That's just silly. The sun blasts the earth with petawatts of energy, we only need to harvest terawatts, the problems are all in cost, efficiency and storage, not in availability of energy.
That isn't how earthquakes work, you have to compare the ground movement at the plant to the design criteria, not the overall energy released by the earthquake (an easy illustration of this is that no one is talking about how well all the reactors in the U.S. stood up to the 9.0, even though it is quite likely that some energy reached them).
See, you don't need to resort to the jail analogy to talk about the problems.
(but publishing anything on the internet is "dangerous", even if you can get Facebook to delete it, what about that guy that manually screen scraped it?)
An over spec event is exactly a failure in planning and design.
I completely disagree that losing normal cooling operations on a design that requires active cooling is graceful. In a graceful failure, you don't need to take extreme emergency action, you use the plan that your design calls for (I'd rather not argue about whether pumping sea water into the reactors was called for, it is close enough to improvisation for me.).
And there are lots of reasons that nuclear reactors need to succeed all the time (you carefully note that planes don't typically fall out of the sky, of course they occasionally do), a big one being that people will freak out over small failures.
There was such a thing on the market at one point.
(It had a big plastic lump at one end and I'm sure that the feel sucked and it doesn't have the magic sound implied on the TV show, but rollup piano keyboards, they have been produced)
I would describe it more in terms of a whole series of boolean values.
So if you have a design criteria that says you can't release radioactive materials into the environment and then your emergency response requires releasing a small amount of radioactive material into the environment, you have failed to meet that criteria and then you are doing an analysis of that failure to figure out how to meet the criteria in the future.
The severity of failures and responses to them will certainly vary, but it isn't particularly ambiguous that there were problems with the planning, design and management of Fukushima Daiichi (how much each of those contributed doesn't seem very clear to me yet).
Is it really a disaster when 10 people die? There is lots of public sentiment that suggests it must be, but there are also thousands of preventable deaths every month, so it isn't so clear.
It's ridiculous to say it worked well. It didn't result in nuclearmageddon, but the license they had meant that they had to get special permission to vent steam directly from the reactors because that isn't something they were ever supposed to need to do.
The problem with using average statistics is that the ongoing case of coal power does not deserve coherent treatment (the best plants and mines have much better numbers than the worst ones).
The upside is that the death statistics from best-case coal still aren't that great.
And the spent fuel pools aren't containment vessels, they are more like swimming pools. In the buildings that lost their roofs, the pools are exposed to the atmosphere.
Fuel limitations for fission plants are largely political, there is technical capacity for repossessing fuel (France actively does it) and breeder reactors are fuel positive. The Japanese have also pulled uranium out of ocean water (at manageable costs, both economic and energy).
So it might not be the smartest path for energy generation, but people claiming a couple hundred years of fuel are full of it.
A natural event occurred and the operators lost the ability to operate the plant due to some combination of design and management problems. That's a nuclear accident.
Politics dictates that loss of normal operation and release of radioactive material (minuscule or not) is a failure, even if lots of people are comfortable with the exposure that lots of other people get from the incident.
I wouldn't be surprised if American nuclear reactors enjoy better oversight and management than Japanese reactors, simply because Americans have a greater tendency for frank and direct communication.
(there is a story about Korea Air switching to English for cockpit communication, as there were incidents that were directly attributed to subordinates being unwilling to contradict erroneous superiors, and it isn't as if the Japanese culture is so far from the Korean culture on that point. Using English helped them shift away from their social culture into the safety culture that is necessary in the cockpit, and they already need to know English for international flights.).
In my state, out of state purchases over $1000 have use tax equivalent to the sales tax due, and purchases below $1000 can either be itemized and pay the sales tax rate or covered with an amount based on AGI (this amount is not very high, so it would be easy to game the use tax for hundreds of dollars, if shipping in thousands of dollars of stuff seemed like a good idea).
So the AGI based part can be gamed, but anyone failing to pay the tax on $1000 or higher purchases or failing to pay some use tax on their other purchases (either itemized and taxed or covered by the AGI blanket) is not exploiting a legal loophole, they are incorrectly filing their taxes.
I would agree that it is an enforcement loophole, in that the state can't profitably enforce $25 of tax evasion.
I think the Seventeenth Amendment is a bigger problem. When Senators were actually beholden to people that were really engaged with state level politics (the state legislatures), they didn't default to thinking it was a good idea to do everything at the federal level.
A smaller federal government where Senators were functionary representatives of their states instead of politicians? Sounds pretty good to me.
(I don't think that the process of appointing senators would be free of politics or anything, I just think it would be better than the current Senate)
Yeah, that makes a lot of sense, make corporations file fifty thousand pages of itemized deductions because the idea of the corporation passing profit out to the owners of the corporation and having them pay personal taxes on that income is too complicated.
If you say "make them take the standard deduction", then you aren't treating them as people anymore.
There are still probably lots of situations where it makes sense to tax corporate profits a bit, but the money doesn't really need to be taxed when the corporation recognizes it as profit and when the owners recognize it as income.
There will always be some labor arbitrage, but I wonder how comparable the 1990 (or so, maybe 1980) era situation where there were hundreds of millions of Chinese and Indians available to do moderately skilled labor at very low wages is to the situation today, where hundreds of millions of Chinese and Indians are aspiring to middle class lifestyles.
People always say that country X is next, but there isn't any comparable population of people with a social system as ordered as China or India, and there are about three times as many people on the demand side of that cheap labor.
One often stated reason for not using proprietary software is that the company that makes it might stop supporting it. But free software supports more and more legacy proprietary formats.
So the big warning was that it was a potential trap, but in many cases, oops, it wasn't.
But I shouldn't have sidetracked myself, telling people that they are in jail is just going to make them stop listening, that's a more important reason to avoid that analogy (but analogies often run into the problem that they will 'offend the ear' of the listener, or they are stupid, or they don't make sense, or whatever).
Stallman takes this to the extreme, working to avoid ever falling into the proprietary trap, even if all it would take to escape was nothing at all.
Slashdot Mirror
That's just silly. The sun blasts the earth with petawatts of energy, we only need to harvest terawatts, the problems are all in cost, efficiency and storage, not in availability of energy.
My post is a little crass, but the thing I'm trying to get at is that a few dozen deaths aren't the thing holding us back from anything.
I mean, imagine the state the commercial airline business would be in if thousands of people had died in airplane crashes.
That isn't how earthquakes work, you have to compare the ground movement at the plant to the design criteria, not the overall energy released by the earthquake (an easy illustration of this is that no one is talking about how well all the reactors in the U.S. stood up to the 9.0, even though it is quite likely that some energy reached them).
See, you don't need to resort to the jail analogy to talk about the problems.
(but publishing anything on the internet is "dangerous", even if you can get Facebook to delete it, what about that guy that manually screen scraped it?)
An over spec event is exactly a failure in planning and design.
I completely disagree that losing normal cooling operations on a design that requires active cooling is graceful. In a graceful failure, you don't need to take extreme emergency action, you use the plan that your design calls for (I'd rather not argue about whether pumping sea water into the reactors was called for, it is close enough to improvisation for me.).
And there are lots of reasons that nuclear reactors need to succeed all the time (you carefully note that planes don't typically fall out of the sky, of course they occasionally do), a big one being that people will freak out over small failures.
There was such a thing on the market at one point.
(It had a big plastic lump at one end and I'm sure that the feel sucked and it doesn't have the magic sound implied on the TV show, but rollup piano keyboards, they have been produced)
I would describe it more in terms of a whole series of boolean values.
So if you have a design criteria that says you can't release radioactive materials into the environment and then your emergency response requires releasing a small amount of radioactive material into the environment, you have failed to meet that criteria and then you are doing an analysis of that failure to figure out how to meet the criteria in the future.
The severity of failures and responses to them will certainly vary, but it isn't particularly ambiguous that there were problems with the planning, design and management of Fukushima Daiichi (how much each of those contributed doesn't seem very clear to me yet).
Is it really a disaster when 10 people die? There is lots of public sentiment that suggests it must be, but there are also thousands of preventable deaths every month, so it isn't so clear.
The design failed.
It's ridiculous to say it worked well. It didn't result in nuclearmageddon, but the license they had meant that they had to get special permission to vent steam directly from the reactors because that isn't something they were ever supposed to need to do.
The problem with using average statistics is that the ongoing case of coal power does not deserve coherent treatment (the best plants and mines have much better numbers than the worst ones).
The upside is that the death statistics from best-case coal still aren't that great.
There are only 3 reactors in 'meltdown', not 6.
And the spent fuel pools aren't containment vessels, they are more like swimming pools. In the buildings that lost their roofs, the pools are exposed to the atmosphere.
Those bonuses would be an expense paid out of net income, and not taxed as profit.
That doesn't help shareholders much, but executive compensation isn't particularly related to taxation.
Fuel limitations for fission plants are largely political, there is technical capacity for repossessing fuel (France actively does it) and breeder reactors are fuel positive. The Japanese have also pulled uranium out of ocean water (at manageable costs, both economic and energy).
So it might not be the smartest path for energy generation, but people claiming a couple hundred years of fuel are full of it.
A natural event occurred and the operators lost the ability to operate the plant due to some combination of design and management problems. That's a nuclear accident.
Politics dictates that loss of normal operation and release of radioactive material (minuscule or not) is a failure, even if lots of people are comfortable with the exposure that lots of other people get from the incident.
I wouldn't be surprised if American nuclear reactors enjoy better oversight and management than Japanese reactors, simply because Americans have a greater tendency for frank and direct communication.
(there is a story about Korea Air switching to English for cockpit communication, as there were incidents that were directly attributed to subordinates being unwilling to contradict erroneous superiors, and it isn't as if the Japanese culture is so far from the Korean culture on that point. Using English helped them shift away from their social culture into the safety culture that is necessary in the cockpit, and they already need to know English for international flights.).
It is only sort of a loophole.
In my state, out of state purchases over $1000 have use tax equivalent to the sales tax due, and purchases below $1000 can either be itemized and pay the sales tax rate or covered with an amount based on AGI (this amount is not very high, so it would be easy to game the use tax for hundreds of dollars, if shipping in thousands of dollars of stuff seemed like a good idea).
So the AGI based part can be gamed, but anyone failing to pay the tax on $1000 or higher purchases or failing to pay some use tax on their other purchases (either itemized and taxed or covered by the AGI blanket) is not exploiting a legal loophole, they are incorrectly filing their taxes.
I would agree that it is an enforcement loophole, in that the state can't profitably enforce $25 of tax evasion.
I think the Seventeenth Amendment is a bigger problem. When Senators were actually beholden to people that were really engaged with state level politics (the state legislatures), they didn't default to thinking it was a good idea to do everything at the federal level.
A smaller federal government where Senators were functionary representatives of their states instead of politicians? Sounds pretty good to me.
(I don't think that the process of appointing senators would be free of politics or anything, I just think it would be better than the current Senate)
Yeah, that makes a lot of sense, make corporations file fifty thousand pages of itemized deductions because the idea of the corporation passing profit out to the owners of the corporation and having them pay personal taxes on that income is too complicated.
If you say "make them take the standard deduction", then you aren't treating them as people anymore.
There are still probably lots of situations where it makes sense to tax corporate profits a bit, but the money doesn't really need to be taxed when the corporation recognizes it as profit and when the owners recognize it as income.
There will always be some labor arbitrage, but I wonder how comparable the 1990 (or so, maybe 1980) era situation where there were hundreds of millions of Chinese and Indians available to do moderately skilled labor at very low wages is to the situation today, where hundreds of millions of Chinese and Indians are aspiring to middle class lifestyles.
People always say that country X is next, but there isn't any comparable population of people with a social system as ordered as China or India, and there are about three times as many people on the demand side of that cheap labor.
Those channels are now owned by your friendly neighborhood Comcast.
They aren't excluded to hide cost of living increases, they are excluded because they are relatively volatile.
Gas is pretty expensive these days, but it was only about 15 years ago that it was about as cheap as it had ever been.
That you can research such information on their website sort of deflates the conspiratorial hand-wringing:
http://data.bls.gov/pdq/SurveyOutputServlet?data_tool=latest_numbers&series_id=WPS0571&output_view=pct_1mth
One often stated reason for not using proprietary software is that the company that makes it might stop supporting it. But free software supports more and more legacy proprietary formats.
So the big warning was that it was a potential trap, but in many cases, oops, it wasn't.
But I shouldn't have sidetracked myself, telling people that they are in jail is just going to make them stop listening, that's a more important reason to avoid that analogy (but analogies often run into the problem that they will 'offend the ear' of the listener, or they are stupid, or they don't make sense, or whatever).
Stallman takes this to the extreme, working to avoid ever falling into the proprietary trap, even if all it would take to escape was nothing at all.
You should make such arguments without resorting to analogies.
Especially because an increasingly viable GNU system mitigates the penalties of using proprietary stuff.
Everyone's pragmatic, they just have different ideas about what that means.
It still wouldn't have been the biggest a-hole in Texas.