They served their purpose in prehistory (holding Egypt together for several millennia), but we just don't need such social control systems any more.
I'm not so sure about that. Without God, you must explain moral codes in practical terms. The most basic (lie, cheat, steal)are easy enough. Some of the less obviously explained moral codes are both very important and not easy to explain the practicality thereof. (Envy, gluttony, etc.)
Humans are not fundamentally morally superior now as compared to 5,000 years ago. The only thing that has provably changed in that time is the societal indoctrination methods, and churches are the majority of those methods.
Churches, God, and Sin are ways of imposing codes of behavior that have been show to be successful over several millennia. The concepts of 'God' and 'Sin' are necessary to impose these codes of behavior, because you can't argue with God and you better do what he tells you.
If you were once again a child, or once again a teen, or once perhaps still are, how often do you recall arguing with your parents over some matter? That you were unconvinced by their stance?
They had at least two decades more of life experience than you to learn life lessons, and perhaps you might remember they were correct much more often than they were wrong.
But you still argued with them, because you didn't understand the value of their experience and you had to learn some of the same lessons the hard way, just as they did.
Well, assigning the most basic of these life lessons as commandments from God, with whom you may not argue, and who will punish you eternally for consistently failing to obey him, removes them from the 'negotiable' list completely. Do not lie. Do not steal. Do not murder. Don't try to screw your neighbors wife. Don't make babies with someone you're not committed to. Don't be envious, etc.
Any one of these things, when broken, will gain the perpetrator a momentary advantage that is plain for anyone to see. In the long run all are detrimental to both the perpetrator and the society around him. Convincing everyone that God would burn you in hell for eternity for doing any of them made folks decide that the momentary gain wasn't worth the fire.
Much less obvious is the long term benefit to society when everyone obeys these rules. Both explaining the full logic of why that is so, and getting the student to accept your and societie's experience is a damn near impossible task with an empty slate of a child or a hormone-driven teenager.
Further, there are countless adults who fail to grasp the utility of the religious rules and traditions we live by. If they are religious, they may yet follow the rules and their lives will be satisfactory, and their impact on society a net positive.
If they are not religious, and do not accept that those traditions and rules exist for reasons they do not grasp, then they will behave as they see fit- leaving ruin in their wake, as lessons learned hundreds or thousands of years ago are tossed out as the baby with the bathwater.
So, allow me to try to summarize if you've made it this far:
Religion is a way of passing down millennia of hard-learned lessons in a way that leaves no room for argument. I would go into the lessons besides 'don't lie, cheat, murder or steal', except you might argue with me about those topics, proving my point while convincing yourself I'm anachronistic.
Western civilization lies atop a massive carefully-built structure of unnatural behaviors that enable the tremendous intellectual and material wealth we enjoy today.
That behavioral structure is so carefully crafted and re-enforced that we forget that it is unnatural, and in forgetting that, we disparage the tools with which it was carefully built and must be maintained.
We are not naturally better than folks 5,000 years ago. We are only better because of the methods our ancestors derived to make us internalize their hard-learned lessons early in life.
Incidentally I do believe in God, but that doesn't prevent me from seeing the anthropology.
Well, it wouldn't be 'cool' in the James Dean/rockstar sense because it's so utterly overdone. Yawn. Protest christianity. It's such an utterly safe and mundane practice that doing it means nothing.
No christian churches label you an 'oppressive person' and send their office of special affairs after you. No christian churches will rile up their congregation over real or percieved insults. You won't see them screaming in the streets, holding signs that say 'death to those who insult christianity.'
You won't even get punched by a believer if you stand in front of a church screaming jesus was a zombie.
Protesting christianity is about as cool as yelling at the old dog laying in the corner because he dug a hole in the back yard. The offense you protest is barely worth mentioning and the dog isn't going to be affected by your protest enough to even get up.
Now, is it 'cool' to protest christianity, as in 'okay'? Sure. There's just no point.
In fact they come from some technological stone-age where the idea of giant-gigawatt-city-plants was considered the best solution imaginable.
Or the technological stone age where scaling up the volume you use to generate electricity cuts down on the ratio of volume to surface area, where you lose heat and efficiency.
Good thing we've gotten around that old Length^3 = volume = power production and Length^2 = area = ambient losses stone age philosophy.
Sarcasm about thermal efficiency aside, the added expense that comes with nuclear- the staffing, the regulatory issues, the security, the higher quality requirements, the safety systems- means that only the largest units are economically viable. New Nuclear power plant designs are even larger (A new GE design is on the order of 1,600MWe) for those reasons.
Now, certain large institutions may be turning toward combined heat and electricity generation. This makes perfect economic sense for those organizations, but it's not a larger trend. I won't go into the economics of it, but you're not going to have a combined heat-power generator in your basement, and neither is the walmart down the street, because the economics aren't there and won't be for the forseeable future.
Several others have done the math and shown how the numbers given for this 2nd place device just don't add up, and it was all basic physics.
Really, what kind of clowns are judging this competition? Does anyone have anything that exonerates the judges and organizers from the charge of being idiots?
We care more about how you randomly invade countries without reason, how you try to enforce your local laws and policy on weaker nations, and things like that.
There is a very, very short list of countries that could conceivably be invaded by the United States of America. There are over 130 countries who will not be invaded by the United States, ever, at all.
Given those ratios, you would think staying off the the USA's short list would start being a priority for certain countries, as it's clearly an achievable goal.
I don't think that the OP was right that bad guys hate our constitution more than anything. In fact, I really don't care what they hate about us. I want them to think long and hard about what they should do to not have us bomb & invade them.
You would have us think, presumably, about how to appease those who attack us with whatever pathetic means they have at their disposal. I would have them think about how to join the 130+ countries in the world the US would never invade- about how to appease us. Clearly it's quite possible.
I'm not going to defend any particular invasion or foreign action. I just want to point out that avoiding the wrath of the United States(or prospect thereof) is something that the vast majority of the world does just fine. It would behoove those the US might attack to study that very, very, long list.
I hate to be so glum but try telling that to abortion clinics and gay bars that get targeted by unsavory Christian whack-jobs. It's not too common fortunately, but if you think Islamic fundamentalists are the only violent ones today you're ignoring quite a bit.
Yes, you are ignoring quite a bit. It seems animal rights activists are running a distant second place to muslims in terrorism these days
It's not unusual for parliamentary systems to have 10-15, or more, parties in parliament. Many European parliaments have parties ranging from communists to right wing nationalists in parliament, with most shades in between. They're composed that way because the parliaments actually reflect the range of opinions present in the population rather than a bland set of lesser evils.
The problem when you get to that many parties is thus: While they may more accurately represent everyone's views, some of those views are utter rubbish and should be treated as such. When 2% of the vote is enough to get some clown with bizarre, unfounded views into a legislative body, they gain legitimacy they shouldn't really have.
It's a foolish societal indulgence to tell everyone that their views are reasonable and their demands rational.
Sorry, some people are full of crap and nothing will convince them of the fact. Giving them power just because they can find a few thousand idiots who roughly agree with them is foolish.
The benefit of a simple majority is that if you can't get a very sizable portion of the population to buy into your theories, you don't get represented- and that's okay, because you could, in fact, be a raving lunatic. In the US, on the national scale, views that don't pass the sniff test of tens of millions of people don't get represented.
It's much harder to get 20 million people to sign off on a bizzare, idiotic idea like "Free cars to every family who does X, W & Z and fills out a sworn idealistic purity statement about plesthetoic fish egg counts in the jurassic era and we'll pay for all of that by forming a national core of aluminum can collectors to walk the roads and pick up litter that has economic value."
In other systems though, you could probably get 15,000 people to sign off on such an idea, and that might get the proponents of such a bizarre scheme in the legislature- when they're f*cking idiots.
Now obviously I exaggerate and your mileage may vary based on your political views.
The point is that most of these alternatives have the big selling point of getting under-represented groups a proportional showing in a legislature. What no one is willing to say, however, is that many of these groups are under-represented because they're a bunch of idiots with bad ideas.
I'm not saying only good ideas make it on the US national level. I am saying our system keeps down the really, really, really bad ideas.
I've heard of negative externalities. The trouble is..
their prices don't reflect their true cost, in terms of environmental and health damage..... that in determining the 'true cost' there's frequently a lot of slop and conjecture involved. Such slop and conjecture in these 'true cost' studies is usually tilted towards those who want to grab power and money 'for our own/ the planets good.'
Huh. Imagine that.
The latest UN conference was on 'climate change', throwing even more suspicion on the entire affair. Not 'global warming', not 'global cooling', but 'climate change.' Now the climate changing is cause for redistributive policies,abrogating any sort of democratic process and arbitrary negative externalities (read: new taxes to prop up overly-generous welfare states whose finances suck).
Pretty convienent for these folks to use an unfalsifiable thesis as a basis for the policies they want, Global warming? Climate change! give us money and power! Global cooling? Climate change! give us money and power!
Nevermind that we have records of the climate changing drastically for hundreds of millions of years with absolutely no help from humans. Did you know that greenland was actually green at some point?
Go study science and engineering if you want to actually contribute, and make something that is both economical and helpful to the environment. Sign-waving jackasses crying for carbon taxes will never be anything more than anchors on people who actually do a damn thing. (and engineering better solutions counts as 'doing something')
Failing science and engineering studies, go join greenpeace and harass the French Navy.
but you clearly aren't the person who should be telling greenies what sort of "lessons" they should be learning
I'm not, you smarmy prick? I think anthropogenic global warming is mostly bullshit (a full discussion of my position is outside of the scope of this discussion), I'm a capitalist, and I would buy this technology.
What's so hard for you to process? You can entice me into your practice of environmentalism with economics, when I ordinarily wouldn't give a shit (not really, but relatively speaking let's go with 'I don't give a shit').
Hey, it's great that tree-huggers have been working on this kind of stuff for decades. That's good. I'm cool with that. It's pretty clear not everyone has gotten the message, so don't go lecturing me about what I should talk about. The most visible (numerous?) environmentalists are angry, sophomoric juveniles who couldn't manage a 7-11 for a week, let alone a cargo ship. Given that, figuring out how to sell your cause to people who can is kind of important, isn't it?
You represent another problem with environmentalists- among their ranks are smarmy self-righteous pricks who think only they're qualified to speak about what environmental practices should be implemented or how they should be advocated. If you haven't noticed there are many among your brethren who want to use the AGW as a power and money grab. Those people can die in a fire.
Bring me something that saves money, does the same job, and helps the environment? I'm all ears.
FYI, did you know that when you throw a gallon of gasoline into your automobile, that at the refinery more energy was consumed in the processing of the gasoline than is available for you when you burn that fuel?
I know that's true for the entire process for certain kinds of sources- tar sands, for example, take a great deal of energy to make a useful fuel- but I was under the impression that it wasn't the case for the majority of fuel.
Even if it is the case, there are other byproducts of crude oil that can be burned for the heat required for the process- I have a hard time imagining it all comes from power plants.
Do you have a good source for your original statement?
It's not about "fighting climate change" like the pro-green TFA title, it's about saving $1600 a day.
The lesson for greenies is of course to find cheaper, more environmentally friendly ways to achieve the same output as fossil fuels.
Raising costs with punitive 'carbon taxes' will earn revulsion and support theories that global warming hysteria is really just a power and money grab.
Developing environmentally friendly AND cheaper, effective solutions will earn their developers lots of money and save the environment at the same time.
You catch more flies with honey than vinegar. This kite- it's environmental honey. Develop more things like it.
Strapping kites onto oil tankers will only help perpetuate the outdated, unsustainable economies we rely on today. Developing technologies that save the shipping company $1600/day is a waste of time and effort
Hey, I'd like it if nuclear power took off in commercial vessels. Considering how much fuel those guys burn it would be worth it.
Your thought process precludes incremental improvements, and denigrating this while promoting windpower in the same comment is silly. It is windpower, and some windpower is better than no windpower, isn't it?
Or are you of the opinion that we should hold off on buidling more windmills until we can power THE ENTIRE NATION from windpower?
Progress is progress. The five steps foward this represents isn't the leap you want, but we've still moved forward.
If you work in an environment where you can't have frank and reasonable discussions with your employer about on-call hours, you should probably be looking for another job anyway.
Some jobs you're just on-call by definition, and that's it. Every other job you should be able dicuss and negotiate that kind of thing to be within reasonable boundaries.
If you can't, you're working for jackasses, and you'd be best off moving on anyway. So start looking. There are other jobs out there.
One of the many things I've found fascinating about this plane is that it is more fuel efficient at higher speeds than lower.
I wish I had a source, but if I remember correctly, the thing basically sips gas while making transcontinental flights faster than you can mow your yard.
Interesting that you continue to meta-argue, bragging about how knowledgable you are about arguments.
You don't have an actual response for him, so you hide under phrases a freshmen picks up in rhetoric 101.
It allows you to convince yourself you have the moral and argumentative high road, when in fact you have neither.
Your pompous ignorance elicits justified frustrated responses, and these frustrated responses become your focal point rather than the valid points he made. It's a self-reinforcing loop you have- make nonsensical arguments to the point of gross ignorance, then when someone points out just how far off base you are, you jump on that to disqualify his character and therefor argument.
So in effect, by ignoring his arguments because he insulted you, you have made judgements that connect his character irrationally with his arguments. That sounds awful close to an ad-hominem fallacy to me.
"Ad hominem validates the opposing view point. By attacking a man one shows inability to respond to what that man says."
This isn't the Royal Debate Society, and you aren't the Professor of Rhetoric. He didn't say "You're a jackass so everything you say can be ignored", which is what I'm sure his signature referred to.
He did say "You are factually incorrect or obscuring what happened in X,Y, and Z specific ways, and your wanton method of doing so indicates you're a jackass." There's a difference, and superficial resemblance does not make them equal.
One of the downsides of open participation internet forums is that people can confidently type out utter rubbish, and then demand to be treated like a credible contributor.
He responded to you what you said, and you ignored it because acknowledging it would challenge the way you think about things. Can't have that, can we?
Your response soley to the 'jackass' label, whilst convienently ignoring the rest, indicates that you are, in fact, a jackass.
Ah, well, there's radioactively hot, and there's temperature hot. There's also the reactor primary coolant loop, and then there's the secondary steam plant electricity generating loop.
Depending on your particular power plant model, of course.
The steam & turbine loop at three mile island (and all pressurized water reactors)is completely seperate from the reactor coolant loop- ie, the water that circulates past the fuel.
The heat in a Pressurized water Reactor (PWR) is passed through solid metal walls in a steam generator- basically a big heat exchanger with boiling water on one side.
These steam generators are often used to remove thermal decay heat, though I doubt TMI did that for the year or two between the incident and when they re-entered the reactor building & vessel.
They probably would have used another system (residual heat removal) which is completely seperate from the steam-electricity side of the plant.
Anyway, the 'hotness' that would have kept them out of the reactor vessel and containment building for a year or two would have been the radioactive kind. Since they melted the fuel into the reactor coolant, and discharged that same coolant onto the containment building floor (reactor coolant system relief valves to the relief tank, relief tank rupture disks to the containment building floor), the radiation levels in the containment building where likely very high for quite some time, and it took a couple years for it to get down to tolerable levels.
I don't remember if TMI's steam generators remained intact. If they didn't, that could affect everything as well, as could the heat output from TMI's destroyed and not fully controllable reactor. If they had to use the SG's to remove a massive amount of decay heat (more than a few percent rated thermal power) then that would have required an isolatable part of the secondary steam plant to remain thermally hot for some time. We'd really have to get into the specifics of the aftermath, to such details you would only find them in industry reports, not news stories.
"Hot" is often used in the nuke industry to indicate high levels of radiation, probably moreso than temperature. That may be where some of the confusion comes from.
High temperatures to everyone else (500-600 deg F) is "Normal Operating Temperature" and the first thing they tell you when you arrive is "don't touch pipes."
Hope that helps things out. As I recall, chernobyl was not a pressurized water reactor, but a boiling water reactor.
In a boiling water reactor, the same water cools the fuel as boils and spins the turbine. I think the same issue applied to chernobyl- the radioactive 'hotness' outlived the thermal 'hotness' by years, and there's no steam generators at chernobyl to seperate the steam plant from the reactor coolant.
I'm sure there's still places at chernobyl you wouldn't want to go.
In the US, any reactor that loses power to the control rods will also cut power to the fuel rods, resulting in the control rods falling into the core, and the fuel rods falling out of the core into a huge slab, stopping the reaction. I wish TFA had properly indicated that as the reason why we won't ever have a chernobyl, along with our compliance with basic safety regulations.
An overall good post, ending with something almost completely incorrect.
When a nuclear power plant loses power, the control rods lose power, and drop into the area of the fuel rods to stop the chain reaction.
The fuel rods still have significant decay heat, and this is removed, in varying designs and at varying times, by: 1. Forced circulation with the aid of emergency generators. 2. Natural circulation (low heat source + high heat sink = flow) and least preferably: 3. By complete and utter destruction of the fuel assemblies, where it melts, destroys the reactor vessel, spreads out in containment, and radiates it's heat away. TMI wasn't even that bad, but chernobyl was. Either way, that's a plant-ending event.
Even if we could recover from a fuel-melting event, the fuel in the core costs us $200 million dollars- something we'd prefer not to replace until it's properly used.
Now, heating the fuel and the water (moderator in US reactors) does slow down the nuclear chain reaction and reduce the power output, but that's an entirely different discussion.
Tennessee Valley Authority doesn't run their nuke plants any better than anyone else, and yes, I'm in a position to know.
I work at a for-profit nuke plant staffed largely- almost exclusively- by republicans, and we're a top-rated facility when compared world-wide.
We, in the nuke industry, keep metrics on these sorts of things, and no plant run by the TVA, France, Finland, Ex-commies in the old USSR, or anyone measures significantly better than us in any category you can come up with.
You have no idea what you're talking about. Your fantasies about democrats and non-profits being inherently better at anything than republicans and profit driven enterprises is the symptom of massive ignorance about numerous topics.
But don't let that stop you from feeling morally superior and self-rightous, m'kay?
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They served their purpose in prehistory (holding Egypt together for several millennia), but we just don't need such social control systems any more.
I'm not so sure about that. Without God, you must explain moral codes in practical terms. The most basic (lie, cheat, steal)are easy enough. Some of the less obviously explained moral codes are both very important and not easy to explain the practicality thereof. (Envy, gluttony, etc.)
Humans are not fundamentally morally superior now as compared to 5,000 years ago. The only thing that has provably changed in that time is the societal indoctrination methods, and churches are the majority of those methods.
Churches, God, and Sin are ways of imposing codes of behavior that have been show to be successful over several millennia. The concepts of 'God' and 'Sin' are necessary to impose these codes of behavior, because you can't argue with God and you better do what he tells you.
If you were once again a child, or once again a teen, or once perhaps still are, how often do you recall arguing with your parents over some matter? That you were unconvinced by their stance?
They had at least two decades more of life experience than you to learn life lessons, and perhaps you might remember they were correct much more often than they were wrong.
But you still argued with them, because you didn't understand the value of their experience and you had to learn some of the same lessons the hard way, just as they did.
Well, assigning the most basic of these life lessons as commandments from God, with whom you may not argue, and who will punish you eternally for consistently failing to obey him, removes them from the 'negotiable' list completely. Do not lie. Do not steal. Do not murder. Don't try to screw your neighbors wife. Don't make babies with someone you're not committed to. Don't be envious, etc.
Any one of these things, when broken, will gain the perpetrator a momentary advantage that is plain for anyone to see. In the long run all are detrimental to both the perpetrator and the society around him. Convincing everyone that God would burn you in hell for eternity for doing any of them made folks decide that the momentary gain wasn't worth the fire.
Much less obvious is the long term benefit to society when everyone obeys these rules. Both explaining the full logic of why that is so, and getting the student to accept your and societie's experience is a damn near impossible task with an empty slate of a child or a hormone-driven teenager.
Further, there are countless adults who fail to grasp the utility of the religious rules and traditions we live by. If they are religious, they may yet follow the rules and their lives will be satisfactory, and their impact on society a net positive.
If they are not religious, and do not accept that those traditions and rules exist for reasons they do not grasp, then they will behave as they see fit- leaving ruin in their wake, as lessons learned hundreds or thousands of years ago are tossed out as the baby with the bathwater.
So, allow me to try to summarize if you've made it this far:
Religion is a way of passing down millennia of hard-learned lessons in a way that leaves no room for argument.
I would go into the lessons besides 'don't lie, cheat, murder or steal', except you might argue with me about those topics, proving my point while convincing yourself I'm anachronistic.
Western civilization lies atop a massive carefully-built structure of unnatural behaviors that enable the tremendous intellectual and material wealth we enjoy today.
That behavioral structure is so carefully crafted and re-enforced that we forget that it is unnatural, and in forgetting that, we disparage the tools with which it was carefully built and must be maintained.
We are not naturally better than folks 5,000 years ago. We are only better because of the methods our ancestors derived to make us internalize their hard-learned lessons early in life.
Incidentally I do believe in God, but that doesn't prevent me from seeing the anthropology.
Well, it wouldn't be 'cool' in the James Dean/rockstar sense because it's so utterly overdone. Yawn. Protest christianity. It's such an utterly safe and mundane practice that doing it means nothing.
No christian churches label you an 'oppressive person' and send their office of special affairs after you. No christian churches will rile up their congregation over real or percieved insults. You won't see them screaming in the streets, holding signs that say 'death to those who insult christianity.'
You won't even get punched by a believer if you stand in front of a church screaming jesus was a zombie.
Protesting christianity is about as cool as yelling at the old dog laying in the corner because he dug a hole in the back yard. The offense you protest is barely worth mentioning and the dog isn't going to be affected by your protest enough to even get up.
Now, is it 'cool' to protest christianity, as in 'okay'? Sure. There's just no point.
In fact they come from some technological stone-age where the idea of giant-gigawatt-city-plants was considered the best solution imaginable.
Or the technological stone age where scaling up the volume you use to generate electricity cuts down on the ratio of volume to surface area, where you lose heat and efficiency.
Good thing we've gotten around that old Length^3 = volume = power production and Length^2 = area = ambient losses stone age philosophy.
Sarcasm about thermal efficiency aside, the added expense that comes with nuclear- the staffing, the regulatory issues, the security, the higher quality requirements, the safety systems- means that only the largest units are economically viable. New Nuclear power plant designs are even larger (A new GE design is on the order of 1,600MWe) for those reasons.
Now, certain large institutions may be turning toward combined heat and electricity generation. This makes perfect economic sense for those organizations, but it's not a larger trend. I won't go into the economics of it, but you're not going to have a combined heat-power generator in your basement, and neither is the walmart down the street, because the economics aren't there and won't be for the forseeable future.
It's almost like a good cop/bad cop routine.
A $2 jug of rain-X windshield washer fluid will do the same thing, and re-applying it as easy as using the 'spray' button.
Several others have done the math and shown how the numbers given for this 2nd place device just don't add up, and it was all basic physics.
Really, what kind of clowns are judging this competition? Does anyone have anything that exonerates the judges and organizers from the charge of being idiots?
We care more about how you randomly invade countries without reason, how you try to enforce your local laws and policy on weaker nations, and things like that.
There is a very, very short list of countries that could conceivably be invaded by the United States of America. There are over 130 countries who will not be invaded by the United States, ever, at all.
Given those ratios, you would think staying off the the USA's short list would start being a priority for certain countries, as it's clearly an achievable goal.
I don't think that the OP was right that bad guys hate our constitution more than anything. In fact, I really don't care what they hate about us. I want them to think long and hard about what they should do to not have us bomb & invade them.
You would have us think, presumably, about how to appease those who attack us with whatever pathetic means they have at their disposal. I would have them think about how to join the 130+ countries in the world the US would never invade- about how to appease us. Clearly it's quite possible.
I'm not going to defend any particular invasion or foreign action. I just want to point out that avoiding the wrath of the United States(or prospect thereof) is something that the vast majority of the world does just fine. It would behoove those the US might attack to study that very, very, long list.
I hate to be so glum but try telling that to abortion clinics and gay bars that get targeted by unsavory Christian whack-jobs. It's not too common fortunately, but if you think Islamic fundamentalists are the only violent ones today you're ignoring quite a bit.
Yes, you are ignoring quite a bit. It seems animal rights activists are running a distant second place to muslims in terrorism these days
"The house of a professor at the University of California at Los Angeles was damaged by a firebomb left at the front door early Tuesday, the university said in a news release, and an animal-rights extremist group has claimed responsibility for the attack.
Something tells me there aren't too many christians in those groups, but I could be wrong.
Oh, yes, could you share with us the last time a gay bar or abortion clinic was violently attacked by christian fundies?
Thanks.
Put simply, if cables become fair game, the US has more to lose than anyone else.
True, but we have the most powerful and numerous navy in the world. While it's not omnipotent, it is terribly useful in this arena.
We can protect missions to cut enemy cables or repair our own, and we can deny an enemy access to repair their own cables.
Obviously there's a whole lot of discussion on tactics, policy, and strategy that can be had.
Ultimately, however, raw power matters, and the US has it in spades.
...is the quality of the office furniture they'll soon be selling off.
I could use a good desk or two, and maybe a nice office chair.
What is it with acting like foreign nationals are some sort of trained monkey? C'mon folks.
C'mon? He's French! Fill in the rest of this phrase: Cheese-eating surrender _________ .
To be fair, the French are fantastic at sinking Greenpeace boats- can't really fault them for that.
(No, I'm not serious, and no, I didn't RTFA)
It's not unusual for parliamentary systems to have 10-15, or more, parties in parliament. Many European parliaments have parties ranging from communists to right wing nationalists in parliament, with most shades in between. They're composed that way because the parliaments actually reflect the range of opinions present in the population rather than a bland set of lesser evils.
The problem when you get to that many parties is thus:
While they may more accurately represent everyone's views, some of those views are utter rubbish and should be treated as such. When 2% of the vote is enough to get some clown with bizarre, unfounded views into a legislative body, they gain legitimacy they shouldn't really have.
It's a foolish societal indulgence to tell everyone that their views are reasonable and their demands rational.
Sorry, some people are full of crap and nothing will convince them of the fact. Giving them power just because they can find a few thousand idiots who roughly agree with them is foolish.
The benefit of a simple majority is that if you can't get a very sizable portion of the population to buy into your theories, you don't get represented- and that's okay, because you could, in fact, be a raving lunatic. In the US, on the national scale, views that don't pass the sniff test of tens of millions of people don't get represented.
It's much harder to get 20 million people to sign off on a bizzare, idiotic idea like "Free cars to every family who does X, W & Z and fills out a sworn idealistic purity statement about plesthetoic fish egg counts in the jurassic era and we'll pay for all of that by forming a national core of aluminum can collectors to walk the roads and pick up litter that has economic value."
In other systems though, you could probably get 15,000 people to sign off on such an idea, and that might get the proponents of such a bizarre scheme in the legislature- when they're f*cking idiots.
Now obviously I exaggerate and your mileage may vary based on your political views.
The point is that most of these alternatives have the big selling point of getting under-represented groups a proportional showing in a legislature. What no one is willing to say, however, is that many of these groups are under-represented because they're a bunch of idiots with bad ideas.
I'm not saying only good ideas make it on the US national level. I am saying our system keeps down the really, really, really bad ideas.
I'm not a libertarian and I'm not going to try to stop them.
It is fascinating that a relatively prominent member of a social welfare state is clearly demonstrating a slave mentality, however.
'Keep me on a leash, I shouldn't be trusted and neither should anyone else.'
I've heard of negative externalities. The trouble is..
.... that in determining the 'true cost' there's frequently a lot of slop and conjecture involved. Such slop and conjecture in these 'true cost' studies is usually tilted towards those who want to grab power and money 'for our own/ the planets good.'
their prices don't reflect their true cost, in terms of environmental and health damage.
Huh. Imagine that.
The latest UN conference was on 'climate change', throwing even more suspicion on the entire affair. Not 'global warming', not 'global cooling', but 'climate change.' Now the climate changing is cause for redistributive policies,abrogating any sort of democratic process and arbitrary negative externalities (read: new taxes to prop up overly-generous welfare states whose finances suck).
Pretty convienent for these folks to use an unfalsifiable thesis as a basis for the policies they want, Global warming? Climate change! give us money and power! Global cooling? Climate change! give us money and power!
Nevermind that we have records of the climate changing drastically for hundreds of millions of years with absolutely no help from humans. Did you know that greenland was actually green at some point?
Go study science and engineering if you want to actually contribute, and make something that is both economical and helpful to the environment. Sign-waving jackasses crying for carbon taxes will never be anything more than anchors on people who actually do a damn thing. (and engineering better solutions counts as 'doing something')
Failing science and engineering studies, go join greenpeace and harass the French Navy.
but you clearly aren't the person who should be telling greenies what sort of "lessons" they should be learning
I'm not, you smarmy prick? I think anthropogenic global warming is mostly bullshit (a full discussion of my position is outside of the scope of this discussion), I'm a capitalist, and I would buy this technology.
What's so hard for you to process? You can entice me into your practice of environmentalism with economics, when I ordinarily wouldn't give a shit (not really, but relatively speaking let's go with 'I don't give a shit').
Hey, it's great that tree-huggers have been working on this kind of stuff for decades. That's good. I'm cool with that. It's pretty clear not everyone has gotten the message, so don't go lecturing me about what I should talk about. The most visible (numerous?) environmentalists are angry, sophomoric juveniles who couldn't manage a 7-11 for a week, let alone a cargo ship. Given that, figuring out how to sell your cause to people who can is kind of important, isn't it?
You represent another problem with environmentalists- among their ranks are smarmy self-righteous pricks who think only they're qualified to speak about what environmental practices should be implemented or how they should be advocated. If you haven't noticed there are many among your brethren who want to use the AGW as a power and money grab. Those people can die in a fire.
Bring me something that saves money, does the same job, and helps the environment? I'm all ears.
I like your post overall, but this gave me pause:
FYI, did you know that when you throw a gallon of gasoline into your automobile, that at the refinery more energy was consumed in the processing of the gasoline than is available for you when you burn that fuel?
I know that's true for the entire process for certain kinds of sources- tar sands, for example, take a great deal of energy to make a useful fuel- but I was under the impression that it wasn't the case for the majority of fuel.
Even if it is the case, there are other byproducts of crude oil that can be burned for the heat required for the process- I have a hard time imagining it all comes from power plants.
Do you have a good source for your original statement?
It's not about "fighting climate change" like the pro-green TFA title, it's about saving $1600 a day.
The lesson for greenies is of course to find cheaper, more environmentally friendly ways to achieve the same output as fossil fuels.
Raising costs with punitive 'carbon taxes' will earn revulsion and support theories that global warming hysteria is really just a power and money grab.
Developing environmentally friendly AND cheaper, effective solutions will earn their developers lots of money and save the environment at the same time.
You catch more flies with honey than vinegar. This kite- it's environmental honey. Develop more things like it.
Strapping kites onto oil tankers will only help perpetuate the outdated, unsustainable economies we rely on today. Developing technologies that save the shipping company $1600/day is a waste of time and effort
Hey, I'd like it if nuclear power took off in commercial vessels. Considering how much fuel those guys burn it would be worth it.
Your thought process precludes incremental improvements, and denigrating this while promoting windpower in the same comment is silly. It is windpower, and some windpower is better than no windpower, isn't it?
Or are you of the opinion that we should hold off on buidling more windmills until we can power THE ENTIRE NATION from windpower?
Progress is progress. The five steps foward this represents isn't the leap you want, but we've still moved forward.
If you work in an environment where you can't have frank and reasonable discussions with your employer about on-call hours, you should probably be looking for another job anyway.
Some jobs you're just on-call by definition, and that's it. Every other job you should be able dicuss and negotiate that kind of thing to be within reasonable boundaries.
If you can't, you're working for jackasses, and you'd be best off moving on anyway. So start looking. There are other jobs out there.
One of the many things I've found fascinating about this plane is that it is more fuel efficient at higher speeds than lower.
I wish I had a source, but if I remember correctly, the thing basically sips gas while making transcontinental flights faster than you can mow your yard.
Interesting that you continue to meta-argue, bragging about how knowledgable you are about arguments.
You don't have an actual response for him, so you hide under phrases a freshmen picks up in rhetoric 101.
It allows you to convince yourself you have the moral and argumentative high road, when in fact you have neither.
Your pompous ignorance elicits justified frustrated responses, and these frustrated responses become your focal point rather than the valid points he made. It's a self-reinforcing loop you have- make nonsensical arguments to the point of gross ignorance, then when someone points out just how far off base you are, you jump on that to disqualify his character and therefor argument.
So in effect, by ignoring his arguments because he insulted you, you have made judgements that connect his character irrationally with his arguments. That sounds awful close to an ad-hominem fallacy to me.
"Ad hominem validates the opposing view point. By attacking a man one shows inability to respond to what that man says."
This isn't the Royal Debate Society, and you aren't the Professor of Rhetoric. He didn't say "You're a jackass so everything you say can be ignored", which is what I'm sure his signature referred to.
He did say "You are factually incorrect or obscuring what happened in X,Y, and Z specific ways, and your wanton method of doing so indicates you're a jackass." There's a difference, and superficial resemblance does not make them equal.
One of the downsides of open participation internet forums is that people can confidently type out utter rubbish, and then demand to be treated like a credible contributor.
He responded to you what you said, and you ignored it because acknowledging it would challenge the way you think about things. Can't have that, can we?
Your response soley to the 'jackass' label, whilst convienently ignoring the rest, indicates that you are, in fact, a jackass.
Ah, well, there's radioactively hot, and there's temperature hot. There's also the reactor primary coolant loop, and then there's the secondary steam plant electricity generating loop.
Depending on your particular power plant model, of course.
The steam & turbine loop at three mile island (and all pressurized water reactors)is completely seperate from the reactor coolant loop- ie, the water that circulates past the fuel.
The heat in a Pressurized water Reactor (PWR) is passed through solid metal walls in a steam generator- basically a big heat exchanger with boiling water on one side.
These steam generators are often used to remove thermal decay heat, though I doubt TMI did that for the year or two between the incident and when they re-entered the reactor building & vessel.
They probably would have used another system (residual heat removal) which is completely seperate from the steam-electricity side of the plant.
Anyway, the 'hotness' that would have kept them out of the reactor vessel and containment building for a year or two would have been the radioactive kind. Since they melted the fuel into the reactor coolant, and discharged that same coolant onto the containment building floor (reactor coolant system relief valves to the relief tank, relief tank rupture disks to the containment building floor), the radiation levels in the containment building where likely very high for quite some time, and it took a couple years for it to get down to tolerable levels.
I don't remember if TMI's steam generators remained intact. If they didn't, that could affect everything as well, as could the heat output from TMI's destroyed and not fully controllable reactor. If they had to use the SG's to remove a massive amount of decay heat (more than a few percent rated thermal power) then that would have required an isolatable part of the secondary steam plant to remain thermally hot for some time. We'd really have to get into the specifics of the aftermath, to such details you would only find them in industry reports, not news stories.
"Hot" is often used in the nuke industry to indicate high levels of radiation, probably moreso than temperature. That may be where some of the confusion comes from.
High temperatures to everyone else (500-600 deg F) is "Normal Operating Temperature" and the first thing they tell you when you arrive is "don't touch pipes."
Hope that helps things out. As I recall, chernobyl was not a pressurized water reactor, but a boiling water reactor.
In a boiling water reactor, the same water cools the fuel as boils and spins the turbine. I think the same issue applied to chernobyl- the radioactive 'hotness' outlived the thermal 'hotness' by years, and there's no steam generators at chernobyl to seperate the steam plant from the reactor coolant.
I'm sure there's still places at chernobyl you wouldn't want to go.
In the US, any reactor that loses power to the control rods will also cut power to the fuel rods, resulting in the control rods falling into the core, and the fuel rods falling out of the core into a huge slab, stopping the reaction. I wish TFA had properly indicated that as the reason why we won't ever have a chernobyl, along with our compliance with basic safety regulations.
An overall good post, ending with something almost completely incorrect.
When a nuclear power plant loses power, the control rods lose power, and drop into the area of the fuel rods to stop the chain reaction.
The fuel rods still have significant decay heat, and this is removed, in varying designs and at varying times, by:
1. Forced circulation with the aid of emergency generators.
2. Natural circulation (low heat source + high heat sink = flow)
and least preferably:
3. By complete and utter destruction of the fuel assemblies, where it melts, destroys the reactor vessel, spreads out in containment, and radiates it's heat away. TMI wasn't even that bad, but chernobyl was. Either way, that's a plant-ending event.
Even if we could recover from a fuel-melting event, the fuel in the core costs us $200 million dollars- something we'd prefer not to replace until it's properly used.
Now, heating the fuel and the water (moderator in US reactors) does slow down the nuclear chain reaction and reduce the power output, but that's an entirely different discussion.
Tennessee Valley Authority doesn't run their nuke plants any better than anyone else, and yes, I'm in a position to know.
I work at a for-profit nuke plant staffed largely- almost exclusively- by republicans, and we're a top-rated facility when compared world-wide.
We, in the nuke industry, keep metrics on these sorts of things, and no plant run by the TVA, France, Finland, Ex-commies in the old USSR, or anyone measures significantly better than us in any category you can come up with.
You have no idea what you're talking about. Your fantasies about democrats and non-profits being inherently better at anything than republicans and profit driven enterprises is the symptom of massive ignorance about numerous topics.
But don't let that stop you from feeling morally superior and self-rightous, m'kay?