I'm not sure what you're buying at Ikea, but the stuff I buy seems to hold up pretty well. Yes, the cost is low, but quality wise, I'm pretty happy. I usually assemble any furniture with a dab of glue on the screws though.
It's Walmart that I stopped buying most Ikea-ish items from, after I needed a bunch of cheap bookshelves and went to Walmart. The shelves slowly deform under the weight of the books.
Ooh, a car analogy! Even better - gasoline and diesel taxes pay for road construction and maintenance.
That's wrong. Gasoline taxes offset part of the cost, but nowhere near the full cost. The government ends up subsidizing the cost of roads. It gets worse, since the government often regulates the amount of parking per business, requiring a certain number of parking spots, which means that non-automobile customers of that business effectively subsidize those who drive. Yes, those who are too poor to own a car are paying more so others can drive.
Local roads are often funded, in part, through property taxes. Which leads to non-obvious arguments, such as bicyclists (who still pay property taxes) cost the city less than automobile drivers (who pay property taxes, as well as a gas tax which comes nowhere close to covering the true cost per mile of roads).
I was using Google books awhile back for some genealogical research. One of the books I was using was the Diary of Joshua Hempstead of New London, Connecticut, published in 1901, which was originally written in 1711-1758.
It's dull diary entries, mostly describing the weather, what task the author had accomplished that day, any income, and who died.
Oddly, the book was republished in 2008, in paperback format. I can buy it on Amazon for $39. But I would have never found it. I'm not related to the author. My relatives are mentioned in there, mostly in passing, or noting their deaths. My access to the book on google doesn't result in a lost sale. I wouldn't know the book had information that was relevant without seeing it, nor would I spend $38 on a whim just in case a relative was mentioned in it.
(By the way, the publishing company (Kessinger Publishing) has been accused of ripping off public domain books digitized by other sources, including google. Here's a thread on that. I don't know if this is true or not, but buyer beware!)
You are missing the main rule of Science Fiction. Humans are always the best balanced species.
If Aliens are strong then us then we are smarter then them. If Aliens are smarter then us then we are stronger then they are. If they are both stronger and smarter then us then humans are more creative or adaptable.
That is why I kinda like the Hitch Hikers Guide to the Galaxy. Arthur Dent is so unremarkable that he is spending most of the time trying to stay out of everybody ways. And the rest of the human population got wiped out in no time.
David Brin's Uplift Series is similar in a non-comedic way. Biologically, we're nothing special, our level of technology is primitive, and we have very little political power. We are easily one of the weakest species in the galaxies.
About our only skill (outside of ecosystem recovery) is that we will combine technology in unusual ways, and that's not really due to any innate human skill, only that we weren't properly educated in the long tradition of galactic science and technology.
are we glossing over that the "fraction of the time of current nuclear waste's lifespan" STILL exceeds the current lifespan of nearly every... modern nation?
It would be like if the "West Francia" had to bury nuclear waste. What, never heard of them? well gosh. I'm sure that pile of deadly, weapons-grade nuclear waste they left behind is around here *somewhere*.
I wouldn't worry about it. Really, imagine if you're a researcher in the year 4,000 or so. You find a reference to an obscure nation called the "United States of America" that buried some highly dangerous nuclear waste under a mountain someplace. You also find out that this same "United States of America" had a habit of burying trash, including some very toxic trash such as heavy metals, in thousands upon thousands of locations.
Oh good, a rebuttal of an extreme position via another extreme position.
It's like watching a Tea Party activist debate a Leninist.
But I must admit that I do want to live in this world you find yourself in, where users are trained on software in high school. Because the world I find myself in, users, if they have any past experience on software, have seemingly undergone some sort of skinner-box style training where they know where to peck, er, click to get a reward, and the most minor of version changes to their word processing software tends to confuse them to no end.
I know this might not be a popular opinion, but why should a business "really care" about keeping the IT department happy over any other department? Yes, they could do a lot of damage, but so could ANY disgruntled employee who walks in with a gun and starts shooting
Most competent IT individuals have the skills already to do severe damage to companies.
Most disgruntled employees don't have an AK-47 waiting on their desk.
Bond movies are not really known for their great storylines. They tend to be set pieces with the barest of plots to string them together. This is especially the case some of the later ones (before the reboot). I can't comment too much on the most recent one because, like you, I found it unwatchable. (Edit: I mean that you found it unwatchable and I did too. I did not mean that I found both the movie and you unwatchable).
Twists do not have to be silly. There have be a couple of movies that had twists that caused me to immediately restart the film and watch it again to look at it in a whole new light. In those cases, knowing the ending would have completely ruined the amazement.
The Song of Ice and Fire series by George R. R. Martin (adapted into the HBO series "A Game of Thrones") are a good example of this. The series is a sort of medieval fantasy. I've read the series (at least what has been published) twice.
The first time reading it, with gaps between the books, not knowing what will happen let me develop ideas about the direction of the series that were later dashed. Horribly in some cases, since the series is almost a deconstruction of the fantasy genre.
The second time reading it, the twists still had an effect on me, but knowing what happened robbed me of some experiences, while letting me see other events in an entirely different light.
That is an interesting spin on the subject.
Try looking up the definition of "per capita", and then looking up the increase in population of the USA for the last 50 years.
Well, globally, the population growth rate is still positive, but has been declining for the past few decades. Which means were are growing, but we're growing less, and are predicted to hit a peak world population of somewhere around 11 billion. One could use this to extrapolate total future net energy usage at US per capita rates.
In the US, we have a positive growth rate (a strong positive growth rate, one of the exceptions among developed nations), but the US also has high levels of immigration, and that probably throws off some of the numbers. I've seen suggestions that the US's population would be peaking soon if it wasn't for the effects of immigration over the last few decades. So I can't think you can point a finger at the US and use it as an example of exponential growth.
I wouldn't be surprised if global energy use shows a rapid increase, but there needs to be some common sense applied to extrapolation. I suspect the number of cars worldwide shows a similar rapid increase, but that doesn't mean that we're going to all be buried under automobiles by the year 2200.
Going further in to debt is not a good strategy to becoming debt free. A person can't drink themselves sober, and economies can't borrow themselves out of debt. The US government should have minted two $1 trillion dollar platinum coins, thus creating debt free currency, deposited that into the Federal Reserve Bank, and then wrote checks against it.
So basically, the US government should have created a currency that's static in size? What happens when the economy tries to grow, while the supply of money remains the same? Money deflates, according to economics 101. And if money by itself can get more valuable just by holding it, what's the incentive to invest?
Lets see. Fossil fuels fine particle pollution kills over 13,000 people a year in the US, mostly from coal. So if a human life is worth $540,000 to $1,850,000, we've matched that in the human cost alone for power plants operating normally in the US.
For a free market, it seems like no coal power plants would be built. Even considering the difference in how much total power comes from coal vs nuclear, coal seems much, much more expensive.
It didn't have a radio. (That I saw: I was looking over his shoulder.) The main reason he was so into it was precisely because he could fix everything on it -- and he did, too. He had a lot to say about why people shouldn't own anything they couldn't fix
With OBDII, the electronics in a modern car aren't that bad to figure out.
Sure, I couldn't probably make the average car sensor from scratch, but I couldn't make a '69 VW Beetle's brake drum from a block of steel.
This economic cycle we see happens independent of the economy. The U.S. was a manufacturing joke in the 18th century, by the 20th century was the world leader, and now is in decline
Technically, US manufacturing is actually a strong sector. Depending on the statistics, we're either #1 or #2 for top manufacturing nation. For a nation with only about a twentieth of the world's population, we produce about a fifth of the world's manufacturing. The output of the manufacturing sector hasn't really shrunk in the long term.
But we're efficient. For the same value of output, we tend to use one worker where China uses five or six. Part of that is labor costs -- the US has far more incentive to automate than China. This increase in productivity means we've lost manufacturing jobs while manufacturing output has grown.
I don't think that in the long term, the US can hope to match India or China, just because of population. 1,000 million of each, compared to 300 million Americans. But in the foreseeable future, the US is doing quite, quite well, and I don't think "decline" can be used.
But we won't ever get back the jobs lost through efficiency gains. And I don't know if we should incentivize growth in the manufacturing sector over other sectors.
every other damn detail about the damn mission including
1. the fact that a courier led them to his house
I wonder about this. Why be so open with the fact that a courier led them to him?
Since there are still senior AQ leaders out there we're hunting, wouldn't we want to hide how we found one?
But perhaps (tinfoil hat time) we are hiding how we found him. We had the wife that was found with him in US custody. She was released to Pakistan, then sent to her native Yemen, yet somehow ended up in Pakistan again. Wouldn't the CIA be tracking her anyways? Perhaps she lead us to Osama. Or perhaps it was a turncoat in the organization, or a noisy neighbor. As a cover story, blaming the courier serves two purposes: It answers any questions about how we found him, and it disrupts the AQ communications network, since they are going to be more suspicious about couriers now.
Some of the other leaks could be explained due to accident (such as leaving the helicopter wreckage behind where news media received photographs and people recognized it was non-standad), expected leaks (people bragging about the names of those involved), things that would be easily guessed (it was going to be an elite team who did it), or just bragging about capabilities that could be guessed at and that might not work as well in practice but could scare terrorists (such as the hyperspectral imagers), but releasing info about the courier so early?
It makes me wonder.
I could see it being just a dumb moment. But it could also be misinformation.
I suppose with this post I need a tinfoil hat now.:)
Hell, even Chernobyl is more than 500 million short for the next concrete sarcophagus, which should last some 100 years.
Considering Russia's attitude towards conventional pollution, does this mean we should give up all conventional industry?
There's plenty of polluted areas in the former USSR, from "business as usual" practices. Heck, the pollution around Norilsk is so bad that it is profitable to mine the soil.
Let's revisit this question in ten years or so....THAT's when we'll probably see the results of the radiation.
Like smoking, you won't be able to pin a SPECIFIC death on radiation, but you'll see a statistical correlation and perhaps an unusual number of cancers in people in the area... yes, perhaps the cause listed on the death certificate will be "cancer", but there will be a rise in them and that rise is caused by the radiation.
Presumably, we should only see that if radiation levels are significantly higher for most of the population.
Slight increases in radiation doesn't seem to harm us in a way that we can statistically determine. This is easy to show -- most parts of the earth have varying levels of background radiation, due to the type of soil and bedroom, as well as the elevation (Denver receives more radiation than the sea coast, all other things being equal). But we don't detect differences in the cancer rate.
Possibly even worse, but much simpler: An enemy of Japan, i.e., North Korea, taking advantage of the relative lack of security around the plant or off the shore of Sendai, finishes off the containment of one or more of the reactors using light artillery. The situation that has been mildly contaminating food and water suddenly wipes out Tokyo. (The fact that this hasn't happened actually raises my impression of North Korea.)
But no sane nation would ever do that...
Oh wait, you're talking about Best Korea.:p
(I'm pretty sure I'm kidding, but Kim lives in a reality-distortion field.)
Jim Baen and I set up the Free Library about a year and half ago. Leaving aside the various political and philosophical issues, which I've addressed elsewhere, the premise behind the Library had a practical component as well. In brief, that in relative terms an author will gain, not lose, by having titles in the Library.
What I mean by "relative" is simply this: overall, an author is far more likely to increase sales than to lose them. Or, to put it more accurately, exposure in the Library will generate more sales than it will lose.
As a practical proposition, the theory behind the Free Library is that, certainly in the long run, it benefits an author to have a certain number of free or cheap titles of theirs readily available to the public. By far the main enemy any author faces, except a handful of ones who are famous to the public at large, is simply obscurity. Even well-known SF authors are only read by a small percentage of the potential SF audience. Most readers, even ones who have heard of the author, simply pass them up.
Why? In most cases, simply because they don't really know anything about the writer and aren't willing to spend $7 to $28 just to experiment. So, they keep buying those authors they are familiar with.
...
Making one or a few titles of an author's writings available for free electronically in the Free Library seems to have no other impact, certainly over time, than to increase that author's general audience recognition-and thereby, indirectly if not directly, the sales of his or her books.
During all of this, I've noticed the slashdot community seems to lean in favor of nuclear power. Not individuals, but the community as a whole - based on the comments that get highest moderation. This is in spite of the fact that the situation there is a total unmitigated disaster. One person held it up as a case in FAVOR of nuclear power, basically saying - look, even with the natural disasters they only released a little radioactive steam. That's just plain ignorant. The building have exploded, 3 reactors are thought have had partial meltdowns (one of them breached), the simple cooling ponds are in trouble (if they were full of water, someone could just walk in there and confirm it - the fact nobody has says the radiation levels are too high to go in because something is wrong), radiation is more than 10 times background 30km away. And regardless of weather you buy all those facts, it is requiring a HUGE effort of man power to prevent it getting worse and there is no solid plan. I did read they're importing 150 tons of boron to dump on it - because well, you need to do that when there is a little steam leak I suppose...
2,000 people will die this year because of malfunctioning nuclear power plants in Japan. We clearly need to replace them with something else.
Oh wait, I mispoke. It's not 2,000, but over 20,000. And it's not malfunctioning plants, but plants operating as designed. And not in Japan, but in the US. And not nuclear power plants, but coal power plants.
Yes, that's right, this year, nearly 24,000 people will die in the US alone because of perfectly normal coal power plants[*]. That's roughly 15 people per coal power plant, per year, or about 60 people killed by coal power in the US per day.
Perhaps that's why we're not so willing to dismiss nuclear power just because some plant hit by an earthquake and tsunami has suffered a partial meltdown and killed (so far) what appears to be two people (officially, they are missing, but we'll assume dead). While in the US, over 500 people have died since the earthquake due to coal power.
WTF? It's a fantasy novel, people. It's something you read when you're not reading real books.
Perhaps it is the moral dichotomy of Tolkien and related fantasy works that creates a separation from "real books".
SF had this problem in the beginning, during the "golden age of science fiction", and a lot of current SF books still shows it. But on the other hand, SF has produced a lot of thought compelling and thought provoking books, even thought the genre suffers some stigma, as noted author Kurt Vonnegut Jr once wrote: "I have been a soreheaded occupant of a file drawer labeled Science Fiction and I would like out, particularly since so many serious critics regularly mistake the drawer for a urinal."
Fantasy does seem to have some interesting works. But there are a lot of books with plots and characters as simple as a Disney's kid's movie.
If they're lying by 40%, then they're lying about a problem that will manifest in the late 2070's or 2080's. That's a long time to hold onto a lie for relatively little gain, since shit will hit the fan either way
Why do you say "little gain"?
I could see several reasons to lie now.
Investors: Would you rather put money into drilling into a small oil field, or a large oil one?
Collateral: Would you rather take a small oil field for collateral on a loan, or a large oil field?
International power: If the world thinks you have a large chunk of the world's petroleum, there are political benefits.
Discourage competition: If you're a (practically) endless source of oil, why would anyone look elsewhere? If oil is going to always be cheap and available, why invest in alternative energy sources? Why try to conserve it?
My impression is that there's a lot more justification (and impetus) for forcible world domination in the Q'uran than there is in the Bible.
I would suggest rereading your bible, than reading a good translation of the Koran.
From the bible, there's passages such as "The LORD is a man of war" (Exodus 15:3), and is supported by other passages such as "And the LORD our God delivered him before us; and we smote him, and his sons, and all his people. And we took all his cities at that time, and utterly destroyed the men, and the women, and the little ones, of every city, we left none to remain." (Deut. 2:33-35).
The biblical account of the Israelis' conquest of the south Levant is pretty bloody and full of genocide.
Plus there are such commands as killing everyone in a city who preach about another religion "If thou shalt hear... men... saying, Let us go and serve other gods, which ye have not known... Thou shalt surely smite the inhabitants of that city with the edge of the sword, destroying it utterly, and all that is therein, and the cattle thereof, with the edge of the sword." (Deut. 13:12-17), and kill family members that try to get you to convert "If thy brother... or thy son, or thy daughter, or the wife of thy bosom, or thy friend, which is as thine own soul, entice thee secretly, saying, Let us go and serve other gods... Thou shalt not consent unto him... neither shall thine eye pity him... But thou shalt surely kill him; thine hand shall be first upon him to put him to death, and afterwards the hand of all the people." (Deut. 13:6-10).
One can find plenty of advocacy for genocidal conquest in the Christian Bible.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, it may be cheaper. It could be faster. But horses require a lot of care and can easily be injured or killed.
I'm not sure what you're buying at Ikea, but the stuff I buy seems to hold up pretty well. Yes, the cost is low, but quality wise, I'm pretty happy. I usually assemble any furniture with a dab of glue on the screws though.
It's Walmart that I stopped buying most Ikea-ish items from, after I needed a bunch of cheap bookshelves and went to Walmart. The shelves slowly deform under the weight of the books.
That's wrong. Gasoline taxes offset part of the cost, but nowhere near the full cost. The government ends up subsidizing the cost of roads. It gets worse, since the government often regulates the amount of parking per business, requiring a certain number of parking spots, which means that non-automobile customers of that business effectively subsidize those who drive. Yes, those who are too poor to own a car are paying more so others can drive.
Local roads are often funded, in part, through property taxes. Which leads to non-obvious arguments, such as bicyclists (who still pay property taxes) cost the city less than automobile drivers (who pay property taxes, as well as a gas tax which comes nowhere close to covering the true cost per mile of roads).
I was using Google books awhile back for some genealogical research. One of the books I was using was the Diary of Joshua Hempstead of New London, Connecticut, published in 1901, which was originally written in 1711-1758.
It's dull diary entries, mostly describing the weather, what task the author had accomplished that day, any income, and who died.
Oddly, the book was republished in 2008, in paperback format. I can buy it on Amazon for $39. But I would have never found it. I'm not related to the author. My relatives are mentioned in there, mostly in passing, or noting their deaths. My access to the book on google doesn't result in a lost sale. I wouldn't know the book had information that was relevant without seeing it, nor would I spend $38 on a whim just in case a relative was mentioned in it.
(By the way, the publishing company (Kessinger Publishing) has been accused of ripping off public domain books digitized by other sources, including google. Here's a thread on that. I don't know if this is true or not, but buyer beware!)
David Brin's Uplift Series is similar in a non-comedic way. Biologically, we're nothing special, our level of technology is primitive, and we have very little political power. We are easily one of the weakest species in the galaxies.
About our only skill (outside of ecosystem recovery) is that we will combine technology in unusual ways, and that's not really due to any innate human skill, only that we weren't properly educated in the long tradition of galactic science and technology.
I wouldn't worry about it. Really, imagine if you're a researcher in the year 4,000 or so. You find a reference to an obscure nation called the "United States of America" that buried some highly dangerous nuclear waste under a mountain someplace. You also find out that this same "United States of America" had a habit of burying trash, including some very toxic trash such as heavy metals, in thousands upon thousands of locations.
What would you worry about?
Why are you so quick to discount the actress's physical fitness? Not all measures of attractiveness are skin-deep.
Oh good, a rebuttal of an extreme position via another extreme position.
It's like watching a Tea Party activist debate a Leninist.
But I must admit that I do want to live in this world you find yourself in, where users are trained on software in high school. Because the world I find myself in, users, if they have any past experience on software, have seemingly undergone some sort of skinner-box style training where they know where to peck, er, click to get a reward, and the most minor of version changes to their word processing software tends to confuse them to no end.
Most competent IT individuals have the skills already to do severe damage to companies.
Most disgruntled employees don't have an AK-47 waiting on their desk.
The Song of Ice and Fire series by George R. R. Martin (adapted into the HBO series "A Game of Thrones") are a good example of this. The series is a sort of medieval fantasy. I've read the series (at least what has been published) twice.
The first time reading it, with gaps between the books, not knowing what will happen let me develop ideas about the direction of the series that were later dashed. Horribly in some cases, since the series is almost a deconstruction of the fantasy genre.
The second time reading it, the twists still had an effect on me, but knowing what happened robbed me of some experiences, while letting me see other events in an entirely different light.
Well, globally, the population growth rate is still positive, but has been declining for the past few decades. Which means were are growing, but we're growing less, and are predicted to hit a peak world population of somewhere around 11 billion. One could use this to extrapolate total future net energy usage at US per capita rates.
In the US, we have a positive growth rate (a strong positive growth rate, one of the exceptions among developed nations), but the US also has high levels of immigration, and that probably throws off some of the numbers. I've seen suggestions that the US's population would be peaking soon if it wasn't for the effects of immigration over the last few decades. So I can't think you can point a finger at the US and use it as an example of exponential growth.
Seems pretty constant for the last fifty years for per-capita use, at least in the US:
Here's a chart.
I wouldn't be surprised if global energy use shows a rapid increase, but there needs to be some common sense applied to extrapolation. I suspect the number of cars worldwide shows a similar rapid increase, but that doesn't mean that we're going to all be buried under automobiles by the year 2200.
So basically, the US government should have created a currency that's static in size? What happens when the economy tries to grow, while the supply of money remains the same? Money deflates, according to economics 101. And if money by itself can get more valuable just by holding it, what's the incentive to invest?
Actually, estimated at $70 billion to $240 billion for the next 10 years.
Hmmm, so $7 to $24 billion a year.
Lets see. Fossil fuels fine particle pollution kills over 13,000 people a year in the US, mostly from coal. So if a human life is worth $540,000 to $1,850,000, we've matched that in the human cost alone for power plants operating normally in the US.
But it looks like the value of a human life comes in at $5 million in the US, on the low end. So normally operating non-nuclear plants in the US are costing us $650 billion in the human cost alone for the next 10 years.
For a free market, it seems like no coal power plants would be built. Even considering the difference in how much total power comes from coal vs nuclear, coal seems much, much more expensive.
With OBDII, the electronics in a modern car aren't that bad to figure out.
Sure, I couldn't probably make the average car sensor from scratch, but I couldn't make a '69 VW Beetle's brake drum from a block of steel.
Technically, US manufacturing is actually a strong sector. Depending on the statistics, we're either #1 or #2 for top manufacturing nation. For a nation with only about a twentieth of the world's population, we produce about a fifth of the world's manufacturing. The output of the manufacturing sector hasn't really shrunk in the long term.
But we're efficient. For the same value of output, we tend to use one worker where China uses five or six. Part of that is labor costs -- the US has far more incentive to automate than China. This increase in productivity means we've lost manufacturing jobs while manufacturing output has grown.
I don't think that in the long term, the US can hope to match India or China, just because of population. 1,000 million of each, compared to 300 million Americans. But in the foreseeable future, the US is doing quite, quite well, and I don't think "decline" can be used.
But we won't ever get back the jobs lost through efficiency gains. And I don't know if we should incentivize growth in the manufacturing sector over other sectors.
I wonder about this. Why be so open with the fact that a courier led them to him?
Since there are still senior AQ leaders out there we're hunting, wouldn't we want to hide how we found one?
But perhaps (tinfoil hat time) we are hiding how we found him. We had the wife that was found with him in US custody. She was released to Pakistan, then sent to her native Yemen, yet somehow ended up in Pakistan again. Wouldn't the CIA be tracking her anyways? Perhaps she lead us to Osama. Or perhaps it was a turncoat in the organization, or a noisy neighbor. As a cover story, blaming the courier serves two purposes: It answers any questions about how we found him, and it disrupts the AQ communications network, since they are going to be more suspicious about couriers now.
Some of the other leaks could be explained due to accident (such as leaving the helicopter wreckage behind where news media received photographs and people recognized it was non-standad), expected leaks (people bragging about the names of those involved), things that would be easily guessed (it was going to be an elite team who did it), or just bragging about capabilities that could be guessed at and that might not work as well in practice but could scare terrorists (such as the hyperspectral imagers), but releasing info about the courier so early?
It makes me wonder.
I could see it being just a dumb moment. But it could also be misinformation.
I suppose with this post I need a tinfoil hat now. :)
Considering Russia's attitude towards conventional pollution, does this mean we should give up all conventional industry?
There's plenty of polluted areas in the former USSR, from "business as usual" practices. Heck, the pollution around Norilsk is so bad that it is profitable to mine the soil.
Presumably, we should only see that if radiation levels are significantly higher for most of the population.
Slight increases in radiation doesn't seem to harm us in a way that we can statistically determine. This is easy to show -- most parts of the earth have varying levels of background radiation, due to the type of soil and bedroom, as well as the elevation (Denver receives more radiation than the sea coast, all other things being equal). But we don't detect differences in the cancer rate.
But no sane nation would ever do that...
Oh wait, you're talking about Best Korea. :p
(I'm pretty sure I'm kidding, but Kim lives in a reality-distortion field.)
Baen's has free online reading copies of some of the stuff they publish.
Here's their view of the Baen's Free Library. I quote:
It's worth reading the full article, btw.
2,000 people will die this year because of malfunctioning nuclear power plants in Japan. We clearly need to replace them with something else.
Oh wait, I mispoke. It's not 2,000, but over 20,000. And it's not malfunctioning plants, but plants operating as designed. And not in Japan, but in the US. And not nuclear power plants, but coal power plants.
Yes, that's right, this year, nearly 24,000 people will die in the US alone because of perfectly normal coal power plants[*]. That's roughly 15 people per coal power plant, per year, or about 60 people killed by coal power in the US per day.
Perhaps that's why we're not so willing to dismiss nuclear power just because some plant hit by an earthquake and tsunami has suffered a partial meltdown and killed (so far) what appears to be two people (officially, they are missing, but we'll assume dead). While in the US, over 500 people have died since the earthquake due to coal power.
Perhaps it is the moral dichotomy of Tolkien and related fantasy works that creates a separation from "real books".
SF had this problem in the beginning, during the "golden age of science fiction", and a lot of current SF books still shows it. But on the other hand, SF has produced a lot of thought compelling and thought provoking books, even thought the genre suffers some stigma, as noted author Kurt Vonnegut Jr once wrote: "I have been a soreheaded occupant of a file drawer labeled Science Fiction and I would like out, particularly since so many serious critics regularly mistake the drawer for a urinal."
Fantasy does seem to have some interesting works. But there are a lot of books with plots and characters as simple as a Disney's kid's movie.
Why do you say "little gain"?
I could see several reasons to lie now.
I would suggest rereading your bible, than reading a good translation of the Koran.
From the bible, there's passages such as "The LORD is a man of war" (Exodus 15:3), and is supported by other passages such as "And the LORD our God delivered him before us; and we smote him, and his sons, and all his people. And we took all his cities at that time, and utterly destroyed the men, and the women, and the little ones, of every city, we left none to remain." (Deut. 2:33-35).
The biblical account of the Israelis' conquest of the south Levant is pretty bloody and full of genocide.
Plus there are such commands as killing everyone in a city who preach about another religion "If thou shalt hear ... men ... saying, Let us go and serve other gods, which ye have not known ... Thou shalt surely smite the inhabitants of that city with the edge of the sword, destroying it utterly, and all that is therein, and the cattle thereof, with the edge of the sword." (Deut. 13:12-17), and kill family members that try to get you to convert "If thy brother ... or thy son, or thy daughter, or the wife of thy bosom, or thy friend, which is as thine own soul, entice thee secretly, saying, Let us go and serve other gods ... Thou shalt not consent unto him ... neither shall thine eye pity him ... But thou shalt surely kill him; thine hand shall be first upon him to put him to death, and afterwards the hand of all the people." (Deut. 13:6-10).
One can find plenty of advocacy for genocidal conquest in the Christian Bible.