Stole? They're using AP1000 reactors from westinghouse. That's not theft, that's called buying. Now to get the contract Westinghouse agreed to a join project with the chinese on a new reactor design that the chinese will own the domestic IP to, but export is still westinghouse. Which is what is otherwise called a technology transfer or sale of technology.
They're probably figuring building them in china, with corrupt chinese workers and officials is a recipe for disaster.
Are they building their new nuclear reactors with 50 year old technology on fault lines next to an ocean with an insufficient battery back up? That would be the only reason a sensible person would look at the Fukushima and decide not to build a nuclear power plant.
Probably close to all 3 of the above actually.
Seriously.
That fault line isn't a valid building location? No problem sir, how much to 'move the fault line' on that map? Done and done. China has a big coast, that's most of their economic activity, and if not a coast, a major river (which faces essentially the same weird random shit happening problem). Things like safe materials and locations aren't high priorities when you can bribe your way to safety.
And 50 year old technology. Well are you going to sell them brand new technology? How new is our technology? For quite a while we weren't doing anything dramatically different with reactor designs in the west. So... maybe not a 50 year old design, but a design that is basically 40 years old? That wouldn't surprise me in the slightest.
There are lessons every reactor can learn from fukushima about, as you say, battery backups and various types of alternate power arrangements and so on. But their 'generation II' reactors in many cases are technology from the 50's through the 70's give or take some minor updating but the core reactor tech didn't change much. Fukushima Daiichi used boiling water reactors which, from the article, are generation 2 reactors. Which is what the chinese are phasing out.
Reactor technology didn't radically change much in the last 40 years, or even a bit longer than that. At least not in the core mode of operation (boiling water, gas cooled, pressurized water etc.). Add to that the fact that the chinese are probably doing a shitty job of actually building the reactors in some cases (where the japanese built it the way it was intended, the design just wasn't up to the disaster, would you want to have trusted chinese concrete with that problem too?) and you're begging for trouble. A lot of it.
If you read up on the AP1000... while I'd be confident of westinghouse building them properly in the US, there's a LOT that can go wrong with that design if people try and cut corners. If I were the chinese government I'd be thinking they aren't really the best plan given corruption. Lopping off the head of a corrupt official doesn't put 100 000 people back in their homes.
The one option nobody installing about is allow competition in money.
Erm... no one talks about it because it exists. You don't have to use your own currency. You can do business in any foreign currency and then convert to dollars for tax purposes, and you can barter. You just still have to pay tax on the equivalent to your own currency. Lots of countries peg their currencies to someone else's for just that reason, it's a free market as to which currency you pick.
The problem with fiat money is that it can be created at no cost. That is the ultimate power and will always be abused.
How often has it actually been abused and how often has it been used to positive effect? Germany Japan and Canada are where we are because we've devalued currencies relative to the dollar by conjuring money out of thin air essentially, keeping our exports competitive. The rising cost of the canadian dollar (due to oil) for example has eviscerated the manufacturing sector who are now 30% or so more expensive to hire than they were 15 years ago. If we had a government that cared about manufacturing and the hundreds of thousands of jobs that come with that and the 16 billion dollar deficit ontario runs because of the manufacturing crash the federal government would have kept devaluing the dollar to keep it at probably 60 or 70 cents US.
Hyperinflation in most cases is actually symptomatic of a different problem, rather than a cause of it. The Weimar republic, zimbabwe, argentina the free city of Danzig, the US in the independence revolt, the both sides in the civil war etc. all had serious inflation problems because their economies were being wrecked by various other factors (wars, debt in foreign currency, coups, sanctions etc.), and in those cases weird shit happens. Weird shit happens with gold too, because if you couldn't get gold due to sanctions for trade you're basically trapped in a massive economic death spiral.
Small devaluation to positive effect is much harder to spit out a list of. It doesn't make huge sexy numbers that are entertaining (like having a quadrillion dollar note being really equal to one dollar), when you devalue your currency by 5% which keeps your exports competitive no one writes a giant wikipedia article on it.
Sure, but the vast majority of people have debt, or debt and savings (have a mortgage, that's debt). Devaluing debt is good for them. Attracting investment/tourism/making exports better are all good things as that creates jobs and helps people get out of debt. An uncompetitive economy has a very hard time internally devaluing (imagine everyone taking a 2% pay cut a year).
As I said to someone else, it's a mostly american concept that devaluing a currency could ever be bad. Germany Japan Canada all have used currency devaluation quite successfully to bolster their economies.
Also, whatever you may think of government debt, it's there, the country can't just absolve itself of paying it, so it has to be paid off somehow. If you're a greek, on a personal basis, the best thing to do is to leave greece because otherwise you're going to be paying 20% of your taxes into interest on debt incurred before you could even pay tax. That debt has to be whittled down, and the only ways to do that are increased tax revenue (which directly takes money out of peoples hands), or inflation which effectively reduces the value of the debt. Cutting spending shrinks the economy and makes the debt proportionally worse (so long as there's high unemployment, which there is, if there's low unemployment cutting the size of government provides more labour for the private sector to take advantage of).
You have to be careful, because you suggested something thats true, but only in a narrow range.
The people should be completely fucked over for the value of their saved money
The important part here is that you're supposing that's a lot of people. If someone has net debt (including their liabilities through government) then devaluing the debt is good for them. If they can keep wage growth on part with, or faster than their interest rates, their debt will shrink proportionally to their earnings and make them net wealth holders sooner. If they have *any* debt at all devaluing debt through inflation is helps them with part of their balance sheet, whether their 'cash on hand' can keep appropriate pace is trickier.
Funny how it works that the rich and bankers are the ones that end up getting the money because it is in "the people's best interest".
You can't have it both ways. Either it's bad for people who have money (the rich, who's cash holdings are devalued) or it's good for the rich (who's are getting interest on the debt) it can't be both, though it can be neutral. So which is your argument? Inflation will reduce their wealth slowly, because as you say, it devalued holding denominated in that currency. So yes, if you have 4% inflation and they have 3% salary growth they appear to be making a lot of money, but their relative position to the overall economy would be retreating.
Also, deflation is far more problematic than inflation, so you don't want that. Small inflation is always preferable to deflation, (and it's very hard to hit a 0 inflation target intentionally), and more inflation has advantages in getting out of debt.
HP's track record with tablets is not all that impressive, but this is a big blow to Windows 8
Quite the opposite. Window RT is a monumentally stupid idea. HP not supporting it is nothing but good. The level of consumer confusion it will create is disastrous. "Why does this work on your tablet and not mine" why does my tablet not have an arm, or need an arm?
If microsoft wants to gradually trend the market towards having split arm and x86 business at the same time they can do it themselves, no one in their right mind should be producing windows arm anything.
Now microsoft doing it might shame intel into competing better and so on, that's good. But theoretical competition that drives innovation being good isn't the same as confusing users who, for the last 30 years have never understood system requirements and adding a new completely completely unresolvable compatibility problem is really bad for the windows market and stands in opposition to the one thing they're trying to do, which is make a simplified experience for users.
My analysis is actually more useful than that. by a lot.
As I say, there's the velocity factor, there aren't 60 trillion dollars (equivalent) floating around. There's probably 4 or 5 trillion dollars that cycle 12-15 times per year.
There's certainly somewhere close to 5 or 6 trillion dollars in gold in existence right now, that could be turned into currency. The issue then is how much gold *per person* is there now, how much gold per person was there at each point in the last decade, how do you facilitate the moving of the money and so on.
Sure, but conceptually massive overprinting of money is easier to understand than quantitative easing and things like buying back debt with non existent money and so on. Conjuring money out of thin air is conjuring out of thin air, however you want to do it.
No matter how a government decides it's currency they need some sort of central bank to manage the interchanges between all the banks and the government. The precise mechanism by which government devalue is secondary to their capacity to do so.
Bitcoins and gold advocates view the ability to devalue currency as an inherent flaw in the system. This is primarily an american viewpoint, because the US got used to having strong foreign buying power with it's dollar, because everyone else devalued relative to the US to make themselves more competitive. For export driven economies (germany, japan, canada) devaluation has always been a feature in the system. More intertwined complex economies, the UK, France, Italy etc. view fiat currency as a tool they can use to further policy, and valuing and devaluing depending on particular circumstance is a feature.
It probably can be done. But then would be explicitly undone by governments and insurance companies by reporting requirements. In effect that is the same as cash transactions. Lots of countries (notably in the Caribbean) take US dollars cash for transactions, the governments fix their exchange rates to US dollars, but when you pay your cabbie 100 USD he's certainly not declaring 100 USD on his income tax.
Prove to me that you only had 50k in income with a perfectly anonymous transaction system. Prove to me that you had 6 million dollars in expenses. Who did you pay this to, for what?
Prove to me that this money was stolen from you, and you just didn't spend it.
Prove to me that you have this much in income so that I can give you a loan. If I give you loan in Euros and you have income in dollars I have to price into that the risk of currencies changing relative to each other. If I give you a loan in Euro's and you only collect income in annonbitcoins how do I value anonbitcoins relative to euro's?
What if there aren't enough anonbitcoins in the system to support a growing population or a more productive economy? Who creates more? What control (or lack of control) do I have over the person creating more anonbitcoins? etc. etc. etc.
The simplest fully anonymous system would be one that gives everyone a unique ID, everyone connects to the central database that handles transactions (assuming perfect security to the database). The database logs no transactions, once a transaction is complete it is done and irreversibly one way, and randomly changes your unique ID after each transaction. No logging would make it fully anonymous (just like cash!), but everyone would have to explicitly trust the issuing authority (whomever controls the database) to responsibly manage it (just like the government!). If you mean a cryptographically untracably anonymous system I don't think that's realistically possible with todays maths. Every exchange that can happen *can* be logged, and since it requires unique identifiers it's possible to log the transactions and work backwords so to speak. To prevent effective logging you need to change unique identifiers unpredictably, and explicitly not log the changes.
World GDP is up to 60 trillion dollars BECAUSE the dollar is not backed by gold anymore. The money supply has been inflated, which devalues the currency.
Correct. Progress. Were not for fiat currency the US would have been bankrupted by the french and Swiss in the 70's demanding repayment for all outstanding debts in gold, china would still be horribly impoverished as rich countries hoarded gold and kept it away from the chinese etc. And we'd still have world GDP would be significantly smaller, everyone would have less wealth and less money flowing through their hands. This is perhaps the greatest success of ditching metal as a currency dramatically improving peoples lives. If it weren't for that the UK could theoretically still be buried with 200 or 300% of GDP in debt in gold that it could never pay back from WW2, leaving it a shell of a country.
Devaluing the currency removes the incentive to save, and forces people to 'invest'
Yep, that's probably the most profoundly useful thing about fiat currency. Gold sitting in a vault isn't flowing into the economy. Investing, even into boring government debt at least keeps the money moving around. Admittedly I probably should have clarified that I was talking about a crude approximation on the velocity factor in economic theory. It makes a huge difference. Sitting on money in a vault is pretty much the most useless thing you can do with it, and deprives everyone else of access to it, contracting the economy as a whole.
If gold was still used by everyone as money, politicians couldn't promise things they can't afford, and bankers couldn't endlessly inflate the money supply, forcing everyone to 'invest' with them.
Right. That's the situation Greece is in. They don't control the supply of euro's any more than they would control the supply of gold. They have 160 or so percent of GDP in debt, can't get investment (euro's or gold) so they need to devalue, which, when you have euro's and gold basically spirals the country deeper into debt that it can't pay off. If they could print more money, say an inflation target of 4% they would be devaluing greek labour relative to say germany, which would fairly quickly make greece a good investment opportunity for business (decreasing relative labour costs), a cheaper vacation spot as time goes on etc. And all that debt they had would start to chip away. They'd still be 10 years getting to 100% of GDP in debt, but as it is in 10 years greece is going to have 170 or 180% of GDP, if not more (unless they go bankrupt obviously) in debt, a population that's fleeing and they're going to face a complete economic disaster. In that sense the Euro and Gold are no different. Note that I'm explicitly not saying the US dollar is the same way, since the US has a federal system that doesn't cut health spending or pensions in florida just because there was a housing crash in florida. By that reasoning another option for the Euro is a more federal state where certain things (pensions, healthcare, justice, education, state ownership of pan euro corporations, such as the bank bailouts, would be trans Eurozone). But that's a whole other topic.
Yes, DUI is covered under those, so why does it get it's special laws? Oh, because it's *NOT* about safety.
Because it's actually easier to quantify. So you can clearly specify, what exactly counts as impaired and don't leave as much up to judges and police, which would lead to more arbitrary enforcement of laws. That's not so much about safety as it is about fairness in the process. Prove someone had a safe (or unsafe) amount of alcohol in their bloodstream. That's a problem that can be neatly quantified with a blood alcohol test. Prove that someone was too tired to safely (or unsafely) drive and it's much harder, basically you have to wait until they fall asleep and crash or are demonstrably weaving along the road, and even then the police don't have a handy scientific piece of evidence to work from, it becomes eye witness testimony or after the fact evidence when something bad already happened. And well, prevention is produces far more safety than response after the fact.
sure. Governments tax (and borrow) ~ 40% of the value of economies in big countries, and they spend it. It's more complicated than that because the people governments pay for things themselves pay tax, so when the government pays someone 100k a year and they pay back 25k in taxes the governments net cost was only 75, and stuff like that. But the basic premise still applies. And of course borrowing (by itself) isn't free money, governments cough up quite a lot in interest payments, which themselves are taxed.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Government_spending
When I said 40% I should probably have clarified that's for rich or rich ish countries. Some of europe is up around 50%, the US and Japan just under 40, Russia mid 30s'. Lots of poor countries are in the 30's or lower. South Korea and Taiwan are down in the 30 and 20 ish range.
Inflation can decrease the relative value of debt, but that applies as much to government debt as private debt, as long as your income growth exceeds your interest rates the relative value of debt is decreasing.
Cash isn't hugely problematic except that cash transactions can dodge tax, and move large amounts of money around (especially in the EU when they have 500 euro notes) for criminal enterprise without government oversight.
The main things with cash that people don't like is that government can simply print more of it to devalue it, so holding physical cash for any length of time gradually loses the relative value of the cash, and that cash can be 'lost' due to fire theft etc. and it's inherently hard to secure for that reason. The other issue of course is convenience and theft. No one really likes carrying around a pocketful of change, cash is inconvenient for large transactions that are legitimate (because governments try and clamp down on large cash transactions that would be illegitimate).
Cash is also more error prone than electronic transactions. In the end I don't actually think this is a huge problem. But human error costs factor into things as well.
1. Has all the same problems as cash (theft, controlled production by someone else etc.), with the added downside that if you 'lose' gold (say in the world trade centre or a sunken ship). If you had gold in a WTC vault you might have been years getting it back, and if it's lost at sea you might never get it back or you might only get back part of its value. Cash? Burned up, bottom of the ocean etc? No problem, the government can just print more to make up for it. Has only value anyone ascribes to it, which significantly overinflates the value if everyone uses gold (creating a synthetic demand), and can be easily depreciated in value by anyone so inclined.
Gold is only sort of anonymous. Sure, trading you a gold bar can be done anonymously. But lugging around gold bars sucks, and is extremely risky. And how do you prove your ownership of the gold? Who verifies that quality (and therefore value of the gold?) Can you stamp it, or otherwise mark it to certify quality and ownership? How do you control the flow of gold into or out of a country? Can only the government stamp gold with serial numbers? For insurance purposes do you have to keep the serial numbers of all gold bars you have (or had) in case of theft? The moment you start trying to build any sort of system around any metal currency you arrive at needing 'metal certificates' which are like any other cash except they are explicitly bound to the value of the metal.
Then you run into the very serious problem of whether or not there is enough gold in the world to represent the value you need. Seriously. Word GDP is up in the 60 trillion dollar range spread over 7 billion people or so. Now you don't need 60 trillion dollars in gold, but hundreds of billions of dollars of it, and gold being 'saved' is not really in the economy anymore (so you need even more gold for some people). If you need say 60 billion dollars equivalent in currency, total, in the world, and all that money moves 1000 times (each dollar is transacted 1000 times*) then sure, you're able to get enough gold. What if you need 1.2 trillion dollars in currency moving around to support 60 trillion dollars in wealth? Is there even 1.2 trillion dollars in gold in the world? How about 5 trillion? 6? How serious would the difference between 5 and 6 be?
Right now the world has about 30 000 tonnes of gold in reserves by governments. And one tonne of gold is worth about 52 million dollars (http://www.onlygold.com/tutorialpages/value_of_gold.asp http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gold_reserve). That means there's only about 1.5, 1.6 trillion dollars worth of gold in the worldwide currency reserves.
And according to http://ycharts.com/indicators/us_currency_in_circulation the US dollar itself has about 1.1 trillion in circulation, meaning the world economy needs more like 4 or 5 trillion dollars worth of currency (that is, by the way, a rough guess, I could easily be off by a couple of trillion dollars in either direction).
Now if you were willing to convert the entire worlds jewelry supply (which is what gives gold value at all), along with all other stores of gold, not just central banks into money then sure, you could probably get 5 trillion dollars in gold, give or take. Which might be enough for the economy today. But what would happen to the value of gold then? It'd be ugly, and then you're handing control of your currency to countries that produce the most gold and so on.
All in all metal standards for money are full of problems, which can manifest to be extremely serious effects, which is why we don't use them anymore.
1. Covered under the blanket "driving while distracted" "reckless driving" etc. Complaining that limits on blood alcohol don't cover other forms of impairment is the same as complaining that murder laws don't cover theft. Just because it's not covered by this rule doesn't mean it isn't covered.
2. I already addressed that.
The law is a slow meandering beast. The US should have had socialized medicine around 1920 or at the latest by the 1960's. Yet it's still not there. Evidence doesn't make governments move quickly. They get there eventually though.
Nor by the way, is the fact that you can directly measure impairment 'false'. Proving 'tiredness' is much harder, but if you fall asleep while driving and cause an accident just about everywhere has a statute that will get your ass. The Japanese go so far as to not care at all about the type of tiredness
Notice this is a 2 page 'free' article. Unfortunately that's all I can give you if you can't access scientific journals (and if you can you clearly don't have the skills to understand them, hopefully you're still in highschool).
Sleep+drink isn't central to the question. The question is how does performance dropoff as you get drunk. Then how does performance drop off as you get tired. That gives the (pointless) measure of 'equivalent to blood alcohol' effect of being tired.
Chart 2 clearly shows that being awake for 15-16 hours is no different from having a BAC of 0.04, and neither of those have much of a meaningful variance in measurable performance. Being up longer than that, having a BAC of 0.05 or more both clearly have measurable dropoffs in performance.
They aren't trying to show the combined effects of drunkenness and tiredness. That would certainly be valid, and more valuable. But this is a 3 page article in a correspondence journal given away for free, and it's clearly more of an interesting thing to consider than any sort of serious new information. It wasn't news before that being tired reduced performance, and it wasn't news before that being drunk reduced performance.
Talking on a handsfree is less safe than being drunk, but is explicitly legal. The real problem with the laws is that they are not regarding safety, but enforcing prohibition. When's the last time a traffic law was based on actual safety studies? Oh, that's right, never.
Right, but talking on a cell phone isn't lots of places. The cellular phone lobby is strong. But that's going to unwind when people shift to handsfree and keep having accidents. In fact talking on a cell phone is banned precisely because of the evidence that it's bad (as is texting while driving). The cell industry managed to get governments to ignore the evidence on handsfree driving, for now.
Countries that have 0 blood alcohol limits are making a moral judgment. Countries that have a 0.04 - 0.05 have made a very clear scientific judgment based on when your driving performance starts to drop off. People still clinging to 0.08 are making an economic and 'personal freedom' lobby based judgment.
The "solution" is to monitor impairment
I would not be surprised if in future all cars have ignition locks on them. Which has been suggested. They don't need to be government owned, they just need to be a standard component of every vehicle, and they need to be maintained and in working order. A new car costs what, 12, 13K on the low end, an ignition interlock device can be about 50 bucks if you put them in every vehicle.
The rest of your sentence is simply not true though. Blood alcohol level is measurable, and the dropoff effect in performance is quite well quantified. That's why the limit is 0.05 most places.
They're just starting into raid testing. So probably september/october range. They probably want to get it out before the christmas rush (which would cannibalize other activision product sales). Which sounds out of place in the games business, but WoW lives in its own ecosystem within the games business.
When you're talking about events 1200 years ago you're not exactly looking for a telescope picture.
There's evidence of a supernova, or possibly something else, from that time period in Japan. So what was it? Well, apparently in the UK they observed some weird shit that could have been a supernova. So it might actually have been a supernova.
Imagine if this was the other way. There was some written european evidence of some weird red thing in the sky in 774. What would tell what that red thing was? a spike in carbon 14 in tree rings from that time period would make 'supernova' a good guess.
It's not really a sciences problem, it's a language problem. Outside of Japan I bet most people didn't really care, and the Japanese didn't have the desire to search through piles of old foreign language documents on the vague guess they might say something that could have caused a carbon 14 spike in 773, 774 or 775. Digitized images and electronic search make that problem easier, and now the question for verification becomes one of finding if there are similar descriptions in other languages for that time period.
It's not like you have 1 driver you are trying to improve the performance of where you focus your efforts on their most dominant problem. There are millions of drivers driving billions of kilometres every year. To combat bad drivers you have things like graduated licencing, incentives for driver training etc. You also have a punishment system for bad drivers. For drunks it's the same basic problem, this is a defined problem (alcohol above about 0.04 reduces your ability to drive) so the government has set some resources to trying to address the problem. The legal limit most places is 0.05 (or 0.08 in the US canada and the UK) and there's enough statistical analysis to determine what the benefit or cost would be to lower it from 0.08 to 0.05. I posted elsewhere in this same overall thread a link to a NZ study that figures 16-72 deaths per year would be prevented and 640-1200 ish injuries. The 'public awareness' portion is effectively the same thing as driver training - make sure people know what they're doing that's bad, give them an opportunity to not do it (i.e. don't drive drunk and don't drive without training) and then there's a punishment regime in place.
Fair enough. The most likely outcome of an accident is one with a parked car. What the accident rate for people who are driving while drunk is harder to figure.
it seemed like that was sort of implied, but obviously not to some people. Such are forums.
Only if it was clear that the post wasn't particularly rigorous, directed at someone clearly not being intellectually honest, with the criticism by someone who themselves does the same thing.
http://www.fatiguescience.com/assets/pdf/Alcohol-Fatigue.pdf (which I posted elsewhere).
Not from that link, but most places the drunk driving limit is 0.05. From figure 1b in that link it's quite clear that up to 0.04 you basically can't detect a performance dropoff.
After that it's a risk tolerance calculations.
I posted elsewhere in this thread (related to the same 0 tolerance post) a few other links, basically in new zealand they figure they'd save 16-72 lives a year and 640-1200 ish injuries a year by lowering the limit from 0.08 to 0.05. There are, if you are inclined to look for it, statistics for the countries (such as france) that reduced the limit from 0.08 to 0.05.
So then what's the risk that you want? Up to 0.04 there's virtually no meaningful or measurable risk. After that you start seeing a decrease in driving performance.
Also japan has the same thing you suggest. Impairment is impairment, they don't care if you're tired, high, drunk etc.. It's all impaired.
The reason you can't just rely on personal judgment is that people are bad at judging their own drunkenness, and the government doesn't want you to be recklessly on the road. It's much easier for everyone if they set a limit based on (quite well defined) averages about how people perform than let you judge for yourself and hope you don't cause an accident.
Just because performance drops off after 0.04 doesn't mean that's where the limit should be.
I posted above or below or something, with a couple of more sophisticated links. To 0.04 it's basically impossible to tell that there's a performance dropoff. After that point there is a dropoff, but 0.05 (which is the legal limit in most of the world) is not much different. But that's a much more sophisticated risk analysis. The data is pretty clear, there's almost no risk up to 0.04, beyond that, your mileage may vary.
http://www.fatiguescience.com/assets/pdf/Alcohol-Fatigue.pdf (as I posted elsewhere).
Figure 2 (top left corner) is 'equivalent to drink', if you get tired enough you stop behaving like a drunk.
Figure 1b is where the real money is. And it's quite clearly a downward trend after 1.04. There appears to be one outlying data point at 0.1. And I would say that highlights what's wrong with their data at all (admittedly, it's not the focus of the paper but still) they should have error bars on their data points, or the table sample size.
The second link actually agrees with the first more or less, but it's harder to read.
Just looking at the data there is no situation where the 0.10 and 0.12 outperform the 0.04, even including the one wacky data point.
The first links actual research is figure 2, so they have error bars correctly there, but that's 'equivalent to the effect of drink' not 'effect of drink' which is figure 1b.
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Stole? They're using AP1000 reactors from westinghouse. That's not theft, that's called buying. Now to get the contract Westinghouse agreed to a join project with the chinese on a new reactor design that the chinese will own the domestic IP to, but export is still westinghouse. Which is what is otherwise called a technology transfer or sale of technology.
They're probably figuring building them in china, with corrupt chinese workers and officials is a recipe for disaster.
Are they building their new nuclear reactors with 50 year old technology on fault lines next to an ocean with an insufficient battery back up? That would be the only reason a sensible person would look at the Fukushima and decide not to build a nuclear power plant.
Probably close to all 3 of the above actually.
Seriously.
That fault line isn't a valid building location? No problem sir, how much to 'move the fault line' on that map? Done and done. China has a big coast, that's most of their economic activity, and if not a coast, a major river (which faces essentially the same weird random shit happening problem). Things like safe materials and locations aren't high priorities when you can bribe your way to safety.
And 50 year old technology. Well are you going to sell them brand new technology? How new is our technology? For quite a while we weren't doing anything dramatically different with reactor designs in the west. So... maybe not a 50 year old design, but a design that is basically 40 years old? That wouldn't surprise me in the slightest.
There are lessons every reactor can learn from fukushima about, as you say, battery backups and various types of alternate power arrangements and so on. But their 'generation II' reactors in many cases are technology from the 50's through the 70's give or take some minor updating but the core reactor tech didn't change much. Fukushima Daiichi used boiling water reactors which, from the article, are generation 2 reactors. Which is what the chinese are phasing out.
Reactor technology didn't radically change much in the last 40 years, or even a bit longer than that. At least not in the core mode of operation (boiling water, gas cooled, pressurized water etc.). Add to that the fact that the chinese are probably doing a shitty job of actually building the reactors in some cases (where the japanese built it the way it was intended, the design just wasn't up to the disaster, would you want to have trusted chinese concrete with that problem too?) and you're begging for trouble. A lot of it.
If you read up on the AP1000... while I'd be confident of westinghouse building them properly in the US, there's a LOT that can go wrong with that design if people try and cut corners. If I were the chinese government I'd be thinking they aren't really the best plan given corruption. Lopping off the head of a corrupt official doesn't put 100 000 people back in their homes.
The one option nobody installing about is allow competition in money.
Erm... no one talks about it because it exists. You don't have to use your own currency. You can do business in any foreign currency and then convert to dollars for tax purposes, and you can barter. You just still have to pay tax on the equivalent to your own currency. Lots of countries peg their currencies to someone else's for just that reason, it's a free market as to which currency you pick.
The problem with fiat money is that it can be created at no cost. That is the ultimate power and will always be abused.
How often has it actually been abused and how often has it been used to positive effect? Germany Japan and Canada are where we are because we've devalued currencies relative to the dollar by conjuring money out of thin air essentially, keeping our exports competitive. The rising cost of the canadian dollar (due to oil) for example has eviscerated the manufacturing sector who are now 30% or so more expensive to hire than they were 15 years ago. If we had a government that cared about manufacturing and the hundreds of thousands of jobs that come with that and the 16 billion dollar deficit ontario runs because of the manufacturing crash the federal government would have kept devaluing the dollar to keep it at probably 60 or 70 cents US.
Hyperinflation in most cases is actually symptomatic of a different problem, rather than a cause of it. The Weimar republic, zimbabwe, argentina the free city of Danzig, the US in the independence revolt, the both sides in the civil war etc. all had serious inflation problems because their economies were being wrecked by various other factors (wars, debt in foreign currency, coups, sanctions etc.), and in those cases weird shit happens. Weird shit happens with gold too, because if you couldn't get gold due to sanctions for trade you're basically trapped in a massive economic death spiral.
Small devaluation to positive effect is much harder to spit out a list of. It doesn't make huge sexy numbers that are entertaining (like having a quadrillion dollar note being really equal to one dollar), when you devalue your currency by 5% which keeps your exports competitive no one writes a giant wikipedia article on it.
Sure, but the vast majority of people have debt, or debt and savings (have a mortgage, that's debt). Devaluing debt is good for them. Attracting investment/tourism/making exports better are all good things as that creates jobs and helps people get out of debt. An uncompetitive economy has a very hard time internally devaluing (imagine everyone taking a 2% pay cut a year).
As I said to someone else, it's a mostly american concept that devaluing a currency could ever be bad. Germany Japan Canada all have used currency devaluation quite successfully to bolster their economies.
Also, whatever you may think of government debt, it's there, the country can't just absolve itself of paying it, so it has to be paid off somehow. If you're a greek, on a personal basis, the best thing to do is to leave greece because otherwise you're going to be paying 20% of your taxes into interest on debt incurred before you could even pay tax. That debt has to be whittled down, and the only ways to do that are increased tax revenue (which directly takes money out of peoples hands), or inflation which effectively reduces the value of the debt. Cutting spending shrinks the economy and makes the debt proportionally worse (so long as there's high unemployment, which there is, if there's low unemployment cutting the size of government provides more labour for the private sector to take advantage of).
You have to be careful, because you suggested something thats true, but only in a narrow range.
The people should be completely fucked over for the value of their saved money
The important part here is that you're supposing that's a lot of people. If someone has net debt (including their liabilities through government) then devaluing the debt is good for them. If they can keep wage growth on part with, or faster than their interest rates, their debt will shrink proportionally to their earnings and make them net wealth holders sooner. If they have *any* debt at all devaluing debt through inflation is helps them with part of their balance sheet, whether their 'cash on hand' can keep appropriate pace is trickier.
Funny how it works that the rich and bankers are the ones that end up getting the money because it is in "the people's best interest".
You can't have it both ways. Either it's bad for people who have money (the rich, who's cash holdings are devalued) or it's good for the rich (who's are getting interest on the debt) it can't be both, though it can be neutral. So which is your argument? Inflation will reduce their wealth slowly, because as you say, it devalued holding denominated in that currency. So yes, if you have 4% inflation and they have 3% salary growth they appear to be making a lot of money, but their relative position to the overall economy would be retreating.
Also, deflation is far more problematic than inflation, so you don't want that. Small inflation is always preferable to deflation, (and it's very hard to hit a 0 inflation target intentionally), and more inflation has advantages in getting out of debt.
HP's track record with tablets is not all that impressive, but this is a big blow to Windows 8
Quite the opposite. Window RT is a monumentally stupid idea. HP not supporting it is nothing but good. The level of consumer confusion it will create is disastrous. "Why does this work on your tablet and not mine" why does my tablet not have an arm, or need an arm?
If microsoft wants to gradually trend the market towards having split arm and x86 business at the same time they can do it themselves, no one in their right mind should be producing windows arm anything.
Now microsoft doing it might shame intel into competing better and so on, that's good. But theoretical competition that drives innovation being good isn't the same as confusing users who, for the last 30 years have never understood system requirements and adding a new completely completely unresolvable compatibility problem is really bad for the windows market and stands in opposition to the one thing they're trying to do, which is make a simplified experience for users.
My analysis is actually more useful than that. by a lot.
As I say, there's the velocity factor, there aren't 60 trillion dollars (equivalent) floating around. There's probably 4 or 5 trillion dollars that cycle 12-15 times per year.
There's certainly somewhere close to 5 or 6 trillion dollars in gold in existence right now, that could be turned into currency. The issue then is how much gold *per person* is there now, how much gold per person was there at each point in the last decade, how do you facilitate the moving of the money and so on.
Sure, but conceptually massive overprinting of money is easier to understand than quantitative easing and things like buying back debt with non existent money and so on. Conjuring money out of thin air is conjuring out of thin air, however you want to do it.
No matter how a government decides it's currency they need some sort of central bank to manage the interchanges between all the banks and the government. The precise mechanism by which government devalue is secondary to their capacity to do so.
Bitcoins and gold advocates view the ability to devalue currency as an inherent flaw in the system. This is primarily an american viewpoint, because the US got used to having strong foreign buying power with it's dollar, because everyone else devalued relative to the US to make themselves more competitive. For export driven economies (germany, japan, canada) devaluation has always been a feature in the system. More intertwined complex economies, the UK, France, Italy etc. view fiat currency as a tool they can use to further policy, and valuing and devaluing depending on particular circumstance is a feature.
It probably can be done. But then would be explicitly undone by governments and insurance companies by reporting requirements. In effect that is the same as cash transactions. Lots of countries (notably in the Caribbean) take US dollars cash for transactions, the governments fix their exchange rates to US dollars, but when you pay your cabbie 100 USD he's certainly not declaring 100 USD on his income tax.
Prove to me that you only had 50k in income with a perfectly anonymous transaction system. Prove to me that you had 6 million dollars in expenses. Who did you pay this to, for what?
Prove to me that this money was stolen from you, and you just didn't spend it.
Prove to me that you have this much in income so that I can give you a loan. If I give you loan in Euros and you have income in dollars I have to price into that the risk of currencies changing relative to each other. If I give you a loan in Euro's and you only collect income in annonbitcoins how do I value anonbitcoins relative to euro's?
What if there aren't enough anonbitcoins in the system to support a growing population or a more productive economy? Who creates more? What control (or lack of control) do I have over the person creating more anonbitcoins? etc. etc. etc.
The simplest fully anonymous system would be one that gives everyone a unique ID, everyone connects to the central database that handles transactions (assuming perfect security to the database). The database logs no transactions, once a transaction is complete it is done and irreversibly one way, and randomly changes your unique ID after each transaction. No logging would make it fully anonymous (just like cash!), but everyone would have to explicitly trust the issuing authority (whomever controls the database) to responsibly manage it (just like the government!). If you mean a cryptographically untracably anonymous system I don't think that's realistically possible with todays maths. Every exchange that can happen *can* be logged, and since it requires unique identifiers it's possible to log the transactions and work backwords so to speak. To prevent effective logging you need to change unique identifiers unpredictably, and explicitly not log the changes.
World GDP is up to 60 trillion dollars BECAUSE the dollar is not backed by gold anymore. The money supply has been inflated, which devalues the currency.
Correct. Progress. Were not for fiat currency the US would have been bankrupted by the french and Swiss in the 70's demanding repayment for all outstanding debts in gold, china would still be horribly impoverished as rich countries hoarded gold and kept it away from the chinese etc. And we'd still have world GDP would be significantly smaller, everyone would have less wealth and less money flowing through their hands. This is perhaps the greatest success of ditching metal as a currency dramatically improving peoples lives. If it weren't for that the UK could theoretically still be buried with 200 or 300% of GDP in debt in gold that it could never pay back from WW2, leaving it a shell of a country.
Devaluing the currency removes the incentive to save, and forces people to 'invest'
Yep, that's probably the most profoundly useful thing about fiat currency. Gold sitting in a vault isn't flowing into the economy. Investing, even into boring government debt at least keeps the money moving around. Admittedly I probably should have clarified that I was talking about a crude approximation on the velocity factor in economic theory. It makes a huge difference. Sitting on money in a vault is pretty much the most useless thing you can do with it, and deprives everyone else of access to it, contracting the economy as a whole.
If gold was still used by everyone as money, politicians couldn't promise things they can't afford, and bankers couldn't endlessly inflate the money supply, forcing everyone to 'invest' with them.
Right. That's the situation Greece is in. They don't control the supply of euro's any more than they would control the supply of gold. They have 160 or so percent of GDP in debt, can't get investment (euro's or gold) so they need to devalue, which, when you have euro's and gold basically spirals the country deeper into debt that it can't pay off. If they could print more money, say an inflation target of 4% they would be devaluing greek labour relative to say germany, which would fairly quickly make greece a good investment opportunity for business (decreasing relative labour costs), a cheaper vacation spot as time goes on etc. And all that debt they had would start to chip away. They'd still be 10 years getting to 100% of GDP in debt, but as it is in 10 years greece is going to have 170 or 180% of GDP, if not more (unless they go bankrupt obviously) in debt, a population that's fleeing and they're going to face a complete economic disaster. In that sense the Euro and Gold are no different. Note that I'm explicitly not saying the US dollar is the same way, since the US has a federal system that doesn't cut health spending or pensions in florida just because there was a housing crash in florida. By that reasoning another option for the Euro is a more federal state where certain things (pensions, healthcare, justice, education, state ownership of pan euro corporations, such as the bank bailouts, would be trans Eurozone). But that's a whole other topic.
Yes, DUI is covered under those, so why does it get it's special laws? Oh, because it's *NOT* about safety.
Because it's actually easier to quantify. So you can clearly specify, what exactly counts as impaired and don't leave as much up to judges and police, which would lead to more arbitrary enforcement of laws. That's not so much about safety as it is about fairness in the process. Prove someone had a safe (or unsafe) amount of alcohol in their bloodstream. That's a problem that can be neatly quantified with a blood alcohol test. Prove that someone was too tired to safely (or unsafely) drive and it's much harder, basically you have to wait until they fall asleep and crash or are demonstrably weaving along the road, and even then the police don't have a handy scientific piece of evidence to work from, it becomes eye witness testimony or after the fact evidence when something bad already happened. And well, prevention is produces far more safety than response after the fact.
sure. Governments tax (and borrow) ~ 40% of the value of economies in big countries, and they spend it. It's more complicated than that because the people governments pay for things themselves pay tax, so when the government pays someone 100k a year and they pay back 25k in taxes the governments net cost was only 75, and stuff like that. But the basic premise still applies. And of course borrowing (by itself) isn't free money, governments cough up quite a lot in interest payments, which themselves are taxed.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Government_spending
When I said 40% I should probably have clarified that's for rich or rich ish countries. Some of europe is up around 50%, the US and Japan just under 40, Russia mid 30s'. Lots of poor countries are in the 30's or lower. South Korea and Taiwan are down in the 30 and 20 ish range.
Inflation can decrease the relative value of debt, but that applies as much to government debt as private debt, as long as your income growth exceeds your interest rates the relative value of debt is decreasing.
Cash isn't hugely problematic except that cash transactions can dodge tax, and move large amounts of money around (especially in the EU when they have 500 euro notes) for criminal enterprise without government oversight.
The main things with cash that people don't like is that government can simply print more of it to devalue it, so holding physical cash for any length of time gradually loses the relative value of the cash, and that cash can be 'lost' due to fire theft etc. and it's inherently hard to secure for that reason. The other issue of course is convenience and theft. No one really likes carrying around a pocketful of change, cash is inconvenient for large transactions that are legitimate (because governments try and clamp down on large cash transactions that would be illegitimate).
Cash is also more error prone than electronic transactions. In the end I don't actually think this is a huge problem. But human error costs factor into things as well.
1. Has all the same problems as cash (theft, controlled production by someone else etc.), with the added downside that if you 'lose' gold (say in the world trade centre or a sunken ship). If you had gold in a WTC vault you might have been years getting it back, and if it's lost at sea you might never get it back or you might only get back part of its value. Cash? Burned up, bottom of the ocean etc? No problem, the government can just print more to make up for it.
Has only value anyone ascribes to it, which significantly overinflates the value if everyone uses gold (creating a synthetic demand), and can be easily depreciated in value by anyone so inclined.
Gold is only sort of anonymous. Sure, trading you a gold bar can be done anonymously. But lugging around gold bars sucks, and is extremely risky. And how do you prove your ownership of the gold? Who verifies that quality (and therefore value of the gold?) Can you stamp it, or otherwise mark it to certify quality and ownership? How do you control the flow of gold into or out of a country? Can only the government stamp gold with serial numbers? For insurance purposes do you have to keep the serial numbers of all gold bars you have (or had) in case of theft? The moment you start trying to build any sort of system around any metal currency you arrive at needing 'metal certificates' which are like any other cash except they are explicitly bound to the value of the metal.
Then you run into the very serious problem of whether or not there is enough gold in the world to represent the value you need. Seriously. Word GDP is up in the 60 trillion dollar range spread over 7 billion people or so. Now you don't need 60 trillion dollars in gold, but hundreds of billions of dollars of it, and gold being 'saved' is not really in the economy anymore (so you need even more gold for some people). If you need say 60 billion dollars equivalent in currency, total, in the world, and all that money moves 1000 times (each dollar is transacted 1000 times*) then sure, you're able to get enough gold. What if you need 1.2 trillion dollars in currency moving around to support 60 trillion dollars in wealth? Is there even 1.2 trillion dollars in gold in the world? How about 5 trillion? 6? How serious would the difference between 5 and 6 be?
Right now the world has about 30 000 tonnes of gold in reserves by governments. And one tonne of gold is worth about 52 million dollars (http://www.onlygold.com/tutorialpages/value_of_gold.asp http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gold_reserve). That means there's only about 1.5, 1.6 trillion dollars worth of gold in the worldwide currency reserves.
And according to http://ycharts.com/indicators/us_currency_in_circulation the US dollar itself has about 1.1 trillion in circulation, meaning the world economy needs more like 4 or 5 trillion dollars worth of currency (that is, by the way, a rough guess, I could easily be off by a couple of trillion dollars in either direction).
Now if you were willing to convert the entire worlds jewelry supply (which is what gives gold value at all), along with all other stores of gold, not just central banks into money then sure, you could probably get 5 trillion dollars in gold, give or take. Which might be enough for the economy today. But what would happen to the value of gold then? It'd be ugly, and then you're handing control of your currency to countries that produce the most gold and so on.
All in all metal standards for money are full of problems, which can manifest to be extremely serious effects, which is why we don't use them anymore.
And that the government which represents ~ 40% of most economies will pay you in their own currencies.
1. Covered under the blanket "driving while distracted" "reckless driving" etc. Complaining that limits on blood alcohol don't cover other forms of impairment is the same as complaining that murder laws don't cover theft. Just because it's not covered by this rule doesn't mean it isn't covered.
2. I already addressed that.
The law is a slow meandering beast. The US should have had socialized medicine around 1920 or at the latest by the 1960's. Yet it's still not there. Evidence doesn't make governments move quickly. They get there eventually though.
Nor by the way, is the fact that you can directly measure impairment 'false'. Proving 'tiredness' is much harder, but if you fall asleep while driving and cause an accident just about everywhere has a statute that will get your ass. The Japanese go so far as to not care at all about the type of tiredness
Erm.. no. that's not what the chart shows at all.
Notice this is a 2 page 'free' article. Unfortunately that's all I can give you if you can't access scientific journals (and if you can you clearly don't have the skills to understand them, hopefully you're still in highschool).
Sleep+drink isn't central to the question. The question is how does performance dropoff as you get drunk. Then how does performance drop off as you get tired. That gives the (pointless) measure of 'equivalent to blood alcohol' effect of being tired.
Chart 2 clearly shows that being awake for 15-16 hours is no different from having a BAC of 0.04, and neither of those have much of a meaningful variance in measurable performance. Being up longer than that, having a BAC of 0.05 or more both clearly have measurable dropoffs in performance.
They aren't trying to show the combined effects of drunkenness and tiredness. That would certainly be valid, and more valuable. But this is a 3 page article in a correspondence journal given away for free, and it's clearly more of an interesting thing to consider than any sort of serious new information. It wasn't news before that being tired reduced performance, and it wasn't news before that being drunk reduced performance.
Talking on a handsfree is less safe than being drunk, but is explicitly legal. The real problem with the laws is that they are not regarding safety, but enforcing prohibition. When's the last time a traffic law was based on actual safety studies? Oh, that's right, never.
Right, but talking on a cell phone isn't lots of places. The cellular phone lobby is strong. But that's going to unwind when people shift to handsfree and keep having accidents. In fact talking on a cell phone is banned precisely because of the evidence that it's bad (as is texting while driving). The cell industry managed to get governments to ignore the evidence on handsfree driving, for now.
Countries that have 0 blood alcohol limits are making a moral judgment. Countries that have a 0.04 - 0.05 have made a very clear scientific judgment based on when your driving performance starts to drop off. People still clinging to 0.08 are making an economic and 'personal freedom' lobby based judgment.
The "solution" is to monitor impairment
I would not be surprised if in future all cars have ignition locks on them. Which has been suggested. They don't need to be government owned, they just need to be a standard component of every vehicle, and they need to be maintained and in working order. A new car costs what, 12, 13K on the low end, an ignition interlock device can be about 50 bucks if you put them in every vehicle.
The rest of your sentence is simply not true though. Blood alcohol level is measurable, and the dropoff effect in performance is quite well quantified. That's why the limit is 0.05 most places.
They're just starting into raid testing. So probably september/october range. They probably want to get it out before the christmas rush (which would cannibalize other activision product sales). Which sounds out of place in the games business, but WoW lives in its own ecosystem within the games business.
When you're talking about events 1200 years ago you're not exactly looking for a telescope picture.
There's evidence of a supernova, or possibly something else, from that time period in Japan. So what was it? Well, apparently in the UK they observed some weird shit that could have been a supernova. So it might actually have been a supernova.
Imagine if this was the other way. There was some written european evidence of some weird red thing in the sky in 774. What would tell what that red thing was? a spike in carbon 14 in tree rings from that time period would make 'supernova' a good guess.
It's not really a sciences problem, it's a language problem. Outside of Japan I bet most people didn't really care, and the Japanese didn't have the desire to search through piles of old foreign language documents on the vague guess they might say something that could have caused a carbon 14 spike in 773, 774 or 775. Digitized images and electronic search make that problem easier, and now the question for verification becomes one of finding if there are similar descriptions in other languages for that time period.
How does that matter?
It's not like you have 1 driver you are trying to improve the performance of where you focus your efforts on their most dominant problem. There are millions of drivers driving billions of kilometres every year. To combat bad drivers you have things like graduated licencing, incentives for driver training etc. You also have a punishment system for bad drivers. For drunks it's the same basic problem, this is a defined problem (alcohol above about 0.04 reduces your ability to drive) so the government has set some resources to trying to address the problem. The legal limit most places is 0.05 (or 0.08 in the US canada and the UK) and there's enough statistical analysis to determine what the benefit or cost would be to lower it from 0.08 to 0.05. I posted elsewhere in this same overall thread a link to a NZ study that figures 16-72 deaths per year would be prevented and 640-1200 ish injuries. The 'public awareness' portion is effectively the same thing as driver training - make sure people know what they're doing that's bad, give them an opportunity to not do it (i.e. don't drive drunk and don't drive without training) and then there's a punishment regime in place.
Fair enough. The most likely outcome of an accident is one with a parked car. What the accident rate for people who are driving while drunk is harder to figure.
it seemed like that was sort of implied, but obviously not to some people. Such are forums.
Only if it was clear that the post wasn't particularly rigorous, directed at someone clearly not being intellectually honest, with the criticism by someone who themselves does the same thing.
E.g.
http://www.fatiguescience.com/assets/pdf/Alcohol-Fatigue.pdf (which I posted elsewhere).
Not from that link, but most places the drunk driving limit is 0.05. From figure 1b in that link it's quite clear that up to 0.04 you basically can't detect a performance dropoff.
After that it's a risk tolerance calculations.
I posted elsewhere in this thread (related to the same 0 tolerance post) a few other links, basically in new zealand they figure they'd save 16-72 lives a year and 640-1200 ish injuries a year by lowering the limit from 0.08 to 0.05. There are, if you are inclined to look for it, statistics for the countries (such as france) that reduced the limit from 0.08 to 0.05.
So then what's the risk that you want? Up to 0.04 there's virtually no meaningful or measurable risk. After that you start seeing a decrease in driving performance.
Also japan has the same thing you suggest. Impairment is impairment, they don't care if you're tired, high, drunk etc.. It's all impaired.
The reason you can't just rely on personal judgment is that people are bad at judging their own drunkenness, and the government doesn't want you to be recklessly on the road. It's much easier for everyone if they set a limit based on (quite well defined) averages about how people perform than let you judge for yourself and hope you don't cause an accident.
Just because performance drops off after 0.04 doesn't mean that's where the limit should be.
I posted above or below or something, with a couple of more sophisticated links. To 0.04 it's basically impossible to tell that there's a performance dropoff. After that point there is a dropoff, but 0.05 (which is the legal limit in most of the world) is not much different. But that's a much more sophisticated risk analysis. The data is pretty clear, there's almost no risk up to 0.04, beyond that, your mileage may vary.
http://www.fatiguescience.com/assets/pdf/Alcohol-Fatigue.pdf (as I posted elsewhere).
Which figure?
Figure 2 (top left corner) is 'equivalent to drink', if you get tired enough you stop behaving like a drunk.
Figure 1b is where the real money is. And it's quite clearly a downward trend after 1.04. There appears to be one outlying data point at 0.1. And I would say that highlights what's wrong with their data at all (admittedly, it's not the focus of the paper but still) they should have error bars on their data points, or the table sample size.
The second link actually agrees with the first more or less, but it's harder to read.
Just looking at the data there is no situation where the 0.10 and 0.12 outperform the 0.04, even including the one wacky data point.
The first links actual research is figure 2, so they have error bars correctly there, but that's 'equivalent to the effect of drink' not 'effect of drink' which is figure 1b.