Let's see here. It is common knowledge that exercising the brain can improve its effectiveness--and so is an effective treatment for dementia. So if the makers of "Brain Age" for Nintendo say so, you've just turned Nintendo into a regulated medical device. This is what unintended consequences is all about.
Isn't that impossible? It's trying to prove a negative. So you mean that in order to sell a product I must prove that for the rest of time there will never be an ill consequence from my product, even though the science to determine potentially ill consequences may not yet exist?
You really don't ever want there to be an economic recovery do you?
You might wish such an ideal world could work, but it observably doesn't.
But we're talking about safety! What happens when the delays and costs of regulating medical applications causes hundreds of people to die because they didn't get better medical help?
Bingo. Thanks for rekindling my hope that not all humans are morons. We need more people like you.
Have you considered that this is the same FDA that causes the death of thousands of people every year because they haven't approved drugs used safely for years elsewhere?
Have you ever been involved with government-approved software before? Mostly it never gets completed because the process kills it.
It's unlikely statists ever consider such things. That would imply they are capable of second order thinking. But they are not, by definition.
Here's a sad story: The drug GHB was once sold in nutritional supplement stores for $30 a bottle. Like anything else it can be used and abused. Used for good or evil. Just like a screwdriver.
One day some nightclub chicks got slipped some of the stuff and wound up getting date-raped. This is a heinous crime and we have existing and rather straightforward legal mechanisms to deal with it.
But the government then banned GHB because a handful of people got hurt, while ignoring the 10000s of alcohol related deaths and the completely medically useless nature of alcohol which if we want to be consistent about our "drug war" should certainly be banned.
So guess what? It turns out that GHB is a very valuable drug for treating narcolepsy, and perhaps other sleep disorders. It may even be an effective and safe antidepressant.
But the government then gave Jazz Pharmaceuticals an exclusive monopoly on the manufacture of the drug Xyrem which is the Na+ salt of GHB for treating such ailments.
Guess what it costs? $5000 a bottle! People have to go through hell to get their insurance to cover it, and many get denied no matter what.
So we ruined the lives of up to 200000 sufferers of narcolepsy to protect a few people who should have known better than to drink with and go home with strangers in the first place. This is government. This is all it ever was and all it will ever be. And all the people do is beg for more.
You fantasize that you are going to get some sort of enlightened government, because THAT is the statism religion. You believe that some bunch of good and noble ones are going to work in the government to care for us and protect us from the rotten ones?
This is the delusion!
Did you ever stop to think, while wallowing in self-interest masqerading as idealism, that the people in government are just like you? They are self-convinced enlightened folk, who believe they are doing good with the gun of government, while completely unable to admit to themselves that they are selfish animals as well.
We all are!
There is no one enlightened!
That is why anyone who claims that government regulation can achieve a noble result is fooling themselves. You bleat on about "science-based regulation" well where is it? Is it in the SWAT teams that are busting the little farmers who sell a gallon of unpasteurized milk to their neighbor? Is it in the tonnes of paraquat dumped on Amazon rainforests?
The empirical fact is that government destroys everything it touches. Look at what is happening right now! Why aren't the bankers who have committed high crimes being indicted!?!?!?
Government does not work. Perhaps we need it minimally--to do one thing and one thing only. Punish crime.
Selling an "app" that falsely diagnoses an illness leading to trouble is one of two things: 1. a mistake and someone can be held liable for it in civil court; 2. criminal fraud and negligence which someone can be tried for in court.
Pray tell why do we need anything more? The "free market" is NOT a license to commit fraud, despite what Marxist propaganda has been shoved down your throat in government funded school. The free-market would have put out of business the criminal banksters in 2008. But why are they still in business? The GOVERNMENT!!!
Oh, I think you are right that a passive convection or whatever cooled *design* could be much more inherently safe than the actively cooled thingy which actually blew. Note that I didn't claim that a passive decay heat removal couldn't work. I stated that a passive shutdown mechanism wouldn't have helped in this case.
My purpose was mainly to clarify something which a lot of people continue to misunderstand--which is that the Fuk. meltdowns were from decay heat, not fission reaction heat as the reactors were already scrammed prior to melting.
Even a passive decay heat removal involves some complex machinery which may fail. But still, it would be better than active.
Does anyone know if it is even theoretically possible to design a passive cooling system which can handle the full fission thermal output of a reactor running full-bore in which the active/passive shutdown mechanism jammed and left the reactor without primary cooling but NOT scrammed? That's the real scary scenario!
So when Drs. prescribe too much medicine even though they are scientifically trained and should know better than to give someone something for long enough to get hooked, take an oath to do no harm yet break their oath, and when the user gets hooked on the medicine in the internet age when every detail of information is available at your fingertips--even to the people in the poorest of countries--it is the fault of "Big Pharm?"
I suppose "Big Oil" puts a gun to your head and makes you fill up at the gas station too?
If you keep the safer drugs like marijuana, heroin, cocaine, and meth legal, then the incentive to use really dangerous stuff like "bath salts" which have no medical or scientific data about their effects will be nil.
I know it may sound crazy to some to call heroin, cocaine, and meth "safe" but the fact is that they are primarily dangerous when impure due to being illegal, and when abused in large quantities. And the danger is mainly just getting addicted, rather than any serious inherent toxicity. Meth is an exception--but it's still not that bad--most of the damage is due to lack of nutrition. Neurotoxicity in reasonable doses can even be largely mitigated via antioxidants and NMDA receptor agonists. Meth is available by prescription as Desoxyn. It can't be that bad if it's "government approved" right?
People will abuse drugs no matter what we do. But the record is pretty clear that most people who clean up even after pretty horrendous addiction histories, can successfully recover the use of their minds and bodies. People are pretty tough. It's illegal drug impurities, black market crime, and crap like cathinones with little or no medical history of use that is scary.
They are over-funded, since their budget is > $0. The feds have the resources to bust the bankers. They don't want to. You don't bite the hand that feeds you. The gov. borrowing scheme and the primary broker dealers are like a snake eating its tail. This setup won't end because of reform. It has to collapse.
It should be legal. And you should be liable if something happens. Unless you entered into a contract to waive it. But lawyers are expensive. And small scale production isn't likely to be the primary production paradigm. It may also not be legal according to zoning laws. And if it can be bought legally, people won't flaunt even little laws to make it since there will be no profit in it! But fundamentally, it is not necessary to criminalize small scale production in order to ensure that most of the drugs used will be pharmaceutical grade.
By the very nature of abused drugs, there will be a need for users to sign a waiver of rights to sue if they have an adverse medical reaction to taking whatever when they buy it from the drug store. Also, just like a good bartender will cut someone off if they get too smashed, it is possible that in the internet era pharmacies will simply cut off users who look like they are over-doing it. Sure some other unscrupulous sellers will enable such addicts (it could be a bonanza for the elderly), but the point is that social pressure to not be a junkie can be developed through means other than criminalization. But perfection is not attainable, so the rights of the rest of us don't deserve to be trampled to try to achieve an unobtainable goal of no drug abuse.
What is good enough are laws against fraud, if only someone would enforce them. If a pharma. co. commits fraud and someone gets hurt because of a contaminant, then they may be sued for fraud, and perhaps criminal fraud or negligence charges as well.
But the regulation that you are promoting only leads to monopoly and corruption, ultimately leading to the sort of situation where the companies can PROTECT themselves from fraud and other liabilities, because the regulators will just "settle" with them--like the way the crook bankers can rip us off these days, then "settle" later for pennies on the dollar of profit.
Micro-breweries are personal-scale drug manufacturing labs. Do you really want to put them out of business?
Are people dropping like flies from tainted nutritional supplements that fall under (justifiably so) a much less strict regulatory regime than pharmaceuticals? No.
Good grief, people presently abusing street drugs prepared from gasoline, in rusty cans, with no lab tests or controls, and you are worried that if legalized and sold by legitimate companies all of the sudden the drugs will become of questionable safety?
What's the difference from food preparation? What you are proposing should apply to anything prepared for human consumption--if you want to be logically consistent about it. Do you propose that every restaurant needs to get FDA approval to operate after spending millions of $$$ on years of studies? Ever been to Thailand? Barely any regulation, and I've never gotten sick. Millions of people eat street vendor food for their entire lives. They are nearly as heathy as here in the "1st world."
There is an interesting YouTube video documentary on herion addiction. In it a large scale distributor says that he prefers people get their dope from him because he knows it's quality is good and they will be safe. You see, most business people just don't want to hurt their customers. Even criminal ones. Don't believe Marxist propaganda. It's just as wrong as anti-drug propaganda.
The problem is that "decriminalization" just means that users don't get punished, or just get a fine for possessing less than some threshold of substance. But the manufacturing and distribution are still illegal. Therefore the criminal black market is still incentivized to exist, along with its violence and the leech government entities that try to stop it and who's jobs depend on retaining this disgusting destructive relationship of illegality ensuring the profitability of illegal trafficking for drug dealers, and which ensures billions in government spending on the "War on Drugs" and employs hundreds of thousands of government employees.
I am simply fed up with the whole thing. Let people do what they want. I have never, ever run into a "meth freak" or any other drug crazed person that threatened me. The really scary people are drunks.
If just one stupid kid gets wasted on some drug like "bath salts" and gets killed (by accident, not directly from the drugs) then there are immediate calls to ban it. Well why the heck do we have "bath salts?" Because methamphetamine, MDMA, and cocaine are illegal! Yet they are much safer drugs with a long history of safety data and medical use! We know they are only harmful if you have a heart condition or if heavily abused. Well of course people are going to abuse them, but that's not my problem. At least if they are legal and you can buy them from a dispensary in pharmaceutical grade then we could benefit from:
1. People can be educated out in the open what is a safe dose, how to keep up your nutrition and minimize harm to your health, and where to get help if you loose control of your use and need help to stop.
2. Much of the damage to users that is actually caused by the IMPURITY of the drugs, the dirty needles, and the unhealthy lifestyles etc., will be eliminated or reduced. Perhaps we can even develop more quick acting oral drugs so that people will be less inclined to inject to get the same effects.
3. We can supply people with opiate antidote drugs to protect themselves in case of accidental overdose.
4. The risk of overdose will be much much lower since the purity will not vary.
5. The cost of treatment programs could be miniscule compared to criminalization and interdiction.
6. The black market and all it's innocent bystanders caught in the cross fire will be eliminated.
7. The price of the drugs will be 5-10x lower, making the theft crime needed for unemployed addicts to support their habits will be proportionally lower.
8. Many more addicts who were unemployable due to prohibition might be able to manage a "functional addict" lifestyle--remaining employed and productive members of society.
9. Medical research into safer and more effective anti-depressants, sleep aids, stimulants, and other psychoactive drugs could be dramatically accelerated.
The criminal black market and all its violence is what scares me. Not dope fiends. I'm personally morally committed to a drug abuse free lifestyle. My family and I don't even drink alcohol. But I'm just so sick of this prohibition crap.
The economy might even benefit from people using stimulants carefully and in non-abusive quantities. The classic drugs such as amphetamine really aren't all that bad, despite all the propaganda and the fact that on the street they are filled with potentially toxic contaminants!.
For those of you with an environmental inclination, look at some videos of how cocaine is extracted in the Amazon jungles, and what is done with the chemical waste. This is real tear-jerking stuff. It's just so disgusting and sad. Yet, if it were legal, then all of this could be done in the open by modern companies following international environmental standards, employing people in 9-5 jobs, who could pay taxes and live normal happy lives.
Now for the bad news: Prohibition is never, ever going to end. It's just too much of a wonderful bonanza for the state.
V=Q/C so expensive (not really that expensive, but complex SMPS circuitry with approx 85-90% efficiency) control circuits ARE required to keep a constant output voltage as the capacitor terminal voltage declines.
The amount of lead-acid batteries (ie., simple tech.) needed to store a single home's energy needs for a night, and in fact for a few days of worst case cloudy weather, in most geographies of the USA at least, is well within the financial capabilities and space constraints of single family households. That means that distributed solar could easily displace the vast majority of residential electricity use. The technology to do so is NOW. What stops it? Most people don't want to invest in solar unless they can sell surplus into the grid. Government/corporations prohibit this in many areas. This is a political battle against decentralization. Solve it and most of the residential energy sector would probably transitioned to solar within 20-30 years.
Oh joy, so we are sure a pebble reactor won't undergo uncontrolled fission reactions if power is lost. But we can't let the glowing balls of graphite-encased fission fuel touch any water or air until they cool down, right?
Guess what is sure to happen then? They will contact air or water, inadvertently.
I have been pro-nuclear for a long time. Still am in principle. But at this point, solar is the way to go for the most part, with wind after that. If we let markets decide the real cost of nuclear (not subsidizing risk and liability via government), it would be relegated to a few niche markets like remote and difficult to access locations.
The reactors didn't melt due to uncontrolled nuclear fission reaction. They melted due to un-cooled decay heat. So a "passive" safety to control the nuclear reaction wouldn't have helped. The problem is decay heat. Remove it or melt. Hence, some sort of active cooling must be provided until cold shutdown is reached. There is essentially NO way to guarantee this. Building the plant below the elevation where there are ancient markers saying "don't build below here" makes clear that this was not a one in a billion event. Perfection can't be achieved, and I can accept a non-perfect world. But they could have done a lot better.
In hunting you want a clean kill as you said, meaning a fast kill, which is "as humane as possible" since we usually (except for sadistic people) want to as best as possible avoid inflicting pain and suffering upon an animal (for that reason my personal animal suffering minimization strategy is not to shoot them in the first place). However, for military purposes, this is irrelevant. The 5.56x45mm is a very nasty thing to get hit with since it tends to fragment and cause awful internal injuries, and a slow death. It is actually advantageous to not inflict a quick kill, but rather to severely wound, the enemy in military combat, from what I understand (not an expert here). Read about the studies done in the Vietnam War era which is why they chose to switch from the 20 round.308 M1A to the 30 round 5.56 M16. The latter is considered to confer greater "firepower" and with less weight.
It's only a straw man if it's a pure argument. In this case it isn't, it is supported by empirically observable reality throughout all of history. So it's a hypothesis at least. Nearly a law of nature at best.
The "system" and "corrupt entities that may attempt to use the system for nefarious purposes" are like two sides of a coin. You cannot have one without the other. Until you see why that is, you are part of the problem.
Slashdot Mirror
Let's see here. It is common knowledge that exercising the brain can improve its effectiveness--and so is an effective treatment for dementia. So if the makers of "Brain Age" for Nintendo say so, you've just turned Nintendo into a regulated medical device. This is what unintended consequences is all about.
Isn't that impossible? It's trying to prove a negative. So you mean that in order to sell a product I must prove that for the rest of time there will never be an ill consequence from my product, even though the science to determine potentially ill consequences may not yet exist?
You really don't ever want there to be an economic recovery do you?
You might wish such an ideal world could work, but it observably doesn't.
Then we have things like this:
http://market-ticker.org/akcs-www?post=209444
But we're talking about safety! What happens when the delays and costs of regulating medical applications causes hundreds of people to die because they didn't get better medical help?
Bingo. Thanks for rekindling my hope that not all humans are morons. We need more people like you.
Have you considered that this is the same FDA that causes the death of thousands of people every year because they haven't approved drugs used safely for years elsewhere?
Have you ever been involved with government-approved software before? Mostly it never gets completed because the process kills it.
It's unlikely statists ever consider such things. That would imply they are capable of second order thinking. But they are not, by definition.
Here's a sad story: The drug GHB was once sold in nutritional supplement stores for $30 a bottle. Like anything else it can be used and abused. Used for good or evil. Just like a screwdriver.
One day some nightclub chicks got slipped some of the stuff and wound up getting date-raped. This is a heinous crime and we have existing and rather straightforward legal mechanisms to deal with it.
But the government then banned GHB because a handful of people got hurt, while ignoring the 10000s of alcohol related deaths and the completely medically useless nature of alcohol which if we want to be consistent about our "drug war" should certainly be banned.
So guess what? It turns out that GHB is a very valuable drug for treating narcolepsy, and perhaps other sleep disorders. It may even be an effective and safe antidepressant.
But the government then gave Jazz Pharmaceuticals an exclusive monopoly on the manufacture of the drug Xyrem which is the Na+ salt of GHB for treating such ailments.
Guess what it costs? $5000 a bottle! People have to go through hell to get their insurance to cover it, and many get denied no matter what.
So we ruined the lives of up to 200000 sufferers of narcolepsy to protect a few people who should have known better than to drink with and go home with strangers in the first place. This is government. This is all it ever was and all it will ever be. And all the people do is beg for more.
You fantasize that you are going to get some sort of enlightened government, because THAT is the statism religion. You believe that some bunch of good and noble ones are going to work in the government to care for us and protect us from the rotten ones?
This is the delusion!
Did you ever stop to think, while wallowing in self-interest masqerading as idealism, that the people in government are just like you? They are self-convinced enlightened folk, who believe they are doing good with the gun of government, while completely unable to admit to themselves that they are selfish animals as well.
We all are!
There is no one enlightened!
That is why anyone who claims that government regulation can achieve a noble result is fooling themselves. You bleat on about "science-based regulation" well where is it? Is it in the SWAT teams that are busting the little farmers who sell a gallon of unpasteurized milk to their neighbor? Is it in the tonnes of paraquat dumped on Amazon rainforests?
The empirical fact is that government destroys everything it touches. Look at what is happening right now! Why aren't the bankers who have committed high crimes being indicted!?!?!?
Government does not work. Perhaps we need it minimally--to do one thing and one thing only. Punish crime.
Selling an "app" that falsely diagnoses an illness leading to trouble is one of two things: 1. a mistake and someone can be held liable for it in civil court; 2. criminal fraud and negligence which someone can be tried for in court.
Pray tell why do we need anything more? The "free market" is NOT a license to commit fraud, despite what Marxist propaganda has been shoved down your throat in government funded school. The free-market would have put out of business the criminal banksters in 2008. But why are they still in business? The GOVERNMENT!!!
Oh, I think you are right that a passive convection or whatever cooled *design* could be much more inherently safe than the actively cooled thingy which actually blew. Note that I didn't claim that a passive decay heat removal couldn't work. I stated that a passive shutdown mechanism wouldn't have helped in this case.
My purpose was mainly to clarify something which a lot of people continue to misunderstand--which is that the Fuk. meltdowns were from decay heat, not fission reaction heat as the reactors were already scrammed prior to melting.
Even a passive decay heat removal involves some complex machinery which may fail. But still, it would be better than active.
Does anyone know if it is even theoretically possible to design a passive cooling system which can handle the full fission thermal output of a reactor running full-bore in which the active/passive shutdown mechanism jammed and left the reactor without primary cooling but NOT scrammed? That's the real scary scenario!
So when Drs. prescribe too much medicine even though they are scientifically trained and should know better than to give someone something for long enough to get hooked, take an oath to do no harm yet break their oath, and when the user gets hooked on the medicine in the internet age when every detail of information is available at your fingertips--even to the people in the poorest of countries--it is the fault of "Big Pharm?"
I suppose "Big Oil" puts a gun to your head and makes you fill up at the gas station too?
If you keep the safer drugs like marijuana, heroin, cocaine, and meth legal, then the incentive to use really dangerous stuff like "bath salts" which have no medical or scientific data about their effects will be nil.
I know it may sound crazy to some to call heroin, cocaine, and meth "safe" but the fact is that they are primarily dangerous when impure due to being illegal, and when abused in large quantities. And the danger is mainly just getting addicted, rather than any serious inherent toxicity. Meth is an exception--but it's still not that bad--most of the damage is due to lack of nutrition. Neurotoxicity in reasonable doses can even be largely mitigated via antioxidants and NMDA receptor agonists. Meth is available by prescription as Desoxyn. It can't be that bad if it's "government approved" right?
People will abuse drugs no matter what we do. But the record is pretty clear that most people who clean up even after pretty horrendous addiction histories, can successfully recover the use of their minds and bodies. People are pretty tough. It's illegal drug impurities, black market crime, and crap like cathinones with little or no medical history of use that is scary.
They are over-funded, since their budget is > $0. The feds have the resources to bust the bankers. They don't want to. You don't bite the hand that feeds you. The gov. borrowing scheme and the primary broker dealers are like a snake eating its tail. This setup won't end because of reform. It has to collapse.
But liberals would never get involved in such slime, right? http://classicalvalues.com/2012/08/terrorists-dealing-drugs http://market-ticker.org/akcs-www?post=209934
It should be legal. And you should be liable if something happens. Unless you entered into a contract to waive it. But lawyers are expensive. And small scale production isn't likely to be the primary production paradigm. It may also not be legal according to zoning laws. And if it can be bought legally, people won't flaunt even little laws to make it since there will be no profit in it! But fundamentally, it is not necessary to criminalize small scale production in order to ensure that most of the drugs used will be pharmaceutical grade.
By the very nature of abused drugs, there will be a need for users to sign a waiver of rights to sue if they have an adverse medical reaction to taking whatever when they buy it from the drug store. Also, just like a good bartender will cut someone off if they get too smashed, it is possible that in the internet era pharmacies will simply cut off users who look like they are over-doing it. Sure some other unscrupulous sellers will enable such addicts (it could be a bonanza for the elderly), but the point is that social pressure to not be a junkie can be developed through means other than criminalization. But perfection is not attainable, so the rights of the rest of us don't deserve to be trampled to try to achieve an unobtainable goal of no drug abuse.
What is good enough are laws against fraud, if only someone would enforce them. If a pharma. co. commits fraud and someone gets hurt because of a contaminant, then they may be sued for fraud, and perhaps criminal fraud or negligence charges as well.
But the regulation that you are promoting only leads to monopoly and corruption, ultimately leading to the sort of situation where the companies can PROTECT themselves from fraud and other liabilities, because the regulators will just "settle" with them--like the way the crook bankers can rip us off these days, then "settle" later for pennies on the dollar of profit.
Micro-breweries are personal-scale drug manufacturing labs. Do you really want to put them out of business?
Are people dropping like flies from tainted nutritional supplements that fall under (justifiably so) a much less strict regulatory regime than pharmaceuticals? No.
Good grief, people presently abusing street drugs prepared from gasoline, in rusty cans, with no lab tests or controls, and you are worried that if legalized and sold by legitimate companies all of the sudden the drugs will become of questionable safety?
What's the difference from food preparation? What you are proposing should apply to anything prepared for human consumption--if you want to be logically consistent about it. Do you propose that every restaurant needs to get FDA approval to operate after spending millions of $$$ on years of studies? Ever been to Thailand? Barely any regulation, and I've never gotten sick. Millions of people eat street vendor food for their entire lives. They are nearly as heathy as here in the "1st world."
There is an interesting YouTube video documentary on herion addiction. In it a large scale distributor says that he prefers people get their dope from him because he knows it's quality is good and they will be safe. You see, most business people just don't want to hurt their customers. Even criminal ones. Don't believe Marxist propaganda. It's just as wrong as anti-drug propaganda.
The problem is that "decriminalization" just means that users don't get punished, or just get a fine for possessing less than some threshold of substance. But the manufacturing and distribution are still illegal. Therefore the criminal black market is still incentivized to exist, along with its violence and the leech government entities that try to stop it and who's jobs depend on retaining this disgusting destructive relationship of illegality ensuring the profitability of illegal trafficking for drug dealers, and which ensures billions in government spending on the "War on Drugs" and employs hundreds of thousands of government employees.
I am simply fed up with the whole thing. Let people do what they want. I have never, ever run into a "meth freak" or any other drug crazed person that threatened me. The really scary people are drunks.
If just one stupid kid gets wasted on some drug like "bath salts" and gets killed (by accident, not directly from the drugs) then there are immediate calls to ban it. Well why the heck do we have "bath salts?" Because methamphetamine, MDMA, and cocaine are illegal! Yet they are much safer drugs with a long history of safety data and medical use! We know they are only harmful if you have a heart condition or if heavily abused. Well of course people are going to abuse them, but that's not my problem. At least if they are legal and you can buy them from a dispensary in pharmaceutical grade then we could benefit from:
1. People can be educated out in the open what is a safe dose, how to keep up your nutrition and minimize harm to your health, and where to get help if you loose control of your use and need help to stop.
2. Much of the damage to users that is actually caused by the IMPURITY of the drugs, the dirty needles, and the unhealthy lifestyles etc., will be eliminated or reduced. Perhaps we can even develop more quick acting oral drugs so that people will be less inclined to inject to get the same effects.
3. We can supply people with opiate antidote drugs to protect themselves in case of accidental overdose.
4. The risk of overdose will be much much lower since the purity will not vary.
5. The cost of treatment programs could be miniscule compared to criminalization and interdiction.
6. The black market and all it's innocent bystanders caught in the cross fire will be eliminated.
7. The price of the drugs will be 5-10x lower, making the theft crime needed for unemployed addicts to support their habits will be proportionally lower.
8. Many more addicts who were unemployable due to prohibition might be able to manage a "functional addict" lifestyle--remaining employed and productive members of society.
9. Medical research into safer and more effective anti-depressants, sleep aids, stimulants, and other psychoactive drugs could be dramatically accelerated.
The criminal black market and all its violence is what scares me. Not dope fiends. I'm personally morally committed to a drug abuse free lifestyle. My family and I don't even drink alcohol. But I'm just so sick of this prohibition crap.
The economy might even benefit from people using stimulants carefully and in non-abusive quantities. The classic drugs such as amphetamine really aren't all that bad, despite all the propaganda and the fact that on the street they are filled with potentially toxic contaminants!.
For those of you with an environmental inclination, look at some videos of how cocaine is extracted in the Amazon jungles, and what is done with the chemical waste. This is real tear-jerking stuff. It's just so disgusting and sad. Yet, if it were legal, then all of this could be done in the open by modern companies following international environmental standards, employing people in 9-5 jobs, who could pay taxes and live normal happy lives.
Now for the bad news: Prohibition is never, ever going to end. It's just too much of a wonderful bonanza for the state.
V=Q/C so expensive (not really that expensive, but complex SMPS circuitry with approx 85-90% efficiency) control circuits ARE required to keep a constant output voltage as the capacitor terminal voltage declines.
The amount of lead-acid batteries (ie., simple tech.) needed to store a single home's energy needs for a night, and in fact for a few days of worst case cloudy weather, in most geographies of the USA at least, is well within the financial capabilities and space constraints of single family households. That means that distributed solar could easily displace the vast majority of residential electricity use. The technology to do so is NOW. What stops it? Most people don't want to invest in solar unless they can sell surplus into the grid. Government/corporations prohibit this in many areas. This is a political battle against decentralization. Solve it and most of the residential energy sector would probably transitioned to solar within 20-30 years.
Great idea! Ok, so when are you going to give me some? See where this leads?
Oh joy, so we are sure a pebble reactor won't undergo uncontrolled fission reactions if power is lost. But we can't let the glowing balls of graphite-encased fission fuel touch any water or air until they cool down, right?
Guess what is sure to happen then? They will contact air or water, inadvertently.
I have been pro-nuclear for a long time. Still am in principle. But at this point, solar is the way to go for the most part, with wind after that. If we let markets decide the real cost of nuclear (not subsidizing risk and liability via government), it would be relegated to a few niche markets like remote and difficult to access locations.
The reactors didn't melt due to uncontrolled nuclear fission reaction. They melted due to un-cooled decay heat. So a "passive" safety to control the nuclear reaction wouldn't have helped. The problem is decay heat. Remove it or melt. Hence, some sort of active cooling must be provided until cold shutdown is reached. There is essentially NO way to guarantee this. Building the plant below the elevation where there are ancient markers saying "don't build below here" makes clear that this was not a one in a billion event. Perfection can't be achieved, and I can accept a non-perfect world. But they could have done a lot better.
It's doubtful anyone here would be as good-looking as a lady-boy as the real Thai ones.
Hey, don't you know--we have to do these things to fight for our freedom!
But isn't the low gain antenna omnidirectional, so that there will always be a link available to the MRO or Odyssey satellites?
In hunting you want a clean kill as you said, meaning a fast kill, which is "as humane as possible" since we usually (except for sadistic people) want to as best as possible avoid inflicting pain and suffering upon an animal (for that reason my personal animal suffering minimization strategy is not to shoot them in the first place). However, for military purposes, this is irrelevant. The 5.56x45mm is a very nasty thing to get hit with since it tends to fragment and cause awful internal injuries, and a slow death. It is actually advantageous to not inflict a quick kill, but rather to severely wound, the enemy in military combat, from what I understand (not an expert here). Read about the studies done in the Vietnam War era which is why they chose to switch from the 20 round .308 M1A to the 30 round 5.56 M16. The latter is considered to confer greater "firepower" and with less weight.
It's only a straw man if it's a pure argument. In this case it isn't, it is supported by empirically observable reality throughout all of history. So it's a hypothesis at least. Nearly a law of nature at best.
That too is a crime.
By that logic, regular checkpoints should be put up all along public roadways. It's for public safety, of course. Right?
I thought they already were put up?
The "system" and "corrupt entities that may attempt to use the system for nefarious purposes" are like two sides of a coin. You cannot have one without the other. Until you see why that is, you are part of the problem.
There's a good explanation here a few months ago: http://www.consumerenergyreport.com/columns/rsquared