We have to pay for the aftermath of nuclear power- it's included in our price for electricity. We routinely ship out low-level rad waste, and we do pay a great deal for it's disposal. For long term, we can reprocess the fuel, thus avoiding the problem of burying it for eternity, or just pitch it in a deep enough hole in the ground, below water tables, in a subduction zone, and seismecally qualified structures be damned. If we aren't allowed to reprocess it, let it go back to where it came from.
And such a thing is hardly 'priceless.' It's quite possible to set up funds to take care of such things, and every nuke plant has one for decommisioning, ready since they came online. Cost of doing business. There has to be enough money to either care for the fuel in perpetuity, or pay someone else to care for it in perpetuity. You'll find your technician-priests at the old Connecticut and Maine Yankee sites, for example, who will be there until the fuel can be carted off to Yucca mountain.
I know nothing of Pickerings problems, but since I haven't heard of any meltdowns or radiation posionings, I'll assume everything is more or less under control, even if their managers are incompetent.
And as for expensive, the number of zeros in a figure mean nothing. If they're willing to spend it, it must mean that it's worth it.
You presume to know more about the nuclear industry than the people who work inside it, and who's job it is to deal with the very things you bring up. Certainly, it's valid to ask these questions, but insulting to presume we haven't thought of it already, and have solutions. There may be questions we haven't asked ourselves, but these issues are really pretty basic.
How about one single well-aimed, fully-fueled passenger liner? No harm to the public then?!?
Probably not, actually. For one, this has recently become an obvious danger, and the airspace around nuclear power plants is monitored closely.
Secondly, the designers of my plant already thought of this, at least to a lesser extent. The containment building was built to withstand the impact of an F-111, fully loaded, at top speed. It's three feet of concrete, with enough rebar to make a six-inch steel shell if it wasn't mixed in with the concrete. And that's just the outer building.
Now, a 737 weighs more than an f-111, but the mass is more spread out, and it goes slower. The building is also rated for at least a three-hour fire, but I wouldn't be suprised if it lasted longer, aside from the fact that 40 fire departments would be there right quick.
Another thing often forgotten here is the human factor- I'm going to make a bold statement, that in light of flight 93, and the new, higher stakes, no US passenger airliner will be successfully hijacked and crashed into a building.
This leaves cargo planes- not sure of the maximum fuel load in a fedex plane, but I'll guess they don't go across the country, and would have less fuel onboard than the 9/11 planes- and foreign planes, who would be nearly dry by the time they hit, and thus less of a fire hazard. Recall that it was the fire, fueled by all that aviation kerosene, that brought down the WTC, not the physical impact.
If a jet impacted into our containment building, the fuel would be disbursed across the outside, and since it wouldn't be able to heat any critical load bearing members (because the entire, massive, overbuilt structure is the load bearer), you'd be safe for quite some time.
Yeah, so anyway, we thought of the plane thing years ago, so think of a soda can filled with gas vs a brick doghouse. Annoying, but not really a threat.
The poor management of one company does not mean nuclear power is expensive. You are correct in that regulation and security add a great deal of cost, but incorrect that this is a deal breaker.
I work at a nuclear power plant, and we sell electricity in a de-regulated market. We underbid all the other types of plants in the New Hampshire Market, and still make hundreds of millions of dollars a year in profit.
We buy our fuel from Westinghouse, and they seem to find it to be a profitable business, because they're still in it. They charge us $750,000 per fuel assembly (193 at a time), and if you read my other post, you'll understand why we pay gladly.
Decomissioning a plant is expensive, true, but represents the profit of one years operation, out of a 40-60 year run for most US plants. The threat of terrorism has undoubtable cost a lot of money in additional security, but since incredibly tight security was the rule long before 9/11, I doubt the increase was even 25% of the security budget. No facts on that, just an educated guess. You'd have to have a team of Navy Seals to get into our plant unnoticed, and even if you did, the worst you could do would be to irreprably damage the plant- not harm the public.
I work at a Nuclear Power plant, and the process is very money-efficient. For starters, the energy release by a fission event, per atom involved, is at least 2 million times greater than a chemical reaction- ie, burning.
Now, in the core at my plant, we have 193 fuel assemblies, each of which contains a little more than half a ton of uranium. Skipping over some details, we can basically use this hundred tons of fuel to generate 1.2 GW for 4.5 years.
The coal powerplant down the road 10 miles burns something on the order of 500 tons of coal a day to make half the electricity we do.
Each of our fuel assemblies costs us $750,000. For coal to be as cheap as nuclear, coal would have to go for $0.46 per ton. It actually costs more in the neighborhood of $28.00 per ton.
So even with the added burdens of security and (ridiculous) regulation, nuclear power is still cheaper. My plant is actually a base load plant- we run at 100% capacity 24/7, and other plants (coal, oil, gas, etc) vary their load with demand- because we underbid all of them in the local deregulated market.
If it wasn't for the ornerous regulation, idiot groups like greenpeace, and widespread misunderstanding about nuclear power, you'd see Nuke plants being built on quite a regular basis. THey'd never be the entire source of electricity for the country, because nuclear plants don't change load gracefully over the course of the day. You start them, fully load them, and run them till they need to be refueled, or shit needs service sooner than you expect, because it's not in it's design parameters.
The UN does not exist because the US allows them to exist.
The UN was started by the US to serve our national interests, and lately I don't think it's been in our interest to continue participating in the world's biggest joke.
We wouldn't stop them from meeting, true, but if we withdrew and kick the UN out of New York, they'd have no place to meet and far less money than they have now. Moreover, for any of their military operations, they need the US for airlift, so the UN blue helmets are pretty useless without us anyway.
There are much stronger forces in the world than pure military fire power. Yeah, the US public, for example, which is who the US military has to answer to. And these mysterious unnamed forces don't matter much if you're dead, or communicating them is impossible because some tinpot dictators and fascists control the internet.
Use the internet to open your mind. A mind is such a beautiful thing to waste.
If you keep your mind too open, people will tend to throw a lot of garbage into it.I don't see what this has to do with anything, though.
If you add what amerians pay for HEALTH CARE to what they pay in taxes, you'll find they actually pay the most taxes on earth
Stated by someone who obviously hasn't done the math. I'll do it for you, then.
Checking my recent pay stub, my federal taxes, including social security and medicare taxes (programs which I do not benefit from, nor expect to, because they'll collapse before I'm eligible) add up to 21% of my gross income.
My health care insurance, which is the total cost of health care for my employers 20,000 employees divide by that same number of employees, is $1180 (my yearly contribution + company's contribution), plus a maximum out of pocket expense of $750 per year, equals $1930, which isn't even 2% of what I earn.
So, you're looking at a rate of 23% by the way you calculate things. Hardly a crushing burden compared to a european high of 60%.
Although that does sound great on the surface, I don't think it's completely the best idea- even though Europe has been getting it's security for free from us for sixty years, to the point where they've become decadent and have come to believe that their style of peace is the natural order of things.
Anyhow, we put troops in Europe after WW2 to make sure that anytime some country felt like taking over another, they'd probably have to kill a bunch of US soldiers, taking the United States into the war. Because our power proved to be decisive in WW1 and 2 (I'm NOT saying we did all the fighting, just that we sealed the deal!), this isn't something done lightly.
Basically, the idea was to keep us out of future wars by making the potential price of future wars too costly for aggressors.
If another huge war did start over there, we couldn't remain neutral, we'd have to act. So we might as well prevent the wars.
It's been said that the purpose of NATO- and the commesurite troops we've kept in Europe, was to keep America in, the Russians out, and the Germans down.
After cleaning up Europe's messes in the first two world wars, it was decided it would be cheaper in terms of American lives just to keep a significant force in Europe to begin with.
This meant that attacking Europe meant killing American soldiers- something that isn't done lightly by anyone who would like to remain in power.
That many people have their heads way up their asses.
Tell me, if we wanted their oil so bad, why didn't we just buy it? One of the things we have in spades compared to the rest of the world is money, and Saddam would have gladly sold us all the oil he could.
It wasn't about oil. We can buy oil. Maybe you you don't think the other reasons are any good, but this 'blood for oil' line is the most idiotic thing I've ever heard.
Chernobyl was caused by _engineers_ testing removal of cores, they took all the cores out and couldn't get them back in.
What will cause more fear is idiots like you under selling the risks.
Pot. Kettle. Black.
First, by cores, you mean control rods. But you're still somewhat off track.
Second, Chernobyl was an unstable, bad design, without a containment building. It's design, RMBK 1000, was such that if things went bad, the nuclear reaction would continue, instead of shutting down.
In addition to the uranium, a nuclear reactor needs two things- a moderator (which actually promotes the fission chain reaction) and a thermal transfer mechanism, to take heat away and make electricity with it. This is beyond the control rods, which are used to shut down the plant.
In every plant in the US, water acts as both the moderator, and the heat transfer mechanism. Lose the water, and the chain reaction is unsustainable. You can't take away heat anymore, but the fission chain reaction slows down dramatically. This is what happened at Three Mile Island (TMI)- they lost the water. They melted parts of their core, but that was the extent of the meltdown. The reactor vessel did it's job and physically contained the uranium. The containment building did it's job, along with all the auxillary systems, and no appreciable radiation was released to the public. TMI proved that we can handle a disaster without endangering the public.
Back to chernobyl. The RMBK 1000 reactor used water as a heat transfer mechanism, and graphite as a moderator. So when they lost water cooling, the reaction actually increased in power, and this raised power output lead to a rapid spike in temperature and pressure, blowing the lid off the reactor core and destroying the building.
Moreover, if they attempt to sustain low power levels (20% of capacity), the system is unstable. Because the core was huge, it was possible to have pockets of reactivity that couldn't be well controlled. When the power level is low, the cooling water/heat transport flow is reduced, to keep proper operating temperatures. But because they had pockets of reactivity that could be greater than average, there could be local areas where the flow was inadequate, boiling off the water prematurely, and getting us back the increasing reactivity with water loss that I mentioned earlier. Hence, they where supposed to operate below 20% power.
As for the people, despite earlier problems at different plants, they were not aware of the aforementioned technical problems. The Soviet bueacracy prevented any useful exchanges on such subjects. This is not to excuse them from not knowing more about their plant, just to paint a picture.
The cause of this was ironically a safety experiment. When a nuke plant is shut down, it still produces a significant amount of heat that must be removed. Normally the power required to run the pumps to remove this heat comes off the grid from other power plants, but if the plant is disconnected from the grid, a diesel generator is used instead. It took them three minutes to start the diesels (as opposed to a ten second standard in the US), so the engineers thought that they could bridge this three minute gap by extracting power from the turbine while it was in the process of coasting to a stop.
In order to test this theory, they deactivated every single safety system the plant had, and brought the power levels down to 6%. I've already talked about why this was bad.
At the end of their 'safety test', they inserted the control rods successfully, and in a hurry, because they could tell they were losing control of the plant. Because of the horrible design, though, these control rods where insufficient to kill the chain reaction, and instead only displaced water, which brought the power levels up to 100 times normal. Kaboom. The 'successful' insertion of the control rods was the final event in an idiotic string of actions.
We've just refueled my plant, and fuel fresh out of the reactor literally glows purple. It does this for a few weeks.
I haven't seen it in person, but I have seen pics from previous refueling operations here, and my friends have seen it. I need to go out to the spent fuel building to see this before it dies off...
Sorry, I haven't been in the nuclear industry to describe the phenomina that causes the glow.
activating the card is your acceptance of the terms.
NOT TRUE.
It may very by company, but when I worked for MBNA, one of the largest credit card companies, we read them the terms over the phone and they accepted them over the phone.
The activation is merely a security measure in case the card gets swiped, because you have to call from a home phone number registered with the company, and provide personal information....
However, after thirty days the card was activated anyway, because the assumption was that thieves would want to make quick work of cards and then get rid of them, so if they were untouched for thirty days, the customer had them, and was letting them sit around.
This was true at MBNA three years ago. YMMV. But if you're told the terms, and there's a signature line or you're verbally asked to agree, that's the vital acceptance of terms.
Funny, at my school, when the admins were setting up bandwidth throttling, they ignored gaming, because it wasn't a significant traffic load.
Of course, because they had a firewall, traffic shaper, and some other machine I don't remember- each with dozens to a hundred rules- they fucked up the network more than unfettered access. Ping times got up to 2 seconds at their worst.
Solution was worse than the problem. Typical bueacracy.
I call bullshit. This was true of windows 9x, but not since 2k. I've had win2k installations running for well over 100 days without a problem (and the 100+ day run ended when the building lost power). It was moderate use- a few games, winamp, MS office.
My current XP box has been up over 2 weeks without a problem. I know that's not much, but it's right next to my bed, so I shut it off sometimes to quiet the room down. Hardware does matter- buy good parts!
Allright, well, neither of us is making any headway with the other. Just let me point out something about your medivac buddy.
By job definition, all he sees day in and day out is death and misery, and then you, his best friend, fill his mail with shit about how you think the entire operation is pointless? What are you trying to do, improve his morale?
Nice friend. I hope you send something encouraging every once in a while.
thank you for reacting before reading my entire post, or stopping to consider the 50,000 dead american soldiers in vietnam, or the the hundreds to thousands of soldiers that died every hour storming the beaches of Normandy, all day long.
Your lack of perspective is astounding, and you completely ignored my statements counter to the very tired mantra you repeat.. "More people have died since Bush declared this war "over" than died while it was going on.
I don't know where the lies and deception came in, as I hope it was evident that I was expressing my take on agreed upon numbers. Must I state the obvious that it's my opinion, preface it with something like IMHO before I say anything?
Would you deny the recent major terrorist bombings in Iraq, against the UN and a mosque? No? Do you disagree that we have a military presence in both Germany and Japan at the moment? As far as I can tell at this late hour, those are the only statements of fact I made.
Everything else is up to intrepretation. Just because you don't like my interpretation, doesn't mean I'm lying or being decietful. And covering your ears and saying 'lalalala I can't hear you" won't help.
Quick? Decisive? We owned that country in a matter of weeks with minimal resistance. The continued desperate, sporadic attacks coming from the Jihaadists I see as signs of desperation, and a great improvement that they're attacking defended targets now, our soldiers, who are quite good at defending themselves, as opposed to our airline stewardesses.
It's hardly a useless conflict when Osoma bin laden is only seen in recycled footage, islamic terrorists are biting the hand that feeds them in the middle east, and they're throwing themselves in large numbers into the blender that is our troops. Sure, they take a few of our troops once in a while. I wager you're crying crocodile tears for our fallen soldiers, and take every spoon-fed soldier death as a great sign that things are SOOOOO BAD IN IRAQ.
I ask for perspective from you, boy, and I get nothing but an expected reaction before you even read 10 lines into my post.A plaintive whine that my opinions qualify as 'lies and deceptions' because they don't line up with yours is hardly worth writing a response over.
I won't call you an ignorant son of a bitch, or a heartless coward. All I ask of you is that you consider for a second your Dogmatic reactions are running on less than the full story. I see headlines on CNN, ABC news, and MSNBC backing up your shrill take on things. All I ask is that you read the following:
If you read the blogs of some of the soldiers over there, you might get a little more insight. When you read about all the bad news in the mainstream news, always remember that bad news sells alot better than good news- "no news is good news."
When you actually bother to read my post, and what I've linked to, please respond, because I enjoy this.
And the power given to the federal government to stick their noses in elementary education is listed in the United States Constitution.
(For those who can't catch my sarcasm, the power to have a hand in education, at any level, is nowhere to be found in the constitution. Yeah, yeah, the constitution poses no threat to our current form of government, but I can hope, can't I?)
France's activities are not the point, agreed. France was never more than an annoyance.
Maybe you missed the news coverage, but the war was quick and decisive. Perhaps you missed out on history, but 300 dead soldiers isn't alot, even for an occupation. Perhaps you never heard of the Nazis who continued to perform guerilla strikes well after Germany had surrendered? The experience in Iraq is not new, nor unexpected.
I personally never expected a quick occupation, seeing as how Japan and Germany took nearly a decade each, and they had a little more going for them. In addition, we're still in both countries 60 years later.
I did expect the United States military to execute a thorough, decisive victory, and they did exactly that. Around 300 soldiers dead? In terms of War, that's an unprecidented effeciency in human life. That may sound cold to the families of those 300 dead soldiers, but it doesn't sound like a lot to anyone except irrational Bush-haters.
As for a revenge tragedy, I would call it defense. In the two years since we lost 2 buildings to Islamic Terrorists, we took two of their countries. The afghanistan economy grew by 28% last year, showing the phenominal capacity of a society freed from medieval Islamic rule. Things are going well in Iraq, too, and the recent bombings in Iraq against a Mosque and the UN (the islamic terrorists only friends until then) show how desperate they are to stir chaos. The more desperate they are, the better it shows things are for us.
Basically, there's no shortage of delusion around here buddy. The Bush hating left has it in spades.
I'm sorry, but how did Clinton lead to 9/11 more than any other president?
By buckling under like a coward and not taking the fight to our enemies. He viewed the military with disdain, and treated the first world trade center bombing and the cole bombing as law enforcement issues, not acts of war that need to be dealt with firmly and decisively. He had the chance to order a strike on Osama bin laden and refused to interupt a golf game to kill the man behind the first world trade center. Osama has been quoted as saying that our responses to the Cole and the WTC bomb told him that America could be defeated.
They terrorists we fight respect one thing only: power. You may be the more peaceful type, but attributing that to folks still stuck in medieval times is an error that left us vulnerable, and embolded Al Qaida to perform 9/11.
I care not wether we piss off as many people as possible, so long as they fear our might. This is the machivellian/hobbsian world we live in buddy. Power matters.
and have an energy company-friendly administration that won't release oil reserves...
You mean the Strategic Oil Reserves? Do you know what strategic means? It's not referring to price protection, buddy. That oil is there so in case we ever have to fight a war and our oil is cut off, our petroleum-dependant war machine can still fight with full effectiveness.
Like the prospect of war or not, releasing a signficant amount of oil from the SOR would leave us in a more vulnerable position, and that's unnacceptable. Clinton's release from the SOR was a petty political manuveur that's goal was primarily to win points for Gore. It was in no way, shape or form good policy. If the price of oil goes up, and you don't like it, USE LESS.
Don't go begging mommy government to compromise our national security so you don't have to turn the thermostat down a few degrees.
Someone commented some time ago that road damage rises with the 4th power, so an SUV that's twice as heavy as a volvo will do 2x2x2x2 16 times the damage, and a fully loaded pickup truck that weighs three times as much will do 3x3x3x3 81 times the damge. This means that a tractor-trailer, which weighs probably 20 times your average auto, will do 20x20x20X20 160,000 times the damage.
Of course, I don't know how this breaks down for tires in contact with the road. If you divide by the 'tire factor' 18/4 = 4.5, 160,000/4.5 ~= 35,000 times the damage.
Of course, we still lack the vital information to make a good judgement:
1. What's the maintence cost per unit damage? 2. How does this compare to the taxes collected? 3. How can we make the tax-load for road maintance the most equitable, without unduling damaging the trucking industry? (the nation depends on trucks, there can be no doubt of this.)
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We have to pay for the aftermath of nuclear power- it's included in our price for electricity. We routinely ship out low-level rad waste, and we do pay a great deal for it's disposal. For long term, we can reprocess the fuel, thus avoiding the problem of burying it for eternity, or just pitch it in a deep enough hole in the ground, below water tables, in a subduction zone, and seismecally qualified structures be damned. If we aren't allowed to reprocess it, let it go back to where it came from.
And such a thing is hardly 'priceless.' It's quite possible to set up funds to take care of such things, and every nuke plant has one for decommisioning, ready since they came online. Cost of doing business. There has to be enough money to either care for the fuel in perpetuity, or pay someone else to care for it in perpetuity. You'll find your technician-priests at the old Connecticut and Maine Yankee sites, for example, who will be there until the fuel can be carted off to Yucca mountain.
I know nothing of Pickerings problems, but since I haven't heard of any meltdowns or radiation posionings, I'll assume everything is more or less under control, even if their managers are incompetent.
And as for expensive, the number of zeros in a figure mean nothing. If they're willing to spend it, it must mean that it's worth it.
You presume to know more about the nuclear industry than the people who work inside it, and who's job it is to deal with the very things you bring up. Certainly, it's valid to ask these questions, but insulting to presume we haven't thought of it already, and have solutions. There may be questions we haven't asked ourselves, but these issues are really pretty basic.
How about one single well-aimed, fully-fueled passenger liner? No harm to the public then?!?
Probably not, actually. For one, this has recently become an obvious danger, and the airspace around nuclear power plants is monitored closely.
Secondly, the designers of my plant already thought of this, at least to a lesser extent. The containment building was built to withstand the impact of an F-111, fully loaded, at top speed. It's three feet of concrete, with enough rebar to make a six-inch steel shell if it wasn't mixed in with the concrete. And that's just the outer building.
Now, a 737 weighs more than an f-111, but the mass is more spread out, and it goes slower. The building is also rated for at least a three-hour fire, but I wouldn't be suprised if it lasted longer, aside from the fact that 40 fire departments would be there right quick.
Another thing often forgotten here is the human factor- I'm going to make a bold statement, that in light of flight 93, and the new, higher stakes, no US passenger airliner will be successfully hijacked and crashed into a building.
This leaves cargo planes- not sure of the maximum fuel load in a fedex plane, but I'll guess they don't go across the country, and would have less fuel onboard than the 9/11 planes- and foreign planes, who would be nearly dry by the time they hit, and thus less of a fire hazard. Recall that it was the fire, fueled by all that aviation kerosene, that brought down the WTC, not the physical impact.
If a jet impacted into our containment building, the fuel would be disbursed across the outside, and since it wouldn't be able to heat any critical load bearing members (because the entire, massive, overbuilt structure is the load bearer), you'd be safe for quite some time.
Yeah, so anyway, we thought of the plane thing years ago, so think of a soda can filled with gas vs a brick doghouse. Annoying, but not really a threat.
The poor management of one company does not mean nuclear power is expensive. You are correct in that regulation and security add a great deal of cost, but incorrect that this is a deal breaker.
I work at a nuclear power plant, and we sell electricity in a de-regulated market. We underbid all the other types of plants in the New Hampshire Market, and still make hundreds of millions of dollars a year in profit.
We buy our fuel from Westinghouse, and they seem to find it to be a profitable business, because they're still in it. They charge us $750,000 per fuel assembly (193 at a time), and if you read my other post, you'll understand why we pay gladly.
Decomissioning a plant is expensive, true, but represents the profit of one years operation, out of a 40-60 year run for most US plants. The threat of terrorism has undoubtable cost a lot of money in additional security, but since incredibly tight security was the rule long before 9/11, I doubt the increase was even 25% of the security budget. No facts on that, just an educated guess. You'd have to have a team of Navy Seals to get into our plant unnoticed, and even if you did, the worst you could do would be to irreprably damage the plant- not harm the public.
I work at a Nuclear Power plant, and the process is very money-efficient.
For starters, the energy release by a fission event, per atom involved, is at least 2 million times greater than a chemical reaction- ie, burning.
Now, in the core at my plant, we have 193 fuel assemblies, each of which contains a little more than half a ton of uranium. Skipping over some details, we can basically use this hundred tons of fuel to generate 1.2 GW for 4.5 years.
The coal powerplant down the road 10 miles burns something on the order of 500 tons of coal a day to make half the electricity we do.
Each of our fuel assemblies costs us $750,000. For coal to be as cheap as nuclear, coal would have to go for $0.46 per ton. It actually costs more in the neighborhood of $28.00 per ton.
So even with the added burdens of security and (ridiculous) regulation, nuclear power is still cheaper. My plant is actually a base load plant- we run at 100% capacity 24/7, and other plants (coal, oil, gas, etc) vary their load with demand- because we underbid all of them in the local deregulated market.
If it wasn't for the ornerous regulation, idiot groups like greenpeace, and widespread misunderstanding about nuclear power, you'd see Nuke plants being built on quite a regular basis.
THey'd never be the entire source of electricity for the country, because nuclear plants don't change load gracefully over the course of the day. You start them, fully load them, and run them till they need to be refueled, or shit needs service sooner than you expect, because it's not in it's design parameters.
The UN does not exist because the US allows them to exist.
The UN was started by the US to serve our national interests, and lately I don't think it's been in our interest to continue participating in the world's biggest joke.
We wouldn't stop them from meeting, true, but if we withdrew and kick the UN out of New York, they'd have no place to meet and far less money than they have now. Moreover, for any of their military operations, they need the US for airlift, so the UN blue helmets are pretty useless without us anyway.
There are much stronger forces in the world than pure military fire power.
Yeah, the US public, for example, which is who the US military has to answer to. And these mysterious unnamed forces don't matter much if you're dead, or communicating them is impossible because some tinpot dictators and fascists control the internet.
Use the internet to open your mind. A mind is such a beautiful thing to waste.
If you keep your mind too open, people will tend to throw a lot of garbage into it.I don't see what this has to do with anything, though.
The UN can hold all the meetings it wants about taking control of the internet, but in the end, this will probably occur:
UN: The communities of the world have decided that it's best we run the internet. We demand control.
USA: Demand? How bout this, you go fuck yourself, and maybe we'll allow the UN to exist for a few more years.
What are they gonna do, take it by force?
I'm no fan of ICANN, but ICANN is better than the UN. Last thing we need is the chinese fire wall on a global scale.
Fuck 'em. The End.
Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms should be the name of a store, not a government agency.
If you add what amerians pay for HEALTH CARE to what they pay in taxes, you'll find they actually pay the most taxes on earth
Stated by someone who obviously hasn't done the math. I'll do it for you, then.
Checking my recent pay stub, my federal taxes, including social security and medicare taxes (programs which I do not benefit from, nor expect to, because they'll collapse before I'm eligible) add up to 21% of my gross income.
My health care insurance, which is the total cost of health care for my employers 20,000 employees divide by that same number of employees, is $1180 (my yearly contribution + company's contribution), plus a maximum out of pocket expense of $750 per year, equals $1930, which isn't even 2% of what I earn.
So, you're looking at a rate of 23% by the way you calculate things. Hardly a crushing burden compared to a european high of 60%.
Although that does sound great on the surface, I don't think it's completely the best idea- even though Europe has been getting it's security for free from us for sixty years, to the point where they've become decadent and have come to believe that their style of peace is the natural order of things.
Anyhow, we put troops in Europe after WW2 to make sure that anytime some country felt like taking over another, they'd probably have to kill a bunch of US soldiers, taking the United States into the war. Because our power proved to be decisive in WW1 and 2 (I'm NOT saying we did all the fighting, just that we sealed the deal!), this isn't something done lightly.
Basically, the idea was to keep us out of future wars by making the potential price of future wars too costly for aggressors.
If another huge war did start over there, we couldn't remain neutral, we'd have to act. So we might as well prevent the wars.
It's been said that the purpose of NATO- and the commesurite troops we've kept in Europe, was to keep America in, the Russians out, and the Germans down.
After cleaning up Europe's messes in the first two world wars, it was decided it would be cheaper in terms of American lives just to keep a significant force in Europe to begin with.
This meant that attacking Europe meant killing American soldiers- something that isn't done lightly by anyone who would like to remain in power.
That many people have their heads way up their asses.
Tell me, if we wanted their oil so bad, why didn't we just buy it? One of the things we have in spades compared to the rest of the world is money, and Saddam would have gladly sold us all the oil he could.
It wasn't about oil. We can buy oil. Maybe you you don't think the other reasons are any good, but this 'blood for oil' line is the most idiotic thing I've ever heard.
Why should apple even care? Money is money, and I don't see how it matters how it gets into apple's coffer.
As long as it's honest and the buyers and sellers both agree to the process, it's irrelevant.
Others, of course, have pointed out better ideas, but I see no reason why apple should fight this.
am I? then show otherwise.
Chernobyl was caused by _engineers_ testing removal of cores, they took all the cores out and couldn't get them back in.
What will cause more fear is idiots like you under selling the risks.
Pot. Kettle. Black.
First, by cores, you mean control rods. But you're still somewhat off track.
Second, Chernobyl was an unstable, bad design, without a containment building. It's design, RMBK 1000, was such that if things went bad, the nuclear reaction would continue, instead of shutting down.
In addition to the uranium, a nuclear reactor needs two things- a moderator (which actually promotes the fission chain reaction) and a thermal transfer mechanism, to take heat away and make electricity with it. This is beyond the control rods, which are used to shut down the plant.
In every plant in the US, water acts as both the moderator, and the heat transfer mechanism. Lose the water, and the chain reaction is unsustainable. You can't take away heat anymore, but the fission chain reaction slows down dramatically. This is what happened at Three Mile Island (TMI)- they lost the water. They melted parts of their core, but that was the extent of the meltdown. The reactor vessel did it's job and physically contained the uranium. The containment building did it's job, along with all the auxillary systems, and no appreciable radiation was released to the public. TMI proved that we can handle a disaster without endangering the public.
Back to chernobyl. The RMBK 1000 reactor used water as a heat transfer mechanism, and graphite as a moderator. So when they lost water cooling, the reaction actually increased in power, and this raised power output lead to a rapid spike in temperature and pressure, blowing the lid off the reactor core and destroying the building.
Moreover, if they attempt to sustain low power levels (20% of capacity), the system is unstable. Because the core was huge, it was possible to have pockets of reactivity that couldn't be well controlled. When the power level is low, the cooling water/heat transport flow is reduced, to keep proper operating temperatures. But because they had pockets of reactivity that could be greater than average, there could be local areas where the flow was inadequate, boiling off the water prematurely, and getting us back the increasing reactivity with water loss that I mentioned earlier. Hence, they where supposed to operate below 20% power.
As for the people, despite earlier problems at different plants, they were not aware of the aforementioned technical problems. The Soviet bueacracy prevented any useful exchanges on such subjects. This is not to excuse them from not knowing more about their plant, just to paint a picture.
The cause of this was ironically a safety experiment. When a nuke plant is shut down, it still produces a significant amount of heat that must be removed. Normally the power required to run the pumps to remove this heat comes off the grid from other power plants, but if the plant is disconnected from the grid, a diesel generator is used instead. It took them three minutes to start the diesels (as opposed to a ten second standard in the US), so the engineers thought that they could bridge this three minute gap by extracting power from the turbine while it was in the process of coasting to a stop.
In order to test this theory, they deactivated every single safety system the plant had, and brought the power levels down to 6%. I've already talked about why this was bad.
At the end of their 'safety test', they inserted the control rods successfully, and in a hurry, because they could tell they were losing control of the plant. Because of the horrible design, though, these control rods where insufficient to kill the chain reaction, and instead only displaced water, which brought the power levels up to 100 times normal. Kaboom. The 'successful' insertion of the control rods was the final event in an idiotic string of actions.
They had no understanding of the safety i
We've just refueled my plant, and fuel fresh out of the reactor literally glows purple. It does this for a few weeks.
I haven't seen it in person, but I have seen pics from previous refueling operations here, and my friends have seen it. I need to go out to the spent fuel building to see this before it dies off...
Sorry, I haven't been in the nuclear industry to describe the phenomina that causes the glow.
activating the card is your acceptance of the terms.
NOT TRUE.
It may very by company, but when I worked for MBNA, one of the largest credit card companies, we read them the terms over the phone and they accepted them over the phone.
The activation is merely a security measure in case the card gets swiped, because you have to call from a home phone number registered with the company, and provide personal information....
However, after thirty days the card was activated anyway, because the assumption was that thieves would want to make quick work of cards and then get rid of them, so if they were untouched for thirty days, the customer had them, and was letting them sit around.
This was true at MBNA three years ago. YMMV. But if you're told the terms, and there's a signature line or you're verbally asked to agree, that's the vital acceptance of terms.
how their obsessive game playing,
Funny, at my school, when the admins were setting up bandwidth throttling, they ignored gaming, because it wasn't a significant traffic load.
Of course, because they had a firewall, traffic shaper, and some other machine I don't remember- each with dozens to a hundred rules- they fucked up the network more than unfettered access. Ping times got up to 2 seconds at their worst.
Solution was worse than the problem. Typical bueacracy.
I call bullshit. This was true of windows 9x, but not since 2k. I've had win2k installations running for well over 100 days without a problem (and the 100+ day run ended when the building lost power). It was moderate use- a few games, winamp, MS office.
My current XP box has been up over 2 weeks without a problem. I know that's not much, but it's right next to my bed, so I shut it off sometimes to quiet the room down. Hardware does matter- buy good parts!
Allright, well, neither of us is making any headway with the other. Just let me point out something about your medivac buddy.
By job definition, all he sees day in and day out is death and misery, and then you, his best friend, fill his mail with shit about how you think the entire operation is pointless? What are you trying to do, improve his morale?
Nice friend. I hope you send something encouraging every once in a while.
thank you for reacting before reading my entire post, or stopping to consider the 50,000 dead american soldiers in vietnam, or the the hundreds to thousands of soldiers that died every hour storming the beaches of Normandy, all day long.
Your lack of perspective is astounding, and you completely ignored my statements counter to the very tired mantra you repeat.. "More people have died since Bush declared this war "over" than died while it was going on.
I don't know where the lies and deception came in, as I hope it was evident that I was expressing my take on agreed upon numbers. Must I state the obvious that it's my opinion, preface it with something like IMHO before I say anything?
Would you deny the recent major terrorist bombings in Iraq, against the UN and a mosque? No? Do you disagree that we have a military presence in both Germany and Japan at the moment? As far as I can tell at this late hour, those are the only statements of fact I made.
Everything else is up to intrepretation. Just because you don't like my interpretation, doesn't mean I'm lying or being decietful. And covering your ears and saying 'lalalala I can't hear you" won't help.
Quick? Decisive? We owned that country in a matter of weeks with minimal resistance. The continued desperate, sporadic attacks coming from the Jihaadists I see as signs of desperation, and a great improvement that they're attacking defended targets now, our soldiers, who are quite good at defending themselves, as opposed to our airline stewardesses.
It's hardly a useless conflict when Osoma bin laden is only seen in recycled footage, islamic terrorists are biting the hand that feeds them in the middle east, and they're throwing themselves in large numbers into the blender that is our troops. Sure, they take a few of our troops once in a while. I wager you're crying crocodile tears for our fallen soldiers, and take every spoon-fed soldier death as a great sign that things are SOOOOO BAD IN IRAQ.
I ask for perspective from you, boy, and I get nothing but an expected reaction before you even read 10 lines into my post.A plaintive whine that my opinions qualify as 'lies and deceptions' because they don't line up with yours is hardly worth writing a response over.
I won't call you an ignorant son of a bitch, or a heartless coward. All I ask of you is that you consider for a second your Dogmatic reactions are running on less than the full story. I see headlines on CNN, ABC news, and MSNBC backing up your shrill take on things. All I ask is that you read the following:
We're winning
and A view from the sandbox.
If you read the blogs of some of the soldiers over there, you might get a little more insight. When you read about all the bad news in the mainstream news, always remember that bad news sells alot better than good news- "no news is good news."
When you actually bother to read my post, and what I've linked to, please respond, because I enjoy this.
For things like No Child Left Behind and AIDS help for Africa, he gives a "What can I do?" shrug and nothing else.
Yeah, cause Helping Africa is never a waste of money.
And the power given to the federal government to stick their noses in elementary education is listed in the United States Constitution.
(For those who can't catch my sarcasm, the power to have a hand in education, at any level, is nowhere to be found in the constitution. Yeah, yeah, the constitution poses no threat to our current form of government, but I can hope, can't I?)
France's activities are not the point, agreed. France was never more than an annoyance.
Maybe you missed the news coverage, but the war was quick and decisive. Perhaps you missed out on history, but 300 dead soldiers isn't alot, even for an occupation. Perhaps you never heard of the Nazis who continued to perform guerilla strikes well after Germany had surrendered? The experience in Iraq is not new, nor unexpected.
I personally never expected a quick occupation, seeing as how Japan and Germany took nearly a decade each, and they had a little more going for them. In addition, we're still in both countries 60 years later.
I did expect the United States military to execute a thorough, decisive victory, and they did exactly that. Around 300 soldiers dead? In terms of War, that's an unprecidented effeciency in human life. That may sound cold to the families of those 300 dead soldiers, but it doesn't sound like a lot to anyone except irrational Bush-haters.
As for a revenge tragedy, I would call it defense. In the two years since we lost 2 buildings to Islamic Terrorists, we took two of their countries. The afghanistan economy grew by 28% last year, showing the phenominal capacity of a society freed from medieval Islamic rule. Things are going well in Iraq, too, and the recent bombings in Iraq against a Mosque and the UN (the islamic terrorists only friends until then) show how desperate they are to stir chaos. The more desperate they are, the better it shows things are for us.
Basically, there's no shortage of delusion around here buddy. The Bush hating left has it in spades.
I'm sorry, but how did Clinton lead to 9/11 more than any other president?
By buckling under like a coward and not taking the fight to our enemies. He viewed the military with disdain, and treated the first world trade center bombing and the cole bombing as law enforcement issues, not acts of war that need to be dealt with firmly and decisively. He had the chance to order a strike on Osama bin laden and refused to interupt a golf game to kill the man behind the first world trade center. Osama has been quoted as saying that our responses to the Cole and the WTC bomb told him that America could be defeated.
They terrorists we fight respect one thing only: power. You may be the more peaceful type, but attributing that to folks still stuck in medieval times is an error that left us vulnerable, and embolded Al Qaida to perform 9/11.
I care not wether we piss off as many people as possible, so long as they fear our might. This is the machivellian/hobbsian world we live in buddy. Power matters.
and have an energy company-friendly administration that won't release oil reserves...
You mean the Strategic Oil Reserves? Do you know what strategic means? It's not referring to price protection, buddy. That oil is there so in case we ever have to fight a war and our oil is cut off, our petroleum-dependant war machine can still fight with full effectiveness.
Like the prospect of war or not, releasing a signficant amount of oil from the SOR would leave us in a more vulnerable position, and that's unnacceptable. Clinton's release from the SOR was a petty political manuveur that's goal was primarily to win points for Gore. It was in no way, shape or form good policy. If the price of oil goes up, and you don't like it, USE LESS.
Don't go begging mommy government to compromise our national security so you don't have to turn the thermostat down a few degrees.
Someone commented some time ago that road damage rises with the 4th power, so an SUV that's twice as heavy as a volvo will do 2x2x2x2 16 times the damage, and a fully loaded pickup truck that weighs three times as much will do 3x3x3x3 81 times the damge. This means that a tractor-trailer, which weighs probably 20 times your average auto, will do 20x20x20X20 160,000 times the damage.
Of course, I don't know how this breaks down for tires in contact with the road. If you divide by the 'tire factor' 18/4 = 4.5, 160,000/4.5 ~= 35,000 times the damage.
Of course, we still lack the vital information to make a good judgement:
1. What's the maintence cost per unit damage?
2. How does this compare to the taxes collected?
3. How can we make the tax-load for road maintance the most equitable, without unduling damaging the trucking industry? (the nation depends on trucks, there can be no doubt of this.)