There's a tool called rcorder that parses REQUIRE and PROVIDE lines in each startup script
Problem is that UNIX services doesn't actually tell you when they're ready to "provide", the init system is based on the notion of having told something to start, not actually having it available.
So, until you address that any prioritization is going to be a kludge at best. It's no use telling a system that something requires something else, until you can actually guarantee that that something else is actually available.
Fun fact, systemd doesn't address this either. Well, there are some kluges in the form of initd like behaviour, but by and large its still the old "spawn off a process and cross your fingers"-approach to service provisioning and dependency resolution. Only a lot more complicated for not much improvement. "Lots of screaming for little wool, said the woman that sheered the pig..." as the Swedish saying would have it.
P.S. Of course, whether you number or name these things doesn't make one bit of difference. But with numbering at least, you're not fooling yourself into thinking that you're getting something you're not.
Here I presume you're going to find my point inconvenient because you really wanted to compare the US to Sweden or something. Tough shit. Its an unreasonable comparison.
Not with the list you put up above. To quote the previous start of the entry for Sweden in the CIA world fact book "Though a military super power in the 17:th century..."
So if you can compare the US to the holy roman empire, then you can compare it to Sweden. The 30 years war for example, was the first true world war and it lasted three times as long as the two the US has been involved in, combined. There were plenty of people who said "the Swede will save us!" (and for a time we actually did), just about as many as sang "Sleep, child, sleep, for tomorrow comes the Swede".
Not that I'm particularly proud of this moment in history, mind you, but it happened all the same.
Any language, any OS, any hardware -- none of these things ultimately matter.
Yes they do. I know its popular to say otherwise, but that's mostly management speak.
What is true though is that we don't know how to quantify that difference and that there are many confounding factors, such as good people tend to flock to the good tools. And that doesn't necessarily mean good for everybody, but good for good people. (In the Haskell community that's know as the "Wow, we're floored by the quality of applicants we get when we post a Haskell job. Didn't know there were programmers like that out there..."
That this trivially true shouldn't be hard to convince oneself of as the argument is basically "Doesn't matter if we equip our troops with the Springfield 1861 rifled musket, or the fancy shmanzy, new and expensive Mauser 1891. After all they're both rifles, and everybody knows it's the rifleman that makes the difference, not the rifle."
Yes, the skill of the rifleman is very important. Critical even. Doesn't matter what rifle you give a bad rifleman, he'll miss as well with a cheap, crappy obsolete one, as a state of the art one. And likewise, a true virtuoso will perform feats of magic whatever you hand him. BUT, and that's a big "but", that doesn't mean that the differences in all other cases, don't matter. A good rifleman will cherish the opportunities the improvements bring, and a bad one will suck less. Sometimes much, much, less.
(And paradoxically, good performers seem to have a preference for simpler tools, that are easier to use for everybody, not the other way around, as you might think. That's probably because good performers tend to practice, and perform, a lot more than the average Joe, and hence are more exposed to their inevitable mistakes, always working to correct them. Extra complexity, for complexities sake, is hence seldom appreciated by the consummate professional.)
Doesn't mean that other things aren't just as, or even more, important, but don't for a minute delude yourself into thinking that the actual tools of the trade doesn't matter. The saying: "It's a poor carpenter who blames his tools", is meant to warn against poor carpenters, not condone poor tools.
If your discussion can't take place without making someone feel bad, why should we allow it to take place?
Because everybody feels bad about something. So, if "it made me feel bad" is supposed to be the brightline then we cannot have even a rational thoughtful discussion about anything.
What sort of environmentalists have you been hanging around with? Environmentalist opposition to dams is so well known that "blowing up dams" is one of the cliche stereotypes of "eco-terrorists".
Swedish ones. What american ones do, or don't on their time I don't know about, and can't answer for. You know that the Swedish green party is actually part of the cabinet? They can't be running around blowing up dams, that'd just hurt them in the polls...
What on Earth are you talking about? Did the government foot the bill after the Deepwater Horizon incident?
Don't know. Didn't mention the Deepwater horizon "incident".
Um, yes they are. You mention Deepwater Horizon.
Nope. You must be thinking about someone else.
Which is why BP and the coal mining companies responsible are now bankrupt?
Nope. Not when it comes to BP at least. They're still doing OK. Dropped from second to fourth largest oil company in the world, but far from bankrupt. Still showing a healthy profit. And the largest shareholder in BP is, you guessed it, Britain. (It was even majority owned, until Thatcher couldn't leave well enough alone.) So they're a bad example, being government owned. You need to look to private industry to find the real weasels.
Price-Anderson is based on a "public pays" principle.
Nor does it make it logical that the solution to companies like Exxon weaseling out of payments is to have the government assume liability for major disasters and let those who caused them off the hook.
OK, maybe you misunderstood me. Whether it makes sense or not is not the issue. Whether it is "right" or "wrong" is not the issue either. The issue is that private companies do weasel out of paying, and they do so using wholly legal means. (It's not for nothing that oil tankers are often owned by completely separate entities, that can go bankrupt with no ill effects for the company that's actually making the money off of those oil shipments) Whether you like it or not, that's what's going to happen more often than not, especially when we talk about catastrophic events, such as the Tsunami that hit Japan, killed ~15000 people, destroyed large tracts of land, and yes, flooded a nuclear reactor emergency generator system.
You would need to change a lot of law to make that impossible. And as you can't even make these companies pay their bloody taxes as it is, lots of luck with that.
In Sweden, most of our nuclear reactors are owned by the government (wholly owned corporations), so of course the government is going to pay for the eventual disaster, one way or the other. (And since they're not allowed by law to take out insurance, that would be stupid, it's a completely moot point anyway).
So that the government assumes responsibility for what they're going to end up assuming responsibility for anyway isn't as stupid as it sounds. What is stupid, is that you seem perfectly happy with letting the private owners make off with the proceeds in the meantime. That is something you should start looking into.
Same with nuclear power. Much as bean counters would like to simply look at the monetary cost of a disaster like Fukushima, most normal people also consider the human cost. The people who died, lose their homes, their communities, their jobs and livelihoods.
"The people that died", you mean the ~ 16000 that died in one of the worst Tsunamis in modern history? Those people? Or the approximately zero people that died as a direct or indirect result of Fukushima?
Or the untold people that lost everything, houses, land, the lot, as a result of said Tsunami, or the much, much smaller number of people who have to move from their houses because of the Fukushima exclusion zone? Those people?
Look, what makes us not take you lot seriously is that you have absolutely no sense of scale. This was a catastrophic disaster that struck Japan. Thousands upon thousands of people died or lost everything. Many of the areas hit won't be rebuilt for generations as the wherewithal, economy etc. isn't there to make that happen. Only the economic loss was staggering. And you go on and on about one tiny corner of that, where no-one died, no-one is probably going to die, and the economic impact is limited, especially compared to the rest of Japan that was devastated.
If you had a sense of scale about these things, you would understand that a nuclear disaster is every bit as "linear" as a large hydro dam failure. We are in no way shape or form at the level of "asteroid-that-killed-the-dinosaurs". Even the worst nuclear accident imaginable (Tjernobyl if you wonder) is a very localised affair (country, maybe continent), that's over in a jiffy, compared to your killer meteorite. (In fact contrary to a large dam failure, nature actually thrives in the nature preserve that is the Tjernobyl exclusion zone.) We couldn't effectively hurt the survival of human kind with nuclear weapons, let alone civilian nuclear energy.
So, we're very much still in the linear part of the spectrum. That you nuclear detractors don't realise this, even getting the idea to comparing a puny nuclear reactor blowing up to a large asteroid, is what makes it impossible to take you seriously.
Nope. Tjernobyl had one count 'em, one reactor blow up (no 4). The other three reactors continued to operate for years after the catastrophic loss of no 4. Now, Fukushima had almost complete meltdown of one reactor, and partial meltdown of two more (but then again, TMI had a more severe meltdown than most of those, to no ill effect). However, these all happened from the same proximate cause, there was no chain reaction or anything of that nature, so counting reactors is a fools game anyway. If Fukushima had had fewer larger reactors, then it wouldn't have been as serious an accident according to you? Or if it had had ten with five melting (instead of three of six) it would have been a more serious accident? Patent nonsense.
What other type of machine has a 1.3% catastrophic failure rate, resulting in billions of Euros of damage each time
So this is why your analysis is basically flawed. If you want to compare then you need a unit of measurement that makes that comparison invariant of e.g. "how many reactors", and for example takes size into account. What you're doing is akin to counting the number of oil spills rather than the severity.
In power generation it's customary to compare given the amount of energy produced. Sure, a nuclear accident is bad, but we get tons of energy from it. It's like air travel safety, sure, one plane crash is bad, but you get to go a long way, quickly and cheaply, so compared to the options all of a sudden flying doesn't look that bad anymore. Now, answering your question, "What do we do in energy production that's as dangerous as nuclear". The answer is, perhaps surprisingly "everything else". Dams in particular are a large scale killer like no other... Many, many, many, more people have died en masse per kWh due to dam failure than anything else, but in total of course it's dwarfed by coal. Even wind and solar is more dangerous than nuclear, and that's a conservative estimate. Just google "death per kilowatthour", and you'll find no lack of sources to list the actual numbers. Coal is easily a factor of thousand more dangerous than nuclear, and guess what, they don't even pay for their damage, let alone insure against it.
First off, who's extolling the virtues of hydroelectric dams?
Quite a few of us how have them, yes and that includes "environmentalists". Sure, they're not without their problems, environmentally, but they have a quite a few upsides as well.
The aspect of Price-Anderson that people complain about is that the US government foots the bill for the vast majority of costs in the event of a catastrophic accident.
Sure, but what I was pointing out (in a roundabout way), is that the same is effectively true of any large scale infrastructure system, especially when it comes to power generation on a massive scale. Doesn't matter if the cost comes from a hydro electric dam that fails, or a coal ash slurry dam failure, or a major oil spill, or indeed a release of radio nucleotides.
If that much money is at stake there are many ways for those that earn money off of the business to protect themselves from damage. Bankruptcy is always cheaper than insurance. Especially when there is no data for the insurance industry to go on (as is the case with large scale catastrophes).
So, it doesn't matter if the nuclear industry doesn't have insurance, since many/most other human endeavours on that scale doesn't either. And even if they did, it wouldn't cover the actual cost anyway, you'd just look at years and years of litigation and ass covering, with very little hard cash in the end to show for it. (To wit the Exxon Valdes spill and the legal aftermath. It didn't seem to hurt Exxon nearly as much as it did Prince William sound.
If you want to construe that as an argument for making these types of endeavours government owned and operated, go ahead, I think that could be argued.
What are your numbers then? Tjernobyl one reactor, Fukushima one reactor (or are you counting multiples there?), vs 443 power generating ones according to Google, that gives me 0.455% let's say 0.5%.
And that's even assuming that number of failed reactors / total, is even a good metric, something I'm not nearly convince of.
Given that nuclear energy producers are not required to have an insurance against nuclear disasters (at least on this side of the Pond)
Neither does hydro dams. Most dams are "insured by the government", i.e. there is no insurance, just like for nuclear. And that doesn't seem to stop anyone from extolling the virtues of hydro electricity even in the face of a very long list of dam failures. You know, a billion here and a billion there, it adds up....
If a 99% accurate test is true, but the probability of the condition is only 0.0001%, it is still highly improbable that the person is afflicted by the condition on the basis of the test alone. Its important to narrow down the population before any testing is effective.
Yepp. It's not for nothing that the first thing a doctor will tell you as the answer to the "What do I do now"-question that inevitably results from a positive test is: "Have more tests".
Initial screening tests are often less accurate, since that inevitably makes them quicker and cheaper. That's why they're called screening tests. The odd positive results is just confirmation that better, slower, more expensive tests should be done.
This should absolutely be the norm for most civil cases.
An interesting twist we have here in Sweden is that for purposes of determining who pays cost, even if you win the case but is awarded less than half of what you originally claimed, you're counted as the loser when it comes to paying cost of litigation.
Keeps down frivolous claims quite nicely. However, I doubt this way of running civil cases would serve well if we didn't also have the system of ombudsmen, i.e. in any case where the little guy would face interests with big pockets (including government) there's an ombudsman to hear you case and litigate on your behalf, providing both the expertise and funds. (They can also fine directly.)
Yeah, I can't remember when I was in an block of flats last that didn't have concrete walls between the flats... Sure, concrete isn't technically "air tight", but its close enough as to make no difference.
And of course there is corruption here as well, but they don't rank us amongst the least corrupt nations of the world, year after year, for nothing. I wouldn't say that its a problem.
As for the climate in Canada, you get so much sun down there on the Mediterranean latitudes that you have no cause for complaints.:-) Canada is what, 49 deg North? That's bloody Paris!:-) Us here on up on the 60th parallel OTOH, we have no such luxury.
Wow! I won't claim to be a ventilation expert, but I did read up on the subject when I designed and put my own mechanical ventilation system into my own house, and here in Sweden at least I have never heard of such a beast. Oh the humanity of breathing other peoples air, even if filtered.:-) Would fly like a brick if someone tried that here. (Granted, being Sweden, indoor climate is important, as the outdoors are somewhat inhospitable for parts of the year.)
Now, I've lived in apartments, and while I've had the usual problems of smelling someone elses smoke from their balcony when I had my windows open, to have to suffer that through a wall would really take the cake. That's definitely not to code here, and heads would roll if it ever happened.
However, as you say, probably not a reliable way of getting high on the cheap. It can't usually be that bad of a problem, surely.;-)
Perhaps naively, I thought that such systems worked such that people in different units didn't breathe each other's air?
That was what the first post in this thread implied, and that's the only reason I can see that pot smoking would be a problem, i.e. if the pot smokers outlet vent becomes your inlet. Please tell me that's not the standard for ventilation in other parts of the world.
"Mostly" is the key word in your post. Morality cannot be defined as a list of do's and dont's that are mechanically obeyed precisely because it has a myriad of "edge cases" that require human interpretation.
OTOH seat belts "don't work" by the same token. There are plenty of edge cases where they could do (and have done) worse than being without.
That's not to say that seat belts are a failure and that we'd be better without. Quite the opposite. "Mostly works" is when you think about it the highest praise any technology can hope to achieve.
He is known for his work in game theory, however he is not a game theory mathematician since before fading into his mental illness he was working on quantum theory. His paper on game theory is his Ph. D. thesis. Just the tip of the iceberg this mathematician was and could have been if the illness didn't stopped him.
Indeed. If you look at his actual proof of the existence Nash equilibrium it's a brilliant piece of mathematics where he freely jumps between seemingly unrelated fields of mathematics (probability theory in one instance, geometry in the next etc.), like a butterfly between flowers on a meadow. Obvious only in hindsight.
However, as schizophrenia is a disease that is characterised by the brain making associations between things that can't even be associated (e.g. "clanging" thinking as if words that rhyme actually have a meaningful relation in speech) you can't help but wonder about the connection. A brain that is able to make fantastic connection between distant fields of mathematics to build new results always teetering on the edge of completely losing touch with factual reality by "over revving," making false connections between everything and anything, even though there are none.
I do have a big problem with people obscuring the truth, and thus far you've presented no compelling evidence to suggest the above information is untrue.
I can't since you don't read Swedish and obviously don't believe me who do.
All the above is media echo chamber from one police report. Even if you failed to link it correctly its this one.
Now, I'm not going to translate the lot for you, as you wouldn't believe it anyway, but just the first sentence sums it up quite nicely "I Sverige finns i nulÃget 55 geografiska omrÃ¥den dÃr lokala kriminella nÃtverk anses ha negativ pÃ¥verkan pÃ¥ lokalsamhÃllet". -> In Sweden there are at present 55 geographic areas where local criminal network are considered to have a negative impact on the local community."
That's as far as the "no-go" zones go.
Now, I'm not going to fisk the rest, because it's too tedious, but just as a "for instance": "Here is just one of many news stories on how police have to install shatterproof glass on their vehicles because they get rocks hurled at them whenever entering these areas". No, if you read the article, it says that due to the possibility of stones being thrown, the police responce busses (piketbussarna) have had shatterproof glass fitted. These are the vehicles carrying the special response units, riot police for example, that gets called in when things have gotten bad enough that its warranted (much like armed police in Britain). Again hyperbole. The offered citation doesn't actually say or support what "swedenreport" is trying to sell.
But like I said before, you're fishing in the wrong pond. There are "better" sites if you wish to keep this up.
If you're so concerned for the truth, then there's plenty of that to go around. One would think that with all this crime, drug dealing, shootings and IS supporters running rampant that would show up in crime statistics? Now, general crime statistics is a tricky subject since there's always the problem of what gets reported and how, so the usual proxy is to look at "homicide" i.e. wrongful death. That's a pretty useful statistic as dead people tend to show up in the statistics and are easy to count, and general crime tends to correlate rather well with violent crime, which correlates with people dying from it.
Here's the current count of "lethal violence" in Sweden. Since we have population of 9 644 864 at last count that means a rate of 0.9 per 100k inhabitants in 2014. This is including the last three years of gang shootings (that as you can see didn't even impact the overall statistics). That's better than almost all countries in the world. Including, I might add, Ireland.
So, by that token, it doesn't even matter that we have "no-go zones" then, as the people in them don't get up to much anyway... Police presence or not...
Hyperbole. That was already included in my previous reply.
That one police officer with no official or other standing says one thing doesn't a summer make. (Why he says that I don't know, but there are a number of mundane reasons).
Now, yes, we're having problems in certain areas. And they seem to stick. No denying that. BUT, by that token, why take the word of one policeman when it comes to "no-go zones". We've had much worse in the very city I'm writing this from. That was a real loss of control of general order from the police. No question about it. And even those reports were overblown. The city was perfectly safe for anybody who wasn't either a protester or police even at the height of "the troubles" (:-)). I should know, I was there... I can only imagine what "swedenreport" would have reported had he been there... He would no doubt be on about how Sweden still wasn't safe for the public and how police were still out of control of the streets. (Hint. If they ever were, they regained it very quickly. That wasn't actually the problem, but rather the overreaction of the establishment to what was really a rather minor incident, all things considered.)
So, what we're having now is the analogue. Police can't act like the usually do, i.e. just a single patrol can't necessarily just take off after a suspect if that suspect flees to certain streets in certain parts of the city in the middle of the night or they might get a stone thrown at their car. They have to actually call for backup. And since Swedish police is dimensioned for the actual need, that backup isn't available. Hence they'll let is slide, and the fiction of "no-go zones" were invented.
When police reallocates (as they have due to the last spate of shootings), lo and behold that place is cleared out in short order. (And then police will allocate back, the bad places left to fester and the cycle repeats. We wouldn't even need more police to solve that, but for the police we have to work when crimes are actually committed, i.e. nights and weekends. But since our police force is ageing, they don't want to/need to work nights and weekends. This is actually a bigger problem than any "no-go" zone).
I mean I sympathise with your need to defend what I presume is your home country, we had something similar here in Ireland during the troubles, tourists were afraid they'd get shot in the streets - no, folks, that's Northern Ireland, part of the UK - but from those reports it does seem as though a real problem exists. It doesn't appear to be widespread, yet, but there it is.
That's a useful analogy. First of course, even in Northern Ireland the streets were "completely safe" even at the heights of the troubles. If you weren't a British squaddie walking alone down Falls road in the middle of the night. If you do the numbers, US crime in New York beat the death rate of "the troubles" by a factor of ten if you look at the period as a whole.
Second. Even taking that as a comparison, the very worst current level of violence in Gothenburg, taking the recent spate of shootings into account, doesn't even begin to reach the level of IRA violence in Republic of Ireland during the troubles. The tourists you speak of objectively were in more danger from the IRA walking the streets of Dublin than the would walking our streets here. In both cases, while the difference in relative risk is quite substantial, the difference in absolute risk is similar, as the absolute risk is the same: as close to zero as to make no difference.
So, it's interesting that you should mention the troubles, as we have a similar situation here, much, much more ink is being spilled than actual blood. Making the general public think there
I see. I take it you don't read Swedish? His own sources doesn't actually say what he claims they say. (Even the vaunted police report he cites doesn't actually say what he says it does.) Yes, we have a growing problem with gang based crime in Sweden (we have a whopping 4000 gang members out of a nine million population, which is 4000 more than only 20-30 years ago). Yes, there are parts of cities in Sweden where police/fire/ambulance etc. have been met with stone throwing. Yes, we have a worrying increase in the number of gang related shootings.
However. All this has to be understood from a backdrop of approximately zero such problems in the past. Hence of course, relatively speaking, we take this very seriously, and we're appalled. As we should be. However, with that said, our crime indicators are still among the lowest in the world, even though gang shootings make the headlines almost every day (it feels like) it's still only a handful per year and our murder rate hasn't even ticked up as a result. Still steady at just over one per 100k/year, which is as close to zero as you're going to get. (Notably it's not any different from mono-ethnical Finland and Norway).
Most notably however, active police work in these areas inevitably reduces the level of overt crime in these areas once they've been in the papers long enough to affect resource allocation. We routinely clean up these areas (by locking up the handful of people who are the real problem) and things are normalised. Until the next time. While we of course are deeply concerned by this pattern, to say that "police have given up" and that there are "no go" zones anywhere in Sweden is taking the current situation much, much too far.
So a "pinch" of salt isn't the appropriate measure here. You need a metric ton. As I say to american friends and family when the inevitable "is it safe?"-question comes; "You being american, your level of street smarts serves you everywhere and anywhere in Sweden. If you behaved like you would in the safest areas of the US, you'd be pretty much OK in the very worst areas here." It's a bit like if Cal Ripken was dropped into a little league game asking the coach who he would have to look out for on the opposing team. The only sensible answer of course being. "No one... But please go easy on them, yeah?"
So, calling any area in Sweden a "police no-go zone" is hyperbole to the level of untruth.
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There's a tool called rcorder that parses REQUIRE and PROVIDE lines in each startup script
Problem is that UNIX services doesn't actually tell you when they're ready to "provide", the init system is based on the notion of having told something to start, not actually having it available.
So, until you address that any prioritization is going to be a kludge at best. It's no use telling a system that something requires something else, until you can actually guarantee that that something else is actually available.
Fun fact, systemd doesn't address this either. Well, there are some kluges in the form of initd like behaviour, but by and large its still the old "spawn off a process and cross your fingers"-approach to service provisioning and dependency resolution. Only a lot more complicated for not much improvement. "Lots of screaming for little wool, said the woman that sheered the pig..." as the Swedish saying would have it.
P.S. Of course, whether you number or name these things doesn't make one bit of difference. But with numbering at least, you're not fooling yourself into thinking that you're getting something you're not.
Here I presume you're going to find my point inconvenient because you really wanted to compare the US to Sweden or something. Tough shit. Its an unreasonable comparison.
Not with the list you put up above. To quote the previous start of the entry for Sweden in the CIA world fact book "Though a military super power in the 17:th century..."
So if you can compare the US to the holy roman empire, then you can compare it to Sweden. The 30 years war for example, was the first true world war and it lasted three times as long as the two the US has been involved in, combined. There were plenty of people who said "the Swede will save us!" (and for a time we actually did), just about as many as sang "Sleep, child, sleep, for tomorrow comes the Swede".
Not that I'm particularly proud of this moment in history, mind you, but it happened all the same.
Any language, any OS, any hardware -- none of these things ultimately matter.
Yes they do. I know its popular to say otherwise, but that's mostly management speak.
What is true though is that we don't know how to quantify that difference and that there are many confounding factors, such as good people tend to flock to the good tools. And that doesn't necessarily mean good for everybody, but good for good people. (In the Haskell community that's know as the "Wow, we're floored by the quality of applicants we get when we post a Haskell job. Didn't know there were programmers like that out there..."
That this trivially true shouldn't be hard to convince oneself of as the argument is basically "Doesn't matter if we equip our troops with the Springfield 1861 rifled musket, or the fancy shmanzy, new and expensive Mauser 1891. After all they're both rifles, and everybody knows it's the rifleman that makes the difference, not the rifle."
Yes, the skill of the rifleman is very important. Critical even. Doesn't matter what rifle you give a bad rifleman, he'll miss as well with a cheap, crappy obsolete one, as a state of the art one. And likewise, a true virtuoso will perform feats of magic whatever you hand him. BUT, and that's a big "but", that doesn't mean that the differences in all other cases, don't matter. A good rifleman will cherish the opportunities the improvements bring, and a bad one will suck less. Sometimes much, much, less.
(And paradoxically, good performers seem to have a preference for simpler tools, that are easier to use for everybody, not the other way around, as you might think. That's probably because good performers tend to practice, and perform, a lot more than the average Joe, and hence are more exposed to their inevitable mistakes, always working to correct them. Extra complexity, for complexities sake, is hence seldom appreciated by the consummate professional.)
Doesn't mean that other things aren't just as, or even more, important, but don't for a minute delude yourself into thinking that the actual tools of the trade doesn't matter. The saying: "It's a poor carpenter who blames his tools", is meant to warn against poor carpenters, not condone poor tools.
If your discussion can't take place without making someone feel bad, why should we allow it to take place?
Because everybody feels bad about something. So, if "it made me feel bad" is supposed to be the brightline then we cannot have even a rational thoughtful discussion about anything.
The more I read, the more it looks like it should be possible to "backport" birds to a surprising degree even without any unobtanium "dinosaur DNA"
You're in good company.
If you think that's the argument, you need to work on your reading comprehension.
What sort of environmentalists have you been hanging around with? Environmentalist opposition to dams is so well known that "blowing up dams" is one of the cliche stereotypes of "eco-terrorists".
Swedish ones. What american ones do, or don't on their time I don't know about, and can't answer for. You know that the Swedish green party is actually part of the cabinet? They can't be running around blowing up dams, that'd just hurt them in the polls...
What on Earth are you talking about? Did the government foot the bill after the Deepwater Horizon incident?
Don't know. Didn't mention the Deepwater horizon "incident".
Um, yes they are. You mention Deepwater Horizon.
Nope. You must be thinking about someone else.
Which is why BP and the coal mining companies responsible are now bankrupt?
Nope. Not when it comes to BP at least. They're still doing OK. Dropped from second to fourth largest oil company in the world, but far from bankrupt. Still showing a healthy profit. And the largest shareholder in BP is, you guessed it, Britain. (It was even majority owned, until Thatcher couldn't leave well enough alone.) So they're a bad example, being government owned. You need to look to private industry to find the real weasels.
Price-Anderson is based on a "public pays" principle.
You mean like "The United States Oil Pollution Act of 1990 limits BP's liability for non-cleanup costs to $75 million unless gross negligence is proven.". You'd be wrong to assume that the nuclear industry is the only large industry that gets to call the shots.
Nor does it make it logical that the solution to companies like Exxon weaseling out of payments is to have the government assume liability for major disasters and let those who caused them off the hook.
OK, maybe you misunderstood me. Whether it makes sense or not is not the issue. Whether it is "right" or "wrong" is not the issue either. The issue is that private companies do weasel out of paying, and they do so using wholly legal means. (It's not for nothing that oil tankers are often owned by completely separate entities, that can go bankrupt with no ill effects for the company that's actually making the money off of those oil shipments) Whether you like it or not, that's what's going to happen more often than not, especially when we talk about catastrophic events, such as the Tsunami that hit Japan, killed ~15000 people, destroyed large tracts of land, and yes, flooded a nuclear reactor emergency generator system.
You would need to change a lot of law to make that impossible. And as you can't even make these companies pay their bloody taxes as it is, lots of luck with that.
In Sweden, most of our nuclear reactors are owned by the government (wholly owned corporations), so of course the government is going to pay for the eventual disaster, one way or the other. (And since they're not allowed by law to take out insurance, that would be stupid, it's a completely moot point anyway).
So that the government assumes responsibility for what they're going to end up assuming responsibility for anyway isn't as stupid as it sounds. What is stupid, is that you seem perfectly happy with letting the private owners make off with the proceeds in the meantime. That is something you should start looking into.
Same with nuclear power. Much as bean counters would like to simply look at the monetary cost of a disaster like Fukushima, most normal people also consider the human cost. The people who died, lose their homes, their communities, their jobs and livelihoods.
"The people that died", you mean the ~ 16000 that died in one of the worst Tsunamis in modern history? Those people? Or the approximately zero people that died as a direct or indirect result of Fukushima?
Or the untold people that lost everything, houses, land, the lot, as a result of said Tsunami, or the much, much smaller number of people who have to move from their houses because of the Fukushima exclusion zone? Those people?
Look, what makes us not take you lot seriously is that you have absolutely no sense of scale. This was a catastrophic disaster that struck Japan. Thousands upon thousands of people died or lost everything. Many of the areas hit won't be rebuilt for generations as the wherewithal, economy etc. isn't there to make that happen. Only the economic loss was staggering. And you go on and on about one tiny corner of that, where no-one died, no-one is probably going to die, and the economic impact is limited, especially compared to the rest of Japan that was devastated.
If you had a sense of scale about these things, you would understand that a nuclear disaster is every bit as "linear" as a large hydro dam failure. We are in no way shape or form at the level of "asteroid-that-killed-the-dinosaurs". Even the worst nuclear accident imaginable (Tjernobyl if you wonder) is a very localised affair (country, maybe continent), that's over in a jiffy, compared to your killer meteorite. (In fact contrary to a large dam failure, nature actually thrives in the nature preserve that is the Tjernobyl exclusion zone.) We couldn't effectively hurt the survival of human kind with nuclear weapons, let alone civilian nuclear energy.
So, we're very much still in the linear part of the spectrum. That you nuclear detractors don't realise this, even getting the idea to comparing a puny nuclear reactor blowing up to a large asteroid, is what makes it impossible to take you seriously.
Nope. Tjernobyl had one count 'em, one reactor blow up (no 4). The other three reactors continued to operate for years after the catastrophic loss of no 4. Now, Fukushima had almost complete meltdown of one reactor, and partial meltdown of two more (but then again, TMI had a more severe meltdown than most of those, to no ill effect). However, these all happened from the same proximate cause, there was no chain reaction or anything of that nature, so counting reactors is a fools game anyway. If Fukushima had had fewer larger reactors, then it wouldn't have been as serious an accident according to you? Or if it had had ten with five melting (instead of three of six) it would have been a more serious accident? Patent nonsense.
What other type of machine has a 1.3% catastrophic failure rate, resulting in billions of Euros of damage each time
So this is why your analysis is basically flawed. If you want to compare then you need a unit of measurement that makes that comparison invariant of e.g. "how many reactors", and for example takes size into account. What you're doing is akin to counting the number of oil spills rather than the severity.
In power generation it's customary to compare given the amount of energy produced. Sure, a nuclear accident is bad, but we get tons of energy from it. It's like air travel safety, sure, one plane crash is bad, but you get to go a long way, quickly and cheaply, so compared to the options all of a sudden flying doesn't look that bad anymore. Now, answering your question, "What do we do in energy production that's as dangerous as nuclear". The answer is, perhaps surprisingly "everything else". Dams in particular are a large scale killer like no other... Many, many, many, more people have died en masse per kWh due to dam failure than anything else, but in total of course it's dwarfed by coal. Even wind and solar is more dangerous than nuclear, and that's a conservative estimate. Just google "death per kilowatthour", and you'll find no lack of sources to list the actual numbers. Coal is easily a factor of thousand more dangerous than nuclear, and guess what, they don't even pay for their damage, let alone insure against it.
First off, who's extolling the virtues of hydroelectric dams?
Quite a few of us how have them, yes and that includes "environmentalists". Sure, they're not without their problems, environmentally, but they have a quite a few upsides as well.
The aspect of Price-Anderson that people complain about is that the US government foots the bill for the vast majority of costs in the event of a catastrophic accident.
Sure, but what I was pointing out (in a roundabout way), is that the same is effectively true of any large scale infrastructure system, especially when it comes to power generation on a massive scale. Doesn't matter if the cost comes from a hydro electric dam that fails, or a coal ash slurry dam failure, or a major oil spill, or indeed a release of radio nucleotides.
If that much money is at stake there are many ways for those that earn money off of the business to protect themselves from damage. Bankruptcy is always cheaper than insurance. Especially when there is no data for the insurance industry to go on (as is the case with large scale catastrophes).
So, it doesn't matter if the nuclear industry doesn't have insurance, since many/most other human endeavours on that scale doesn't either. And even if they did, it wouldn't cover the actual cost anyway, you'd just look at years and years of litigation and ass covering, with very little hard cash in the end to show for it. (To wit the Exxon Valdes spill and the legal aftermath. It didn't seem to hurt Exxon nearly as much as it did Prince William sound.
If you want to construe that as an argument for making these types of endeavours government owned and operated, go ahead, I think that could be argued.
What are your numbers then? Tjernobyl one reactor, Fukushima one reactor (or are you counting multiples there?), vs 443 power generating ones according to Google, that gives me 0.455% let's say 0.5%.
And that's even assuming that number of failed reactors / total, is even a good metric, something I'm not nearly convince of.
Around 1.3% of all civilian reactors have failed catastrophically
"Citation needed."
Given that nuclear energy producers are not required to have an insurance against nuclear disasters (at least on this side of the Pond)
Neither does hydro dams. Most dams are "insured by the government", i.e. there is no insurance, just like for nuclear. And that doesn't seem to stop anyone from extolling the virtues of hydro electricity even in the face of a very long list of dam failures. You know, a billion here and a billion there, it adds up....
If a 99% accurate test is true, but the probability of the condition is only 0.0001%, it is still highly improbable that the person is afflicted by the condition on the basis of the test alone. Its important to narrow down the population before any testing is effective.
Yepp. It's not for nothing that the first thing a doctor will tell you as the answer to the "What do I do now"-question that inevitably results from a positive test is: "Have more tests".
Initial screening tests are often less accurate, since that inevitably makes them quicker and cheaper. That's why they're called screening tests. The odd positive results is just confirmation that better, slower, more expensive tests should be done.
This should absolutely be the norm for most civil cases.
An interesting twist we have here in Sweden is that for purposes of determining who pays cost, even if you win the case but is awarded less than half of what you originally claimed, you're counted as the loser when it comes to paying cost of litigation.
Keeps down frivolous claims quite nicely. However, I doubt this way of running civil cases would serve well if we didn't also have the system of ombudsmen, i.e. in any case where the little guy would face interests with big pockets (including government) there's an ombudsman to hear you case and litigate on your behalf, providing both the expertise and funds. (They can also fine directly.)
Yeah, I can't remember when I was in an block of flats last that didn't have concrete walls between the flats... Sure, concrete isn't technically "air tight", but its close enough as to make no difference.
And of course there is corruption here as well, but they don't rank us amongst the least corrupt nations of the world, year after year, for nothing. I wouldn't say that its a problem.
As for the climate in Canada, you get so much sun down there on the Mediterranean latitudes that you have no cause for complaints. :-) Canada is what, 49 deg North? That's bloody Paris! :-) Us here on up on the 60th parallel OTOH, we have no such luxury.
Wow! I won't claim to be a ventilation expert, but I did read up on the subject when I designed and put my own mechanical ventilation system into my own house, and here in Sweden at least I have never heard of such a beast. Oh the humanity of breathing other peoples air, even if filtered. :-) Would fly like a brick if someone tried that here. (Granted, being Sweden, indoor climate is important, as the outdoors are somewhat inhospitable for parts of the year.)
Now, I've lived in apartments, and while I've had the usual problems of smelling someone elses smoke from their balcony when I had my windows open, to have to suffer that through a wall would really take the cake. That's definitely not to code here, and heads would roll if it ever happened.
However, as you say, probably not a reliable way of getting high on the cheap. It can't usually be that bad of a problem, surely. ;-)
Perhaps naively, I thought that such systems worked such that people in different units didn't breathe each other's air?
That was what the first post in this thread implied, and that's the only reason I can see that pot smoking would be a problem, i.e. if the pot smokers outlet vent becomes your inlet. Please tell me that's not the standard for ventilation in other parts of the world.
"Mostly" is the key word in your post. Morality cannot be defined as a list of do's and dont's that are mechanically obeyed precisely because it has a myriad of "edge cases" that require human interpretation.
OTOH seat belts "don't work" by the same token. There are plenty of edge cases where they could do (and have done) worse than being without.
That's not to say that seat belts are a failure and that we'd be better without. Quite the opposite. "Mostly works" is when you think about it the highest praise any technology can hope to achieve.
He is known for his work in game theory, however he is not a game theory mathematician since before fading into his mental illness he was working on quantum theory. His paper on game theory is his Ph. D. thesis. Just the tip of the iceberg this mathematician was and could have been if the illness didn't stopped him.
Indeed. If you look at his actual proof of the existence Nash equilibrium it's a brilliant piece of mathematics where he freely jumps between seemingly unrelated fields of mathematics (probability theory in one instance, geometry in the next etc.), like a butterfly between flowers on a meadow. Obvious only in hindsight.
However, as schizophrenia is a disease that is characterised by the brain making associations between things that can't even be associated (e.g. "clanging" thinking as if words that rhyme actually have a meaningful relation in speech) you can't help but wonder about the connection. A brain that is able to make fantastic connection between distant fields of mathematics to build new results always teetering on the edge of completely losing touch with factual reality by "over revving," making false connections between everything and anything, even though there are none.
I do have a big problem with people obscuring the truth, and thus far you've presented no compelling evidence to suggest the above information is untrue.
I can't since you don't read Swedish and obviously don't believe me who do.
All the above is media echo chamber from one police report. Even if you failed to link it correctly its this one.
Now, I'm not going to translate the lot for you, as you wouldn't believe it anyway, but just the first sentence sums it up quite nicely "I Sverige finns i nulÃget 55 geografiska omrÃ¥den dÃr lokala kriminella nÃtverk anses ha negativ pÃ¥verkan pÃ¥ lokalsamhÃllet". -> In Sweden there are at present 55 geographic areas where local criminal network are considered to have a negative impact on the local community."
That's as far as the "no-go" zones go.
Now, I'm not going to fisk the rest, because it's too tedious, but just as a "for instance": "Here is just one of many news stories on how police have to install shatterproof glass on their vehicles because they get rocks hurled at them whenever entering these areas". No, if you read the article, it says that due to the possibility of stones being thrown, the police responce busses (piketbussarna) have had shatterproof glass fitted. These are the vehicles carrying the special response units, riot police for example, that gets called in when things have gotten bad enough that its warranted (much like armed police in Britain). Again hyperbole. The offered citation doesn't actually say or support what "swedenreport" is trying to sell.
But like I said before, you're fishing in the wrong pond. There are "better" sites if you wish to keep this up.
If you're so concerned for the truth, then there's plenty of that to go around. One would think that with all this crime, drug dealing, shootings and IS supporters running rampant that would show up in crime statistics? Now, general crime statistics is a tricky subject since there's always the problem of what gets reported and how, so the usual proxy is to look at "homicide" i.e. wrongful death. That's a pretty useful statistic as dead people tend to show up in the statistics and are easy to count, and general crime tends to correlate rather well with violent crime, which correlates with people dying from it.
Here's the current count of "lethal violence" in Sweden. Since we have population of 9 644 864 at last count that means a rate of 0.9 per 100k inhabitants in 2014. This is including the last three years of gang shootings (that as you can see didn't even impact the overall statistics). That's better than almost all countries in the world. Including, I might add, Ireland.
So, by that token, it doesn't even matter that we have "no-go zones" then, as the people in them don't get up to much anyway... Police presence or not...
Oh right, their own home is linked to another via the vents and heat loop
What? If that's really the general case in the US, then drugs should be a very distant second concern, far behind the transmission of disease.
You need to get your HVAC-shit together.
Okay, so how about this one from only a few days ago: http://swedenreport.org/2015/0...
Hyperbole. That was already included in my previous reply.
That one police officer with no official or other standing says one thing doesn't a summer make. (Why he says that I don't know, but there are a number of mundane reasons).
Now, yes, we're having problems in certain areas. And they seem to stick. No denying that. BUT, by that token, why take the word of one policeman when it comes to "no-go zones". We've had much worse in the very city I'm writing this from. That was a real loss of control of general order from the police. No question about it. And even those reports were overblown. The city was perfectly safe for anybody who wasn't either a protester or police even at the height of "the troubles" (:-)). I should know, I was there... I can only imagine what "swedenreport" would have reported had he been there... He would no doubt be on about how Sweden still wasn't safe for the public and how police were still out of control of the streets. (Hint. If they ever were, they regained it very quickly. That wasn't actually the problem, but rather the overreaction of the establishment to what was really a rather minor incident, all things considered.)
So, what we're having now is the analogue. Police can't act like the usually do, i.e. just a single patrol can't necessarily just take off after a suspect if that suspect flees to certain streets in certain parts of the city in the middle of the night or they might get a stone thrown at their car. They have to actually call for backup. And since Swedish police is dimensioned for the actual need, that backup isn't available. Hence they'll let is slide, and the fiction of "no-go zones" were invented.
When police reallocates (as they have due to the last spate of shootings), lo and behold that place is cleared out in short order. (And then police will allocate back, the bad places left to fester and the cycle repeats. We wouldn't even need more police to solve that, but for the police we have to work when crimes are actually committed, i.e. nights and weekends. But since our police force is ageing, they don't want to/need to work nights and weekends. This is actually a bigger problem than any "no-go" zone).
I mean I sympathise with your need to defend what I presume is your home country, we had something similar here in Ireland during the troubles, tourists were afraid they'd get shot in the streets - no, folks, that's Northern Ireland, part of the UK - but from those reports it does seem as though a real problem exists. It doesn't appear to be widespread, yet, but there it is.
That's a useful analogy. First of course, even in Northern Ireland the streets were "completely safe" even at the heights of the troubles. If you weren't a British squaddie walking alone down Falls road in the middle of the night. If you do the numbers, US crime in New York beat the death rate of "the troubles" by a factor of ten if you look at the period as a whole.
Second. Even taking that as a comparison, the very worst current level of violence in Gothenburg, taking the recent spate of shootings into account, doesn't even begin to reach the level of IRA violence in Republic of Ireland during the troubles. The tourists you speak of objectively were in more danger from the IRA walking the streets of Dublin than the would walking our streets here. In both cases, while the difference in relative risk is quite substantial, the difference in absolute risk is similar, as the absolute risk is the same: as close to zero as to make no difference.
So, it's interesting that you should mention the troubles, as we have a similar situation here, much, much more ink is being spilled than actual blood. Making the general public think there
From the Swedish police it would seem:
I see. I take it you don't read Swedish? His own sources doesn't actually say what he claims they say. (Even the vaunted police report he cites doesn't actually say what he says it does.) Yes, we have a growing problem with gang based crime in Sweden (we have a whopping 4000 gang members out of a nine million population, which is 4000 more than only 20-30 years ago). Yes, there are parts of cities in Sweden where police/fire/ambulance etc. have been met with stone throwing. Yes, we have a worrying increase in the number of gang related shootings.
However. All this has to be understood from a backdrop of approximately zero such problems in the past. Hence of course, relatively speaking, we take this very seriously, and we're appalled. As we should be. However, with that said, our crime indicators are still among the lowest in the world, even though gang shootings make the headlines almost every day (it feels like) it's still only a handful per year and our murder rate hasn't even ticked up as a result. Still steady at just over one per 100k/year, which is as close to zero as you're going to get. (Notably it's not any different from mono-ethnical Finland and Norway).
Most notably however, active police work in these areas inevitably reduces the level of overt crime in these areas once they've been in the papers long enough to affect resource allocation. We routinely clean up these areas (by locking up the handful of people who are the real problem) and things are normalised. Until the next time. While we of course are deeply concerned by this pattern, to say that "police have given up" and that there are "no go" zones anywhere in Sweden is taking the current situation much, much too far.
So a "pinch" of salt isn't the appropriate measure here. You need a metric ton. As I say to american friends and family when the inevitable "is it safe?"-question comes; "You being american, your level of street smarts serves you everywhere and anywhere in Sweden. If you behaved like you would in the safest areas of the US, you'd be pretty much OK in the very worst areas here." It's a bit like if Cal Ripken was dropped into a little league game asking the coach who he would have to look out for on the opposing team. The only sensible answer of course being. "No one... But please go easy on them, yeah?"
So, calling any area in Sweden a "police no-go zone" is hyperbole to the level of untruth.
No, of course not. As those "no-go areas" don't actually exist in Sweden.
Seriously, where do you people get this crap?