covers:
to overcome or wear down the spirit, strength, or resistance of; to cause to yield, especially under pressure, torture, or the like:
to disable or destroy by or as if by shattering or crushing:
to ruin financially; make bankrupt
to impair or weaken the power, effect, or intensity of
to train to obedience; tame
to become inoperative or to malfunction, as through wear or damage
I think my use of the word is particularly appropriate.
We're darn close to it anyways. We have a freaky huge moon for the size of our planet, far out of proportion from the rest of the planets.
I've actually theorized that it might be factor in life forming.
CANDU is the only plant design that I'm aware of that doesn't require enrichment. I should have said 'No idea if they're using one', IE a design that doesn't require enrichment.
They should, of course, avoid the problematic RBMK design.
Going by the AC's picture, I guess I'd have to amend my statement to 'center of mass spends at least some time in one of the orbital bodies', if Jupiter and Saturn are enough to yank it outside on occasion.
Such agreements actually exist in the USA, it's just that there are exemptions like 'only if it's 300 ft or less, in which case the person requesting service has to pay for the extra distance'. Generally said distance is 'around' double the average necessary hookup distance, and the extra install is at the marginal cost - IE the extra labor & materials. If it costs $1k just to show up on location and start pushing pipe, but only $1/ft after that, a 100 foot install would cost $1100, the maximum 300 foot one $1300, and the homeowner that's 400 feet away would be charged only $100 for being hooked up.
I said 'for example', and that they need to be 'broken'. That can mean either removing their monopolistic protections, or breaking them through regulations. I suggested examples of both paths.
If service in an area is so broken that a community decides to replace them by issuing municipal bonds to form a cooperative, that's their business.
Find the centerpoint of the rotation. Plop a line through it perpendicular to the motion. The line is your axis.
He might not know about it. Going by what's reported, Comcast really screwed the pooch customer service wise. They spent plenty of effort, just not effective effort.