The type of people who "can afford it" are the type of people who pay almost nothing. Hell even Warren Buffet (who pays 17% tax whilst his assistant pays 30%) and Bill Gates (Sr.) have been campaigning against the unfairness of how little they pay.
The government accepts voluntary tax payments. They can put up or shut up.
As a younger man I used to get very upset about the gap between rich and poor, pointing to this type of excess as an example. But having accepted it as an adult, the world is not fair, I actually enjoy seeing this kind of insanity. If the rich want to blow their money on what amounts to "fluff" then so be it. We should be encouraging them every chance we can.
Exactly. This car was not designed and built by other multi-millionaires for fun. Legions of middle class engineers and assembly line workers made a good living putting this, and every other rich-boy toy together. They took that money home, fed their family, sent their kids to college, and put some cash away for retirement.
Conspicuous consumption like this is fantastic for all the people who make the products that are conspicuously consumed, and the vast majority of them are ordinary fellows.
While I don't expect a Chomsky fan to have any reasoning abilities found outside of a college sophomore with a chip on his shoulder, I'll respond anyway for other readers.
Whether or not we have a 'right' to cheap energy is besides the point. The bill will be completely inneffective while gutting our economy.
1) China and Russia are laughing at us. This act will artificially drive up the price of cheap-carbon based fuel in the US, reducing US demand. Reduced US demand will lower the global price, making oil and coal MORE attractive options for the rest of the world. Their increased use will more than offset any possible reductions we could do, with this bill or any other.
2) Folks like you are willing to spend billions of dollars and eviscerate our economy on the trillion dollar scale in a futile and arrogant attempt to turn back the clock. None from your side has ever talked about how we would deal with increased global temperatures, how we might mitigate any rising sea levels, or what the potential upsides to global warming are.
(These first two points are valid regardless of whether or not you're a global warming believer)
3) The climate is always changing, even before we started emitting massive amounts of carbon or anything else. Go look up climate history and see that the best reconstructed information we have, in recorded human history and prior, shows the climate has been significantly warmer and significantly cooler than it is now.
The term 'global warming' lately has even been replaced with the term 'climate change.' This should tip off any prudent observer that it's all a blatant move to grab money and power. The climate is always changing, and as such, in the 'Climate Change' political environment, will always serve as a convienent excuse to expand taxes and the suffocating regulatory state.
The problem isn't carbon emissions, the problem is folks like you who think they're infinately wiser than their fellow man and the free market, and see no problem with grasping all the money and power they can in order to force their good intentions on the rest of us.
And don't you dare talk to me like I favor large smoke stacks bellowing thick black smoke over American cities, and dumping nasty chemicals into rivers. We solved those problems decades ago and I'm fine with that sort of regulation. Now we've got arrogant do-gooders on a mission with nothing good to do, and we'll all suffer for their hubris if not stopped.
They're pointing out that there's so much untapped wind power that we should stop thinking about wind power as only a minor source of energy and invest more toward developing the resource.
The problem with wind power is that it's unreliable. We need absurd amounts of power available on command, not only when mother nature feels like delivering it.
Energy storage is difficult- the only large scale solution that's viable is to build dams in valleys, pump water uphill when the wind blows, and let it through water turbines as required.
Then of course your environmental impact is tremendous- not only did you mine or recycle the steel, copper, aluminum, etc to make the monstrosities in the first place, but then you covered rolling plains in them, and then you flooded countless square miles so the entire thing could actually work in a stable manner.
Oh yeah, and you built the damns, poured that concrete, and built all the other generators in the dam.
Lots of folks seem to think that you just make a wind turbine, hook it up to the grid, and when it generates electricity, the birds sing and the unicorns fart rainbows.
It ain't so. The grid has to be stable, wind isn't stable, so wind power is limited to supply only what actual power plants can replace rapidly.
These guys called me several times. First couple of times I hung up on them.
Then I told an operator to never call me back, and she said she'd put me on the do not call list.
Then another guy called, I demanded "What's the name of your company?" immediately, and he said he'd put me on the do not call list and hung up.
Finally, I listened to the idiotic robo-message in it's entirety, and at the end it said press #2 to be removed from our calling list. So I did.
I haven't gotten a call from them since.
It seems their telemarketers are penalized for putting people on the do-not-call list, because they never did. Once I told the auto-dialer to do so, I never got a call back.
When I grade, I don't care about the answer. I look at the way the student solves the problem. If the setup is correct, the computations are reasonable, and the flow of the solution demonstrates that the student knows what she's doing, then I give it full credit even if the answer is wrong. I hope you're not teaching engineers!
To paraphrase some other slashdot comment, "You build bridge. Bridge fall down. You want partial credit?"
Not to say that partial credit isn't appropriate in largely the manner you described, but being right has to also count, doesn't it?
That's a lovely list you have there. It appears, though, your premise in posting it has two questionable basis:
1) That all the knowledge required to prevent any of those incidents was freely available to humanity before we started experimenting with nuclear power.
2) That people in the nuclear power industry don't learn from these events and design & train against them.
The acquisition of knowledge isn't 'free'- sorry, no one is smart enough to foresee everything. Once the knowledge is acquired, however, it spreads rapidly throughout the industry.
Plus, a number of the items on that list are exaggerated, and their importance 'played up' for ignorant readers. Ignorance is of course rampant on the anti-nuke side: ignorance of the specifics of radiation, lack of perspective, the inability to evaluate realistic alternatives, ignorance of the political issues (not technical ones) that dominate the 'waste debate', etc, etc.
For most anti-nukers, all they have left is 'RADIATION BAD!!!!'. If they've got anything more than that, it's "WASTE BAD." In both cases a substantial level of ignorance and the accompanying fear are an intrinsic part of the equation.
Anyway, I'd like to know what Chernobyl, and any nuclear accident of that scale, might cost, and I'd like this figure taken into account when considering the cost building more nuclear power plants.
Now multiply it by the probability, and I'm just fine with that- Because the added dollar cost of this figure is utterly insignificant.
My Ranger is limited to 92 MPH, based on stability reasons (My estimate from actually going that fast, finding the limit, and trying to change lanes.)
That being said, we shouldn't put ourselves in the position of determining what our fellow citizens 'need,' especially in the absence of demonstrated over-riding social concerns. The number of accidents- proportional, and straight numeric amount- based on excessive speed alone do not come anywhere close to an overriding social concern.
On the whole, we are no wiser than our fellow man. Substituting our judgement (in the form of law) for the individuals should be done extremely rarely, and with great caution.
Unfortunately, folks on slashdot and web forums in general tend to vastly over-estimate their own wisdom, and vastly under-estimate the prudence and wisdom of their fellow man. Web forums, generally speaking, often come across as a room full of teenagers convinced they know everything, and their parents / society know nothing.
Don't concern yourself with limiting your fellow man to what you think he 'needs.' Just look after yourself.
This seems to be an extension of the last 30 years of defective parenting techniques- specifically, everyone's a winner and no one loses.
The 'theory' have given us the latest, and most reviled, generation to enter the workplace: The 'millenials,' widely know for both a sense of entitlement and shirking individual responsibility for results.
Obviously it's not universal to everyone in that age group, but ask anyone who's been hiring for decades- all generations have their quirks. The latest are the worst.
Kamen's silly ideas in this area shows the limits of his otherwise able intellect.
It's getting tiresome to have some moron shit on America every half-chance they get, with the same tired cliches.
Command of a starship-or a real ship- or a battalion- isn't an exercise in intellectualism. It's not a matter of how many books you read (though the right books can certainly help.)And it's not a matter of getting up in front of a committee with a thesis on command and defending it to a bunch of robe-wearing professors.
It's having the right kind of judgment shaped by years of experience. It's the culmination of years of successes and failures on lesser scales that develop an individual into a leader with the right kind of personnel handling skills, good 'battle' sense if you will, and a solid strategic vision.
These are not things that anyone has managed to distill into an 'intellectual' exercise.
Your anti-American "anti-intellectual" cliche is utterly out of place.
Experience matters, and experience isn't academic intellectualism. We've seen pointy-headed types appoint folks you'd consider 'intellectuals' to important posts where they proceeded to cause a great deal of ruin. Why? Because for all the letters after their name, they don't know what the fuck they're doing until they've had years of actual experience.
So yeah, putting Kirk as captain in this movie was way out of place, but not out of any concern for 'intellectualism.'
I expected a cheap shot like this, so here's my answer: The 'Propaganda' you refer to is generally about far-away places and events, and therefor any contrast with reality would not be apparent.
These people are being fed bullshit about the workings of their daily lives, and are required to participate in the lies or be hauled off to the gulag. There is a big difference between 'stoopid americans falling for propaganda about WMD/Iraq Lollerskates!!11Lol!' and Koreans believing or not believing the nonsense they're told, or participate in, each day, about matters that directly affect every waking moment.
The article says that P-238 is used as a power source because of the heat is causes during decay. Surely someone could come up with a better power source for these probes than a rare isotope. I'm not even sure than this plutonium could be manufactured by refining nuclear waste, since that process produces P-239.
The thing is that nuclear fission and decay have a higher energy density, by a factor of at least six orders of magnitude, than anything else*. Storing an equivalent amount of any other type of energy source would require increasing the craft size by a factor of a million or so. If you can't use solar, some sort of nuclear generation is the only alternative.
Now, if you mean maybe they can find a less-rare isotope to work with, well, maybe. They have $150 million reasons to look for decent alternatives.
*I work at a nuclear power plant, and we generate 1.2 gigawatts of electrical power for a year and a half on a low enrichment 12' cube of uranium. The coal required to produce the same amount of power would fill about 60 miles of 500' long coal-hauling ships. Batteries have even less density than that.
Joking aside, were it to happen, I believe that liberation of the North Korean people would open a massive can of worms.
Given that they've lived under an all-encompassing veil of propaganda and likely have a totally skewed worldview, can you imagine what would happen if the government fell and (e.g.) UN forces went in?
What do you tell these people? How will they react? How will you govern them?
I'm pretty sure they can tell they're being lied to, that their lives are not how they should be, and something is fundamentally wrong with their current society. While there are certainly a number of party members who do well as it stands right now, I'm pretty sure even they know it's all a lie- hell, they're more likely to be sure it's all bullsh*t.
While propaganda can be a very powerful tool, it is never sufficient to overturn most folk's perception of reality, when reality is diametrically opposed to the propaganda.
In the history of tyrannical upheavals, I have not once heard a report of "Holy fuck! You mean I was being lied to the entire time I was alive?" This sort of personality cult authoritarianism requires all its participants to lie on an extremely routine basis, because their society and structure is so utterly at odds with nature, with proper society, with reality, and with people's hearts.
It's a degrading way to live and I guarantee you that every single half-sane person in North Korea knows it.
Beyond that, a proper transition is certainly important and would be tricky. But it won't be because everyone is surprised they've been fed baloney for decades.
None of that really matters. We could get into epeen contests about who invented or built what all day long.
The only thing that matters is this: Leave well enough alone.
Screwing with something that functions adequately, in a known fashion, is an invitation to all kinds of mischief, not all of which can be predicted at this time.
If this isn't a backdoor effort to control speech on the web with European-style 'hate speech' laws, then it is nothing more than some internationals wanting their existence validated and their egos stroked.
The problem with having ICANN controlled by a US corporation is that it is subject to US laws and, more importantly, US court rulings. This has caused some problems in the recent past, because even state courts can issue judgements which affect ICANN. It's not just US law, for example, it's California law which governs ICANN.
The devil you know is better than the one you don't.
The fact that everyone says the US has done a fine job so far is the number one reason NOT TO FUCK WITH IT.
The last thing the Internet needs- or anything needs, for that matter- is a bunch of self-styled do-gooders asserting control over something running perfectly fine, and then trying to 'perfect' it.
The purpose of tenure is to protect teachers from unfair termination, not to protect bad teachers. If a teacher is underperforming there is usually a process to get rid of them, even if tenured, only most administrators are too lazy to go through it. The whole system is designed precisely so a school principal can't just terminate someone because IN THEIR JUDGMENT, the teacher is doing a lousy job. Personally I'd trust the judgment of most teachers over most school administrators.
Your position lies on the premise that a teacher is both entitled to their job, and if good, can't get employment elsewhere. If the 'process' takes five years and hundreds of thousands of dollars, your charge of 'administrators are too lazy to do it' falls pretty flat. New York, if A recall correctly, has a rubber room they send worthless teachers to, because paying them for years is cheaper than getting rid of them.
Are we going to punish a teacher because most of their students failed a standardized English test? What if more than half of their students don't SPEAK English?
Their first class should then be English, and it should be their only class until they master it. A language barrier is a crystal-clear cultural division that is easily exploitable by anyone with ambition or an axe to grind. (Hence, why it's preserved in so many places- divide and conquer.)
I could go on and on, but here's my ultimate point: The public school system is defective by design- it was never intended to create thinking, free citizens- it was intended to create controllable subjects. The systematic end result is what we see today. Teachers feel entitled to their jobs, students feel entitled to good grades, and parents feel entitled to taxpayer funded nannies that must obey their whims.
The fact that any public school manages to turn out decent or well-educated students is a testament to the parents and teachers involved.
If you expect that to make you happy, you'll be disappointed if you ever get it.
It's like when people move away from their shitty town to try to find a better life, only to realize that their life is still shitty because they brought themselves.
Or the woman constantly bitching about all her failed relationships, who has failed to realize that she's the common element in all of them.
Many things can only come from the inside. Happiness- or Life not Sucking- requires much from the individual, and not a lot from their surroundings./happy guy from a poor, dysfunctional family and a generally shitty background
The market system delivers the goods people want, but those who make it work cannot readily explain why it is so. The socialist or communist system does not deliver the goods, but those who operate it can readily explain away it's failure.
Araaag, drugs drugs drugs drugs. How about addressing the core problem of making life not SUCK so much?! That's up to you. What do you expect governments or scientists to do about it?
Also, it is true that fines are a significant portion of the EU's small budget. If so, doesn't this make it rather difficult for the EU to be a disinterested, fair, regulator?
It seems like they would have an incentive to invent corporate crimes and then impose fines for them, regardless of the targeted behaviors effect on consumers. (Not withstanding TFA, which I haven't read.)
This is what an unconstrained national government looks like. It wastes taxpayer money on petty things, and elsewhere, it uses it's power to direct people's lives in ever-increasing detail.
Remember that, when you advocate the US government take on yet another role. The state becomes all-encompassing, perverse, petty, and ultimately tyrannical (even if in a bureaucratically infuriating, superficially benign manner.)
I don't know how many of you have been paying attention for how long, but on the whole politicians are filthy bastards. Left or Right. You can't trust a word that comes out of their mouths. They'll f*ck over anything resembling a principled position if they think it'll give them 2 more points at the poles.
They're incompetent. Their only demonstrated competency is getting elected. They ruin everything they touch.
Left or Right. Doesn't matter. If a national politician is making the government do something, it'll be corrupt and expensive. The campaign promises they tell you are all bullsh*t.
They're not gonna save you. They're not gonna fix your life. The worthless promises they made to you they made to 300 million people. I have a hard time believing anyone can look at national politicians, in general, and not see a pile of incompetent filth.
There is only one conclusion to be drawn, when you understand this: The Federal Government must be minimized.
(this is often true for local and state politicians as well, but they're much more vulnerable in the polls, or it's much easier to escape their grasp.)
There isn't a person here who won't go on a five minute rant about the fed's incompetence on some pet topic of theirs. Many folks will then turn around and say how they want MORE government in area X.
Are you insane? Can you not see that the same defective processes and incentives that create the absurd behavior in the parts of the government you hate, would be present in the expanded parts of the government that you advocate? Do you somehow think the politicians on subcommittee X and bureaucrats at Agency PDQ would be cut of finer cloth?
What I advocate is how we started: The federal system. You can and should have anything you want as a government in your local states, Constitution and Amendments notwithstanding. If you can convince a majority of your fellow state citizens to vote for it, go for it.
And if you think your state is run by a bunch of idiots, and you can't get enough people to vote your way to change it, then you can leave to a state that suits you better. Or you can decide that your disagreements with your fellow citizens are tolerable, given whatever cost you associate with moving.
You have choice in the proper federal system. You are a free agent.
On the other hand, an over-reaching Federal Government gives you one big idea, right or wrong. You're stuck with it. The details of your life are dictated by a power-mad bunch in Washington that you have essentially no influence over.
There are a very, very few functions that can essentially be done by the Federal Government only. It should serve only those functions. If there is any other way to get a function done besides the federal government, it should be done by those alternates. Town Governments. State Governments. Private Charity. Churches.
I don't care which, really. Because you have a choice, and I have a choice, when the role of the federal government is limited. When there is no limit, YOU ARE STUCK with whatever bright idea those 535-ish chuckle heads in Washington come up with.
Oh, and if your bright idea X has been tried on the state level and failed, it wasn't because you lacked the power and money to properly implement your idea. It's because it was a bad idea. More money and power will only amplify the failure and trap us all.
Well, perhaps. But that wasn't my point. If I go and list critical problems associated with government charity, I fear you will argue those points, and then go back to considering libertarians and conservatives heartless.
First I ask you to understand that it is not callousness that defines conservatives/libertarians, but critical differences of opinions as to the best methods.
I see that you're not the original poster I responded to, so I'm not certain as to your starting point on this.
Slashdot Mirror
The type of people who "can afford it" are the type of people who pay almost nothing. Hell even Warren Buffet (who pays 17% tax whilst his assistant pays 30%) and Bill Gates (Sr.) have been campaigning against the unfairness of how little they pay.
The government accepts voluntary tax payments. They can put up or shut up.
As a younger man I used to get very upset about the gap between rich and poor, pointing to this type of excess as an example. But having accepted it as an adult, the world is not fair, I actually enjoy seeing this kind of insanity. If the rich want to blow their money on what amounts to "fluff" then so be it. We should be encouraging them every chance we can.
Exactly. This car was not designed and built by other multi-millionaires for fun. Legions of middle class engineers and assembly line workers made a good living putting this, and every other rich-boy toy together. They took that money home, fed their family, sent their kids to college, and put some cash away for retirement.
Conspicuous consumption like this is fantastic for all the people who make the products that are conspicuously consumed, and the vast majority of them are ordinary fellows.
While I don't expect a Chomsky fan to have any reasoning abilities found outside of a college sophomore with a chip on his shoulder, I'll respond anyway for other readers.
Whether or not we have a 'right' to cheap energy is besides the point. The bill will be completely inneffective while gutting our economy.
1) China and Russia are laughing at us. This act will artificially drive up the price of cheap-carbon based fuel in the US, reducing US demand. Reduced US demand will lower the global price, making oil and coal MORE attractive options for the rest of the world. Their increased use will more than offset any possible reductions we could do, with this bill or any other.
2) Folks like you are willing to spend billions of dollars and eviscerate our economy on the trillion dollar scale in a futile and arrogant attempt to turn back the clock. None from your side has ever talked about how we would deal with increased global temperatures, how we might mitigate any rising sea levels, or what the potential upsides to global warming are.
(These first two points are valid regardless of whether or not you're a global warming believer)
3) The climate is always changing, even before we started emitting massive amounts of carbon or anything else. Go look up climate history and see that the best reconstructed information we have, in recorded human history and prior, shows the climate has been significantly warmer and significantly cooler than it is now.
The term 'global warming' lately has even been replaced with the term 'climate change.' This should tip off any prudent observer that it's all a blatant move to grab money and power. The climate is always changing, and as such, in the 'Climate Change' political environment, will always serve as a convienent excuse to expand taxes and the suffocating regulatory state.
The problem isn't carbon emissions, the problem is folks like you who think they're infinately wiser than their fellow man and the free market, and see no problem with grasping all the money and power they can in order to force their good intentions on the rest of us.
And don't you dare talk to me like I favor large smoke stacks bellowing thick black smoke over American cities, and dumping nasty chemicals into rivers. We solved those problems decades ago and I'm fine with that sort of regulation. Now we've got arrogant do-gooders on a mission with nothing good to do, and we'll all suffer for their hubris if not stopped.
They're pointing out that there's so much untapped wind power that we should stop thinking about wind power as only a minor source of energy and invest more toward developing the resource.
The problem with wind power is that it's unreliable. We need absurd amounts of power available on command, not only when mother nature feels like delivering it.
Energy storage is difficult- the only large scale solution that's viable is to build dams in valleys, pump water uphill when the wind blows, and let it through water turbines as required.
Then of course your environmental impact is tremendous- not only did you mine or recycle the steel, copper, aluminum, etc to make the monstrosities in the first place, but then you covered rolling plains in them, and then you flooded countless square miles so the entire thing could actually work in a stable manner.
Oh yeah, and you built the damns, poured that concrete, and built all the other generators in the dam.
Lots of folks seem to think that you just make a wind turbine, hook it up to the grid, and when it generates electricity, the birds sing and the unicorns fart rainbows.
It ain't so. The grid has to be stable, wind isn't stable, so wind power is limited to supply only what actual power plants can replace rapidly.
These guys called me several times. First couple of times I hung up on them.
Then I told an operator to never call me back, and she said she'd put me on the do not call list.
Then another guy called, I demanded "What's the name of your company?" immediately, and he said he'd put me on the do not call list and hung up.
Finally, I listened to the idiotic robo-message in it's entirety, and at the end it said press #2 to be removed from our calling list. So I did.
I haven't gotten a call from them since.
It seems their telemarketers are penalized for putting people on the do-not-call list, because they never did. Once I told the auto-dialer to do so, I never got a call back.
Does anyone else have a similar experience?
When I grade, I don't care about the answer. I look at the way the student solves the problem. If the setup is correct, the computations are reasonable, and the flow of the solution demonstrates that the student knows what she's doing, then I give it full credit even if the answer is wrong.
I hope you're not teaching engineers!
To paraphrase some other slashdot comment,
"You build bridge. Bridge fall down. You want partial credit?"
Not to say that partial credit isn't appropriate in largely the manner you described, but being right has to also count, doesn't it?
That's a lovely list you have there. It appears, though, your premise in posting it has two questionable basis:
1) That all the knowledge required to prevent any of those incidents was freely available to humanity before we started experimenting with nuclear power.
2) That people in the nuclear power industry don't learn from these events and design & train against them.
The acquisition of knowledge isn't 'free'- sorry, no one is smart enough to foresee everything. Once the knowledge is acquired, however, it spreads rapidly throughout the industry.
Plus, a number of the items on that list are exaggerated, and their importance 'played up' for ignorant readers. Ignorance is of course rampant on the anti-nuke side: ignorance of the specifics of radiation, lack of perspective, the inability to evaluate realistic alternatives, ignorance of the political issues (not technical ones) that dominate the 'waste debate', etc, etc.
For most anti-nukers, all they have left is 'RADIATION BAD!!!!'. If they've got anything more than that, it's "WASTE BAD." In both cases a substantial level of ignorance and the accompanying fear are an intrinsic part of the equation.
Now multiply it by the probability, and I'm just fine with that- Because the added dollar cost of this figure is utterly insignificant.
My Ranger is limited to 92 MPH, based on stability reasons (My estimate from actually going that fast, finding the limit, and trying to change lanes.)
That being said, we shouldn't put ourselves in the position of determining what our fellow citizens 'need,' especially in the absence of demonstrated over-riding social concerns. The number of accidents- proportional, and straight numeric amount- based on excessive speed alone do not come anywhere close to an overriding social concern.
On the whole, we are no wiser than our fellow man. Substituting our judgement (in the form of law) for the individuals should be done extremely rarely, and with great caution.
Unfortunately, folks on slashdot and web forums in general tend to vastly over-estimate their own wisdom, and vastly under-estimate the prudence and wisdom of their fellow man. Web forums, generally speaking, often come across as a room full of teenagers convinced they know everything, and their parents / society know nothing.
Don't concern yourself with limiting your fellow man to what you think he 'needs.' Just look after yourself.
This seems to be an extension of the last 30 years of defective parenting techniques- specifically, everyone's a winner and no one loses.
The 'theory' have given us the latest, and most reviled, generation to enter the workplace: The 'millenials,' widely know for both a sense of entitlement and shirking individual responsibility for results.
Obviously it's not universal to everyone in that age group, but ask anyone who's been hiring for decades- all generations have their quirks. The latest are the worst.
Kamen's silly ideas in this area shows the limits of his otherwise able intellect.
It's getting tiresome to have some moron shit on America every half-chance they get, with the same tired cliches.
Command of a starship-or a real ship- or a battalion- isn't an exercise in intellectualism. It's not a matter of how many books you read (though the right books can certainly help.)And it's not a matter of getting up in front of a committee with a thesis on command and defending it to a bunch of robe-wearing professors.
It's having the right kind of judgment shaped by years of experience. It's the culmination of years of successes and failures on lesser scales that develop an individual into a leader with the right kind of personnel handling skills, good 'battle' sense if you will, and a solid strategic vision.
These are not things that anyone has managed to distill into an 'intellectual' exercise.
Your anti-American "anti-intellectual" cliche is utterly out of place.
Experience matters, and experience isn't academic intellectualism. We've seen pointy-headed types appoint folks you'd consider 'intellectuals' to important posts where they proceeded to cause a great deal of ruin. Why? Because for all the letters after their name, they don't know what the fuck they're doing until they've had years of actual experience.
So yeah, putting Kirk as captain in this movie was way out of place, but not out of any concern for 'intellectualism.'
Good story. Thank you.
I'll second the "Details, please!" request, in case you've blocked AC's.
I expected a cheap shot like this, so here's my answer:
The 'Propaganda' you refer to is generally about far-away places and events, and therefor any contrast with reality would not be apparent.
These people are being fed bullshit about the workings of their daily lives, and are required to participate in the lies or be hauled off to the gulag. There is a big difference between 'stoopid americans falling for propaganda about WMD/Iraq Lollerskates!!11Lol!' and Koreans believing or not believing the nonsense they're told, or participate in, each day, about matters that directly affect every waking moment.
Clear enough?
The article says that P-238 is used as a power source because of the heat is causes during decay. Surely someone could come up with a better power source for these probes than a rare isotope. I'm not even sure than this plutonium could be manufactured by refining nuclear waste, since that process produces P-239.
The thing is that nuclear fission and decay have a higher energy density, by a factor of at least six orders of magnitude, than anything else*.
Storing an equivalent amount of any other type of energy source would require increasing the craft size by a factor of a million or so. If you can't use solar, some sort of nuclear generation is the only alternative.
Now, if you mean maybe they can find a less-rare isotope to work with, well, maybe. They have $150 million reasons to look for decent alternatives.
*I work at a nuclear power plant, and we generate 1.2 gigawatts of electrical power for a year and a half on a low enrichment 12' cube of uranium. The coal required to produce the same amount of power would fill about 60 miles of 500' long coal-hauling ships. Batteries have even less density than that.
I'm pretty sure they can tell they're being lied to, that their lives are not how they should be, and something is fundamentally wrong with their current society. While there are certainly a number of party members who do well as it stands right now, I'm pretty sure even they know it's all a lie- hell, they're more likely to be sure it's all bullsh*t.
While propaganda can be a very powerful tool, it is never sufficient to overturn most folk's perception of reality, when reality is diametrically opposed to the propaganda.
In the history of tyrannical upheavals, I have not once heard a report of "Holy fuck! You mean I was being lied to the entire time I was alive?"
This sort of personality cult authoritarianism requires all its participants to lie on an extremely routine basis, because their society and structure is so utterly at odds with nature, with proper society, with reality, and with people's hearts.
It's a degrading way to live and I guarantee you that every single half-sane person in North Korea knows it.
Beyond that, a proper transition is certainly important and would be tricky. But it won't be because everyone is surprised they've been fed baloney for decades.
None of that really matters. We could get into epeen contests about who invented or built what all day long.
The only thing that matters is this: Leave well enough alone.
Screwing with something that functions adequately, in a known fashion, is an invitation to all kinds of mischief, not all of which can be predicted at this time.
If this isn't a backdoor effort to control speech on the web with European-style 'hate speech' laws, then it is nothing more than some internationals wanting their existence validated and their egos stroked.
The problem with having ICANN controlled by a US corporation is that it is subject to US laws and, more importantly, US court rulings. This has caused some problems in the recent past, because even state courts can issue judgements which affect ICANN. It's not just US law, for example, it's California law which governs ICANN.
The devil you know is better than the one you don't.
The fact that everyone says the US has done a fine job so far is the number one reason NOT TO FUCK WITH IT.
The last thing the Internet needs- or anything needs, for that matter- is a bunch of self-styled do-gooders asserting control over something running perfectly fine, and then trying to 'perfect' it.
The purpose of tenure is to protect teachers from unfair termination, not to protect bad teachers. If a teacher is underperforming there is usually a process to get rid of them, even if tenured, only most administrators are too lazy to go through it. The whole system is designed precisely so a school principal can't just terminate someone because IN THEIR JUDGMENT, the teacher is doing a lousy job. Personally I'd trust the judgment of most teachers over most school administrators.
Your position lies on the premise that a teacher is both entitled to their job, and if good, can't get employment elsewhere. If the 'process' takes five years and hundreds of thousands of dollars, your charge of 'administrators are too lazy to do it' falls pretty flat. New York, if A recall correctly, has a rubber room they send worthless teachers to, because paying them for years is cheaper than getting rid of them.
Are we going to punish a teacher because most of their students failed a standardized English test? What if more than half of their students don't SPEAK English?
Their first class should then be English, and it should be their only class until they master it. A language barrier is a crystal-clear cultural division that is easily exploitable by anyone with ambition or an axe to grind. (Hence, why it's preserved in so many places- divide and conquer.)
I could go on and on, but here's my ultimate point: The public school system is defective by design- it was never intended to create thinking, free citizens- it was intended to create controllable subjects. The systematic end result is what we see today. Teachers feel entitled to their jobs, students feel entitled to good grades, and parents feel entitled to taxpayer funded nannies that must obey their whims.
The fact that any public school manages to turn out decent or well-educated students is a testament to the parents and teachers involved.
If you expect that to make you happy, you'll be disappointed if you ever get it.
It's like when people move away from their shitty town to try to find a better life, only to realize that their life is still shitty because they brought themselves.
Or the woman constantly bitching about all her failed relationships, who has failed to realize that she's the common element in all of them.
Many things can only come from the inside. Happiness- or Life not Sucking- requires much from the individual, and not a lot from their surroundings. /happy guy from a poor, dysfunctional family and a generally shitty background
You reminded me of a quote I've read recently:
-Peter Bauer, London School of Economics.
Araaag, drugs drugs drugs drugs. How about addressing the core problem of making life not SUCK so much?!
That's up to you. What do you expect governments or scientists to do about it?
Also, it is true that fines are a significant portion of the EU's small budget.
If so, doesn't this make it rather difficult for the EU to be a disinterested, fair, regulator?
It seems like they would have an incentive to invent corporate crimes and then impose fines for them, regardless of the targeted behaviors effect on consumers.
(Not withstanding TFA, which I haven't read.)
This is what an unconstrained national government looks like.
It wastes taxpayer money on petty things, and elsewhere, it uses it's power to direct people's lives in ever-increasing detail.
Remember that, when you advocate the US government take on yet another role. The state becomes all-encompassing, perverse, petty, and ultimately tyrannical (even if in a bureaucratically infuriating, superficially benign manner.)
I don't know how many of you have been paying attention for how long, but on the whole politicians are filthy bastards. Left or Right. You can't trust a word that comes out of their mouths. They'll f*ck over anything resembling a principled position if they think it'll give them 2 more points at the poles.
They're incompetent. Their only demonstrated competency is getting elected. They ruin everything they touch.
Left or Right. Doesn't matter. If a national politician is making the government do something, it'll be corrupt and expensive. The campaign promises they tell you are all bullsh*t.
They're not gonna save you. They're not gonna fix your life. The worthless promises they made to you they made to 300 million people. I have a hard time believing anyone can look at national politicians, in general, and not see a pile of incompetent filth.
There is only one conclusion to be drawn, when you understand this:
The Federal Government must be minimized.
(this is often true for local and state politicians as well, but they're much more vulnerable in the polls, or it's much easier to escape their grasp.)
There isn't a person here who won't go on a five minute rant about the fed's incompetence on some pet topic of theirs. Many folks will then turn around and say how they want MORE government in area X.
Are you insane? Can you not see that the same defective processes and incentives that create the absurd behavior in the parts of the government you hate, would be present in the expanded parts of the government that you advocate? Do you somehow think the politicians on subcommittee X and bureaucrats at Agency PDQ would be cut of finer cloth?
What I advocate is how we started: The federal system. You can and should have anything you want as a government in your local states, Constitution and Amendments notwithstanding. If you can convince a majority of your fellow state citizens to vote for it, go for it.
And if you think your state is run by a bunch of idiots, and you can't get enough people to vote your way to change it, then you can leave to a state that suits you better. Or you can decide that your disagreements with your fellow citizens are tolerable, given whatever cost you associate with moving.
You have choice in the proper federal system. You are a free agent.
On the other hand, an over-reaching Federal Government gives you one big idea, right or wrong. You're stuck with it. The details of your life are dictated by a power-mad bunch in Washington that you have essentially no influence over.
There are a very, very few functions that can essentially be done by the Federal Government only. It should serve only those functions. If there is any other way to get a function done besides the federal government, it should be done by those alternates. Town Governments. State Governments. Private Charity. Churches.
I don't care which, really. Because you have a choice, and I have a choice, when the role of the federal government is limited. When there is no limit, YOU ARE STUCK with whatever bright idea those 535-ish chuckle heads in Washington come up with.
Oh, and if your bright idea X has been tried on the state level and failed, it wasn't because you lacked the power and money to properly implement your idea. It's because it was a bad idea. More money and power will only amplify the failure and trap us all.
Well, perhaps.
But that wasn't my point. If I go and list critical problems associated with government charity, I fear you will argue those points, and then go back to considering libertarians and conservatives heartless.
First I ask you to understand that it is not callousness that defines conservatives/libertarians, but critical differences of opinions as to the best methods.
I see that you're not the original poster I responded to, so I'm not certain as to your starting point on this.