Sooo. We implement a technology (thorium breeders) that we have far less engineering experience with than the standard reactors and it will automagically instantly be better?
Uh. Who's doing cargo cult again?
(I favor thorium fueled reactors, but it will not automatically be a solution to all problems without further engineering and experience. Nothings easy.)
Oh, and are we talking about using 70s tech to clean sites up to 70s de facto standards of safe it, lock the place up and monitor it forever?
Or the massively more stringent modern ones requiring removal of all the radioactives and chemical contaminants?
I think it's proof that most of us slashdot geeks are such social basket cases even our ancestors had to move to a foreign land and get a neanderthal to date them.
Those slashdotters who are from Africa get a free pass on this one.
Digging down into the links on the discussion page of that article:
Apparently in some countries Telex has a legal status that other communications don't neccesarily have. I'm guessing it's been judged to be evidence of a contract since it is reasonably well authenticated.
eg: "We sent you a Telex ordering N tons of commodity Y by date X and received a confirmation from you." would be admissible in court as a signed contract.
It certainly works for Japan. They've had an outsourced nuclear deterent for decades. Of course, no one asks if there really are nuclear weapons on board the carrier that's based at Yokosuke and the like. Wink. Nudge.
Maybe we could contract with Pakistan or India to provide ours. They might even get into a bidding war over it.
Smoot Hawley wasn't the sort of finance regulation you're thinking of. It was a set of protective trade tariffs that resulted in tariffs being erected by other countries and reduced US international trade drastically.
They are used as an example of how tariffs can work to do exactly the opposite of the job protection they are supposed to in some cases.
Oh, get off your high horse. I was raised a Methodist and they aren't supposed to drink either. Didn't stop quite a number making the pilgrimage to the Pink House bar a few miles aways.;)
It was a somewhat whimsical example made to not be taken seriously save for the demonstration that there could be a leak of info.
Even given the safeguard of having the bank send the coupon, when the coupon is used info is given if that style coupon was given only to the bank to forward.
So, I send a bank a deal aimed at consumers who (for example) bought alcohol and restrict the geography to an overwhelmingly Mormon neighborhood and get back a list of names. I cross reference those with church memberships. I now can target the backsliders.
I have somehow magically not violated anyones privacy.
"Um, you just defended the subsidies on that grounds that people you like get them."
You really need to take a critical reading course. Or do you just re-interpret things to suit what your mental model of the world is?
I wrote that what Jedidiah said didn't square with my own experience and I thought it was a simplistic view of a more complex reality.
What part of
"Whether it should be that way is a different discussion, but the simple picture you paint is misleading at best."
didn't you understand?
Or did you do a TLDR since it was on the 6th line?
As it happens, I tend to be against subsidies. But they're a reality, and if you're in the farm business it's hard to stay competitive if you give them up while others take them. It's a tragedy of the commons situation.
If you want to cuss people out because of that reality, be my guest.
That's similar to what the call centers were like in the 90s here in the US.
I had a friend who worked at one of AOL's centers. He was terribly frustrated and regularly got in trouble for helping people too much (taking too long). But, he actually was solving their problems.
I'm not a big fan of subsidies. A lot of farmers I know aren't either. But, if your in farming, it's a business. If the subsidies are available, you nearly have to take them to stay competitive with those who do.
There are some situations when countries have to use them, but in most cases they're a poor sort of crutch and last far longer than they are really needed.
They're addictive. When you have subsidies people/businesses get used to them and when you cut them it can hurt.
There's a lot of cash rent and crop share, but most of the farmers where I'm at own a lot of their own ground. It's usually been in families for generations.
You get people buying up land for investment, but surprisingly often their at least local. We've got a local cardiac surgeon who owns large amounts in this county. He's not a megacorp either. (Disclaimer: he operated on my dad for an aortic aneurysm. Several farmers I know farm land he owns, but they also have their own land too.)
One of the links is to Donald Sadoway's research group at MIT. His group works on the very topics that will make or break the shift to better energy sources and greater efficiency.
He's also a wonderful teacher who's put up a course at MIT open course ware. It's Solid State Chemistry 3.091 and it utterly rocks. If you want to understand how chemistry impacts energy efficiency and the properties of materials, this is the course for you. And, it's in a format that is great for self teaching.
I know it's a shameless plug, but give me a break. I work in a chemistry department that does a lot of work on improved energy related materials and methods.
I sure know a lot of family owned farms here in east central Illinois that take the subsidy programs.
But, what do I know. I just hang out with farmers and own farmland of my own. I assure you I'm hardly a megacorp.
Yes, the large corporations like ADM and many others do large lobbying pushes, but they don't directly vote. In farm states (you probably call them fly-over states), the congress-critters often rely on the farm vote to keep their jobs.
Whether it should be that way is a different discussion, but the simple picture you paint is misleading at best.
I've been watching Gaia's timeline for more than a decade. This mission is doing so many worthwhile things it's amazing. High resolution astrometry data for a billion stars.
Astrometry may not have the "pretty picture" allure of the Hubble or Webb telescopes, but it's in many ways even more important. Astronomers will be mining this data for a long time.
I remember the anticipation when Hipparcos launched and the chagrin when it didn't reach proper orbit. The ability to not only recover from that, but exceed the original aims of the mission was very impressive.
"We can basically say renewable energy fsckin works, now ?"
You can say whatever you want.
I can put lipstick on a pig and say it's Lindsay Lohan but I don't think I'd get many takers.;)
Renewable energy certainly works. On some scales, in some markets, and in some applications.
The chemistry and chem engineering departments I work in do boatloads of work trying to make it and other energy technologies cheaper, better and more efficient. Better batteries, fuel cells, materials for solar cells, biofuels, etc. We have groups working on all of those.
We're getting there. But, there's still a lot to do.
(Disclaimer, I fix lab equipment and research instruments. I'm not currently doing research work, but I keep up with a lot of the work that's done here.)
Oh, the chart itself is simple. The problem is, it's incomplete info without much context.
You have to go to the EIA.gov web site and look at other tables than the one linked to find out that the big part of biomass used is wood.
That's been fairly steady for decades. A lot of that is paper and forestry products burning the waste wood to power their plants, and ignorant rural rednecks like me stoking up the fireplace among other things. (Gotta power those moonshine stills with something. The revenuers track electrical and fuel deliveries anymore.)
I'm not sure that's exactly what most people are thinking of as "green" energy. And chopping down a tree to burn it and release carbon immediately sure doesn't sequester carbon very well.
A lot of the rest of the biomass is ethanol in gasoline which is mandated more as a subsidy to farming and as an oxygenator rather than as a real competitor to gasoline.
Conventional hydropower is another huge part of these "renewables". Just try to build a new dam and found out how green the environmentalists think it is.
So, if you just take it as "simple" and only look at that one chart it's rather misleading.
I'll give Kaku a bit more credit on the string theory area. He did work on string field theory, and was an author on one of the first papers on it. That's real.
Then again, I'm something of a string theory skeptic. And when some media type mistakenly says that Kaku started string theory, Nambu, Nielsen and Susskind et al have to be giggling and rolling their eyes.
Slashdot Mirror
The illegal aliens from Mercury already have a pretty high radiation tolerance.
"sodium cooled fast breeder reactors are way cool, we should build loads more of them and solve all the world's ecological problems!"
You've converted to that? Way cool.
I was beginning to lose hope for you.
Sooo. We implement a technology (thorium breeders) that we have far less engineering experience with than the standard reactors and it will automagically instantly be better?
Uh. Who's doing cargo cult again?
(I favor thorium fueled reactors, but it will not automatically be a solution to all problems without further engineering and experience. Nothings easy.)
Oh, and are we talking about using 70s tech to clean sites up to 70s de facto standards of safe it, lock the place up and monitor it forever?
Or the massively more stringent modern ones requiring removal of all the radioactives and chemical contaminants?
DFR, the reactor they're talking about in this case, used a liquid sodium potassium alloy for coolant.
I think it's proof that most of us slashdot geeks are such social basket cases even our ancestors had to move to a foreign land and get a neanderthal to date them.
Those slashdotters who are from Africa get a free pass on this one.
Digging down into the links on the discussion page of that article:
Apparently in some countries Telex has a legal status that other communications don't neccesarily have. I'm guessing it's been judged to be evidence of a contract since it is reasonably well authenticated.
eg: "We sent you a Telex ordering N tons of commodity Y by date X and received a confirmation from you." would be admissible in court as a signed contract.
It certainly works for Japan. They've had an outsourced nuclear deterent for decades. Of course, no one asks if there really are nuclear weapons on board the carrier that's based at Yokosuke and the like. Wink. Nudge.
Maybe we could contract with Pakistan or India to provide ours. They might even get into a bidding war over it.
I fear it's you, my dear AC who lack clue here.
Smoot Hawley wasn't the sort of finance regulation you're thinking of. It was a set of protective trade tariffs that resulted in tariffs being erected by other countries and reduced US international trade drastically.
They are used as an example of how tariffs can work to do exactly the opposite of the job protection they are supposed to in some cases.
The Tariff Act of 1930 is better known by another name: The Smoot-Hawley Tariff.
Most of that was repealed. How interesting to know that sections of it are still around.
Oh, get off your high horse. I was raised a Methodist and they aren't supposed to drink either. Didn't stop quite a number making the pilgrimage to the Pink House bar a few miles aways. ;)
It was a somewhat whimsical example made to not be taken seriously save for the demonstration that there could be a leak of info.
Even given the safeguard of having the bank send the coupon, when the coupon is used info is given if that style coupon was given only to the bank to forward.
Exactly. My example was spur of the moment, so not all that well formed. Given some thought, you can come up with more effective scenarios.
But regardless, you give information on at least some of the customers to the retailer (or whoever the retailer is fronting for).
So, I send a bank a deal aimed at consumers who (for example) bought alcohol and restrict the geography to an overwhelmingly Mormon neighborhood and get back a list of names. I cross reference those with church memberships. I now can target the backsliders.
I have somehow magically not violated anyones privacy.
A purpose built machine will often vastly outperform a general purpose computer.
The nice thing about an FPGA machine is that creating the purpose built machine is much faster.
"Um, you just defended the subsidies on that grounds that people you like get them."
You really need to take a critical reading course. Or do you just re-interpret things to suit what your mental model of the world is?
I wrote that what Jedidiah said didn't square with my own experience and I thought it was a simplistic view of a more complex reality.
What part of
"Whether it should be that way is a different discussion, but the simple picture you paint is misleading at best."
didn't you understand?
Or did you do a TLDR since it was on the 6th line?
As it happens, I tend to be against subsidies. But they're a reality, and if you're in the farm business it's hard to stay competitive if you give them up while others take them. It's a tragedy of the commons situation.
If you want to cuss people out because of that reality, be my guest.
That's similar to what the call centers were like in the 90s here in the US.
I had a friend who worked at one of AOL's centers. He was terribly frustrated and regularly got in trouble for helping people too much (taking too long). But, he actually was solving their problems.
I'm not a big fan of subsidies. A lot of farmers I know aren't either. But, if your in farming, it's a business. If the subsidies are available, you nearly have to take them to stay competitive with those who do.
There are some situations when countries have to use them, but in most cases they're a poor sort of crutch and last far longer than they are really needed.
They're addictive. When you have subsidies people/businesses get used to them and when you cut them it can hurt.
Since you seem to know what my (and their) opinions on subsidies are better than I do, I'll just let you tell me.
Makes the argument a lot easier for you, no? I'll just listen to you rant. Pass the popcorn.
There's a lot of cash rent and crop share, but most of the farmers where I'm at own a lot of their own ground. It's usually been in families for generations.
You get people buying up land for investment, but surprisingly often their at least local. We've got a local cardiac surgeon who owns large amounts in this county. He's not a megacorp either. (Disclaimer: he operated on my dad for an aortic aneurysm. Several farmers I know farm land he owns, but they also have their own land too.)
One of the links is to Donald Sadoway's research group at MIT. His group works on the very topics that will make or break the shift to better energy sources and greater efficiency.
He's also a wonderful teacher who's put up a course at MIT open course ware. It's Solid State Chemistry 3.091 and it utterly rocks. If you want to understand how chemistry impacts energy efficiency and the properties of materials, this is the course for you. And, it's in a format that is great for self teaching.
3.091 course link
I know it's a shameless plug, but give me a break. I work in a chemistry department that does a lot of work on improved energy related materials and methods.
Really? You live in the city, right?
I sure know a lot of family owned farms here in east central Illinois that take the subsidy programs.
But, what do I know. I just hang out with farmers and own farmland of my own. I assure you I'm hardly a megacorp.
Yes, the large corporations like ADM and many others do large lobbying pushes, but they don't directly vote. In farm states (you probably call them fly-over states), the congress-critters often rely on the farm vote to keep their jobs.
Whether it should be that way is a different discussion, but the simple picture you paint is misleading at best.
"It does much, much more than that"
I've been watching Gaia's timeline for more than a decade. This mission is doing so many worthwhile things it's amazing. High resolution astrometry data for a billion stars.
Astrometry may not have the "pretty picture" allure of the Hubble or Webb telescopes, but it's in many ways even more important. Astronomers will be mining this data for a long time.
I remember the anticipation when Hipparcos launched and the chagrin when it didn't reach proper orbit. The ability to not only recover from that, but exceed the original aims of the mission was very impressive.
Was your great grandpappy one of those who was laughing at the Wright brothers and saying "If man were meant to fly, he'd have wings."?
Or are you just a researcher whose proposal didn't get funded?
"We can basically say renewable energy fsckin works, now ?"
You can say whatever you want.
I can put lipstick on a pig and say it's Lindsay Lohan but I don't think I'd get many takers. ;)
Renewable energy certainly works. On some scales, in some markets, and in some applications.
The chemistry and chem engineering departments I work in do boatloads of work trying to make it and other energy technologies cheaper, better and more efficient. Better batteries, fuel cells, materials for solar cells, biofuels, etc. We have groups working on all of those.
We're getting there. But, there's still a lot to do.
(Disclaimer, I fix lab equipment and research instruments. I'm not currently doing research work, but I keep up with a lot of the work that's done here.)
"It doesn't get much simpler."
Oh, the chart itself is simple. The problem is, it's incomplete info without much context.
You have to go to the EIA.gov web site and look at other tables than the one linked to find out that the big part of biomass used is wood.
That's been fairly steady for decades. A lot of that is paper and forestry products burning the waste wood to power their plants, and ignorant rural rednecks like me stoking up the fireplace among other things. (Gotta power those moonshine stills with something. The revenuers track electrical and fuel deliveries anymore.)
I'm not sure that's exactly what most people are thinking of as "green" energy. And chopping down a tree to burn it and release carbon immediately sure doesn't sequester carbon very well.
A lot of the rest of the biomass is ethanol in gasoline which is mandated more as a subsidy to farming and as an oxygenator rather than as a real competitor to gasoline.
Conventional hydropower is another huge part of these "renewables". Just try to build a new dam and found out how green the environmentalists think it is.
So, if you just take it as "simple" and only look at that one chart it's rather misleading.
I'll give Kaku a bit more credit on the string theory area. He did work on string field theory, and was an author on one of the first papers on it. That's real.
Then again, I'm something of a string theory skeptic. And when some media type mistakenly says that Kaku started string theory, Nambu, Nielsen and Susskind et al have to be giggling and rolling their eyes.