Is this as much a problem nowadays? I can't imagine a realistic scenario in which our combat aircraft are going to be without AWACS support in any sort of conflict in the foreseeable future.
That depends. With the sort of conflict you've been in the last couple of times, you didn't even need AWACS as the enemy couldn't shoot back. Hence drones...
Against an enemy that can shoot back AWACS is more useful, but not a panacea. While AWACS can warn you of far away aircraft, it isn't that much better at identifying them, and they don't help you shoot them. You have to use your own radar for that. And when you do, you've given up your own stealth. Opening yourself up for a return shot.
Against a stealth capable opponent, the argument that "stealth aircraft can get in the sneak attack" can be turned against the AWACS. If that's true, then the AWACS aircraft (being such a valuable asset) has to be protected at all cost, this means lots of escort and a very defensive posture. Both of which means that the effectiveness of AWACS is diminished. (It's interesting to note that NATO planners expected AWACS to survive for one, max, two, days if the balloon ever went up. Not very survivable. Sure, AWACS is better at detecting stealth aircraft than other aircraft are. But on the flip side, it can't turn-and-burn to get out of the way of a missile worth a damn either. Having to rely solely on ECM/chaff/flares etc. that historically haven't been 100% either. So its anybody's guess which factor will dominate.
So of course you're onto something fundamentally true. "What do you need the aircraft for?". Scenarios can be very different. But fundamentally, if you have a highly capable "top of the line" aircraft, expecting to meet adversaries that are likewise equipped, then don't hope for many long range kills. There are much too many things conspiring against that happening. The need for identification (a must in anything short of an all out, no holds barred, total war scenario, one we haven't had that often, thank God) is only one such thing.
Nope, I wouldn't call it "dangerous". Rather "realistic". What Stillion is saying are the same things that were said in the sixties... They weren't true then, and they probably aren't now either. So there's nothing new there. Development is surprisingly slow. And that you can kill an unaware and (essentially) non-manoeuvring target with a BWR missile is actually an improvement. The earliest missiles couldn't even do that. (Pk with any sort of radar guided missile is surprisingly low in actual combat). Against a manoeuvring and aware target a long range kill is a very difficult thing to achieve. Just turn 90 deg to the missile to make it lead you that much more (it has to) and then make an out of plane manoeuvre when it's too late for the missile (at the end of its flight it has too much speed and no fuel left for hard manoeuvring). Or you can turn tail and run away from it. That works well at long ranges as well.
Which incidentally illustrates your point nicely. There have of course been lots of tactical adaption to the new battlefield in the fact of long range missiles. Due to physics (air launched missiles are limited in size and weight, in order to have long reach they have to burn their fuel early and then cost on down from up high, etc. etc.) many of these tactics are difficult to counter by the missile developer. Hence long range missiles aren't used for kills against targets that can turn and pull Gs, they're often deployed as "pushers", forcing the enemy to manoeuvre into a disadvantageous position. Until you turn the missile into a "drone" the same things are probably going to be stay or less true.
But all this depends on there being all out total war, where you can deploy your weapons without restrictions. That's only happened a small number of times since the advent of the jet aircraft. The overwhelming majority of engagements have happened under much more restrictive ROEs, and a plane that can't operate under such, realistically isn't much use. Or rather, is at best a strategic deterrent, not very useful operationally against an enemy that can shoot back. The last two wars you've been in, that wasn't really true however, hence the explosion of drones...
The main driving design principles of the F-35 were to have it to detect and destroy from longer distances while reducing the distance in which it can be detected and destroyed.
Yes, that has been the driving design since the sixties. It has never come to pass. Problem has always been, and will probably continue to be, identification of far away targets (BWR). IFF "doesn't work", i.e. there are too many situations where your own forces won't have IFF, or it will be switched off. There are also all the third parties that don't have IFF (civilian aircraft). This has always lead to an ROE where you'll first have to acquire visually to confirm your target. In almost all instances where fast jets have operated.
And with stealth aircraft that has only gotten worse, not better, as you now cannot turn on your own radar, for fear of being the first to give up your position. Which means that your own stealth leaves you relatively speaking more blind than before. Before you could light up your enemy, since they were already lighting you up. Now, not so much. And without radar, no BWR shot. (Advanced IR has gotten much more important, but isn't generally good enough to shoot with.)
So, sensors and technology do get better, whether they'll finally be good enough to actually be safe to use, that's still very much up for debate. My money is on "no, not really", dogfighting is still going to be the order of the day, as it always has been.
Well I looked it up, and CANDU are run with with a positive void coefficient, which is bad. But since the people behind the CANDU reactor design realised this, they put in passive design elements to counter this. The thermal mass of the coolant is such that boiling takes a long time. And another interesting feature is that since it's a heavy water moderated reactor, cooling it (even in a makeshift emergency scenario) with light water will not add to the reactivity.
That said, even though it has some interesting safety features not present in ordinary PWR/BWR reactors of the era, it's not a modern passive safety design. The Wikipedia article on the CANDU design looks OK though AFAIK regarding its safety features, so start there if you want to know more. There are better designs today that would make the reactor "just walk away from the controls and nothing bad will happen"-safe. But since we're not allowed to build new ones (pretty much), they've not been built.
In summary, CANDU has some nice safety features, that's never been tested in "real life", but it's not a modern design, so you'd still better have people at the controls that know what they're doing. Tjernobyl of course had the one-two punch of a pretty crappy (paramilitary, the way it was designed was heavily influenced by military considerations) reactor design, and a crew that didn't know what they were doing. (They were insufficiently trained to realise what the implications of what they were doing were. They had for instance not been told of Xenon poisoning.)
Yes, they did have a meltdown due to loss of the cooling required to remove decay heat after the reaction has stopped. Tjernobyl however went prompt critical and the containment vessel (such as it was, i.e. not really) exploded. That's a much worse scenario that Fukushima.
Yes, they did have explosions at Fukushima, that did release radioactive material into the atmosphere, but that wasn't from the reactor exploding proper. That was from loss of cooling melting the fuel rods, making them so hot they stripped hydrogen from what water was present and leading to a hydrogen explosion. I.e. a chemical explosion. (The same scenario happened at TMI, but the hydrogen accumulation in the reactor building, but outside the containment vessel, was handled and the reactor survived in much better shape). In Fukushima the pools with spent fuel rods at the top of the reactor were full, and explosions aren't something you want close to those either, but again, that's not part of the nuclear reaction as such.
Now, that Fukushima suffered worse effects than TMI has to do with the necessary emergency cooling to remove decay heat being available at TMI (they melted the reactor by accident in the early part of the event, when the realised their error they started doing the correct things). In Fukushima the reactors shut down as planned, but with the lack of backup power, and batteries only lasting so long, the decay heat managed to melt the fuel to a much larger extent than TMI.
So in summary, Tjernobyl was a much riskier design in that it has to be "reigned in" all the time. If you loosen the reigns, it can run away from you and explode. Western reactors will stop "by themselves" in the same scenario, but unfortunately even stopped they have to be nursed for a week, before they are cool enough to be left just sitting. If you fail to cool them adequately they can/will still melt their fuel enough to create a serious situation. In TMI this cooling was available, in Fukushima it wasn't.
So with a car analogy...:-) Tjernobyl. If you don't keep your foot on the break all the time, the engine will runaway and explode. In a western reactor you have to keep your foot on the gas pedal for it to run at all, but when you take your foot off, you still have to stop the car somehow, as you're travelling at high speed. If you have breaks, with plenty of pads left, that's not generally a problem. If you don't, you can still end up in a ditch. In either case, ditch is plenty bad, not question, but still better than smoking hole in the ground from exploded engine.
And furthermore it also contained a binary readable version (bar code) and one T-shirt reader was made, otherwise it wouldn't have been considered a munition.
Yes it can. But that takes forced induction. (How did you think steel was heated to be melted in the first place? Before electricity it was by burning stuff).
But, as the parent pointed out. That's not the point. The point is that ordinary construction steel is severely weakened by heat (blacksmithing wouldn't work if it wasn't). It's actually structurally worse than wood in many cases when it comes to fire resistance. So you don't have to melt the steel in order to collapse a building. You only have to have it hot enough to lose structural integrity. Melting steel is for casting, which is a completely different use case altogether. Heating to much lower temperatures is for forging. You can hot forge at 1000C and low and behold, a jet fuel fire reaches 1000C in open air. Case closed.
Yeah... I wouldn't trust the plumber, since he's gotten the galvanic corrosion the wrong way around. It's the galvanised gas line that would corrode through, not the copper ones.:)
But, that aside, you're point is well taken. A plumber that had experience from this wouldn't make that mistake. He wouldn't need a degree in materials science or electrochemistry to know that kopper+zink=bad, and it's the zink that's going to suffer. He wouldn't have to look it up (like I did) because he'd just know it.
And that's why, as you say, we're a trusting animal. It's a great labour saving device and makes us as a tribe more efficient and effective.
If that is really true. That just increases the risk, as the enemy of your enemy now has a great way of amplifying their attack, by shooting you first.
So, hopefully that's not actually true. Such a stance would in itself be destabilising.
Well, in order to take out the entire country with one strike you need a megaton device and large rocket. But for say Texas, a kiloton on top of a "Scud"-class missile would do quite nicely.
Now of course, Pan Am was different in that it was a very localised event with law enforcement etc. being able to respond in full. With a couple of mid-high level EMP bursts, resources would be severely strained to do that, to say the least. So the only relatively quick option then is striking with nuclear weapons (even if everything else goes to shit, which it wouldn't, the subs will still be viable). The question then becomes, whom do you shoot? That's not an easy question... There wouldn't be the same tell tale traces, that are left after chemical explosives, and if Pan Am had gone down into the sea, as was the plan, the investigation would have been a lot more difficult.
They also destroy anything else in their path, and you might want to keep your fields and forests and orchards for the commercial and other value they represent.
The problem is one of cost. Placing a mine can cost as little as a few dollars, but clearing one cost on the order of a thousand. So you have to be really rich for there to be parity. And this is also what we see, in that mines in rich countries aren't that much of a problem, they've been mostly cleared. (Together with the unexploded ordinance, that can often be larger problem). It's the already poor countries, that are hit with the double whammy of now being poor and having mines costing even more in terms of lives and livelihoods. And that could be fixed, if only they had the money to clear them. Which they don't. So they end up in yet another version of "it takes a lot of money to be poor".
Smarter landmines (modern sea mines are plenty smart today) would be even harder to clear, and cost even more. That's the situation with today's sea mines. Sure some of the smarts goes towards hitting a higher value target, but most of it is in making the mine more difficult to sweep. Increasing the cost for the defender even more.
Yes, I'm not sure I agree with that. Sure, an EMP strike as part of an all out Soviet style nuclear armageddon attack, is neither here nor there. There's going to be plenty of EMP going around anyway, and the overpressure/heat/radiation/fallout are going to be much, much, worse problems.
But, my point is rather that if you're facing that kind of enemy then EMP isn't that much of a concern, if you're facing a much smaller and weaker enemy, then all of a sudden an EMP strike becomes a force multiplier and part of a very attractive asymmetric scenario. If you only have three to five warheads and medium range ballistic missiles, you couldn't hurt the US (or Europe or...) directly from your own territory, but you could launch them from a civilian freighter in the Gulf of Mexico (that then conveniently goes "boom"), and then the US would be in a world of hurt. We're talking 50% of the population dying level of hurt here.
Now, you'd still need a state level actor here, but which state? Are you going to nuke all of North Korea, Pakistan, Iran etc. in retaliation? Knowing full well that most of them had nothing whatsoever to do with the attack, and that whatever small traces you would find would most likely be put there by the attacker to try and blame someone else?
This is what makes nukes in the hands of rogues to dangerous. The retaliatory theory doesn't work anymore, since there is no nation state to retaliate against. So if you can launch an attack with subterfuge, or from an actor that is not a nation state, then all of a sudden that attack looks much more plausible. I.e. you'll probably never see an ICBM launched against your country (one wouldn't be a good number anyway), but a shipping container going boom, that's another matter entirely. And if you can fly the warhead in that container straight up for just a little stretch, then all of a sudden you could have widespread effect from a small warhead, instead of the very localised effect you'd have from detonating it in (say) DC.
So, no. If you're worried about nations with just a small handful of nukes and non-ICBM capabilities, this is the sort of scenario that should be close to the top of your list. You'd better task the CIA to not ignore any rockets being smuggled onto freighters. That's a red flag.
That's not quite the conclusion drawn by your own government's EMP commission:
Several potential adversaries have or can acquire the capability to attack the
United States with a high-altitude nuclear weapon-generated electromagnetic pulse
(EMP). A determined adversary can achieve an EMP attack capability without having a
high level of sophistication.
A readable fictionalisation of such an event can be read in "One Second After"
Now, if all you're saying is that there are more pressing things to worry about, then sure. There always are. But an EMP strike is unfortunately well within the means of a fairly unsophisticated attacker and could be made in a deniable fashion. (That won't help you much, as the US is not above attacking whole countries for unrelated reasons, (cough) Iraq (cough)). Like with many things security wise, we're "safe" from it, not so much because the attack is impossible or unfeasible, but rather that there aren't enough crazies around with the capability at hand. Capabilities tend to increase as time goes by though, and crazy doesn't seem to decrease, unfortunately.
IF the Municipalities instead built a single COLO facility and brought fiber to every residence or business (or at least Conduit), we could have private enterprise competing for customers, without needing a franchise agreement. BUT nobody thinks along those lines, and thus, we have government solving problems, that create more problems, that only government can solve!
That's how we more or less do it in Sweden in many/most places. I'm sending this post via just one such line. Owned and operated by a single (previously municipal) company, with my choice of about eight different ISPs offering service.
But of course, we couldn't do it without the "government". So it's not really a question of "government" vs "no government" but between proper management of resources vs. improper management. And with a political system in place that lets telecoms giants lobby for law that makes such a thing illegal, how do you expect there to be proper management? The solution to that clearly isn't "less government", but government by/for/of the people instead of corporate special interests. No?
Yes, I saw the link in the separate comment now, and read it. It's talking about another thing than what I'm doing, (and thought we were doing). Namely the state of Nvidia's drivers on Windows vs Linux.
The article you're citing says itself that the difference is between DirectX on Windows and OpenGL on Linux. That, that couldn't be different is not something I could argue. On the contrary, if you develop a game for one API (with its inherent assumptions of how to use it best) and then port it to another, of course there can be differences in performance. The same if of course true of the the hardware, if it's developed with one API in mind, and then the driver implements another, then again there could be large differences.
My argument was that if you have OpenGL code using the Nvidia driver on windows for a certain performance, than you'll have the same on Linux. While that is not true for AMD's offerings, it is true for Nvidia, and has been for a long time. The article you cite even says as much itself (by way of a Phoronix reference).
And yes. Getting your displays to work at all, esp. in an even slightly unusual setup can be a pain on Linux. Again, Nvidia based setups are often better here as well.
Did you miss a link? I didn't find the article referred to.
It's been my experience (as well as Phoronix) that the proprietary Nvidia drivers have had the same performance on Linux and Windows, to within as little as doesn't matter, for many, many years now. And I haven't really heard anyone that's experienced otherwise? No tweaking necessary
But maybe you're comparing the free and open Nvidia drivers against the windows closed ones? There's no comparison there, no argument. I'm talking about the Nvidia blob for linux. Which is basically the same source as their windows one, they have a unified driver architechture.
I don't really care about gaming whether on Linux or anywhere else, but when it comes to Nvidia performance on Linux, it's been on par with Windows for a long time. So "blow out of the water" is a gross exaggeration in the general case. (YMMV and all that).
5 Star safety ratings aren't mandated by governments
Uhh, what? It's the US government that mandates how the safety rating is to be achieved and measured! (That's why Volvo doesn't like it, they feel that you can either be safe on the road, i.e. in the real world, or max out your "stars", but not both. That's another issue though.)
Did you honestly think that the auto industry were allowed to do their own usual marketing spinn on how safe their products are? Not even close... This is too important, and hence to make the market work, the government mandates how safety should be measured and reported.
And as others have pointed out, no-one bought ABS when they first came out because it made cars safer. As a matter of fact it's well known that customers will not pay extra for safety, with ABS being a prime example. When I worked at SAAB just as anti-lock brakes were introduced they were an optional extra that cost the same as a aluminium rims (also an optional extra), something like 80-90% of customers spent the extra money on the rims, foregoing the ABS-brakes. Customers buying a SAAB or Volvo just requires the car to be safe, they're in general not willing to pay one dime extra, even when given the option.
There's also this little organisation called "The international red cross". No religious affiliation what so ever, that covers almost the entire list above.
And I don't understand the point of micro loans. They were pretty much invented by a secular organisation.
Well, that's a general trend. Fewer people can create more mayhem with less resources now than before. (Maybe that is the Fermi paradox...)
Now, I'm not sure it's all that easy to "print up something harmful" just yet. And my point was rather, that if you have a bio-reactor that can print up viruses left, right and centre, then you could have a chemical reactor to make you sarin gas, at half the price.
However, even though the capabilities for mayhem are legio, we don't see that much mayhem, so there are other mechanisms at play as well. If twenty years in the security field has taught me anything, it's that the overwhelming majority are nice people, and not the immoral bastards that modern "economic theory" claim we all are.
But, when, how and if we reach a tipping point, that is both a difficult and of course an important question. Lots of sci-fi speculating on that very subject (I'm partial to Rainbow's End, by V. Vinge), but one also has to remember that the devil is in the details, so it's not a simple linear extrapolation.
I'm all for making society a better place, and of course bad surroundings make more bad people. So we could at least start by trying to not make things worse... If we reach the point where all it takes is a single loon however, all bets are of course off. And that's the scary part.
My point was rather, that the more "poor" you have, the less consumption you have. If you have no consumers, then all the automated production in the world won't make you one single dollar. There's no-one to buy the stuff you produce. So "poor" people are important to the economy as consumers, not just producers.
Historically it actually took a long time to make people work longer than they had to, in order to be able to afford buying stuff they didn't need. For a hundred years or so in the seventeenth and eighteenth century, people just stopped when they had "enough" and did other stuff instead. This hampered industrialisation in the early years.
Well we know it's been tried, but the attacks weren't successful. It's interesting to note that the one terrorist organisation that had the wherewithal to produce both biological and chemical agents, gave up on their biological vector since they couldn't get it to work, and went the chemical route instead. (And if they had only tried to come up with a delivery system worth the name, the number of deaths could easily surpassed 9/11. Why they didn't, I haven't seen any info on.)
So, if you have enough biological skills to make bioweapons, chemicals are an easier, and more certain route, at present that is. So the question is if CRISP is enough of a game changer to change the economics in favour of biologicals over chemicals. Sure, there is a holy grail of e.g. ethnic targeting, that you can't achieve with chemicals, but I'd say that's sci-fi for the foreseeable future. As it stands, chemicals are a lot simpler than gene splicing and editing.
Unfortunately I think you can also have a stable situation where almost all productivity comes form automation, and a small percentage of the population controls that production by owning the capital. I would like to think that they would take care of the unemployed masses, but I don't see any reason to think that is how they will act.
Well, under capitalism they actually need to as well. Without a market to sell their goods (whether real or virtual) control of production means nothing. You need consumers for the equation to balance.
Now, the picture is of course very complex, but as others have said, we have an economy in the west that is very much consumption limited. If there were buyers available, almost "anything" is available for a reasonable price.
It's not for nothing that one of the best stimuli for the market is putting more money in the hands of the poorest people of the economy. They actually buy stuff with their money, instead of putting it in the "bank", and the stuff they buy si in aggregate worth a lot of money.
So there are reasons to make sure we have a population strong enough to support consumption, and it does benefit those who hold the means of production, but whether that's strong enough, and what will result and how the transition will be made, who knows.
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Is this as much a problem nowadays? I can't imagine a realistic scenario in which our combat aircraft are going to be without AWACS support in any sort of conflict in the foreseeable future.
That depends. With the sort of conflict you've been in the last couple of times, you didn't even need AWACS as the enemy couldn't shoot back. Hence drones...
Against an enemy that can shoot back AWACS is more useful, but not a panacea. While AWACS can warn you of far away aircraft, it isn't that much better at identifying them, and they don't help you shoot them. You have to use your own radar for that. And when you do, you've given up your own stealth. Opening yourself up for a return shot.
Against a stealth capable opponent, the argument that "stealth aircraft can get in the sneak attack" can be turned against the AWACS. If that's true, then the AWACS aircraft (being such a valuable asset) has to be protected at all cost, this means lots of escort and a very defensive posture. Both of which means that the effectiveness of AWACS is diminished. (It's interesting to note that NATO planners expected AWACS to survive for one, max, two, days if the balloon ever went up. Not very survivable. Sure, AWACS is better at detecting stealth aircraft than other aircraft are. But on the flip side, it can't turn-and-burn to get out of the way of a missile worth a damn either. Having to rely solely on ECM/chaff/flares etc. that historically haven't been 100% either. So its anybody's guess which factor will dominate.
So of course you're onto something fundamentally true. "What do you need the aircraft for?". Scenarios can be very different. But fundamentally, if you have a highly capable "top of the line" aircraft, expecting to meet adversaries that are likewise equipped, then don't hope for many long range kills. There are much too many things conspiring against that happening. The need for identification (a must in anything short of an all out, no holds barred, total war scenario, one we haven't had that often, thank God) is only one such thing.
Nope, I wouldn't call it "dangerous". Rather "realistic". What Stillion is saying are the same things that were said in the sixties... They weren't true then, and they probably aren't now either. So there's nothing new there. Development is surprisingly slow. And that you can kill an unaware and (essentially) non-manoeuvring target with a BWR missile is actually an improvement. The earliest missiles couldn't even do that. (Pk with any sort of radar guided missile is surprisingly low in actual combat). Against a manoeuvring and aware target a long range kill is a very difficult thing to achieve. Just turn 90 deg to the missile to make it lead you that much more (it has to) and then make an out of plane manoeuvre when it's too late for the missile (at the end of its flight it has too much speed and no fuel left for hard manoeuvring). Or you can turn tail and run away from it. That works well at long ranges as well.
Which incidentally illustrates your point nicely. There have of course been lots of tactical adaption to the new battlefield in the fact of long range missiles. Due to physics (air launched missiles are limited in size and weight, in order to have long reach they have to burn their fuel early and then cost on down from up high, etc. etc.) many of these tactics are difficult to counter by the missile developer. Hence long range missiles aren't used for kills against targets that can turn and pull Gs, they're often deployed as "pushers", forcing the enemy to manoeuvre into a disadvantageous position. Until you turn the missile into a "drone" the same things are probably going to be stay or less true.
But all this depends on there being all out total war, where you can deploy your weapons without restrictions. That's only happened a small number of times since the advent of the jet aircraft. The overwhelming majority of engagements have happened under much more restrictive ROEs, and a plane that can't operate under such, realistically isn't much use. Or rather, is at best a strategic deterrent, not very useful operationally against an enemy that can shoot back. The last two wars you've been in, that wasn't really true however, hence the explosion of drones...
The main driving design principles of the F-35 were to have it to detect and destroy from longer distances while reducing the distance in which it can be detected and destroyed.
Yes, that has been the driving design since the sixties. It has never come to pass. Problem has always been, and will probably continue to be, identification of far away targets (BWR). IFF "doesn't work", i.e. there are too many situations where your own forces won't have IFF, or it will be switched off. There are also all the third parties that don't have IFF (civilian aircraft). This has always lead to an ROE where you'll first have to acquire visually to confirm your target. In almost all instances where fast jets have operated.
And with stealth aircraft that has only gotten worse, not better, as you now cannot turn on your own radar, for fear of being the first to give up your position. Which means that your own stealth leaves you relatively speaking more blind than before. Before you could light up your enemy, since they were already lighting you up. Now, not so much. And without radar, no BWR shot. (Advanced IR has gotten much more important, but isn't generally good enough to shoot with.)
So, sensors and technology do get better, whether they'll finally be good enough to actually be safe to use, that's still very much up for debate. My money is on "no, not really", dogfighting is still going to be the order of the day, as it always has been.
Well I looked it up, and CANDU are run with with a positive void coefficient, which is bad. But since the people behind the CANDU reactor design realised this, they put in passive design elements to counter this. The thermal mass of the coolant is such that boiling takes a long time. And another interesting feature is that since it's a heavy water moderated reactor, cooling it (even in a makeshift emergency scenario) with light water will not add to the reactivity.
That said, even though it has some interesting safety features not present in ordinary PWR/BWR reactors of the era, it's not a modern passive safety design. The Wikipedia article on the CANDU design looks OK though AFAIK regarding its safety features, so start there if you want to know more. There are better designs today that would make the reactor "just walk away from the controls and nothing bad will happen"-safe. But since we're not allowed to build new ones (pretty much), they've not been built.
In summary, CANDU has some nice safety features, that's never been tested in "real life", but it's not a modern design, so you'd still better have people at the controls that know what they're doing. Tjernobyl of course had the one-two punch of a pretty crappy (paramilitary, the way it was designed was heavily influenced by military considerations) reactor design, and a crew that didn't know what they were doing. (They were insufficiently trained to realise what the implications of what they were doing were. They had for instance not been told of Xenon poisoning.)
Yes, they did have a meltdown due to loss of the cooling required to remove decay heat after the reaction has stopped. Tjernobyl however went prompt critical and the containment vessel (such as it was, i.e. not really) exploded. That's a much worse scenario that Fukushima.
Yes, they did have explosions at Fukushima, that did release radioactive material into the atmosphere, but that wasn't from the reactor exploding proper. That was from loss of cooling melting the fuel rods, making them so hot they stripped hydrogen from what water was present and leading to a hydrogen explosion. I.e. a chemical explosion. (The same scenario happened at TMI, but the hydrogen accumulation in the reactor building, but outside the containment vessel, was handled and the reactor survived in much better shape). In Fukushima the pools with spent fuel rods at the top of the reactor were full, and explosions aren't something you want close to those either, but again, that's not part of the nuclear reaction as such.
Now, that Fukushima suffered worse effects than TMI has to do with the necessary emergency cooling to remove decay heat being available at TMI (they melted the reactor by accident in the early part of the event, when the realised their error they started doing the correct things). In Fukushima the reactors shut down as planned, but with the lack of backup power, and batteries only lasting so long, the decay heat managed to melt the fuel to a much larger extent than TMI.
So in summary, Tjernobyl was a much riskier design in that it has to be "reigned in" all the time. If you loosen the reigns, it can run away from you and explode. Western reactors will stop "by themselves" in the same scenario, but unfortunately even stopped they have to be nursed for a week, before they are cool enough to be left just sitting. If you fail to cool them adequately they can/will still melt their fuel enough to create a serious situation. In TMI this cooling was available, in Fukushima it wasn't.
So with a car analogy... :-) Tjernobyl. If you don't keep your foot on the break all the time, the engine will runaway and explode. In a western reactor you have to keep your foot on the gas pedal for it to run at all, but when you take your foot off, you still have to stop the car somehow, as you're travelling at high speed. If you have breaks, with plenty of pads left, that's not generally a problem. If you don't, you can still end up in a ditch. In either case, ditch is plenty bad, not question, but still better than smoking hole in the ground from exploded engine.
And furthermore it also contained a binary readable version (bar code) and one T-shirt reader was made, otherwise it wouldn't have been considered a munition.
Case in point.
There are tons more like it.
Point well taken. There is something there.
Yes it can. But that takes forced induction. (How did you think steel was heated to be melted in the first place? Before electricity it was by burning stuff).
But, as the parent pointed out. That's not the point. The point is that ordinary construction steel is severely weakened by heat (blacksmithing wouldn't work if it wasn't). It's actually structurally worse than wood in many cases when it comes to fire resistance. So you don't have to melt the steel in order to collapse a building. You only have to have it hot enough to lose structural integrity. Melting steel is for casting, which is a completely different use case altogether. Heating to much lower temperatures is for forging. You can hot forge at 1000C and low and behold, a jet fuel fire reaches 1000C in open air. Case closed.
Yeah... I wouldn't trust the plumber, since he's gotten the galvanic corrosion the wrong way around. It's the galvanised gas line that would corrode through, not the copper ones. :)
But, that aside, you're point is well taken. A plumber that had experience from this wouldn't make that mistake. He wouldn't need a degree in materials science or electrochemistry to know that kopper+zink=bad, and it's the zink that's going to suffer. He wouldn't have to look it up (like I did) because he'd just know it.
And that's why, as you say, we're a trusting animal. It's a great labour saving device and makes us as a tribe more efficient and effective.
If that is really true. That just increases the risk, as the enemy of your enemy now has a great way of amplifying their attack, by shooting you first.
So, hopefully that's not actually true. Such a stance would in itself be destabilising.
Well, in order to take out the entire country with one strike you need a megaton device and large rocket. But for say Texas, a kiloton on top of a "Scud"-class missile would do quite nicely.
Now of course, Pan Am was different in that it was a very localised event with law enforcement etc. being able to respond in full. With a couple of mid-high level EMP bursts, resources would be severely strained to do that, to say the least. So the only relatively quick option then is striking with nuclear weapons (even if everything else goes to shit, which it wouldn't, the subs will still be viable). The question then becomes, whom do you shoot? That's not an easy question... There wouldn't be the same tell tale traces, that are left after chemical explosives, and if Pan Am had gone down into the sea, as was the plan, the investigation would have been a lot more difficult.
They also destroy anything else in their path, and you might want to keep your fields and forests and orchards for the commercial and other value they represent.
The problem is one of cost. Placing a mine can cost as little as a few dollars, but clearing one cost on the order of a thousand. So you have to be really rich for there to be parity. And this is also what we see, in that mines in rich countries aren't that much of a problem, they've been mostly cleared. (Together with the unexploded ordinance, that can often be larger problem). It's the already poor countries, that are hit with the double whammy of now being poor and having mines costing even more in terms of lives and livelihoods. And that could be fixed, if only they had the money to clear them. Which they don't. So they end up in yet another version of "it takes a lot of money to be poor".
Smarter landmines (modern sea mines are plenty smart today) would be even harder to clear, and cost even more. That's the situation with today's sea mines. Sure some of the smarts goes towards hitting a higher value target, but most of it is in making the mine more difficult to sweep. Increasing the cost for the defender even more.
Yes, I'm not sure I agree with that. Sure, an EMP strike as part of an all out Soviet style nuclear armageddon attack, is neither here nor there. There's going to be plenty of EMP going around anyway, and the overpressure/heat/radiation/fallout are going to be much, much, worse problems.
But, my point is rather that if you're facing that kind of enemy then EMP isn't that much of a concern, if you're facing a much smaller and weaker enemy, then all of a sudden an EMP strike becomes a force multiplier and part of a very attractive asymmetric scenario. If you only have three to five warheads and medium range ballistic missiles, you couldn't hurt the US (or Europe or ...) directly from your own territory, but you could launch them from a civilian freighter in the Gulf of Mexico (that then conveniently goes "boom"), and then the US would be in a world of hurt. We're talking 50% of the population dying level of hurt here.
Now, you'd still need a state level actor here, but which state? Are you going to nuke all of North Korea, Pakistan, Iran etc. in retaliation? Knowing full well that most of them had nothing whatsoever to do with the attack, and that whatever small traces you would find would most likely be put there by the attacker to try and blame someone else?
This is what makes nukes in the hands of rogues to dangerous. The retaliatory theory doesn't work anymore, since there is no nation state to retaliate against. So if you can launch an attack with subterfuge, or from an actor that is not a nation state, then all of a sudden that attack looks much more plausible. I.e. you'll probably never see an ICBM launched against your country (one wouldn't be a good number anyway), but a shipping container going boom, that's another matter entirely. And if you can fly the warhead in that container straight up for just a little stretch, then all of a sudden you could have widespread effect from a small warhead, instead of the very localised effect you'd have from detonating it in (say) DC.
So, no. If you're worried about nations with just a small handful of nukes and non-ICBM capabilities, this is the sort of scenario that should be close to the top of your list. You'd better task the CIA to not ignore any rockets being smuggled onto freighters. That's a red flag.
That's not quite the conclusion drawn by your own government's EMP commission:
Several potential adversaries have or can acquire the capability to attack the United States with a high-altitude nuclear weapon-generated electromagnetic pulse (EMP). A determined adversary can achieve an EMP attack capability without having a high level of sophistication.
A readable fictionalisation of such an event can be read in "One Second After"
Now, if all you're saying is that there are more pressing things to worry about, then sure. There always are. But an EMP strike is unfortunately well within the means of a fairly unsophisticated attacker and could be made in a deniable fashion. (That won't help you much, as the US is not above attacking whole countries for unrelated reasons, (cough) Iraq (cough)). Like with many things security wise, we're "safe" from it, not so much because the attack is impossible or unfeasible, but rather that there aren't enough crazies around with the capability at hand. Capabilities tend to increase as time goes by though, and crazy doesn't seem to decrease, unfortunately.
IF the Municipalities instead built a single COLO facility and brought fiber to every residence or business (or at least Conduit), we could have private enterprise competing for customers, without needing a franchise agreement. BUT nobody thinks along those lines, and thus, we have government solving problems, that create more problems, that only government can solve!
That's how we more or less do it in Sweden in many/most places. I'm sending this post via just one such line. Owned and operated by a single (previously municipal) company, with my choice of about eight different ISPs offering service.
But of course, we couldn't do it without the "government". So it's not really a question of "government" vs "no government" but between proper management of resources vs. improper management. And with a political system in place that lets telecoms giants lobby for law that makes such a thing illegal, how do you expect there to be proper management? The solution to that clearly isn't "less government", but government by/for/of the people instead of corporate special interests. No?
Yes, I saw the link in the separate comment now, and read it. It's talking about another thing than what I'm doing, (and thought we were doing). Namely the state of Nvidia's drivers on Windows vs Linux.
The article you're citing says itself that the difference is between DirectX on Windows and OpenGL on Linux. That, that couldn't be different is not something I could argue. On the contrary, if you develop a game for one API (with its inherent assumptions of how to use it best) and then port it to another, of course there can be differences in performance. The same if of course true of the the hardware, if it's developed with one API in mind, and then the driver implements another, then again there could be large differences.
My argument was that if you have OpenGL code using the Nvidia driver on windows for a certain performance, than you'll have the same on Linux. While that is not true for AMD's offerings, it is true for Nvidia, and has been for a long time. The article you cite even says as much itself (by way of a Phoronix reference).
And yes. Getting your displays to work at all, esp. in an even slightly unusual setup can be a pain on Linux. Again, Nvidia based setups are often better here as well.
Did you miss a link? I didn't find the article referred to.
It's been my experience (as well as Phoronix) that the proprietary Nvidia drivers have had the same performance on Linux and Windows, to within as little as doesn't matter, for many, many years now. And I haven't really heard anyone that's experienced otherwise? No tweaking necessary
But maybe you're comparing the free and open Nvidia drivers against the windows closed ones? There's no comparison there, no argument. I'm talking about the Nvidia blob for linux. Which is basically the same source as their windows one, they have a unified driver architechture.
I don't really care about gaming whether on Linux or anywhere else, but when it comes to Nvidia performance on Linux, it's been on par with Windows for a long time. So "blow out of the water" is a gross exaggeration in the general case. (YMMV and all that).
5 Star safety ratings aren't mandated by governments
Uhh, what? It's the US government that mandates how the safety rating is to be achieved and measured! (That's why Volvo doesn't like it, they feel that you can either be safe on the road, i.e. in the real world, or max out your "stars", but not both. That's another issue though.)
Did you honestly think that the auto industry were allowed to do their own usual marketing spinn on how safe their products are? Not even close... This is too important, and hence to make the market work, the government mandates how safety should be measured and reported.
And as others have pointed out, no-one bought ABS when they first came out because it made cars safer. As a matter of fact it's well known that customers will not pay extra for safety, with ABS being a prime example. When I worked at SAAB just as anti-lock brakes were introduced they were an optional extra that cost the same as a aluminium rims (also an optional extra), something like 80-90% of customers spent the extra money on the rims, foregoing the ABS-brakes. Customers buying a SAAB or Volvo just requires the car to be safe, they're in general not willing to pay one dime extra, even when given the option.
There's also this little organisation called "The international red cross". No religious affiliation what so ever, that covers almost the entire list above.
And I don't understand the point of micro loans. They were pretty much invented by a secular organisation.
Well, that's a general trend. Fewer people can create more mayhem with less resources now than before. (Maybe that is the Fermi paradox...)
Now, I'm not sure it's all that easy to "print up something harmful" just yet. And my point was rather, that if you have a bio-reactor that can print up viruses left, right and centre, then you could have a chemical reactor to make you sarin gas, at half the price.
However, even though the capabilities for mayhem are legio, we don't see that much mayhem, so there are other mechanisms at play as well. If twenty years in the security field has taught me anything, it's that the overwhelming majority are nice people, and not the immoral bastards that modern "economic theory" claim we all are.
But, when, how and if we reach a tipping point, that is both a difficult and of course an important question. Lots of sci-fi speculating on that very subject (I'm partial to Rainbow's End, by V. Vinge), but one also has to remember that the devil is in the details, so it's not a simple linear extrapolation.
I'm all for making society a better place, and of course bad surroundings make more bad people. So we could at least start by trying to not make things worse... If we reach the point where all it takes is a single loon however, all bets are of course off. And that's the scary part.
My point was rather, that the more "poor" you have, the less consumption you have. If you have no consumers, then all the automated production in the world won't make you one single dollar. There's no-one to buy the stuff you produce. So "poor" people are important to the economy as consumers, not just producers.
Historically it actually took a long time to make people work longer than they had to, in order to be able to afford buying stuff they didn't need. For a hundred years or so in the seventeenth and eighteenth century, people just stopped when they had "enough" and did other stuff instead. This hampered industrialisation in the early years.
Are you sure they haven't?
Well we know it's been tried, but the attacks weren't successful. It's interesting to note that the one terrorist organisation that had the wherewithal to produce both biological and chemical agents, gave up on their biological vector since they couldn't get it to work, and went the chemical route instead. (And if they had only tried to come up with a delivery system worth the name, the number of deaths could easily surpassed 9/11. Why they didn't, I haven't seen any info on.)
So, if you have enough biological skills to make bioweapons, chemicals are an easier, and more certain route, at present that is. So the question is if CRISP is enough of a game changer to change the economics in favour of biologicals over chemicals. Sure, there is a holy grail of e.g. ethnic targeting, that you can't achieve with chemicals, but I'd say that's sci-fi for the foreseeable future. As it stands, chemicals are a lot simpler than gene splicing and editing.
May you live in interesting times and all that.
Unfortunately I think you can also have a stable situation where almost all productivity comes form automation, and a small percentage of the population controls that production by owning the capital. I would like to think that they would take care of the unemployed masses, but I don't see any reason to think that is how they will act.
Well, under capitalism they actually need to as well. Without a market to sell their goods (whether real or virtual) control of production means nothing. You need consumers for the equation to balance.
Now, the picture is of course very complex, but as others have said, we have an economy in the west that is very much consumption limited. If there were buyers available, almost "anything" is available for a reasonable price.
It's not for nothing that one of the best stimuli for the market is putting more money in the hands of the poorest people of the economy. They actually buy stuff with their money, instead of putting it in the "bank", and the stuff they buy si in aggregate worth a lot of money.
So there are reasons to make sure we have a population strong enough to support consumption, and it does benefit those who hold the means of production, but whether that's strong enough, and what will result and how the transition will be made, who knows.