. Mitt Romney takes advantage of loop-holes in tax laws to hide his money from US taxes by shuffling it around shell corporations in the Cayman islands. Mitt pays accountants and lawyers to set all that stuff up. The whole reason the US produces so many lawyers is to help rich people and corporations walk right up the the often fuzzy line between what is legal and what isn't.
Oh, look, it's a 'Take every chance to blame an enemy of the left whenever possible even though it's not remotely connected to the topic at hand' post.
I thought these were confined to fark.com; it appears I was mistaken, and it also appears there are moderators on board. Perhaps your very own sock puppet moderators.
Then there's the DRM. "That wouldn't affect you unless you are a pirate!" you say? Bullshit..
There's an Anime series (a remake of Neon Genesis Envangelion) I would have purchased by now, except it's coded in a different region. That means I have to want to watch it enough to not only pay for the discs, but a region-free player as well.
So I haven't purchased anything, when they could have had my money already for the discs.
Taking someone's life through a death sentence or a whole-life prison term will never bring restoration to the family of the victim.
So do away with most whole-life sentences. Restore decent parole opportunities. That's what happens in almost every other civilized country, allowing almost all prisoners an opportunity to reform.
The rise in supermax prisons has way more to do with the potential profit for the commercial prison industry than it has to do with crime.
I never said anything about life in prison or a death sentence bringing restoration to the victim's family. I'm concerned with getting dangerous, extremely violent people away from the living permanently.
A dog gets rabies. Am I mad at the dog for getting rabies? No. Does it matter how he got rabies? Only insofar as we can eliminate the source; for the fate of the dog, it doesn't matter one wit.
The dog is put down because it is simply too dangerous to be allowed around the living anymore. So it is with death row inmates.
As for what 'civilized countries do', kindly provide some stories of comparable murderers who were successfully re-introduced to society.
> 20 minutes of semi-conscious agony ending in a heart attack vs. breathing dirt
False dichotomy. Everyone reading this would not be effected by either, as long as he's behind bars.
Cue the madding crowds telling me why I'm wrong to hold my opinion
He'd still be there to torment his prison guards and fellow inmates. The decline of the death penalty matches up nicely with the rise in supermax prisons.
Everyone who brings up your line of logic imagines that the most base, vicious members of society will sit in prison for the rest of their days reading books and reflecting on their life's choices. It isn't so.
Take a good look at how these life sentence crooks entertain themselves when they have nothing to look forward to but decades of confinement. Then decide if you still think lifetime imprisonment is irrelevant to the living, and to lesser criminals.
So, you don't actually steal it. You blow it up, along with the site itself. Cause safety system failure and cause a meltdown. If you don't plan to survive the attack, you can certainly use a nuclear plant itself as a sort of weapon.
You say it like that would be easy. It wouldn't. Nuclear power plants have significant numbers of armed guards who run drills against adversary teams trying to do just that sort of thing; a factor that's very important, but omitted due to the nature of my previous point.
I'd also like to point out there is a short supply of suicide attackers who have any sort of real capacity to run a mission. 9/11 was the last time anyone with more than five brain cells willingly died in an attack. There's been the occasional unwilling but reasonably intelligent suicide bomber, but a guy like that ain't doing much besides driving a car up to a target.
If you have proof to the contrary, I'd like to see it.
You die.
Seriously, the stuff that's radioactive enough to make a dirty bomb is radioactive enough to kill you before you get offsite. New fuel (less than 5% enriched uranium) is not particularly radioactive. It's perfectly safe to stand next to it; to inspect it before you put it in the nuclear reactor.
On the other hand, spent fuel is incredibly radioactive, and when it's being handled it's kept under 30' of water so it doesn't kill everyone in the building.
Now, let's assume you had access to the fuel long enough to get it out of the pool. You would receive a lethal dose of radiation in 36 seconds; enough to kill you within a month. Even if death doesn't come for weeks, you would be rapidly debilitated- which of course would leave you immobile next to something giving off massive amounts of radiation, so I imagine you'd be dead-dead within a half hour. Probably much less.
Now, there is spent fuel that's had several years to decay sitting in dry storage on most nuclear sites, but they're kept in casks and bunkers which are so robust, you're not going to be able to steal or breach them in less time than it takes for three states worth of Law Enforcement and FBI to come crashing down on your party.
That fuel in dry storage would still kill you, but it would take longer.
If all the money spent on software licence had instead been spent on developing software, the government would have produced the necessary software ten times over and been able to distribute for free instead of still paying to this day.
I don't contest the logic of this statement in and of itself, but I do wonder were this kind of thinking ends. The Government has it's own critical tasks to perform, and officials should focus their efforts on, well, governing what they're supposed to look after.
Should the government build it's own office chairs? It's own cars? How about servers? Handguns?
Eventually, wealthy and liberal societies come to an end for other reasons
Those 'other reasons' are pretty simple:
Liberal and wealthy societies become complacent due to the ease of their lives, and that makes them neglect the principles and practices that made them powerful and wealthy to begin with.
The default human condition is poverty, misery and violence. Escaping that is rare, and it takes a special society to make wealth, power and security seem normal. Once wealth, power and security are seen as birthrights and not hard-won prizes, the parts of a society that make it special are neglected (because, hey, they're 'mean' and 'hard work'), and rot sets in.
They've been trying to build one for years (Keystone XL) but have been stonewalled at every turn by Obama.
Not just Obama, but the by anti-oil people. They think by blocking the pipeline, they will be reducing CO2 in our atmosphere. The sad part is, they are actually INCREASING the amount of CO2 and other pollutants.
Don't forget that OPEC countries have been found financing anti-Keystone XL 'environmental' groups as a means to keep competition out of their oil markets and keep prices up. Then there's the railway owners, who would lose out if a pipeline was built. Much of the inland oil development is shipped by BSNF, a Berkshire-Hathaway company. Buffet is an Obama supporter who has publicly supported Keystone XL, but who knows what deals are going on behind closed doors?
(my apologies if this is a repeat post, the last one didn't seem to take.)
They've been trying to build one for years (Keystone XL) but have been stonewalled at every turn by Obama.
Not just Obama, but the by anti-oil people. They think by blocking the pipeline, they will be reducing CO2 in our atmosphere.
There's more though. Arab oil-producing companies have been found backing environmental groups, to fight the introduction of new supply into their markets, which would depress prices. Then there's the owners of the railroads, who would lose out if the pipe network was expanded. If I remember correctly, BSNF railway ships much of the recent inland oil development, and it's owned by Warren Buffet, a notable supporter of Obama. Buffet (again IIRC) has come out in support of the Keystone XL pipeline, but who knows what deals are going on behind closed doors?.
There's no reason to think the melted core will get that far down, or even burn through the concrete floor, or even leave the reactor vessel in any sort of coherent form.
Chernobyl's overheated core just spread through the lower parts of the structure (look for the 'elephant's foot' picture), Three Mile island's core was scraped off the inside of the reactor vessel, having only blued the metal.
'Corium' is basically molten ceramic (The fuel is a uranium-oxide matrix.) It has such poor heat conducting properties that during normal operations, it could be 3000F in the center of a pellet, and 650F on the surface of the cladding- 3/16" away from the center.
why not just let the thing meltdown? It would essentially bury the fuel. After it drops down a 1000' or so, fill the hole in with cement. I wouldn't be too worried about volcanic eruptions, radiation is what keeps the earth core nice and soft.
The most important reason is that 'corium' isn't actually hot enough to burn through the earth like that, nor does it conduct heat all that well, even if any part of it became hot enough.
The integrity of the fuel rods is challenged at 2200F (zircaloy-water reaction, which released the hydrogen that caused the reactor building roofs to blow off on three of the Daichi units.)
Steel melts at about 2600F. Concrete breaks down at about 1800F.
In addition, the fuel is a uranium-oxide mix, a sort of ceramic. This class of material is generally known for poor thermal conductivity. That's why the pellets are the size of a pencil eraser, they need to be small and have a high surface area in order to conduct heat from the center of the pellet- which might be at 3000F in normal operations- to the fuel cladding and into the reactor coolant, which might be around 600F.
Anyway, from what I know about western reactors (it's my line of work, but i'm not a reactor engineer per se), I seriously doubt the fuel would 'burn' through steel or concrete. The fission products escape because of physical destruction to the facility caused by the Tsunami, or because of relief valves that limit reactor coolant system pressure, or primary containment structure pressure.
Chernobyl's release was due to a massive overpressure event that physically broke the reactor vessel. Nothing ever burned through concrete (check out the photos of the 'elephant's foot')
Three Mile Island's core was found in the bottom of the reactor vessel; a small amount of fission products was released by mis-operation of support systems. The integrity of the reactor vessel was never threatened, though the containment building (much larger than Daichi primary containment structures) withstood several hydrogen burns.
The fascist actions of the Government lately cannot have escaped your notice. In case they have, I'll paste a summary for you:
Coincidence: Hollywood’s only conservative group is getting close IRS nonprofit scrutiny
Another Coincidence: James O’Keefe Group Being Audited by NY. Again.
Yet Another Coincidence: Dinesh D’Souza Indicted For Election Fraud
Still Another Coincidence: IRS Proposes New 501(c)(4) Rules That Just Happen to Cover Most Tea Party Groups
Judge Strikes Down Wisconsin’s ‘John Doe’ Subpoenas
Secret investigations targeted coincidentally at most prominent conservative groups in WI who can only now legally talk about their harassment. If you want to see what American fascism would look like, well this is it.
The power of the federal goverment, and some state governments, is being turned against those who oppose the powerful. If you don't have a problem with that, you're no better than a Nazi, regardless of Godwin's law.
I was being sarcastic, of course, but this sort of news will certainly discourage guys from assisting lesbian couples.
The couples will have to go pay full price at a fertility clinic for sperm.
Is that not a logical consequence of this case? Does this not increase costs for the women involved?
One guy gets screwed over by the court. Hundreds (Kansas) or thousands (National) of lesbian couples won't be able to find economical sperm donors. Buying sperm from a clinic will run north of $500.
Yes, they ought to be able to swing $500+ if they want to have a kid. But should they have to?
This case will make it that much harder for lesbian couples to obtain a sperm donor. Like many laws and regulations, it'll ensure that things only occur when the proper people (in this case fertility clinics) get their cut.
Some folks have confused the United States prohibition on an established, national religion (congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion...) in the first amendment with a ban on any intermingling of religion with public office or government function.
This odd view has been entertained from time to time in various courts, and is pushed by certain atheist and 'civil liberties' groups who lack productive work to pursue.
So kindly forgive the GP poster, his confusion is rather common place.
The argument is somewhat circular, because death-penalty opponents have made it so expensive. I'm not against all of the additional costs, mind you, in this day and age we ought to be damn sure we're executing the right person.
I don't understand how one can have any knowledge of the history of science, and think that Genesis would be a literal record.
Accepting divine relevation of the Pentateuch, the record spans 4,000 to 1600 BC.
Our understanding of Natural Law (Newton, Galileo, etc) has only really started to explode in the last 600 years or so- meaning that Moses-Era people lacked the knowledge necessary to understand the specific mechanisms of pretty much any aspect of how the current conditions came to be.
A lecture on natural law would have been out of place and unhelpful to the faithful for the following 5,000 years; the message was simply "I, God, made you and this world."
The fact that this short message was stretched out to a seven-day process in no way makes it literal. The specifics of creation were not the point, and would have been lost on those folks; so it was omitted.
Those same young earth creationists must believe that the God of Abraham has a bit of Loki the Norse Trickster god in him, given that there is so much physical evidence contradicting a 6,000 year old earth. Either that, or they must believe that there's a massive satanic conspiracy to invent evidence for an earth billions of years old, an equally preposterous claim.
Religion gives us the 'Why' of life; science is the 'How.' They cannot serve each other's purposes.
1. the hard, solid, nonmetallic mineral matter of which rock is made, esp. as a building material.
"the houses are built of stone" rock, pebble, boulder More (in metaphorical use) weight or lack of feeling, expression, or movement. "Isabel stood as if turned to stone"
ASTRONOMY: a meteorite made of rock, as opposed to metal.
MEDICINE: a calculus; a gallstone or kidney stone.
2. a piece of stone shaped for a purpose, esp. one of commemoration, ceremony, or demarcation.
3. The stone (abbreviation st) is a unit of measure equal to 14 pounds avoirdupois (about 6.35 kg [nb 1]) used in Great Britain and Ireland for measuring human body weight.
Isn't it about time a technical site such as slashdot started using metric units , eg kilos? You know, for the rest of the world outside the USA who has no clue what the hell 96,000 lbs means? Even in the UK hardly anyone under the age of 60 uses lbs as a measurement any more.
1) There is Islamic terrorism, and U.S. militia terrorism, and atheist terrorism, and Christian terrorism, and others. I know of no one worth listening to who seriously disputes any of these.
Now rank them by body count.
2) If you're really sitting around worried about Islamic terrorists hitting your town, you need to get a hobby.
The projected capacity is 830,000 barrels per day. This is equivalant to a continous chain of 30,000 gallon rail cars, with one completing an offload every 1 minute 14 seconds. Even if they run it initially at a quarter capacity, that's still a railcar every five minutes, or 288 rail cars kept off the tracks each day.That's a three mile long train.
Given the massive capital cost of this project, I'm imagine TransCanada will make good use of the line.
I am curious why you have a problem taking a 3-12 mile long train of crude oil off the tracks each day.
The only explanation I can come up with is that you believe:
1) that the relevant oil production is limited by rail transportation constraints, and
2) that the creation of a pipeline would allow a large increase of oil production, and
3) the same amount of oil would travel by rail, with an additional amount traveling via pipeline.
That explanation alone is also insufficient to explain opposition to the project.
Oh, one more thing:
It simply isn't practical to build out a pipeline network as substantial as the existing rail network within any reasonable timeframe.
Given that we can use infrastructure like this for a good 100 years if not longer, this no reason to stop the project either. A 'reasonable timeframe' isn't limited to our vanishingly brief lives.
Creating a single pipeline will not remove demand for oil on rail. In order to reduce that demand you'd have to create a network of oil pipelines as big as the rail network itself. Oil goes by rail beause it's relatively efficient (compared to trucks et al) and can go anywhere without the need to build out huge amounts of infrastructure.
Pipelines are a total red-herring.
Are you saying we shouldn't build any pipelines, because we can't completely eliminate rail shipment of crude oil? It would seem to me that if you build just a few pipelines from the sources of crude oil to the refineries, you would greatly reduce the crude oil being shipped on rails.
That's the idea behind the Keystone XL pipeline.
Warren Buffet, Obama's buddy, owns BNSF railway, incidentally.
Blocking the Keystone XL pipeline from being built directly enriches a major Obama campaign donor.
Slashdot Mirror
. Mitt Romney takes advantage of loop-holes in tax laws to hide his money from US taxes by shuffling it around shell corporations in the Cayman islands. Mitt pays accountants and lawyers to set all that stuff up. The whole reason the US produces so many lawyers is to help rich people and corporations walk right up the the often fuzzy line between what is legal and what isn't.
Oh, look, it's a 'Take every chance to blame an enemy of the left whenever possible even though it's not remotely connected to the topic at hand' post. I thought these were confined to fark.com; it appears I was mistaken, and it also appears there are moderators on board. Perhaps your very own sock puppet moderators.
Maybe they were trying to be polite in suggesting you get a life?
Mod parent up. Reposting to get past AC filter.
Then there's the DRM. "That wouldn't affect you unless you are a pirate!" you say? Bullshit. .
There's an Anime series (a remake of Neon Genesis Envangelion) I would have purchased by now, except it's coded in a different region. That means I have to want to watch it enough to not only pay for the discs, but a region-free player as well. So I haven't purchased anything, when they could have had my money already for the discs.
Taking someone's life through a death sentence or a whole-life prison term will never bring restoration to the family of the victim.
So do away with most whole-life sentences. Restore decent parole opportunities. That's what happens in almost every other civilized country, allowing almost all prisoners an opportunity to reform.
The rise in supermax prisons has way more to do with the potential profit for the commercial prison industry than it has to do with crime.
I never said anything about life in prison or a death sentence bringing restoration to the victim's family. I'm concerned with getting dangerous, extremely violent people away from the living permanently. A dog gets rabies. Am I mad at the dog for getting rabies? No. Does it matter how he got rabies? Only insofar as we can eliminate the source; for the fate of the dog, it doesn't matter one wit. The dog is put down because it is simply too dangerous to be allowed around the living anymore. So it is with death row inmates. As for what 'civilized countries do', kindly provide some stories of comparable murderers who were successfully re-introduced to society.
> 20 minutes of semi-conscious agony ending in a heart attack vs. breathing dirt
False dichotomy. Everyone reading this would not be effected by either, as long as he's behind bars.
Cue the madding crowds telling me why I'm wrong to hold my opinion
He'd still be there to torment his prison guards and fellow inmates. The decline of the death penalty matches up nicely with the rise in supermax prisons.
Everyone who brings up your line of logic imagines that the most base, vicious members of society will sit in prison for the rest of their days reading books and reflecting on their life's choices. It isn't so.
Take a good look at how these life sentence crooks entertain themselves when they have nothing to look forward to but decades of confinement. Then decide if you still think lifetime imprisonment is irrelevant to the living, and to lesser criminals.
So, you don't actually steal it. You blow it up, along with the site itself. Cause safety system failure and cause a meltdown. If you don't plan to survive the attack, you can certainly use a nuclear plant itself as a sort of weapon.
You say it like that would be easy. It wouldn't. Nuclear power plants have significant numbers of armed guards who run drills against adversary teams trying to do just that sort of thing; a factor that's very important, but omitted due to the nature of my previous point.
I'd also like to point out there is a short supply of suicide attackers who have any sort of real capacity to run a mission. 9/11 was the last time anyone with more than five brain cells willingly died in an attack. There's been the occasional unwilling but reasonably intelligent suicide bomber, but a guy like that ain't doing much besides driving a car up to a target.
If you have proof to the contrary, I'd like to see it.
Now, let's assume you had access to the fuel long enough to get it out of the pool. You would receive a lethal dose of radiation in 36 seconds; enough to kill you within a month. Even if death doesn't come for weeks, you would be rapidly debilitated- which of course would leave you immobile next to something giving off massive amounts of radiation, so I imagine you'd be dead-dead within a half hour. Probably much less.
Now, there is spent fuel that's had several years to decay sitting in dry storage on most nuclear sites, but they're kept in casks and bunkers which are so robust, you're not going to be able to steal or breach them in less time than it takes for three states worth of Law Enforcement and FBI to come crashing down on your party.
That fuel in dry storage would still kill you, but it would take longer.
I don't contest the logic of this statement in and of itself, but I do wonder were this kind of thinking ends. The Government has it's own critical tasks to perform, and officials should focus their efforts on, well, governing what they're supposed to look after. Should the government build it's own office chairs? It's own cars? How about servers? Handguns?
Eventually, wealthy and liberal societies come to an end for other reasons
Those 'other reasons' are pretty simple: Liberal and wealthy societies become complacent due to the ease of their lives, and that makes them neglect the principles and practices that made them powerful and wealthy to begin with.
The default human condition is poverty, misery and violence. Escaping that is rare, and it takes a special society to make wealth, power and security seem normal. Once wealth, power and security are seen as birthrights and not hard-won prizes, the parts of a society that make it special are neglected (because, hey, they're 'mean' and 'hard work'), and rot sets in.
They've been trying to build one for years (Keystone XL) but have been stonewalled at every turn by Obama.
Not just Obama, but the by anti-oil people. They think by blocking the pipeline, they will be reducing CO2 in our atmosphere. The sad part is, they are actually INCREASING the amount of CO2 and other pollutants.
Don't forget that OPEC countries have been found financing anti-Keystone XL 'environmental' groups as a means to keep competition out of their oil markets and keep prices up. Then there's the railway owners, who would lose out if a pipeline was built. Much of the inland oil development is shipped by BSNF, a Berkshire-Hathaway company. Buffet is an Obama supporter who has publicly supported Keystone XL, but who knows what deals are going on behind closed doors? (my apologies if this is a repeat post, the last one didn't seem to take.)
They've been trying to build one for years (Keystone XL) but have been stonewalled at every turn by Obama.
Not just Obama, but the by anti-oil people. They think by blocking the pipeline, they will be reducing CO2 in our atmosphere.
There's more though. Arab oil-producing companies have been found backing environmental groups, to fight the introduction of new supply into their markets, which would depress prices. Then there's the owners of the railroads, who would lose out if the pipe network was expanded. If I remember correctly, BSNF railway ships much of the recent inland oil development, and it's owned by Warren Buffet, a notable supporter of Obama. Buffet (again IIRC) has come out in support of the Keystone XL pipeline, but who knows what deals are going on behind closed doors?.
'Corium' is basically molten ceramic (The fuel is a uranium-oxide matrix.) It has such poor heat conducting properties that during normal operations, it could be 3000F in the center of a pellet, and 650F on the surface of the cladding- 3/16" away from the center.
why not just let the thing meltdown? It would essentially bury the fuel. After it drops down a 1000' or so, fill the hole in with cement. I wouldn't be too worried about volcanic eruptions, radiation is what keeps the earth core nice and soft.
The most important reason is that 'corium' isn't actually hot enough to burn through the earth like that, nor does it conduct heat all that well, even if any part of it became hot enough.
The integrity of the fuel rods is challenged at 2200F (zircaloy-water reaction, which released the hydrogen that caused the reactor building roofs to blow off on three of the Daichi units.)
Steel melts at about 2600F. Concrete breaks down at about 1800F.
In addition, the fuel is a uranium-oxide mix, a sort of ceramic. This class of material is generally known for poor thermal conductivity. That's why the pellets are the size of a pencil eraser, they need to be small and have a high surface area in order to conduct heat from the center of the pellet- which might be at 3000F in normal operations- to the fuel cladding and into the reactor coolant, which might be around 600F.
Anyway, from what I know about western reactors (it's my line of work, but i'm not a reactor engineer per se), I seriously doubt the fuel would 'burn' through steel or concrete. The fission products escape because of physical destruction to the facility caused by the Tsunami, or because of relief valves that limit reactor coolant system pressure, or primary containment structure pressure.
Chernobyl's release was due to a massive overpressure event that physically broke the reactor vessel. Nothing ever burned through concrete (check out the photos of the 'elephant's foot')
Three Mile Island's core was found in the bottom of the reactor vessel; a small amount of fission products was released by mis-operation of support systems. The integrity of the reactor vessel was never threatened, though the containment building (much larger than Daichi primary containment structures) withstood several hydrogen burns.
1) cigarette embers on a napkin
2) a bad 12V accessory
Coincidence: Hollywood’s only conservative group is getting close IRS nonprofit scrutiny
Another Coincidence: James O’Keefe Group Being Audited by NY. Again.
Yet Another Coincidence: Dinesh D’Souza Indicted For Election Fraud
Still Another Coincidence: IRS Proposes New 501(c)(4) Rules That Just Happen to Cover Most Tea Party Groups
Judge Strikes Down Wisconsin’s ‘John Doe’ Subpoenas
Secret investigations targeted coincidentally at most prominent conservative groups in WI who can only now legally talk about their harassment. If you want to see what American fascism would look like, well this is it.
quote source: Here, with more links.
The power of the federal goverment, and some state governments, is being turned against those who oppose the powerful. If you don't have a problem with that, you're no better than a Nazi, regardless of Godwin's law.
I was being sarcastic, of course, but this sort of news will certainly discourage guys from assisting lesbian couples. The couples will have to go pay full price at a fertility clinic for sperm. Is that not a logical consequence of this case? Does this not increase costs for the women involved? One guy gets screwed over by the court. Hundreds (Kansas) or thousands (National) of lesbian couples won't be able to find economical sperm donors. Buying sperm from a clinic will run north of $500. Yes, they ought to be able to swing $500+ if they want to have a kid. But should they have to?
This case will make it that much harder for lesbian couples to obtain a sperm donor. Like many laws and regulations, it'll ensure that things only occur when the proper people (in this case fertility clinics) get their cut.
Some folks have confused the United States prohibition on an established, national religion (congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion...) in the first amendment with a ban on any intermingling of religion with public office or government function. This odd view has been entertained from time to time in various courts, and is pushed by certain atheist and 'civil liberties' groups who lack productive work to pursue. So kindly forgive the GP poster, his confusion is rather common place.
Money's a bad consideration. Death Row inmates cost more than regular life-sentence inmates to house.
The argument is somewhat circular, because death-penalty opponents have made it so expensive. I'm not against all of the additional costs, mind you, in this day and age we ought to be damn sure we're executing the right person.
A lecture on natural law would have been out of place and unhelpful to the faithful for the following 5,000 years; the message was simply "I, God, made you and this world."
The fact that this short message was stretched out to a seven-day process in no way makes it literal. The specifics of creation were not the point, and would have been lost on those folks; so it was omitted. Those same young earth creationists must believe that the God of Abraham has a bit of Loki the Norse Trickster god in him, given that there is so much physical evidence contradicting a 6,000 year old earth. Either that, or they must believe that there's a massive satanic conspiracy to invent evidence for an earth billions of years old, an equally preposterous claim.
Religion gives us the 'Why' of life; science is the 'How.' They cannot serve each other's purposes.
1. the hard, solid, nonmetallic mineral matter of which rock is made, esp. as a building material. "the houses are built of stone" rock, pebble, boulder More (in metaphorical use) weight or lack of feeling, expression, or movement. "Isabel stood as if turned to stone" ASTRONOMY: a meteorite made of rock, as opposed to metal. MEDICINE: a calculus; a gallstone or kidney stone.
2. a piece of stone shaped for a purpose, esp. one of commemoration, ceremony, or demarcation.
3. The stone (abbreviation st) is a unit of measure equal to 14 pounds avoirdupois (about 6.35 kg [nb 1]) used in Great Britain and Ireland for measuring human body weight.
Isn't it about time a technical site such as slashdot started using metric units , eg kilos? You know, for the rest of the world outside the USA who has no clue what the hell 96,000 lbs means? Even in the UK hardly anyone under the age of 60 uses lbs as a measurement any more.
Explain 'Stones"
1) There is Islamic terrorism, and U.S. militia terrorism, and atheist terrorism, and Christian terrorism, and others. I know of no one worth listening to who seriously disputes any of these.
Now rank them by body count.
2) If you're really sitting around worried about Islamic terrorists hitting your town, you need to get a hobby.
I'm not.
Given the massive capital cost of this project, I'm imagine TransCanada will make good use of the line.
I am curious why you have a problem taking a 3-12 mile long train of crude oil off the tracks each day.
The only explanation I can come up with is that you believe:
1) that the relevant oil production is limited by rail transportation constraints, and
2) that the creation of a pipeline would allow a large increase of oil production, and
3) the same amount of oil would travel by rail, with an additional amount traveling via pipeline.
That explanation alone is also insufficient to explain opposition to the project.
Oh, one more thing:
It simply isn't practical to build out a pipeline network as substantial as the existing rail network within any reasonable timeframe.
Given that we can use infrastructure like this for a good 100 years if not longer, this no reason to stop the project either. A 'reasonable timeframe' isn't limited to our vanishingly brief lives.
Bullshit.
Creating a single pipeline will not remove demand for oil on rail. In order to reduce that demand you'd have to create a network of oil pipelines as big as the rail network itself. Oil goes by rail beause it's relatively efficient (compared to trucks et al) and can go anywhere without the need to build out huge amounts of infrastructure.
Pipelines are a total red-herring.
Are you saying we shouldn't build any pipelines, because we can't completely eliminate rail shipment of crude oil? It would seem to me that if you build just a few pipelines from the sources of crude oil to the refineries, you would greatly reduce the crude oil being shipped on rails.
That's the idea behind the Keystone XL pipeline.
Warren Buffet, Obama's buddy, owns BNSF railway, incidentally. Blocking the Keystone XL pipeline from being built directly enriches a major Obama campaign donor.