I made a typo. That should say "NONE were approved for 35 years". It's expensive to get people to loan you money (or invest) for a nuclear plant, knowing that they'll probably lose all their money because some branch of the government won't approve the license. (It requires many approvals from many different government agencies).
The last 40 years beg to differ. That's how long nuclear has *already* been providing 20% of our electricity in the US. In Sweden, nuclear provides 38%. Today, not "Elon Musk predicts that maybe 30 years from now". It's quite possibly running your house right now, and has been for decades.
Yes natural gas and coal have been a bit less expensive, in most areas, AFTER accounting for the 10-year licensing delay afor nuclear and probability of complete loss if the license isn't approved (and nine were approved for 35 years). Suppose I offer to pay you $110 tomorrow if you loan me $100 today. You get a $10 profit, so you'd probably do it, if my credit is good. Suppose I offer to pay you back TEN YEARS from now, rather than tomorrow. How much profit do you need to make *ten years* from now in order to make it worthwhile to invest today? A lot more than $10. That's a significant extra cost to nuclear - the cost of capital is much higher when you can't even start paying it off for ten extra years - and that's hoping that after ten years the license is approved. The US government didn't approve any new reactors from 1977 to 2013. It's awfully expensive to get capital for a project that will probably never be approved. Would you loan your money in a company knowing that they'd probably never be approved to begin operation? They'd have to offer you an awfully high return to make it worth that risk, wouldn't they?
With an objective, standardized approval process for the standarsized designs that we already sell to other countries, nuclear can be cost-competitive with natural gas, given volatility of natural gas prices. Stability of costs is worth something.
Well, do you think do you think all 40 or so dams in Norway will be intact 2,000 years from now? Lake Homs in Syria might still be there, but it's a pretty good bet Norway will have some more failures - they have before, just as the US has. If they make a habit of building dams upstream of cities, it's a pretty good bet some failures will wipe out cities. Niagara failed at Schoellkopf power station. If a major failure at Niagara that happened today, with the number of people now living downstream, it wouldn't be pretty.
If you drive drunk tonight, you'll probably make it home okay. If you make a habit of driving drunk all the time, in all likelihood you'll *eventually* get into a major crash. The idea that long-term risk requires that bad consequences occur *every* time rather than *some* times is a major, major source of bad decisions, especially among young people. If you play Russian roulette once, you'll probably be fine. If you make a habit of playing Russian roulette, you'll be dead. Most of our decisions are about the kinds of things we'll do on a daily basis, habits, how we live life on a regular basis. They aren't really one-time events. Each is just an example of our habits, and our habits will almost certainly have consequences.
We're not talking about having one dam in one place for one day. We're talking about many dams, which will be there for tens of thousands of days - including the day tha the worst storm in a hundred years hits.
I voted against Trump, twice, partly because he doesn't know anything about government policy and governing. Yeah, he's an "outsider", also known as a newbie.
On the other hand, there are four billion reasons to think he knows something about business, specifically high-end real estate.
Dallas, for example, has about 100,000 IT professionals. How many does your company need? In my specific niche, IT security, over 100 people regularly attend IT security events. Our *monthly* OWASP meeting is probably 60 people, and that's maybe 1% of the IT security people in town, so there are roughly 6,000 IT security professionals for a company in Dallas to choose from. How many does your company need?
Actually more than that - my company chose me from a city three hours away. To make it worth moving, the paid me enough that I bought a 3,500 square foot house here in Dallas, yet that cost them roughly the same as an *intern* costs in San Jose.
Btw the United Nations report is also pretty thorough, if you'd like to have a read. The UN conclusions are very close the WHO numbers.
Pretty much only Greenpeace sticks to their original estimates, despite them being very obviously wrong at this point. They projected by now, radiation would have killed more cleanup workers than the total who have died from all sources combined. In other words, even if we counted workers who died in car accidents decades later as Chernobyl victims, there are STILL too many workers alive today for the Greenpeace numbers to be anywhere close to correct.
> So says greenpeace, the WHO, 'Doctors without frontiers
Let me copy-paste from WHO (World Health organization) for you: -- A total of up to 4000 people could eventually die of radiation exposure from the Chernobyl nuclear power plant (NPP) accident nearly 20 years ago, an international team of more than 100 scientists has concluded.
As of mid-2005, however, fewer than 50 deaths had been directly attributed to radiation from the disaster -- http://www.who.int/mediacentre...
The only mention I found on the Doctors Without Borders site says "dozens of lives". If you want to, you can do a more thorough search of their publications.
> Your numbers for Chernobyl are retardedly optimistic - I have no clue where you got them
Check *any* source not paid for an extremist anti-nuclear group. There was a lot of variation in projections back in the late 1980s, estimating how it might effect cancer rates in the 1990s, 2000s, and 2010s. Now pretty much everyone is roughly in agreement. The World Health Organization did one well-known study. See Sovacool for other references. Since it's been 30 years, experts no longer need to debate about projections - the actual data exists.
There was one estimate at 6,000+, but it was pointed out that's more than the TOTAL number of deaths in the area, from car accidents, old age, etc. The concern with Chernobyl was thyroid cancer, and we now know how many cases of thyroid cancer there have been.
A major dam failure may be unlikely in Norway, and as seen at Banqiao and elsewhere it can be a MAJOR catastrophe. Why mention unlikely risks? Norway gets the electricity it uses from three sources - wind, hydro, and nuclear. A nuclear catastrophe is similarly unlikely, but its certainly something people bring up! Actually nuclear catastrophe is quite a bit less likely - the type of nuclear accident they are afraid of has NEVER happened. (Chernobyl killed 38 people, and decades later probably shortened the lives of 4,000 others). Dam failures DO actually happen. They are real events, that actually kill hundreds of thousands of people. If you're going to consider the risk of a theoretical type of event that has never actually happened, certainly it makes sense to similarly consider the types of catastrophic failures which *do* actually happen in real life.
So that's the point - for the people who choose to consider worst case scenarios, who are afraid of nuclear, they should be even more afraid of hydro. Or chill out and realise that there are dams and nuclear plants all over the place, but what kills people is Corollas and Big Macs.
> Whether they sell their clean electricity abroad for others to use or they use the clean electricity themselves doesn't make a shitload of difference. The net effect is the same. Are you splitting hairs or am I missing a valid point here?
You may be "missing a valid point" because I didn't explicitly say it. That is, there IS a difference, an important difference, but I didn't say what the difference is.
On a small scale, perhaps an individual, the net effect would indeed be the same. On a broad scale, for national policy and international agreements, there is a HUGE difference. I should start by saying wind power is great. It can produce a lot of cheap clean power when the wind is right. The power available from wind is proportional to the CUBE of the wind speed. So there is a LOT of power there during a medium-strong wind, and virtually no usable power in a light breeze. That cube power law becomes even more important at higher speeds, when the extreme forces on the turbines are trying to destroy them. So within a fairly narrow range of wind speeds, wind power is great. Roughly 30% of the time, it provides a significant portion of Norway's electricity needs. The other 70% of the time, the wind isn't right - and building more turbines doesn't change that. If the world, or Europe, produced 500% of the energy they need on Saturday, and 10% of their needs on Wednesday, that doesn't work. The net effect is *not* the same. The net effect is blackouts on Wednesday.
This is why we'd love to have a practical method of storing enough energy to run a country. We don't have that yet. There are some ideas, ideas which are 10-20 years out - and have been since the 1960s. Maybe one day some very clever people will come up with a practical way to store the immense amount of energy needed to power a whole country.
Norway DOES have clean electricity (not to be confused with energy). That's awesome. Let's look at how they achieved that. Was it by spending hundreds of billions on subsidising solar-electric, handing out taxpayer dollars to "companies" who haven't actually produced any solar panels, but are run by friends of the politicians? Nope. They achieved clean energy by taking advantage of their particular geography that's especially well-suited to hydro (and taking the risk of a Banqiao) and buying clean nuclear energy (despite the risk, and mostly fear, of a catastrophic nuclear event, which is theoretically possible although nuclear has in fact been the safest energy).
I see you didn't bother to read your own link before posting an extremely obvious too-good-to-be-true claim.
Let me copy-paste from our own link: --- the average electricity consumption mix of a Norwegian household was 36% renewable.[4]
As per the European Union's 2009 Renewables Directive (later added in the EEA Agreement), Norway has established a national goal for renewable energy - 67.5% of gross final consumption --
So 36% of what they *use* is renewable. What they *produce* is hydro and wind. Where do they get the electricity the use? They buy nuclear-generated electricity from Sweden.
Does that mean they don't use fossil fuels? Well no, transportation and everything is still fossil fuels, but their *electricity* doesn't come from fossil fuels. It comes from Sweden's nuclear plants amd Norway's mountains by way of hydro.
Hydro IS great in places with lots of mountains far from people. When you put your hydro upstream from populations, you eventually get Banqiao (200,000 dead, 11 million displaced). So don't do that. But where you've got lots of mountains and no towns downstream, hydro is great. It's not powering 99% of Norway, though. 36%, according to your link.
Maybe his ideas are crap. There is no way to tell since he didn't give / link even one specfic example.
Maybe the way he presents his ideas is a problem. A very common problem os suggesting WHAT might be done, without mentioning WHY. You always need the why, and should lead with it. Think commercials "do you have this problem... Our product will fix that problem for you. You'll benefit in three ways, X Y and Z." Often people suggest "let's do this" without clearly stating the problem it'll solve or the benefits of their suggestion. There is no way to tell if tje submitter does this since he didn't give / link even one specfic example.
What we DO know is something about the submitter's writing style. We know he *assumes* that his ideas should be implemented, and further assumes that we'll agree - without even telling us what any of his ideas are. Likely, he does the same thing in his suggestions - assumes that they should be done, assumes that everyone will agree that they should be done, and fails to provide even one example of what he's talking about.
The funny thing about that is those people is that most of us on Slashdot are "those people", scaled down. $35,000 puts you in the top 2% of income - we're the richest people in the world. Yet many of us squander it, making silly purchases *daily* like spending $6.50 on a cup of coffee, when coffee at the grocery store is 25 cents.
There are a couple of Slashdot regulars who are wealthy (have a lot) with incomes below $100,000, but not many.
It seems Subway is making two assertions: A) The chicken does not contain any significant amount of soy. B) The people who did the testing itself and the analysis of the tests were incompetent.
I haven't tested the chicken, and I don't know anything about the people who did the testing, so I don't know if either claim is true. If the TV station had two third-graders do the testing and analysis, they'll probably lose the law suit. If they were qualified, independent labs, and the TV station accurately represented the labs' conclusions, they'll win. We'll see what comes out at trial.
> Fund the IRS properly and the government could reduce taxes and keep the same level of revenue. Why isn't this happening?
The IRS has said that what they need is $58 million to replace the software system that they use for fraud detection. I guess they know what they need.
So Congress and the Clinton administration gave them the $58 million. Then they told the Obama administration they needed another $65 million - they had a bit of trouble managing the project. Then they needed another $50 million. That's around the time the department's own inspector general pointed out that the approach used by the new system doesn't actually work. The IRS currently estimates they'll finish the new software in 2022 - twenty-eight years after they started the project. Not that any of their projections so far have been correct, but if they manage to pull it off this time they will have spent hundreds of millions of dollars and 28 years to build a system that doesn't work, based on Windows 3.1 era software design.
We should definitely give them another $300 million to do more of that kind of thing.
> "... than with some malicious ignorance against immigrants to America." > I understand now, you have a reading comprehension problem.... > I was not claiming it was malicious
I see what you mean. I also see that you're being a dick, for no apparent reason.
> I'm not sure there's a correlation between bureaucracy and "leftists"
Liberals (aka the left) tend to think in terms of "we", that the group should do this or that. They tend SOCIAList and COMMUNist (social and community). Conservatives (aka the right) tend to think of individual freedom and individual responsibility.
Naturally people on the left side of the spectrum therefore form groups, commitees -bureaucracies- through which the whole of society is supposed to work together. Conservatives tend to be more individualistic. We don't need a committee for me to do my thing and you do your thing.
Both viewpoints have their strengths and weaknesses. It's too bad that rather than complementing each other, getting the best of both worlds, these two groups in the US tend to fight each other so much. They cooperate more when they face a common opponent, such as in World War I and World II.
Most of the video series have a download link. Two of my classes have used CBT Nuggets, if you're familiar with that company.
Most of the books are Vitalsource Bookshelf, which gives you access via your computer, phone, and tablet. That seems to be permanent access. You download the book to your phone and open it in the app. I would guess that you could also save them just like any other web page (at least the browser-based version), but I haven't tried. I don't think you can't sell them, but then again you didn't exactly buy them. I'm happy with having them permanently on my phone.
Since you just started there, it might be be helpful to know that the credit hours at WGU don't always track very consistently with the amount of time you'll need to put in. Of course it depends on your previous experience with each topic, but also some 6-credit classes are much harder than other 6-credit classes. If you whip through one 6-credit class, don't assume you can complete your next class just as quickly. (On the the other hand, if your first few classes are hard, the next ones may be easier.)
An alternative to those student loans is something like Western Governors University. Founded by the governors of 19 states, WGU is an online university that charges $6,000/year. There's a $1,500 tax credit, so the cost if $4,500 / year. The student doesn't even have to pay that nuch, though. Employers can provide pre-tax tuition assistance up to about $5,500 / year, so many employers do offer a couple thousand dollars. There's one other thing that makes WGU even easier to afford:
Many WGU courses have the final exam be an industry-standard certification exam. For example, for my networking class the final exam was the Cisco CCNA exam. Other course final exams include Microsoft and CompTIA certifications. What that means is that halfway through school I had already earned a few certifications, which helped lead to a much higher-paying job. In the three years I've been at WGU, I've paid them $18,000, got $4,500 in tax credits, and been paid $60,000 more salary than when I started. So rather than graduating with debt, I'll graduate with a lot more money than when I started school.
There's one last trick for WGU to cost the cost even further. Like most schools, you can transfer in credits. Well for the networking course that has Cisco CNNA as the exam, you can transfer in an existing CCNA certification. So what you can do is spend a year studying and maybe getting some of the certs before you even enroll and start paying. Then when you enroll (and start paying $6K/year), you immediately start out with a year of credits already done, through your existing certs. Even better is to study and *not* get the cert. The first month after you enroll in WGU, you go get the cert and THEY pay for it. That can save up to $1,000, because some of the certs are expensive.
All in all, in your first year at WGU you can get two years of credits at a net cost of $4,500. Not bad. Even better if your enployer covers half of that $4,500, as mine did.
Ps: my school does include books and other materials in the tuition cost. I spend maybe $50- $100 every other semester to get a supplementary source that I choose on my own. For example, the final exam for my networking class was the Cisco CCNA exam, so in addtion to the book and video series provided by the school, I went down to Half Price Books and spent $15 or so on a different kind of CCNA book.
Tuition costs are publicized. It's very easy to hit Google or any number of dead tree sources and get tuition comparisons. What's harder to find are all the add-ons that comprise almost half the cost.
> I'd actually like to record what I say the next time.
That's a great idea. Many years ago, I used to record sometimes and write a lot. I wrote some stuff for the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws (NORML) while in various states of consciousness. Like you, my friends an I had some rather profound experiences.
Listening to recordings back then, and reading later what I wrote (and was well received by the NORML community) is enlightening. We discovered some profound truths such as "whoa, blue is totally blue dude". That was very profound at the time.
Slashdot Mirror
I made a typo. That should say "NONE were approved for 35 years". It's expensive to get people to loan you money (or invest) for a nuclear plant, knowing that they'll probably lose all their money because some branch of the government won't approve the license. (It requires many approvals from many different government agencies).
> Nuclear isn't a viable alternative.
The last 40 years beg to differ. That's how long nuclear has *already* been providing 20% of our electricity in the US. In Sweden, nuclear provides 38%. Today, not "Elon Musk predicts that maybe 30 years from now". It's quite possibly running your house right now, and has been for decades.
Yes natural gas and coal have been a bit less expensive, in most areas, AFTER accounting for the 10-year licensing delay afor nuclear and probability of complete loss if the license isn't approved (and nine were approved for 35 years). Suppose I offer to pay you $110 tomorrow if you loan me $100 today. You get a $10 profit, so you'd probably do it, if my credit is good. Suppose I offer to pay you back TEN YEARS from now, rather than tomorrow. How much profit do you need to make *ten years* from now in order to make it worthwhile to invest today? A lot more than $10. That's a significant extra cost to nuclear - the cost of capital is much higher when you can't even start paying it off for ten extra years - and that's hoping that after ten years the license is approved. The US government didn't approve any new reactors from 1977 to 2013. It's awfully expensive to get capital for a project that will probably never be approved. Would you loan your money in a company knowing that they'd probably never be approved to begin operation? They'd have to offer you an awfully high return to make it worth that risk, wouldn't they?
With an objective, standardized approval process for the standarsized designs that we already sell to other countries, nuclear can be cost-competitive with natural gas, given volatility of natural gas prices. Stability of costs is worth something.
> Are you saying all dams eventually fail?
Well, do you think do you think all 40 or so dams in Norway will be intact 2,000 years from now? Lake Homs in Syria might still be there, but it's a pretty good bet Norway will have some more failures - they have before, just as the US has. If they make a habit of building dams upstream of cities, it's a pretty good bet some failures will wipe out cities. Niagara failed at Schoellkopf power station. If a major failure at Niagara that happened today, with the number of people now living downstream, it wouldn't be pretty.
If you drive drunk tonight, you'll probably make it home okay. If you make a habit of driving drunk all the time, in all likelihood you'll *eventually* get into a major crash. The idea that long-term risk requires that bad consequences occur *every* time rather than *some* times is a major, major source of bad decisions, especially among young people. If you play Russian roulette once, you'll probably be fine. If you make a habit of playing Russian roulette, you'll be dead. Most of our decisions are about the kinds of things we'll do on a daily basis, habits, how we live life on a regular basis. They aren't really one-time events. Each is just an example of our habits, and our habits will almost certainly have consequences.
We're not talking about having one dam in one place for one day. We're talking about many dams, which will be there for tens of thousands of days - including the day tha the worst storm in a hundred years hits.
I voted against Trump, twice, partly because he doesn't know anything about government policy and governing. Yeah, he's an "outsider", also known as a newbie.
On the other hand, there are four billion reasons to think he knows something about business, specifically high-end real estate.
Dallas, for example, has about 100,000 IT professionals. How many does your company need? In my specific niche, IT security, over 100 people regularly attend IT security events. Our *monthly* OWASP meeting is probably 60 people, and that's maybe 1% of the IT security people in town, so there are roughly 6,000 IT security professionals for a company in Dallas to choose from. How many does your company need?
Actually more than that - my company chose me from a city three hours away. To make it worth moving, the paid me enough that I bought a 3,500 square foot house here in Dallas, yet that cost them roughly the same as an *intern* costs in San Jose.
Here's a video of Greenpeace reporting the death toll for you:
https://youtu.be/uBxMPqxJGqI
Btw the United Nations report is also pretty thorough, if you'd like to have a read. The UN conclusions are very close the WHO numbers.
Pretty much only Greenpeace sticks to their original estimates, despite them being very obviously wrong at this point. They projected by now, radiation would have killed more cleanup workers than the total who have died from all sources combined. In other words, even if we counted workers who died in car accidents decades later as Chernobyl victims, there are STILL too many workers alive today for the Greenpeace numbers to be anywhere close to correct.
> So says greenpeace, the WHO, 'Doctors without frontiers
Let me copy-paste from WHO (World Health organization) for you:
--
A total of up to 4000 people could eventually die of radiation exposure from the Chernobyl nuclear power plant (NPP) accident nearly 20 years ago, an international team of more than 100 scientists has concluded.
As of mid-2005, however, fewer than 50 deaths had been directly attributed to radiation from the disaster
--
http://www.who.int/mediacentre...
The only mention I found on the Doctors Without Borders site says "dozens of lives". If you want to, you can do a more thorough search of their publications.
> Your numbers for Chernobyl are retardedly optimistic - I have no clue where you got them
Check *any* source not paid for an extremist anti-nuclear group. There was a lot of variation in projections back in the late 1980s, estimating how it might effect cancer rates in the 1990s, 2000s, and 2010s. Now pretty much everyone is roughly in agreement. The World Health Organization did one well-known study. See Sovacool for other references. Since it's been 30 years, experts no longer need to debate about projections - the actual data exists.
There was one estimate at 6,000+, but it was pointed out that's more than the TOTAL number of deaths in the area, from car accidents, old age, etc. The concern with Chernobyl was thyroid cancer, and we now know how many cases of thyroid cancer there have been.
A major dam failure may be unlikely in Norway, and as seen at Banqiao and elsewhere it can be a MAJOR catastrophe. Why mention unlikely risks? Norway gets the electricity it uses from three sources - wind, hydro, and nuclear. A nuclear catastrophe is similarly unlikely, but its certainly something people bring up! Actually nuclear catastrophe is quite a bit less likely - the type of nuclear accident they are afraid of has NEVER happened. (Chernobyl killed 38 people, and decades later probably shortened the lives of 4,000 others). Dam failures DO actually happen. They are real events, that actually kill hundreds of thousands of people. If you're going to consider the risk of a theoretical type of event that has never actually happened, certainly it makes sense to similarly consider the types of catastrophic failures which *do* actually happen in real life.
So that's the point - for the people who choose to consider worst case scenarios, who are afraid of nuclear, they should be even more afraid of hydro. Or chill out and realise that there are dams and nuclear plants all over the place, but what kills people is Corollas and Big Macs.
> Whether they sell their clean electricity abroad for others to use or they use the clean electricity themselves doesn't make a shitload of difference. The net effect is the same. Are you splitting hairs or am I missing a valid point here?
You may be "missing a valid point" because I didn't explicitly say it. That is, there IS a difference, an important difference, but I didn't say what the difference is.
On a small scale, perhaps an individual, the net effect would indeed be the same. On a broad scale, for national policy and international agreements, there is a HUGE difference. I should start by saying wind power is great. It can produce a lot of cheap clean power when the wind is right. The power available from wind is proportional to the CUBE of the wind speed. So there is a LOT of power there during a medium-strong wind, and virtually no usable power in a light breeze. That cube power law becomes even more important at higher speeds, when the extreme forces on the turbines are trying to destroy them. So within a fairly narrow range of wind speeds, wind power is great. Roughly 30% of the time, it provides a significant portion of Norway's electricity needs. The other 70% of the time, the wind isn't right - and building more turbines doesn't change that. If the world, or Europe, produced 500% of the energy they need on Saturday, and 10% of their needs on Wednesday, that doesn't work. The net effect is *not* the same. The net effect is blackouts on Wednesday.
This is why we'd love to have a practical method of storing enough energy to run a country. We don't have that yet. There are some ideas, ideas which are 10-20 years out - and have been since the 1960s. Maybe one day some very clever people will come up with a practical way to store the immense amount of energy needed to power a whole country.
Norway DOES have clean electricity (not to be confused with energy). That's awesome. Let's look at how they achieved that. Was it by spending hundreds of billions on subsidising solar-electric, handing out taxpayer dollars to "companies" who haven't actually produced any solar panels, but are run by friends of the politicians? Nope. They achieved clean energy by taking advantage of their particular geography that's especially well-suited to hydro (and taking the risk of a Banqiao) and buying clean nuclear energy (despite the risk, and mostly fear, of a catastrophic nuclear event, which is theoretically possible although nuclear has in fact been the safest energy).
I see you didn't bother to read your own link before posting an extremely obvious too-good-to-be-true claim.
Let me copy-paste from our own link:
---
the average electricity consumption mix of a Norwegian household was 36% renewable.[4]
As per the European Union's 2009 Renewables Directive (later added in the EEA Agreement), Norway has established a national goal for renewable energy - 67.5% of gross final consumption
--
So 36% of what they *use* is renewable. What they *produce* is hydro and wind. Where do they get the electricity the use? They buy nuclear-generated electricity from Sweden.
Does that mean they don't use fossil fuels? Well no, transportation and everything is still fossil fuels, but their *electricity* doesn't come from fossil fuels. It comes from Sweden's nuclear plants amd Norway's mountains by way of hydro.
Hydro IS great in places with lots of mountains far from people. When you put your hydro upstream from populations, you eventually get Banqiao (200,000 dead, 11 million displaced). So don't do that. But where you've got lots of mountains and no towns downstream, hydro is great. It's not powering 99% of Norway, though. 36%, according to your link.
> maybe his suggestions are crap
Maybe his ideas are crap. There is no way to tell since he didn't give / link even one specfic example.
Maybe the way he presents his ideas is a problem. A very common problem os suggesting WHAT might be done, without mentioning WHY. You always need the why, and should lead with it. Think commercials "do you have this problem ... Our product will fix that problem for you. You'll benefit in three ways, X Y and Z." Often people suggest "let's do this" without clearly stating the problem it'll solve or the benefits of their suggestion. There is no way to tell if tje submitter does this since he didn't give / link even one specfic example.
What we DO know is something about the submitter's writing style. We know he *assumes* that his ideas should be implemented, and further assumes that we'll agree - without even telling us what any of his ideas are. Likely, he does the same thing in his suggestions - assumes that they should be done, assumes that everyone will agree that they should be done, and fails to provide even one example of what he's talking about.
The funny thing about that is those people is that most of us on Slashdot are "those people", scaled down. $35,000 puts you in the top 2% of income - we're the richest people in the world. Yet many of us squander it, making silly purchases *daily* like spending $6.50 on a cup of coffee, when coffee at the grocery store is 25 cents.
There are a couple of Slashdot regulars who are wealthy (have a lot) with incomes below $100,000, but not many.
It seems Subway is making two assertions:
A) The chicken does not contain any significant amount of soy.
B) The people who did the testing itself and the analysis of the tests were incompetent.
I haven't tested the chicken, and I don't know anything about the people who did the testing, so I don't know if either claim is true. If the TV station had two third-graders do the testing and analysis, they'll probably lose the law suit. If they were qualified, independent labs, and the TV station accurately represented the labs' conclusions, they'll win. We'll see what comes out at trial.
> Fund the IRS properly and the government could reduce taxes and keep the same level of revenue. Why isn't this happening?
The IRS has said that what they need is $58 million to replace the software system that they use for fraud detection. I guess they know what they need.
So Congress and the Clinton administration gave them the $58 million. Then they told the Obama administration they needed another $65 million - they had a bit of trouble managing the project. Then they needed another $50 million. That's around the time the department's own inspector general pointed out that the approach used by the new system doesn't actually work. The IRS currently estimates they'll finish the new software in 2022 - twenty-eight years after they started the project. Not that any of their projections so far have been correct, but if they manage to pull it off this time they will have spent hundreds of millions of dollars and 28 years to build a system that doesn't work, based on Windows 3.1 era software design.
We should definitely give them another $300 million to do more of that kind of thing.
> "... than with some malicious ignorance against immigrants to America." ...
> I understand now, you have a reading comprehension problem.
> I was not claiming it was malicious
I see what you mean. I also see that you're being a dick, for no apparent reason.
> I'm not sure there's a correlation between bureaucracy and "leftists"
Liberals (aka the left) tend to think in terms of "we", that the group should do this or that. They tend SOCIAList and COMMUNist (social and community). Conservatives (aka the right) tend to think of individual freedom and individual responsibility.
Naturally people on the left side of the spectrum therefore form groups, commitees -bureaucracies- through which the whole of society is supposed to work together. Conservatives tend to be more individualistic. We don't need a committee for me to do my thing and you do your thing.
Both viewpoints have their strengths and weaknesses. It's too bad that rather than complementing each other, getting the best of both worlds, these two groups in the US tend to fight each other so much. They cooperate more when they face a common opponent, such as in World War I and World II.
Most of the video series have a download link. Two of my classes have used CBT Nuggets, if you're familiar with that company.
Most of the books are Vitalsource Bookshelf, which gives you access via your computer, phone, and tablet. That seems to be permanent access. You download the book to your phone and open it in the app. I would guess that you could also save them just like any other web page (at least the browser-based version), but I haven't tried. I don't think you can't sell them, but then again you didn't exactly buy them. I'm happy with having them permanently on my phone.
Since you just started there, it might be be helpful to know that the credit hours at WGU don't always track very consistently with the amount of time you'll need to put in. Of course it depends on your previous experience with each topic, but also some 6-credit classes are much harder than other 6-credit classes. If you whip through one 6-credit class, don't assume you can complete your next class just as quickly. (On the the other hand, if your first few classes are hard, the next ones may be easier.)
An alternative to those student loans is something like Western Governors University. Founded by the governors of 19 states, WGU is an online university that charges $6,000/year. There's a $1,500 tax credit, so the cost if $4,500 / year. The student doesn't even have to pay that nuch, though. Employers can provide pre-tax tuition assistance up to about $5,500 / year, so many employers do offer a couple thousand dollars. There's one other thing that makes WGU even easier to afford:
Many WGU courses have the final exam be an industry-standard certification exam. For example, for my networking class the final exam was the Cisco CCNA exam. Other course final exams include Microsoft and CompTIA certifications. What that means is that halfway through school I had already earned a few certifications, which helped lead to a much higher-paying job. In the three years I've been at WGU, I've paid them $18,000, got $4,500 in tax credits, and been paid $60,000 more salary than when I started. So rather than graduating with debt, I'll graduate with a lot more money than when I started school.
There's one last trick for WGU to cost the cost even further. Like most schools, you can transfer in credits. Well for the networking course that has Cisco CNNA as the exam, you can transfer in an existing CCNA certification. So what you can do is spend a year studying and maybe getting some of the certs before you even enroll and start paying. Then when you enroll (and start paying $6K/year), you immediately start out with a year of credits already done, through your existing certs. Even better is to study and *not* get the cert. The first month after you enroll in WGU, you go get the cert and THEY pay for it. That can save up to $1,000, because some of the certs are expensive.
All in all, in your first year at WGU you can get two years of credits at a net cost of $4,500. Not bad. Even better if your enployer covers half of that $4,500, as mine did.
Ps: my school does include books and other materials in the tuition cost. I spend maybe $50- $100 every other semester to get a supplementary source that I choose on my own. For example, the final exam for my networking class was the Cisco CCNA exam, so in addtion to the book and video series provided by the school, I went down to Half Price Books and spent $15 or so on a different kind of CCNA book.
Tuition costs are publicized. It's very easy to hit Google or any number of dead tree sources and get tuition comparisons. What's harder to find are all the add-ons that comprise almost half the cost.
> I'd actually like to record what I say the next time.
That's a great idea. Many years ago, I used to record sometimes and write a lot. I wrote some stuff for the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws (NORML) while in various states of consciousness. Like you, my friends an I had some rather profound experiences.
Listening to recordings back then, and reading later what I wrote (and was well received by the NORML community) is enlightening. We discovered some profound truths such as "whoa, blue is totally blue dude". That was very profound at the time.
I'm awaiting the Wikileaks for this. Because the sailors work for the citizens and whatever, of course.