And every president before him has resisted those calls, since it's a stupid thing to do. We don't need a warfighting branch in a place where we are banned by treaty from fighting wars....or even developing the weapons to fight a war.
But Trump's narcissism is useful for the people that want a Space Force.
But I don't see why the use of the planes with "bomb" loads that are designed to spread flame retardant or extinguishing chemicals would be at all controversial
There's a few problems with it.
1) Wrong Equipment - firefighting aircraft and bombers have completely different equipment, and you can't easily turn a bomber into a firefighter and back to bombers.
2) No bombs - AFAIK, nobody's making bombs that spray retardant instead of exploding. And a bomb small enough to fit on the aircraft while still being large enough to carry significant fire retardant is not going to be easy or cheap.
3) Explosives are bad in a fire - to make a firefighting bomb work, you need a mechanism where the bomb sprays the fire retardant over a large area at the right time. You can't have it start spraying too high, or the retardant dissipates too much and isn't effective. You can't have this happen too low or you don't cover much area. So you can't have a "bomb" that just opens some nozzles, because that won't give you the coverage you need. Which means you've got to use explosives to spread the retardant to do it quickly enough and at the right height.
Duds exist. You drop a ton of firefighting bombs, and you'll get a significant number that don't explode. Now you've got a fire, explosives, and firefighters on the ground all close together. That's not a good thing.
4) Turn-around time - it takes a while to load bombs onto an aircraft. It takes a lot less time to pump retardant into a specially-built plane. "Super Scoopers" take even less time, since they suck up water from nearly lakes or the ocean.
If you want to get the military involved in firefighting, you're probably better served by figuring out how to turn the tankers used for aerial refueling into something that can spray fire retardant. But that's still fraught with issues, like cleaning out the jet fuel when you change to retardant, and then cleaning out the retardant when you want to switch back to jet fuel. Plus the crews aren't at all trained for firefighting.
Seriously, our forests are loaded with dead trees due to beetle kill
Some of our forests are loaded with dead trees. Not all of them.
And ironically, dead trees are not good to harvest for lumber - the wood decays in such a way that it's not as good as a tree that was alive when it was cut down.
In California, a huge portion of the wildfires are not going through what most people would consider a forest, but more of a scrub brush with pine trees mixed in. It's not good for harvesting for lumber, since the trees are not really that dense or large. You could harvest it for other wood products, but those products typically come from faster-growing and easier-to-harvest trees.
There's not a large number of forestry companies chomping at the bit for these trees. They're far more interested in what grows further North.
No Nuclear does not. Nuclear projects governed by the regulations in place do.
The people actually building the nuclear plants have said the output will cost too much per kwh. Nebulous "regulations" are not the cause. The plants cost a lot to operate.
And that cost still treats long-term storage as "free" because we haven't addressed that at all.
Just checking, nope I didn't say anywhere the country which invested most. Just that the USA invested heavily in nuclear. That must be my USA the one that still has 20% of the energy mix nuclear, and not your USA which apparently didn't play with atoms at all.
When whining about mischaracterizing a post, it's probably not a good idea to mischaracterize a post.
France invested way more than the US in nuclear power. 75% of France's electricity comes from nuclear power. The US's "investment" was paltry compared to that.
The government and regulations are not local. I didn't say "USA" I said Governments.
France doesn't have a government? They somehow managed to have such terrible anti-nuclear regulations that they resulted in 75% of their power coming from nuclear?
Or do you think nations were just magically wealthier in the past?
I think people believed they could figure out a way to make it cheaper in the long run.....and they did. Nuclear plants, inflation-and-GW-adjusted, are cheaper now than they were back then.
But something came along that's even cheaper than that.
4x the number of solar panels in the darkness or the shade doesn't really help. 4x the number of wind turbines in the still air doesn't really help
It does when coupled with storage. Which the lower cost allows you to build.
A decommissioning that was largely driven by **politics** not economics.
Citation required. Because the people actually building the plants say it's because nuclear costs too much.
And opponents of nuclear overlook a secondary benefit of modern reactors. They help clean up the mess left behind by the older reactors.
Nope.
While it's physically possible, a reactor that reprocesses spent fuel can also produce nuclear weapons. So no, we can't just build such reactors everywhere. There are treaty obligations, as well as proliferation being a really bad idea.
Al Gore's prediction was the need to act before it cost us a great deal of money, death and famine. We apparently decided to go ahead and pay some of that cost because we did very little. Well, the folks in charge decided to let their (great) grandchildren pay that cost. Ya like ISIS? 'Cause they exist thanks to a long-lasting drought that's probably climate-change-induced. Extremism sounds great when you're starving and they're the ones with the money and thus food.
This next prediction is about it costing an unbelievably massive amount of money, death and famine. We'll see if we decide to pay that cost....or more precisely decide for our (grand) children to pay that cost.
You have to keep in mind that even if the areas closer to the poles get warmer, they will still receive the same hours of sunlight per year. And that means they can not be as agriculturally productive as lower latitudes.
Psst....there's these things called "plants". They make all the food we eat. They need sunlight to grow. Your plan of cutting down sunlight that strikes the earth slows their growth and cuts our food supply.
So under your plan we'll just need to bring a jacket to our massive climate-induced famine instead of a t-shirt.
I've read that extra-terrestrial reptillians control all the world's governments. So clearly we need to make decisions based on that. After all, I read it, so it has to be true.
Also nuclear is cheap, you can see that in your own USofA which invested heavily in Nuclear early on, built quite a bit of it up and enjoys energy prices so low that many developed nations are envious.
Nuclear costs about 4-8 times the cost of solar and wind in the US. That's why nuclear plants currently under construction are being abandoned. They cost way too much compared to "alternative" sources.
Also, you're extremely wrong on which country invested heavily in nuclear. France kicked the USA's ass on that.....and France is also abandoning nuclear plants that are under construction because they cost too much compared to "alternative" sources.
Historically, cheap US power was because of coal. Now it's because of natural gas and renewables. Nuclear has never been cheap.
We already have an alternate power source to avoid this - nuclear power
The nuclear fans come out of the woodwork on every article like this.
France, the most nuclear-friendly country on the planet, has started abandoning nuclear plants already under construction because other non-CO2-releasing methods are far, far, far, far cheaper. For less than the cost of nuclear, you can overbuild renewables by a factor of 4 to more than deal with intermittentcy.
This would be an example of an engineer not thinking the issue all the way through. 'Cause you left out another formula.
Solar irradiation = food.
You reduce the amount of sunlight hitting the Earth, then you reduce the rate that plants grow. Which means you reduce our food supply.
Earth is an incredibly complex system. Any time you're tempted to try to explain everything with one simple formula, you're going to be missing several other incredibly important "formulas".
Nobody gets a PhD, or massive new funding, for saying "er, yeah, keep doing the three Rs like what always worked."
There's an infinite number of ways to "do the three Rs". You could easily create a thesis studying the effectiveness of a different methods.
Also, we haven't had experts designing our education system in a very long time. It's been non-experts (politicians and "philanthropists") attempting to get around the problem of not wanting to spend money on education, with some graft mixed in. The best experts have done is to mitigate some of the damage.
Actually, it's incredibly complex. Especially because there are multiple ways to actually do it, and you have to consider how each child responds to each education method.
But everyone assumes they know how to actually educate children, so they blather away on the Internet about what needs to be changed. And those changes invariably do not involve getting anyone who actually studies child development and education involved.
For example, do you even know what Common Core is? All it does is require all children to follow the same curriculum instead of one tailored to the particular student's abilities. That's why you hear complaints about things like 10-boxes for math instead of "the way I dun learned it". Some kids need those 10-boxes to actually get it, so all kids get those 10-boxes. Probably would be better to only use it on the kids where it's helpful and let the others learn set theory in high school, but hey, gotta have one curriculum for the high-stakes test to match.
Btw, do you know that Common Core is a suggestion and not a requirement? Your school district didn't have to implement it, and don't have to keep doing it.
These are not rocket science pay rates, but they're pretty good in comparison to other states.
Apparently, your education did not include the concept of "cost of living".
I work in school settings, and have on more than one occasion been in a class where the teacher was telling the students factually incorrect things, such as the starting date of the Civil War. I heard one teacher actually state that slavery was legal in the United States until the mid 1960s.
So, we pay our teachers poorly, and get low-quality teachers. Which is exactly what I was saying.
And the poles are in *public* ground. Without taxpayers, there would be no Internet and cable. Period.
Which doesn't change that the poles are not public property. They're private property.
Also, the vast majority of the time it isn't "public" ground. Utilities are usually run through an easement on private property. You buy your house, and the deed will say "the government can allow utilities to run though this strip without asking you". That strip is usually on the edge of the property. And it's existence is part of why there are building setbacks on single-family houses. But legally, it's your land.
Are you saying that those august people haven't been guiding public education for many decades?
Not for many years. Instead, politicians and grifters have.
"Hmm...this school's not doing well.....the teachers are paid abysmally....the building is falling down....they don't have enough textbooks for all the students.....we won't spend any money to fix any of these problems.....I know how to fix it!! Competition from charter schools!!"
Slashdot Mirror
And every president before him has resisted those calls, since it's a stupid thing to do. We don't need a warfighting branch in a place where we are banned by treaty from fighting wars....or even developing the weapons to fight a war.
But Trump's narcissism is useful for the people that want a Space Force.
But I don't see why the use of the planes with "bomb" loads that are designed to spread flame retardant or extinguishing chemicals would be at all controversial
There's a few problems with it.
1) Wrong Equipment - firefighting aircraft and bombers have completely different equipment, and you can't easily turn a bomber into a firefighter and back to bombers.
2) No bombs - AFAIK, nobody's making bombs that spray retardant instead of exploding. And a bomb small enough to fit on the aircraft while still being large enough to carry significant fire retardant is not going to be easy or cheap.
3) Explosives are bad in a fire - to make a firefighting bomb work, you need a mechanism where the bomb sprays the fire retardant over a large area at the right time. You can't have it start spraying too high, or the retardant dissipates too much and isn't effective. You can't have this happen too low or you don't cover much area. So you can't have a "bomb" that just opens some nozzles, because that won't give you the coverage you need. Which means you've got to use explosives to spread the retardant to do it quickly enough and at the right height.
Duds exist. You drop a ton of firefighting bombs, and you'll get a significant number that don't explode. Now you've got a fire, explosives, and firefighters on the ground all close together. That's not a good thing.
4) Turn-around time - it takes a while to load bombs onto an aircraft. It takes a lot less time to pump retardant into a specially-built plane. "Super Scoopers" take even less time, since they suck up water from nearly lakes or the ocean.
If you want to get the military involved in firefighting, you're probably better served by figuring out how to turn the tankers used for aerial refueling into something that can spray fire retardant. But that's still fraught with issues, like cleaning out the jet fuel when you change to retardant, and then cleaning out the retardant when you want to switch back to jet fuel. Plus the crews aren't at all trained for firefighting.
Seriously, our forests are loaded with dead trees due to beetle kill
Some of our forests are loaded with dead trees. Not all of them.
And ironically, dead trees are not good to harvest for lumber - the wood decays in such a way that it's not as good as a tree that was alive when it was cut down.
In California, a huge portion of the wildfires are not going through what most people would consider a forest, but more of a scrub brush with pine trees mixed in. It's not good for harvesting for lumber, since the trees are not really that dense or large. You could harvest it for other wood products, but those products typically come from faster-growing and easier-to-harvest trees.
There's not a large number of forestry companies chomping at the bit for these trees. They're far more interested in what grows further North.
Ok, name the country with weapons systems. (Since this is explicitly banned by the Outer Space Treaty, that may be a tad difficult).
The point is the US military has far more in space than everyone else. Even if it doesn't have a gun bolted to the satellite.
Start an arms race in the ONLY fucking military area you're NOT superior than the rest of the planet combined
I wouldn't say that....the USAF and NRO has a lot of space assets.
No, you're forgetting the most important thing: It would put Trump's name in the history books as the guy who created the Space Force.
Because if you keep using the USAF for space things, Trump doesn't get his name in the history books as the guy who created it.
No Nuclear does not. Nuclear projects governed by the regulations in place do.
The people actually building the nuclear plants have said the output will cost too much per kwh. Nebulous "regulations" are not the cause. The plants cost a lot to operate.
And that cost still treats long-term storage as "free" because we haven't addressed that at all.
Just checking, nope I didn't say anywhere the country which invested most. Just that the USA invested heavily in nuclear. That must be my USA the one that still has 20% of the energy mix nuclear, and not your USA which apparently didn't play with atoms at all.
When whining about mischaracterizing a post, it's probably not a good idea to mischaracterize a post.
France invested way more than the US in nuclear power. 75% of France's electricity comes from nuclear power. The US's "investment" was paltry compared to that.
The government and regulations are not local. I didn't say "USA" I said Governments.
France doesn't have a government? They somehow managed to have such terrible anti-nuclear regulations that they resulted in 75% of their power coming from nuclear?
Or do you think nations were just magically wealthier in the past?
I think people believed they could figure out a way to make it cheaper in the long run.....and they did. Nuclear plants, inflation-and-GW-adjusted, are cheaper now than they were back then.
But something came along that's even cheaper than that.
4x the number of solar panels in the darkness or the shade doesn't really help. 4x the number of wind turbines in the still air doesn't really help
It does when coupled with storage. Which the lower cost allows you to build.
A decommissioning that was largely driven by **politics** not economics.
Citation required. Because the people actually building the plants say it's because nuclear costs too much.
And opponents of nuclear overlook a secondary benefit of modern reactors. They help clean up the mess left behind by the older reactors.
Nope.
While it's physically possible, a reactor that reprocesses spent fuel can also produce nuclear weapons. So no, we can't just build such reactors everywhere. There are treaty obligations, as well as proliferation being a really bad idea.
And those backwaters will then learn about all the funding the big cities sent to build and maintain the infrastructure in the backwaters.
Their wages are outlandish for the required skills.
The required skills are a bachelors degree and either a masters degree or a certificate program that is slightly less than a master's degree.
For only a bachelor's degree, you can get paid double the starting rate for a teacher. Because teacher pay rate is 100% politically-set.
but the job is attracting sloughs that do not have ambition or the required skills to compete in corporate America or the business world in general.
Golly, I wonder how that would shift if teachers were paid more.....almost like the good teachers are choosing a different field due to low pay.....
Al Gore's prediction was the need to act before it cost us a great deal of money, death and famine. We apparently decided to go ahead and pay some of that cost because we did very little. Well, the folks in charge decided to let their (great) grandchildren pay that cost. Ya like ISIS? 'Cause they exist thanks to a long-lasting drought that's probably climate-change-induced. Extremism sounds great when you're starving and they're the ones with the money and thus food.
This next prediction is about it costing an unbelievably massive amount of money, death and famine. We'll see if we decide to pay that cost....or more precisely decide for our (grand) children to pay that cost.
Massive.
You have to keep in mind that even if the areas closer to the poles get warmer, they will still receive the same hours of sunlight per year. And that means they can not be as agriculturally productive as lower latitudes.
Psst....there's these things called "plants". They make all the food we eat. They need sunlight to grow. Your plan of cutting down sunlight that strikes the earth slows their growth and cuts our food supply.
So under your plan we'll just need to bring a jacket to our massive climate-induced famine instead of a t-shirt.
Because the upcoming massive wars and famines will not result in any authoritarianism.
Oh wait......
I've read that extra-terrestrial reptillians control all the world's governments. So clearly we need to make decisions based on that. After all, I read it, so it has to be true.
Also nuclear is cheap, you can see that in your own USofA which invested heavily in Nuclear early on, built quite a bit of it up and enjoys energy prices so low that many developed nations are envious.
Nuclear costs about 4-8 times the cost of solar and wind in the US. That's why nuclear plants currently under construction are being abandoned. They cost way too much compared to "alternative" sources.
Also, you're extremely wrong on which country invested heavily in nuclear. France kicked the USA's ass on that.....and France is also abandoning nuclear plants that are under construction because they cost too much compared to "alternative" sources.
Historically, cheap US power was because of coal. Now it's because of natural gas and renewables. Nuclear has never been cheap.
We already have an alternate power source to avoid this - nuclear power
The nuclear fans come out of the woodwork on every article like this.
France, the most nuclear-friendly country on the planet, has started abandoning nuclear plants already under construction because other non-CO2-releasing methods are far, far, far, far cheaper. For less than the cost of nuclear, you can overbuild renewables by a factor of 4 to more than deal with intermittentcy.
This would be an example of an engineer not thinking the issue all the way through. 'Cause you left out another formula.
Solar irradiation = food.
You reduce the amount of sunlight hitting the Earth, then you reduce the rate that plants grow. Which means you reduce our food supply.
Earth is an incredibly complex system. Any time you're tempted to try to explain everything with one simple formula, you're going to be missing several other incredibly important "formulas".
Nobody gets a PhD, or massive new funding, for saying "er, yeah, keep doing the three Rs like what always worked."
There's an infinite number of ways to "do the three Rs". You could easily create a thesis studying the effectiveness of a different methods.
Also, we haven't had experts designing our education system in a very long time. It's been non-experts (politicians and "philanthropists") attempting to get around the problem of not wanting to spend money on education, with some graft mixed in. The best experts have done is to mitigate some of the damage.
Education isn't rocket surgery.
Actually, it's incredibly complex. Especially because there are multiple ways to actually do it, and you have to consider how each child responds to each education method.
But everyone assumes they know how to actually educate children, so they blather away on the Internet about what needs to be changed. And those changes invariably do not involve getting anyone who actually studies child development and education involved.
For example, do you even know what Common Core is? All it does is require all children to follow the same curriculum instead of one tailored to the particular student's abilities. That's why you hear complaints about things like 10-boxes for math instead of "the way I dun learned it". Some kids need those 10-boxes to actually get it, so all kids get those 10-boxes. Probably would be better to only use it on the kids where it's helpful and let the others learn set theory in high school, but hey, gotta have one curriculum for the high-stakes test to match.
Btw, do you know that Common Core is a suggestion and not a requirement? Your school district didn't have to implement it, and don't have to keep doing it.
These are not rocket science pay rates, but they're pretty good in comparison to other states.
Apparently, your education did not include the concept of "cost of living".
I work in school settings, and have on more than one occasion been in a class where the teacher was telling the students factually incorrect things, such as the starting date of the Civil War. I heard one teacher actually state that slavery was legal in the United States until the mid 1960s.
So, we pay our teachers poorly, and get low-quality teachers. Which is exactly what I was saying.
what you call "assembly-line" mindset is not "archaic", ancient, medieval, or even victorian, it is "modern". and wrong headed.
"Archaic" does not mean "old". It means "outdated and no longer useful". The original iPhone connector is "archaic" despite its youth.
And the poles are in *public* ground. Without taxpayers, there would be no Internet and cable. Period.
Which doesn't change that the poles are not public property. They're private property.
Also, the vast majority of the time it isn't "public" ground. Utilities are usually run through an easement on private property. You buy your house, and the deed will say "the government can allow utilities to run though this strip without asking you". That strip is usually on the edge of the property. And it's existence is part of why there are building setbacks on single-family houses. But legally, it's your land.
Are you saying that those august people haven't been guiding public education for many decades?
Not for many years. Instead, politicians and grifters have.
"Hmm...this school's not doing well.....the teachers are paid abysmally....the building is falling down....they don't have enough textbooks for all the students.....we won't spend any money to fix any of these problems.....I know how to fix it!! Competition from charter schools!!"